temporarily yours worlds of desire: the chicago series on sexuality, gender, and culture Edited by Gilbert Herdt American Gay Stephen O. Murray A Plague of Paradoxes: AIDS, Culture, and Demography in Northern Tanzania Out in Force: Sexual Orientation Philip W. Setel and the Military edited by Gregory M. Herek, Jared B. Jobe, and The Course of Gay and Lesbian Lives: Ralph M. Carney Social and Psychoanalytic Perspec- tives Bertram J. Cohler and Robert Queer Forster edited by Robert K. Galatzer-Levy Martin and George Piggford Homosexualities Stephen O. Murray The Cassowary’s Revenge: The Life and Death of Masculinity in a New The Bedtrick: Tales of Sex and Guinea Society Donald Tuzin Masquerade Wendy Doniger Mema’s House, Mexico City: On Money, Myths, and Change: The Eco- Transvestites, Queens, and Machos nomic Lives of Lesbians and Gay Men Annick Prieur M. V. Lee Badgett Travesti: Sex, Gender, and Culture The Night Is Young: Sexuality in among Brazilian Transgendered Prosti- Mexico in the Time of AIDS Héctor tutes Don Kulick Carrillo Sambia Sexual Culture: Essays from The Emerging Lesbian: Female Same- the Field Gilbert Herdt Sex Desire in Modern China Tze-lan D. Sang Gay Men’s Friendships: Invincible Communities Peter M. Nardi Coyote Nation: Sexuality, Race, and Conquest in Modernizing New Mexico, No Place Like Home: Relationships 1880–1920 Pablo Mitchell and Family Life among Lesbians and Gay Men Christopher Carrington With Respect to Sex: Charting Hijra Identity in Hyderabad, India Beyond Carnival: Male Homosexual- Gayatri Reddy ity in Twentieth-Century Brazil James N. Green Caribbean Pleasure Industry: Tourism, Sexuality, and AIDS in the Dominican Republic Mark Padilla temporarily Intimacy, Authenticity, and the Commerce of Sex Elizabeth Bernstein the university of chicago press Chicago and London Elizabeth Bernstein is assistant professor of sociology at Barnard College, Columbia University, and coeditor of Regulating Sex: The Politics of Intimacy and Identity. The University of Chicago Press, Chicago 60637 The University of Chicago Press, Ltd., London © 2007 by The University of Chicago All rights reserved. Published 2007 Printed in the United States of America 16 15 14 13 12 11 10 09 08 07 1 2 3 4 5 isbn-13: 978-0-226-04457-6 (cloth) isbn-13: 978-0-226-04458-3 (paper) isbn-10: 0-226-04457-2 (cloth) isbn-10: 0-226-04458-0 (paper) Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Bernstein, Elizabeth, 1968– Temporarily yours : intimacy, authenticity, and the commerce of sex / Elizabeth Bernstein. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. isbn-13: 978-0-226-04457-6 (cloth : alk. paper) isbn-13: 978-0-226-04458-3 (pbk. : alk. paper) isbn-10: 0-226-04457-2 (cloth : alk. paper) isbn-10: 0-226-04458-0 (pbk. : alk. paper) 1. Prostitution. 2. Sex-oriented businesses. I. Title. hq118.b47 2007 306.740973 — dc22 2006034203 ᭺ϱ The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of the American National Standard for Information Sciences — Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ansi z39.48–1992. contents acknowledgments ix Sexual Commerce in Postindustrial Culture 1 Remapping the Boundaries of “Vice” 22 Modern Prostitution and Its Remnants 40 The Privatization of Public Women 70 Desire, Demand, and the Commerce of Sex 112 The State, Sexuality, and the Market 142 Sexuality Debates and Pleasure Wars 167 appendix: a note on methodology 189 notes 203 bibliography 243 index 279 To Kerwin Kaye, always acknowledgments So many people have helped to guide and inspire me through the myriad loops and twists that this project has taken. From fi eldwork to theoriz- ing to the multiple writings and rewritings that would eventually give shape to the fi nal text of this book, the fi ction of individual authorship has been belied by the wide array of friends, kin, and colleagues who have been my partners in dialogue at every stage. Though the creation of this book would have been impossible without the critical interper- sonal and institutional support that I have been so fortunate to receive, any errors, omissions, or misinterpretations that appear in the follow- ing pages should of course be considered solely my own. I am fi rst and foremost indebted to the hundreds of women and men who shared their experiences and stories with me. Taken together, they comprise a vast and varied group, one with wide-ranging reserves of expertise. In San Francisco, the nightly companionship of Carol Leigh in the cold, damp streets of the Tenderloin was particularly important during the early stages of my research. I am enormously grateful to her for “adopting” me at the project’s outset and for introducing me to many of the sex workers and activists who would make crucial contri- butions to my subsequent investigations. I have benefi ted tremendously from the insights that Norma Hotaling offered at the inception of this project and from the warmth and wisdom that Victoria Schneider has shared with me over many years. Ulla-Carin Hedin, Arne Randers- Pehrson, Petra Östergren, Marieke van Doorninck, Ida Koch, Sven Axel Månsson, Jan