[lbo-talk] sex at the margins

shag carpet bomb shag at cleandraws.com
Mon Mar 2 16:37:17 PST 2009


I put off reading Postone in order to read Laura Agustin's _Sex at the Margins_ which I'd order through interlibrary loan and have until the 16th to read.

I'm hoping to do one of the seminars/close readings like I used to do at the old blog, a start is here: http://cleandraws.com/category/books/authors/laura-agustin/

Excerpt:

Meanwhile, an excerpt from Agustin's introduction:

"Sex at the Margins examines the intersection of two groups of people: those who migrate to Europe and engage in domestic, caring and sexual labour, and those working in the social sector with these migrants.

Overwhelmingly

media, academic, government, and most NGO voices either infantilise these migrants or ignore their existence.

Sex at the Margins examines current ideas about this phenomenon of travel and work "

- I'm cutting out here because I want to highlight the word she used: travel. Instead of talking about this in terms of migrancy, which signifies a kind of transiency en route to someplace else, an eventual settling, Agustin's keen to write about these folks as travelers ­ which implies a rather different idea ­ more of a sense of agency, I think, less of a sense of victimization.

and, in a second post:

For Delphyne ­ and often even for people railing against the condition of migrant labor in general ­ people only ever leave their country of origin because they *have* to. They imagine a migrant who is a passive victim of economic oppression, political oppression, what have you. A woman never picks up and migrates to another country ­ or from a rural area to an urban one ­ to become a sex worker because she *chose* to. This is beyond any sense for most people in these discussions.

Agustin wants to undermine this tendency ­ and she wants to undermine it even among the most enlightened of people who advocate for a more sex positive feminist approach, or even among those who advocate for a more justice-minded approach to thinking about immigration, migrants, etc. She begins the task of disrupting the hegemony of the victim identity in Chapter 2, "Working to Travel, Travelling to Work."

Here, she opens the chapter by saying, "I begin with notions of travel in general, because so much stigmatising and bad publicity derives from wrong impression about what people are doing when they leave home."

And what better idea to start with than the idea of tourism. If you immediately thought that she was talking about sex tourism and sex tourists, think again. She's putting into question the idea that migrants cannot be thought of as tourists. She's questioning the arbitrary boundaries put up between immigration, travel, tourism, migrancy, and so forth.

Think of white, middle class people you know who've gone to another country, as a tourist basically, but who've also set themselves off from mere tourists by pointing out that they are going to stay there for a long time, and they are going to probably get a job, to get to know the people and the culture better.

Think of business travelers who are their for work, but who also take off some time for tourism.

Think of the oppositions that have been set up here, between work and leisure, between traveling to get away from work and traveling to work.

From working in order to travel, from traveling in order to work.

Think of the person you unconsciously see in the role of traveler, tourist, migrant, immigrant, vagabond, hitchhiker, vagrant, business traveler, someone who says, "I'm going out of the country for business "

"let's be civil and nice, but not to the point of obeying the rules of debate as defined by liberal blackmail (in which, discomfort caused by a challenge is seen as some vague form of harassment)."

-- Dwayne Monroe, 11/19/08

-- http://cleandraws.com Wear Clean Draws



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