1NC
1
“The United States should” means the debate is solely about a policy established by
governmental means
Ericson ‘03
(Jon M., Dean Emeritus of the College of Liberal Arts – California Polytechnic U., et al., The Debater’s
Guide, Third Edition, p. 4)
The Proposition of Policy: Urging Future Action In policy propositions, each topic contains certain key
elements, although they have slightly different functions from comparable elements of value-oriented
propositions. 1. An agent doing the acting ---“The United States” in “The United States should adopt a
policy of free trade.” Like the object of evaluation in a proposition of value, the agent is the subject of
the sentence. 2. The verb should—the first part of a verb phrase that urges action. 3. An action verb to
follow should in the should-verb combination. For example, should adopt here means to put a program
or policy into action though governmental means. 4. A specification of directions or a limitation of the
action desired. The phrase free trade, for example, gives direction and limits to the topic, which would,
for example, eliminate consideration of increasing tariffs, discussing diplomatic recognition, or
discussing interstate commerce. Propositions of policy deal with future action. Nothing has yet occurred.
The entire debate is about whether something ought to occur. What you agree to do, then, when you
accept the affirmative side in such a debate is to offer sufficient and compelling reasons for an audience
to perform the future action that you propose.
Legalize means to make lawful by judicial or legislative sanction
Business Dictionary No Date, "legalize", www.businessdictionary.com/definition/legalize.html
legalize¶ Definition¶ To make enforceable, justifiable, or lawful by judicial or legislative sanction.
They claim to win the debate for reasons other than the desirability of topical action.
That undermines preparation and clash. Changing the question now leaves one side
unprepared, resulting in shallow, uneducational debate. Requiring debate on a
communal topic forces argument development and develops persuasive skills critical
to any political outcome.
Debate over a controversial point of action creates argumentative stasis—that’s key
to avoid a devolution of debate into competing truth claims, which destroys the
decision-making benefits of the activity
Steinberg and Freeley ‘13
David Director of Debate at U Miami, Former President of CEDA, officer, American Forensic Association
and National Communication Association. Lecturer in Communication studies and rhetoric. Advisor to
Miami Urban Debate League, Masters in Communication, and Austin, JD, Suffolk University, attorney
who focuses on criminal, personal injury and civil rights law, Argumentation and Debate
Critical Thinking for Reasoned Decision Making, Thirteen Edition
Debate is a means of settling differences, so there must be a controversy, a difference of opinion or a
conflict of interest before there can be a debate. If everyone is in agreement on a feet or value or
policy, there is no need or opportunity for debate; the matter can be settled by unanimous consent.
Thus, for example, it would be pointless to attempt to debate "Resolved: That two plus two equals
four,” because there is simply no controversy about this statement. Controversy is an essential
prerequisite of debate. Where there is no clash of ideas, proposals, interests, or expressed positions of
issues, there is no debate. Controversy invites decisive choice between competing positions. Debate
cannot produce effective decisions without clear identification of a question or questions to be
answered. For example, general argument may occur about the broad topic of illegal immigration. How
many illegal immigrants live in the United States? What is the impact of illegal immigration and
immigrants on our economy? What is their impact on our communities? Do they commit crimes? Do
they take jobs from American workers? Do they pay taxes? Do they require social services? Is it a
problem that some do not speak English? Is it the responsibility of employers to discourage illegal
immigration by not hiring undocumented workers? Should they have the opportunity to gain
citizenship? Does illegal immigration pose a security threat to our country? Do illegal immigrants do
work that American workers are unwilling to do? Are their rights as workers and as human beings at risk
due to their status? Are they abused by employers, law enforcement, housing, and businesses? How are
their families impacted by their status? What is the moral and philosophical obligation of a nation state
to maintain its borders? Should we build a wall on the Mexican border, establish a national identification
card, or enforce existing laws against employers? Should we invite immigrants to become U.S. citizens?
Surely you can think of many more concerns to be addressed by a conversation about the topic area of
illegal immigration. Participation in this “debate” is likely to be emotional and intense. However, it is
not likely to be productive or useful without focus on a particular question and identification of a line
demarcating sides in the controversy. To be discussed and resolved effectively, controversies are best
understood when seated clearly such that all parties to the debate share an understanding about the
objective of the debate. This enables focus on substantive and objectively identifiable issues
facilitating comparison of competing argumentation leading to effective decisions. Vague
understanding results in unfocused deliberation and poor decisions, general feelings of tension
without opportunity for resolution, frustration, and emotional distress, as evidenced by the failure of
the U.S. Congress to make substantial progress on the immigration debate. Of course, arguments may
be presented without disagreement. For example, claims are presented and supported within speeches,
editorials, and advertisements even without opposing or refutational response. Argumentation occurs in
a range of settings from informal to formal, and may not call upon an audience or judge to make a
forced choice among competing claims. Informal discourse occurs as conversation or panel discussion
without demanding a decision about a dichotomous or yes/no question. However, by definition, debate
requires "reasoned judgment on a proposition. The proposition is a statement about which competing
advocates will offer alternative (pro or con) argumentation calling upon their audience or adjudicator
to decide. The proposition provides focus for the discourse and guides the decision process. Even
when a decision will be made through a process of compromise, it is important to identify the
beginning positions of competing advocates to begin negotiation and movement toward a center, or
consensus position. It is frustrating and usually unproductive to attempt to make a decision when
deciders are unclear as to what the decision is about. The proposition may be implicit in some applied
debates (“Vote for me!”); however, when a vote or consequential decision is called for (as in the
courtroom or in applied parliamentary debate) it is essential that the proposition be explicitly expressed
(“the defendant is guilty!”). In academic debate, the proposition provides essential guidance for the
preparation of the debaters prior to the debate, the case building and discourse presented during the
debate, and the decision to be made by the debate judge after the debate. Someone disturbed by the
problem of a growing underclass of poorly educated, socially disenfranchised youths might observe,
“Public schools are doing a terrible job! They' are overcrowded, and many teachers are poorly qualified
in their subject areas. Even the best teachers can do little more than struggle to maintain order in their
classrooms." That same concerned citizen, facing a complex range of issues, might arrive at an
unhelpful decision, such as "We ought to do something about this” or, worse, “It’s too complicated a
problem to deal with." Groups of concerned citizens worried about the state of public education could
join together to express their frustrations, anger, disillusionment, and emotions regarding the schools,
but without a focus for their discussions, they could easily agree about the sorry state of education
without finding points of clarity or potential solutions. A gripe session would follow. But if a precise
question is posed—such as “What can be done to improve public education?”—then a more profitable
area of discussion is opened up simply by placing a focus on the search for a concrete solution step.
One or more judgments can be phrased in the form of debate propositions, motions for parliamentary
debate, or bills for legislative assemblies, The statements "Resolved: That the federal government
should implement a program of charter schools in at-risk communities” and “Resolved; That the state
of Florida should adopt a school voucher program" more clearly identify specific ways of dealing with
educational problems in a manageable form, suitable for debate. They provide specific policies to be
investigated and aid discussants in identifying points of difference. This focus contributes to better and
more informed decision making with the potential for better results. In academic debate, it provides
better depth of argumentation and enhanced opportunity for reaping the educational benefits of
participation. In the next section, we will consider the challenge of framing the proposition for debate,
and its role in the debate. To have a productive debate, which facilitates effective decision making by
directing and placing limits on the decision to be made, the basis for argument should be clearly
defined. If we merely talk about a topic, such as ‘"homelessness,” or “abortion,” Or “crime,” or “global
warming,” we are likely to have an interesting discussion but not to establish a profitable basis for
argument. For example, the statement “Resolved: That the pen is mightier than the sword” is debatable,
yet by itself fails to provide much basis for dear argumentation. If we take this statement to mean Iliad
the written word is more effective than physical force for some purposes, we can identify a problem
area: the comparative effectiveness of writing or physical force for a specific purpose, perhaps
promoting positive social change. (Note that “loose” propositions, such as the example above, may be
defined by their advocates in such a way as to facilitate a clear contrast of competing sides; through
definitions and debate they “become” clearly understood statements even though they may not begin
as such. There are formats for debate that often begin with this sort of proposition. However, in any
debate, at some point, effective and meaningful discussion relies on identification of a clearly stated
or understood proposition.) Back to the example of the written word versus physical force. Although
we now have a general subject, we have not yet stated a problem. It is still too broad, too loosely
worded to promote weII-organized argument. What sort of writing are we concerned with—poems,
novels, government documents, website development, advertising, cyber-warfare, disinformation, or
what? What does it mean to be “mightier" in this context? What kind of physical force is being
compared—fists, dueling swords, bazookas, nuclear weapons, or what? A more specific question might
be, “Would a mutual defense treaty or a visit by our fleet be more effective in assuring Laurania of our
support in a certain crisis?” The basis for argument could be phrased in a debate proposition such as
“Resolved: That the United States should enter into a mutual defense treaty with Laurania.” Negative
advocates might oppose this proposition by arguing that fleet maneuvers would be a better solution.
This is not to say that debates should completely avoid creative interpretation of the controversy by
advocates, or that good debates cannot occur over competing interpretations of the controversy; in
fact, these sorts of debates may be very engaging. The point is that debate is best facilitated by the
guidance provided by focus on a particular point of difference, which will be outlined in the following
discussion.
Debate over the material effects of legalization are vital to challenging the social
construction of gender identity
Showden, 12 - Assistant Professor Political Science University of North Carolina Greensboro (Carisa,
“Theorising maybe: A feminist/queer theory Convergence” Feminist Theory 2012 13: 3, DOI:
10.1177/1464700111429898)
Theory, politics, and prostitution One way to think about sex-positive queer feminist norms is that they
are multiple and therefore must be balanced. To balance them one must consider the various
constraints on subjects in practice. If what is required to realise particular norms (anti-subordination or
sexual autonomy or economic stability) is different practices in similar institutions, and if the norms
most needed for resistance are also variable, then one resulting argument is that some situations of
prostitution are more ethically defensible than others. A sex-positive queer feminism then leads us to
think about sex generally and prostitution specifically as multiple; rather than ‘prostitution’ we are led
to think about ‘prostitutions’. This is problematic, perhaps, from a legal perspective, which, as I noted
above, might be one reason why Halley and others argue that MacKinnon’s work ‘won’ the legal feminist
sex wars. But politics and policy can be (slightly) more nuanced and context-sensitive. Here sex-positive
queer feminism needs to be (warily) more governance-oriented. It needs to infuse prostitution policy
with a different ethics – to take the norms it brings to queer theory and make them work for women, to
fight the subordination produced by stigmatising ‘deviant’ sex as well as the subordination produced by
poverty and coercion into sex. The epistemological shift I am endorsing matters ethically for public
policy debates, even recognising the inconsistent relationship between a policy’s goals and its actual
material effects, as these debates create frameworks of understanding and subjectification. This
convergentist epistemology is neither precisely (dominance) feminist nor queer. While feminism and
queer theory ‘know’ sexuality differently – it either is or it is not heterosexual, subordinating, and the
source of women’s social ills – they also know sexuality the same: it is through either the rejection of sex
or the embracing of sexual acts in all their manifestations that we will be led to the new frontier of
gender relations. In Elisa Glick’s formulation, queer theory says we can ‘fuck our way to freedom’ (2000:
22) and, it seems, dominance feminism says we can not-fuck our way there. So there is an
epistemological break between them, but a break premised on an ontological agreement: sex, sexuality,
sex acts are the be-all and end-all of liberation or resistance. Or at least ‘good’ sex (however defined) is
the personal practice leading to political change. But what if it is not? What if sexuality and sexual
modalities can intervene in the consciousness of the people fucking, but this consciousness raising has
really quite mediated and distorted effects on the larger institutional contexts within which these sexual
actors live, work, and play? A more nuanced reading of sexuality, and one that accepts neither
epistemological framework of sex precisely as dominance and queer theorists have served it up so far,
might make more modest claims for its theory. Yes, rights to sexual pleasure and sexual knowledge are
essential to one’s health and well-being and (following Cornwall, Correˆa, and Jolly, 2008) are
fundamental to a human rights framework, but the specific sex acts that people engage in are not, in
and of themselves, essentially revelatory or politically engaged. Too much focus on specific acts puts all
the effort into self-styling and personal empowerment, and not enough into securing more general
collective rights to sexuality without stigma.29 Decentring sex as the central activity of identity
formation and political status does not make it unimportant; it simply means that sex does not occupy
the vanguard position in identity construction, political subordination, or political resistance. This
version of ‘sex-positive’ feminism is in some ways more ‘sex negative’ than dominance feminism: it is
less positive that sex is capable of producing subjectivity, at least in whole. If sex is not all that and then
some, there are still arguments to be had about how and why to regulate sex acts; but taking the onus
off the sex part of prostitution, for example, as either dooming women to oppression or freeing them to
reinvent themselves and the sexual order, might just open up spaces to see other aspects of
prostitution: the material effects of legalisation or criminalisation on the prostitutes themselves. If,
ironically, ‘sex-positive’ queer feminism can take some of the ‘special’ out of sex and make it one
significant form of human interaction among others, then perhaps policy makers can be guided by a
sense that is both more and less ‘free market’. More in that not all commodified sex is necessarily bad;
less in arguing that regulating conditions of commodification is the role of good government. This is
the point at which my interlocutors have asked for a more forceful normative defence: why should
feminists shift to a sex-positive queer approach such as the one I have outlined here, particularly in
thinking about prostitution? I would say first, as Kimberly D. Krawiec convincingly argues, both
commodification and coercion objections to prostitution – based on the ‘special status’ of sex – help
feed its continued marginal legal status, and it is this marginal status that benefits everyone except the
women supposedly protected by the ‘tolerated, but not embraced’ sex market (2010: 1743).30 Further,
surveys of sex workers across types of prostitution venues reveal that some prostitutes experience sex
work much as abolitionists have described it, but many do not.31 Given that many people, including
some sex workers, do not in fact experience sex acts as significantly tied to their identity, it seems
somehow wrong – anti-feminist, in fact – to insist on public policies premised on precisely this
assumption. Given also the normative power of the law, sex work’s illegality contributes to a view of
women as either ‘good girls’ or ‘bad girls’ based on promiscuity. Finally, a discursive shift that describes
sex as sometimes good and sometimes bad, but insists on attention to women’s knowledge of sex from
their own experiences of it, might eventually promote a legal regime that takes women’s knowledge
with similar seriousness, perhaps even eventually leading to changes in how rape claims are taken up by
judges and law enforcement officers. Listening to how the woman claiming rape frames the encounter
could become more central while beginning to marginalise currently hegemonic narratives about what
indicates that a woman ‘wanted it’. Discourse matters in the construction of subjectivity and
consciousness, of jurists no less than the rest of us. Even if the effects of theory on law and policy are
highly mediated, a more nuanced theory of sex is needed for its own sake in addition to policy
purposes. With its more modest ‘epistemology of sex’, sex-positive queer feminism provides a way of
contesting that it is the sex itself that is the problem with prostitution, arguing instead that it is when
sex is combined with economic coercion, or violent pimps, or desire only to feed a drug addiction, for
example, that prostitution is a problem. This shift in conceptions of power – where dominance is one,
but not the primary, modality, and the production of subjectivities and normative assessment and
material weight of any acts one engages in is multivalent – reflects a complex reality more accurately.
