Episode 5 -  Female Gaze, Law, Labour and the Economy

This episode, marking International Workers’ Day, honours the often-overlooked contributions of women’s labour through a conversation with Dr. Prabha Kotiswaran. It traces the complex and often turbulent journey of women’s work, from its historical invisibility to its partial and uneven recognition today. Through a feminist lens, the episode examines how law functions not merely as text on paper, but as a force that interacts with, and sometimes deepens, economic, social, and political inequalities, shaping the lived realities of women’s labour.

The discussion centres on Dr. Prabha Kotiswaran’s project, Laws of Social Reproduction, grounded in the Global South context of India. It explores female reproductive labour in its many forms, from unpaid domestic work within households to labour performed outside marriage and for the market, including sex work, erotic dancing, surrogacy, egg donation, and paid domestic work. By locating these forms of labour along a market–marriage continuum, the project shows how law both renders much of this work invisible and regulates each sector differently through criminal, licensing, contract, family, and tort law, exposing deep inequalities in recognition, protection, and rights.

The episode places special emphasis on care work, the often unrecognised backbone of the Indian economy. It examines everything from the unpaid domestic labour of homemakers to the essential contributions of Anganwadi and ASHA workers in education and healthcare, asking what it would truly mean to recognise and value this labour as foundational to development. At the same time, it looks to the past to understand how different forms of women’s labour have been controlled, marginalised, or erased through criminalisation, restrictive policies, and systemic neglect. In doing so, it shows how these forms of labour continue to exist under constant scrutiny and threat, raising urgent questions about recognition, rights, and dignity.

Meet Dr. Prabha Kotiswaran

Dr. Prabha Kotiswaran is Professor of Law and Social Justice at King’s College London. She is the author of Dangerous Sex, Invisible Labor: Sex Work and the Law in India (Princeton, 2011), which won the SLSA Hart Prize, and Wages for Housework: India’s Experiment with Unconditional Cash Transfers for Women (forthcoming, OUP, May 2026). She has also co-authored and edited several other books on gender and the law. In 2014, she received the Leverhulme Prize for her contributions to legal scholarship.

Important Readings

Media : 

  1. Website : All resources related to the Social Reproduction Project : https://lawsofsocialreproduction.net/
  2. Lecturers : 

Report : 

  1. Dancing For Respectability, A study of Karagattam and Adal Padal dancers in rural Tamil Nadu  by : Shakthi Nataraj, Sutapa Majumdar, and Prabha Kotiswaran https://www.lawsofsocialreproduction.net/f/dancing-for-respectability-a-study-of-karagattam-and-adal-padal-dancers-in-rural-tamil-nadu/file.pdf
  2. Recent Book : Wages for housework: India’s experiment with unconditional cash transfers to women

Journal Articles: 

  1. Laws of Social Reproduction, Prabha Kotiswaran  https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=4605747
  2. Dangerous sex, Invisible labor: Sex work and the law in India by Prabha Kotiswaran. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2011. 298 pp. $29.95 paperback. https://lawcat.berkeley.edu/record/1124987/files/fulltext.pdf
  3. Born unto Brothels: Towards a legal ethnography of Sex work in an Indian Red Light Area  by Prabha Kotiswaran https://www.studocu.com/in/document/op-jindal-global-university/information-privacy-law/ssrn-id1636966-detailed-notes-and-litureature/110751636
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