chapter 29 Seeing Beyond Prostitution: Agency and the Organization of Sex Work
Thaddeus Gregory Blanchette
In order to understand the role agency plays in sex work, we must first divest ourselves of the liberal belief that the term is a synonym for free will, sover- eignty, or untrammelled choice. Furthermore, we must also challenge two common positions regarding prostitution: its naturalization as a moral cat- egory and the belief that it is simply work, like any other work under capital- ism. Finally, we must also question as analytical categories certain emic1 or accusatory categories such as trafficking, pimp, and prostitute. Only by culti- vating a cultural studies approach that looks at commercial sex as a rich field of human activities intimately intertwined with wider forms of engendered labour performed by women can we understand the role individual agency plays in the (re)production of forms of sexual/affective exchange understood to be prostitution.
I am not a libertarian, I rarely talk about rights and freedoms. I also am not a neoliberal proponent of the happiness of making money in a free marketplace. What I am is a believer in human agency. I believe that dis- advantaged persons with limited options of how to proceed in life have, until they are actually put in chains, some space to move, negotiate, pre- fer one option to another. This position hardly seems philosophical to me, and I am not going to get credit for inventing a new theory with it. Yet time and again it turns conversations upside down. laura agustin
Stop punishing me just because you may not be able to imagine being me. Artist and sex worker sadie lune
1 Emic categories are those used by a group of insiders—members of a certain population—to describe reality. In the case of sex work, the emic categories that are usually employed, sans analysis, come from law enforcement, social work, and so-called “rescue” groups.
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Introduction
My partner, Dr Ana Paula da Silva, does a lot of her research into prostitution in restrooms. One evening, she went into one and found a young woman crying alone over an industrial sink. Ana is an excellent ethnographer and a sympa- thetic person, so it didn’t take her long to find out what was wrong. The young woman was working to support her family, in which she was the only labouring adult. She had been on the job for three months—some days for up to twelve hours—but had yet to be paid. She had met her household’s expenses by borrowing at exorbitant interest rates. Now, word had come down that her pay would be delayed for a fourth month running. She had no effec- tive legal response and was at wit’s end. As she talked to Ana, she confessed that she was thinking of killing herself. Only the thought of her family being stripped of any income kept her going. “After all”, she said, half declaring, half entreating, “as long as I keep working, they have to pay me some day. Right?” Many of you reading this story in its present context—a volume on the global history of prostitution—are probably recognizing this young woman’s plight. After all, the received wisdom regarding those who sell sex highlights the variety of deceptions that are used to exploit them. We have read thou- sands of pages on sex worker enslavement, recruitment under false pretences, indebtedness… The terms “pimp”, “trafficker”, and “exploiter” fall glibly from our tongues. If there’s one thing the histories in this collaborative volume em- phasize, it’s that prostitutes2 are often exploited and sometimes enslaved.
2 What to call those who sell or exchange sex for livelihood is quite complicated. Most of the people I interact with prefer “sex worker” while many wish to reclaim “prostitute”. Both terms have problems. As prostitute rights activist Gabriela Leite points out, “sex worker” is a con- ceptually more general word which can be applied to anyone involved in the commercializa- tion of sex, including strippers, phone sex workers, and even people otherwise glossed as “pimps”. “Prostitute”, according to Leite, has the advantage of referring specifically to the per- son having sex for money. It is in this sense that many of the authors in this volume seem to use the term. However, this is also problematic because people who may not actually sell sex (but rather trade it) are often understood to be prostitutes. Furthermore, people who actually do sell sex but do so in relatively privileged social circumstances that permit destigmatiza- tion (i.e. bar hostesses in upper class clubs, middle class “party girls”, some sexual therapists, and certain wives and mistresses) manage to largely avoid being qualified as prostitutes. Fi- nally, the view that prostitution refers to the simple commercial sale of sex is empirically complicated by the fact that many sex workers sell a wide range of things that go beyond sex, such as companionship and affective services of all sorts (Elizabeth Bernstein, Temporar- ily Yours: Intimacy, Authenticity and the Commerce of Sex (Chicago, 2007)). Nevertheless, we
