Urban Undesirables: Volume 1: City Transition and Street-Based Sex Work in Bangalore

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· Cambridge University Press
Ebook
211
Pages
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About this ebook

This book presents urban transition experiences over nearly three decades in Bangalore based on the narratives of the city's street-based sex workers. Sex workers – female, male, and transgender – have been omnipresent in Bangalore's streets for decades. However, despite being blacklisted as 'undesirable' and hazards to the 'ideal public', they have their own unique imaginaries and narratives of the city and its mutations. In mapping out their spatial and social ecosystems and experiences with technology, this book redraws, rewrites, and relooks at a city and its transformations from their perspectives. The analysis of their experience is anchored to concepts around neoliberal urbanism, gender, labour informality, and the politics of technology. The authors take an unconventional journey through their spaces, comrades, and battles to announce and affirm their individuality and agency through their empowerment strategies, and through their struggles to reclaim their spaces and assert their identities as informal workers and legitimate citizens of the city.

About the author

Neethi P. is Faculty at Indian Institute for Human Settlements, Bengaluru. She works on urban labour informality and focuses on women informal workers and various forms and responses from upcoming alternative labour associations. She has published in the areas of garments, electronics, ports, home-based work, street vending, sanitation, mill work, and sex work. She is the author of Globalization Lived Locally: A Labour Geography Perspective (2016).

Anant Kamath is Assistant Professor at National Institute of Advanced Studies, Bengaluru. He works on technology and the subaltern in India, and concerns on inequality, urban transition, social mobility, spatiality, gender, and caste, undergird his enquiries on technological experiences and outcomes. He is the author of The Social Context of Technological Experiences (2020) and Industrial Innovation, Networks, and Economic Development (2015).

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