This is something different, she said. The johns who come here, they don’t think they’re johns. They think they’re friends of mine. They think I’m this spacey Village chick, which I am, and that they’re my friends, which they are. I mean, they come here to get laid, let’s face it, but they could get laid quicker and easier in a massage parlor, no muss no fuss no bother - dig? But they can come up here and take off their shoes and smoke a joint, and it’s a sort of a raunchy Village pad, I mean you have to climb three flights of stairs and then you roll around in a waterbed. I mean, I’m not a hooker. I’m a girlfriend. I don’t get paid. They give me money because I’ve got rent to pay and, you know, I’m a poor little Village chick who wants to make it as an actress and she’s never going to. Which I’m not, and I don’t care much, but I still take dancing lessons a couple mornings a week and I have an acting class every Thursday night, and I was in a showcase last May for three weekends. We did Ibsen, and do you believe that three of my johns came? (p 145)

I was living in the Village the year this was published, 1993, and my friend Mona was just like this character. Mona didn’t call herself a prostitute, and I didn’t either. Using a casual feminist analysis, we thought she was doing what a lot of wives do, in a careful, choosy way and without ceremony. In a context in which rents are sky-high and lots of people are trying to make it in demanding professions, Mona’s choice was sensible. She got to take her lessons and audition for parts, and, in the rare case that she got one, she was free to accept it.

Mona probably wouldn’t have been interested in a movement to advance sex workers’ rights. But that movement is interested in Mona, because she illustrates how sex-for-money can occur in casual, unproblematic ways that are part of normal life. If you recall the obsessive quality of hustling culture that John Rechy conveyed so well, this Village chick sounds serene - or spacey. But her easiness with her life is also common. In order to bring out more of these situations, I proposed a field called the cultural study of commercial sex. Scholarship without moralising.

A Migrant World of Services

Social Politics, 10, 3, 377-96 (2003)

Laura Maria Agustín

Abstract: There is a strong demand for women’s domestic, caring and sexual labour in Europe which promotes migrations from many parts of the world. This paper examines the history of concepts that marginalise these as unproductive services (and not really ‘work’) and questions why the west accepts the semi-feudal conditions and lack of regulations pertaining to this sector. The moral panic on ‘trafficking’ and the limited feminist debate on ‘prostitution’ contribute to a climate that ignores the social problems of the majority of women migrants.

In a variety of scenarios in different parts of Europe, non-Europeans are arriving with the intention to work; these are largely migrant women and transgender people from the ‘third world’ or from Central and Eastern Europe and countries of the former Soviet Union. The jobs available to these women in the labour market are overwhelmingly limited to three basic types: domestic work (cleaning, cooking and general housekeeping), ‘caring’ for people in their homes (children, the elderly, the sick and disabled) and providing sexual experiences in a wide range of venues known as the sex industry. All these jobs are generally said to be services.

In the majority of press accounts, migrant women are presented as selling sex in the street, while in public forums and academic writing, they are constructed as ‘victims of trafficking.’ The obsession with ‘trafficking’ obliterates not only all the human agency necessary to undertake migrations but the experiences of migrants who do not engage in sex work. Many thousands of women who more or less chose to sell sex as well as all women working in domestic or caring service are ‘disappeared’ when moralistic and often sensationalistic topics are the only ones discussed. One of the many erased subjects concerns the labour market—the demand—for the services of all these women. The context to which migrants arrive is not less important than the context from which they leave, often carelessly described as ‘poverty’ or ‘violence.’ This article addresses the European context for women migrants’ employment in these occupations. Though domestic and caring work are usually treated as two separate jobs, very often workers do both, and these jobs also often require sexual labour, though this is seldom recognised. All this confusion and ambiguity occurs within a frame that so far has escaped definition.

For the rest, get the pdf at the top of this post.

In a battle of statistics and ‘evidence’ last week on the Guardian’s comment website, both sides claimed to have the correct, evidence-based analysis of the extent of trafficking in the UK. To my thinking, this is a fruitless debate. That is, I agree with the 27 academics arguing that figures have been extrapolated and manipulated shamelessly by fundamentalist-feminist politicians. I was one of the first people, many years ago, to say so and take the flak. But the painful conflict is not about numbers It’s about definitions, visions of the world, passions, sex and money. My contribution to this business has been, from the beginning, to complicate conversations that present black versus white versions of something that is very grey indeed. For those who would rush to legislation my vision is not satisfying because it says ‘Wait, stop, slow down. Until you comprehend the myriad elements present amongst people who leave home to go to another country and sell sex, you shouldn’t be passing laws about them. Of any kind.’ This is not useless ‘postmodern’ dithering. It is a position that says that until you understand the minimum about how people experience their own lives, you cannot responsibly take actions to help them.

Leaving Home for Sex is the first piece I published that defined what my work would be for the next few years. At the time it was unusual enough not to use the term prostitutes, but I wasn’t and still am not in a position to make a clear substitute with the term sex workers. Here I was trying to describe how selling sex can be an occupation that works out okay for migrant women without their taking on a definite identity based on it. This is also the piece that suggested that many migrant sex workers can be viewed as cosmopolitan subjects. The reference to ‘challenging place‘ derives from the editorial focus, for a journal issue, on women and place, the local and the global. I couldn’t fit migrant workers into that framework, and this was the result.

Challenging ‘Place’: Leaving Home for Sex

Laura Mª Agustín

Development, 45.1, Spring 2002, 110-117.

As soon as people migrate, there is a tendency to sentimentalise their home. Warm images are evoked of close families, simple household objects, rituals, songs, foods.[1] Many religious and national holidays, across cultures, reify such concepts of ‘home’ and ‘family’, usually through images of a folkoric past. In this context, migration is constructed as a last-ditch or desperate move and migrants as deprived of the place they ‘belong to’.Yet for millions of people all over the world, the birth and childhood place is not a feasible or desirable one in which to undertake more adult or ambitious projects, and moving to another place is a conventional—not traumatic—solution.

How does this decision to move take place? Earthquakes, armed conflict, disease, lack of food impel some people in situations that seem to involve little element of choice or any time to ‘process’ options: these people are sometimes called refugees. Single men’s decisions to travel are generally understood to evolve over time, the product of their ‘normal’ masculine ambition to get ahead through work: they are called migrants. Then there is the case of women who attempt to do the same.

Research in a marginal place: Geographies of exclusion

For a long time I worked in educación popular in various countries of Latin America and the Caribbean and with latino migrants in North America and Europe, in programmes dedicated to literacy, AIDS prevention and health promotion, preparation for migration and concientización (whose exact translation does not exist in English but combines something about consciousness-raising with something about ‘empowerment’). My concern about the vast difference between what first-world social agents (governmental, NGO workers, activists) say about women migrants and what women migrants say about themselves led me to study and testify on these questions. I have deliberately located myself on the border of both groups: the migrants and the social, in Europe, where the only jobs generally available to migrant women are in the domestic, ‘caring’ and sex industries. My work examines both the social and the migrants, so I spend time in brothels, bars, houses, offices, ‘outreach’ vehicles and ‘the street’, in its many versions. Data on what migrant women say come from my own research and others’ in many countries of the European Union; women have also been interviewed before or after migrating in Latin America, Eastern Europe, Asia and Africa. Data on what social agents say come from my own research with those who work on prostitution issues in those countries, including as evaluator of projects for the International Labour Office and the European Commission.

Although researchers and NGO personnel have been working with migrant prostitutes for nearly twenty years in Europe, publication of their findings remains outside mainstream press and journals. Most of the people who have met and talked with many migrant prostitutes are neither academics nor writers. ‘Outreach’ is conceptualised as distinct from ‘research’ and generally funded as HIV/AIDS prevention. This means that the published products of outreach research are generally limited to information on sexual health and practices; the other many kinds of information collected remain unpublished. Some of those who work in these projects have the chance to meet and exchange such information, but most do not. Recently, a new kind of researcher has entered the field, usually young academic women studying sociology or anthropology and working on migrations. These researchers want to do justice to the reality around them, which they recognise as consisting of as many migrant prostitutes as migrant domestic/‘caring’ workers. Most of these researchers do oral histories and some have begun to publish but it will be some time before such findings are recognised. Stigma works in all kinds of ways, among them the silencing of results that do not fit hegemonic discourses.[2] The mainstream complaint says ‘the data is not systematised’ or ‘there is no data.’ In my research, I seek out such ‘marginalised’ results.

Discourses of leaving home

It is striking that in the year 2001 women should so overwhelmingly be seen as pushed, obligated, coerced or forced when they leave home for the same reason as men: to get ahead through work. But so entrenched is the idea of women as forming an essential part of home if not actually being it themselves that they are routinely denied the agency to undertake a migration. So begins a pathetic image of innocent women torn from their homes, coerced into migrating, if not actually shanghaied or sold into slavery. This is the imagery that nowadays follows those who migrate to places where the only paid occupations available to them are in domestic service or sex work.[3] The ‘trafficking’ discourse relies on the assumption that it is better for women to stay at home rather than leave it and get into trouble; ‘trouble’ is seen as something that will irreparably damage women (who are grouped with children), while men are routinely expected to encounter and overcome it. But if one of our goals is to find a vision of globalisation in which poorer people are not constructed solely as victims, we need to recognise that strategies which seem less gratifying to some people may be successfully utilised by others. Therefore, this essay is not about whether domestic service can ever be pleasant or prostitution should be accepted as ‘work’.[4]

The bad beginnings or sad, frightening or even tragic moments of people’s migrations to work need not forever mark them nor define their whole life experience. Relative powerlessness at one stage of migration need not be permanent; poor people also enjoy ‘multiple identities’ that change over life-courses composed of different stages, needs and projects. By insisting on the instrumentality of migrating under less than ideal conditions, the existence of the worst experiences are not negated. The abuses of agents who sell ways to enter the first world extend to migrants who work as domestic servants and in sweatshops, maquiladoras, mines, agriculture, sex or other industries, whether they are women, men or transgender people. But these most tragic stories are fortunately not the reality for most migrants.

