“Policing Bodies: Law, Sex Work, and Desire in Johannesburg” by I. India Thusi is set to be released worldwide on December 21, 2021. This transformative work examines relationships between police and sex workers in Johannesburg, South Africa, where legal ambiguity has led to inconsistent action and attitudes among law enforcement, leaving room for violence and stigma despite increased focus on human rights and social welfare.
With Johannesburg as the backdrop, Thusi addresses broad issues of police violence, particularly among marginalized communities, and raises essential questions about the role of policing in society, how criminalization leads to violence, and how current arguments about the legal treatment of sex work fall short. Offering powerful insights and crucial, often-overlooked information, this book provides new perspective on issues affecting communities around the world, inviting readers to further question the role of policing in society at large.
“Policing Bodies: Law, Sex Work, and Desire in Johannesburg” by I. India Thusi is set to be released worldwide on December 21, 2021. This transformative work examines relationships between police and sex workers in Johannesburg, South Africa, where legal ambiguity has led to inconsistent action and attitudes among law enforcement, leaving room for violence and stigma despite increased focus on human rights and social welfare.
With Johannesburg as the backdrop, Thusi addresses broad issues of police violence, particularly among marginalized communities, and raises essential questions about the role of policing in society, how criminalization leads to violence, and how current arguments about the legal treatment of sex work fall short. Offering powerful insights and crucial, often-overlooked information, this book provides new perspective on issues affecting communities around the world, inviting readers to further question the role of policing in society at large.
I was clerking for the Constitutional Court of South Africa the first time I visited the Hillbrow community in Johannesburg, South Africa. The Constitutional Court is just adjacent to Hillbrow, yet many of my native South African co- clerks had never even entered this area. Several of
my colleagues warned me about the danger that lurked right behind us in the Hillbrow community. There is a mythology about Hillbrow as a “den of iniquity” that was enough to frighten young lawyers from ever daring to enter this space, even during the daytime. Nevertheless, one day, disappointed by the lunch options near the Court, I decided to take a walk through this community. Immediately, I was struck by the hustle and bustle of its streets. Hillbrow is filled with high-rise apartment buildings with laundry hanging outside, graffiti sprayed on the sides of buildings, and the honking of minibus “taxis” polluting the air. Groups of young men chat outside apartment building entrances, and hawkers sell goods as diverse as bananas, chewing gum, and live chickens.
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The streets are crowded with Africans from around the continent, filled with various African vernaculars as you walk down the street. During this initial visit, I saw no White people (which is unusual for many parts of Johannesburg), just many Black African faces on the pulsating streets. Hillbrow is vibrant and full of life. I ended up eating at a fish and chips spot down the road from the Court.
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This visit sparked my interest in the area, clouded by its reputation for illegality and crime. Hillbrow’s high- rise buildings include residences, hotels with transient housing, business offices, strip clubs, and bars; at times, they are managed by sophisticated criminal syndicates that charge cheap, daily rents. Hillbrow is one of the most densely populated areas in Africa and
has an estimated population of 75,000 people crammed into just 1.08 square kilometers. It is well known as a red-light district, although it is no longer a site for visible street-based sex work. In a 2002 survey of local hotels, 27 percent of women living in those hotels admitted to working as sex workers. The sense of vibration, movement, and new settlement in Hillbrow illustrates Edgar Pieterse’s view that “urban territories are as much nodal points in multiple circuits of movement of goods, services, ideas and people, as they are anchor points for livelihood practices that are more settled, more locally embedded and oriented.” While this book focuses on Johannesburg, it also describes “elements or processes in cities, or the circulations and connections which shape cities,” more generally, uncovering a story about sex, policing, and urban spaces common to other cities around the globe. This book contributes to comparative yet global perspectives on policing, feminism, and sex work, following Jennifer Robinson’s suggestions for a comparative
methodology that is still global. Much as Kimberly Kay Hoang’s book Dealing in Desire provides global insights about Western decline and capitalism through an ethnography about prostitution in Ho Chi Minh City, this book provides global insights about feminism, race, and policing through an ethnography about prostitution in Johannesburg.
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Although I began my research ambivalent about whether sex work should be (de)criminalized, the limitations of promoting human rights by policing and criminalizing conduct became evident as my research progressed. I began to seriously question whether a human rights approach to sex work should ever contribute to more policing of sex work, even if the policing is limited to sex workers’ clients. This issue is important, as there is growing concern about the appropriate role for police, if any, in society. Many people around the world are critically examining policing in response to various incidents of police violence within marginalized communities. In the past several decades, police have taken on additional responsibilities as administrators of social welfare and adopters of community policing. Yet, it remains an open debate whether policing and criminalization bring additional security and human rights protection, especially when it comes to populations that have been historically stigmatized.It is within this social context that I examine the policing of sex work in Johannesburg.
