CeASR seminar series

This is a hybrid seminar, taking place in the Calverley Building, room 313, Leeds Beckett University, and on Teams. The join online, please use this link.

Overview:

This seminar will explore Sikha's current research, which engages with ideas of stigma attached to the figure of the sex worker, especially through the medium of popular culture. It will be argued that these representations are shaped by colonial ideas that historically associated sex work with notions of uncivilisation and disease. Through discussions of films such as Tikli and Laxmi Bomb (2017) and The Shameless (2024), Sikha intends to build on the idea that portraying the “grim reality” of sex work often reinforces connections between addiction, deviance, and sexual labour. As a result, stigma becomes rewritten as realism, and certain images of the sex worker remain difficult to challenge. At the same time, the question of mental health, how individuals working in the industry experience psychological vulnerability, remains largely overlooked, while substance abuse is frequently accentuated and further gendered through the figure of the female “abuser”.

Speaker bio:

Sikha Mohanty is a research scholar at the Indian Institute of Technology Patna, India, working under the supervision of Dr. Priyanka Tripathi in the Department of Humanities and Social Sciences. Dr. Priyanka Tripathi is also a member of the CeASR Research Cluster for Institutional and Societal Violence at Leeds Beckett University.

Sikha's dissertation, "To Be Deviant, Or Not To Be: Exploring Space, Labour and Language of Sex Workers in Hindi Cinematic Narratives Post-1990s," intends to understand how popular culture in India constructs the social and cultural meanings of sex work. She is currently visiting the UK during April 2026, as a recipient of the Charles Wallace Research Fellowship, and hopes to connect with academics whose work engages with deviance, stigma and social representations of marginalised communities.

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Host or Publisher LBU - Centre for Applied Social Research (CeASR)