Displacement or misplacement? Questions of will and ‘choice’

Research among migrant prostitutes and domestic workers reveals little essential difference in their migration projects and demonstrates that migrations that may have begun as a kind of displacement (a feeling of being pushed out, of having no reasonable choices) are not doomed to be permanently sad stories.[5] Even the poorest and even the partially ‘trafficked’ or ‘deceived’ look for and find spaces to be themselves in, run away, change jobs, learn to utilise friends, clients, employers and petty criminals. In other words, they do the same as other migrants and in all but the worst cases tend to find their way eventually into situations more to their liking, whether that means finding a good family to clean for or a decent brothel owner or the right contacts to work freelance.

Neither are migrations totally economically motivated. Exposed to media images that depict world travel as essential to both education and pleasure, potential migrants learn that first world countries are highly comfortable and sophisticated places in which to live. They are excited at the prospect of meeting people from other countries. All poor people do not decide to migrate; many that do are people interested in and capable of taking the risks involved in uprooting in order to ‘find a place in the world’.

My example here is migrant women and transsexuals in Europe, but the discourses which construct them as ‘trafficked’ exist all over the world and are being addressed by international bodies.[6] At the time of this writing, the majority of migrant prostitutes in Europe come from the west of Africa, Latin America, eastern Europe and countries of the ex-Soviet Union. While domestic workers have begun to unite across ethnic borders to demand basic rights, sex workers have not, making them impossible to fit into classic migration frameworks, in which associations are formed as an essential step to ‘settling’ down. For a variety of legislative and social reasons, not least of which are the repressive policies of police and immigration all over Europe, prostitutes tend to keep moving, from city to city and from country to country.[7] This itinerant lifestyle creates a particular relationship to ‘place’ that impedes doing the things migrants are ‘supposed’ to do, related to establishing themselves and becoming good (subaltern) citizens (the Roma suffer from the same impediment). While nomadism is found romantic in people who live far away (such as the Bedouin) it tends to be seen as a social problem inside the West.

Writers on migrations and diaspora maintain a nearly complete silence about migrant prostitutes,[8] though they can be studied as daring border-crossers who typically and (repeatedly) arrive with little information, luggage or local language. But the only aspects of their lives discussed (by everyone, not only by lobbyists against prostitution) are their victimhood, marginalisation and presumed role in the transmission of HIV/AIDS, injustices which reproduce stigmatisation. Yet it is safe to surmise that if men were the large group using prostitution as a strategy to get into Europe and good wages then it would be seen as a creative move and not routinely characterised as a tragedy.

Finding pleasure in the margins

A crucial element in this gendered reaction is the widespread assumption that a woman’s body is above all a sexual ‘place’, where women’s experiences of sex and their sexual organs is essential to their self-respect. While this may be true for many, it is not universal, and the use of the body for economic gain is not considered so upsetting or important by many prostitutes, who usually report that the first week on the job was difficult but that later they adapted.[9] Some theorists assume that something like the soul or real self is ‘alienated’ when sex occurs outside the context of ‘love’, and that women are fatally damaged by this experience, but these must remain moralising hypotheses impossible to prove. Some women feel this way and some find pleasure in prostitution, which only means there is not a single experience of the body shared by everyone—no surprise, after all. In any case, even prostitutes who don’t like what they do say it’s better than a lot of other options that they also don’t like; learning to adapt to necessities and ignore unpleasant aspects of a job is a normal human strategy.

In the sentimentalising that occurs around ‘uprooted migrants’, the myriad possibilities for being miserable at home are forgotten. Many women, homosexuals and transsexuals are fleeing from small-town prejudices, dead-end jobs, dangerous streets, overbearing fathers and violent boyfriends. ‘Home’ can also be a boring or suffocating place, as evidenced by the enormous variety of entertainment sites located outside of it. In many third-world cultures, only men are allowed to partake of these pleasures, occupy these spaces; in Europe, everyone can. People in prostitution also have private lives, go to films, bars, discotheques, restaurants, concerts, festivals, church parties and parks. Their wish to leave work behind and be ordinary is no different from that of other people; in the context of urban spaces they become flâneurs and consumers like anyone else.

Social constructs of prostitutes’ ‘place’

Various NGO projects in Europe work with migrant prostitutes and would like to foment their self-organisation to defend their basic rights.[10] Such projects inevitably require, however, that subjects identify as prostitutes, which few do; rather, they identify as migrant people from Cali or Benin City or Kherson who are doing sex work temporarily as a means to an end. This means they are less interested in questions of identity than in being allowed to get on with earning money the way they are without being harassed and subjected to violence on the one hand or pitied and subjected to projects to ‘save’ them on the other.[11]

Very often the discourse of solidarity sets up a dichotomy about ‘place’ for migrants which consists of (1) home (which you loved and were forced to leave) and (2) Europe (which you don’t want to be deported from). The complicated relationships migrants have to ‘home’, which may or may not be a place they wish to visit or actually live in again, are excluded from discussions about them. And when migrant prostitutes are constructed as ‘trafficked’ they are assumed to have been wrested away against their will, allowing immediate unsubtle deportation measures to appear benevolent (and to be characterised by some ironic activists as ‘re-trafficking’).[12] Various theorists have pointed out how migrants’ work of caring for children, the elderly and the sick creates ‘chains’ of love and affection which take in the families migrants leave behind, the families they come to work for and new relationships started abroad. This more nuanced vision of the role of ‘place’ in women migrants’ lives is generally not extended to sex workers, however.

Milieux as workplaces

All this theorising impinges little on women focussed on getting ahead, whose relationship to ‘places’ is dramatically mediated by the industry they work in, a series of milieux. A rural woman from a third-world country can arrive in Europe and, with the right contacts, soon be in a position to earn 5000 or more euros a month. This figure does not refer to what are sometimes called ‘luxury’ prostitutes who work with ‘elite’ customers (and who can earn much more) but refers to an amount commonly earned in large or small clubs and brothels as well as flats, whose names and particular characteristics change from country to country.[13]

With this amount, a migrant may be able to pay back debts undertaken to migrate fairly soon, and to earn it she works in multicultural, multilingual clubs, brothels, apartments and bars. Here you find people from Ecuatorial Guinea working alongside people from Brazil and Russia and people from Nigeria alongside people from Perú and Bulgaria. Milieux are ‘workplaces’ for those selling sexual services in them, who spend many hours in the bar, socialising, talking and drinking with each other and the clientele as well as other workers like cooks, waiters, cashiers and bouncers. In the case of flats, some people live in them while others arrive to work shifts. The experience of spending most of their time in such ambiances, if people adapt to them at all, produces cosmopolitan subjects, who, by definition, have a special relationship vis-a-vis ‘place’. The cosmopolite considers the world his oyster, not his home, and there is nothing in the concept which impedes him or her from being poor or a prostitute.

It is easy to find migrant sex workers who have lived in multiple European cities: Turin, Amsterdam, Lyon. They have met people from dozens of countries and can speak a little of several languages; they are proud of having learnt to be flexible and tolerant of people’s differences. Whether they speak lovingly of their home country or not, they have overcome the kind of attachment to it that leads to nationalist fervour and have joined the group that may be the hope of the world, the one that judges people on their actions and thoughts and not on how they look or where they are from. This is the strength of the cosmopolite.

Some doubt that ordinary work relations can exist in milieux. This doubt seems to construct all other work sites as less alienating: office, medical, factory, domestic, mining, sweatshop, farming, academic, homework, etc. But the sex industry is huge, taking in clubs, bars, discotheques and cabarets, erotic telephone lines, sex shops with private cabins, massage parlours and saunas, escort services, some matrimonial agencies, flats, pornographic cinema, erotic restaurants, services of domination and submission and street prostitution. Much of this work is part-time, occasional or a second job, and working conditions for these millions of jobs worldwide vary enormously, so they cannot be generalised in terms of ‘place’. Though frequent change of personnel is common, this is also a characteristic of work in the cinema and performing arts, as well as of ‘temporary’ office and computer workers (where no one doubts that normal relationships occur). Relationships with colleagues may cross ethnic lines or not, according to the individual; the chance of this is increased where a great variety of people is found with no one type predominating. This is the situation in the milieux, now that migrants constitute the majority of prostitutes across Europe—as many as 90 per cent in Italy (Tampep 200).

. . . and milieux as borderlands

Milieux are not only multi-ethnic; they are borderlands: places of mixing, confusion and ambiguity, where the defining ‘lines’ between one thing and another are blurred. Since so many of Europe’s migrant prostitutes are foreigners, languages spoken in the milieux include pidgins, creoles, signing and lingua francas, where Spaniards learn to communicate with Nigerians, Italians with Russians, French with Albanians. Similarly, many clubs would appear to be carnival sites, the world upside down, where the prostitute is like the pícaro, the half-outsider who substitutes trickery for dignified work, living the role of “cosmopolitan and stranger . . . exploiting and making permanent the liminal state of being betwixt and between all fixed points in a status sequence” (Turner 1974, 232).

