Feminist Theory
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The ‘subject’ of prostitution: Interpreting the discursive, symbolic and
material position of sex/work in feminist theory
Jane Scoular
Feminist Theory 2004; 5; 343
DOI: 10.1177/1464700104046983
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The ‘subject’ of prostitution
FT
Interpreting the discursive, symbolic and material
position of sex/work in feminist theory
Jane Scoular Strathclyde University
Feminist Theory
Copyright © 2004
SAGE Publications
(London,
Thousand Oaks, CA
and New Delhi)
vol. 5(3): 343–355.
1464–7001
DOI: 10.1177/1464700104046983
www.sagepublications.com
Prostitution is often viewed in feminist theory as the sine qua non of the
female condition under patriarchy. Frequently cited as ‘the absolute
embodiment of patriarchal male privilege’ (Kesler, 2002: 19), the highly
gendered nature of commercial sex appears to offer a graphic example of
male domination, exercised through the medium of sexuality.
This construction is, however, as convincing as it is problematic. By
reviewing the work of Shelia Jeffries, Judith Walkowitz, Gail Pheterson,
Shannon Bell, Jo Doezema, Kamala Kempadoo and Jo Phoenix, I aim to
illustrate that feminist writers, by assuming different theoretical lenses,
offer diverse interpretations of the subject of prostitution – both in terms
of women’s subjective positions and as a problem of a particular type.
Prostitution therefore rather than having a singular meaning is more
usefully viewed as an important crucible for testing the central mainstays
of feminist theory. As Donna Guy notes:
Full of apparent contradictions and discrepancies, the history of modern prostitution control offers a dynamic perspective on the private lives of women as well
as the public functioning of medicine, patriarchy and the nation state and
emphasizes the need to understand how gender and sexuality are interrelated
inextricably to race, cultural diversity and economic circumstances. (Guy, 1995:
182)
As this quotation suggests, and as I will demonstrate in the course of this
article, there are limitations in viewing prostitution as straightforwardly
paradigmatic, given the contingencies and diversity of the structures under
which its materializes.
keywords identity, post-modernism, prostitution, sex work, violence
The very idea of prostitution – radical feminist perspectives
Prostitution remains morally undesirable . . . because it is one of those most
graphic examples of men’s domination over women. (Pateman, 1983: 56)
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The prostitute symbolizes the value of women in society. She is paradigmatic of
women’s social, sexual and economic subordination, in that her status is the
basic unit by which all women’s value is measured and to which all women can
be reduced. (Giobbe, 1990: 77)
Radical feminist insights into prostitution have done most to highlight the
harms experienced by women in this area and have illustrated the inequalities in prostitution within the context of a gendered analysis of the state
and sexuality. The defining characteristic of work in this area, expressed
in the writings of Kate Millet (1975), Kathleen Barry (1979, 1995), Carole
Pateman (1983, 1988), Catherine MacKinnon (1987, 1989) and Andrea
Dworkin (1987, 1989), is an understanding of prostitution as violence
against women – violence not only in the practice of prostitution but more
fundamentally in the very idea of ‘buying sex’ which is considered so inextricably linked to a system of heterosexuality and male power that it
represents ‘the absolute embodiment of patriarchal male privilege’ (Kesler,
2002: 19).1
Shelia Jeffries’ work The Idea of Prostitution (1997) is a useful reference
point as it aims to defend this ideological position which, she states, since
the late 1960s has ‘analysed prostitution uncompromisingly as the ultimate
in the reduction of women to sexual objects which can be bought and sold,
to a sexual slavery that lies at the root of marriage and prostitution and
forms the foundation of women’s oppression’ (Jeffries, 1997: 2). The notion
of sexual slavery, first coined by Barry, is one that Jeffries maintains
throughout this book as she seeks to counter critiques that focus on prostitution as women’s deviant sexuality:
[Prostitution is] male sexual behaviour characterised by three elements variously
combined: barter, promiscuity, and emotional indifference. Any man is a prostitution abuser who, for the purposes of his sexual satisfaction, habitually or intermittently reduces another human being into a sexual object by the use of money
or other mercenary considerations. (Jeffries, 1997: 4)
An understanding of prostitution as a practice that contributes to women’s
oppression, and as a foundational idea that pre-determines it, informs the
contemporary campaigns by radical feminists in the political and legal
arenas to establish all prostitution as a violation of women’s human rights,
thus ‘exploding the false distinction between forced and voluntary prostitution’ (Jeffries, 1997: 10). Through the Coalition Against Trafficking in
Women (CATW), Jeffries and other prominent radical feminists focus attention on trafficking as the sexual slavery of women and children and seek
to challenge its ‘widespread support’.2 This ‘support’ is considered to
emanate from an apparent array of actors (sex liberals, queer theorists,
pimps, sex tourists and postmodernists) who consider alternative influences or frameworks such as work, choice and sex. Jeffries cites this diverse
group as ‘united in their resistance to a feminist politics of prostitution’,
preferring to ‘sustain women’s exploitation’ in this field (Jeffries, 1997: 6).
