Film | "Working Girls" Screening and Discussion with Filmmaker Paromita Vohra

2025 | Paromita Vohra | India | 133 Minutes | Bangla, Hindi, Marathi, Malayalam, Tamil, Telugu w/ English subtitles

Working Girls is a vibrant, thought-provoking journey into the often-unseen world of women’s labour across India. From the bustling streets of Kolkata, Pune and Mumbai to the sloping streets of Shillong, the temple town of Madurai, and the fields of Latur, and through the lives of domestic workers, dancers, mothers, farmers, ASHA workers, surrogates, sex workers, union leaders, and grassroots organisers, the film explores the many faces of work that remain invisible yet essential. 

Blending sharp wit, rich music, and a deep engagement with the legal and historical forces shaping women’s lives, Working Girls redefines what we think of as “work” and challenges our assumptions about labour, gender, and power. 

Created in collaboration with the Laws of Social Reproduction project, this bold new documentary from the feminist filmmaker Paromita Vohra, offers both urgency and joy in its portrayal of resistance, resilience, and everyday survival. 

About the Speaker:

Paromita Vohra is a filmmaker, writerwhose extraordinary body of truth-telling, kinetic and intensely sensuous films, online videos, art installations and television programming, explore feminism, gender, desire, urban life and popular culture. She is the director of several documentaries including Unlimited Girls, Q2P, Where’s Sandra?, Morality TV and the Loving Jehad, Partners in Crime and most recently Working Girls. She has written the film Khamosh Pani/Silent Waters, the comic Priya’s Mirror and the play Ishqiya Dharavi Ishtyle. In 2015 she founded Agents of Ishq, a pioneering digital platform which has transformed conversations on sex, love and desire in India. Her weekly column Paronormal Activity in Sunday Midday recently concluded after 15 years.

About the Discussants:

Kalindi Vora is Professor of Gender, Sexuality and Women’s Studies and Ethnicity, Race, and Migration at Yale University. She is an anthropologist who works at the intersections of medicine, technology and inequality. Vora is author of Life Support: Biocapital and the New History of Outsourced Labor from the University of Minnesota Press (2015), and co-author with Neda Atanasoski of Surrogate Humanity: Race, Robots, and the Politics of Technological Futures (2018) and of Technoprecarious (2020) as a member of the Precarity Lab. Her collected work on transnational gestational surrogacy in India is published together in Reimagining Reproduction: Surrogacy, Labour and Technologies of Human Reproduction (2022). 

Dr. Vora’s current research includes a book project tentatively titled, Sensitive Subjects that places contemporary narratives of illness by patients facing racism and sexism in their daily lives within an analysis of the history of the concept of autoimmunity and contemporary practices of healthcare self-monitoring to understand the potential for patient-physician co-production of medical knowledge. A second project continues ongoing research and publishing on artificial intelligence and automation through the lens of STS and critical theory, extending research published in Surrogate Humanity.

Rohit De is Associate Professor of History and Chair of the South Asian Studies Council at Yale University. He is a historian of South Asia and the British common law world. He is the co-author, with Ornit Shani, of the recently released Assembling India's Constitution: A New Democratic History (2025) and author of A People's Constitution: The Everyday Law in the Indian Republic (2018).