The milieux are sites of experimentation and show, where masculinity is performed by some and femininity by others. Investigations as far apart as Tokyo and Milan demonstrate that for many the sexual act carried out at the end of a night on the town or puttan tour is not at the centre of the experience, which rather resides in sharing with male friends an experience of talking, drinking, looking, driving, flirting, making remarks, taking drugs and, in general, being ‘men’ (Allison 1994, Leonini 1999). The prostitute in her work uniform does what will lead to making money, in the case of the transsexual a hyperperformance of womanliness. While any sexual service contracted usually occupies no more than fifteen minutes, not only workers but clients spend long hours having no sex at all.

In the patriarchal institution of the sex industry it is men who are publicly ‘permitted’ to experiment with their masculinity and relate to people they would not meet anywhere else. The availability of migrant women, homosexual men and transsexuals means that millions of relationships take place every day between people of different cultures. The essentialisation of these relationships as undifferentiated ‘acts’ and their elimination from cultural consideration because they involve money cannot be justified.[14] For some who theorise sex as culture, sexual practices are seen as constructed, transmitted, changed, even globalised, and migrant sex workers as the bearers of cultural knowledge.[15]

Everyone agrees that the sex industry exists within patriarchal structures. Some critics will continue to lament migrant prostitutes’ loss of home and the near impossibility of their organising formally. But one must also give credit where credit is due, recognise the resourcefulness of most migrant women and allow them the possibility of overcoming feelings of victimhood and experiencing pleasure and satisfaction within difficult situations and in strange places.

Notes

[1] The word ‘home’ in English connotes much of this all by itself, but this is not omnipresent in other languages.

[2] David Sibley has contributed invaluable evidence of this in his chapter on W.E.B. DuBois’ rigorous sociological research on ‘The Philadelphia Negro’, which never was accepted by the academy (1995).

[3] Domestic service involves many of the same isolating characteristics as work in the sex industry, and the two are undertaken simultaneously by numerous women looking to acquire more money in a shorter amount of time.

[4] As one member of Babaylan, a migrant domestic workers’ group, said: “We look at migration as neither a degradation nor improvement . . . in women’s position, but a restructuring of gender relations.This restructuring need not necessarily be expressed through a satisfactory professional life. It may take place through the assertion of autonomy in social life, through relations with family of origin, or through participating in networks and formal associations.The differential between earnings in the country of origin and the country of immigration may in itself create such an autonomy, even if the job in the receiving country is one of a live-in maid or prostitute.” Anny Misa Hefti: 1997 (my emphasis).

[5] Published findings by and personal communications with researchers in Spain, the U.K., Italy, France, Belgium, Germany, Holland and Switzerland.

[6] Important other current sites of discourse on the issues are India, the Mekong Delta, Nigeria and the Dominican Republic, as well as Canada and the U.S.

[7] Police and immigration efforts to ‘clean up’ prostitution sites or pick up ‘undocumented’ workers vary from city to city across Europe, change from day to day and are targeted, according to the moment’s policy, on street, bar or brothel workers. Few workers are completely exempt from fears of police attention.

[8] The most notable exception to this silence is negative and emblematic. Discussing Mira Nair’s film India Cabaret, Arjun Appadurai begins by describing young women from Kerala who “come to seek their fortunes as cabaret dancers and prostitutes in Bombay”, a neutral enough treatment of the situation. Two sentences later, however, he refers to “these tragedies of displacement”, without providing any justification, and likewise criticises the men who frequent the cabarets as returnees from the Middle East, “where their diasporic lives away from women distort their very sense of what the relations between men and women might be”. Appadurai provides no references and no theoretical backup for these typically moralistic opinions about how sex and relationships ‘ought’ to be. (Appadurai 1996, 38-9) It is also interesting that he did not change his vision of this phenomenon since its first publication six years earlier, in Public Culture.

[10] Note that these are solidarity projects with sex workers and not composed of sex workers.

[11] Many will note that being allowed to ‘get on’ in sex work relies on the prior social proposition.

[9] I am not referring here to particular people who actively enjoy their sex jobs and want their rights as workers recognised. Some of these are organised and lobby against the criminalisation of prostitution and for prostitutes’ rights.

[13] The surprise this figure may cause is related to the media’s nearly exclusive coverage of either street prostitution or interior sites of worst exploitation. The ability to earn such an amount depends on being introduced or introducing oneself into this market, having the skills to operate there and learning to manage this kind of money (a frequent problem is large-scale consumption which tends to cancel out high earnings). Working fewer hours or days or taking breaks between contracts reduces income. For more on the ‘skills’ required, see Agustín 2000.

[12] The late realisation that such arguments are convenient to conservative immigration policies—those basically intended to close borders and exclude migrants—has led to various national proposals to allow trafficked people to remain, whether they agree to denounce their exploiters or not.

[14] The latest ‘place’ to be inhabited by migrant prostitutes is cyberspace, like cosmopolitan space borderless. The stigmatisation of prostitutes and the wish of many clients to hide their desires make cyberspace ideal for everyone, and, in a rapid proliferation of forms, sexual services are offered and/or completed in chat rooms, on bulletin boards, in pages with images and recorded sound, in direct advertisements with telephone numbers, and, via webcams, in both one-on-one and more ‘public’ shows. Here women are emerging as consumers, perhaps because of the dearth of ‘places’ where women may go to seek anonymous, public or commercial sex. Consider a study carried out in Europe which showed women to make up 26 per cent of visitors to pornographic websites. (Nielsen Netratings 1999)

[15] “Contextualising sexuality within political economy has underscored how extensively prevailing notions about sexuality, gender, and desire are fueled by a colonialist mentality that presumes a crosscultural rigidity and consistency of sexual categories and the durability of geographic and cultural boundaries imposed by Western scholars.” (Parker, Barbosa, and Aggleton: 2001, p. 9).

References

Agustín, Laura. 2000. “Trabajar en la industria del sexo.” OFRIM Suplementos, No. 6,
June, Madrid. English translation, “Working in the Sex Industry”, at
http://www.swimw.org/agustin.html

Allison, Anne. 1994. Nightwork: Sexuality, Pleasure and Corporate Masculinity in a
Tokyo Hostess Club. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Appadurai, Arjun. 1996. Modernity at Large. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.

Hefti, Anny Misa. “Globalization and Migration”. Presentation at conference Responding to Globalization, 19-21 September 1997, Zurich.

Leonini, Luisa, ed. 1999. Sesso in acquisito: Una ricerca sui clienti della prostituzione. Milan: Edizioni Unicopli.

Nielsen Netratings, published in Ciberpaís, 9, March 2001, p. 13, Barcelona.

Parker, Richard, Barbosa, Regina Maria and Aggleton, Peter. 2000. Framing the Sexual Subject: The Politics of Gender, Sexuality and Power. Berkeley: University of California Press.

Sibley, David. 1995. Geographies of Exclusion. London: Routledge.

Tampep (Transnational AIDS/STD Prevention Among Migrant Prostitutes in
Europe Project). 1999. Health, Migration and SexWork: The Experience of Tampep. Amsterdam: Mr A de Graaf Stichting.

Turner, Victor. 1974. Dramas, Fields and Metaphors. Ithaca: Cornell University Press.

It’s tedious to convert the footnotes to ‘live’ status, but some day I’ll do it. For now you must go down and then back up manually if you want to read them along with the text.

rhizomes,10, spring 2005

Helping Women Who Sell Sex: The Construction of Benevolent Identities

Laura María Agustín

Abstract: Social interventions aimed at helping the group positioned as most needy in Europe today, migrant women who sell sex, can be understood by examining that time, 200 years ago, when ‘the prostitute’ was identified as needing to be saved. Before, there was no class of people who viewed their mission to be ‘helping’ working-class women who sold sex, but, during the ‘rise of the social,’ the figure of the ‘prostitute’ as pathetic victim came to dominate all other images. At the same time, demographic changes meant that many women needed and wanted to earn money and independence, yet no professions thought respectable were open to them. Simultaneous with the creation of the prostitute-victim, middle class women were identified as peculiarly capable of raising them up and showing the way to domesticity. These ‘helpers’ constructed a new identity and occupational sphere for themselves, one considered worthy and even prestigious. Nowadays, to question ‘helping’ projects often causes anger or dismissal. A genealogical approach, which shows how governmentality functioned in the past, is easier to accept, and may facilitate the taking of a reflexive attitude in the present.

This article addresses the governmental impulse to name particular commercial-sex practices as ‘prostitution’ and its practitioners as ‘prostitutes.’ Although it is conventional to refer to ‘the world’s oldest profession,’ the term prostitution has never described a clearly defined activity and was constructed by particular social actors at a specific time for specific reasons. [i] Within feminism, the phenomenon called prostitution is the centre of an intransigent debate about its meanings, one aspect of the conflict revolving around what words should be used to describe women who offer sexual services for sale: prostitute, sex worker, prostituted woman, victim of sexual exploitation. The use of one label or another locates the speaker on one or the other side of the debate, which essentially asks whether a woman who sells sex must by definition be considered a victim of others’ actions or whether she can enjoy a degree of agency herself in her commercial practice. In the prostitution discourse, those who sell are women and those who buy are men; it is a gendered concept, despite the enormous numbers of transgenders and men who sell sex and the transgenders and women who buy it. The anxiety to define and classify concerns the position of women, and this anxious debate should be seen as a governmental exercise carried out by social actors whose own identities are at stake. Academics and other theorists and advocates for one or another vision define themselves as good feminists or caring persons through their writing and advocacy. Being ‘right’ about how to envision women who sell sex is necessary to these identities, which explains the heated, repetitive nature of the debate. At the same time, for most of those who actually carry out the activity that excites so much interest and conflict, the debate feels far away and irrelevant.

