The book foregrounds the perspective of street sex workers who pepper urban Bengaluru’s streets.
The gist: Urban Undesirables, the latest book by social scientists Neethi P and Anant Kamath, studies the discrimination and abuse that afflicts street-based sex workers’ lives in the city. The authors conceived the idea to dig into Bengaluru’s underbelly in 2015 when they were faculty members at Azim Premji University.
- Using the oral history methodology, the authors base their book on those who work the streets of MG Road, Majestic, KR Market, and Yeswanthpur. Their work reveals the changing nature of discrimination and abuse based on sex workers’ identities.
- The authors suggest that transgender sex workers have it the hardest as their public presence is contested in Bengaluru’s urban landscape. The lives of sex workers are upended when people or the police discover their profession.
Ideal urban publics: When people invoke Bengaluru’s commercial and urban landscape, they forget the existence of the urban poor. Several people in the city’s informal workforce engage in sexual commerce, yet they find no place in urban planning.
Perspective problem: Many people pity sex workers or consider them loose instead of multi-layered human beings. The magnitude of the abuse that entails a life of sex work can reduce if others find a way to accept the financial and personal viability of the occupation.