culture

Mira este video de una marcha en Lima llevada a cabo el 2 de junio, Día Internacional de los/as Trabajadores Sexuales. Here’s a great, colourful video of a pro-rights march held in Lima on 2 June on International Sex Workers Day.

La marcha forma parta de un proyecto de CiudadaniaSx: activismo cultural y derechos humanos, que enfrenta el estigma y la discriminación a través del arte y el activismo cultural. El proyecto sobre el trabajo sexual, llamado Intervención Bochinche, tiene como meta

confrontar el estigma y la discriminación que sufren cotidianamente las trabajadoras sexuales mujeres y trans (travesti, transgénero, transexual) debido a la criminalización del trabajo sexual, motivo por el cual suelen ser víctimas de diversas formas de violencia y violación de sus derechos.

Según donde estés, la palabra bochinche significa jaleo, alboroto (mess, row, racket, upheaval) o chisme (gossip). En el caso de esta inciativia, los dos significados pueden servir. Antes de la marcha, el proyecto colocó por Lima pancartas con interesantes mensajes, jugando con las palabras y las políticas represivas de la municipalidad. Entonces:

Street prostitution is advancing - neat!

Caresses available

Pick them up - We’re not watching you

The city is filling with lust - great!

Operation Sodom is also coming

Hookers’ Summit in Lima

On Monday Sarkozy threatened to make wearing a burka in public illegal in France. I wrote about this kind of thinking last year in The Guardian. This issue is related to migration, it is related to trafficking and it is related to commercial sex. Ideas about how the right kind of women should look predominate in the history of women: you’re meant to cover yourself up more, or less, or in some particular way. From the original text of Sarkozy’s speech:

Le problème de la burqa n’est pas une problème religieux, c’est un problème de liberté, de dignité de la femme. Ce n’est pas un signe religieux, c’est un signe d’asservissement, d’abaissement. La burqa ne sera pas la bienvenue dans notre République française.

From the BBC story:

We cannot accept to have in our country women who are prisoners behind netting, cut off from all social life, deprived of identity. That is not the idea that the French republic has of women’s dignity.

Note the applause from politicians when he makes these statements.

Women wearing burkas are not welcome in France. That ‘Frenchness’ should depend on clothing I find very scary. That the idea of personal identity should be institutionalised by the French state I find even scarier. The original title of the following piece was Which migrants assimilate best? How do we know?, which editors changed to

What Not to Wear - if you want to be French

The Guardian, Comment is Free,  6 August 2008

Laura Agustín

A woman from Morocco who has lived in France for eight years with a French husband, has three French children and speaks fluent French, was refused citizenship recently on grounds of being insufficiently assimilated. The Conseil d’etat said Faiza Silmi’s way of life does not reflect “French values”, particularly the goal of gender equality. The judgment claims she lives in “total submission” to the men in her life because she wears the niqab, which covers all of the face except the eyes. The decision was approved by commentators from right, left and centre. Fadela Amara, the urban affairs minister, called Silmi’s clothing a “prison” and a “straitjacket”. Predictable debates about fundamentalism unfolded in the media, with Silmi appearing as a strange, distant object.

What does Silmi herself say? The website Jeuneafrique.com has just published her first interview with the French press, corroborating another in the New York Times. Silmi’s voice emerges clearly:

I am not submissive to the men in my family nor do I lead the life of a recluse and I go out when I want. When I drive my car, I wear my niqab. I alone decided to wear it, after reading some books. I respect the law and my husband respects my decisions.

While she talked, her husband served tea. Read the rest of this entry »

I have excerpted here some of the ethnographic material from a research article that has much more in it, on how Mexican migrant men’s loneliness affects their sexual behaviour. The article illustrates how ethnography can illuminate our understanding of the sex industry. It’s a description of one particular place in New York City and the activities of one specific group of young men from Puebla, Mexico. I’ve chosen to excerpt two kinds of material: 1) description of the site and dancing and 2) how male socialising may depend more on watching and talking than directly on sex.

Miguel Muñoz-Laboy, Jennifer S. Hirsch and Arturo Quispe-Lazaro. ‘Loneliness as a Sexual Risk Factor for Male Mexican Migrant Workers.’ American Journal of Public Health 2009, Vol 99, No. 5, 806-7.

