The controversy over the dance bar girls represents the complex process of the construction of sexuality of lower-caste women by various agencies and how it has emerged as a site for the anxieties of the state to be worked out. It also represents the fractures within the women's movement regarding definition of work, sexuality and the caste question. At another level, in the process of liberalisation and market-oriented reforms, the state has been considerably weakened as an independent entity and lost its economic and political power. The cultural field has emerged as a major, and probably the only, domain in which it can exercise full power.