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But I haven’t been entirely honest with you. Although Ana does much of her ethnographic work in restrooms, this particular incident didn’t happen in a brothel, but at her university. unisuor3 is a private school in Rio de Janeiro. The woman in question was a newly employed professor with a master’s de- gree. Her monthly salary was around 4,000 reais, which at the time made it the equivalent of eight minimum wages or four times what fully 72 per cent of Brazilian workers earn (around 1,000 reais monthly in 2010).4 In 2008, only 17 per cent of all Brazilian households were earning what she was earning.5 All of this presumes, of course, that she was receiving her salary—which she wasn’t. The dilemma faced by this young professor is nothing new to Brazilian workers, especially those who (like the majority of female workers) struggle in the economy’s lower reaches.6 Brazilian workers are vulnerable to gross exploi- tation. Having a job does not necessarily mean that one receives a salary and for those caught in this cycle of late- or unpaid work, the means to confront one’s bosses are few and the opportunities to go into debt while awaiting pay- ment are many. It is certainly true that prostitutes and professors are not the same. Pros- titution involves stigma and risks that professors do not face and these have real consequences for sex workers’ lives. What the above story illustrates, how- ever, is the degree of exploitation and lack of options faced even by privileged female workers. Often when we talk about prostitution, the common labour practices of the neo-liberal globalized economy disappear and exploitation is conceived of outside its larger economic framework. Prostitution is analysed as if it were a separate field from life and labour in general, not just in moral or theoretical terms, but in terms of life as it is lived. Because of this, the question of why many women enter into prostitution is stripped of any real context. Nowhere is this perhaps more apparent than in discussions about agen- cy and prostitutes’ ability to choose sexual labour. Few people ask if maids,
must have labels. In this chapter, I will use “sex worker” and “prostitute” interchangeably to refer to women who exchange sex for livelihood. Obviously, there are also male prostitutes, but given that the histories collected here rarely mention them, my focus here will likewise be restricted to women. 3 unisuor is a fake name and an in-joke between me and Ana Paula. It means “UniSweat” and it reflects the belief of many of the institution’s professors that it is a sweatshop for educators. 4 ibge, Mulher no mercado de trabalho: perguntas e respostas (Brasília, 2012); uol “ibge: 72% dos brasileiros ganhavam até 2 salários mínimos em 2010”, uol Economia, 19 March 2012, available at: http://economia.uol.com.br/noticias/redacao/2012/12/19/ibge-72-dos-brasileiros -ganhavam-ate-2-salarios-minimos-em-2010.htm; last accessed 2 August 2017. 5 ibge, Pesquisa nacional por amostra de domicílio 2002/2008 (Brasília, 2009). 6 ibge, Mulher no mercado de trabalho.
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7 Etic categories stand in contrast to emic categories (see footnote 1). They are science -oriented and speak to a wider audience than one small cultural group. They seek to de- scribe cultures impartially. 8 Gayle Rubin, “The Traffic in Women: Notes on the ‘Political Economy’ of Sex”, in Reiter (ed.), Toward an Anthropology of Women (New York, 1975), pp. 157–210. 9 Friedrich Engels, “The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State”, in Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels: Selected Works (New York, 1986), pp. 468–595. 10 Sherry Ortner, “Is Female to Male as Nature is to Culture?” and “The Virgin and the State”, in Ortner, Making Gender: The Politics and Erotics of Culture (Boston, 1996), pp. 21–58.
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11 Marcel Mauss, The Gift: Forms and Functions of Exchange in Archaic Societies (London, 1990) and David Graeber, Debt: The First 5000 Years, (Brooklyn, 2011). 12 Gomes and Boesch, for example, show that wild chimpanzees apparently exchange meat for sex. Christina M. Gomes & Christophe Boesch, “Wild Chimpanzees Exchange Meat for Sex on a Long-Term Basis”, PLoS ONE, 4 (2009), available at: http://www.plosone.org/ article/citationList.action;jsessionid=2F5438EB4D946ACD217EF1EAB223B541?articleURI =info%3Adoi%2F10.1371%2Fjournal.pone.0005116; last accessed 2 August 2017. 13 Rubin, “The Traffic in Women”; Claude Leví-Strauss, The Elementary Structures of Kinship (New York, 1969). 14 Engels, “The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State”, pp. 509–510.
