understand the likely consequences on Sonagachi of a proposed amendment to the anti-sex work law

currently tabled before the Indian Parliament that criminalizes the customers of sex workers.

METHODOLOGY

This article is based on my interviews of roughly fifty sex workers, brothel keepers, landlords, dalals
(touts), employees of the local sex-worker organization, the Durbar Mahila Samanwaya Committee
(DMSC) in Sonagachi, and real estate developers over the summers of 2004 and 2006. Since 2002, I have
also been involved with legal advocacy work for DMSC, a sixty thousand-member

2. Sex work can be performed in several other institutional settings such as the street economy, the
entertainment sector, and the family with varying degrees of organization.

Born unto Brothels 583

organization of sex workers that calls for the recognition of sex workers as workers in the informal
economy. For this, I studied Indian labor laws that could be made applicable to sex workers and
organized two legal advocacy workshops on the various international models of regulation of sex work
and relevant Indian labor laws in which sex workers actively participated. I have also participated since
2002 in two international conferences of sex workers organized by the National Network of Sex Workers
(NNSW), a network consisting of DMSC and NGOs working all over India with sex workers and who share
DMSC's approach to sex work. The first conference, in 2002, called Shanti Utsab (Festival of Peace), was
organized by DMSC in Kolkata. The second, in 2003, called the Festival of Pleasure, was organized by the
Kerala Sex Workers Forum, an NNSW member in Thiruvananthapuram. On both occasions, I interacted
closely with NNSW member organizations, sex workers, social workers, donor agencies, activist lawyers,
journalists, public health specialists, and intellectuals sympathetic to DMSC's struggle. I supplemented
my field work with secondary sources, typically project reports and surveys produced over the past
fifteen years by DMSC and its HIV prevention project. All references to the ethnographic work in this
article derive from my dissertation (Kotiswaran 2006) and all names of sex workers have been changed
to protect their identity.

I. SOCIOLOGY OF SEX WORK AND LEGAL ETHNOGRAPHY OF SONAGACHI

Formulating the sociology of sex work in Kolkata is complicated, given the burdens of popular
representation surrounding both Kolkata and its sex industry illustrated most vividly by Briski's Born into
Brothels and its complete denial of sex-worker agency in Sonagachi. Moreover, government narratives
unfailingly produce a fixed national stereotype of the trafficked sex worker forced and beaten into sex
work in big-city brothels (Sen and Nair 2004). More generally, there is an assumption in feminist theory
of monolithic categories of stakeholders in the sex industry such as the "sex worker" or the "brothel
keeper" or the "landlord." I problematize this lumping through the use of stakeholder analysis by which I
mean "an approach, a tool or set of tools for generating knowledge about actors-individuals and
organizations-so as to understand their behavior, intentions, interrelations and interests; for assessing
the influence and resources they bring to bear on decision-making or implementation processes"
(Varvasovszky and Brugha 2000, 338). I do not, however, use stakeholder analysis to forward a nexus