The Stickiness of Sex Work: Pleasure, Habit, and Intersubstantiality in South India

Walters, Kimberly

doi:10.1086/686754

Cited by 14 publications

(6 citation statements)

References 17 publications

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“…The notion of a self that is susceptible to transformation from material action and substances is in line with other descriptions of personhood in South Asia (Marriott and Inden 1977;Daniel 1984;Trawick 1990;Busby 1997;Lamb 2000;Walters 2016). As such we should understand students' ideological construals of productive activity as drawing on larger cultural idioms for evaluating material action and personhood.…”

Section: Doing Laborsupporting

confidence: 81%

Ideologies of Labor and the Consequences of Toil in India’s Construction Industry

Sargent

2021

Signs soc.

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This article examines the semiotics of labor through an analysis of a construction skill training program in Delhi. It focuses on recurring struggles between students and administrators over the nature and consequences of the activities they engaged in at the training center. Drawing on the notion of language ideology, it argues that students and administrators invoked different ideologies of labor in framing the value and meaning of productive activities. Under different ideological framings, productive action had the potential to transform the subject in radically different but equally unstable ways. While students worried that engaging in “labor work” could transform them into abject laborers, administrators tried to shore up the notion that “practical” would make students into successful workers. More generally, the paper suggests that attending to ideologies of labor can nuance accounts of how labor transforms subjects and social worlds.

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Section: Doing Laborsupporting

confidence: 81%

Ideologies of Labor and the Consequences of Toil in India’s Construction Industry

Sargent

2021

Signs soc.

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“…While transnational organizations assume that gender inequality is a universal development issue, feminist anthropologists have long argued that the meanings of gendered difference and inequality are profoundly sociohistorically contingent (Gal and Kligman 2000; Lamphere 2016; Mohanty 1988; Oyěwùmí 2000; Rosaldo 1980). In India, for example, scholars have explored how gendered difference acquires meaning in dialogue with other categories, including caste, sexuality, age, generational status, and distinctions between human and nonhuman actors (Govindrajan 2018; Lamb 2000; Pinto 2008; Ramberg 2013; Walters 2016).…”

Section: Affect Gender Inequality and Alternate Visions Of Agencymentioning

confidence: 99%

Rebalancing Himmat: Affect and Vernacular Approaches to Inequality in North India

Kowalski

2021

Feminist Anthropology

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This article explores how affect shaped frontline workers’ efforts to address gender inequality in Jaipur, the capital of the Indian state of Rajasthan. Counselors, frontline workers who helped women facing violence seek legal and social support, used the term himmat, courage/daring, to criticize the behavior of men and to celebrate the bravery of women. In counseling interactions, activist writing, and everyday speech, people used the word himmat to describe how affect might be marshaled for social transformation. I argue that himmat animates social movements addressing inequality, simultaneously serving as a felt diagnostic of hierarchy and a prompt to act against that hierarchy. Phenomena such as himmat are what I call affective fulcrums. A fulcrum both generates and limits motion. As an affective fulcrum, himmat channels affect that gains energy from relations shaped by a grid of inequality, including gender inequality. Yet it also creates movement around and within those unequal relations. Using himmat as an example of an affective fulcrum, I argue that attention to the role of affect in women's rights organizations can help us better analyze how inequality grounds efforts for change even as it allows for movement towards transformation.

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“…Scholars have used the concept of attunement to draw attention to the way bodies are aligned to their surrounding environments through exposure (Fortun 2001; Murphy 2006; Shapiro 2015). While much of this work has focused on the sensory awareness and effects of toxic exposures, the concept has also been used to analyze the way bodies and environments are conjoined in the mundane activities of daily life and labor (Choy and Zee 2015; Kantor 2019; Solomon 2016; Walters 2016). As trade workers “kept doing” their work, their bodies interfaced with the same environmental stimuli, from rusty rebar to stone dust, and these stimuli changed their bodies.…”

Section: The Politics Of āDatmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…In becoming habituated to a trade, one was transformed by its characteristic substances (cf. Walters 2016). When helpers had proved they could work as masons, workers would say, “Now ādat has been made.” In this way, the workers actively anticipated and cultivated a particular ādat as part of the process of becoming a particular sort of person.…”

Section: The Politics Of āDatmentioning

confidence: 99%

Working against Labor: Struggles for Self in the Indian Construction Industry

Sargent

2020

Anthropology of Work Review

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From the outside, India’s urban construction sites appear to be places of toil, yet for workers, the material qualities of particular actions, from carrying bricks to cutting marble, are experienced as either self‐affirming work or abject labor. This article explores how construction workers understand and intervene in the meaning of their work. Skilled and semi‐skilled workers are particularly attentive to the bodily shifts brought on by work, as well as the varied recognition of such shifts by others. The formulation of a superior’s command, along with callouses, capacities, and the aches induced by work are all understood as elements of an unstable process of transformation. Workers are constantly on guard to ensure that their work, envisioned as a specific bodily capacity, does not devolve into labor or undifferentiated toil. By refusing to perform tasks that they consider labor, these workers simultaneously assert control over the conditions of their productive activity and recreate an embodied form of class distinction. I argue that such refusals and contestations constitute a politics of work that poses particular limitations but also possibilities for envisioning the nature of capitalist work more generally.

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The Stickiness of Sex Work: Pleasure, Habit, and Intersubstantiality in South India

Cited by 14 publications

References 17 publications

Ideologies of Labor and the Consequences of Toil in India’s Construction Industry

Ideologies of Labor and the Consequences of Toil in India’s Construction Industry

Rebalancing Himmat: Affect and Vernacular Approaches to Inequality in North India

Working against Labor: Struggles for Self in the Indian Construction Industry

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