Visser, Gert Hekma, Kersten van Dalen, Jackie, Ulrika Dahl, Anna Gavanas, Licia Brussa, Pye Jacobssen, Bo Hansson, Anders Gripelov, Annicka Ericcson, and Marjan Wijers were wonder- fully informative and generous hosts to me while I pursued my research in Scandinavia and the Netherlands. I am also extremely thankful x Acknowledgments to the members of the diverse sex-worker organizations — including COYOTE, SAGE, PROMISE, US-PROs, CAL-PEP, de Rode Draad, Pro-Sentret, the Prostitution Project, Street Survival Project, and Iris — and to the members of the Oakland, San Jose, San Francisco, Copenhagen, Göteborg, and Stockholm police departments who al- lowed me to tag along with them while they went about their work, patiently indulging my questions and scribbling. I owe a special debt of gratitude to my coparticipants on the San Francisco Task Force on Prostitution, who provided the original context in which my thinking on this issue developed. In this book’s prior incarnation as a doctoral dissertation in the sociology department at the University of California at Berkeley, my faculty advisors served as a signifi cant source of intellectual and emo- tional support. Over the nearly two decades that I have known her, Kristin Luker has been an especially signifi cant mentor and role model. Her deep commitment to the sociological study of gender and sexuality, one which is premised on both worldly relevance and theoretical rigor, has been a motivating example for my own research. I am grateful to Loïc Wacquant for his creative and dynamic input into this project as it unfolded, to Jerome Skolnick for his facilitation of vital components of my fi eld research, and to Lawrence Cohen for his astute engagement with the incubating thoughts that comprised my early chapter drafts. To Ruth Rosen, I owe the inspiration that her own groundbreaking study of modern-industrial prostitution provided. I owe extra special thanks to the members of my dissertation group — Laurie Schaffner, Lucinda Ramberg, Will Rountree, and Jackie Orr — who accompa- nied me on research outings whenever necessary, read everything from chapter drafts to anxiously scrawled memos, and helped me to real- ize my dream of vibrant intellectual community. Thanks also to Stacy Lawrence, Michael Burawoy, Nancy Chodorow, and Ronald Weitzer for their assistance with this project during its earliest, conceptual stages — long before I had any idea that it might someday become a primary intellectual focus, let alone a dissertation or book. In New York City and beyond, I am so grateful to the many friends and colleagues who read chapter drafts and provided all variety of en- couragement and commentary along the way. I would especially like to thank Kelly Moore, Penelope Saunders, Clare Corcoran, Sealing Cheng, Mark Padilla, Lynn Chancer, and Katherine Newman. At Bar- nard and Columbia, Janet Jakobsen, Rob Smith, Elizabeth Castelli, Carole Vance, Ali Miller, Paige West, Katalin Makkai, Lisa Gordis, Acknowledgments xi Gary Dowsett, and Deb Minkhoff have been wonderfully supportive colleagues and mentors. Emily Dobbins, Liam MacLeod, Antonia Levy, Kate Broad, and Magdalena Ruiz provided vital research, artistic, and transcription assistance. I am indebted to Siobhan Brooks, Hima B., Darby Hickey, Winddance Twine, Don Kulick, Salvador Vidal Ortiz, Ben Shepard, Denise Brennan, Casey Green, Melissa Ditmore, Rhys Williams, and Christina Crosby for their support of this project, and to Gail Kligman, Adrian Favell, Viviana Zelizer, David Greenberg, Steven Seidman, Ann Pellegrini, Miryam Sas, Kay Levine, Ruth Milk- man, Mitch Duneier, Laura Agustín, and Elizabeth Wood for provid- ing valuable and generous feedback at different stages. I wish also to thank my deeply supportive cohort of friends in Barcelona — Marçal Solé, Magda Solé, Monsterrat Guntín, Manolo García, Paco Abril, and Ana García — who have contributed so much to my life and work over many years. I am extremely grateful to the following institutions and fellow- ships for providing funding for this work: the National Science Foun- dation, the Woodrow Wilson Foundation, the Mellon Post-Doctoral Fellowship in the Humanities, the University of California Chancel- lor’s Dissertation Fellowship, and the Phi Beta Kappa Alpha Chapter. This funding was absolutely crucial to the successful execution of this project: it afforded me the all-too-rare gifts of time and material re- sources that are a prerequisite for sustained research and thinking. At the University of Chicago Press, I am greatly indebted to Gil Herdt, Doug Mitchell, Timothy McGovern, Susan Olin, and the reviewers of this manuscript who offered thoughtful and astute readings of the text. Their contributions strengthened my analysis, sharpened my argument, and enhanced the readability of the fi nal book. Finally, I would like to thank my parents, Ruth and Bernard Ber- nstein, my sister and brother-in-law, Jan and Tom Chargin, and my grand parents, Sylvia and Arthur Rubenstein — who in subtle ways set much of the political and intellectual backdrop for this project.