Digitisation

There is a consensus that sex work and the sex industry have been globalised owing to factors such as the development of sex tourism, neo-liberal economic policies and the influence of the sexual revolution. This paper attempts to pose the question: How have digitisation and globalisation altered the spatiality of sex work and the sex industry? I use Saskia Sassen’s framework provided in "The City: Localizations of the Global" in this attempt to propose a new lens for understanding the spatial changes that sex work has undergone. The notion of the globalised sex industry’s spatiality needs to be reconfigured—spatiality of sex work can no longer be seen as purely physical as there is an imbrication of the digital in the non-digital. The globalised sex industry is a local environment placed in a global network, whose notions of centrality have changed as well with changes in the spatiality of the functional and locational centrality of the red-light districts. This diffusion of centrality has manifested itself at the level of the world system as well via the formation of “third-world” business centres.

As the COVID-19 pandemic forces several sectors into the digital space, India faces the danger of aggravating existing inequalities by excluding large parts of the population.