The importance of this work, which has provided a vital space to articulate the harms women have experienced and continue to experience
‘under’ eroticized power relations, can be overshadowed in the critiques
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that emerge from alternative voices in the sex industry and from postmodernists. An uncompromised account of domination does offer opportunities for action in the face of the seeming nihilism of more abstract
postmodern theories and the de-politicization created by the normalization
of heterosexual power differentials and the apparent market inevitability
of their commodification.
Nevertheless, the move from empirical, and at times partial, accounts of
women’s experiences in prostitution to an ideological position is
frequently achieved at the expense of a recognition of women’s agency and
the complexities and contradictions inherent in analysing selling sex
across space and time, without regard for the structuring roles of culture,
class and race.
The alienated subject of prostitution
The importance of gender in structuring the sale of sex informs a radical
perspective on prostitution. Rather than representing freedom or diversity,
the practice of women selling sex is considered the epitome of the oppressive sexual relations, ‘the public recognition of men’s mastery’ (MacKinnon, 1993: 13). Sexuality is considered as the primary dynamic in the
ordering of society, represented in MacKinnon’s maxim: ‘Sexuality is to
feminism, what work is to Marxism; that which is most one’s own and yet
that which is most taken away’ (MacKinnon, 1982: 515). Carole Pateman,
in The Sexual Contract, engenders the political fiction of the social contact
to demonstrate the centrality of sexual possession to male–female relations
in European societies and the role of prostitution in maintaining this
dynamic: ‘womanhood . . . is confirmed in sexual activity, and when a
prostitute contracts out the use of her body she is thus selling herself in a
very real way’ (Pateman, 1988: 207, emphasis in original).
There are, however, a number of problems with such accounts. By overdetermining gendered power-dynamics critics have noted that domination
theory simply essentializes and fails to move outside the phallocentric
imaginary (Cornell, 1995; Brown, 1995; Scoular, 1996).3 This is evident in
the quotation above where, in one rhetorical swoop, all women are reduced
to prostitutes and prostitutes to their sex acts. Not only does this reify an
image of the prostitute as sexual subordinate, it also sustains the myths and
norms of the sex industry, of potent men and submissive women, rather
than transforming them (Shrage, 1994: 134). Gender and sexuality clearly
play important structuring roles in prostitution but it is a phenomenon that
cannot be reduced to either gender or sexuality (Zatz, 1997: 279).4 In doing
so radical feminist theories reduce women’s identity to a single trait,
regardless of the structuring roles of money, culture or race. In identifying
sex more than other bodily mediated activities, such as childcare, nursing
or domestic activities, radical feminists ascribe a particular value to sex,
which is then used to argue against its commodification (Oerton and
Phoenix, 2001: 387). Pateman, for example, defines the difference between
paid sex and loving sex as: ‘[the] difference between the reciprocal expression of desire and unilateral subjection to sexual acts with the consolation
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of payment: it is the difference for women between freedom and subjection’ (Pateman, 1988: 204). Barry echoes this when she notes that ‘when
sex is not explicitly treated as genuine human interaction, it dehumanises
the experience and thereby dominates women’ (Barry, 1995: 28).
Not only does this confirm current normative understandings of
‘genuine’ sex as in some way outside power, it also, as Zatz observes,
accepts the culturally specific processes that separate work from relationships of intimacy. The economic dimension is important in this context.