One can begin to articulate the domination that exists in, for example, human trafficking without
conflating human trafficking with prostitution (thereby ignoring forms of human trafficking that aren’t
for purposes of sex trafficking) or prostitution with trafficking (thereby ignoring forms of prostitution
that are more like sex work and less like forced labour or rape). Here, though, is the epistemological
break – within feminism – that simply cannot be bridged. Radical feminists say that sex ought not be
commodified, because their epistemology of sex is an epistemology of the self. The commission of sex
acts cannot be separated from self-hood; therefore, commodified sex is slavery. In this view, a ‘better’
marketplace of sexual transaction is, literally, inconceivable. But what sex-positive queer feminism
knows about sex it gets by looking at the world through lenses of both feminism’s definitional minima
and queer theory’s power plays: that sex can be a site of domination, but that it can also be a site of
productive, opaque, and diffuse power relations. Given this, then, a sexpositive queer feminism would
know that sex ought not be commodified under particular circumstances. On this view, sex does not say
anything essential about women, but practices of commodified sex under certain conditions are
indictments of unequal structural opportunities. The point of sex-positive queer feminist norms is to
help activists challenge the conditions producing political subordination, not to challenge women for
having sex. And the only way to get to that challenge is to stop putting so much identity-bearing weight
on sex acts. Further, a queer feminism, as opposed to ‘queer theory’, can also employ its Foucauldian
power frame to approach prostitution in the way that many radical feminists claim we ought to pay
more attention to and that is not directly addressed by queer theory. Prostitution is often framed as a
question of why women choose to go into this line of work. But the answers are not terribly complicated
in most cases, and only for a minority of prostitutes is it specifically for reasons that follow directly from
a queer theory position of destabilising the meaning of sex acts. The more interesting radical feminist
question is why so many men use the services of prostitutes.32 The Foucauldian power framework
offers a more satisfying toehold on an answer because it asks how men’s subjectivities are formed and
points to ways of resisting the reading of political power out of sex acts into gendered social relations. It
also points to a more nuanced answer to the motives and political understandings of the far-frommonolithic group of men who purchase sex from women.33 In the same way that moving away from a
domination model of power makes it possible to conceptualise women’s actions and motives in terms of
constrained agency rather than forcing women into being either agents or victims, productive,
subjectifying versions of power relations make men’s subjectivity both more complicated and more
open to potential reform. On the dominance view, there is no reason for men to change given the
benefits they currently receive. Further, a dominance frame where most sex is nearly indistinguishable
from rape makes dominance feminism all but useless in theorising a complex male sexuality. But such
work is an important aspect of a critical theory of sex given the number of women who seem to want to
continue to have sex with men, and the number of men and women who find various uses of power, but
not over-arching structures of dominance, erotic. Finally, much feminist theory and sex worker activism
that is focused on legalisation or decriminalisation maintains this focus in part because of the critique of
the stigma that surrounds sex and sex work. The argument is that the more stigmatised that social
norms make sex workers, the more sex workers become legitimate targets of abuse, and the harder it is
for them both to seek redress for harm and to leave sex work. This stigma is also problematic because of
its function in reminding all of us that ‘good girls don’t’ and that women’s sexuality needs to be
monitored so that it continues to serve as the moral compass for the national body. Even if most forms
of prostitution cannot be ethically defended as ‘good sex’ or even ‘good employment’, criminalisation of
prostitution is problematic as it serves as an effective strategy in the war for control over women’s
sexuality, sexual rights, and sexual pleasures. Structures of subordination are reinforced not only by
what is permitted, but by what is forbidden. Easing the legal restrictions on prostitution may be, in fact,
more in line with dominance feminism and its ultimate abolitionist project than many would like to
admit.34 Conclusion The deep incommensurability between radical feminism and queer theories of sex
cannot be overcome or merged into a happy (or even unhappy) middle ground. What the balance of
freedom and equality require in one theory is often antithetical to what is required in the other. But this
deep incommensurability is not between feminism and queer theory, it is between one version of
feminism and queer theory. There are ways to reconcile feminist critiques of subordination and feminist
desires to generate a more open habitus of sexuality for women with queer theory’s reliance on
subversion, play, and resistance. This matters theoretically, as the way we see the world shapes how we
understand what is possible and desirable in it. So a sex-positive queer feminist theory claims, on the
one hand, a more modest view of the future – one where ‘freedom’ isn’t attainable, but degrees of
openness and agency are – and, on the other hand, a more expansive one, where ‘freedom’ is defined in
myriad ways within a complex notion of equality in difference. Whether this equality is based on
multiple intersecting identities or not through identities at all, but through practices and positionalities
that shift and can be shifted is a question I have been able only to raise in this article but not discuss in
any detail. The question of identity politics and its necessity for a robust feminist theory is obviously
fraught, but is again being fought within feminism and not only between feminism and its ‘others’.35
This recognition of the incommensurability of feminist and queer epistemologies of sex also matters
politically, especially given the rise of ‘governance feminism’ over the last thirty years. It’s not enough
for voices of dissent within feminism to work culturally; sex-positive feminist theorists must also
engage in the specific political institutions that help to produce the discursive and material vectors
through which power flows. Such political engagement is more difficult for non-dominance feminists.
This is partly because dominance feminism (along with liberal feminism) is already more solidly fixed as
‘the’ voice of feminism in US jurisprudence especially, but also because governance violates both the
anti-regulatory queer influence on sex-positive feminism, and the poststructuralist feminist cautions
against working in the state because it requires calcifying power relations and identities, operates
through false universals, and forces women to claim to be victims in order to be heard.36 Clearly, then
strategising about how to influence policy will be an on-going debate, but one that feminism beyond
dominance needs to be party to. Otherwise, the brief carried for F may too often be a brief against her.
2
The aff reclaimation of the whore is the internalization of a process of production and
consumption. This Normalizes the New capitalist culture and market logic
Barbara G. Brents and Kathryn Hausbeck 2007 "Marketing Sex: US Legal Brothels and Late Capitalist
Consumption"
https://faculty.unlv.edu/brents/research/MarketingSex.pdfhttps://faculty.unlv.edu/brents/research/Ma
rketingSex.pdf Barb Brents is a professor in the Department of Sociology at the University of Nevada,
Las Vegas. Kathryn Hausbeck, Ph.D., is Senior Associate Dean of the Graduate College and Associate
Professor in Sociology at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas.
Selling sex is business. In addition to all else it may be, it is also situated in the specific forms of
production and consumption at particular locales and time periods. The economic and cultural context
in which sex is sold has changed significantly. Since the Second World War, a globally integrated
economic system has developed, whose engine has changed from production to consumption, making
service the core industrial sector (Harvey, 1989; Jameson, 1991). These forces have driven the
development of new commodities, new forms of labour and new forms of consumption.1 Most
recently, travel and tourism have become the world’s largest industries employing 11 per cent of all
workers world wide, and producing 10 per cent of the world’s gross domestic product (Wonders and
Michalowski, 2001: 549). Simultaneously, the non-tourist service industry has become increasingly
‘touristic’ – that is, rather than selling services with specific outcomes, services sell experience,
spectacle, fantasy, adventure, escapism and personal interactions (Urry, 2002). These economic
changes have had profound effects on cultural practices, especially intimacy, sex and sexuality. Late
capitalist mass consumption has encouraged, according to some studies, a pornographication of
culture, more liberal and egalitarian sexual attitudes, and an acceptance of fleeting, temporary
relationships (Bauman, 2003; Giddens, 1992; Hawkes, 1996; McNair, 2002). Studies also demonstrate an
increasing commodification of intimacy and a heightened sexualization of work (Adkins, 2002; Zelizer,
2005). An important empirical question emerges: In this context, how has the sex industry changed? In
this article, we argue that sex businesses as forms of commerce must be situated in local institutional
fields of consumption as they intersect global late capitalist culture and economy. We emphasize that
when it comes to understanding consumption, business and culture are inextricably intertwined. We
conceptualize an institutional field as ‘a set of interconnected economic and cultural institutions
centered on the production of commodities for individual demand’ (Zukin and Maguire, 2004: 175). We
examine how recent changes in the economic infrastructure of mass consumption and the values and
attitudes of consumer culture are affecting how the sex industry is organized and sex as a product is
marketed, through one site, the legal brothel industry in 10 of the rural counties of Nevada, the only
place in the USA where prostitution is legal. We demonstrate the trend toward using similar
organizational and marketing strategies to both tourist and touristic service industries, despite the small
size of the brothel industry. These strategies include marketing to broad-ranging audiences, using more
mainstream business forms, and selling individualized, touristic experiences rather than rationalized sex
acts. This new style of organization and marketing may have significant implications for the integration
of the sex industries with other businesses, as well as the nature of sex work.
Queering identity falls in line with neoliberal governmentality – the aff gets co-opted
in favor of creating new markets for queers
Ladelle McWhorter 12 – Professor of Philosophy, Women, Gender, Sexuality, and Environmental
Studies, University of Richmond, “Queer Economies”, Foucault Studies, No. 14, pp. 61-78, September
2012
Neoliberal Subjectivity My focus in this article, however, is not population management but the types of subjec-tivity that are generated through population management within neoliberal
who (or what) are we becoming? Foucault’s work suggests that those of us who participate in markets
are becoming entrepreneurs who invest in our own human capital in order to generate income streams. After explaining Foucault’s
claim, in this section I will argue that this process reshapes the notion of identity, seriously fraying its ties to normalized
development and rendering its variants quite a bit less rigid than they were previously. Ultimately, my contention will
be that within neoliberal regimes, the practice of queering identities is not as resistant to dominant power
networks as it might seem or as we might want it to be, and in some domains it may actually facilitate
neoliberal governmentality rather than resist it at all. Neoliberal theory follows economist Lionel Robbins in his definition of
apparatuses of security. In other words,
economics as “the science of human behavior as a relationship between ends and scarce means which have mutually exclusive uses.”37 This definition, as Foucault points out, shifts the
discipline away from analyses of processes and toward analyses of activities.38 Production, for exam-ple, is no longer central; rather, income acquisition and allocation are. This shift seriously
blurs the distinction between labor and capital. Laborers’ wages are, simply, income, just as capitalists’ rent, interest, and profit from sales are income.
There may be a difference in quantity (in fact, of course there is a difference in quantity), but there is no difference in quality between various incomes. Furthermore, neoliberal theorists,
minds and bodies themselves can be capital. Voilà, wage
earners are capitalists! Or, to be more precise, wage earners are entrepreneurs. They invest in their human capital, market
themselves, and sell their time, energy, knowledge, and skills. As Nobel Prize winning economist Gary Becker puts it, “Persons investing in
following Irving Fisher, define “capital” as anything from which an income can be derived, and hold that
human capital can be considered ‘firms’ that combine such capital perhaps with other resources to produce earning capital…”39 Thus, “the basic element to be deciphered by economic
An economy made up of enterprise-units, a society
made up of enterprise-units, is at once the principle of decipherment linked to liberalism and its programming for the
rationali-zation of a society and an economy.”40 In other words, these entrepreneurs-of-themselves are both
theoretical assumptions that neoliberal theorists make in order to describe human market behavior and,
at the same time, neoliberal prescriptions for how human beings should behave. Neoliberalism is both analytic and
normative. Good neoliberal subjects, then, are more or less successful enterprise-units.41 The in-come streams they generate enable them to
maximize their utility functions (or, at least, the purpose of generating income streams is to amass the resources necessary to maximize uti-lity, whether this is realized or
analysis is not so much the individual, or processes and mechanisms, but enterprises,” Foucault writes. “
not). Ultimately, what these enterprises produce (or at least endeavor to produce) is their own preference satisfaction. The income stream may be used to purchase (or attract) the raw
materials—shelter, groceries, a mate, etc.—which may be combined with non-market labor to produce whatever the neoliberal subject wishes to con-sume (warmth, nutrients, orgasm, etc.).
This way of construing human activity makes of each individual a self-interested bundle of sui generis [of its
own kind] preferences calculating the costs and benefits of every available option for conduct and relationship in
view of his or her own likelihood of satisfaction. Every-thing we do is to be understood as utility
maximizing behavior based on preferences and calculation. Even our most intimate associations—with our parents, with our spouses, with our
children—are explicable on this model, according to Becker.42 Generosity and self-sacri-fice are investments; genetically related offspring are commodities for which close substi-tutes are
scarce;43 and
friendships are valuable insofar as they maximize one’s utility function. Becker is famous for having analyzed criminal
behavior in this way. Law-breaking, he argues, be it parking in a tow-away zone or selling narcotics, is market behavior, and if authorities want to reduce it, they have simply to reduce the
incentives to engage in it. There is no qualitative difference between people who break laws and people who do not; the “delinquent” is not a special kind of person.44 Repetitions of the
choice to break laws leading to multiple arrests and incarcerations might generate the label and even the sub- jective experience of oneself as “criminal” or “delinquent,” but those identities
the same case can be made for the
“homosexual,” as well as for any of the other sexual identity categories generated through the twentieth century. Everybody
starts with their own set of personal preferences. Neoliberal theorists are not interested in the whence
and wherefore of those preferences; it simply does not matter (although adver-tisers are very interested in how to generate new
preferences for market purposes). As neo-liberals see it, we all make predictions regarding what will satisfy our preferences and
enhance our utility, and then we calculate the costs and risks of attempting to achieve satisfaction in each of the ways available to us at a given
time. Our lives are made up of these thousands of calculated choices. Our identities are to be understood not as some underlying truth
that comes into the world with us at conception or birth, or even as the names for biological and psychological developmental outcomes, but
simply as names for relatively long-term patterns of behavior that can be thought of as manifestations of
are simply shorthand for aggregated preferences as expressed and implemented choices over time. Obviously,
choice and strategy.45 For identities to have any value or meaning in neoliberal regimes, they must play some
role in markets. And they do. “Lesbians” are a population with certain preferences cohesive enough to
form a market—for four-wheel drive vehicles, Birkenstocks, power tools, wedding planners, and reproductive technologies. Likewise “gay men” are a
population with certain preferences (and statistically, being [white] men, with about 30% more income to allocate than lesbians); so they are a market—
for vodka, magazines, sophisticated household furnishings, men-only cruise lines.46 We call these stereotypes, which make
them seem detrimental, and they do have detrimental effects. But unlike older stereotypes, the detrimental effects fall not so much on
those who do but rather on those who do not fit them. Whereas it was terrible to be a limp-wristed sissy,
it is not so bad to be an urban sophisticate with artistic flare; in fact, it might greatly increase one’s
income stream. What is terrible is to be bullied out of an education, to try to survive among the ranks of the working poor, to be ill without insurance, or to raise children or care
for a disabled partner without the civil rights necessary to protect their interests. Neoliberalism has an answer to whatever discrimination people suffer, however. It is to let the
market handle it. Some people have a taste for racism or homophobia, a pre-ference for avoiding contact with blacks or Jews or gays. They calculate the costs and
risks of satisfying that preference, and then they do so in whatever manner best maximizes their utility. However, as Milton Friedman notes, “The man who
exercises discrimination pays a price for doing so.”47 If he happens to be an entrepreneur, this price interferes with opera-tional efficiency. “A businessman or entrepreneur who expresses
preferences in his busi-ness activities that are not related to productive efficiency is at a disadvantage compared to other individuals who do not. Such an individual is in effect imposing higher
costs on him-self than are other individuals who do not have such preferences. Hence, in a free market they will tend to drive him out.”48 Indeed, markets have remedied some discrimination
against non-heterosexuals.49 As of 2008, according to an Equality Forum survey, 473 of Fortune 500 companies included sexual orientation in their non-discrimination policies.50 Increasingly,
such companies offer partner benefits to employees in same-sex relationships. And the job market is not the only market to address discrimination. For example, for many years the
Commonwealth of Vir-ginia prohibited insurance companies from selling domestic partner health insurance poli-cies in Virginia. Having discovered a lucrative market niche outside the state
that they felt sure could be replicated within it, the companies lobbied hard to change the law. In fact, when gay and lesbian activists attempted to attend the General Assembly hearings on
the question, insurance representatives urged them to stay away, so as not to confuse a free market issue with a social issue; the companies’ spokespeople would handle everything. And they
this market approach only works to
end discrimination if inclusion of the groups of people in question is profitable. When it is not, there simply is no remedy.
Those lesbians and gay men, transpeople and queers of all sorts who are without sufficient human capital
and resources to allocate in markets may well still be subject not only to discrimination but to harassment and
violence. But to return to the question at hand, within a neoliberal framework, an identity is not coincident with a subject
position. Neoliberal subjects are (or should be, if they are rational) self-entrepreneurs; it is up to them to acquire whatever discipline is needed
to en-hance their human capital and compete in the marketplace. Identities, when they come into play at all, are simply labels imposed on aggregated
choices, which in turn are based on sui generis preferences; they are not the names of developmental trajectories, as they are in
regimes of disciplinary normalization. Consequently, they will not be strictly enforced on every individual human body. And this brings us back to queer theory
and politics. Queering in the Absence of Firm Identities The project of queering identities began in the early 1990s as a way of breaking
down rigid delineations of experience and desire. Queer theorists pointed out numerous examples of ambiguous or veiled
homosexual desire in apparently heterosexual images, tropes, charac-ters, and plot lines in classical literature, drama, and film, as well as in
popular culture. They showed us that our own real-life sexual and gender identities were simulacra, con-stantly
requiring reenactment, reiteration, and representation to bolster and sustain them-selves. They resisted and challenged homogeneity of
identification by inciting identities to proliferate and endlessly differ from themselves. In short, where our normalized identities defined and
imprisoned us, they excavated exits and melted bars. They showed us that those identities had histories
and political investments and interests that transcended and sometimes opposed our individual lives and
well-being. They laid bare the mechanisms of disciplinary normalization. They encouraged us to experience dis-identification and
estrangement. In Foucault’s terms, they helped us to get free of ourselves.51 Now, however, if disciplinary
normalization is receding where it is in tension with expanding regimes of security wherein circulation (of
money, commodities, information, human bodies, etc.), not development, is paramount, how are queer theory and politics
situated? If “queer” resists the forces that would contain us in normalized identities, can “queer” also
resist the forces that would transform us into utility maximizers operating as entrepreneurial firms? Or is it more likely just
to render us all more open to marketing across what used to be our normalized identity boundaries? The
question is pressing because, on some fronts at least, it looks like queering identities facilitates the expansion and multiplication of
markets. To attract a desired mate, a straight man might need to invest in his human capital by learning
from—and then by purchasing the same products as—men with fashionable “queer eyes,” as depicted on an early
twenty-first century reality TV show, “Queer Eye for the Straight Guy.” Straight masculinity needs to be softened or refined; hence, a
did. The legal change that ensued was thus a result of market pressure, not of de-mands for equality or justice. Of course,
little queerness is good for everybody. In some queer youth cultures, boundary breaking and genderbending strategies rely very heavily on deploying purchased products; one announces one’s challenges to
identification through clothes, jewelry, hair styles, tattoos, personal electronics, and similar accoutrements and often
through relatively rapid changes in these modes of personal stylization. After all, in a neoliberal world, what does
refusing to be contained in an identity mean other than refusing to make consistent consumer choices?