‘. . . The signs on the outside of the La Garza club provided an accurate depiction of the differences between strip clubs or brothels and this type of social space. These signs said in both English and Spanish:

Every day beautiful dancers; Monday - Mexican nights tequilazo; Tuesday - all dancers in sexy babydolls; Wednesday - bikini nights; Thursday - sexy dancer nurses; Saturday - all dancers in micro-miniskirts; Sunday - school girls night; Happy Hour from 4 to 10pm, $3 beers and house drinks; no caps or hats, no sneakers, no jeans; decent place to dance; we are looking for dancers.

. . . La Garza was a 1-floor [table-dance] club with bathrooms in the basement, a 20-foot-long bar, 1 large-screen TV, 1 pool table that can only be used by VIPs, a dance floor in the center of the club, and 3 small seating sections around the dance floor. There is no entrance fee. Each dance costs $4 but clients can get a private dancer for $40 per hour.

. . . some couples danced physically close whereas others did not; some danced fast, others slow. However, reggaeton songs were danced almost the same across patrons; men were pressed against the columns or standing by the walls by the women dancers who would thrust their backs and buttocks against the men’s penis area (this is also known as grinding). Reggaeton was probably the most erotic dance in the club, and, yet, the most common behavior among men in the club was drinking and watching women dance, with other men, by themselves, or with other women.

. . . The men who attended La Garza can be divided into 3 main groups: (1) those that went mostly to dance with women, (2) those that mostly spoke and flirted with women and rarely danced and; (3) those that went to drink and watch, but rarely danced or spoke with the female dancers.

. . . [In] the second group . . . men paid women to speak with them for the duration of a single song (approximately 3 minutes) but most often they started their conversation in the middle of the previous song). They expressed that they had a better chance of getting together with any of the women by talking with them rather than by dancing and grinding. . . .  Men . . .talked about their experiences in places like La Garza as a way of being able to talk to women without the ‘complications’ of doing it at work or in the neighborhood. As expressed by research participants, these complications induded the difficulty of initiating a conversation with a strange woman, the need to avoid sexual harassment in the workplace, and prohibitions on men being able to talk to clients in many of the restaurant establishments in which they worked. . . .’

The following comments reveal some of the contradictions experienced while trying to work within the framework of ‘trafficked children’. The study was funded by the US National Institute of Justice ‘to examine the experiences of children, mostly girls, trafficked to the United States for sexual and labor exploitation and analyze their prospects for reintegration.’ I make many of the same comments in my book Sex at the Margins and am glad to see that numerous other researchers are now writing about cultural differences that mean that campaigns to save young people from doing paid work often oppress and make them unhappy. These are just a few excerpts from the article, so if you’ve got questions go to the original. I’ve highlighted some points in bold, and made sure to leave in concepts not often mentioned in debates (child fostering and child circulation).

Anthropological Quarterly, Vol. 81/4, pp. 903–923, (2008)

On Challenges, Dilemmas, and Opportunities in Studying Trafficked Children

Elzbieta M. Goździak, Institute for the Study on International Migration, Georgetown University

In the United States the system of care for trafficked children has been developed within a framework based on middle-class Western ideals about childhood as a time of dependency and innocence during which children are socialized by adults and become competent social actors. Economic and social responsibilities are generally mediated by adults so that the children can grow up free from pressures of responsibilities such as work and child care. Children who are not raised in this way are considered “victims” who have had their childhood stolen from them. This framework views universal concern for children as transcending political and social divides; assumes a universally applicable model of childhood development; presupposes a consensus on what policies should be in place to realize the best interest of the child; assumes that child victims have universal needs (such as a need for rehabilitation); and promotes a therapeutic model of service provision. . .

. . . we understood that “disagreements over [child trafficking]’s magnitude are underpinned by different understandings of the term ‘child’ and ‘trafficking’” and that “this is a conceptual and political problem that cannot be resolved by more data alone” (Manzo 2005: 394).

. . . many of the children did not consider themselves trafficked victims, but thought of their experiences as migration in search of better opportunities that turned into exploitation. Many also did not think of their traffickers as perpetrators of crime and villains; after all in some instances the traffickers were parents or close relatives.

. . . Almost all of the children were highly motivated to migrate to the US in the hope of earning money. Many of them had compelling reasons to send money home and had to repay smuggling fees. Typically, the children’s desire to earn money did not change once they were rescued. [State programs] reflect US laws requiring children to attend school, defining the age of employment and number of hours a minor child is allowed to work. . .  These restrictions may run counter to many children’s goals and lead to a struggle as they adjust to their new lives. These issues have longterm consequences for the children’s commitment to education and affect their desire to remain in care. The children’s reluctance to see themselves as victims stood in sharp contrast to the perceptions of service providers who referred to the children as victims, often because the law conceptualizes them as victims.