Although seen by radical feminists as just an exacerbating variable, in an
always-dominant sexual hierarchy, the presence of money has important
structural consequences.5 Feminists have highlighted the public/private
norms of instrumental rationality and love that operate to obscure the role
of desire in the market and to place burdens on groups, especially women,
whose labour in an affective private world goes unrecognized (Zatz, 1997:
303; Olsen, 1983: 1497). Prostitution, however, challenges this dualism.
Zatz (1997: 303) describes it as a ‘bifurcated event’ – an act that cannot be
identified as singularly a market transaction or the realization of private
desire. The confusion this creates fuels the whore stigma, which as McClintock (1992: 73) observes, reflects deeply felt anxieties about women
trespassing the dangerous boundaries between private and public. It is also
met with criminalization which attempts to force back public elements of
prostitution into the realm of private sexuality, thus keeping the economy
and sexuality symbolically separated: ‘By denying prostitution the status
of work criminalization helps patrol the boundary between the sex/affective labour routinely assigned to and expected of women and practices
deserving of the financial and status rewards of “work” ’ (Zatz, 1997: 287).
Failure to recognize the role of stigma and law in structuring the marginal
status of sex work means, as Zatz perceptively notes, that radical feminists
often underestimate how much of what they identify as harmful in prostitution
is a product, not of the inherent character of sex work or sexuality but rather of
the specific regimes of criminalization and denigration that serve to marginalize
and oppress sex workers while constraining and distorting sex work’s radical
potential. (Zatz, 1997: 289)
Sex radicals
The most obvious critique that emerges in response to domination theory
is from those whose experience lies beyond a myopic interpretation of
complex social practices. As Doezema notes, ‘In claiming the “injured
prostitute” as the ontological and epistemological basis of feminist truth
[radical feminist work] forecloses the possibility of political confrontation
with sex workers who claim a different experience’ (Doezema, 2001: 28).
This tension, is vividly captured in Gail Pheterson’s accounts of the first
Congress of Whores (in 1989) where, describing themselves as ‘feminists
in exile’6 (Pheterson, 1989: 17), prostitutes organized not only to campaign
against legal discrimination but also to resist accounts which cast them as
mere victims. Pheterson highlights the beginnings of counter movements
of ‘sex workers’ in the West which formed directly in response to legal
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discrimination but also in response to feminist hesitations around viewing
prostitution as work (Bell, 1987; Delacoste and Alexander, 1988).
In A Vindication of the Rights of Whores, Pheterson (1989) subverts
Wollstonecraft’s early liberal feminist manifesto to ground an ongoing
campaign for the civil rights of women in the sex industry. Seemingly
flippant at times, for example, the demand for the right ‘to charge for what
other women give for free’ (Delacoste and Alexander, 1988: 273), sex
worker narratives do offer important counter-hegemonic insights: ‘its open
challenge both to the identification of sex acts with acts of desire and to
the opposition between erotic/affective activity and economic life’ (Zatz,
1997: 277).
Alongside postmodern work that has theoretically refined and bolstered
sex worker discourse, support has been garnered from those who similarly
oppose dominant notions of appropriate sexual behaviour and campaign
against the legal constraints on their apparent ‘deviant’ identities. While
this alliance is understandable given the lack of unconditional support
from large parts of the feminist movement and the shared experience of
engaging in sexual activity outside the legitimated boundaries of married,
heterosexual monogamy, assimilating sex work with ‘deviant’ sexualities
is, at times, problematic.
As diverse as the work in the area of sexuality is, there is a tendency
amongst the most rhetorical writers to cast the deviant category itself as
normative, especially when striving for legal recognition, at the expense of
more pluralistic struggles around sexuality (Bower, 1994; Herman and
Stychin, 1995; Stychin and Herman, 2000). Sex worker discourses, at
times, fall into this mode of thinking. Pheterson, for example, maintains
that law ‘contributes to the stigmatization and suppression of all active and
autonomous expressions of female desire’ (Pheterson, 1989: 23, 194;
Shrage, 1994: 134). By equating the restrictions on women’s sexual activity
with the suppression of an apparent ‘natural’ sexual drive she inadvertently reinforces dominant notions of sex as pre-social and confirms the
centrality of sexuality to subjects’ identity. Such an approach ignores the
role of law and material structures in producing, as well as constraining,
sexual preferences and acts (Foucault, 1978).
