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Marxist Sex Work Essay

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Sengupta 1
Ipshita Sengupta
Mr. Yogesh Dubey
Term Paper (Semester II)
5th March, 2016

Feminism and Sex Work
Marxist school of thought has often claimed that women are the proletariat of the Proletariats. Although Marxism has been accused of sidelining the women question, tracing the root of all oppression to class differences and subjugations, modern day Marxist critics have branched into a new school of thought called the Socialist Feminism. Socialist Feminism claims to broaden Marxist feminism's argument for the role of capitalism in the oppression of women and radical feminism's theory of the role of gender and the patriarchy. Popular imagination has recently given way to the discourses on sexually marginalized population of our society. …show more content…

However, the debates can be very broadly classified into three- class based, gender based, and ethics based, all culminating into formation of two oppositional positions with respect to sex work in India. The first question to be asked here is, Can sex work in India be observed separately without taking the class question into consideration? Critical consensus reflects on the notion that sex work transactions are often structured around existing practices of migrant labor, thereby making prostitution strongly rooted in a socio-economic divide of …show more content…

Catharine MacKinnon, feminist theorist who argues against the theories propagated by Socialist Marxists, comments that in contrast to upper class women who are kept as possessions, proletariat women are more liberated in the sense they have certain agency to go out and earn a living. But is working in an industry marred with crime, heath hazards, and other anti-social aspects be truly liberating? Indian feminist discourse on sex work in circumscribed in a certain imagination which translates into the logic that Third World women enter sex work out of poverty (xxxiv). Jean D’cunha’s attempt to develop a non-western feminist position regarding sex work in India on the grounds of financial crisis in the society only reiterates this

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