It will be argued that this popular culture appropriation of “queer” has little or nothing to do with the queer politics of the 1970s
and 1980s or with the queer theory and politics of the 1990s. And there is merit in that argument. My point is not that the work done in those decades was
misguided, only that, with the changes in notions of identity that have occurred with the advance of neoliberalism
over the last four decades, that sort of work now will inevitably be appropriated and, to use a very old word, co-opted. It does not
challenge neoliberal subjectivities directly enough not to be; its focus was disciplinary normalization. But can we turn queering into
resisting neoliberalism? I believe so, and I believe we should.
The structures of capitalism are driving multiple large-scale processes that are
increasingly out of the control of individuals living their lives. Global warming,
multiple wars of accumulation, loss of land and income stratification: all of these are
making life unlivable.
Parr ’13 (Adrian, Assoc. Prof. of Philosophy and Environmental Studies @ U. of Cincinnati, THE WRATH
OF CAPITAL: Neoliberalism and Climate Change Politics, pp. 145-147)
A quick snapshot of the twenty-first century so far: an economic meltdown; a frantic sell-off of public
land to the energy business as President George W Bush exited the White House; a prolonged, costly,
and unjustified war in Iraq; the Greek economy in ruins; an escalation of global food prices; bee colonies
in global extinction; 925 million hungry reported in 2010; as of 2005, the world's five hundred richest
individuals with a combined income greater than that of the poorest 416 million people, the richest 10
percent accounting for 54 percent of global income; a planet on the verge of boiling point; melting ice
caps; increases in extreme weather conditions; and the list goes on and on and on.2 Sounds like a ticking
time bomb, doesn't it? Well it is.¶ It is shameful to think that massive die-outs of future generations will
put to pale comparison the 6 million murdered during the Holocaust; the millions killed in two world
wars; the genocides in the former Yugoslavia, Rwanda, and Darfur; the 1 million left homeless and the
316,000 killed by the 2010 earthquake in Haiti. The time has come to wake up to the warning signs.3¶
The real issue climate change poses is that we do not enjoy the luxury of incremental change anymore.
We are in the last decade where we can do something about the situation. Paul Gilding, the former head
of Greenpeace International and a core faculty member of Cambridge University's Programme for
Sustainability, explains that "two degrees of warming is an inadequate goal and a plan for failure;'
adding that "returning to below one degree of warming . . . is the solution to the problem:'4 Once we
move higher than 2°C of warming, which is what is projected to occur by 2050, positive feedback
mechanisms will begin to kick in, and then we will be at the point of no return. We therefore need to
start thinking very differently right now.¶ We do not see the crisis for what it is; we only see it as an
isolated symptom that we need to make a few minor changes to deal with. This was the message that
Venezuela's president Hugo Chavez delivered at the COP15 United Nations Climate Summit in
Copenhagen on December 16, 2009, when he declared: "Let's talk about the cause. We should not avoid
responsibilities, we should not avoid the depth of this problem. And I'll bring it up again, the cause of
this disastrous panorama is the metabolic, destructive system of the capital and its model: capitalism.”5¶
The structural conditions in which we operate are advanced capitalism. Given this fact, a few
adjustments here and there to that system are not enough to solve the problems that climate change
and environmental degradation pose.6 Adaptability, modifications, and displacement, as I have
consistently shown throughout this book, constitute the very essence of capitalism. Capitalism adapts
without doing away with the threat. Under capitalism, one deals with threat not by challenging it, but by
buying favors from it, as in voluntary carbon-offset schemes. In the process, one gives up on one's
autonomy and reverts to being a child. Voluntarily offsetting a bit of carbon here and there, eating
vegan, or recycling our waste, although well intended, are not solutions to the problem, but a symptom
of the free market's ineffectiveness. By casting a scathing look at the neoliberal options on display, I
have tried to show how all these options are ineffective. We are not buying indulgences because we
have a choice; choices abound, and yet they all lead us down one path and through the golden gates of
capitalist heaven.¶ For these reasons, I have underscored everyone's implication in this structure –
myself included. If anything, the book has been an act of outrage – outrage at the deceit and the double
bind that the "choices" under capitalism present, for there is no choice when everything is expendable.
There is nothing substantial about the future when all you can do is survive by facing the absence of
your own future and by sharing strength, stamina, and courage with the people around you. All the rest
is false hope.¶ In many respects, writing this book has been an anxious exercise because I am fully aware
that reducing the issues of environmental degradation and climate change to the domain of analysis can
stave off the institution of useful solutions. But in my defense I would also like to propose that each and
every one of us has certain skills that can contribute to making the solutions that we introduce in
response to climate change and environmental degradation more effective and more realistic. In light of
that view, I close with the following proposition, which I mean in the most optimistic sense possible: our
politics must start from the point that after 2050 it may all be over.
Vote Negative to reject the capitalist market logic that underlays the affirmative.
Pedagogical spaces are the key starting point for breaking down market logic.
McLaren, Distinguished Fellow – Critical Studies @ Chapman U and UCLA urban schooling prof, and
Scatamburlo-D’Annibale, associate professor of Communication – U Windsor, ‘4
(Peter and Valerie, “Class Dismissed? Historical materialism and the politics of ‘difference’,” Educational
Philosophy and Theory Vol. 36, Issue 2, p. 183-199)
For well over two decades we have witnessed the jubilant liberal and conservative pronouncements of
the demise of socialism. Concomitantly, history's presumed failure to defang existing capitalist relations
has been read by many self-identified ‘radicals’ as an advertisement for capitalism's inevitability. As a
result, the chorus refrain ‘There Is No Alternative’, sung by liberals and conservatives, has been
buttressed by the symphony of post-Marxist voices recommending that we give socialism a decent
burial and move on. Within this context, to speak of the promise of Marx and socialism may appear
anachronistic, even naïve, especially since the post-al intellectual vanguard has presumably
demonstrated the folly of doing so. Yet we stubbornly believe that the chants of T.I.N.A. must be
combated for they offer as a fait accompli, something which progressive Leftists should refuse to
accept—namely the triumph of capitalism and its political bedfellow neo-liberalism, which have worked
together to naturalize suffering, undermine collective struggle, and obliterate hope. We concur with
Amin (1998), who claims that such chants must be defied and revealed as absurd and criminal, and who
puts the challenge we face in no uncertain terms: humanity may let itself be led by capitalism's logic to a
fate of collective suicide or it may pave the way for an alternative humanist project of global socialism.
The grosteque conditions that inspired Marx to pen his original critique of capitalism are present and
flourishing. The inequalities of wealth and the gross imbalances of power that exist today are leading to
abuses that exceed those encountered in Marx's day (Greider, 1998, p. 39). Global capitalism has paved
the way for the obscene concentration of wealth in fewer and fewer hands and created a world
increasingly divided between those who enjoy opulent affluence and those who languish in
dehumanizing conditions and economic misery. In every corner of the globe, we are witnessing social
disintegration as revealed by a rise in abject poverty and inequality. At the current historical juncture,
the combined assets of the 225 richest people is roughly equal to the annual income of the poorest 47
percent of the world's population, while the combined assets of the three richest people exceed the
combined GDP of the 48 poorest nations (CCPA, 2002, p. 3). Approximately 2.8 billion people—almost
half of the world's population—struggle in desperation to live on less than two dollars a day (McQuaig,
2001, p. 27). As many as 250 million children are wage slaves and there are over a billion workers who
are either un- or under-employed. These are the concrete realities of our time—realities that require a
vigorous class analysis, an unrelenting critique of capitalism and an oppositional politics capable of
confronting what Ahmad (1998, p. 2) refers to as ‘capitalist universality.’ They are realities that require
something more than that which is offered by the prophets of ‘difference’ and post-Marxists who would
have us relegate socialism to the scrapheap of history and mummify Marxism along with Lenin's corpse.
Never before has a Marxian analysis of capitalism and class rule been so desperately needed. That is not
to say that everything Marx said or anticipated has come true, for that is clearly not the case. Many
critiques of Marx focus on his strategy for moving toward socialism, and with ample justification;
nonetheless Marx did provide us with fundamental insights into class society that have held true to this
day. Marx's enduring relevance lies in his indictment of capitalism which continues to wreak havoc in
the lives of most. While capitalism's cheerleaders have attempted to hide its sordid underbelly, Marx's
description of capitalism as the sorcerer's dark power is even more apt in light of contemporary
historical and economic conditions. Rather than jettisoning Marx, decentering the role of capitalism, and
discrediting class analysis, radical educators must continue to engage Marx's oeuvre and extrapolate
from it that which is useful pedagogically, theoretically, and, most importantly, politically in light of the
challenges that confront us. The urgency which animates Amin's call for a collective socialist vision
necessitates, as we have argued, moving beyond the particularism and liberal pluralism that informs the
‘politics of difference.’ It also requires challenging the questionable assumptions that have come to
constitute the core of contemporary ‘radical’ theory, pedagogy and politics. In terms of effecting
change, what is needed is a cogent understanding of the systemic nature of exploitation and oppression
based on the precepts of a radical political economy approach (outlined above) and one that
incorporates Marx's notion of ‘unity in difference’ in which people share widely common material
interests. Such an understanding extends far beyond the realm of theory, for the manner in which we
choose to interpret and explore the social world, the concepts and frameworks we use to express our
sociopolitical understandings, are more than just abstract categories. They imply intentions,
organizational practices, and political agendas. Identifying class analysis as the basis for our
understandings and class struggle as the basis for political transformation implies something quite
different than constructing a sense of political agency around issues of race, ethnicity, gender, etc.
Contrary to ‘Shakespeare's assertion that a rose by any other name would smell as sweet,’ it should be
clear that this is not the case in political matters. Rather, in politics ‘the essence of the flower lies in the
name by which it is called’ (Bannerji, 2000, p. 41). The task for progressives today is to seize the moment
and plant the seeds for a political agenda that is grounded in historical possibilities and informed by a
vision committed to overcoming exploitative conditions. These seeds, we would argue, must be derived
from the tree of radical political economy. For the vast majority of people today—people of all ‘racial
classifications or identities, all genders and sexual orientations’—the common frame of reference arcing
across ‘difference’, the ‘concerns and aspirations that are most widely shared are those that are rooted
in the common experience of everyday life shaped and constrained by political economy’ (Reed, 2000, p.
xxvii). While post-Marxist advocates of the politics of ‘difference’ suggest that such a stance is outdated,
we would argue that the categories which they have employed to analyze ‘the social’ are now losing
their usefulness, particularly in light of actual contemporary ‘social movements.’ All over the globe,
there are large anti-capitalist movements afoot. In February 2002, chants of ‘Another World Is Possible’
became the theme of protests in Porto Allegre. It seems that those people struggling in the streets
haven’t read about T.I.N.A., the end of grand narratives of emancipation, or the decentering of
capitalism. It seems as though the struggle for basic survival and some semblance of human dignity in
the mean streets of the dystopian metropoles doesn’t permit much time or opportunity to read the
heady proclamations emanating from seminar rooms. As E. P. Thompson (1978, p. 11) once remarked,
sometimes ‘experience walks in without knocking at the door, and announces deaths, crises of
subsistence, trench warfare, unemployment, inflation, genocide.’ This, of course, does not mean that
socialism will inevitably come about, yet a sense of its nascent promise animates current social
movements. Indeed, noted historian Howard Zinn (2000, p. 20) recently pointed out that after years of
single-issue organizing (i.e. the politics of difference), the WTO and other anti-corporate capitalist
protests signaled a turning point in the ‘history of movements of recent decades,’ for it was the issue of
‘class’ that more than anything ‘bound everyone together.’ History, to paraphrase Thompson (1978, p.
25) doesn’t seem to be following Theory's script. Our vision is informed by Marx's historical materialism
and his revolutionary socialist humanism, which must not be conflated with liberal humanism. For left
politics and pedagogy, a socialist humanist vision remains crucial, whose fundamental features include
the creative potential of people to challenge collectively the circumstances that they inherit. This variant
of humanism seeks to give expression to the pain, sorrow and degradation of the oppressed, those who
labor under the ominous and ghastly cloak of ‘globalized’ capital. It calls for the transformation of those
conditions that have prevented the bulk of humankind from fulfilling its potential. It vests its hope for
change in the development of critical consciousness and social agents who make history, although not
always in conditions of their choosing. The political goal of socialist humanism is, however, ‘not a resting
in difference’ but rather ‘the emancipation of difference at the level of human mutuality and
reciprocity.’ This would be a step forward for the ‘discovery or creation of our real differences which can
only in the end be explored in reciprocal ways’ (Eagleton, 1996, p. 120). Above all else, the enduring
relevance of a radical socialist pedagogy and politics is the centrality it accords to the interrogation of
capitalism. We can no longer afford to remain indifferent to the horror and savagery committed by
capitalist's barbaric machinations. We need to recognize that capitalist democracy is unrescuably
contradictory in its own self-constitution. Capitalism and democracy cannot be translated into one
another without profound efforts at manufacturing empty idealism. Committed Leftists must
unrelentingly cultivate a democratic socialist vision that refuses to forget the ‘wretched of the earth,’
the children of the damned and the victims of the culture of silence—a task which requires more than
abstruse convolutions and striking ironic poses in the agnostic arena of signifying practices. Leftists must
illuminate the little shops of horror that lurk beneath ‘globalization’s’ shiny façade; they must challenge
the true ‘evils’ that are manifest in the tentacles of global capitalism's reach. And, more than this,
Leftists must search for the cracks in the edifice of globalized capitalism and shine light on those fissures
that give birth to alternatives. Socialism today, undoubtedly, runs against the grain of received wisdom,
but its vision of a vastly improved and freer arrangement of social relations beckons on the horizon. Its
unwritten text is nascent in the present even as it exists among the fragments of history and the shards
of distant memories. Its potential remains untapped and its promise needs to be redeemed.
Case
No reclaiming of the word “whore” is possible – attempts fail to account for
prostitution as a daily form of torture that prevents empowerment.
Rebecca Mott, 2013 Your Language is Part of the Problem
http://rebeccamott.net/2013/09/04/your-language-is-part-of-the-problem/
I have often written on how the language around prostitution and porn is the language of the privileged
used to silenced the prostituted class. It is a language forged by punters and the sex trade, and there can
be no reclaiming of the words that keep the prostituted as goods, as sub-humans. No amount of
“feminist” reclaiming, no amount of liberal re-framing, and no wordplay can take away the destructive
force of this language. It is this language that make the male violence to the prostituted into a noncrime, it is this language that said the prostituted feel no pain and have no boundaries, it is the language
that it impossible to rape the prostituted. That is the language you think is worth reclaiming, that is the
language that is force onto the prostituted until they forget that they have multiple voices. I will write to
some of these words that the ignorant want to take back. WHORE Instead of slut, there is a slow
movement to reclaim whore for women. This cannot be done, and it saddened me that some women
speak over exited women to get back the word. Whore has always used by the profiteers of the sex
trade to give the illusion that they are women-friendly. The trick is get into feminism the concept of the
Sacred Whore – which is mostly made-up history and a play on feminist language. It is the convenient
concept that the whore is this unique being with supernatural sexual powers, with no human reach to
pain or grief. The myth of the whore is not only does she give endless sex to endless men – but she also
is their carer, their confident, their comfort in wars. The whore is never human – so men can any
violence to her, men can use her and toss her away – or being a “goddess”, no harms can be done to the
whore. This male construction is making of temple whores, making of courtesans, making of escorts. In
reality, to be a whore is to trapped in a room with streams of punters who have enough money to be
entitled to torture and murder at any time – for their power and privilege means it never a crime or
even an event. There is nothing empowering about being a whore – only in male porn fantasies, and
why would any woman want to reclaim that. END WORD It so hard to write about language that is
reclaim from the sex trade. The reclaiming is naive for it takes no account that the sex trade is an
institution that daily is destroying millions of prostituted women and girls. Reclaiming these words is an
individual act mainly by folks who refuse to view with a clear eye this genocide. As you play with words,
the prostituted are being tortured, sold into hell and losing their humanity. We cannot reclaim these
words – as each and every the prostituted are murdered and made to disappear. There is no time to be
that self-indulgent.
No solvency for reclaiming “whore” – reclamations are rarely successful and have only
been successful for words that are not subject to value judgment.
AIDAN WILSON | MAY 30, 2011 7:30PM
| EMAIL | PRINT Taking Slut Back: How a word gets
reclaimed http://blogs.crikey.com.au/fullysic/2011/05/30/taking-slut-back-how-a-word-gets-reclaimed/
There have been only a few successful word reclamations in English globally over the last hundred years
or so; the most notable of these is nigger, but other examples are fag (but interestingly, not faggot),
queen and although it hasn’t completed the journey yet, cunt. So looking at these examples, can we
infer anything about how successful an attempt at word reclamation is going to be? I mentioned
above that word reclamation is usually driven at a grassroots level, whereby the community to whom an
offensive term is directed begin using it as an in-group marker of identity. At the same time its use by
someone outside the group is still taken to be offensive, but is now rendered powerless as compared
with the power that its in-group use has in strengthening group identity. For instance, the power of
nigger used as a slur is minuscule compared with its power to strengthen pride in the black
community [AW: On reflection, this is much too strong a position. See Stina's comment for an
impassioned response]. Being told that a word is no longer offensive just might not work; it has to
spread from below. Much like democracy in the Middle-East. There’s also another element to word
reclamation that might not work inslut‘s favour. Successful reclamations like nigger, fag and cunt
describe things that are just facts about people and are thus not subject to value-judgment; being black,
being gay, or being female. The dictionary of the computer I’m writing this on defines slut as “a
slovenly or promiscuous woman”. So slutdescribes behaviour which is potentially subject to valuejudgment, and there’ll always be someone in the world who will judge it harshly. Slut unfortunately,
may therefore never be able to escape slurhood.
