Policing Desire and Governing Death: The Necropolitics of Sex Work in India

Abstract: 

This paper examines how the Indian state enacts gendered necropolitics through the criminalisation of sex work, focusing on the solicitation provisions of the Immoral Traffic (Prevention) Act (ITPA). The central argument is that the state produces ‘death worlds’, which are zones of legal, spatial, and economic abandonment, by designating sex workers as victims in law while simultaneously criminalising their survival strategies. This double move enables the state to mask its violence as protection, even as it structures sex workers' lives around precarity, displacement, and incarceration. Central to this analysis is a critique of how law operates as a moralising apparatus. While the ITPA may not criminalise sex work per se, but by outlawing solicitation and "public nuisance," it renders the labour itself impossible without criminal exposure. Drawing on the theories of necropolitics and decolonial feminist ideas of counter-sovereignty, the paper analyses how the state uses criminal law not only to regulate bodies but to spatially contain marginalised populations through slow violence. The paper also engages with feminist debates around agency, victimhood, and rights, interrogating how carceral feminism aligns with state logics of control. A close reading of legislative texts, case law, and activist discourse, reveals how sex workers resist this necropolitical order through collective organising, public visibility, and alternative epistemologies of care and survival. Ultimately, the paper concludes that sex workers are not merely victims of state violence but are active practitioners of resistance who unsettle the state’s moral and legal authority.