Nowadays, much of the discourse targets migrant women who sell sex, particularly in wealthier countries. I have written in other places about the construction by outsiders of these contemporary subjects as prostitutes, sex workers or victims of ‘trafficking’ when their self-definitions are different (2005a), the construction of victimhood in general (2003a, 2005a), the disqualification of other elements of their identity (2002, 2004b, 2006), the obsession with certain of their sexual practices to the exclusion of everything else about their lives (2003b), the difficulty on the part of many feminists to accept the agency of working-class women who sell sex (2004a) and the voluminous quantity of interventions designed to help, save and control them (2005b).

The social sector desiring to help and save women who sell sex is very large indeed. The proliferation of discourses implicated includes the feminisation of poverty, closing borders and immigration law, international organised crime (especially ‘trafficking’ and modern forms of slavery), sexual-health promotion, the control of contagious diseases, debt bondage, non-recognised economic sectors, violence against women, women’s and human rights, social exclusion, sex tourism, globalisation, paedophilia and child labour, as well as policies aimed at controlling the sale of sex. Attendant technologies have also proliferated, including safe houses, rehabilitation programmes, outreach projects, drop-in centres, academic research, harm-reduction theory and a whole domain of ‘psy’ theories and interventions concerning the causes and effects of selling sex on individuals. People positioned as experts on the subject constantly lobby governments, write and speak at conferences on the subject, with the result that women who sell sex are pathologised as victims daily.

All these preoccupations and apparatuses provide employment for large numbers of people, the majority women. These social-sector jobs are considered dignified, sometimes prestigious and may even be tinged with a sacrificial brush—the idea that those employed in ‘helping’ are unselfish, not themselves gaining anything through their work. The fact that their projects are governmental exercises of power is ignored. There is strong resistance to the idea that rescue or social-justice projects might be questionable or criticised in general, and the internecine feminist conflict focussing on whether the activity called prostitution is inherently a form of violence or can be a plausible livelihood strategy distracts from any real reflection on the usefulness of the projects. Yet, despite the abundant efforts carried out on their behalf, there has been little improvement in the lot of women who sell sex since the whole helping project began two hundred years ago. ‘Programmes presuppose that the real is programmable,’ said Nikolas Rose and Peter Miller (1992: 183). In this case, ‘the real’ is too often a woman designated victim who does not want to be saved, so it is little wonder that programming does not work. This article therefore explores the beginnings of the identification of a pathological activity (prostitution) and the labelling of its practitioners (prostitutes), the governmental projects that resulted and the social effects on both groups involved.

The history of philanthropy tends to treat as progressive and unproblematic the entry of capable women into the field, referring to them, for example, as ‘willingly giving of their time and money’ to ‘take up the cause of the poor’ (Vicinus 1985: 212). My object is not to construe all charity as simple self-servingness but rather to discuss a particular case at a specific time in history in which those doing charitable works entered into a governmental relationship with the objects of their charity, and created themselves as important social actors in the process. This period is known as ‘the rise of the social.’ Governmentality theory illuminates how social critics and philanthropists constructed an identity for ‘the poor’ in general, and ‘prostitutes’ in particular, which necessitated intervention, at the same period when the same critics, in need of and desiring employment, designated themselves as peculiarly suited to intervene. I explicitly highlight the non-abstract, on-the-ground practices they undertook in order to ‘do something’ about the identified problem, thus showing how new understandings of the object of charity permitted the exercise of power and the formation of identities in projects of saving, educating, reclaiming and protecting. ‘Helping’ became a profession that relied on identifying subjects and then placing them in closed spaces where they could be worked upon and controlled.

On the subject of commercial sex in general (a more inclusive concept than prostitution), one can find people with reforming, repressive and regulatory theories and projects throughout history. But during the period when our contemporary concept of prostitution began, philanthropy came to be seen as an appropriate sphere of paid employment for middle-class women, who designated themselves as those authorised to care for a group of working-class women they designated prostitutes. Both groups were engaged in the search for livelihoods and a degree of independence during the development of industrial capitalism. In the new ‘prostitution’ discourse, both figures, the victim and the rescuer, belonged to a new vision of society in which good conduct was linked to bourgeois, domestic marriage and family. In this vision, the woman who sold sex outside marriage could have no place.

Although I have studied the European evidence in general and both French and British evidence closely, in this article, I concentrate on Britain. It should be understood, however, that studies from all over the European continent reveal similarities, making it possible to speak of general trends in the treatment of commercial sex from the Middle Ages on (Richards 1992). [ii]

Before the Invention of ‘Prostitution’

I begin with the comment of a scholar of patriarchy, who points to how the term prostitution has been imposed on the past.

To understand the historic development of prostitution we need . . . to examine its relationship to the sexual regulation of all women in archaic states and its relationship to the enslavement of females. . . It is unfortunate that most authorities use the same term to cover a broad range of behavior and activities . . . which occur in archaic states. (Lerner 1986: 124)

According to Gerda Lerner, modern historians have confused distinct cultural activities, cultic sexual service and commercial sex, when writing about ancient worlds, and thus have created a cause-effect relation between the two that cannot be proved. Lerner’s sources for this unjustifiable fusion are encyclopedia and historical works, the earliest William Sanger’s A History of Prostitution, published in 1858. The date is not coincidental, falling squarely in the period which the present article explores.

All over Europe before the Enlightenment, a wide range of evidence indicates that the buying and selling of sex was treated as one of an array of social offences, often considered petty. By the eleventh and twelfth centuries, theologians were arguing, after St. Augustine, that it was a necessary evil (the ’sewer in the palace’). Both monarchs and municipalities began attempting to suppress various kinds of ‘vice’ and to limit commercial sex to designated districts, but all evidence shows that sex was sold at every place and hour and that those selling it were ‘an integral part of urban life in the Middle Ages’ (Richards 1992: 116). The recurring issues were (1) juridical (what offences to punish and what methods to use) and (2) zoning (where to allow women selling sex to operate). Leah Otis, writing of the Languedoc, believes that modern concepts of deviance and marginality cannot apply to the medieval period and describes the sale of sex as a ‘recognized, if not particularly respected, profession’ (1985: 2). Mary Perry, describing sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Seville, considers that the common maxim of the day that women who sold sex were moral cesspools actually had the effect of integrating them into the social order (1985: 143).

There was no word or concept which signified exclusively the sale of sexual services until the social period. ‘Whoring’ referred to sexual relations outside of marriage and connoted immorality or promiscuity without the involvement of money, and the word whore was used to brand any woman who stepped out of current boundaries of respectability. Ruth Karras demonstrates how ‘the connexion of sexuality, greed, and commerce permeates the view of gender relations presented in late medieval English as well as Continental literature’ (Karras 1996: 95). A consistent thread in all accounts refuses to isolate women who sold sexual services into a separate, identifiable group, rather considering them nuisances who assaulted men in the street and offended good taste. Jacques Rossiaud considers that there was a general change toward more social integration of those selling sex from the fifteenth century on in Europe (1988), but the evidence points both ways: toward a greater acceptance and normalisation and also toward a greater moral censure. The latter pressure came from Protestantism as well as in reaction to the severe syphilis epidemic that swept Europe in the early sixteenth century. The way was certainly prepared for further repression (Richards 1992). [iii]

Edward Bristow suggests that ‘for conventional moralists of the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries, sexual misconduct was a serious matter; but there was no reason to single it out as the ultimate in wickedness’ (1977: 20). But as the eighteenth century went on, repressive movements grew in France, related to denunciations of the hedonistic habits of nobility and royalty, and in Britain, associated with the evangelical Protestant revival. ‘Vice’ and the ‘obscene’ were to be rooted out on the stage, in books and in a general reformation of manners. Improper sexual relations, including commercial sex, formed part of this general concern, but there was still a lack of consensus on how to frame the problem itself. Most attempts to control it referred to disorderliness, public scandal, riot or indecency, in which non-sexual offences were included with sexual. In eighteenth-century London, women who sold sex ‘both individually and collectively, were perhaps as much an accepted part of plebeian London as any other identifiable group,’ and seem to have had little difficulty in moving into other social roles (Henderson 1999: 44). [iv]

Prior to the rise of the social, royal, civil and clerical figures pronounced and issued decrees on activities considered to be obscene. The relationship between those doing the decreeing and those being decreed about was hierarchical and juridical, those above deciding what the duties and faults were of those below them in the social order, without any self-reflexion on their own roles (Foucault’s ‘upwards continuity,’ 1979a). The question is not whether the sale of sex had long been simultaneously deplored, combated and tolerated, because it had; the stigma against women who sold sex had been severe and the punishment at times horrible, as it was for many crimes. But what appears in histories prior to the social period consists of authorities’ dictates on how to deal with problems of delinquency and public scandal in their locality, with the clergy providing pious justifications. Beyond that, discourses on the subject were rudimentary and changed little over many hundreds of years. Although religious projects had provided ‘homes’ for reformed women all along, most such attempts failed, and inmates went back to their former occupation (Bristow 1977).

‘The Rise of the Social’ – and the Family

In the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century, when concepts of the divine rights of kings were being swept away or discredited in northern Europe, self-appointed observers and commentators consciously set out to consider major social questions: the existence of poverty, the effects of industrialisation and the growth of cities. Until this time, most people believed that destiny decreed that some people be wealthy, virtuous or lucky and others be poor, depraved or unlucky, but now the belief arose that destitution and depravation might be prevented or repaired through the intervention of educated and virtuous social actors. Philosophers and new social experts felt called to decide the right way for people to live in civilised societies and how to bring this about. This project began to take shape before the French Revolution, forms part of the Enlightenment and continued through the nineteenth century and into the present, when the social becomes a major element of government. This definition of the social does not refer to ’society’ but to techniques and practices constituting ‘a particular form of social cohesion’ (Smart 1986: 159), and can be seen in the way social problems, social reform and social welfare are formulated. The concept derives substantially from the work of Jacques Donzelot, who closely linked the social with conscious efforts at philanthropy predating their governmentalisation, which he calls policing, (from the French police):

Victorian depiction of an idealized wife and mother. The Warder Collection.