Words can only be reclaimed by those for whom the word is an insult – can’t reclaim
the word “whore” unless you have been a sex worker.
Ashley Dryburgh June 18, 2014 To bitch or not to bitch? We keep using the B word, but should we?
http://www.vueweekly.com/bitch-bitch/
I’m all for words being reclaimed—hell, this very column is called “Queermonton.” But can everything
be reclaimed? My friend Jil has made the wonderful point that words can only be reclaimed by those for
whom the word is an insult. So maybe it’s not the best idea for drag queens or gay men to be trying to
reclaim the word bitch, in the same way it’s inappropriate for women who have never been sex workers
to reclaim “whore.” Perhaps feminists can reclaim bitch, but maybe after 700 years it’s time to find
better language for ourselves.
Legalization is more exploitative than prohibition
Thompson 00 (Susan, J.D. Candidate, Capital University Law School, 2000, “Prostitution: A Choice
Ignored”, Hein Online)
At first glance, the system of legalization appears to be the best model of control, for allowing women
the freedom to practice prostitution if they choose. However, a closer examination shows that
legalization does not promote freedom or choice in prostitution, but rather eliminates all freedom
associated with the choice of prostitution. In some ways, the legalized system of control is more
exploitative and criminal than the criminalized model of prostitution control. Under legalization, women
are not given any options. Either they work within the strict regulations that dictate their behavior and
activities, or work outside of the law and risk potential violence and arrest. Although brothel prostitutes
may make a decent living, they enjoy less freedom than the average worker at a fast-food restaurant.5
°° In some ways, the worker at a fast-food establishment may actually fare better than the brothel
prostitute because that worker is not subjected to mandatory weekly and monthly health examinations,
and is free to walk and travel where she pleases.5 'O More importantly, if she loses her job or is unable
to work, unemployment, disability insurance, and other social benefits are available for her protection.
The system of legalization is a form of modern day slavery-created, operated, and condoned by the
government, in order to control women's sexuality.502 In essence, the legalized prostitute is the most
exploited worker under a system of capitalism. She is forced to work for the "master," with no questions
asked. This legalized system of imprisonment is carefully structured so the prostitute does all the work
and receives none of the benefits. The system of legalization forces us to question who truly benefits
from the laws of legalization.
Prostitution is the most systemic reduction of women to sex and the foundation of all
exploitation of women. The affirmative functions to normalize oppression. Failure to
recognize prostitution as sexual exploitation means all other forms of oppression of
women will be ineffectively addressed. We are raising the issue of what should be
acceptable labor. This turns the case.
Kathleen Barry (teaches in the Department of Human Development and Family Studies at Pennsylvania
State University).The Prostitution of Sexuality 1996
The prostitution exchange is the most systematic institutionalized reduction of woman to sex. It is the
foundation of all sexual exploitation of women. It ¡s the prototype, the model from which all other
sexual exploitation can be understood. Put another way, if this practice is not recognized as sexual
exploitation and as a model for the sexual subordination of women, then all other forms of sexual
exploitation will be ineffectively addressed, many going fully unrecognized as sexual exploitation. In the
normalization of the prostitution of sexuality, it is not surprising to find that prostitution is increasingly
considered to be merely another form of labor. Considering prostitution as merely another form of labor
raises the question, what kind of labor? Slave labor or exploited labor of feudalism or class exploitation
of capitalism? Slave labor is condemned universally because it deprives human beings of freedom and of
the gains from their labor, and child labor is considered to be work that not only denies freedom but is
developmentally premature. If, for example, consent was the criterion for determining whether or not
slavery is a violation of human dignity and rights, slavery would not have been recognized as a violation
because an important element of slavery is the acceptance of their condition by many slaves. So deeply
is the self- hatred of racism and sexism encoded. Various theories of labor and analyses of labor markets
treat capitalist labor as the exploitation of surplus value, revealing inequalities and dual labor markets.
Consider labor in the produc tion of the commodity of human services. In between unremunerated,
exploited domestic labor that includes emotional labor and private sex exchange exists a range of
personal services that are marketed—psychological therapy, counseling, and physical therapies,
including massage. Human services begin with distinctions and difierentiations—demarcarions of what
is saleable. Psycho logical therapy and massage each identifies appropriate treatments for particular
conditions that are provided for a price. They may be meant to improve emotional and personal life, and
the pur- chaser may receive emotional and/or personal satisfaction and even pleasure from them. But
the therapist is not selling emotions, desires, drives or other aspects of their person. The difference from
prostitution is that these services do not invoke sex; in fact, professional ethics in these fields require of
the service providers that all protections against sexualizing the services be accorded their clients or
customers. The question of whether paid sexual exchange is exploited as labor does not fully address
the question of whether certain experiences and actions should be conditions of labor at all.
Dangerously, feminism has not yet asked about sex what marxists and socialists have asked about labor.
Marxists ultimately envision labor freed from capitalist exploitation and laborers owning their own labor
power. Can feminism, without contradicting its commitment to liberation, envision women as free
sexual laborers sometime in the future? As prostitution becomes the model for patriarchal sexual
relations of power, the unasked, unexplored, and seemingly hopelessly mired question surfaces: What
do we as women want sex to be? How shall we socially construct sexuality as a condition of our
liberation? The recent research on women’s unpaid domestic labor that addresses that part of it that is
emotional labor24 has confounded this issue and the answers to these questions, as it tends to adopt
the terms “sexual labor” or “sex work.” The terms “sex work” and “sexual labor” imply that sex, if it
were not exploited by traffickers, pimps, and industries, should be labor, or a condition of laboring, work
that anyone should be able to engage in at a fair wage with full benefits of social services. In the absence
of political consciousness of the exploitation of labor by capitalists and by husbands, the term “sex
work” becomes imbued with a sense of normalcy. There is an even larger question beneath this debate:
Is emotional labor exploited because it is unremunerated, or is it exploited because emotional and
sexual life have been reduced to mere servicing, to a labor that sustains gender power relations?
Women’s subordination in general and sexual exploitation in particular raises the question asked earlier:
What in the range of human experience should be considered as labor? And how do we achieve a
condition of unexploited labor? And beyond reducing the human experience of sex to labor, the
promotion of “sex work” is specifically gendered: services are bought by men, provided for men—
services that are not only the privilege of male domination, but the cause. With economic development
and advancement, as material conditions improve for communities, families, and individuals, more
emphasis is placed on inner life, emotions, and the personal. The self begins to be understood and
developed in relation to inner life and emotions. Emotions, Inner life, and the personal are gendered;
they have distinctly different meanings for women and for men. Emotional work and sexual service
become part of what men require from women. Men’s emotional disengagement and sexual
requirements are not merely a matter of masculinist socialization. Rather, male underdeveloped
emotional life and objectified sexual life are produced in power arrangements. In those power arrange
ments, emotions and sex are reduced to labor that is exploitation of women.
Prostitution is not a form of empowerment – aff functions as support for an
institutional, economic, and sexual model for women’s oppression.
Kathleen Barry (teaches in the Department of Human Development and Family Studies at Pennsylvania
State University).The Prostitution of Sexuality 1996
When the human being is reduced to a body, objectified to sexually service another, whether or not
there is consent, violation of the human being has taken place. The human being is the bodied self that
human rights is meant to protect and human development is intended to support. However, in the
American legal context, consent has become the defining factor in determin ing whether violation has
occurred. In this way, the fullness of human experience and the human self is reduced to will, intent or
consent, as if that is all that is involved in violation. Human will is the cornerstone of liberal theory and
law, which makes the individual central and singular in the Western concept of rights. In this way, liberal
legal theory does not consider oppression, the condition of class domination which is so pervasive that it
actually invokes consent, collusion or some form of cooperation from the oppressed. Prostitution is
structured to invoke women’s consent, as is marriage, as is socially constructed sexuality. In this work I
am shifting from the nearly singular standard of consent or force in the determination of violation to its
full hu man, interactive bodied experience, to span the range of oppres sion from individualized
coercion to class domination. In the fullness of human experience, when women are reduced to their
bodies, and in the case of sexual exploitation to sexed bodies, they are treated as lesser, as other, and
thereby subordinated. This is sexual exploitation and it violates women’s human rights to dignity and
equality. Therefore, while pornographic media are the means of sexually saturating society, while rape is
paradigmatic of sexual exploitation, prostitution, with or without a woman’s consent, is the institutional,
economic, and sexual model for women’s oppression.
2NC
Cap
O/V
– understanding class division as structured by market logic is a prerequisite to the aff
– Intersecting inequality is real, but prior focus on class antagonism is key to
historicize the oppression they outline and address collective imperatives
Petras, 97 (James, Bartle Professor (Emeritus) of Sociology at Binghamton University in Binghamton, New York and adjunct professor at
Saint Mary's University, Halifax, Nova Scotia, Canada, November 1997, A Marxist critique of post-Marxists,
http://www.rebelion.org/hemeroteca/petras/english/critique170102.htm,)
The post-Marxists attack the Marxist notion of class analysis from various perspectives. On the one hand, they
claim that it obscures the equal or more significant importance of cultural identities (gender, ethnicity). They accuse class analysts of
being “economic reductionists” and failing to explain gender and ethnic differences within classes. They
then proceed further to argue that these “differences” define the nature of contemporary politics. The second line of attack on class analysis
stems from a view that class is merely an intellectual constructionit is essentially a subjective phenomenon that is culturally determined. Hence,
there are no “objective class interests” that divide society since “interests” are purely subjective and each culture defines individual
preferences. The third line of attack argues that there have been vast transformations in the economy and society that have obliterated the old
class distinctions. In “post-industrial” society, some post-Marxists argue, the source of power is in the new information systems, the new
technologies and those who manage and control them. Society, according to this view, is evolving toward a new society in which industrial
workers are disappearing in two directions: upward into the “new middle class” of high technology and downward into the marginal
“underclass”.¶ Marxists
have never denied the importance of racial, gender and ethnic divisions within
classes. What they have emphasised, however, is the wider social system which generates these
differences and the need to join class forces to eliminate these inequalities at every point: work,
neighborhood, family. What most Marxists object to is the idea that gender and race inequalities can
and should be analysed and solved outside of the class framework: that landowner women with servants
and wealth have an essential “identity” with the peasant women who are employed at starvation wages; that Indian
bureaucrats of neo-liberal governments have a common “identity” with peasant Indians who are displaced
from their land by the free market economic policies. For example, Bolivia has an Indian vice-president presiding over the mass arrest of cocoagrowing Indian farmers.¶ Identity
politics in the sense of consciousness of a particular form of oppression by an immediate group can be an appropriate
become an “identity prison” (race or gender) isolated from other exploited
social groups unless it transcends the immediate points of oppression and confronts the social system in
which it is embedded. And that requires a broader class analysis of the structure of social power which
presides over and defines the conditions of general and specific inequalities.
point of departure. This understanding, however, will
We have to foreground class, not footnote it—their claim to have mentioned
economics and class in passing during the 1AC is the link. The reduction of class to a
neutral level among a long list of other oppressions such as gender, destroys the
emancipatory potential of class to reach across all lines of identity and forge political
action. Class must be recognized as qualitatively more important—otherwise the
system is able to satisfy demands on grounds of formal equality, destroying attempts
to overcome capitalist oppression*
Giminez, ’01 [Martha, Prof. Sociology at UC Boulder, “Marxism and Class; Gender and Race”, Race, Gender and Class, Vol. 8, p. online:
http://www.colorado.edu/Sociology/gimenez/work/cgr.html]
There are many competing theories of race, gender, class, American society, political economy, power, etc. but no specific theory is invoked to
define how the terms race, gender and class are used, or to identify how they are related to the rest of the social system. To some extent, race,
gender and class and their intersections and interlockings have become a mantra to be invoked in any and all theoretical contexts, for a tacit
agreement about their ubiquitousness and meaning seems to have developed among RGC studies advocates, so that all that remains to be
dome is empirically to document their intersections everywhere, for everything that happens is, by definition, raced, classed, and gendered.
This pragmatic acceptance of race, gender and class, as givens, results in the downplaying of theory,
and the resort to experience as the source of knowledge. The emphasis on experience in the construction of knowledge is intended as a
corrective to theories that, presumably, reflect only the experience of the powerful. RGC seems to offer a subjectivist understanding of theory
as simply a reflection of the experience and consciousness of the individual theorist, rather than as a body of propositions which is collectively
and systematically produced under historically specific conditions of possibility which grant them historical validity for as long as those
conditions prevail. Instead, knowledge and theory are pragmatically conceived as the products or reflection of experience and, as such,
unavoidably partial, so that greater accuracy and relative completeness can be approximated only through gathering the experiential accounts
of all groups. Such is the importance given to the role of experience in the production of knowledge that in the eight page introduction to the
first section of an RGC anthology, the word experience is repeated thirty six times (Andersen and Collins, 1995: 1-9). I agree with the
importance of learning from the experience of all groups, especially those who have been silenced by oppression and exclusion and by the
effects of ideologies that mystify their actual conditions of existence. To learn how people describe their understanding of their lives is very
illuminating, for "ideas are the conscious expression -- real or illusory -- of (our) actual relations and activities" (Marx, 1994: 111), because
"social existence determines consciousness" (Marx, 1994: 211). Given
that our existence is shaped by the capitalist
mode of production, experience, to be fully understood in its broader social and political implications,
has to be situated in the context of the capitalist forces and relations that produce it. Experience in itself,
however, is suspect because, dialectically, it is a unity of opposites; it is, at the same time, unique, personal, insightful and revealing and, at the
same time, thoroughly social, partial, mystifying, itself the product of historical forces about which individuals may know little or nothing about
(for a critical assessment of experience as a source of knowledge see Sherry Gorelick, "Contradictions of feminist methodology," in Chow,
Wilkinson, and Baca Zinn, 1996; applicable to the role of experience in contemporary RGC and feminist research is Jacoby's critique of the
1960s politics of subjectivity: Jacoby, 1973: 37- 49). Given the emancipatory goals of the RGC perspective, it is through the analytical tools of
Marxist theory that it can move forward, beyond the impasse revealed by the constant reiteration of variations on the "interlocking" metaphor.
