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

This book presents urban transition experiences over nearly three decades in Bangalore city 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 Bangalore 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. We 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 Authors: Anant Kamath is Associate Professor with the National Institute of Advanced Studies (NIAS), Bangalore. He works on the sociology of technology in India, with special interest in the subaltern. Concerns on inequality, urban transition, social mobility, spatiality, gender, and caste, undergird his enquiries on technological experiences and outcomes. He is the author of Urban Undesirables: City Transition and Street Based Sex Work in Bangalore (2022) The Social Context of Technological Experiences (2020) and Industrial Innovation, Networks, and Economic Development (2015), besides several research articles. He completed his PhD at the United Nations University / MERIT (The Netherlands, 2013), and has studied at the Centre for Development Studies (CDS, Trivandrum), Madras School of Economics (MSE, Chennai), and St Joseph’s College, Bangalore. Neethi P. is Associate Professor with Manipal Academy of Higher Education (MAHE) Bangalore. 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 Urban Undesirables: City Transition and Street Based Sex Work in Bangalore (2022), and Globalization Lived Locally: A Labour Geography Perspective (2016), and several research articles. She has completed her PhD and MPhil at the Centre for Development Studies, under Jawaharlal Nehru University (JNU, 2014). She was also a Fulbright Nehru Doctoral Fellow at the University of Georgia in 2011-12.