The global sex panic around sex work and trafficking has fostered prostitution law reform worldwide. While the normative status of sex work remains deeply contested, abolitionists and sex work advocates alike display an unwavering faith in the power of criminal law; for abolitionists, strictly enforced criminal laws can eliminate sex markets, whereas for sex work advocates, decriminalization can empower sex workers. I problematize both narratives by delineating the political economy and legal ethnography of Sonagachi, one of India's largest red‐light areas. I show how within Sonagachi there exist highly internally differentiated groups of stakeholders, including sex workers, who, variously endowed by a plural rule network—consisting of formal legal rules, informal social norms, and market structures—routinely enter into bargains in the shadow of the criminal law whose outcomes cannot be determined a priori. I highlight the complex relationship between criminal law and sex markets by analyzing the distributional effects of criminalizing customers on Sonagachi's sex industry.
This article explores the shifting trends in prostitution law and policy in the postcolonial context of India. Indian law has since the 1950s criminalized several aspects of the commercialization of prostitution rather than the sale of sex for money per se. Of late however, following international trends around human trafficking and the relatively popular Swedish model, the Indian state has been keen to criminalize further the demand for sexual services. The competing prerogative of HIV prevention has however powerfully helped counter this trend towards increased criminalization. The Indian sex workers' movement has also attempted to shift the policy terrain by reframing prostitution as a form of livelihood, in other words, sex work. While the counter-vailing logic of pandemic control has offered sex workers some respite, the article argues that Indian sex workers' intertwined claims to both recognition and redistribution, to draw on Nancy Fraser, can only be realized by acknowledging the increasing disutility of the policy vocabulary around sex work and reassessing the materiality of law in all its forms, particularly its relationship to the political economy of sex markets.
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