4 - Mela, Immobility, and Imperial Feminism

Summary

The summer of 2012 was unusually busy in Sonagachi. It was marked by three events that catapulted the sex workers into a tangle of imperial feminism, immobility, and insubordination. They found themselves – unwittingly and unwillingly – at the global center. That summer was first marked by Gloria Steinem's “Learning Tour” to India in April. Steinem's visit was arranged by Ruchira Gupta, the founder-president of Apne Aap Worldwide and Apne Aap International, the abolitionist NGO in India. For Steinem, the “trip [to Sonagachi] was life changing.” She found it “very hard to look at women – or men – treated as if they were objects, as if they have no feelings, no will of their own. Their phrase in many countries is ‘survival sex’.”

Steinem's visit was followed by Hillary Clinton’s, then the US secretary of state. Uma Das, the youth coordinator of Apne Aap at the time, urged Clinton to wear a wristband that stated: “Cool Men Don't Buy Sex.” She promptly agreed, and, as Ruchira Gupta, reported, “Then she asked everyone in the room to wear the band too. Soon, the entire diplomatic corps, members of the Secret Service and even the travelling press corps were wearing a wristband. Next day, most newspapers published photographs of this.” “Cool Men Don't Buy Sex” is an abolitionist campaign launched by Apne Aap in 2011 (Figure 4.1), and in 2017, Ashley Judd too wore the wristband, again upon the request of Uma Das. Clinton also visited Kolkata and attended a performance by sex workers’ children at the Indian Council for Cultural Relations usually known as the Rabindranath Tagore Centre. Notably, Steinem is a Clinton feminist (Dowd 2016). So, the interest of the two white women in India signals a particular kind of feminism, one of the key themes in this chapter.

Later in July, the International AIDS Society organized the 19th International AIDS Conference or AIDS 2012, themed, “Turning the Tide Together: A Declaration to End AIDS Epidemic.” It was hosted by the US for the first time in 22 years, in Washington, DC. However, sex workers from Sonagachi and elsewhere alongside intravenous drug users (IDUs) could not travel to the US to participate given the “ineligibilities” listed in Section 212(a), “Inadmissible Aliens,” of the Immigration and National Security Act as follows: