Labors of Love: Sex, Care, and Migration in Bangalore

Long a destination for rural migrants, Bangalore has become one of the world’s “hotspots” for climate in-migration (Rigaud 2018). This paper, bringing together literature on sex work (e.g. Shah 2021; Agustín 2007; Mai 2018) and sexuality (Carrillo 2020; Saria 2021) in relation to livelihood and migration, traces the ways sexuality shapes migration pathways to the city, and how existing systems of kinship are both redefined and reproduced in the process. Drawing on a decade of ethnographic and collaborative work with sex worker and transgender communities, and over a hundred life-history interviews with poor and working-class migrant women across the city and its outskirts, including garment workers, sex workers, and street vendors, I trace circular pathways to and from the city, within which women, both cisgender and transgender, bear the burden of caring for kin in the face of increasing economic precarity. Rather than revealing a linear pathway from deprivation to sexual liberation (Choi, Hwang, and Parreñas 2018), my interviews show that various ruptures—family violence after an inter-caste marriage, an abusive partner, or the rejection of gender non-normativity—shape pathways both to the city and back to the small town and village. These migration pathways often redefine dominant systems of femininity and sexual morality, while sustaining patriarchal arrangements within the family. My cisgender women interviewees describe bending the norms of respectable femininity—including by leaving husbands or pursuing sex work—to sustain the demands of mothering and elder care and generate value within their natal families (Ramberg 2014). My transgender interviewees describe caring for relatives or sending remittances even as their inclusion remains precarious. In the context of urban precarity and the instability of rural livelihoods, undergirded by climate change, these migrants, even when marked as deviant or abject, become those best equipped to ensure the family’s material sustenance.