[lbo-talk] sex at the margins

shag carpet bomb shag at cleandraws.com
Tue Mar 3 03:22:16 PST 2009


At 08:44 PM 3/2/2009, Carrol Cox wrote:


>shag carpet bomb wrote:
> >
>[clip]
> > -
> > 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.
>
>For 30+ years tons of ink have been expended on this theme of not
>treating people as victims, that it deprviives them of "agency." But why
>can't agents be victims and victims be agents? I remember my grandmother
>talking about her memory of her grandmother, who would stand in the
>front yard of her daughter's home gazing easteard towards her old home
>in (I think) Cornwall. She was an agent o.k., but working conditions in
>England in the mid-19th-century had damn well "victimized" her. And I
>don't see why one shouldn't say so.
>
>And about 20+ years ago a Guatemalan migrant talked here in B/N (brought
>here by our CISPES chapter), acoompanied by his translator. I can't
>remember his whole story now; a number of moving from one place to
>another several times at home, and each time in the new place (one of
>which was newly opened territory) the slaughter began again. Several
>members of his family had been killed. In the middle of his speech he
>broke down crying: he wanted to be home! He didn't want to be in the
>fucking u.s.a. but he had run all the way from Guatemala just to stay
>alive. (He was an 'illegal' migrant.)
>
>It does not deprive that man of agency to call him a victim. He fucking
>well was avictim AND an agent. It deprives him of agency NOT to call him
>an agent who was a victim.
>
>Carrol

well, a few things going on here. First, get the language out of the way: I wrote, "more of a sense of agency, I think, less of a sense of victimization." Those words shouldn't have been read as setting up an either/or. I wasn't saying "no victim language, yay!".

the other thing going on is that Agustin is speaking specifically to the issue of sex workers and gender. What she pointed out earlier is that the discourses on migration, in general, are gendered: men are seen as agents when they travel; women are seen as victims. So, there is both -- agent and victim; problem is, men get to be agents, women get to be victims.

moreover, the discussions of sex workers is taken up in the context of colonialism where, in the name of (western) feminism, brown women are constructed as in need of being saved from brown men.

to illustrate: you see this all the time in discussions of the burqa, which is represented as the most horrible form of women's oppression in discussions among western feminists. and yet, these same discussions often don't raise the issue of the oppression experienced by these women as they're dodging bombs dropped by the u.s. military -- bombs sometimes dropped in the name of saving brown women from oppression by brown men.

discussions of sex workers follow the same pattern when the sex workers are women in poorer countries or who are migrating from poorer countries. Agustin is specifically talking about what she calls the *rescue industry* -- which she and others have pointed out often ends up causing a great deal of harm to these women, and all in the name of rescuing them. As AGustin points out, feminists and "helpers" who buy into the victimization narrative do a serious disservice here because they are never motivated to actually ask about the effects of their work on the lives of the women and girls they are trying to save.

In a very similar vein, I read another book on the topic, Kamala Kempadoo's Trafficking and Prostitution Reconsidered: New Perspectives on Migration, Sex Work, and Human Rights. http://cleandraws.com/2008/01/15/erasing-the-agency-of-girls/. IF you go to that link, you can read about how, in Taiwan, this assumption that it is foreigners who drug young girls with laced pepsis, rape them into submission and then pimp them out is a highly problematic myth since, by and large, most of the women are prostitutes with the blessing of their families. that doesn't mean oppression isn't going on, but it's a lot more complicated than is supposed by the myth of foreigners abducting innocent girls.

To quote Agustin directly on the issue of why the victimization (as sole explanation) discourse is a problem:

Usually, these slippages are blamed on abstractions ­ society, the state ­ but this book argues that those declaring themselves to be helpers actively reproduce the marginalisation they condemn. I aim to connect domains usually treated separately ­ studies of migrations and service work, the sex industry, feminism, philanthropy and social projects ­ to show that these separations cannot be justified once all the cards are on the table.

Taken together, these experiences showed me that how people on the southwestern side of the Atlantic talked about their own trips had little in common with European ways of talking, and this is still mainly true. The crux of the difference concerns autonomy: whether travellers are perceived to have quite a lot versus little or none at all. I decided to try to find out how this difference comes about and what it is made of, but where I expected to find theory to enlighten me, I found little: either the whole problematic was reduced to a few simplistic concepts, or they were ignored. Thus when I looked at work in the fields of migration and diaspora studies people selling sex were not there (until extremely recently), migrant women from poor countries being figured as domestic workers and migrant men as engaged in construction and agriculture. Studies of services, the concept usually invoked to describe migrant women's work, omitted sex. There was a new area, 'trafficking', which dealt with the criminal aspects of the worst kind of migration and could not be imposed on all migrants. People selling sex were dealt with and normalised in AIDS research , but there the interest was reduced to condom use and other aspects of 'risk behaviour'. Nowhere did d I find these migrants treated as having a range of interests, occupations and desires - as being people who read newspapers, cook, go to church, films and parties or who count themselves as activities in any political or social cause. At the beginning, then, I was dealing with absences and silences, except in one area.

Within feminist theory, a hyper-production of writings existed on the concept of 'prostitution', repetitively arguing about whether or not it is always and intrinsically violent and exploitative. In this literature, it was common for each side to do little more than criticise the other. There were also scores of research studies about women who sell sex in the street, tending always to try to explain *why* in the world they did it, the assumption being that it was uniquely perverse and devastating.

I wanted to know about the abundant social programming aimed at helping these migrants. Given the lack of information, the incoherence of so much social action was not surprising. But why had social agents not come up with their own theories, based on their experiences? Are they so caught up in their projects that they do not stop to measure the effects on the people they want to help? By and large, they accept the 'prostitution' discourse ­ and the' prostitute' as victim ­ as fact, not as social construction. From there, they position themselves as benevolent helpers, in what seems to them to be a natural move. Through historical research, I found that this self-positioning began at a time in European history when interest was awakened in the art of government and the welfare of the governed. Those who were concerned, the growing middle class, saw themselves as peculiarly suited to help., control, advise and discipline the unruly poor, including their sexual conduct.

http://cleandraws.com/2009/03/02/sex-on-the-margins-is-a-must-read/



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