The growth of the police in the eighteenth century relied on the power of the family, promising it peace and happiness while extending police authority over the family’s revels and cast-offs. Hence the central apparatus proclaimed itself to be in the service of families. (Donzelot 1979: 24) During the rise of the social, the bourgeoisie began to achieve the status it had long been seeking. For the nobility, lineage (and pride) relied on securing property for the family line (Barber 1955), but the bourgeoisie defined ‘family’ in a more emotive way, as society’s central unit but also as a domestic way of life. The development of the notion of privacy and the cultural construction of childhood as a time of innocence requiring long years of protection and instruction contributed to the cult of domesticity, and families were seen to require supervision, spiritual nourishment and a specific place of their own, ‘the home’ (Ariès 1960). The reproduction of these values was raised to a calling for women, who were considered innately gifted with virtue and affection, and they were to be carried out either directly or through the correct supervision of servants. Women’s work was ‘increasingly represented as the emotional labour motivated (and guaranteed) by maternal instinct’ (Poovey 1988: 10). Theories of hygiene, nutrition and regulation of personal behaviour were turned into a series of norms intended to prevent the family from falling apart, now widely known as the ‘domestic ideology’ (Armstrong 1987).

At this time, the working class came to be considered to need ‘civilising’ by the bourgeoisie, as the bourgeoisie had before been considered to need it by the aristocracy (Elias 1939). And in the same period that explorers encountered ‘natives’ in faraway places and set out to colonise them, so an ‘enlightened’ class came to believe that the working class needed exploring and would benefit through intervention in their affairs. Thus the middle class set out to carry the message of the right way to live to everyone else.

With the identification of married couples and their children as virtuous and normal, large numbers of people were discursively converted into social misfits: people without proper places in a domestic structure. Not only flagrant beggars, homeless children and criminals but even people who were thought to spend too much time in taverns, who gambled, who ate food outside the home, who weren’t interested in marriage and who liked to dawdle in the streets: all were peered at through a lens that sought to know why they engaged in these practices and how they could be prevented. Non-conforming subjects, those outside the family hearth, were seen as threats to normal society and became ‘populations’ that had to be dealt with, steered toward a right way of life, cared for and protected from their wrong impulses (Foucault 1979a). This meant setting up apparatuses of social control, technologies that included investigation of the target groups, methods of surveillance, codes of dress and behaviour, definition of correct pastimes and vocations, as well as techniques for classifying and recording all the information collected. Donzelot called this philanthropy:

. . . not to be understood as a naively apolitical term signifying a private intervention in the sphere of so-called social problems, but [to] be considered as a deliberately depoliticising strategy for establishing public services and facilities at a sensitive point midway between private initiative and the state. (1979: 55)

The vast surge of theorising, proposing and acting on behalf of the well-being of groups identified as problematic was undoubtedly often sincerely motivated by a desire to prevent unhappiness and injustice, because of sympathy with or anger about the lot of the poor. Apart from the time they may have dedicated to practical ’social work’ (Leach 1980; Ferguson 1992; Walkowitz 1994), philanthropists also dedicated themselves to theorising, forming associations to debate social theories and believing that their conclusions were the key to achieving a good society. But the invention of socially problematic groups necessitated (and justified) the creation of a series of jobs for those who would carry out the defined social projects.

The Construction of the Prostitute

This is the period when ‘prostitution’ was identified as a distinct social problem (women selling sex to men, regardless of the existence of men who sold sex) and the identity ‘prostitute’ was created. At the beginning of the period, the most widespread image of the woman who sold sex was ‘vile harlot,’ whose body was a stinking sewer threatening society but who was also carefree, pleasure-seeking and attractive. Another, alternative, image positioned her as a victim of circumstances, and it is this image which came to predominate as the period went on. Lynda Nead theorises the metamorphosis from dangerous to victimised as a mechanism that allowed outsiders to feel pity, rather than fear: ‘Pity deflects the force of that group and redistributes power in terms of a conventional relationship organized around notions of social conscience, compassion and philanthropy’ (1988: 139). [v] So women who sold sex came to be considered in need of rescue and control. Where before a small number of religious projects aimed to help women who renounced their own immorality, now a whole social and laic discourse was dedicated to the identification of victims. A new moral charge was assigned to these projects, and a commitment to them emerged on the part of educated and middle-class women.

The Vagrancy Act of 1822 first named ‘prostitutes’ as offenders, but efforts to control them were frustrated by the impossibility of agreeing on a definition of who they were, exactly. In his mid-century investigation London Labour and the London Poor, Henry Mayhew used the word prostitutes but he described them as ‘park women,’ ‘female operatives,’ ‘maid-servants,’ ‘ladies of intrigue,’ ‘keepers of houses of assignation’ and ‘cohabitant prostitutes’—a very wide range of people indeed. At this point the term does not signify victimhood, since Mayhew classified such women with vagrants, professional beggars, cheats and thieves. No wonder early social projects aimed at locating and counting such women were hard put to identify them.

Literally every woman who yields to her passions and loses her virtue is a prostitute, but many draw a distinction between those who live by promiscuous intercourse, and those who confine themselves to one man. (Mayhew 1851: 215)

Q. You know the man who goes by the name of William Simmons. . ? A. Yes. Q. Have you lived with him for some time? A. Yes, for six or seven years. Q. As his wife? A. Yes. Q. And you are not a prostitute? A. No; only to the one man. Q. Only to Simmons, you mean? A. Yes. Q. You mean that you are not a prostitute, other than as living with one man without marriage? A. Yes, that’s what I mean. (Abolitionist Flysheets 1870)

These testimonies make it clear that a social explorer, a judge and a woman who lived with a man outside marriage used the word ‘prostitute’ in different ways. But the image being constructed by reformers depicted a woman with a particular life trajectory: not only promiscuous or charging money for sex but fallen into degradation, torturing guilt, drunkenness, failing looks and, within a few years, syphilis and suicide. Numerous texts, including from medical authorities, insisted this was the story of large numbers of poor women (Tait 1840; Logan 1843; Greg 1850; Sanger 1859).

When they had to identify such women, however, observers relied on superficial indicators: clothing, manners and speech. The sole fact of standing on a notorious street corner, going bare-headed, wearing ‘garish’ dress, talking in a loud voice or engaging in ‘rowdy’ behaviour were enough to incriminate women of any class or education. ‘Good women’ were besieged by police and social investigators; one charged with ferreting out vice complained that ‘the way women dress today they all look like prostitutes’ (Peiss 1983: 78). In fact, mainstream fashions have often been initiated by women who sell sex, a phenomenon particularly lamented during the social period (Nead 1988: 180).

Yet despite the difficulty in identifying those women thought to need help, perhaps even because of it, helpers were incited to produce more discourse, investigation and surveillance. Some investigators tried to prove through anthropometry that ‘prostitutes’ were biologically degenerate, born with a constitution and disposition to this particular evil (Lombroso and Ferrero 1895). The British government moved toward a form of regulationism in passing the Contagious Diseases Acts of 1864, 1866 and 1869, which mandated the medical examination of women identified as prostitutes in garrison and port towns (for the stated protection of the armed forces). Non-uniformed police officers were charged with selecting the offenders, who were submitted to compulsory medical examinations and isolation in hospitals and penitentiaries if found to be suffering from venereal disease (regimes described in detail by Judith Walkowitz 1980 and Linda Mahood 1990). A social movement arose to abolish the Acts as violation of the rights of women (Bristow 1977; McHugh 1980; Walkowitz 1980).

Women considered prostitutes who were interviewed by medical and social researchers revealed that they did not see themselves as prostitute, victims or ‘fallen women’; instead, they were working-class women who sold sex from time to time or during periods between other kinds of employment (Parent-Duchâtelet 1836; Acton 1856). Although this discovery might have thrown doubt on the identity ‘prostitute,’ it seems rather to have encouraged social reformers in their task of extracting women from pernicious, non-family lifeways and perverse sexual practices and restoring them to virtue.

Foucault has elucidated how sexuality came to be conceived as a concept and homosexuality as a category during this same period. In a way that had not existed before, people were now obliged to assume identities based on their sexual practices. ‘Good’ women were conceptualised as capable of sexual abstinence, while men were thought to have a biological need for frequent sexual relations. These sexual practices were linked to other characteristics, for women moral superiority and natural domesticity, for men a predisposition to moral laxity and a propensity to leave home for bars, streets, gaming houses, brothels and theatres. Women were expected to delay practicing sex until men could provide for a family, but men were not. Women were denied the possibility of sex outside marriage, whereas men were permitted it.

For commercial sex, the focus first went to incorrect practices (’prostitution’) and next to some of the people who participated in these (’prostitutes’). Although the activity requires two figures, one who sells and one who buys, the pathologising discourse was not interested in the purchaser, understood to always be a man, his desire incorrigible and biologically driven. The vendor of sex, on the other hand, conceived of always as a woman, could be removed from the situation. By the late nineteenth century men did occupy a central role for a movement that demanded universal purity (Pankhurst 1913),

The Rights of Women; or, Take Your Choice (July 1869).

but no programmes or projects were set up to save men from themselves, incarcerating them to prevent the realisation of their desires, and no social actors conceived of themselves as called to employ themselves in his rescue. The drive to save was limited to the woman who served man’s desires for a price: any other aspect of her life, any other talent, activity or responsibility, including motherhood, was made secondary to this one of her sexual practices.

