[EVENTS] PANEL DISCUSSION ON BAR DANCE AS LABOUR: MULTIDIMENSIONAL DISCOURSE AT NATIONAL LAW UNIVERSITY, DELHI ON 31st OCTOBER, 2022

ABOUT THE PANEL DISCUSSION

Erotic labour is often sought to be disciplined through arbitrary and fluid notions of public morality, decency, and dignity. The social and policy discourses on bar dancing reduce the cultural and socially reproductive labour into merely a means of leisure and catering to prurient interests. The erotic labour by bar dancers to earn livelihood and climb the social and economic ladder threatened the State of Maharashtra that claimed it was obscene and impinged on women’s dignity. It reacted with repeated attempts to strictly regulate the
business of bars and dancing therein. Law was used as a tool for the patriarchal circumscription of female labour based on morality, obscenity and women’s dignity. It seemed to resist the possible repositioning of the caste-class-gender nexus facilitated by
renewed forms of erotic labour in the globalised society. Though, in January 2019, the Supreme Court read this as a fundamental rights issue under Article 19(1)(g) of the Constitution, the time limit on bar dance and prohibition on note/coin showering were upheld. Hence, the populist cultural notions continue to cast a shadow over the issue of bar dance as a form of labor. Another form of resistance comes from few activists who view bar dance as an entrenchment of gender-cum-caste-based exploitation and commodification of the female body. Yet, other feminist critiques have also questioned the exclusion of socially reproductive labour forms, such as bar dance, from the State policy discourses on protection of labour rights.