This would require, however, a) a rethinking and modification of the postulated relationships between race, class and gender, and b) a
reconsideration of the notion that, because everyone is located at the intersection of these structures, all social relations and interactions are
"raced," "classed," and "gendered." In the RGC perspective, race, gender and class are presented as equivalent systems of oppression with
extremely negative consequences for the oppressed. It is also asserted that the theorization of the connections between these systems require
"a working hypothesis of equivalency" (Collins, 1997:74). Whether
or not it is possible to view class as just another
system of oppression depends on the theoretical framework within class is defined. If defined within
the traditional sociology of stratification perspective, in terms of a gradation perspective, class refers
simply to strata or population aggregates ranked on the basis of standard SES indicators (income,
occupation, and education) (for an excellent discussion of the difference between gradational and relational concepts of class, see Ossowski,
1963). Class in
this non-relational, descriptive sense has no claims to being more fundamental than
gender or racial oppression; it simply refers to the set of individual attributes that place individuals
within an aggregate or strata arbitrarily defined by the researcher (i.e., depending on their data and research
purposes, anywhere from three or four to twelve "classes" can be identified). From the standpoint of Marxist theory, however, class is
qualitatively different from gender and race and cannot be considered just another system of
oppression. As Eagleton points out, whereas racism and sexism are unremittingly bad, class is not entirely a "bad thing" even though
socialists would like to abolish it. The bourgeoisie in its revolutionary stage was instrumental in ushering a new era in historical development,
one which liberated the average person from the oppressions of feudalism and put forth the ideals of liberty, equality and fraternity. Today,
however, it has an unquestionably negative role to play as it expands and deepens the rule of capital over the entire globe. The
working
class, on the other hand, is pivotally located to wage the final struggle against capital and, consequently, it is "an
excellent thing" (Eagleton, 1996: 57). While racism and sexism have no redeeming feature, class relations are,
dialectically, a unity of opposites; both a site of exploitation and, objectively, a site where the
potential agents of social change are forged. To argue that the working class is the fundamental agent of change does not
entail the notion that it is the only agent of change. The working class is of course composed of women and men who
belong to different races, ethnicities, national origins, cultures, and so forth, so that gender and racial/ethnic
struggles have the potential of fueling class struggles because, given the patterns of wealth ownership and income distribution in this and all
capitalist countries, those who raise the banners of gender and racial struggles are overwhelmingly propertyless workers, technically members
of the working class, people who need to work for economic survival whether it is for a wage or a salary, for whom racism, sexism and class
exploitation matter. But this vision of a mobilized working class where gender and racial struggles are not subsumed but are nevertheless
related requires a class conscious effort to link RGC studies to the Marxist analysis of historical change. In
so far as the "class" in RGC
remains a neutral concept, open to any and all theoretical meanings, just one oppression among
others, intersectionality will not realize its revolutionary potential. Nevertheless, I want to argue against
the notion that class should be considered equivalent to gender and race. I find the grounds for my
argument not only on the crucial role class struggles play in processes of epochal change but also in the very
assumptions of RGC studies and the ethnomethodological insights put forth by West and Fenstermaker (1994). The assumption of the
simultaneity of experience (i.e., all interactions are raced, classed, gendered) together with the ambiguity inherent in the interactions
themselves, so that while one person might think he or she is "doing gender," another might interpret those "doings" in terms of "doing class,"
highlight the basic issue that Collins accurately identifies when she argues that ethnomethodology ignores power relations. Power relations
underlie all processes of social interaction and this is why social facts are constraining upon people. But the pervasiveness of power ought not
to obfuscate the fact that some
power relations are more important and consequential than others. For
example, the power that physical attractiveness might confer a woman in her interactions with her
less attractive female supervisor or employer does not match the economic power of the latter over
the former. In my view, the flattening or erasure of the qualitative difference between class, race and
gender in the RGC perspective is the foundation for the recognition that it is important to deal with
"basic relations of domination and subordination" which now appear disembodied, outside class
relations. In the effort to reject "class reductionism," by postulating the equivalence between class and other forms of oppression, the
RGC perspective both negates the fundamental importance of class but it is forced to acknowledge its
importance by postulating some other "basic" structures of domination. Class relations -- whether we are
referring to the relations between capitalist and wage workers, or to the relations between workers (salaried and waged) and their managers
and supervisors, those who are placed in "contradictory class locations," (Wright, 1978) -- are of
paramount importance, for
most people's economic survival is determined by them. Those in dominant class positions do exert
power over their employees and subordinates and a crucial way in which that power is used is
through their choosing the identity they impute their workers. Whatever identity workers might claim
or "do," employers can, in turn, disregard their claims and "read" their "doings" differently as "raced"
or "gendered" or both, rather than as "classed," thus downplaying their class location and the class
nature of their grievances. To argue, then, that class is fundamental is not to "reduce" gender or racial
oppression to class, but to acknowledge that the underlying basic and "nameless" power at the root
of what happens in social interactions grounded in "intersectionality" is class power.
Our method can result in the aff - Analysis grounded in economic theory broadens
discussions over legal prostitution and historicizes our understanding of it through
cultural context- our criticism is necessary to interrogate the material conditions of
gender and sexuality
Barbara G. Brents and Kathryn Hausbeck 2007 "Marketing Sex: US Legal Brothels and Late Capitalist
Consumption"
https://faculty.unlv.edu/brents/research/MarketingSex.pdfhttps://faculty.unlv.edu/brents/research/Ma
rketingSex.pdf Barb Brents is a professor in the Department of Sociology at the University of Nevada,
Las Vegas. Kathryn Hausbeck, Ph.D., is Senior Associate Dean of the Graduate College and Associate
Professor in Sociology at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas.
In this article we examined the effects of shifting economic structures and cultural practices on the
institutional field of consumption at one local site, the legal brothel industry in Nevada, where it is clear
that we are seeing shifts in the organization and marketing of the sex industry. The largest of Nevada’s
brothels with the capital to do so are beginning to adopt marketing strategies that are more like
mainstream businesses. They are up-scaling, expanding services, clientele and markets and using
business forms similar to mainstream businesses, including corporate forms and diversification, as they
try to integrate into the tourist economy. The nature of the product sold involves less of a McDonaldized
rationalization of outcome-oriented sexual gratification than in the past, and is aimed more at providing
individualized, interactive, touristic experiences. The two brothels analyzed have different approaches
to this mainstreaming. The corporate Resort at Sheri’s Ranch is seeking to normalize their business as a
destination resort that also offers sexual fantasy, in a low key, less spectacular way. The independent
owned and managed Moonlite Bunny Ranch markets itself as selling high quality, individualized,
fantasybased sexual experience to an upscale audience that already embraces sexualized tourist culture.
This study has indicated that the changes affecting other late capitalist tourist industries are appearing
at the ground level in this local institutional site of sexual consumption. While changes are not
monolithic and uniform, there are identifiable trends. What some researchers have documented in
other parts of the global sex industry, we are witnessing in Nevada brothels. There is a slow but
noticeable convergence between some legal brothels and mainstream tourist and touristic businesses.
This is likely to make significant impacts on the industry. As some adult sex businesses become
structurally integrated with ‘legitimate’ businesses, their economic and political power are likely to
increase. Las Vegas’ gaming industry went through a similar mainstreaming process as they went from
control by organized crime to corporate structures (Moehring, 2000). While the legal brothels are still
highly stigmatized businesses, this kind of mainstreaming has already made it harder for local
governments to close or increase sanctions against profitable businesses. Working conditions are also
likely to improve somewhat, at least approximating other service industry jobs, in sectors that become
more structurally similar to mainstream businesses. This is largely because these more upscale, touristic
businesses are increasingly competing with mainstream service industries for skilled workers. It is no
longer useful to posit the sex industries as an ‘other’ to late capitalist industry. Research on the sex
industries can tell us much about the effects of the economic infrastructure of mass consumption and
the values and attitudes of consumer culture. Employing a framework grounded in economic and
cultural shifts promises to add much to analyses of sex work. It historicizes our understandings, situates
changes in the economic contexts and the cultural meaning of sex in which sex work occurs, and invites
examination of the social construction and material conditions of gender, sex and sexuality. More
research needs to be done in examining the institutional field of the consumption of sex at local sites,
how the industry is organized and sex as a product defined, marketed and consumed at specific locales.
Only within these broader contexts of economic and cultural, political and legal change can we
effectively assess the potentially empowering, exploitative, humane or inhumane elements of labour in
late capitalist tourist and service industries, including sex work.
Links
The individualistic discourse of prostitution as an empowering choice and the
description of sex work as liberatory cements neoliberal social relations---the
celebration of prostitution as a means for survival displaces transforming the
conditions that necessitate someone sell their body in the first place – the analysis on
the bottom of the 1ACindicates that all experiences are different and can not be
accounted for by the aff – that proves they eschew a class based analysis
Meghan Murphy 11, the founder and editor of Feminist Current. Masters degree in Women’s Studies
from Simon Fraser University. A progressive dialogue: Building a progressive feminist movement in neoliberal times, rabble.ca/news/2011/10/progressive-dialogue-building-progressive-feminist-movementneo-liberal-times
For me, feminism and the left have always been inextricably linked. The connections between gender
oppression and global capitalism, the ties between feminism and anti-colonialism, the fight for social
systems that put people first, starting from a place that views our existence as a group effort rather than
a wall one climbs alone -- those connections made feminism an obviously progressive movement in my
mind. How could we make long-lasting change for women without a deep commitment towards
addressing race and class oppression? How could we uproot the deep foundations of patriarchy that
support all of our most powerful institutions without a profound commitment towards supporting the
most marginalized? While my love affair with the left has been plagued with anger and frustration, I
remain not only convinced that progressive movements must include the dismantling of patriarchy as a
key element of their analysis and action, but that a neo-liberal feminism, that is, a feminism that is
disconnected from the left, is a feminism that is hardly worth fighting for. In a time when some of our
hardest fought for rights and freedoms are under threat, when unions are under attack, when American
privatization is leaning heavily on our doorstep, when safe housing is treated as a privilege, not a right,
when we are told that concepts like universal daycare and decent social assistance programs are
inconceivable, mainstream feminism seems to be hacking away at its own knees. It's as though we are
so afraid of losing everything that we've decided to fight for nothing. Desperation, coupled with the
growing influence of neo-liberal discourse, has led us to look for empowerment where there is none,
twisting deeply sexist imagery and industries into a frighteningly ironic version of female liberation. In
the age of Slutwalks, the neo-burlesque "movement," the mainstreaming of pornography, and of a "sexpositive" feminism that acts as an assault on decades of feminist discourse, how must we work to
revitalize a feminist movement that doesn't kowtow to American neo-liberalism? That is, an ideology
that wants very much for us all to believe that freedom lies in positive thinking and that we can rise
above institutionalized oppression by pretending it isn't there. Denise Thompson describes the problem
of individualism as such: "If relations of domination and subordination are interpreted as nothing but
properties of individuals, they cannot be seen as relations of ruling at all. They become simply a matter
of preferences and choices engaged in by discrete individuals who have no responsibilities beyond their
own immediate pleasures and satisfactions." (Radical Feminism Today, 2001) This critique of
individualism demands that feminism be a progressive movement and makes arguments for individual
autonomy in sex work, for example, problematic. And yet we, we who should consider ourselves
progressive, have bought into it. This is an ideology that erases systems of domination and
subordination and tells us that our empowerment depends only on how we've framed our supposed
oppression. It tells us that wealth is at our fingertips if only we would just work at it a little harder (and
that freedom is based on our ability to make money in whatever way possible), focus our energy within,
and forget about the plight of our neighbours. It tells us to work with what we've got because, hey,
we've been struggling long enough and still we suffer so why not just make the best of it? Feminism has
not escaped this mindset; far from it. It would appear, rather, that much of mainstream feminism has
embraced this ideology with open arms. Now, a popular feminist position to take is one that frames the
sex industry as a potentially empowering space for women so long as she "chooses" to participate. But
what is radical or progressive about women selling their bodies to men? What is progressive about the
male gaze? What is revolutionary about legalizing, and, in doing so, normalizing the concept of women
as sexual commodities? These concepts seem far from progressive to me, propelling us backwards into
an age where sexism is not only accepted, but encouraged as a potential route towards liberation.
Visible examples of the way in which parts of the feminist movement have adopted individualism as part
of their discourse and action include efforts to decriminalize prostitution and the phenomenon of
Slutwalks. Decriminalizaton of prostitution The decriminalization or legalization of prostitution has been
taken on by many Canadian progressives and self-identified feminists as a goal worth fighting for.
Positioned as a way to make women safer and allow them to make "choices" about their own bodily
autonomy, this argument is decidedly rooted in neo-liberal discourse. Rather than looking at
prostitution as representative of how we, as a society view and treat women, advocates argue that
decriminalization will provide women with "the freedom to choose," and that we should prevent state
interference in said "choice." The connection that these arguments fail to make is that women,
historically, make these "choices" when they are in poverty. They make these "choices" in order to
survive. When there are no social structures in place that support women's survival and safety, when
women have no real choice, they "choose" prostitution. And who benefits? Men. A growing gap
between the rich and poor ensures that women will continue to be forced to "choose" prostitution as a
means of survival. Keeping women safe from violence and abuse means that we provide women with
real options, with safe and affordable housing, and with social safety nets. It does not mean that we
frame exploitation as a viable career path. If the left truly desires an equitable society, we must be
working to end prostitution. We must work towards freedom within the context of humanity rather
than, simply, a lack of restrictions. While certainly there are women who are privileged enough to
consider their choice to do sex work to be an empowered one, the nature of the industry is one that
exploits the most marginalized. The answer is not to pretend that this work is empowering, but rather
to ensure that women have alternatives and that men are not able to prey on women in need. I am not
an object that exists to provide pleasure for a man with more power and status than me, and neither are
any of my sisters. Slutwalks Embraced by many young women around the world, and viewed by some as
"the most successful feminist action of the past 20 years," this movement, surprisingly, originated in
Canada. I say surprisingly because we tend to associate the kind of individualist rhetoric that has been so
much a part of the Slutwalk movement from the get-go, with American neo-liberalism. The "I wear what
I want" mantra chanted alongside women marching the streets in their underwear with the word "slut"
written across their chests, hardly seems to address any systematic inequity or the roots of rape culture.
The epitome of "MYCHOICE" feminism, Slutwalks were immediately embraced by those who argue that
the sex industry is an empowering space for women as well as by those who may not have previously
aligned themselves with feminism, perhaps out of fear that the movement would take away their
stilettos. While many view Slutwalks as feminist, this movement is disappointing from a progressive
perspective. Missing an opportunity to present a radical challenge to the roots of oppression, they
remain deeply focused on clothing and the "freedom" to identify as "sluts," making this "movement"
one that places individual freedom above social change. In a culture that has successfully
mainstreamed pornography, sexualized rape and dominance, presented women's bodies consistently as
things, cut up into pieces for consumption, it is troubling that these issues have been visibly left off the
table in a march against rape culture. Not only that but the marches continue to play to a male gaze,
featuring women on stripper poles and plenty of camera ops for the men watching from the sidelines. If
our genuine goal, as the left, is equality for all, feminism can only be a progressive movement at its core.
Neo-liberal ideology that values individual "freedom" and "choice" over emancipation will not liberate
the poor and the marginalized. Selling sex has never provided women with independence, safety, and
long-lasting empowerment, but rather has further reinforced male power and privilege. If we don't care
about one another, if we don't look towards building a world where women's options for survival do not
involve selling their bodies to men with power, then this cannot be called a progressive movement. It
can't even be called a movement at all. This is not an idea that needs only to be absorbed by the
feminist movement, but it is something that must be understood by the left, as a whole. An "every man
for himself" ethic has never been our vision of freedom and yet, when it comes to women, we've been
manipulated into believing this means liberation.
