Citation

Lynes KG. Signs 2011; 37(1): 109-132.

Copyright

(Copyright © 2011, University of Chicago Press)

DOI

10.1086/660180

PMID

unavailable

Abstract

This article explores how artists and documentarists wrestle with representing the conditions and causes of sexual exploitation in India's red-light districts. It compares three works: Ross Kauffman and Zana Briski's popular documentary Born into Brothels (2004) and the artist Elahe Massumi's multichannel video installations The Hijras (2000) and A Kiss Is Not a Kiss (2000). The analysis examines how each work defines a specific site of sexual exploitation and how each defines the scale of the problem, and I articulate how the representation of women's bodies as sex workers locates them in particular economies of value (loans, indenture, and exchange) on a national and transnational level. The question of scale addresses both the chains of responsibility and relationality that produce the red-light district's activity and exploitation and the position of the intended audience, calling for charity, empathy, or accountability. Representations of prostitution specifically wrestle with the production of images that may reinforce the looks by which sex workers are eroticized and exploited. They also contend with visual regimes that (directly or indirectly) pass moral judgment on sex work generally. The article finds that Born into Brothels follows a rescue narrative whereby the children's safety is (conditionally) guaranteed by the structures of liberal citizenship, thus figuring the documentary's own role as enfranchising. It uses international rights-based language and institutions to rescue children from "joining the line." Massumi's multichannel videos, on the other hand, formally address the differential position of sex workers, both within the structures of transnational capitalism (exploitation) and violently shut out from them (subaltern oppression). The videos' formal experimentation acts as a device to produce in its viewers a responsiveness to, and sense of responsibility toward, its subjects even as it proposes no concrete solutions to conditions of sexual exploitation. The subjects figured are not simply victims, and yet they are still violently excluded from the privileges of citizenship and subjectivity. Massumi's artworks thus belie the more clearly drawn line between inside and outside proposed by a project like Born into Brothels. They call to account the interconnected structures (in which we as viewers also participate) that produce both the conditions of the subjects' exploitation as well as the international community's demand for redress.

Keywords: Human trafficking

Language: en