Saving Other Children from Other Women: Born Into Brothels
Abstract
In this paper the author explores representations of rescue and motherhood in the 2005 film, Born Into Brothels, which won the Academy Award for Best Feature Documentary. Embedded in a colonial history of looking relations, the film embodies white Euro-American fantasies about children in “other” parts of the world. In the film, Indian children are portrayed as innocent, vulnerable, preyed upon for prostitution, and in need of rescue. Indian women, on the other hand—their mothers—are portrayed as impoverished, incompetent, and eager to prostitute their own children. Through its decontextualized portrayal of the sex industry in Calcutta and its cinematic erasure of local efforts to improve the lives of sex workers and their children, Born Into Brothels tells a familiar story that appeals to western notions of rescue. The author asks: Why are the children worth saving, but their mothers are not? And, how are contemporary practices of sex work in Calcutta structured by the postcolonial state and its relationship to other social, political, and economic contexts?Downloads
Published
How to Cite
Issue
Section
License
All intellectual property in relation to material included on this site belongs to the Motherhood Initiative for Research and Community Involvement (MIRCI). All material on this site is protected by Canadian and international copyright and other intellectual property laws. Users may not do anything which interferes with or breaches those laws or the intellectual property rights in the material. All materials on the Motherhood Initiative for Research and Community Involvement (MIRCI) are copyrighted and all rights are reserved. Any reproduction, modification, publication, transmission, transfer, sale, distribution, display or exploitation of the information, in any form or by any means, or its storage in a retrieval system, whether in whole or in part, without the express written permission of the Motherhood Initiative for Research and Community Involvement (MIRCI) is prohibited. Please contact us for permission to reproduce any of our materials. This site may include third party content which is subject to that third party's terms and conditions of use.