The Sex Worker That She Is Not: Suggestion, Risk and Public Femininity in Contemporary Hindi Cinema.

This paper argues for the significance of sex work as a figurative and affective reference point in the production of ideas of romance, risk and respectability in public culture through a reading of contemporary Hindi cinema. Reading the films Jab We Met (2007) and Pink (2016), I ask what the sex worker does in the films' narratives when she herself is absented from it but brought up suggestively. I propose suggestion as a figurative technique deployed in the films to mediate a tension about knowing and identifying sex work as well as to produce an ideology of romance, personhood and injury, critical to assemblages of femininity in these films. This paper argues that such a reading of films that privileges the figuration of sex work through what may otherwise be seen as a minor invocation, presents the opportunity to critically examine naturalised ideas of romance, risk and respectability that find expression in them. It makes the case for the figure of the sex worker as an important node of affective intensification in the larger sphere of public sexuality. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]