The aff’s conception of queerness defines itself solely as that which is outside the
norm – IE something is queer because it is not heteronormative. This definition makes
it impossible to escape from dominant power structures – this turns solvency
Ruffolo adjunct Professorships at the Ontario Institute for Studies in Education, University of Toronto (Department of Theory and Policy
Studies in Education) and Ryerson University 2k9 (David, Post Queer Politics. Pg 50-54)
Post-queer rhizomatic politics is one that is directed outwards rather than inwards. The continuous
flows of dialogical-becomings--_-the indefinite breaks and connections—are always moving forward where
something new is always created out of something given. Unlike the arborescent-subject that is directed inwards,
rhizomatic dialogical-becomings are always deterritorialized as they maintain an ongoing state of
becoming a body without organs (BwO). The complex flows of desiring-machines described above persistently strive to become a
BwO as their connections try to reach pure deterritorialization. In this section, I want to consider how the BwO is a virtual affect of dialogicalbecomings. It does not encapsulate desiring-machines but is an additional (anti-)production together with desiring-machines. The
BwO is a
fundamental aspect of post- queer politics because it speaks to the production of intensities that
emerge when the flows of desiring-machines stop. Deterritorializations are not finalized states or
binary oppositions. They offer an important strategy for contemporary politics because they do not
directly oppose a structure (such as the queer/ heteronormative dyad) but instead remap a system
through creative lines of flight (the plateauing of queer and post-queer). We can think of the BwO as a limit that continuously seeks
to deterritorialize without ever reterritorializing (even though, as you will see belo reterritorializations are often coupled with
deterritorializations). As Brian Massumi writes: Think
of the body without organs as the body outside any
determinate state, poised for any action in its repertory; this is the body from the point of view of its
potential, or virtuality. Now freeze it as it passes through a threshold state on the way from one
determinate state to another. This is a degree of intensity of the body without organs. It is still the body as virmality but a lower
level of virtuality, because only the potential states involved in the bifurification from the preceding state to the next are effectively superposed
in the threshold state. (1992, 70) The
BwO is therefore not opposed to desiring-machines but is instead in a
constant tension with them. The term itself—Body without Organs—is not in opposition to the organism. It is against what the
organism stands for: organization. We can think of the subject as such an organization where all meaning refers back to a central core and all
movement corresponds with a central tendency. The
BwO not only challenges the arboreal structures of life but also
works within a different realm as that of the rhizome where it does not break flows (rhizomatic breaks and
connections) but desires continuous flows. Unlike the subject that requires external agencies for meaning such as language
structures or discursive realms, the BwO is pure intensity: The body without organs is nonproductive;
nonetheless it is produced, at a certain place and a certain time in the connective synthesis, as the
identity of producing and the product: the schizophrenic table is a body without organs. The body without
organs is not the proof of an original nothingness, nor is it what remains of a lost totality. Above all, it is not a projection; it has nothing
whatsoever to do with the body itself, or with an image of the body. It is the body without an image. This imageless, organless body, the
nonproductive, exists right there where it is produced, in the third stage of the binary-linear series. It is perpetually reinserted into the process
of production. (Deleuze and Guattari 1983, 8) We can
think of the BwO as a plane of immanence rather than
stratification.’3 It may seem as if desiring-machines and BwO are a part of two different systems. They are in fact two forms of the same
principle: desiring-machines and BwO are both a part of the productions of productions of life. It is through the tension that they share that
every production becomes an anti-production because dialogical-becomings, for instance, can not maintain a multiplicity of desiring-machines
and are unable to fully become a BwO. Dialogical-becomings are schizo. Capital is perhaps the most widely referenced example of a BwO. It is
the becoming-BwO of capitalism that creates the illusion that everything is produced through it. Although capital can be transformed into
something concrete (i.e., money can purchase goods) it can not do anything on its own. Capital is a miraculating machine that creates the
desire for a BwO to overcome the flows of desiring-machines: the BwO deterritorializes the organization of capitalism by opting for flows and
smooth spaces. The capitalist machine transforms desiring- machines into BwO by creating the ultimate schizophrenic that “plunges further and
further into the realm of deterritorialization, reaching the furthest limits of the decomposition of the socius on the surface of his own body
without organs” (35). The capitalist-schizo becomes the surplus product of capitalism as it seeks the limits of capitalism itself. Although the BwO
is unachievable, it becomes a seemingly preferred state: “You never reach the Body without Organs, you can’t reach it, you are forever
attaining it, it is a limit” (Deleuze and Guattari 1987, 150). It is not a heightened awareness of the self, nor is it a fully embodied self. Unlike in
significations, representations, and identifications, the BwO is no self at all. In fact, the BwO is prior to such a subjective capacity The tension
between desiring-machines (reterritorializations) and BwO (deterritorializations) works within a different realm than, say, the subjective limits
of identities categories where subjects become intelligible through their associations with identity norms. Everything for desiring-machines and
BwO is pure difference. The intensities involved in such a relationship are before the coding structures of subjectivity that stratify subjects. It is
the abovementioned intensities that make post-queer politics so creative because they challenge the structured organization of organs and
biologically defined bodies. Desiring-machines
and BwO offer a new language for thinking about life itself
without reducing the experiences of such relationships to the stratification of language. The creativity
of post-queer dialogical-becomings rests in the potential to deterritorialize stratified structures that
limit life to predetermined organizations. Despite the BwO existing prior to the subjective capacities of, say, psychoanalysis
and discursive norms, this certainly does not imply that deterritorializations can not offer strategies for rethinking life as it is accounted for
through representations, significations, and identifications. We
can, for example, think of the various codings of subjectivity
that have permeated identity politics and subsequently the queer/heteronormative dyad as
territorialized stratifications that are in concert with BwO. Stratifications, or strata, take hold of
intensities by territorializing them. For instance, they appropriate the BwO’s flows of pure difference by
organizing dialogical-becomings as subjects of reiterative norms. The strata codes and territorializes
such becomings but the BwO constantly attempts to deterritorialize these territorializations. Despite
queer’s interest in a politics of identity that seeks to consider bodies as mobile and fluid, these
movements can never escape the territorializations of identity norms because they are always in
relation to heteronormative coding and the overall arboreal organization of bodies
that are directed inwards. Deleuze and Guattari describe three types of strata that help to think through the territorializations
of the queer/heteronormative dyad: the organism, signifiance, and sub jectification. The surface of the organism, the angle of signiflance and
interpretation, and the point of subjectification or subjection. You
will be organized, you will be an organism, you will
articulate your body—otherwise you’re just depraved. You will be signifier and signified, interpreter
and interpreted—otherwise you’re just a deviant. You will be a subject, nailed down as one, a subject
of the enunciation recoiled into a subject of the statement—otherwise you’re just a tramp. To the strata as
a whole, the BwO opposes disarticulation (or n articulation) as the property of the plane of consistency, experimentation as the operation on
that plane (no signifier, never interpret!), and nomadism as the movement (keep moving, even in place, never stop moving, motionless voyage,
desubjectification). (Deleuze and Guattari 1987, 159) This
call to dismantle the organism does not imply that we just
get rid of the subject or cut the body from stratification. We recall from above that the BwO and all its
intensities comes before the subject and the organization of the body as an organism and so a politics
of becoming calls for a return to these productive flows of desire: “opening the body to connections
that presuppose an entire assemblage, circuits, conjunctions, levels and thresholds, passages and
distributions of intensity, and territories and deterritorializations measured with the craft of a
surveyor” (160). Post-queer dialogical-becomings seek to deterritorialize the three great strata that
territorialize life through significations, representations, and identifications. This project is but one line of flight
that can plateau subjugated sub jectivities. Its intent is to map various intensities so as to smooth these assemblages by moving towards a plane
of immanence. The first step is to identify the strata involved and then consider the assemblages that constitute such strata. For example, the
organism codes an aboreal life by creating various assemblages that define what it means to be “human”; sigmflance codes meaning through
discourse where language has become the primary means for thinking about experience; and subjectification creates subjects by coding them
through social norms. The
purpose of this is to locate flows of intensities—not by discovering a BwO but by
creating one in the process of deterritorializing the strata. The queer/heteronormativity dyad has
resulted in an arboreal dyad. The extensions of an arboreal tree go through its central root that
supports the whole tree. The queer/heteronorrnative dyad is such a root where all politics emerge
from it. Post-queer rhizomatic politics, in contrast, do not strictly move or extend from a main root
such as the queer/heteronormative dyad. With that said, dialogical-becomings can engage this binary by
plateauing it through its rhizomatic connections that can spout from any point. The arboreal
organization of queer/heteronormativity prohibits a politics of becoming because movement stops
when there is a need to refer back to this dyad. In other words, the queer/heteronormative dyad halts
queer politics when the politics of queer is predominantly concerned with disrupting heteronormative
structures. Post-queer rhizomatic politics is about deterritorializing politics itself rather than opposing
an a priori structure. This project is one line of flight amongst many that can remap contemporary politics as we know it today.
Despite queer’s keen investment in a conceptualization of identity through mobilities and fluidities,
its politics can only go so far because of its arboreal references to heteronormativity . Let me be clear that I
am not demanding an outright rejection of the queer/heteronormative strata for, as we recall from above, this can result in further
territorializations. I am also not suggesting an absolute denunciation of this relationship nor am I disputing the important developments that
queer politics have made. I
am instead calling for the production of different lines of flight and new
assemblages that can smoothen the strata so as to not be limited by structural organizations.
Perm
Individualism DA
The emphasis on individual freedoms is a neoliberal cooptation of social justice
advocacy---the permutation’s notion of choice abstracts individuals from their social
context, precluding structural transformation
Corey Lee Wrenn 13, adjunct professor of Sociology with Dabney S. Lancaster Community College and
an adjunct professor of Social Psychology with the Rocky Mountain College of Art and Design, The
Neoliberalism Behind Sexy Veganism: Individuals, Structures, and “Choice”,
veganfeministnetwork.com/tag/individualism/
I’m going to make a radical claim, well, actually it’s pretty widely accepted in the social sciences: There
is no “choice.” This isn’t about the
individual. This is about systems of oppression and social structures that shape our behavior and limit
what choices are available to us based on our social identity. If you are a young, thin, white woman advocating for Nonhuman
Animals in a pornified, hyper-sexualized society, one choice stands out loud and clear: Get naked. It’s supposed to be empowering, and we think maybe it helps
animals. First, I’m not really sure why one has to feel sexually empowered when one is advocating against the torture and death of Nonhuman Animals. Why our
movement is keen on making violence a turn on is a little disturbing. It probably speaks something to our tendency to juxtapose women with violence. The
sexualization of violence against women and other feminized social groups like Nonhuman Animals is evidence to the rape culture we inhabit. Aside that, however,
“choice”
is often thrown around as a means of deflecting critical thought at systems of oppression. If
it’s all about your individual choice, only you are responsible, only you are to blame. Anyone who has a
problem with that must be judging you as a person. So often our advocacy is framed as personal choice,
an individual expression. If you aren’t vegan, that’s your “choice.” If you want to have sex with vegetables and have it filmed by PETA, that’s your
“choice.” This is a co-optation of anti-oppression social activism in a neo-liberal structure of exploitation .
Neoliberalism is all about “freedom”: Freedom from government, freedom from regulation, freedom to
buy, freedom to sell, freedom to reach your full potential, etc. It’s about individuals out for themselves.
This is how capitalism thrives: many are free to do whatever they want in the name of open markets, but ultimately, that freedom comes
at a cost to those who will inevitably be exploited to pay for that “freedom.” The ideology of neoliberalism and
individualism works to benefit the privileged when individuals can attribute their success to their own individual hard work (when in reality they had extensive help
from their race, gender, class, physical ability, etc.). It also works to blame those less fortunate for their failure. We call them lazy, stupid, leeches (when in reality
they had extensive barriers placed upon them according to their race, gender, class, physical ability, etc.). This myth of freedom and meritocracy is actually pretty
toxic for social movements. If we fail to recognize how structural barriers impede some, while structural privileges benefit others, we will find it difficult to come
together as a political collective. When
we soak in this neoliberal poison and start to view social movements–
inherently collective endeavors designed to challenge unequal power structures–as something done by
the individual, for the individual, we’ve lost the fight right off the bat. This isn’t about personal “choice;” there is no
personal choice. Choice is socially constructed. Who you are and where you come from will influence exactly what “choices” are or are not available to you. Why the
hell are so many young women (mostly white, as women of color aren’t allowed to be sexual under our white supremacy) “choosing” to masturbate vegetables to
promote veganism and “choosing” to dance on mobile stripper poles on parade floats to promote kitten adoption? Why
choose sex and stripping
instead of some other “choice,” like leading a protest, writing a song, writing a book, etc.? Because sex and
stripping are the “choices” forced on women, while leadership and innovation (social movement activities that respect the personhood of activists instead of
objectifying them) is reserved for men. Making it all about the “individual” also means prioritizing one’s privilege to engage certain behaviors at the expense of
other less fortunate groups who suffer as a result. Middle-class white women represent our movement with their thin, sexy forms, but where are the women of
color? Where are the larger sized women? That’s right, they don’t get to be sexy. What about their “choice?” Not everyone is granted the “choice” to participate in
the so-called “sexual revolution.” Furthermore, the sexual objectification of women and pornography are both linked to increased violence and rape against
women. And guess which women have the highest rates of experiences with violence and rape? White women? Nope, guess again. Women of color, poor women,
lesbian women, trans women, disabled women, etc. Young
white women of privilege can enter public spaces and flaunt
their sexuality and find it “liberating,” but it’s the masses of poor and disadvantaged women who bear
the brunt of that “liberation” through rapes, sexual harassment, and beatings. Listen up, ladies: It’s a trick. The
“individualization” of social advocacy divides. It masks privilege, otherizes, and excludes disadvantaged groups. Neoliberalism is
what created the problem in the first place (the oppression of Nonhuman Animals), why would we think using more
neoliberalism would fix it? Neoliberalizing our movement means we lose our collective power. And when we play by the rules of this patriarchy, with
the bizarre assumption that we can only get people to drop that hamburger if they get a hard on, we simply reinforce oppression. Neoliberalism has co-opted our
movement. We surrendered our power; we repackaged our social justice claimsmaking for pornified Playboy-speak. Instead of loudspeakers, pens, and protests, it’s
thongs, butts, and boobies. This isn’t a social movement anymore, it’s quelled resistance. Not only are we disempowered, but we’re even further exploited because
we become another site of sexual objectification. The bad guys not only get you to shut it up, but they get you to take it off, too. Take, for example, this Playboy
image. Porn? Or Liberation? White woman in high heels twisting around to expose her buttocks and breasts. She is completely naked except a swirling robe. She
holds a wine glass and smiles at the viewer. Reads, "Male Supremacy is alright--but I favor a different position." The caption reads, “Male supremacy is fine–but I
favor a different position.” Ha! The feminist position or a sexual position? Porn? Or Liberation? Having trouble deciding? You should, because there is no difference.
Feminism is being repackaged in a way that absolutely eliminates any female threat to male power, it is
being repackaged in a way that benefits men. Women are stripping and performing for patriarchy, and they’re doing it
willingly. They’re doing it under the mistaken assumption that they’re liberated, as though they are
acting of their own free will and individual choice. Don’t for one second think that this hasn’t been happening in the Nonhuman Animal
rights movement. PETA regularly hires Playboy “bunnies” to perform their pornographic demonstrations. There’s even a vegan pinup website and a vegan strip club.
It’s liberating! Look at the following PETA/Playboy pinup. “Lettuce entertain you.” Ha! Get it! Veganism or sexy time? Which is it? Serious social movement, or more
penis-focused noise in the crowded pornography landscape of Western culture? ¶ DISCLAIMER Individuals vs. Systems Most of the content of this site is concerned
with dismantling systems of oppression. We
are cautious of personal "agency" and "choice" in human behavior and
"individualism" in collective action. We seek to challenge the institutionalized forms of violence against
humans and nonhumans. We urge our readers to refrain from misconstruing the content of this site as personal
attacks on individuals.
Root ause
Capitalism is the root of feminine and queer oppression---only a materialist analysis
solves
Sherry Wolf 4, ISR Editorial Board, "The Roots of Gay Oppression", Internationalist Socialist Review
Issue 37, September-October 2004, www.isreview.org/issues/37/gay_oppression.shtml
GAY OPPRESSION hasn’t always existed, and neither have gays as a distinct sector of the population.1 The oppression of
gays and lesbians–and all sexual minorities–is one of modern capitalism’s infinite contradictions.
Capitalism creates the material conditions for men and women to lead autonomous sexual lives, yet it
simultaneously seeks to impose heterosexual norms on society to secure the maintenance of an
economic, ideological, and sexual order. Famous gays such as Melissa Etheridge pack concert venues, and the Fab Five "queer"
guys are used to sell fashion–while homophobic laws defend discrimination on the job and in marriage. Gay oppression under
capitalism, like racism and sexism, serves to divide working-class people from one another in their
battles for economic and social justice. Socialists fight for a world in which sexuality is a purely personal matter, without legal or
material restrictions of any sort. Sexuality, like other behaviors, is a fluid–not fixed–phenomenon. Gay sexuality exists along a
continuum. The modern expression of this can be found among the millions of men and women who identify as gay, lesbian, bisexual,
transgender, queer, or two-spirited–often identifying themselves differently at different times in their lives. There are not two kinds of people
in the world, gay and straight. As far as biologists can tell, there is only one human race with a multiplicity of sexual possibilities that can be
either frustrated or liberated, depending on the way human society is organized. Reams of historical evidence confirm that homosexual
behavior has existed for at least thousands of years, and it is logical to assume that homosexual acts have been occurring for as long as human
beings have walked the earth. But only
when capitalist society in the late nineteenth century created the
potential for individuals to live outside the nuclear family was the modern conception of a gay identity
born. The oppression of gays and lesbians, therefore, is a fairly recent phenomenon. Contemporary industrial societies
created the possibility for men and women to identify themselves and live as gays and lesbians, argues gay historian John D’Emilio. What we
call "homosexuality" (in the sense of the distinguishing traits of "homosexuals"), for example, was not considered a unified set of acts, much
less a set of qualities defining particular persons, in pre-capitalist societies…. Heterosexuals
and homosexuals are involved in
social "roles" and attitudes which pertain to a particular society, modern capitalism.2 Historical evidence
suggests that homosexual behavior was successfully integrated in many pre-capitalist cultures. The most
famous example is ancient Greece, where sexual relationships between older men and teenage boys
were heralded as one of the highest forms of love. Certain tribal groups embraced transvestite men and
women who adopted the gender roles of the opposite sex, known as berdache. Even the Roman
Catholic Church, until the twelfth century, celebrated love between men.3 However, in these societies, it was
homosexual actions and not an identifiable category of people who were either tolerated or lauded. The changing family The roots
of gay sexuality and its subsequent repression can be found in the ever-changing role of the family. The
"family"–that sacrosanct institution exalted by right-wingers and surreally depicted by countless laundry detergent commercials–has changed
radically throughout human history. In fact, the family itself has not always existed. Karl Marx’s closest collaborator, Frederick Engels, employed
the anthropological research of Lewis Henry Morgan in his groundbreaking nineteenth-century work The Origin of the Family, Private Property
and the State. Anthropology was then a new science and some of Morgan’s research has since been refuted. Nevertheless, Engels’ theoretical
conclusions have been substantiated by more recent anthropological research.4 Engels
argues that although human beings
have existed as a species for more than a hundred thousand years, people have only begun living in
family units in the last few thousand years–when previously egalitarian societies divided into classes.
Prior to humans’ ability to store food and other goods as a surplus, there was no "wealth" to be
hoarded, precluding the possibility for inequality between social classes. Since there was no wealth to be inherited
by individuals, there was no reason for people to divide into individual "family" units. On the contrary, pre-class human social organization was
based on large clans and collective production, distribution, and child rearing. A division of labor existed between men and women in pre-class
societies, but there is no evidence to suggest that women were systematically oppressed–and in at least some societies, women were afforded
an even higher status than men.5 The
oppression of women corresponded with the rise of the first class divisions
in society and the creation of the monogamous family unit. The development of the plough and the domestication of
cattle to pull the plough enormously increased agricultural productivity. For the first time in human history, it
became possible to accumulate a productive surplus–more than was needed simply to survive. This marked the first appearance
of social classes and the first possibility of passing wealth on to the offspring of the wealthy in the form
of inheritance. The rise of the nuclear family was a consequence of these changes. The initial meaning of the
word "family" is a far cry from the Norman Rockwell images of domestic bliss. Early Romans used the term "famulus" to describe household
slaves and "familia" to refer to the "total number of slaves belonging to one man."6 For the early feudal aristocracy, marriage was an economic,
not emotional, relationship–a means to transfer land wealth or to secure peaceful relations between landed estates. Men were increasingly
drawn into production and women were increasingly isolated in the role of reproduction, or child rearing. The changing
economic
structure of society drastically altered attitudes toward both women and sexuality. Only with the rise of
the family–and the separation of the spheres of production and reproduction–did the division of labor between men and
women begin to connote inequality between the sexes. Imposing monogamy–for women only–afforded the
means through which wealthy men’s property could be inherited by children whom the father could be
certain were his own. Monogamous marriage, in essence, developed as the agency through which ruling class men could establish
undisputed paternity.7 As Engels wrote, The first class opposition that appears in history coincides with the development of the antagonism
between man and woman in monogamous marriage, and the first class oppression coincides with that of the female sex by the male.