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Agency and Prostitution
Debates about agency and its relation to structure have a long history in the social sciences, reaching back to sociologist Émile Durkheim’s comments re- garding the interplay between individual will and social facts.15 The problem of agency revolves around to what degree, if any, human beings can make choices in the face of coercive social pressures. As Durkheim pointed out, society cannot be understood as the sum of indi- vidual human actions as it exists outside the individual and exerts a coercive power upon her:
[T]here are ways of acting, thinking and feeling which possess the re- markable property of existing outside the consciousness of the indi- vidual. Not only are these types of behavior and thinking external to the individual, but they are endued with a compelling and coercive power by virtue of which, whether he wishes it or not, they impose themselves upon him.16
For Durkheim, however, this coercive power of the social is not absolute; it is refracted through the individual conscience, creating a situation in which the effects of social facts are inevitably different from the facts themselves. Indi- viduals, in other words, retain the ability to modulate social coercion through their performance in the face of social strictures and structures and they inevi- tably exercise this ability even when they attempt to faithfully follow rules and laws.17 Individuals, however, notoriously do not always attempt to follow their society’s precepts. Even such strict anti-liberal social determinists as Berger and Luckmann point out that institutions break down and lose their relevance
15 Émile Durkheim, The Rules of the Sociological Method (New York, 1982), pp. 50–59. In fact, the debate reaches further back still to Marx and Engels and even to the acrimonious arguments surrounding predestination during the Reformation. The question concerning to what extent humans are actually free to choose has been perennial within western and, indeed, human thought. 16 Durkheim, The Rules of the Sociological Method, p. 51. 17 Ibid., pp. 54–59.
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Deviance from the institutionally “programmed” courses of action be- comes likely once the institutions have become realities divorced from their original relevance in the concrete social processes from which they arose. To put this more simply, it is more likely that one will deviate from programmes set up for one by others than from programmes that one has helped establish oneself.18
The trend within recent sociology and social anthropology has been towards seeing agency in light of this dialectical relationship between the individual conscience and social structure. This tendency has perhaps reached its apex in certain lines of post-structuralist anthropology. An example is Pierre Bour- dieu’s understanding of habitus as the internalized expression of external social constraints, with individual actions that have been modulated by inter- ests transmitting change to the social fields that are productive of habitus.19 A similar understanding can be found in Marshall Sahlins’ Islands of History20 with culture providing the rules for individual behaviour and praxis inevitably leading to cultural change. A good workable definition of agency within this intellectual trend has been provided by Emirbayer and Mische, who see it as
…a temporally embedded process of social engagement, informed by the past (in its “iterational” or habitual aspect) but also oriented towards the future (as a “projective” capacity to imagine alternative possibilities) and toward the present (as a “practical-calculative” capacity to contex- tualize past habits and future projects within the contingencies of the moment).21
Within the debates surrounding prostitution, however, agency has taken on a different connotation. Contrary to its current use within sociology and an- thropology, the word seems to be generally used as a synonym for free will, especially by feminist theorists whose opinions inform a large portion of the
18 Peter L. Berger & Thomas Luckmann, The Social Construction of Reality: A Treatise in the Sociology of Knowledge (London, 1984), p. 80. 19 Pierre Bourdieu, Outline of a Theory of Practice (Cambridge, 1972). 20 Marshall Sahlins, Islands of History (Chicago, 1985). 21 Mustafa Emirbayer & Ann Mische, “What is Agency?” The American Journal of Sociology, 103 (1998), pp. 962–1023.