A Growing Need for Employment

Despite the reign of the ‘domestic ideology,’ not all middle-class women were comfortably settled inside good houses and homes; on the contrary, for a complex of demographic and social reasons, there were now more educated women, with time to spare and/or the desire or need to earn their living: widows, unmarried daughters, wives without access to their own property and leisured women. At mid-century, women with money to pay an attorney could denounce violent husbands, but only through laws passed in 1870 and 1882 did they have the right to their own earnings once they were married (Humphreys 1997). Many women who wanted to escape from oppressive situations, if they were not able or willing to return to parents or other relatives, could break away only if they could find paying work.

Financial independence being such a difficult option and domesticity such a central value, it is disconcerting to find that in the British census of 1851, 42% of women between the ages of twenty and forty were unmarried, and two million of a total six million women were self-supporting: one-third of the female population (Poovey 1988: 4-5). In the census of 1861 women represented more than a third of the labor force, one-fourth of these married (Holcombe 1977: 10).

Florence Nightingale as The Lady with the Lamp. The Warder Collection.

Perhaps the most famous of these ’spinsters’ was Florence Nightingale, an upper-class woman who became a nurse despite her family’s disapproval on the grounds that it was not suitable to her station. According to the museum dedicated to her honour, her greatest achievement was the raising of nursing to respectability. For some extremist social commentators, such women were ‘redundant’ and ought to have been shipped to the colonies. [vi] In France, Jules Simon published popular works berating women who worked as ‘impious’ and sordid,’ in fact no longer women. They represented disorder when order was defined as family and maternity. More to the point, the supply of women needing or wanting to earn their own living was growing. But how could middle-class women maintain respectability and still work outside the home?

The occupations considered respectable for middle-class women were for a long time only lady’s companion and governess, whose perceived decency derived from their association with a ‘true’ home, in which workers lived by the side of real, respectable ladies. These workers were required to possess a certain cultural level, ideally to be ‘gentlewomen’ themselves. At the same time, the governess shared the taint of forbidden sexualities ascribed to all house servants by a bourgeoisie frightened of contamination (Davidoff 1979; Donzelot 1979), which meant that the so-called respectable occupations were actually considered dubious. [vii] One middle-class lady considered engraving, drawing patterns and needlework to be acceptable tasks; another said her work was running a household, writing letters and seeing callers; while a third defined work as crocheting bonnets for friends (Davidoff and Hall 1987: 183-189). These ideas reflect what the bourgeoisie deemed correct for women, and have encouraged some to believe that few were found working outside the home. At the same time, women could take on many more kinds of jobs in nineteenth-century Britain (Scott and Tilly 1975).

There were dressmakers, needlewomen, milliners, washerwomen, charwomen, milkmaids, nursemaids, circus women, shoebinders, mantuamakers, satin stitch workers, glove makers, strawbonnet makers, stay trimmers, hat binders, shop assistants and chambermaids. Women worked in the jute industry, as machinists in mills and as hawkers, flower sellers, message girls and match girls. They brewed and sold beer; they managed lodging houses and brothels; they tended silkworms. Outside the cities they kept vegetable gardens and animals, carried loads on their backs and picked strawberries and hops. ‘Flither girls’ gathered birds’ eggs and limpets, and women hauled coal in the mines. Later in the century, more women did ‘white blouse’ work (school teaching, sales, office work and nursing) and were waitresses and attendants in toilets. Petty theft and picking pockets were other sources of income. Finally, as always, many who did these jobs also sold sexual favours at some time or another, to tide them over or to supplement income. All these options were conventional for the lower classes, with so many ‘genteel’ women needing work, wouldn’t some have moved into these jobs? Inevitably, but many must have resisted such a move downwards as being the antithesis of the progress and betterment advocated by the social climate.

The Creation of ‘Suitable Jobs for Women’

During the rise of the social, a discourse of social evolutionism placed societies on a ’stream of Time,’ in which the bourgeois way of life was considered ‘advanced’ and the poor’s, like that of primitive tribes, ‘backward’ (Fabian 1983: 18). Women were of course considered inherently inferior to men, but within all possible classifications, bourgeois women, as members of the most advanced class in the most advanced society, were placed ahead of poor women.

A theory of self-government also began to arise, the idea that individuals could set out to tailor and improve their thoughts and behaviour according to virtuous models of conduct, but it was thought that only those with sufficient capacity for rational thinking could carry out such a project. Adam Smith believed that poor men were prevented from developing self-government in the modern liberal state’s division of labour, a regime in which they were ‘conceptualised as an aggregate’ and thus treated differently from those individuals capable of ’specular morality,’ the ability to reflect on one’s own moral character (Poovey 1995: 34). Where this was lacking, other people were called upon to help.

The moral decay of the working class was seen above all in terms of its deficient pattern of family life, the apparently absent values of domesticity, family responsibility, thrift and accumulation. Hence the growth of the paradoxical phenomena of leisured middle-class ladies encouraging the education of working-class women in the virtues of housewifery, with the development of sewing schools, cooking classes and so on . . . (Weeks 1981: 32-3)

Middle-class women now came to be seen as embodying virtue and thus having a natural duty to care for the incapable poor in a new ‘missionary domain’ (Donzelot 1979: 46). Whereas eighteenth-century salon hostesses had moral authority because of their ‘disinterestedness and generosity, an eloquent concern for the public welfare,’ ‘respectability’ now made virtue, and only married women were seen as respectable (Glotz and Maire, quoted in Barber 1955: 14-15). Nancy Armstrong discusses the developing ideology that held that the virtuous domestic woman, at least superficially, knew what was best for everyone (1987), and Poovey shows how domestic, middle-class women were represented as protecting and, increasingly, incarnating virtue . . . their economic support tended to be translated into a language of morality and affection; their most important work was increasingly represented as the emotional labor motivated (and guaranteed) by maternal instinct. (1988: 10) [viii]
There is a paradox in this discourse becoming so strong just when women increasingly were looking for jobs outside the home, a paradox perhaps resolved by these women becoming active not only in preaching the new domesticity but also in carrying it to the level of a vocation, that of attempting to reclaim the poor to domestic life. Discursively, middle-class ladies were constructed as ‘grac[ing] the homes of the underprivileged the way they graced their own homes’ (Mahood 1995: 70). Thus

. . . the reformers discovered many of the elements from which they would forge their own class and sexual identity, still ill-defined and diffuse in 1850; women, particularly, strengthened their role as dictators of domestic and familial standards for all classes . . . (Stansell 1982: 311) [ix]

The phrase ‘woman’s mission to women’ became current, contradicting another discourse holding that pure women should not know about ‘vile’ things that happened to less fortunate ones (Walkowitz 1994). It was argued that women magistrates and women police should be introduced to work with women (Bland 1992: 400) and that workhouses should be supervised by women, who would inject ‘the law of love’ into them (Louise Twining, quoted in Nead 1988: 199).

It has been felt that no efforts on behalf of the fallen were likely to be so successful as those which were made by their own sex. They are able better to enter into their feelings, to sympathise with them, to receive from them their tale of sorrow, and to advise them for their present and eternal welfare. (Charles 1860: 4)

Mary Higgs, in investigations presented in the pamphlet ‘Three Nights in Women’s Lodging Houses,’ posed as a poor woman in order to find out what went on in the places where streetwalkers lived, and proposed that ‘girls such as this should be passed on to some agency that would ‘mother’ them. It is easy to see how a little indecision, and the pressure of hunger, might anchor a girl to sin’ (Higgs 1905: 281). The Reverend Frederick Maurice commented on the ’softening, humanising, health-giving influence’ of lady visitors to hospital wards for the poor, who were seen as able to supervise and reinforce the medical regime, administering medicines, scrutinising the nurses, reporting their behaviour and above all inquiring into the moral habits of poor patients—factors which were now known to play such a crucial role in the spread of disease. (Mort 1987: 43)

Many women reformers referred to class and cultural rather than gender differences per se, however, in arguing about who was in the best position to carry out reform projects. Ellen Ranyard ran the Female Bible Society on the principle that ‘the poor could best be encouraged to help themselves if they were initially helped by another like themselves,’ and the distribution of bibles had to be supplemented by actual physical presence and accompaniment in household tasks by the woman helpers (Poovey 1995: 46-7). Octavia Hill founded a charitable society based on the belief that ‘personal relations between rich and poor would bring the deserving ones out of habits of dependence and thriftlessness.’ She bought tenements and sent out female home visitors to collect rents and supervise domesticity (Walkowitz 1994: 54-55). Linda Mahood describes the treatment of women interned as ‘prostitutes’ in Glasgow’s penitentiaries as

. . . organized around the premise that inmates could only be reformed if order was put into their lives and a strict regime of ‘mild, wholesome, paternal, and Christian discipline’ was enforced. . . what is striking . . . is the overall ‘gentility’ and similarity to the manner in which middle-class women might spend their evenings. The emphasis on gentility reflects how closely penitentiaries associated middle-class manners with reform. (1990: 78 and 84)

The highest posts in social apparatuses were often assigned to (male) father-figures, but the very nature of the project meant that (female) mother-figures had to be there, too. The incarcerating technologies—lock-hospital, penitentiary, prison—were conceived to provide a family structure for women thought to lack one.

In all these ways and for all these reasons and more, work in the social sector, including that related to the reclamation of women labelled prostitutes, began to be considered not only appropriate and dignified work for respectable ladies but particularly suited to them. ‘Social’ work became not only a suitable job for a woman but the vehicle for creating a whole sphere of functions positioned as belonging naturally to women. These were paid occupations not seen as compromising received notions of femininity, something that had not existed before this period.

