Interested Gazes and Invisible Audiences: Judicial Narratives on Sex Work

The dominant paradigm in Indian legal review is doctrinal and empirical. However, judgements of the Supreme Court of India are often couched in rhetoric and literary sources. In this regard, the law and literature paradigm has created different interpretive tools, including law as literature and literature in law. These are the tools that I utilise to explore how sex work is understood and how the ideal sex worker is conceptualised by the judges of India. Judgements on sex work are particularly conducive to a law and literature analysis as in these cases, the courts are called upon to justify legal rationality, forcing them to draw upon popular morality, best reflected in persuasive literature. Judicial dicta in four cases that have come before the Supreme Court over the span of half a century (1964–2012) are analysed to provide a cultural critique of the post-colonial and neoliberal sensibilities that underlie judicial discourses.