Monogamous marriage was a great historical step forward; nevertheless, together with slavery and private wealth, it opens the period that has
lasted until today in which every step forward is also relatively a step backward, in which prosperity and development for some is won through
the misery and frustration of others.8 Although landless peasants possessed no wealth of their own, the institution of the nuclear family was
nevertheless legally established as the norm for all sectors of society. Feudal communities usually arranged marriages between poor peasants.
Family life was filled with grinding work for all family members, and childbirth often ended in death for either mother or infant, or both.
Severe sanctions were enforced against all sexual behaviors that were non-procreative. In 1533, Britain’s King
Henry VIII–whose obsession with producing a male heir led to six marriages–introduced the Buggery Act, which would put men to death for
"buggery," the catchall term of the day for non-procreative sex that was considered a crime against nature.9 The act coincided with other laws
in the same period punishing "vagabonds,"_i.e. peasants forced off the land with nowhere to go. Buggery was included in the Articles of War
beginning in the seventeenth century in Britain and was punished the same as mutiny and desertion. The households of European colonists in
the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries were independent units of both production and reproduction in which all family members worked
together on a plot of land to supply virtually all of the family’s needs. In
the New England colonies, "solitary living" was
forbidden. Servants and apprentices had to live with the households they worked for, but even without
legal constraints, economic survival in colonial times was inconceivable outside the family structure.10
The need for labor in the colonies fueled efforts by New England churches and courts to outlaw and punish
adultery, sodomy, incest, and rape. Extramarital sex by women, who were considered incapable of controlling their
passions, was punished more severely than extramarital sex by men. Sodomy could either mean sex between two people
of the same gender or any "unnatural" acts such as anal or oral intercourse, even between married couples. Some cases of "lewd behavior"
between women were punished by whippings, though no one was executed for sodomy in the colonies during the eighteenth century, probably
due to the legal requirement of proof of penetration and two eyewitnesses.11 The dominance of the church and the lack of any means to care
for children born out of wedlock drove neighbors’ zealous watch over the sexual mores of their community. With
the rise of urban
centers and industrial production methods in the late-nineteenth century in Western Europe and North America,
wage labor became much more common. There was an increased separation of home from work
compared with farm life, so that the family became much more exclusively a center for reproduction.
Over the decades, the growth of industry created a new kind of family ideal, as a haven from a changing, often hostile world. But the
relationship between the family and capitalism was fraught with contradictions from the beginning. As
D’Emilio writes, On the one hand, capitalism continually weakens the material foundation of family life, making it
possible for individuals to live outside the family, and for a lesbian and gay male identity to develop. On
the other, it needs to push men and women into families, at least long enough to reproduce the next
generation of workers. The elevation of the family to ideological preeminence guarantees that a
capitalist society will reproduce not just children, but heterosexism and homophobia. In the most profound
sense, capitalism is the problem.12 The capitalist mode of production brought with it the rise of an entrepreneurial class–and with it,
the notion of personal achievement and individuality as a social ideal. At the same time, the increasing prosperity of a new middle class and the
broader accumulation of personal wealth and transferable inheritances demanded strict sexual morality, especially for women. British historian
Jeffrey Weeks describes the contradictions of this new family structure: The bourgeois family was "both the privileged location of emotionality
and love…and simultaneously an effective policeman of sexual behavior."13 In contrast to the prosperous middle class, industrial life was
literally killing the working class in mid-nineteenth century England. Middle-class men in the rural area of Rutland, England, lived to be fifty-two,
while working-class "men" died at the average age of seventeen in industrial centers like Manchester, sixteen in Bethnel Green, and fifteen in
Liverpool.14 Textile mill owners employed mostly women and children for long hours of arduous labor at far less pay than men, which led to
illness and mortality rates that threatened to cut into owners’ profits. Frederick Engels describes the near-collapse of working-class family life in
The Condition of the Working Class in England. He describes the crowded and filthy conditions in working-class homes and quotes one report by
the Ministry of Health: "In Leeds, brothers and sisters, and lodgers of both sexes, are found occupying the same sleeping-room with the
parents, and consequences occur which humanity shudders to contemplate."15 A reinvention of the working-class family was urgently needed.
Victorian reformers campaigned for changes in factory work and housing, which led to the creation of a "family wage" for men, an amount that
was intended to sustain a family and allow women to stay at home and care for children and clean their homes. This wage rarely did suffice and
working-class women continued to take in sewing and other piecework. Though it had the impact of trapping women, it also relieved women
form exhausting hours of factory work. Children
were sent to school, not only to educate them for future jobs, but
to instill in them the discipline of work. Middle-class sexual mores were propagated widely among the working class to drive
down the rate of prostitution and the deadly diseases and out-of-wedlock births that are its consequences. Capitalist society continues to
grapple with the contradictions between the privatization of child rearing and household maintenance and the countervailing forces that tear
the family apart. The
nuclear family today–especially in the U.S., where social services such as childcare are expensive and
ruling classes with an inexpensive means for the feeding and preservation of the
current workforce and the raising and disciplining of the next generation of workers.
hard to find–provides
Ppr
A2 Whiteness
Our pedagogical method is necessary to address issues like the environment, trade,
and militarism that exceed whiteness. their representation of “whiteness” as a root
cause reduces all these to products of whiteness instead of dealing with them in their
full complexity.
George YÚDICE Latin American & Caribbean Studies; Spanish & Portuguese Languages and Literatures;
Social and Cultural Analysis @ Princeton ‘95 “Neither Impugning nor Disavowing Whiteness Does a
Viable Politics Make: The Limits of Identity Politics” in After Political Correctness eds. Christopher
Newfield and Ronald Strickland p. 279-281
It is arguments such as those of SWOP and Ganados del Valle, not simply the claim that all we need to fight is
white, Eurocentric cultural imperialism, that have the power to incorporate the white middle and
working classes into struggles led by coalitions that include people of color and that benefit the
citizenry rather than capitalist corporations. Whites must feel that they have a stake in the politics of
multiculturalism and not simply see themselves as a backdrop against which subordinated groups take
on their identity. The question may be raised whether the rearticulation of whiteness and the
incorporation of whites into struggles over resource distribution do not lead to the deconstruction of
other racial and identity groupings and thus weaken the basis on which people of color in the United
State" have waged their politics. Rearticulating whiteness does not necessarily lead to a weakening of
the identity of people of color and other oppressed groups, but it does create the possibility that many
more issues will be perceived no longer as exclusively "white" concerns but also as matters of
importance to ethnoracially and sexually minoritized groups and vice versa. Shifting the focus of
struggle from identity to. resource distribution will also make it possible to engage such seemingly nonracial issues
as the environment, the military, the military-industrial complex, foreign aid, and free-trade
agreements as matters impacting local identities and thus requiring a global politics that works outside of the
national frame,¶ Of course, such a politics is meaningless unless it can be articulated among diverse
constituencies and to the location of power and capital in the state. In City of Quartz, Mike Davis has mapped the
ways in which urban ethnoracial politics and a myriad of global forces brokered by the US. state are imbricated: ¶ The privatization of the
architectural public realm, moreover, is shadowed by parallel restructurings of electronic space, as heavily policed, pay-access "information orders:' elite data-bases and subscription cable services appropriate part of the invisible agora. Both processes, of course, mirror the deregulation
of the economy and the re- cession of non-market entitlement. 63¶ The erosion of public space, the
bunkerization of the wealthy,
the segregation of ethnoracial groups, the political economy of drugs, the expendability of youth, the
absolute permeation of everyday life by consumerism from the richest to the poorest, even a religious schism between
right-to-lifers (Archbishop Mohanty) and Christian liberationists (Father Olivares)----all of these phenomena are shaped by
global forces that greatly exceed although they certainly do not exclude the question of whiteness. It is
incumbent upon multiculturalists and identity- politics activists, if we are going to make a difference, to take our
politics beyond, without placing all the blame on or fostering disavowal of, the white (straw)man at
which we have aimed so many of our efforts. I CAN'T IMAGINE EVER WANTING TO BE WHITE. This statement makes me think, but it does not
encourage me to imagine; in fact, it admits to a failure of the imagination. But why not imagine the cir-cumstances under which one might want
to be white-or black, or brown, or queer, or none of the above?
Only a project that rearticulates rather than condemns whiteness can succeed – we
need a critical race theory that can connect the pedagogical method and language to
dominant institutions and groups in our society.
George YÚDICE Latin American & Caribbean Studies; Spanish & Portuguese Languages and Literatures;
Social and Cultural Analysis @ Princeton ‘95 “Neither Impugning nor Disavowing Whiteness Does a
Viable Politics Make: The Limits of Identity Politics” in After Political Correctness eds. Christopher
Newfield and Ronald Strickland p. 273-275
It is incumbent upon multiculturatists, then, to project a new democratic vision that makes sense to the white
middle and working classes. But identity politics have been at their weakest, in my opinion, in articulating
such a vision. Each iden- tity FOUp has articulated its own agenda. with nods to the agendas of other groups also
perceived to have been oppressed on the basis of their racial, ethnic and sexual identity. Multiculturalism is at its strongest in
disseminating the representations of these identities and on this basis legitimating needs claims and their satisfaction. After all, it is people of
color, women, gays and lesbians, and other subordinated groups who are on the front lines of the downward slide of life chances. But this
should not he seen as a point of contention around which groups divide, claiming greater victimization and thus construing themselves as more
deserving of compensation than this or that other subordinated group. It is an opportunity, rather, for subordinated groups to occupy positions
of leadership in multiracial and nmltigroup coalitions struggling to increase and democratize the distribLition of resources. This may sound a hit
Pollyannaish, especially in light of the painful racial and sexual conflicts throughout the United States epito- mized in New York by Puerto Ricans
pitted against Hasidim in Williamsburg, blacks against Koreans in Flatbush, and other examples cited above. But these conflicts, it seems to
me, point
not to a weakness in the struggle over resource distribution that I advocate but rather to the
limitations of an identity politics that does not look at the larger picture: the relationship between
identity groups and institutions, the relationship among institutions (e.g., the academy and business),
the relationship between these institutions, the state (the military and the welfare bureaucracy), and the
economy, and the articulation of all of these relationships in a global context. I am only trying to make the
obvious point that identity politics and its academic ideology multiculturalism must go beyond a politics of
representations, understood as the critique of omitted and distorted representations, to a critique and
an intervention in the institutional supports of these representations and their immersion in state and
economic rationalities. The problem is that mulitculturalism has no place in it to legitimate the claims of
over 70 percent of the population-the white working and middle classes- who also have to face the
shrinkage of educational, employment, and other social and economic resources. As Manning Marabie argues,
"We need to keep in mind constantly that 6o percent of all welfare recipients are white; that 62 percent of all
people on food stamps are white; that more than two-thirds of Americans with- out medical
insurance are white."" Whiteness, then, is not only a matter of social and cultural privilege; we all know that
it is also an economic advantage, that con- structions of race correlate with and reproduce class positions. But it is more than this; it is also
about the very mechanisms-instruments such as census question- naires, polls, etc.-on which institutions, be they educational, legal, civic, or
even recreational, rely in order to achieve self-understanding. Whiteness is even an issue in foreign affairs, underlying decisions that favor
economic aid, say, for East- ern European countries over aid for Latin American, African, or Asian countries. It is an important factor in
immigration policy, the negotiation of free-trade agreements with Mexico and other Latin American countries and the relation of these
agreements to the shrinking U.S. labor market, and so on. I
don't want to suggest that multiculturalists have
completely disregarded these issues; it does seem to me, however, that they have gotten short shrift in the
much more vociferous call for "whites" to recognize the history and demands of people of color, a call
in which whiteness is taken for granted. After arguing that we must all understand each other, one writer, for example. asserts:
Those from the dominant culture and class [meaning middle-class whites] must cease naming our [meaning people of color's} experience for us,
outside of our participa- tion. Instead, if they sincerely wish to express solidarity for the self-determination of people of color, they must work
to use their influence to support in concrete ways our struggles for a place to work, speak, and affirm our existence. There must be an active
comniitint'iit by those front the dominant culture to work in their own communities to challenge the forms of injustice which result from racism, classism, sexism, homopliohia and other forms of institutional oppression. There must exist a clear understanding by all that the struggle of
people of color i" not one that is limited to the domain of the intellectual, the academic or the realm of ideology, but rather that it is a struggle
that is ultimately linked to the material, to the heart, and to the spirit." These are desiderata that I share. But for radical multiculturalists to
share them is not the problem. The
problem is, rather, how to get liberals and the so-called dominant class and
culture, especially white youth, to share them as well. I am afraid that accepting the hegemonic white
construct is not the best means. This is a dilemma that Kathy Dohie explores in an essay on disaffected white
youth who opt to embrace white supremacism: If ethnic identity and ethnic suffering are valued now,
what's ¶ a mongrel white kid to do? (Most of the skin [headis are some hodgepodge of Weswrn European ancestry that ceased to
mean anything a long tiuie ago.) "What about our history?" they yell. They don't seem to see themselves as part of the big white
backdrop that people of color have charged against for ages, making a mark here and there. They're just blanks. Because of their white skin,
they've escaped hyphenation. They're just American kids, not African-American or Asian-American or Mexican-American, Yet it makes them feel
rootless, all alone, without a flag to defend. They want an ethnic community, too-but what is it? What can it be for a white American kid?" One
thing it cannot be is an ethnic identity analogous to that of people of color and other subordinated groups who have had to bear the brunt of
diminishing ex- pectations. The
conditions for mobilizing white youth to light for a progressive culture cannot
be provided convincingly by continually telling them that they must forget their own interests on
behalf of those of others. On the contrary, rather than forget their whiteness in order to focus on the
plight of others, they must rearticulate it; the basis for their relative privilege must be uncovered and
it- placed with an understanding of how life chances have diminished under free- market policies not
only for people of color but for themselves too. It must be demonstrated that their opportunities to get ahead in the world
are diminished not because of affirmative action but rather because of the abandonment of the social contract under the Reagan and Bush
administrations and, more generally, under the logic of late capitalism, which now brings us the North American Free Trade Agreement.
A2 Prost. Victimization DA
Critique of the sexual contract emphasizes women’s agency.
Carole PATEMAN Poli Sci @ UCLA ’88 The Sexual Contract p. 15-16
Familiar arguments against contract, whether from the Left or those of Hegel, the greatest theoretical critic of contract, are all thrown into a different light once the
story of the sexual contract is retrieved. Ironically, the critics, too, operate
within parameters set by the original patriarchal
contract and thus their criticisms are always partial. For example, marital subjection is either endorsed or ignored, the patriarchal construction
of the 'worker' never recognized and the implications of the civil slave contract are never pursued. This is not to say that an examination of patriarchy from the
feminists have justifiably
become concerned at the widespread portrayal of women as merely the subjects of men's power, as
passive victims, and to focus on patriarchal subordination might appear to reinforce this portrayal.
However, to emphasize that patriarchal subordination originates in contract entails no assumption that
women have merely accepted their position. On the contrary, an understanding of the way in which contract is
presented as freedom and as antipatriarchal, while being a major mechanism through which sexright is
renewed and maintained, is only possible because women (and some men) have resisted and criticized
patriarchal relations since the seventeenth century. This study depends on their resistance, and I shall refer to some of their neglected
perspective of the sexual contract is a straightforward task; misunderstandings can easily arise. For instance, some
criticisms of contract.
Case
Xxxx
Lib
focusing on the liberating potential for sex work creates a romanticized vision that
what’s empowering for a select few women is overall empowering---this necessarily
obscures the brutal reality that the vast majority of sex worker’s face---their
fetishization of individual choice precludes critical analysis of the neoliberal context
within which choices for some come at the direct cost of oppression for others
JMP 11, writes for Marxist-Leninist-Maoist Reflections, has a PhD. The Limits of Sex Work Radicalism,
moufawad-paul.blogspot.com/2011/07/limits-of-sex-work-radicalism.html
This is why it is now in fashion for a strata of privileged academics, who are quite taken with this
supposedly "transgressive" idea that sex
work is intrinsic to radical politics, to dabble in prostitution in their spare time. This is the sexual equivalent of kids from rich families who
dumpster dive, or pan-handle now and then, because of some asinine belief that the activities of those classes who do not have any other option but pan-handling
or dumpster diving are somehow intrinsically radical. Of course these kids can usually stop dumpster diving and pan-handling whenever they wish and perform
these activities according to their own boundaries and limits. The same goes for the so-called radical dabbling
in sex work: they choose their
clients, practice when they wish to practice, and imagine that they are somehow similar to the vast
populations of women who have no other option. The practice is only transgressive because sex in this
puritan society is still treated as transgressive, and being transgressive is not political.