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In Hillbrow, the commanding Hillbrow police station spans multiple buildings and is charged with maintaining public safety in this bustling community. The main building is six stories high. The upper levels include the offices for ranking members of the police. There are also meeting
rooms on multiple floors, and brightly colored flyers near the elevator for each floor advertise the current police meetings. When people walk into the main building, they see police officers seated behind a long front counter, addressing community complaints and needs. There are usually around eight police officers behind the counter, and an endless flow of community members waiting to file complaints, certify documents, and meet with detectives. During my ethnographic fieldwork, I met with my police officer “partners” in this front lobby area to accompany them on their daily patrols of various brothels.
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One evening, I interviewed Zolo, a young police officer who filed community complaints and certified documents. I began my interview by asking for his thoughts on “prostitution” (the term for sex work used by the police) and, soon aft er, asked him whether prostitution should be legal.
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Zolo conceded, “It is legal . . . mostly.”
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This comment about the “mostly” legal nature of sex work illustrates how sex work occupies a liminal space because the government has made the commercialization of an ordinary occurrence— sex— criminal. Sex work is difficult to regulate and is at the literal and figurative margins of proper society, occupying a place where legality and illegality often blur into one another. The policing of sex work in Johannesburg straddles the line between formal and informal. On the streets, police often appear to be acting in an informal and ad hoc manner. However, high-level organizational directives intended to regulate the obligations and duties of the police toward sex workers also influence police action and tilt the exercise of discretion to the formal. These obligations themselves reflect the tension between the law and human rights: the police must respect the human rights of sex workers, but they must also enforce the laws of the country. Sex work is illegal, but it is also  time-consuming to regulate and difficult to prove that a sex work transaction occurred. Sex work involves activity that occurs in private transactions in spaces that are ordinarily private. But the illegality of sex work makes it a matter of public concern.
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In this liminal space, this book examines the history of sex work in South Africa and reveals the continuities and contradictions between the discourses that have both informally and formally policed sex workers, as well as the current conditions that constitute the contemporary policing of sex workers in Johannesburg. Achille Mbembe and Sarah Nuttall have complained about the descriptions of the urban African metropolis as a site of terror and vice—arguing that the “loathing of Johannesburg in the social sciences should be seen as part of an antiurban ideology that has consistently perceived the industrial city, in particular, as a cesspool of vice.” However, even in the world of vice, there is space to contemplate resistance, alternate visions of the world, and the liberatory potential of the body. Vice is not all bad. And sex work is a site for the contestation of femininity and masculinity, desire, and in the context of South Africa and countries like it—race. Of course, Johannesburg is not all vice, and in this book I reveal how the framing and conception of vice is itself contestable. Moreover, I aim to disrupt the tendency to treat “Africa as an object apart from the world, or as a failed and incomplete example of something else.” In searching out the realities of sex work and its policing, my study acknowledges that there are “multiple elsewheres of which the continent actually speaks” to offer insights that transcend the borders of Africa.
Policing Bodies: Law, Sex Work, and Desire in Johannesburg is the culmination of Dr. India Thusi’s pioneering work observing, mapping, and interviewing the people who make up the sex work landscape of Johannesburg, South Africa. From 2012 – 2015 Thusi observed the law enforcement officers, brothel operators, sex workers, and those who solicited them in three distinct, geographic quarters of Johannesburg, quarters that could be further broken down into five specific research sites, areas of focus often as narrow as a single street or block. In her research, Thusi sought to lay out how sex workers, and those who police them, define the impossibly complex, and ever evolving, relationship between these two groups, and the spaces where they inevitably come into contact.
However, Policing Bodies is not merely a contemporary study. One cannot explore the South Africa of today without also examining the history of colonialism, slavery, exploitation, and apartheid on the country as a whole, and Johannesburg in particular. By looking back to this history and apartheid’s laxer view on what some might call police brutality, and the officers themselves might call a necessary show of force, Thusi shows how this legacy still echoes through the policing of Johannesburg to this day. In doing this Thusi further complicates, and enriches, the debate surrounding modern sex work in her regions of study and the conversation surrounding it.
Across the course of her text, Thusi does an admirable job of remaining neutral in her presentation of all sides of the debate about policing sex work, and the legality or illegality of the work itself. However, as the researcher herself comments: “It was impossible … to be so closely immersed in the reality of sex work, floating between the perspectives of the police the and the sex workers and constantly shifting my frame of reference, without developing an opinion…”, and her opinions do come through on occasion (Thusi, 133).
That said, this is not a critique of those opinions or their appearances in portions of the text. Thusi’s ability to view, and describe, all the sides to the complex reality that is sex work in a city like Johannesburg brings incredible humanity to those she studies. Yes, this is an excellent piece of ethnographic scholarship from a young and impressive researcher, and it should be treated as such – but Thusi never loses sight ethnos part of her study. In a field of research where ethical questions and moral grey areas can prove absolute pitfalls to researchers new and old alike, Thusi never forgets that ethnography is the study of people who are just trying to survive in a world that can range from unkind, to indescribably cruel, and that is what truly elevates her work.