There was now employment for women in charitable, educational and correctional institutions. New jobs included social investigator, district visitor, rent collector, sanitary inspector, poor-law guardian, fundraiser, public speaker, settlement house worker, missionary, superintendent, matron, hospital and penitentiary staff, probation officer, teacher, tract writer, campaign activist, clerical worker, nurse. These posts multiplied as the causes did: abolition of slavery, child labour laws, poor-law reform, compulsory schooling, sanitation and housing reform, child-saving, repeal of the Contagious Diseases Acts and the rescue of ‘prostitutes.’ Charity work was a way to get a foot in the door of the public world, and many women began as volunteers, defying ideas that their only place was the home. F.K Prochaska, historian of women’s philanthropic work in the nineteenth century, has documented the significant numerical rise in numbers of women on charity subscription lists, in women’s financial contributions to charities, in women’s ‘district visiting’ to the poor, in women’s participation on management committees and as managers and as volunteer helpers in a variety of sites from lying-in hospitals to village bazaars (1980).

Later, there would be a move to professionalise, train and struggle for recognition, but at the beginning, amateurs were essential. In London alone, 279 charities were founded before 1850 and 144 more during the following decade (Humphreys 1997). In the city of Aberdeen, with a population of less than 70,000 in the 1840s, rescue organisations included local branches of the Association for the Promotion of Social Sciences, the British Ladies’ Society for Promoting the Reformation of Female Prisoners and the Association for the Promotion of Social Purity, as well as the Aberdeen Association for Reclaiming Fallen Females and the Aberdeenshire Association of Ladies for the Rescue of Fallen Women (Mahood 1990: 116). The evolution of theories and the maturing of discourses meant the creation of new apparatuses, necessitating increasing numbers of workers.

The movement was diversifying and as the various societies expanded some of their homes became specialised and made pioneering efforts in social work. The Rescue Society ran a home for the fallen, another for invalids and a third for girls in danger. The Female Mission to the Fallen, which alone fielded lady missioners to approach prostitutes in the streets and workhouses, helped attempted suicides and uniquely sponsored two homes for unmarried mothers and their babies. (Bristow 1977: 70)
New theories emerged within each rescue project, one example being the concept of prevention: ‘The work of the reformer is not with the outcast, the Magdalen, but with the causes that make outcasts—better save future generations than twenty fallen women’ (quoted in Leach 1980: 295). Rose and Miller would call these new ideas ‘problematics of government,’ which include the changing discursive fields within which the exercise of power is conceptualised, the moral justifications for particular ways of exercising power by diverse authorities, notions of the appropriate form, objects and limits of politics, and conceptions of the proper distribution of such tasks among secular, spiritual, military and familial sectors. (1992: 175) These governmental technologies are played out in concrete, day-to-day practices.

How ‘Benevolence’ Becomes Governmental Control

The use of penitentiaries and other enclosed spaces for women designated as prostitutes and needing reform belongs to the new kind of discipline and punishment Foucault identified in prisons, asylums and other institutions from the eighteenth century forward, in which the goal was the transformation of the wrongdoer into an ‘obedient subject,’ rather than the punishment of the wrong act itself. To achieve this end, the reformer needs access to the wrongdoer in order to establish a relationship through coercion and constraint (Foucault 1978a). In the movement to transform working-class women who sold sex, middle-class women were designated as the proper agents of change. It is relevant to ask, then, how discourses of social ‘helping’ played out on the ground, in the day-to-day life of those who embodied the discourses in their work. Consider the posted ‘Rules for the conduct of the women’ in York Female Penitentiary at mid-century:

I. The directions and orders of the Matron shall at all times be promptly obeyed.

II. The women shall preserve a decent deportment, and a becoming silence, especially while at work. Reproaches for past irregularities, railing, and all angry expressions, are strictly forbidden; and if repeated after admonition from the Matron, shall be reported to the committee, and punished at their discretion.

III. Lying, swearing, dishonesty, repeated disobedience, and gross misbehaviour, shall be punished by the Committee with expulsion, unless circumstances should induce them to mitigate the punishment.

IV. No woman shall leave her employment without the Matron’s permission.

V. The father, mother, or other near relation, (being known to be such,) may be permitted to see and converse with any of the women, at the discretion and in the presence of the Matron, between the hours of eleven and twelve in the morning, and two and three in the afternoon (Sundays excepted.)—But no such person, whether male or female, shall be admitted into the wards.

VI. No letter shall be conveyed to or from the house, without the inspection of the Matron. (Reproduced in Finnegan 1979: 173)

Many people were required to labour inside institutions with such rules. [x] While much of the work was straightforward maintenance (cleaning floors, preparing food), it must be remembered that those interned had not chosen to be there. The paid jobs of many employees were of a policing nature, to prevent escapes and to control inmates. Locking the door on people who want to get out; submitting people to dress codes; separating people from their friends; saying no; closing doors; shutting out the pleas of those being controlled; observing visits; forcing people to do laundry; reading them ‘improving’ texts; and teaching one kind of domestic economy to people who already know another all became forms of employment.

In Discipline and Punish, Foucault described some reform efforts as ‘a procedure for requalifying individuals as juridical subjects,’ but such was not the aim of the reformers of ‘prostitutes.’ Instead, the project aimed to make them into docile domestic servants or wives—not the autonomous subjects helpers were themselves struggling to become. From being seen as unrespectable and pitiable in the mid-nineteenth century, educated women who worked for a living had become respected and essential to the British labour force by 1914 (Holcombe 1977). The creation and opening up of the social sector to women played a large part in this change.

Conclusion: The Contradictions of ‘Helping’

That middle-class women’s jobs should have been dedicated to condemning and attempting to eradicate so many working-class women’s livelihoods is a central irony (and, from a contemporary perspective, contradiction) of this story. Selling sex was targeted as especially evil, but a whole range of non-domestic jobs were seen as lamentable, and working women exhorted to return to the home. Thus precisely at the moment when bourgeois women formulated their desire for emancipation to participate in a culture of individual work, they joined campaigns and regimes aimed at repressing and limiting opportunities for less privileged women (Summers 1979). Moreover, the only job reformers truly approved for women they reformed was domestic service: a self-serving rationale for the bourgeois servant-employing class.

The paradox is that the identity they constructed, who needed saving from her fate, already enjoyed, as a working-class woman, much of what the middle-class woman desired: a looser concept of marriage, more access to public spaces, the right to enjoy common pleasures and more varied and flexible jobs (Wilson 1991; Agustín 2004a). All research shows that the people constructed as ‘prostitutes’ were nothing more than poorer women taking up the one employment opportunity that offered independence and better money than could be found anywhere else, often as a part-time or stop-gap measure. Several together often lived in lodging-houses indistinguishable from those lived in by other working-class people and run by a landlady (not a ‘madam’). Their neighbours and lovers did not exclude them from normal social life. They may have had severe problems, but they still lived within the community and were not looking to be rescued (Parent-Duchâtelet 1836; Mayhew 1865; Walkowitz 1980). Moreover, selling sex also brought significant advantages, as earning more money meant being able to have rooms of their own, better clothes and access to the centre of comfortable sociality for the working class, the pub (Walkowitz 1977: 76). These advantages were disqualified, however, in a discourse that made bourgeois domesticity as a way of life a goal to be sought after for everyone, even if it meant becoming servant.

The reformer’s refusal to accept the worker’s expressed desire to be left alone and to remain in the sex trade has to be recognised as convenient; after all, without subjects to rescue, she could be out of a job. Of course, our contemporary value on hearing the subject’s own ‘voice’ did not exist at this time. Reformers, who believed they knew best because of their class and gender, considered their efforts to be intrinsically different and better than the policeman’s or the judge’s. But like the work of the policeman and the judge, theirs depended on defining others as mistaken, misled or deviant, and not listening to poorer women’s own versions of their lives assured that helpers would always have the upper hand.

By the late nineteenth century the construction of ‘prostitution’ as a phenomenon and ‘prostitute’ as an identity had isolated these women from their communities and endowed them with a stigmatising label from which there was little escape. Moreover, the period’s prime projects relating to women—the abolition of ‘prostitution,’ the eradication of poverty, the attempt to keep poorer women at home, the change to a regime of chastity rather than promiscuity—did not succeed on their own terms. [xi] Yet histories of philanthropic movements show that the benefits of social work for those construed as helpers, in terms of experience and satisfaction, are rarely disputable. Thus the main effect of this designation of women needing to be saved was the construction of a benevolent figure required to help them. As Mitchell Dean said, ‘the domain of effects in the real cannot be read off the programmes of government themselves’ (2002: 120). [xii]

There was, of course, resistance to reformers’ practices: women who escaped from penitentiaries and who refused to dress ‘respectably’ or pay attention to domestic bourgeois discourse. Nevertheless, the damage done was real, since the stigmatising discourse remained, as did the apparatuses of social interference that had been invented and burgeoned because of them. The use of the term ‘prostitute’ to signify a supposedly separable negative identity, and projects aimed at helping them not only still exist today, they proliferate.