By moving beyond this, identity politics, whether for gay rights or for
sex workers’ rights, risks affirming a ‘fully constituted and bounded’
identity which is in fact ‘created’ by the power structures it aims to
critique. As Minow notes,
Just as conventional notions of objectivity failed to recognize the authority of the
voices of the relatively powerless, alternative notions of authority in subjective
accounts are defective in their inattention to material, historical experiences
beyond individual subjectivity. (Minow, 1993: 1437)
By contrast, work in sexuality which recognizes the historical and cultural
contingency of dominant forms of sexuality (Foucault, 1978; Rubin, 1984;
Weeks, 1985; Bell, 1994) helps develop a less normative approach which
casts prostitute rights not as ‘another configuration of sexual desire and
pleasure’ but as a strategic movement that attempts to resist the structuring
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role of law (Zatz, 1997: 301). This is often overlooked in certain prostitute
rights campaigns that counter objections to prostitution as degrading
women by asserting its role in promoting sexual expression and economic
freedom for women. This position is empirically problematic and, given
the highly gendered nature of the sex industry, many feminists are sceptical if not hostile to the idea of equating commercial sex to erotic diversity.
As Shrage observes, ‘prostitution . . . is a cultural institution that is
produced by, and reproduces, repressive norms of female sexuality’
(Shrage, 1994: 134 referring to McIntosh, 1978). Sex work may more
usefully be viewed with ambivalence given that it is an activity which challenges the boundaries of heterosexist, married, monogamy but may also be
an activity which reinforces the dominant norms of heterosexuality and
femininity.
Postmodern subjects
Postmodern work, in contrast to previous approaches, considers prostitution as neither a subversive sexual practice nor an inherently oppressive
one. As Shannon Bell in Reading, Writing and Re-Writing the Prostitute
Body notes, ‘the referent, the flesh-and-blood female body engaged in some
form of sexual interaction in exchange for some kind of payment, has no
inherent meaning and is signified differently in different discourses’ (Bell,
1994: 1). From this position, Bell reveals the contingency of current
constructions, for example radical theory’s reliance on modernist discourse
in constructing the prostitute subject as ‘other’ which reproduces the
dualisms of modernism in the form of ‘victim and subject’ alongside ‘good
and bad’, ‘whore and madonna’. Bell argues that this othering process can
only be fractured by a postmodern reading of the prostitute subject and
with reference to the work of Luce Irigaray and Gayle Rubin considers
different ways of reading the prostitute body that dissolve the overarching
dichotomies. She focuses on the ancient sexual, sacred, healing female
body of the hetaerae in ancient Greece (Bell, 1994: 2) and the contemporary
politicization of the prostitute body by sex workers7 and prostitute
performance art – all of which, she argues, disrupt the dualism of
modernity by linking the obscene with the sacred, the experiential body
with the political subject, the affective with the public realm and sex with
knowledge:
prostitutes collectively and in the realm of art deploy their bodies as sites of
resistance to undermine both the hegemonic production of the prostitute body
in modernity and the modernist feminist reproduction of the prostitute body.
(Bell, 1994: 12)
Bell can be criticized for romanticizing the spiritual element of sex work
(Fitch, 1996: 130) and overestimating the extent to which ‘performance’ is
able to overcome structural barriers. Indeed this work is often better read
in conjunction with empirical studies that consider the impact of material
structures and resources on a subject’s ability to mount discursive
challenges. Good examples include Julia O’Connoll Davidson’s work
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Prostitution, Power and Freedom (1998) which empirically considers the
variety of forms prostitution takes and the differing degrees of control sex
workers have over their lives and Maggie O’Neill’s work Prostitution and
Feminism (2001) which utilizes a sophisticated combination of postmodern insight and ethnography to highlight the socio-economic processes
and structures that lead women into prostitution yet avoids viewing prostitution as either inherently oppressive or as an expression of sexual
freedom. In a similar vein, Jo Phoenix’s Making Sense of Prostitution (1999)
engages with contemporary work on identity in her study of the way in
which women in street prostitution negotiate and struggle to maintain a
coherent sense of self in prostitution. Phoenix acknowledges subjects’
agency but also recognizes that access to material resources and the weight
of structural forces militate to limit opportunities for performative resistance. She talks of the ‘profound contradiction of involvement in prostitution as both a means of securing material and social survival and as a
relationship that threatens that survival’ (Phoenix, 1999: 2). This tension
makes for an ambivalent identity and provides a leveller to unqualified and
de-contextualized notions of the utopian artisan. Bell’s work is, nevertheless, important, not only in offering a counter-hegemonic imaginary but
also in alerting us to the contingency of contemporary constructions – in
particular, the legal and radical feminist work attachment to ‘the profane,
diseased, and excluded body of the nineteenth century’ (Bell, 1994: 2).
