Deep Care: Reconceptualizing Care Work of Adolescent Children of Sex Workers and Their Mothers

• In Event: 30665 - Children, Youth & Work

Abstract

In this paper, I use a Southern feminist epistemology to critically appraise the discourse around children of sex workers framed as non-agentic subjects of the State and NGO care. I subvert this gaze and show how the adolescent children of sex workers in an Indian city present a care paradox as they are both subjects of care and emerge as young carers within their families and in their kinship contexts. This is both an empirical and theoretical intervention in the literature on children of sex workers which primarily centers on their vulnerabilities, stigmatization, and discrimination as well as the literature on mothering of sex workers that frames them as deficit mothers. The deep care perspective reorients the construction of care as a linear relationship of ‘giving’ by mothers to their children to instead focus on the symbiotic relationship of providing and receiving care and acknowledgment between adolescent children and their mothers under the circumstances of poverty, stigma, and violence. This study is based on 16 in-depth interviews from the red-light areas of Kalighat and Bowbazar neighborhoods in Kolkata, India. Using the southern marginal feminist perspective of deep care, I center the voices of adolescent children of sex workers whose experiences are shaped by the intersection of class, caste, and religious marginality, parental social status as well as gender discrimination and which have been muted in academic and policy discourses.

Author

• Anuneeta Chatterjee, University of Calgary