Category: Articles
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Counterproductive Regulation of Assisted Reproductive Technologies: A Review of the Assisted Reproductive Technologies Bill, 2020
This article critically engages with the Assisted Reproductive Technologies (Regulation) Bill, 2020 (ART Bill 2020) which is set to draw curtains on a regulatory journey of more than a decade and a half to culminate in a highly restrictive approach. Engaging with the provisions of this Bill, the article foregrounds that one of the important…
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‘No single hand can produce claps’ A Feminist Evaluation of Customers Liability for Availing Sexual Services under Indian law.
by Prabha Kotiswaran. GNLU LAW & SOCIETY REVIEW. Sex work debates around the world are saturated with normative questions around the commodification of women’s bodies and whether selling sexual services is an assault on women’sdignity and human rights or whether it is merely an expression of their economic and sexual agencyin a world where a…
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Regulating Reproductive Technologies: A Blow to Inclusive Family Forms
The Assisted Reproductive Technology (Regulation) Bill, 2020 was tabled in the Lok Sabha in September 2020. It was referred to the department-related Parliamentary Standing Committee on Health and Family Welfare, which submitted its 129th report on the ART Bill, 2020 on 17 March 2021. This article critically engages with the recommendations of this report. Attempts at regulating…
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Schemes that offer zilch relief to workers
Domestic workers are amongst the most exploited in India’s unorganised sector. Performing poorly paid and laborious work with little recognition from their employers, who often refer to them as ‘help’, and with no benefits from the state, they have suffered immensely during the series of lockdowns. Many were not paid salaries, lost jobs or faced…
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The Sexual Politics of Anti-Trafficking Discourse
by Prabha Kotiswaran 0 years since the negotiation of the Palermo Protocol on Trafficking in 2000, the anti-trafficking field has gone from an early, almost exclusive preoccupation with sex work to addressing extreme exploitation in a range of labour sectors. While this might suggest a reduced focus on the nature of the work performed and…
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Theorizing the Continuities between Marriage and Sex Work in the Experience of Female Sex Workers in Pune, Maharashtra
by Shakthi Nataraj and Sutapa Majumdar Marriage is near-universal in India, where most cisgender women sex workers have been married at some point in their lives, while also navigating responsibilities to family and children. In this paper, we explore how cisgender women sex workers in Pune, in the Indian state of Maharashtra, experience continuities between…
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Divine labours, devalued work: the continuing saga of India’s surrogacy regulation
This article offers a feminist critique of the Surrogacy (Regulation) Bill,2019. Fifteen years since the first proposed regulation of assisted repro-ductive technologies and surrogacy, the 2019 Bill leaves much to bedesired. It reflects a limited understanding of the complexities of surro-gacy, is discriminatory in its approach, is plagued by lack of clarity, isunrealistic and most importantly, does not include adequate safeguardsfor…
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Researchers at Harvard Medical School and Yale School of Public Health: stop scapegoating sex workers for the spread of COVID-19 in India!
In May 2020, a controversial study entitled ‘Modelling the Effect of Continued Closure of Red-Light Areas on COVID-19 Transmission in India’ was released without being peer-reviewed, and quickly went viral on Indian media outlets. It recommends that shutting down red-light areas in Mumbai, New Delhi, Nagpur, Kolkata, and Pune during and beyond the lockdown can…
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Closing red-light areas to contain COVID-19: a misguided fantasy of containment
In the effort to contain COVID-19, “red light areas” are in danger of becoming a fantasy backdrop for the state to perform grand, empty gestures of “pandemic control.” This distracts from the fact that persons doing sex work in India, whether in brothels, homes, streets, lodges, or construction sites, belong to the vast population of…