Pandemic Hustles: The Impact of COVID-19 on Commercial Sex Work—A Case Study from Urban Sri Lanka

Commercial sex work in Sri Lanka is a vastly under-researched area. Given the high levels of stigma and legal barriers directed at sex work, it continues to operate in the underground economy, rendering sex workers a marginalized and “hard-to-reach” group, which was further accentuated during the COVID-19 pandemic and the ensuing mobility restrictions imposed by the Government. This chapter draws from a qualitative study undertaken in urban Sri Lanka in early 2021 with a pilot sample of four key informants and ten sex workers to understand the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on sex workers. The sample includes five cisgender and five transgender (nachchi) sex workers in street, spa, or brothel-based sex work. This study aims to expand the existing local feminist literature on sex work that broadly explores sex work within the discourse of HIV/AIDS, violence, sex trafficking, and the civil war by situating sex work within a labor framework. Intersectionality is used as a theoretical and analytical framework to analyze how aspects of gender, sexual orientation, and the nature of sex work influence the ability of cisgender and nachchi sex workers to cope with the health risks posed by the pandemic. The findings reveal that the nature of violence experienced by sex workers and the support systems available to them are determined by factors such as gender and sexual orientation. This underscores the pervasive influence of social institutions, such as family and state structures, in perpetuating heteronormativity as the normative standard while simultaneously marginalizing those who do not adhere to it.