The argument against the accusation of privileged tourism, however, is simply to fall back on some idealist nonsense about workers self-management, that I
demystified above, and a
claim that all sex workers should have the right to pick their own clients. Well, as much as I
the deeper questions that the historical
materialist asks: why is it that the vast majority of sex workers (not just nationally but globally) do not
have the right to pick their own clients, why do the vast majority of sex workers not have the privilege to
engage in prostitution as a transgressive activity on the side, why are the vast majority of sex workers
even sex workers in the first place, and what are the material structures upon which sex work exists?
agree with that point by itself (though not the fundamental political position), it dodges
Those who support sex work as an essential activity of radicalism, as synonymous with human agency,
generally fail to ask these questions; if they do, they provide the wrong answers. Inversely, when they argue for workers self-management and
sex workers unions they are, to paraphrase Althusser, providing the right answers for the wrong questions. The point being: there is a general lack of
political rigour, a failure to understand structural oppression, behind a position that treats sex work as
radical in and of itself. This position is related to the current fad of treating polyamory as intrinsically radical, though far more offensive because it
ends up supporting the maintenance of real world oppression.
So the absence of concrete theoretical rigour around this issue is truly offensive, especially when some radical sex work theorists provide possible world scenarios
that are utterly ignorant of history and society. Imagine that we live in a society where prostitutes are treated like intellectuals, one academic sex work dabbler has
argued, where prostitutes are treated as academics are treated now and vice versa. Then she proceeds to build her entire argument upon this notion of
inclusion/exclusion, of transgression/taboo, without ever truly investigating the concrete circumstances behind the existence of sex work. Nor does she realize that
her possible world scenario is utterly ludicrous. In the philosophy of politics, the appeal to a possible world scenario sho uld be performed in an entirely logical
manner: we ask questions about whether x would be different if y was changed, but the only way these questions can ever lead to a rigorous understanding of
society is if we work hard to keep the x and y within the confines of possibility. What if capitalism originated in China instead of Europe is a fruitful question
because we ask it to discover the social relations that define capitalism. What if the Yeti developed capitalism before humans is a ludicrous question, except for
maybe a science fiction novel, because the terms are so outside the realm of possibility that they will tell us nothing useful. The same can be said about a possible
world where the role prostitutes and intellectuals, a possible world that is ahistorical and idealist because it ignores the division between manual and mental labour,
and the privileging of the latter, that was necessary to produce a society where there is such a thing as prostitution. To imagine a social reversal of intellectuals and
prostitutes should lead our possible world theorist, if there was any investigation about the material relations that found what she or he was speaking about in the
first place, to accept that prostitution as it is presently understood would not exist.
All of this is to say that there are reasons, exploitative and oppressive reasons, behind the emergence of prostitution as a form of alienated labour––reasons
outlined by every marxist-feminist who has attempted to investigate the relationship between capitalism and sex work, as well as the historical roots of sex work,
but reasons that I will not discuss in much detail here because I am more concerned with examining the present discourse's logical problems than reiterating what
used to be part of a strong leftist and feminist analysis for the past few decades.
I am also concerned with how this
over-valorization of sex work is a specifically North American and eurocentric
phenomenon. If we want to truly look at the sex industry, we need to look at its existence as a global
industry. Just as gains for the working class here are economically possible because of imperialism, so
would the gains for sex workers here be economically and patriarchally possible through the superexploitation of third world women. The sex trade is an issue of global misogyny, not some provincial quibble at the
centres of capitalism, and has led to a massive death toll and innumerable unmarked graves of women. And just as
the brutal practices of exported capital are the intrinsic telos of capitalism when it is left to its own devices without pesky labour laws that get in the way (exploiting
workers, especially those deemed racially inferior, as cheaply and for as long as possible is the logic of surplus value), exchanging
women as
disposable sex receptacles is the logic of the sex industry, the logic of misogynist-capital, that emerged as an
industry due to the ontological assumption that women, because they were lesser than human, could be treated like property.
1NR
Case
focusing on the liberating potential for sex work creates a romanticized vision that
what’s empowering for a select few women is overall empowering---this necessarily
obscures the brutal reality that the vast majority of sex worker’s face---their
fetishization of individual choice precludes critical analysis of the neoliberal context
within which choices for some come at the direct cost of oppression for others
JMP 11, writes for Marxist-Leninist-Maoist Reflections, has a PhD. The Limits of Sex Work Radicalism,
moufawad-paul.blogspot.com/2011/07/limits-of-sex-work-radicalism.html
This is why it is now in fashion for a strata of privileged academics, who are quite taken with this
supposedly "transgressive" idea that sex
work is intrinsic to radical politics, to dabble in prostitution in their spare time. This is the sexual equivalent of kids from rich families who
dumpster dive, or pan-handle now and then, because of some asinine belief that the activities of those classes who do not have any other option but pan-handling
or dumpster diving are somehow intrinsically radical. Of course these kids can usually stop dumpster diving and pan-handling whenever they wish and perform
these activities according to their own boundaries and limits. The same goes for the so-called radical dabbling
in sex work: they choose their
clients, practice when they wish to practice, and imagine that they are somehow similar to the vast
populations of women who have no other option. The practice is only transgressive because sex in this
puritan society is still treated as transgressive, and being transgressive is not political.
The argument against the accusation of privileged tourism, however, is simply to fall back on some idealist nonsense about workers self-management, that I
demystified above, and a
claim that all sex workers should have the right to pick their own clients. Well, as much as I
the deeper questions that the historical
materialist asks: why is it that the vast majority of sex workers (not just nationally but globally) do not
have the right to pick their own clients, why do the vast majority of sex workers not have the privilege to
engage in prostitution as a transgressive activity on the side, why are the vast majority of sex workers
even sex workers in the first place, and what are the material structures upon which sex work exists?
agree with that point by itself (though not the fundamental political position), it dodges
Those who support sex work as an essential activity of radicalism, as synonymous with human agency,
generally fail to ask these questions; if they do, they provide the wrong answers. Inversely, when they argue for workers self-management and
sex workers unions they are, to paraphrase Althusser, providing the right answers for the wrong questions. The point being: there is a general lack of
political rigour, a failure to understand structural oppression, behind a position that treats sex work as
radical in and of itself. This position is related to the current fad of treating polyamory as intrinsically radical, though far more offensive because it
ends up supporting the maintenance of real world oppression.
So the absence of concrete theoretical rigour around this issue is truly offensive, especially when some radical sex work theorists provide possible world scenarios
that are utterly ignorant of history and society. Imagine that we live in a society where prostitutes are treated like intellectuals, one academic sex work dabbler has
argued, where prostitutes are treated as academics are treated now and vice versa. Then she proceeds to build her entire argument upon this notion of
inclusion/exclusion, of transgression/taboo, without ever truly investigating the concrete circumstances behind the existence of sex work. Nor does she realize that
her possible world scenario is utterly ludicrous. In the philosophy of politics, the appeal to a possible world scenario should be performed in an entirely logical
manner: we ask questions about whether x would be different if y was changed, but the only way these questions can ever lead to a rigorous understanding of
society is if we work hard to keep the x and y within the confines of possibility. What if capitalism originated in China instead of Europe is a fruitful question
because we ask it to discover the social relations that define capitalism. What if the Yeti developed capitalism before humans is a ludicrous question, except for
maybe a science fiction novel, because the terms are so outside the realm of possibility that they will tell us nothing useful. The same can be said about a possible
world where the role prostitutes and intellectuals, a possible world that is ahistorical and idealist because it ignores the division between manual and mental labour,
and the privileging of the latter, that was necessary to produce a society where there is such a thing as prostitution. To imagine a social reversal of intellectuals and
prostitutes should lead our possible world theorist, if there was any investigation about the material relations that found what she or he was speaking about in the
first place, to accept that prostitution as it is presently understood would not exist.
All of this is to say that there are reasons, exploitative and oppressive reasons, behind the emergence of prostitution as a form of alienated labour––reasons
outlined by every marxist-feminist who has attempted to investigate the relationship between capitalism and sex work, as well as the historical roots of sex work,
but reasons that I will not discuss in much detail here because I am more concerned with examining the present discourse's logical problems than reiterating what
used to be part of a strong leftist and feminist analysis for the past few decades.
I am also concerned with how this
over-valorization of sex work is a specifically North American and eurocentric
phenomenon. If we want to truly look at the sex industry, we need to look at its existence as a global
industry. Just as gains for the working class here are economically possible because of imperialism, so
would the gains for sex workers here be economically and patriarchally possible through the superexploitation of third world women. The sex trade is an issue of global misogyny, not some provincial quibble at the
centres of capitalism, and has led to a massive death toll and innumerable unmarked graves of women. And just as
the brutal practices of exported capital are the intrinsic telos of capitalism when it is left to its own devices without pesky labour laws that get in the way (exploiting
workers, especially those deemed racially inferior, as cheaply and for as long as possible is the logic of surplus value), exchanging
women as
disposable sex receptacles is the logic of the sex industry, the logic of misogynist-capital, that emerged as an
industry due to the ontological assumption that women, because they were lesser than human, could be treated like property.
T
2NC OV
T Version
Government action is key to reverse the stigma – local methodologies only perpetuate
the patriarchal constructions of women
MGBAKO 13 CHI ADANNA MGBAKO, Clinical Associate Professor of Law, Fordham Law School;
Founding Director, Walter Leitner International Human Rights Clinic. J.D. Harvard Law School; B.A.
Columbia University, “THE CASE FOR DECRIMINALIZATION OF SEX WORK IN SOUTH AFRICA”,
Georgetown Journal of International Law 44 Geo. J. Int'l L. 1423 Lexis
Law plays an important role in influencing societal attitudes. Criminalization stigmatizes sex workers as
criminals, which negatively affects the way society views them. n8 Because sex workers are criminalized,
communities often believe abuses against sex workers are justified. As a result, sex workers suffer
stigma, discrimination, and abuse from many facets of society including police, health workers, schools,
banks, and other service providers. n9 Criminalization also has an effect on family life. Despite being
breadwinners for their families, stigma causes many sex workers to feel shame and to try and hide their
profession. Sex workers also report that their children face stigma. n10 As one sex worker argued, "Sex
work is our job--we work to put food on the table for our children and people are judging us. The
government has to do something about people judging us." n11
Talking about a problem caused by the state does not legitimize the state—shortcircuits their offense
Frost 1996 (Mervyn Frost, Professor at the University of Kent, “Ethics In International Relations A
Constitutive Theory,” pp. 90-91)
A first objection which seems inherent in Donelan's approach is that utilizing the modern state domain
of discourse in effect sanctifies the state: it assumes that people will always live in states and that it is
not possible within such a language to consider alternatives to the system. This objection is not well
founded. By having recourse to the ordinary language of international relations I am not thereby
committed to argue that the state system as it exists is the best mode of human political organization or
that people ought always to live in states as we know them. As I have said, my argument is that
whatever proposals for piecemeal or large-scale reform of the state system are made, they must of
necessity be made in the language of the modern state. Whatever proposals are made, whether in
justification or in criticism of the state system, will have to make use of concepts which are at present
part and parcel of the theory of states. Thus, for example, any proposal for a new global institutional
arrangement superseding the state system will itself have to be justified, and that justification will have
to include within it reference to a new and good form of individual citizenship, reference to a new
legislative machinery equipped with satisfactory checks and balances, reference to satisfactory law
enforcement procedures, reference to a satisfactory arrangement for distributing the goods produced in
the world, and so on. All of these notions are notions which have been developed and finely honed
within the theory of the modern state. It is not possible to imagine a justification of a new world order
succeeding which used, for example, feudal, or traditional/tribal, discourse. More generally there is no
worldwide language of political morality which is not completely shot through with state-related
notions such as citizenship, rights under law, representative government and so on.
A2 W/M
A2 C/I
A2 DA
A2 T precludes Ground
A2 Steinberg goes aff
A2 Roleplaying bad
Debate roleplay specifically activates agency
Hanghoj, 8 – assistant professor at Aarhus University, since this PhD project began in 2004, has been
affiliated with DREAM (Danish Research Centre on Education and Advanced Media Materials) (Thorkild,
http://static.sdu.dk/mediafiles/Files/Information_til/Studerende_ved_SDU/Din_uddannelse/phd_hum/
afhandlinger/2009/ThorkilHanghoej.pdf)
Thus, debate games require teachers to balance the centripetal/centrifugal forces of gaming and
teaching, to be able to reconfigure their discursive authority, and to orchestrate the multiple voices of a
dialogical game space in relation to particular goals. These Bakhtinian perspectives provide a valuable
analytical framework for describing the discursive interplay between different practices and knowledge
aspects when enacting (debate) game scenarios. In addition to this, Bakhtin’s dialogical philosophy also
offers an explanation of why debate games (and other game types) may be valuable within an
educational context. One of the central features of multi-player games is that players are expected to
experience a simultaneously real and imagined scenario both in relation to an insider’s (participant)
perspective and to an outsider’s (co-participant) perspective. According to Bakhtin, the outsider’s
perspective reflects a fundamental aspect of human understanding: In order to understand, it is
immensely important for the person who understands to be located outside the object of his or her
creative understanding – in time, in space, in culture. For one cannot even really see one's own exterior
and comprehend it as a whole, and no mirrors or photographs can help; our real exterior can be seen
and understood only by other people, because they are located outside us in space, and because they
are others (Bakhtin, 1986: 7). As the quote suggests, every person is influenced by others in an
inescapably intertwined way, and consequently no voice can be said to be isolated. Thus, it is in the
interaction with other voices that individuals are able to reach understanding and find their own
voice. Bakhtin also refers to the ontological process of finding a voice as “ideological becoming”, which
represents “the process of selectively assimilating the words of others” (Bakhtin, 1981: 341). Thus, by
teaching and playing debate scenarios, it is possible to support students in their process of becoming
not only themselves, but also in becoming articulate and responsive citizens in a democratic society.
A2 Fairness bad
A2 Reasonability
No brightline for what reasonably close to the topic means – allowing them to be only
vaguely tied to the resolution legitimizes them defending the words “should” or
“restrict” – no unique reason they have to defend executive war powers under their
interpretation.
Makes judge intervention inevitable – either you defend a policy action or you don’t –
allowing leeway makes predictable ground of what is topical impossible.
Clear definition of terms is key
Resnick, assistant professor of political science – Yeshiva University, ‘1
(Evan, “Defining Engagement,” Journal of International Affairs, Vol. 54, Iss. 2)
In matters of national security, establishing a clear definition of terms is a precondition for effective
policymaking. Decisionmakers who invoke critical terms in an erratic, ad hoc fashion risk alienating their
constituencies. They also risk exacerbating misperceptions and hostility among those the policies target.
Scholars who commit the same error undercut their ability to conduct valuable empirical research.
Hence, if scholars and policymakers fail rigorously to define "engagement," they undermine the ability
to build an effective foreign policy.
Default to our interp – Usfg is the gov in Washington DC – zero risk of them meeting
our interp
2NC Case as offense
The circular logic of these arguments—they are only true because they are not fair—is
antithetical to debate.
The way they have introduced their argument makes it impossible to judge- the aff
requires strict proof that the resolution is bad to justify their move away from it- there
is no way to achieve that level of epistemological certainty
THEODORAKAKOU 2005 [A. THEODORAKAKOU “What is at Issue in Argumentation? Judgment in
the Hellenistic Doctrine of Krinomenon” 2005 Argumentation (2005) 19: 239–250]
Rationality in argumentation does not, and could not, rest upon strictness of proof, since the
mathematical model of formal logic is the very opposite of an argumentation theory: The latter’s sphere
is map- ped out exactly on the basis of proof ’s impossibility in the sense pecu- liar to the former. It is
this ambiguity that Myles F. Burnyeat explores in his Enthymeme: Aristotle on the Rationality of Rhetoric
(Burnyeat, 1996, p. 88) where a passage from Plutarch is cited to familiarize the reader with the
question of proof:¶ ‘‘Against the person who said, ‘Don’t give your verdict until you have heard both
sides,’ Zeno argued as follows: The second speaker is not to be heard whether the first speaker proved
their case (for then the inquiry is at an end), or they did not prove it (for this is tantamount to their not
having appeared when summoned, or to their having responded to the summons with mere prattle).
But either they proved their case or they did not. Therefore, the second speaker is not to be heard.’’¶
Burnyeat uses Zeno’s aphorism against the court to introduce a ‘thin’ concept of proof. According to
Burnyeat’s analysis, if one ac- cepted a strict concept of proof, then it would indeed be logically
impossible for both adverse parties to have proven their statements since they are contradictory (noncontradiction principle). Therefore, if the first litigant has proven his/her allegation beyond reasonable
doubt, there is no reason for the second litigant to be heard. Neverthe- less, as Burnyeat points out,
such proofs leading to uncontested con- clusions are rare in judicial procedures. That means both
adverse par- ties must be heard for an issue to be judged. Judgment is neither a mere product of law
application nor arbitrary; beyond the logic of necessity, legal determinism or judicial decisionism, it is a
decision that can and should be reasonably grounded.
2NR
Cap