From Bangladesh Colony to Shanthinagar: housing rights, sexuality, and consumption in Keralam

As the developmental state attempted to transform the urban slum in Kerala into a model housing colony, narratives of decency, self-restraint, and sexual discipline became crucial for securing housing rights in the transformed space. ‘Bad’ and ‘good’ consumption; ‘bad’ and ‘good’ poor and images of ‘normality’ and the ‘normal home’ as the abode of the ideal citizen and worker were some of the strategies deployed by the residents of the Bangladesh Colony to encounter the quotidian world of moral non-acceptance. This article examines how neoliberal articulation of rights through government projects often have contradictory effects on the lives of differently positioned women. The moral economy of consumption hinders the realization of the neoliberal ideal of the consumer-citizen. Practices considered as ‘excess’ in consumption by female sex workers were perceived as a threat to this slum community lying on the urban margins, resulting in their expulsion. The article integrates theories of urban assemblage and queer temporality to understand how women sex workers resisted such expulsions. These theories converge on the notion of excess/abundance. Abundance of relationships, of political alliances and strategies, of consumption practices—exceeding heteronormative ideals—was deployed by women sex workers to resist their erasure and confinement into any single identity.