‘I Entered This Life Because My Husband Left Me, I Have to Be Careful Now’: A Study of Domesticity, Intimacy and Belonging in the Lives of Women in Sex Work in a Red-Light Area in Eastern India

In this chapter, I explore relations of intimacy and belonging within the lives of women in sex work, living in a red-light area in Eastern India. Specifically, I unpack two such relations: sexual-affective relations with long-term customers and motherhood with children born within and outside sex work. I examine how these relations are (per)formed, perceived, managed and experienced, and how they affect each other. I highlight how this process reproduces the red-light area as a space where social and emotional arrangements co-exist with the economic. Conceptually, I draw on Illouz’s (Cold Intimacies: The Making of Emotional Capitalism. Polity, Cambridge, 2007, Why Love Hurts: A Sociological Explanation. Polity, Cambridge, 2012) work on ‘cold intimacies’ and the ‘architecture of choice’ to explore how agency and victimhood co-exist dynamically in the lives of women in sex work for whom the ‘domestic’ and the ‘workplace’ overlap

Entrepreneurial Justice: The New Spirit of Capitalism in Emerging India

In their survey of management literature, Boltanski and Chiapello (2005) argue that the 1990s signal a new phase in the spirit of capitalism. We consider how these counter-cultural transformations that shaped new management thinking in Europe and North America traveled to places such as India, where neo-liberal economic reforms led to economic growth alongside unprecedented suffering. Looking across the expansive Indian media landscape, we see the growing prominence of India\u27s own “cool capitalists” in the figures of Rajat Gupta and Aamir Khan. Khan\u27s hit talk show Satyamev Jayate helps to popularize this new management culture establishing a new set of moral claims over the future of economic development in the global South. Our article addresses the theme of geo-politics by considering the increasingly influential role of corporate actors in shaping popular debates about the economy, economic distress, and redress