Puppets at the Hands of Water: Sex Workers in Mongla, Bangladesh

Abstract

The sex workers of Mongla reside on the banks of the Passur River. The river is gnawing at their occupational land, forcing them to conduct their sex trade on the remaining land or on boats. Their uncelebrated lives, I realized, would undergo trauma if they were pushed for direct interviews during ethnographic research. Hence, I turned to arts-based research. In a six-month-long workshop, Mongla’s sex workers painted and described the reality of climate change in their lives. The artistic project provided the sex workers with the space to control their narrative and speak about it without trauma. Thus, based on a year of fieldwork, transcontinental archival data, and arts-based research, this paper maps the “amphibious” lives of sex workers in Bangladesh’s Mongla brothel in the age of the Anthropocene.