. . . Middle-class Eurocentric ideals often assume that, apart from exceptional cases, children live in nuclear families, experience childhood together with their siblings and have access to resources provided by both biological parents. Research contradicts this assumption and documents a wide range of living arrangements experienced by children in resource-poor countries (Lloyd and Desai 1992).

. . .  child fostering or child circulation is a long-standing cultural practice in many regions. . .  including West Africa, . . . Latin America . . .  and the Pacific. According to Demographic and Health Surveys, covering 10 African countries (Benin, Burkina Faso, Cote d’Ivoire, Ghana, Guinea, Mali, Niger, Nigeria, and Senegal), the percentage of foster children ranges between 10 and 20 percent in the six to nine age bracket, and between 13 and 25 percent in the 10 to 14 age group. In the overwhelming majority of cases, both parents are alive but do not live with their children (Pilon 2003). . .

. . .  In West Africa, fostering is an important technique rooted in kinship structures and traditions. Children are not sent out only in the event of crisis; sending of children is practiced by both stable and unstable families, married and single mothers (Isiugo-Abaniche 1985, 1991).

. . . According to the British Agencies for Adoptions and Fostering, 10,000 children, mostly from West Africa, were living with families other than their own in the United Kingdom in 2001 (Economist 2003). . .

. . . In Latin America, “child circulation” is a principal way in which Peruvian rural-to-urban migrants move children between houses as part of a common survival and betterment strategy in the context of social and economic inequality (Leinaweaver 2007). Poverty and vulnerability shape Peruvian practices of kinship formation through child circulation. For the receiving family, child circulation represents strategic labor recruitment; for the sending household, it spells relief from the economic burdens of child rearing and constitutes a source of highly desirable remittances. A considerable proportion of children in Mexico and Colombia were found to spend some time during childhood without a father. When births outside a union are included, one-fifth of Mexican children and one-third of Colombian children were affected. An additional five percent of Mexican children and nine percent of Colombian children do not live with their mothers (Richter 1988).

. . . For the societies involved, child circulation is a characteristic of family systems, fitting in with patterns of family solidarity and the system of rights and obligations. Fostering is a component of family structure and dynamics (Pilon 2003). Indeed, the majority of the children in our study lived with other family members or friends prior to being trafficked and most were sent to live with family members or friends in the United States and ended up being trafficked.

Here’s a story From Stuff.co.nz about signs advertising an online escort website that are upsetting a New Zealand community because children pass them on the way to school. Comments to the story address the issue of whether children’s ‘innocence’ needs to be protected or not. Prostitution is legal in NZ (as discussed in several previous posts: re migration, re street work, re trafficking and re whiteness). This story shows how it’s the visible aspects of the sex industry that upset most people, not its existence. Compare with the other day’s article about Tel Aviv.

Photo: Ben Watson

The online escort business’s own comment was this:
18 May 2009 - Press Release: Adultspace.co.nz

The subject of street-based prostitution is both controversial and topical. Adultspace is a Marketing Agency that provides a service to workers in the sex industry. This allows them to promote their business in a professional, discreet and non-intrusive way.

There is a general consensus of opinion that the street element of prostitution needs to be controlled. This has resulted in much debate aimed at finding a resolution for this social issue. Adultspace allows individuals to promote themselves, via the website, in a safe and socially responsible way, without having to walk the streets.

The signage promoting Adultspace is not designed to be offensive, and is probably less sexual and shocking than billboards displayed throughout New Zealand. We feel it is both tasteful and understated. We fail to see why the local school are concerned. They have not approached us directly, and we have had no negative feedback from members of the general public.

The sex industry is legal. Adultspace is a Marketing Agency that supports it. Like all other companies, we should be allowed to display visible signage relevant to our business.

We endeavor to be sensitive to the impact that some elements of this industry may have on certain sectors of the general public.

As with other activities seen as deviant, the sex industry is only acceptable and tolerated when it is out of sight - even when it is legal.

Lisboa, 1 de mayo 2009

Este texto viene de Alexandra Oliveira de Portugal, autora de un excelente libro sobre el trabajo sexual llamado As vendedoras de ilusões. La foto es de Sérgio Vitorino, quien cuenta su experiencia aquí con más fotos. My English translation of Alexandra’s text follows her original.

