Racialised Erotic Labour among Northeastern Student Women in Delhi

This paper examines why female university students aged 18–21 from northeast India enter Delhi’s informal erotic economy, massage parlours, escort platforms, brothels, at rates structurally unmatched by peers from other regions. Drawing on 34 semi-structured interviews (February–December 2025), Right-to-Information institutional data, and semiotic analy- sis of 147 escort listings, we identify five interlocking mechanisms that produce what we term racialised surplus availability: a structural position wherein northeast women are simultaneously hyper-desired as erotic commodities and hyper-excluded from institutional safety nets. The paper documents the labour itself in granular ethnographic detail—the acts, the bodily negotiations, the somatic aftermath, as narrated by participants in their own teenage and young-adult register. We reject both rescue and empowerment framings, arguing that student sex work in this population is a rational, degrading, temporally bounded survival strategy produced at the intersection of racial desire and institutional abandonment