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Though some […] women and children have been forced into prostitu- tion by a third party, it is dull economic compulsion that drives many of them into sex work, just as in America (a country with a per capita gdp of us $21,558), many women and girls “elect” to prostitute themselves rather than join the 35 per cent of the female workforce earning pover- ty-level wages […]. To describe such individuals as exercising rights of self-sovereignty seems as spurious as stating that their prostitution rep- resents a violation of their right to dignity. There is no dignity in poverty, which denies the person full powers of agency. Yet the right to sell one’s labor (sexual or otherwise) does not guarantee the restitution of dignity or moral agency.22
Here, O’Connell-Davidson implies that agency is synonymous with self- sovereignty and is something that increases as one’s economic status improves. She seems to be saying that within a capitalist society, rich people have more agency than poor people. Furthermore, it is their relative lack of agency that “forces” women23 into prostitution through “dull compulsion”. The choice be- tween sex work and “poverty-level wages” is understood to not be a real choice at all and is thus not “full […] agency”. O’Connell-Davidson understands prostitution to be a form of labour and prostitutes as women who exercise some degree of agency, however con- strained. Her principal abolitionist interlocutors—people such as Sheila Jeffreys, Catherine McKinnon, Meghan Murphy, and Melissa Farley—oppose the very notion of sex as work, claiming that prostitution is ipso facto engen- dered violence comparable to slavery. According to these intellectuals, to talk about agency in such a situation borders upon the obscene. The most commonly encountered abolitionist feminist view is that pros- titution cannot be work because in it, the woman transforms her body into a
22 Julia O’Connell Davidson, “The Rights and Wrongs of Prostitution”, Hypatia, 17 (2002), pp. 84–98, 90. 23 Obviously, many categories of people other than women and girls—men, boys and the transgendered—enter into sex work. Debates regarding prostitution have historically revolved around the question of female prostitution, however. That is also the focus of my own research and of every article in the current volume. Given this, the present ar- ticle concentrates on the heterosexual prostitution of women and girls. The question of whether or not the analysis presented here is of use in discussing other forms of sex work is something I leave for future debate.
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24 Finn McKay, “Arguing Against the Industry of Prostitution: Beyond the Abolitionist Ver- sus Sex-Worker Binary”, Feminist Current, 24 June 2013, available at: http://feministcurrent .com/7758/arguing-against-the-industry-of-prostitution-beyond-the-abolitionist-versus -sex-worker-binary/; last accessed 2 August 2017; Janice G. Raymond, “Prostitution as Violence Against Women: ngo Stonewalling in Beijing and Elsewhere”, Women’s Stud- ies International Forum, 21 (1998), pp. 1–9; Sheila Jeffreys, The Idea of Prostitution (North Melbourne, 2009).
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25 Frederick Engels, “The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State”, in Karl Marx and Frederick Engels, Selected Works (New York, 1986), pp. 468–595, 503. 26 Durkheim, The Rules of the Sociological Method.
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Sex Work and Economies of Makeshift
An important effect of the reified view of agency is that it doesn’t allow us to see sex work as a logical continuation of (or a revolt against) normative gen- der relations under patriarchical capitalism. One thing that I commonly en- counter in my fieldwork—and which many of the texts in this volume also demonstrate—are women who sell sex as an extension of other, socially re- spectable, engendered roles. An excellent example of this can be found in
27 Bourdieu, Outline of a Theory of Practice; Gilberto Velho, Projeto e metamorfose: Antropo- logia das sociedades complexas (Rio de Janeiro, 1972).