Rhetorical historicization
This ‘rigid modernism’ (Fitch, 1996: 130) is apparent in Jeffries’ earlier
work where, in an effort ‘[to] explain how feminist thinking on prostitution
has become so polarised at the end of the 20th century’, she returns the
reader to a period where ‘these views that call themselves feminist did not
always exist’ (Jeffries, 1997: 1). The apparent ‘golden age’ of feminist
consensus that is invoked is, coincidently, the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries and ‘the profane, diseased, and excluded body’ (Bell, 1994:
2) of prostitution under the Contagious Diseases Act.
This move to a time when feminist views were pleasingly homogeneous
not only avoids postmodern critiques, it also represents a period in which
there is an absence of prostitute women’s voices and experiences which,
as discussed earlier, challenge a unitary approach to the issue. What is
present, however, is a vocal and seemingly united feminist movement – in
the form of the Ladies National Association. They are significant to Jeffries
as they share with radical feminists an understanding of prostitution as the
ultimate ‘profanation of the dignity and individuality of women’ (Elmy
quoted in Jeffries, 1997: 34)8 which not only informed domestic campaigns
against the Contagious Diseases Act but also extended to international
efforts to outlaw trafficking in women. Their insights are considered to be
directly relevant to contemporary feminist campaigns by Jeffries who
argues ‘we should not have to reinvent the wheel’ in developing a united
stand, clear definition of the problem and clear agenda regarding state
action (Jeffries, 1997: 2). This is an example of what I would term rhetorical
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historicization whereby history is interpreted through preconceived
categories, in this case gender and sexuality. In limiting analysis to fit an
ideological framework, more complex meanings and ambiguities are overlooked.
In contrast, Judith Walkowitz’s work on Prostitution and Victorian
Society (1980) offers a more nuanced reading of the same historical period
and reveals the operation of more complex dynamics than Jeffries alludes
to. Walkowitz situates prostitution control in the context of the intense
social and economic transformation which marks the Victorian era. She
ably demonstrates that the dynamics of urbanization and in particular the
cultural anxiety over women’s shifting roles were focused largely on
unmarried working-class women. Given this context, the Contagious
Diseases Act, which constructs prostitute women’s bodies as a site of moral
and medical degeneracy, can be read as an attempt to control these anxieties. She illustrates the way in which feminist censure, while potentially
counter-hegemonic, often became normative when extending to a more
general crusade against prostitution as degrading to women, often forming
uneasy alliances with moral puritans in the process. Overlooking the state’s
role in structuring and maintaining a distinction between women, appeals
to the state for protection by middle-class feminists on behalf of their ‘poor
sisters’ often cast prostitute and young working-class women as objects of
care and concern. Such constructions operated to increase state control and
surveillance of ‘wayward girls’, which continues to this day (Phoenix,
2002). The increase in the age of consent for young women can be attributed to the efforts at this time to protect young women from exploitation
by men. Constructions of young women as powerless victims and the
failure to empower by addressing their economic vulnerability meant that
any ‘protection’ was tendered at the expense of female sexual autonomy.
By failing to address the material needs of young women or to challenge
the way in which the state regulates prostitution to the benefit of male
power, feminist politics by seeking protection for others maintained rather
than altered relationships of inferiority, fuelling the asymmetrical
dynamics of prostitution. Indeed, as Zatz notes, the forms of prostitution
encouraged by these historic processes inform current prostitution control
and are those in which its ‘subversive power is very much limited while
supply is maintained’ (Zatz, 1997: 309).
