ABSTRACT
Over my year in Chennai, I interviewed fifty-six women for this book and one of the topics that was discussed in the interview was how and why they had started to sell sex. This chapter uses this interview data to broaden current representations of sex workers (beyond seeing only their roles in HIV prevention) and to emphasise the socially complex realities and multiplicity of other social aspects of the lives of the sex workers. As Nandini Gooptu (2000) found in her research within the Calcutta Sonagachi red light district, sex workers are a heterogeneous group. Despite their differences, however, sex workers in Calcutta deployed simplistic representations of themselves as a strategic act: HIV provided an issue around which sex workers were able to mobilise. HIV can act as a common enemy, which provides the sex workers with a degree of unity that otherwise they find hard to achieve. Such a strategy has not been successful in Chennai: women have not mobilised in these ways, and in answering the question ‘why not?’ my findings highlight how ‘flat’ a health-focused representation of HIV is. It neither takes women’s heterogeneity into account nor addresses the social problems behind the risk of HIV. Sex work in not restricted to HIV nor experienced in isolation from the other roles that women have, and these other roles contextualise why they engage in sex work. Therefore, although sex work was the primary focus of the interviews with the women, the discussions ranged over aspects of women’s other identities as well.