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Dasgupta’s28 article on Calcutta. Because of traditional Indian taboos against remarriage, women who choose to be housewives and mothers can find them- selves bereft of both economic support and sexual fulfilment upon the death of a partner. It is not surprising, then, to find that 78 per cent of the women who voluntarily chose sex work in Dasgupta’s study are widows. The sex work- ing, family-supporting mother or daughter is also a classic example of this phe- nomenon. Rio de Janeiro prostitutes often emphasize that they’ve chosen sex work in order to provide better educational opportunities for their children or healthcare for their parents. In these situations, prostitution is situated as an adjunct for the reproduction of the family and a necessary extension of women’s roles within it. In eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Bruges, twentieth-century Nairobi, early twentieth-century Rio de Janeiro, early twentieth-century Buenos Aires, mid-twentieth-century Nigeria, twentieth-century Bolivia and, in fact, in al- most every context presented in this volume, increased female immigration to cities, combined with poor or uncertain wages in engendered labour markets, led women to combine sex work with other forms of (generally unstable and poorly paying) labour. Seasonal work, piece work, and dependent labour all characterize much of what is traditionally considered “women’s work”, making the salaries obtained through these forms of labour insufficient or uncertain. These conditions of engendered labour make sex work a viable and/or neces- sary option for many women in an economy of makeshifts.29 One should not be too quick to label sex work in this context a “survival strategy”, however, especially if one means to set it apart from other work through this. All work is ultimately a survival strategy. To claim that certain women are “vulnerable” to sex work while not seeing them as “vulnerable” to other forms of women’s labour is to naturalize prostitution as inferior labour. It is also important to remember that “women’s work” has often combined la- bour and sex in ways which may not be neatly categorizable. In the chapters on nineteenth-century Rio de Janeiro, Buenos Aires, Havana, Bruges, and Singa- pore we find reports of domestic labour being intermixed with the provision of sexual services.30 Furthermore, as Mechant points out, domestic labour in par- ticular makes women highly dependent on the family as an employer and thus
28 Dasgupta, this volume, Calcutta. 29 For an understanding of the concept of the “economy of makeshifts” and its application to women’s lives in one given historical context, see Chapter 2 of Sarah Mendelson & Patricia Crawford, Women in Early Modern England 1550–1720 (Oxford, 2003). 30 In fact, the persistent occurrence of this mix of sexual and domestic labour in almost all the chapters leads me to wonder if some sort of deeper, structural factor might be in play.
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When you marry a man, that’s when he thinks he owns you. What I do here in the streets isn’t any different from what I did at home when I was married […]. It was a job, just like this here. Actually, that’s a lie: it was a duty. And you don’t make money off of a duty. Here at least I get paid for what I do. My husband never paid me.33
Sex work, for all its many problems, can be liberating, especially when it is set against other forms of traditional women’s work. And while sex work does result in situations similar to slavery, so do other kinds of work, particularly in the lowest reaches of the economy. It’s interesting to note in this context that Dasgupta’s Calcuttan informant Sapna distinguished sex work as a superior oppositional category to both the supposed “freely given” sex of marriage and the coerced sex demanded of women by foremen in the construction trade, declaring “No more free and forced sex!”34 For a woman to sell sex at least presumes that she has sex to sell, in other words, that it is hers.35 This position stands in direct contrast to a wide range
31 Mechant, this volume, Bruges. 32 Dasgupta, this volume, Calcutta. 33 Thaddeus Gregory Blanchette & Ana Paula da Silva, “Prostitution in Contemporary Rio de Janeiro” in Susan Dewy & Patty Kelly (eds), Policing Pleasure: Sex Work, Policy and the State in Global Perspective (New York, 2011), pp. 130–145. 34 Dasgupta, this volume, Calcutta. 35 This presumes, of course, that the woman in question is not a slave. That qualifier, how- ever, should be made for all forms of labour and not just the sexual.
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36 Simone de Beauvoir, The Second Sex (New York, 1953); Cristiana Schettini, “Que tenhas teu corpo”: Uma história social da prostituição no Rio de Janeiro das primeiras décadas republi- canas (Rio de Janeiro, 2004). 37 Susan Dewey, Neon Wasteland: On Love, Motherhood, and Sex Work in a Rust Belt Town (Berkeley, 2011). 38 Mechant, this volume, Bruges. 39 Biancani and Hammad, this volume, Cairo.
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40 Babere Kerata Chacha, “An Over-view History of Prostitution in Nairobi: From the Preco- lonial Period to the Present”, unpublished paper collected for the project “Selling Sex in the City”, 2013. 41 Ekpootu, this volume, Nigeria.