Colonialist ambitions
The same dynamics can be seen in the international ambitions of Victorian
feminist campaigns, which Jeffries hopes to adhere to as a model for
current campaigns against trafficking. The medical discourse, as an
imperialist discourse and influenced a wider political community to which
feminist campaigns at the time appealed, in an effort to rally support
against commercial sex as slavery for all women. Not content to represent
only their ‘poor sisters’ at home, Victorian women also sought to extend
their reach to women in the colonies and did so by invoking ideas of
‘women’s supposed ability, based on essential feminine characteristics, to
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identify with the suffering bodies and therefore, to represent them politically’ (Doezema, 2001: 22).
Burton (1994) argues that the spectre of slavery employed in campaigns
at this time concealed a colonialist discourse. Burton argues that Victorian
feminists’ relationship to the ‘injured identities’ of ‘colonial others’ was
central to feminist desire ‘to (re)-focus the attention of the state on their
own desire for inclusion in the body politic’ (Burton, 1994: 339). By
homogenizing Indian women’s identity ‘as backward, helpless and inferior’
(Doezema, 2001: 24) the campaign against the Contagious Diseases Act
could be transported to rescue and civilize the ‘poor unfortunates’, creating
a ‘perfect foil to indicate the “advanced” situation of middle-class
Victorian feminists’ (Doezema, 2001: 24). By claiming rights on behalf of
others in a manner that re-affirms Britain as the centre of democracy,
Victorian feminists were themselves able to claim ‘their right to participate
in the empire’ (Burton, 1994: 499) and advance their claims for enfranchisement.
Yet as Donna Guy notes, while female commercial sex at the time was
common, its impact on ‘colonized and post-colonial societies and on nonwhite, non-European women is quite diverse’ (Guy, 1995: 182). Burton, for
example, outlines the role of immigration, the dynamics of religion and
racial difference as well as nationality in the construction of political and
moral camps to control prostitution in India. The importance of culture in
structuring the meanings of prostitution, however, is not only absent in
Victorian feminist campaigns, it is also frequently overlooked in international discourses which continue to privilege western categories,
subjects and experiences.
As Agustín suggests, the Coalition Against Trafficking in Women
(CATW), supported by both Jeffries and Barry, ‘in an effort to save as many
victims as possible’ attempts to fuse the two concepts of trafficking and
prostitution, but in doing so totalizes the experiences of all women and
migrants working in the sex industry in a ‘variety of situations involving
different levels of personal will and makes it more difficult to propose
practical solutions’ (Agustín, 2001: 107).9 Contemporary writers have also
criticized the recurring focus on ‘the injured body of the third world prostitute’ in current trafficking discourse which acts as a powerful metaphor
for advancing certain feminist interests and interventionist impulses.
Kapur, for example, argues that representations of third world women as
perpetually underprivileged and marginalized equat[es] choice with
wealth and coercion with poverty and no space remains to recognise and
validate the choices that women make when confronted with limited
economic opportunities’ (Kapur, 2001: 869).
By contrast, Jo Doezema and Kamala Kempadoo’s Global Sex Workers:
Rights, Resistance, and Redefinition (1998) offers a more nuanced understanding of the complexity and variability of sexual labour when contextualized within particular transnational, socio-cultural and economic
structures. The 24 contributions in the collection demonstrate the way in
which sexual labour is shaped by local conditions, sexual norms,10 narratives of racism and the increasing influence of global capitalism. A rich
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body of empirical work emerges in the narratives of Ghanaian women in
Côte d’Ivorie, Japanese migrant sex workers in Thailand, the Jineterismo in
Cuba and migrant experiences in the Caribbean, South Africa, Australia,
Brazil and India.
Rejecting universal and simplistic understandings, the authors engage
with ‘racialized sexual subjectivities in tandem with the historical weight
of imperialism, colonialism and racist constructions of power’ (Doezema
and Kempadoo, 1998: 13). Consonant with postmodern work previously
discussed, commercial sex is shown to be contingent on social, economic
and cultural factors but with law, money and sex playing key structuring
roles; in particular the collection reveals a persistent theme of the feminization of international labour migration, where experiences of dislocation and migration are often oppressive, and addresses the role of law in
prohibiting sex work and immigration consequently creates further obstacles for women crossing borders (Doezema and Kempadoo, 1998: Chapters
2 and 4).
