ABSTRACT
This chapter argues that A Life Apart inverts the hegemonic gaze at the ‘rent boy’ from afar in literature by narrating the affective experience of an abject body in urban space. It also argues that new literatures of queer sex work cleave this ground, opening up a space for criticality that moves beyond stigma and glimpses the dynamic ways in which sex work manifests across time and space, and between bodies that cannot be contained within heteronormative categories of identity. Ritwik’s play with invention and artistic license is a poststructuralist challenge to essentialism, pointing instead to multiple modes of identification or non-identification. This mode of literary invention invokes the writing of male sex workers, which use the page as a canvas of expression, often blurring the border between fiction and memoir in representing the experience of selling sex. The revelation of Ritwik’s thought process details a fluctuating relationship with his work, and the sensate and affective minutiae of selling sex.