‘No dia 1 de Maio, um grupo de prostitutas integrou a manifestação do May Day, em Lisboa. Acho que foi um dia histórico: foi a primeira vez que tal aconteceu em Portugal e partiu delas, spontaneamente. Elas perguntaram às trabalhadoras sociais de um projecto de intervenção porque não iam juntar-se aos outros trabalhadores no dia do trabalhador. Eu estive lá com elas, a dar apoio. Foram 7 mulheres que desfilaram sem máscaras, cheias de coragem - duas delas levaram as filhas pequenas com elas. O apoio veio das Irmãs Oblatas - umas freiras fantásticas que fazem trabalho de rua com mulheres trabalhadoras do sexo -, dum grupo de activistas LGBT (Panteras Rosa) e duma associação artística que tem uma bailarina que faz com elas trabalho de dança e expressão corporal (c.e.m - centro em movimento). Fomos todos no desfile. Eramos um pequeno grupo mas chamamos a atenção com os nossos guarda-chuvas vermelhos. Aos poucos, está a criar-se um movimento. Fiquei feliz e orgulhosa por estar lá.’

On the first of May, a group of prostitutes joined the May Day demonstration in Lisbon. I think it was an historic day: it was the first time this happened in Portugal and came from the women spontaneously. They asked the social workers from an outreach project why they shouldn’t join other workers on workers’ day. I was there with them to give support. They were 7 women who marched without masks, full of courage - two brought their little daughters with them. Support came from sisters of the Oblatas order - fantastic nuns who do street work with women sex workers -, from a group of LGBT activists (Panteras Rosa - Pink Panthers) and from an artistic association that has a dancer who works with the women on dance and body expression (called c.e.m/centro em movimento - movement centre). We were all in the procession. We were a small group but we attracted attention with our red umbrellas. So a movement is created, in gradual steps. I was happy and proud to be there.

Albertine, by Alfred Seland, 1940s

This relief is sculpted into a corner of Oslo’s City Hall. Stories about what it represents vary, but Tourist Information in the city, as well as people who have written to me, confirm that the woman in the centre represents the protagonist of Christian Krohg’s novel Albertine, published in 1886. Albertine is a poor woman who takes up prostitution in the city’s old Vika district. The well-dressed man on the right is said to be a client. The difference of opinion amongst commentators revolves around the man on the left. Some say he is Albertine’s working-class sweetheart, and some say he is her pimp. As we know, he could be both, if by pimp we just mean that Albertine ever gave him some of the money she made. I haven’t read the novel so don’t make a guess myself.

We should perhaps be glad that no one has proposed that a sculpture representing not only a prostitute but her male companions be removed, since Norway has now legislated that paying for sex is a crime. Recently there was a fuss over whether the remains of Grisélidis Réal should be allowed interrment in Geneva’s Cimetière des Rois. They were, finally, but many people thought it was wrong, that no prostitute or sex worker ought ever to be honoured. Another statue to prostitutes stands in Oudekerksplein in Amsterdam’s red-light district.

Belle, by Els Rijerse , 2007

Sex Work: A Review of Recent Literature

Qualitative Sociology 32, 1, pp 213–220 (March 2009)

Tijuana, México. Photo: Tomas Castelazo

by AnneMarie Cesario and Lynn Chancer

This sex-positive review essay should be very useful to students.

Political economy and bounded authenticity, agency and risk, globalization and migrant
service work, the relationship of men to ‘prostitution’ and its stereotyped image as just “women’s work”: the four books surveyed take research on sex work farther than it has been, sociologically, in years. Surely, more yet needs to be done to fill in other parts of the enormous social scientific canvas with which we began. But . . . at least the study of sex work seems well on its way to establishing its own deserved legitimacy.

Books reviewed:

Sex at the Margins: Migration, Labour Markets and the Rescue Industry. Laura María Agustín. London: Zed Books, 2007.

Temporarily Yours. Elizabeth Bernstein. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2007.

Male Sex Work: A Business Doing Pleasure. Todd G. Morrison and Bruce W. Whitehead (Eds.). Binghamton: Haworth Press, 2007.

Sex Work: A Risky Business. Teela Sanders. Portland: Willan Publishing, 2005.