The complex subject positions of migrant sex workers display a
‘dynamic interplay between repression and resistance’ (Kapur, 2001: 857),
mirroring the earlier work of Phoenix which highlights the ambivalence
created by women’s resistance in ‘the context of both the structural
constraints and dominant relations of power in the global sex industry’
(Doezema and Kempadoo, 1998: 8).
In contrast to the homogeneous, perpetually victimized, and linear
subject embedded in legal discourse or constructions of the third world
subject as a ‘repressed subject’ (Kapur, 2001: 857) in radical feminist work,
Kapur offers an image of the migrant woman crossing borders as a ‘resistant subject’: ‘she situates herself as a resistant subject, challenging “patriarchal” control within the family and marriage as well as a subject who
exercises economic choices and social mobility’ (Kapur, 2001: 880). In this
schema the migrant subject’s agency is not ‘free and unfettered’ but is fractured by experiences of violence, poverty, racism, and marginalization
(Kapur, 2001: 885). Yet the benefit of this and earlier postmodern work is
that by maintaining a critical distance from oppressive structural factors,
theorists are able to resist attempts to see power as overwhelming and
consuming the subject. This creates the discursive space for a transformative feminist theory which seeks to utilize the disruptive potential of the
counter-hegemonic and ‘resisting’ subject to challenge hierarchical
relations.
Notes
1. Radical feminists have used the practice of prostitution, alongside
pornography, as the exemplar of the female condition under patriarchy.
2. Critical voices, based on empirical observation and including those of
migrant women, are collapsed into an ‘opposition’ supporting trafficking.
3. Also, if patriarchy is a complete system this cannot adequately explain
empirical examples that fall outside the schema: for example, women
buying men (Doezema and Kempdoo, 1998); the selling of sex between
gay and bisexual men (Davies and Feldman, 1997); commercial sex
between women (Nestle, 1988).
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4. Yet consider the description by Barry of prostitution and sexual
exploitation as a ‘class condition’:
My study of sex as power . . . inevitably, continually, unrelentingly returns me
to prostitution . . . one cannot mobilize against a class condition of oppression
unless one knows its fullest dimensions. Thus my work has been to study and
expose sexual power in its most severe, global, institutionalized, and
crystallized forms . . . Prostitution – the cornerstone of all sexual exploitation.
(Barry, 1995: 9)
5. This is not to say it is the variable as Marx asserted, simply ‘a specific
expression of the general prostitution of the labourer’ (Marx, 1964: 133),
as this begs the question of why is it overwhelmingly women’s and not
men’s sex that is commodified, and as Zatz notes, ‘why is it that
prostitution has been so differentiated from other forms of waged work?’
(Zatz, 1997: 288).
6. ‘. . . excluded from a rightful place in the feminist movement’ (Pheterson,
1989: 17).
7. Not only do their demands at times fuse work/affective relations but also,
as Bell (1994) notes, they move the prostitute body from a place as an
experiential body to produce a new public site of discourse – prostitute
discourse.
8. This ‘typical feminist view of the time’ comes from Elizabeth
Wolstenholme Elmy, a member of the Ladies National Association.
9. Agustín (2001) continues ‘and all of those who help them migrate’, which
covers a wide array of family, friends, lovers, agencies and criminal
networks and many different forms of help characterized as trafficking.
10. The importance of local sexual norms is often ignored in favour of
specific western ideologies and moralities regarding sexual relations. For
example Kempadoo argues that in African and Caribbean cultures ‘one
can speak of a continuum of sexual relations from monogamy to multiple
sexual partners and where sex may be considered a valuable asset for
women to trade’ (Doezema and Kempadoo, 1998: 12).
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Jane Scoular is a Senior Lecturer in Law at the Strathclyde University. Her
research is concerned with the intersection of theories of gender and law and
she has written on the subjects of informal justice, domestic violence and
prostitution, see for example, J. Scoular (ed.) Family Dynamics: Contemporary
Issues in Family Law (Butterworths, 2001). Recent publications and empirical
studies focus on the subject of prostitution and include an analysis of its
relationship to social exclusion and a critique of the Swedish law which
criminalizes clients. She is currently working on a book entitled The Subject
of Prostitution: Sex/Work, Law and Social Theory, to be published in 2007.
Address: Senior Lecturer in Law, University of Strathclyde, 173 Cathedral
Street, Glasgow G4 ORQ, Scotland. Email: jane.scoular@strath.ac.uk
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