@article{TheScatterofEmpire:Prostitution:4788,
      recid = {4788},
      author = {Sameen, Zoya},
      title = {The Scatter of Empire: Prostitution, Law, and Trouble in  Colonial India},
      publisher = {University of Chicago},
      school = {Ph.D.},
      address = {2022-08},
      pages = {240},
      abstract = {This dissertation examines the troubled history of law and  prostitution in colonial India from the late nineteenth to  the mid-twentieth century across contexts of statewide  regulatory laws, cantonment codes, municipal rules, and  border regimes. It explores how legislation on prostitution  was translated from letter into practice, and crucially,  how this process of translation was mediated, negotiated,  and even appropriated by the targets of law—primarily  subaltern Indian women—amid an inconsistent and dispersed  everyday imperial state. In doing so, this study frames  this history as one of routine disruption whereby a range  of ordinary women and men confronted, stymied, and evaded  laws around prostitution on the scattered ground of empire.  Moreover, it pushes against a historiography on the  colonial state, law, and gender in India that has broadly  focused on governmental power and its mandate via  legislation and codification. Instead, "The Scatter of  Empire" foregrounds notions of trouble and disruption to  present a new reading of colonial interventions into  sexuality as they unfolded on the ground.

Drawing on a  range of colonial correspondence and reports, alongside  newspapers, institutional records, and previously  unexplored oral histories, this dissertation is structured  around four episodic moments of legislative and regulatory  interventions—evasion, reform, ‘traffic,’ and memory—that  are a means to examining creative confrontations with law  and empire among various groups of troubling agents. These  include subaltern Indian women engaged in prostitution, who  appear across this dissertation in terms of their popular  legal knowledge, jurisdictional shifting, filing of  petitions, evading of surveillance, and refusals to be  relocated in the face of multiple scales of coercive  measures that placed capacious categories of criminality  over them. French women similarly emerge in this  dissertation as disruptors of late colonial border regimes  as they strategized their travels to India to engage in sex  work from the point of visa applications to the point of  border-crossing into British jurisdiction. British  soldiers, on the other hand, appear in this dissertation  situated differently to trouble, for they did not trouble  law and regulations as much as they troubled empire’s  account of itself through oral histories after the end of  empire, which revealed elaborate official worlds of sexual  commerce that military authorities had consistently denied  during the twentieth century.

This dissertation ultimately  makes two key arguments: one, that trouble, challenge, and  confrontation—including acts of evading arrest, refusing  orders, contesting expulsions, and negotiating  borders—characterized encounters with colonial laws on  prostitution, even when the threat of coercion, discipline,  and punitive action was on the cards. And two, that reading  colonial projects to regulate gender and sexuality, and  more generally the lives of colonial subjects, in terms of  the trouble and confrontation they provoked presents a  vastly different reading of empire—one where empire is not  a homogenizing and unchallenged force from above, but  instead a ‘scatter’ of legal enforcement, inconsistent  communication, clashing laws, and dueling narratives on the  ground below. The case for centering the scatter in empire  is to, in one sense, puncture the self-regard of empire in  imperial histories, and in another, to highlight the  trouble, turbulence, and fragility that marked its daily  workings.},
      url = {http://knowledge.uchicago.edu/record/4788},
      doi = {https://doi.org/10.6082/uchicago.4788},
}