This is a follow-up to the many interesting comments made on my previous three posts on New Zealand’s Prostitution Reform Act (just scroll down). Obviously the conversation could go in several different directions, but I want to try to clarify a couple of points made in the original post about the possible ‘whitening’ effect of a brothel-oriented policy. I was talking about cultural whiteness, not skin colour: the tastes, presumptions and norms of the (ruling) middle classes. The purpose of studying whiteness is to help us see that most of what is taken for granted as ‘good for society’ simply represents the views of the people who have most power, whose interests lie with the status quo (nearly always anti-poor, anti-immigration) and whose opinions are said to be ‘normal’.

This discussion started because the Prostitution Reform Act prohibits migrants from sex working in NZ; it’s a law regulating a business sector that also contains a piece of migration law. Some of us are speculating that a law that focusses on brothels

‘creates an ideological framework that promotes a very white middle-class kind of sex industry - one that is concealed from public view behind the doors of brothels. ‘ Josie

The fact that one can find a variety of ethnicities in brothels, anywhere in the world, is not surprising and doesn’t contradict the point. Brothel managers very often have a policy of keeping ‘one of each’ on hand to satisfy consumer whims. What I’m trying to

La Sortie du Bourgeois, Jean Béraud, 1889

get at here is that regulated brothels are a conservative, patriarchal business form, a conception of the sex industry most palatable to bourgeois ‘family values’ stressing discretion (for the benefit of men) and non-visibility (of women’s sexuality). So whilst a semi-hysterical ’sexiness’ shimmies away on television, making people feel they are more ‘liberated’ all the time, this prostitution law addresses primarily the most controlled and traditional version of commercial sex. In New Zealand, local councils may limit signs outside and the location of houses, which is good for community relations but belongs to the same impulse to ‘clean up the streets’ that protests against street prostitution do. This isn’t to say this law isn’t better than most. And I have taken the point that street prostitution is progressively accepted and included in it. But note also that the enormous variety of businesses found within the sex industry is not mentioned, including potentially raunchier activities like lap dancing and peep shows. How do those fare?

I’m not going to pronounce on the extent to which New Zealand is diverse or multicultural. Statistics from NZ’s census can be viewed here, and in a simple chart here, but they can be interpreted different ways. The statistics don’t include anyone living in NZ irregularly, of course - tourists who have overstayed their visas, workers who’ve been smuggled and so on. There are maps showing the percentage of people identifying as Maori (13.0%), Asian (8.1%) and Pacific Islander (6.0%) in the 2006 census. ‘73% of New Zealand’s population is of unmixed Europrean descent’ - whatever that means. The maps show that non-European people are densest in the north.

On the other hand, if you simply count the number of nationalities and ethnicities people lay claim to, then you can say that the country is highly diverse. A NZ Ministry for Culture and Heritage website roundly claims multiculturalism. Of course, you need to add in variables about language, age, religion, and you must try to resist relying on your experiences living there or as a visitor. Someone who’s lived in New York might experience NZ as very white; someone from a small town in a Nordic country might find it diverse. The term multiculturalism can also refer to a state policy that encouragies members of different groups to celebrate and maintain their different cultures as a way to promote social cohesion.

Similarly, NZ’s immigration policy can be described as benevolent and open or highly restrictive. As in other richer countries, the openness is towards ‘Skilled Migrants’, a point system is used, there are many, many limitations and difficulties put in the way and the whole thing is skewed towards the most educated white collar workers. I wouldn’t bet on the chances on getting into NZ for someone from South America or Africa whose profession is Kitchen Help or Manual Labourer (Construction), though I expect some of those jobs need filling. Many who read this blog consider sex work to be skilled, but so far no country’s migration policy agrees.

Links to information about the law are back at the first post.

Zinda Laash: Bollywood’s Norms for Dhandewalis is a 15-minute-long film revealing the stereotypes used for portraying prostitutes in India’s film industry. Both incisive and amusing, Zinda Laash was made by Point of View in Mumbai, in association with Sangram/VAMP in Sangli, Mararashtra, India.

Bollywood’s term for women working in the sex industry, dhandewalis, technically means women in business, but it has come to have a derogatory meaning. The norms Zinda Laash identifies for representing prostitutes, sex workers and call girls are classically melodramatic:

They must smoke
They must swear
They must dress ‘differently’
Paan is a must
Clients come in all shapes and sizes
Seedy brothels are the only spaces for them
They are surrounded by shady characters
They enter this world through deceit
They must be abused
They are impure
They are living corpses in hell
They have no place in society
They are different from other women
They cannot be a wife
They cannot be a mother
They can never escape their identity

Watch the film here