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At the same time, sex workers are also usually very clear about the dangers and stigmas they are subject to; they are aware that they are often seen by other members of society as “the lowest of the low” and that this makes them vulnerable to harassment, exploitation, and violence. Prostitution is generally not understood by them to be positive (though, of course, there is a significant minority that disagrees) and it is not what they would “freely choose” if given the proverbial three wishes. Nevertheless, they often see it as the best choice available along their horizon of possibilities. It is thus in the field of truly existing opportunities and desires that women exercise the decision to engage in sex work and not against the backdrop of some utopian full autonomy where all possibilities are equally available. Nev- ertheless, these decisions are real and have real consequences. It is women’s negotiation of the possibilities and perils of sex work—in short, their agency— which often determines whether or not sex work allows them to achieve their goals, traps them in a regressive life cycle,42 or, indeed, enslaves them.
Agency and the Social Organization of Prostitution
When we apply a relational understanding of agency to prostitution, we begin to see that the questions we should be asking have to do with what options are opened or closed for a person who engages in sex work. How does sex work link to, reinforce, negate, or modify other social roles, especially engendered roles? How do people negotiate the possibilities created by sex work while try- ing to avoid its pitfalls? How does this work intersect with other social forms and institutions? In order to give a reasonable account of prostitution as work, we must study it as a set of lived cultures and not as a singular, abstract, ideologized category. It is only by situating sex work within life as it’s lived by socially-constrained actors that its meanings become clear. The ultimate poverty of the eternal ar- guments between “sex positive” and “abolitionist” feminists and their respec- tive political allies is that these debates reify extremely abstract definitions of prostitution to the point where they have little, if any, link to actually occurring social practices.
42 The concept of the “regressive life cycle” comes from Paul Cressey’s ground-breaking sex work study The Taxi Dance Hall (Chicago, 2008 [1932]), p. 97. It refers to the fact that work which places a high premium on youth, beauty, and/or novelty tends to trap labourers in a downward spiral in which it becomes ever more difficult to reproduce economic success.
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Anthropologist Laura Agustin believes that the only way out of the impasse in which a large part of prostitution studies has been stuck over the past cen- tury is to look at commercial sex as a rich field of human activities intimately intertwined with the surrounding socio-cultural milieus:
The cultural study of commercial sex would use a cultural-studies, in- terdisciplinary approach to fill gaps in knowledge about commercial sex and relate the findings to other social and cultural concepts. Recent work has demonstrated how people who sell sex are excluded from stud- ies of migration, of service work and of informal economies, and are in- stead examined only in terms of “prostitution”, a concept that focuses on transactions between individuals, especially their personal motivations. With the academic, media and “helping” gaze fixed almost exclusively on women who sell sex, the great majority of phenomena that make up the sex industry are ignored, and this in itself contributes to the intran- sigent stigmatization of these women […]. A cultural-studies approach […] would look at commercial sex in its widest sense, examining its inter- sections with art, ethics, consumption, family life, entertainment, sport, economics, urban space, sexuality, tourism and criminality, not omitting issues of race, class, gender, identity and citizenship.43
The persistent classification of prostitution as a morally separate and inferior activity engaged in by women who have a distinct and sexualized social per- sona flattens and homogenizes the phenomenon. When “agency” becomes a code-word for “free will” and is transformed into the prime category through which people attempt to distinguish between “enslaved prostitution” and morally-noxious-yet-tolerable sex work, the real interactions between choice and structure, individual will, and socio-economic limitations involved in the decision to start, continue, or stop selling sex disappear from view. In this way “prostitute” comes to stand as a singular, homogenous sign for an enormous variety of forms of sexual(ized) labour engaged in by women in different con- texts and conditions. Its incautious usage causes us to lose touch with the lived cultures of sex and work. And it is precisely within these lived cultures that agency, opportunity, enslavement, and independence become manifest, not to mention the actual social organization of sex work itself. In order to better grasp the diverse set of social realities with which we need to engage in order to study commercial sex as a cultural phenomenon, let’s
