JOURNAL OF LAW AND SOCIETY VOLUME 37, NUMBER 1, MARCH 2010 ISSN: 0263-323X, pp. 105±24 Labours in Vice or Virtue? Neo-liberalism, Sexual Commerce, and the Case of Indian Bar Dancing Prabha Kotiswaran* Of late, the Indian state has adopted an abolitionist stance towards sex work and bar dancing. This article argues that although in the Indian state of Maharashtra, the judicial overturning of the ban against bar dancing has been celebrated by feminists as a triumph of women's right to livelihood over patriarchal demands of women's sexual morality, the judgment is predicated on a sharp distinction between morally `good' and `bad' female labour, namely, bar dancing and sex work. This is ironic given their striking sociological similarities and the stigmatization and levels of state abuse inflicted against both. The article considers the usefulness of the totalizing logic of neo-liberalism for explaining the increased judicial and feminist tolerance for bar dancing. The article argues that prospects for redistributive law reform for all sexual workers are dim unless the arbitrary legal distinctions drawn between markets in female sexual labour are overcome. INTRODUCTION Feminist scholars have grown increasingly dissatisfied with the state of the sex work debates, confined as it has been to the highly polarized positions between abolitionist radical feminists and sex work advocates. Of late, however, instead of striking the more familiar conciliatory middle ground between the two positions, feminist ethnographers of sex markets have started to outline the rapid changes in the economy of sexual commerce which extends well beyond transactional sex work and without necessarily 105 ß 2010 The Author. Journal Compilation ß 2010 Cardiff University Law School. Published by Blackwell Publishing Ltd, 9600 Garsington Road, Oxford OX4 2DQ, UK and 350 Main Street, Malden, MA 02148, USA * School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London, Thornhaugh Street, Russell Square, London WC1H 0XG, England pk5@soas.ac.uk The author wishes to thank Jane Scoular, Teela Sanders, and Srimati Basu for their generous feedback on her article. Many thanks to Arundhati Katju and Chinmayee Chandra for their excellent research assistance.