Are male prostitutes ever conceptualized in this fashion?
Christopher E. Doss Moscow, Russian Federation
--- On Tue, 3/3/09, shag carpet bomb <shag at cleandraws.com> wrote:
> From: shag carpet bomb <shag at cleandraws.com>
> Subject: Re: [lbo-talk] sex at the margins
> To: lbo-talk at lbo-talk.org
> Date: Tuesday, March 3, 2009, 6:52 AM
> I accidentally left off this last paragraph:
>
> This book argues that social helpers consistently deny the
> agency of large numbers of working-class migrants , in a
> range of theoretical and practical moves whose object is
> management and control: the exercise of governmentality. The
> journeys of women who work in the sex industry are treated
> as involuntary in a victimising discourse known as
> 'trafficking', while the experiences of men and
> trangenders who sell sex are ignored. The work of migrant
> women in Europe, not only in sex but in housework and
> caring, is mostly excluded from government regulation and
> accounts, leaving these workers social invisible. Migrants
> working in the informal sector are treated as passive
> subjects rather than as normal people looking for
> conventional opportunities, conditions and pleasures, who
> may prefer to sell sex to their other options. The victim
> identity imposed on so many in the name of helping them
> makes helpers themselves disturbingly important figures.
> Historical research demonstrates how this victimising and
> the concomitant assumption of importance by middle-class
> women, which began two centuries ago, was closely linked to
> their carving out of a new employment sphere for themselves
> through the naming of a project to rescue and control
> working-class women."
>
>
> I want to add that reading Kempadoo's books on
> trafficking, which contain an abundance of actual research
> -- interviews with women, participatory action research,
> ethnography -- reveal that the stories of the women are so
> varied that it is, indeed, very wrong to impose on all of
> them the notion that they are passive victims. When Agustin
> writes, above, that they are "normal people looking for
> conventional opportunities, conditions, and pleasures, who
> may prefer to sell sex to their other options," people
> are often outraged. They might buy that this is the case
> among Western women, but that it could be the case in
> Thailand or among Guatamalan women who've migrated to
> Spain seems completely wrong to them. You see these in the
> sex worker wars in bloglandia. Christ, women who *are* sex
> workers, whether Western or not, will actually write about
> their own lives, intervening in these debates with their own
> experiences.
>
> Without fail, every single one is ignored or, worse,
> silenced. They are said to be unique, privileged exceptions
> to the rule if anyone pays attention to them. Or, they are
> completely ignored. *crickets* Worse, they are often told
> they are dupes of the patriarchy and/or willingly colluding
> to maintain male privilege -- and will often be called men
> -- as in, male identified OR as sock puppets pretending to
> be prostitutes since their stories couldn't possibly be
> the stories told be a real woman.
>
> I don't know if Dwayne ever followed the sex worker
> wars but if he did, then he knows exactly what I'm
> talking about. It was kind of astounding to watch as sex
> workers would show up at these debates, trying to speak
> their lives, only to be ignored, belittled, silenced or
> outright told they were liars.
>
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