43 Laura Agustin, “New Research Directions: The Cultural Study of Commercial Sex”, Sexu- alities, 8 (2005), pp. 618–631.
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Bruges Brothel prostitution (official and clandestine). Phone sex. Pole danc- ing. Foreign and native prostitutes. Literate and illiterate prostitutes. Registered and unregistered prostitutes. Textile and domestic work as linked to prostitution. Full time and part time prostitution. Pimps. Madams. Escort agents. Brothel owners. Married and unmarried prostitutes. Prostitutes with and without children. Older and younger prostitutes. Soldiers as customers of prostitutes. Immigrant prosti- tutes. Brothel networks that exchange prostitutes. Debt as a means of controlling prostitutes. “Dishonest inns”. Payment in money and pay- ment in goods. Paying a fixed amount for lodging in a brothel. Paying half of one’s earnings for lodging in a brothel. Prostitutes who work from their homes. Street prostitution. Visible and invisible prostitu- tion. Independent prostitutes. Forced and free prostitutes. Cities which tolerate prostitution and cities which openly fight it.
Buenos Aires White slaves. Trafficked women. Jewish traffickers. Pimps. Cafishos. Madams. Brothel prostitution. Regulated brothels. Immigrant prosti- tutes. Foreign prostitutes as emblematic of aggressive modernity, ur- banization, and otherness. “Creole” or native prostitutes. Clandestine prostitutes. Waitresses who sell sex. Actresses who sell sex. Domestic workers who engage in sex as part of their work. Dance hall workers. Boarding house residents. Brothels. Registered prostitutes. Under- aged prostitutes. Independent prostitutes. Prostitutes who work from their homes. Street prostitutes. Licensed brothels. French prostitutes as teachers of “civilized” sex. Prostitutes who don’t speak Spanish. Ca- sas de citas. Casas de comissionatas. Working class clients. Debt as a means of controlling prostitutes. Tango musicians and other men ac- companying “artist prostitutes” as protectors. Entrepreneurs, directors and managers of night clubs, cafés, and theatres as managers of pros- titutes. Prostitutes’ union.
Lagos Wives whose male lovers pay their husbands “for encroaching on his property”. Slave wives. Hausa prostitutes. West African prostitutes. Chinese prostitutes. European prostitutes. Immigrant prostitutes.
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Runaway wives from the provinces. Hotel-based prostitutes. Foreign clients. Clients with high social status. Clients with low social status. High-class prostitutes with good educations. Escort services. Call girls. Strip clubs. Brothels. Divorcees and widows who sell sex and engage in other commercial ventures, particularly beer-brewing. Seamstresses who engage in prostitution in bars and cafés. Patron/husbands. Street- hawkers who sell sex. Smuggler prostitutes. Poor women engaged in “survival” prostitution. University students engaged in “runs”. Boys employed by prostitutes to engage clients. Under-aged sex workers. “Women’s houses”. Domestic workers who engage in sex as part of their work. Married and unmarried prostitutes. Prostitutes with and without children. Payment in cash and payment in goods or proper- ty. Prostitutes’ organizations. Prostitution as a transient stage before marriage. “Ammunition wives”. Prostitution as a route for participa- tion in global consumer culture. Prostitution as a means of assuring accommodation during housing shortages. Child marriage disguising child prostitution. Debt as a means of controlling prostitutes. On-line soliciting. Outdoor prostitution. Street prostitution. Companion and hostess prostitution. Massage parlour prostitution. Lap dancing. Pros- titution and “boma” and “jaguda” criminal boys’ gangs. Prostitution as an act of defiance and resistance to the social/sexual constraints placed on women. “Awon” girls. Management societies formed by prostitutes along ethnic lines. Sex Workers’ Alliance Nigeria.
The histories collected in the present volume do a sterling job of identifying these cultural categories and allow us to descry some questions which seem to be common to prostitution almost everywhere. However, they only begin to scratch the surface of the social organization of prostitution and how the many categories deployed to describe it interrelate with one another and with larger social contexts. We know, for example, that certain sex working women in mid-nineteenth century Florence could live as isolated registered prostitutes in casa particolari and that this allowed them “to gain an appearance of normality, make more complex relationships” and achieve a notable degree of autonomy. How and why did these women become casa particolari prostitutes as opposed to broth- el prostitutes, however? What did they have to do to negotiate this status? How did they protect it? In twentieth-century Rio de Janeiro, we can see that a distinct bifurcation developed between prostitutes confined to the lower- class Mangue red-light district and those who worked in the “artistic” cafés and clubs of the bohemian Lapa and Copacabana districts. We do not know,
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44 Ekpootu, this volume, Nigeria. 45 Schettini, this volume, Buenos Aires. See also Thaddeus Gregory Blanchette & Ana Paula da Silva, “As American Girls: Migração, sexo e status imperial em 1918”, Horizontes Antrop- ológicos, 15 (2009), pp. 75–99.
