Everyday violence and care: insights from fictive kin relations between madams and sex workers in India

This article intervenes in the globally polarised terrain of debates on violence and agency in sex work. With a critical eye on how developmentalism governs these debates, the article explores fictive kin relations between women in Sonagachi, a prominent red-light area in Eastern India. Through an analysis of ethnographic observations and life-history interviews among madams and sex workers across three brothel households, this article argues that the configuration of ‘family-like’ relationships needs to be understood against a backdrop of what ‘family’ implies for socio-economically marginalised women who sell sex in urban India. Specifically, experiences of choice and coercion within these relationships are predicated on how madams and sex workers respond to kosto, a vernacularised articulation of everyday violence in each other’s lives, through jotno or care. Through this, the article sheds light on everyday forms of harm and solidarity between women in a red-light area, challenging institutionalised exceptionalisms of violence within sex work.