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46 John Torpey, The Invention of the Passport: Surveillance, Citizenship and the State (Cam- bridge [etc.], 2000), pp. 8–9, 111–121. 47 Mathieu Deflem, Policing World Society: Historical Foundations of International Police Cooperation (Oxford [etc.], 2002), pp. 65–70. 48 Mary Ann Irwin, “‘White Slavery’ as Metaphor Anatomy of a Moral Panic”, Ex Post Facto: The History Journal, 5 (1996), pp. 2–22; Frederick K. Grittner, White Slavery: Myth, Ideology, and American Law (New York, 1990); Jo Doezema, Sex Slaves and Discourse Masters: The Construction of Trafficking (London [etc.], 2010); Schettini, “Que tenhas teu corpo”; Blanch- ette & Silva, “As American Girls”.
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49 National Archives and Records Administration (nara). rg 84, Foreign Service Posts of the Department of State, Brazil: Rio de Janeiro Embassy. 50 Isabel t.c.m. Ferreira, “A construção social do tráfico de pessoas” (Unpublished m.a., ppgas/mn/ufrj Rio de Janeiro, 2009).
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51 As in “to engage in ordination” either by ordaining or by defining social and legal ordinates.
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Conclusion: Seeing Beyond Prostitution to Agency
Prostitution studies have suffered from two major vices: an ethnocentric ten- dency to view prostitution from “the top down” via a framework of naturalized moral and political standards, and the reification and unreflective use of ac- cusatory categories created by state ordination. Both of these problems have militated against a relational understanding of sex work as cultural phenom- ena and eschewed the recuperation of agency by foregrounding macro-scale social structures and (more problematically) legal accusations in descriptions of sex work. The histories collected in this volume lay out a rich variety of phenomena that have been labelled “prostitution” and allow us to envision how much work still needs to be done in order to fully understand these phenomena and their relationships to surrounding cultural categories. If nothing else, the articles presented here serve as a warning to those who would attempt to homoge- nize and flatten the intersection between sex and work into a one-size-fits-all category. We can, however, see certain global trends in the material presented here that relate specifically to the question of agency and the organization of sex work. One of the most important of these are the laws that have been made with regards to prostitution over the past 500 years. Simplifying (but not great- ly), we can say that the hegemonic legal structures through which prostitution is conceived in the world today seem to have been born in modern Europe during the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries and exported via colonial imperialism throughout the rest of the world. It is notable in this respect that
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Trusting in the benevolence of those who reserve the right to destroy you at the slightest shift in the political winds is both imprudent and unprincipled. Power does not become your friend simply because it has refrained from beating you for a decade. Certainly, if political dynamics come out in momentary favor of a liberatory cause, one should take ad- vantage of them, and some gratitude justly belongs to those who ably do so. But believing that this represents some fundamental shift in the nature of state or class power-structures is a dangerous illusion.54
Prostitution researchers should take these words to heart and seek to create investigative projects that foreground the experiences, trajectories, and forms of negotiation of the people involved in the sale of sex, prioritizing local con- tingency rather than grand moral or political questions. In such a way of look- ing at the world, even the category of “prostitute” itself must be contextualized and interpreted with an eye to the dialectical relationship between individual agency and social structures.
52 S. Dodillet & P. Östergren, “The Swedish Sex Purchase Act: Claimed Success and Docu- mented Effects” (Unpublished paper presented at the workshop Decriminalizing Prosti- tution and Beyond: Practical Experiences and Challenges, 2011). 53 Paul Amar, The Security Archipelago: Human-Security States, Sexuality Politics, and the End of Neoliberalism (Durham [etc.], 2013), p. 41. 54 Personal communication, 4 April 2013.
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