Writing of the nineteenth century, Lynda Nead called the prostitute image a myth that did not describe actually existing people but rather constituted a new group (1988: 94). The labelling thus has a performative aspect, decreeing certain women to be prostitutes in the way doctors decree babies to be boys or girls at birth. This performativity continues in the work of later and contemporary scholars who use these terms even when they themselves are engaged in their deconstruction. It must be understood that every time the terms are used, the stigma is reproduced, and the lives of the actual women involved made more difficult. Substituting ’sex worker’ as a more respectable term may appease some who feel identified with the job, but does not solve the problem of vast numbers of people who use commercial sex as an occasional or periodic livelihood strategy without feeling any sense of profession or identity connected with it, among them many migrant women. As happened two hundred years ago, in the present no other aspect of these women’s lives is considered as important as this one, neither their condition as mother or supporter of family nor their personal desires to get ahead or see the world. And also as in the past, the drive to rescue women from their fate is often met with their desire to be left to get on with what they are trying to do. So the original relationship between two groups of women continues today, and although there is little evidence that the projects accomplish what they set out to, the governmental relationship is rarely questioned. My hope is that an understanding of how it began will make it visible and questionable in the present.

Endnotes

[i] Julia Varela has called prostitution ‘the most modern profession’ (1995).

[ii] See Abrams (1988) on Germany; Corbin (1978), Benabou (1987) and Harsin (1985) on France; Gibson (1986) on Italy; Vázquez García (1998) on Spain; Mahood (1990) on Scotland and Walkowitz (1980) on England.

[iii] It should be noted that, despite their own arguments that ‘prostitution’ and ‘prostitutes’ did not constitute separable categories in the times and places studied, these 20th century scholars use the term, as though it described something we now know better about or as though the categories had become separable since the eras studied. Since they have not so become, these scholars’ impositions of the terms constitute part of the governmental project referred to in this article.

[iv] Tony Henderson bases this evaluation on what working-class people said about themselves and their communities.

[v] The competing images were never perfectly distinct from one another but rather alternated, the woman involved at one moment representing gay pleasure, at the next the power to contaminate or the damaged subject—a tendency that still exists.

[vi] William R. Greg called redundant those women who were not fortunate enough to marry, ‘who in place of completing, sweetening and embellishing the existence of others are compelled to lead an independent and incomplete existence of their own’ (Greg 1876: 276). Common themes of paintings of the time showed ‘the reduced gentleman’s daughter,’ ‘the poor teacher,’ the ‘fortune hunter,’ ‘the seamstress,’ ‘the fallen woman’ (Roberts 1972). The surplus of middle-class women is usually ascribed to the emigration of men, the differences in mortality rates of men and women and the tendency of middle-class men to marry later than women.

[vii] Some thought that any paid occupation for women was tainted, certainly nursing was (Holcombe 1973: 69).

[viii] At mid-century, this message was heard in Australia: ‘If Her Majesty’s Government be really desirous of seeing a well-conducted community spring up in these Colonies, the social wants of the people must be considered. If the paternal Government wish to entitle itself to that honoured appellation, it must look to the materials it may send as a nucleus for the formation of a good and great people. For all the clergy you can despatch, all the schoolmasters you can appoint, all the churches you can build, and all the books you can export, will never do much good without what a gentleman in that Colony very appropriately called ‘God’s police’—wives and little children—good and virtuous women.’ (Chisholm 1847, quoted in Summers 1975: 300)

[ix] Anthony Platt, in a study of women who devoted themselves to the saving of children, asserts that ‘philanthropic labor filled a vacuum’ in the lives of bourgeois women (1969: 98).

[x] In 1860 there were about 65 such homes in Britain, accommodating about 1300 women (Bristow 1977: 70).

[xi] One historian has characterised the failure of these projects as ‘Nothing had been done for the women who were exploited by prostitution’ (Mort 1987: 113).

[xii] Of course, one can argue that individuals were helped: ‘On its own terms . . . [rescue work] was far from failing. As the Church Penitentiary Association pointed out in 1862, ‘the Mission of the Association is to rescue individual souls; and if, out of the number who annually leave the Penitentiaries, between two hundred and three hundred are permanently rescued, who can dare to say that little is done?’ (Bristow 1977: 70).

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Remettre en question la notion de ‘place’: Quitter son pays pour le sexe

ConStellation, 8, 1, 51-65.

Laura Mª Agustín

D’abord publié dans Development, 45.1, printemps 2002, dans le cadre du projet dirigé par la Société de Développement International (Rome) sur ‘La Femme et les conséquences politiques de sa place’.

Dès que les gens migrent, ils ont tendance à songer à l’endroit où ils sont nés sentimentalement. Ils évoquent de chaleureuses images de leurs proches, des objets de la vie de tous les jours, de leurs rituels, des chansons, de la nourriture. Dans toutes les cultures, beaucoup de fêtes religieuses et nationales réifient certains concepts comme le ‘chez soi’ et la ‘famille’, habituellement par des images d’un passé folklorique. Dans ce contexte, la migration est perçue comme étant un ultime recours, un déplacement désespéré et les déplacés comme étant privés de l’endroit auquel ils ‘appartiennent’. Pourtant pour des millions d’individus tout autour de la Terre, il n’est ni réaliste, ni désirable d’entreprendre des projets plus adultes ou plus ambitieux au lieu de naissance; et changer de lieu de vie est une solution conventionnelle — pas traumatisante.

Comment cette décision de se déplacer se produit-elle? Les tremblements de terre, les conflits armés, les maladies ou le manque de nourriture contraignent certaines personnes, ne leur laissant pas beaucoup de choix ni de temps pour considérer leurs options: ces gens sont parfois appelés des réfugiés. Quand un homme célibataire décide de voyager, son geste est généralement vu comme une évolution entendue, le produit de son ambition ‘normale’ et masculine d’améliorer son lot par son travail: on l’appelle un migrant. Puis, il y a le cas de la femme qui tente d’en faire autant.

La recherche dans la marge: la géographie de l’exclusion

Pendant très longtemps j’ai travaillé en educación popular dans différents pays d’Amérique Latine et des Caraïbes, ainsi qu’avec des migrants latinos en Amérique du Nord et en Europe; ces programmes d’éducation étaient voués à l’alphabétisation, à la prévention du SIDA et à l’avancement de la santé, et à la préparation pour la migration et la conscientisation. Sur le sujet des femmes migrantes, il y a un immense écart entre ce qu’affirment les femmes elles-mêmes et ce qu’affirment les agents sociaux des pays industrialisés (les gouvernements, les travailleurs pour les ONG, les activistes); c’est ce constat qui m’a amenée à étudier et à témoigner sur ces questions. Je me suis délibérément positionnée sur la frontière qui sépare les deux groupes: les migrantes et le social, en Europe, là où généralement les seuls emplois ouverts aux femmes migrantes sont dans les industries domestique, ‘de soins’ et du sexe. Mon travail se penche à la fois sur le social et les migrantes, alors je passe beaucoup de temps dans les bordels, les bars, les maisons, les bureaux, les véhicules ‘d’action directe’ et ‘la rue’, dans ces multiples aspects. Les données citant les femmes migrantes proviennent de recherches; la mienne et celle de d’autres intervenants dans plusieurs pays de l’Union Européenne. Certaines femmes ont aussi été interviewées avant ou après avoir migré en Amérique Latine, en Europe de l’Est, en Asie et en Afrique. Les données citant les intervenants sociaux proviennent de ma propre recherche avec ceux qui travaillent sur les questions entourant la prostitution dans ces pays, incluant l’évaluation de projets pour le Bureau International du Travail et la Commission Européenne.

Bien que les chercheurs et le personnel des ONG travaillent avec les prostituées migrantes depuis bientôt vingt ans en Europe, la publication de leurs conclusions demeure en retrait de la presse et des revues traditionnelles. La plupart de ceux et celles qui ont rencontré et discuté avec des prostituées migrantes ne sont ni des théoriciens ni des écrivains. On conçoit différemment ce que l’on appelle ‘l’action directe’ et ‘la recherche’ et on la finance généralement sous la rubrique prévention VIH/SIDA. Ce qui signifie que les produits publicisés de la recherche résultant de l’action directe sont généralement limités à de l’information sur la santé et les pratiques sexuelles; bien que considérable, le reste de l’information glanée n’est pas publié. Il y a des gens qui travaillent au sein de ces projets qui ont l’occasion de se rencontrer et de partager l’information, mais la plupart n’ont pas cette chance. Récemment, une nouvelle race de chercheur a fait irruption dans le décor : de jeunes théoriciennes étudiantes en sociologie ou en anthropologie et qui étudient les migrations. Ces chercheuses veulent rendre justice à la réalité qui les entoure, dans laquelle elles retrouvent autant de prostituées migrantes que de travailleuses domestiques/‘soignantes’ migrantes. La plupart de ces chercheuses recueillent des historiques oraux et certaines ont commencé à publier, mais il faudra un certain temps avant que de telles conclusions soient reconnues. Le stigmate fonctionne de toutes sortes de manières, entre autre en taisant les résultats qui ne concordent pas avec le discours hégémonique. Les représentants du courant dominant se plaignent du fait que ‘les données ne sont pas systématisées’ ou ‘qu’il n’y a pas de données.’ Dans mon travail, je recherche ces résultats ‘marginalisés’.

Quitter la maison – le discours

Il est frappant qu’encore en 2001, la femme qui quitte la maison pour la même raison que l’homme – pour améliorer son sort en travaillant – soit si largement perçue comme y étant poussée, obligée, contrainte ou forcée. Mais le concept de la femme comme partie essentielle de la maison (quand elle n’est pas carrément la maison) est si bien ancré qu’on lui refuse de façon régulière les moyens d’entreprendre une migration. Ainsi commence l’image pathétique de la femme innocente arrachée à sa demeure, forcée de migrer, quand elle n’est pas carrément enlevée ou vendue comme esclave. Cette image suit aujourd’hui celles qui migrent vers des endroits où les seules occupations rémunérées qui leur sont accessibles sont dans le service domestique ou le travail du sexe. Le discours du ‘trafic’ repose sur la présomption qu’il vaut mieux pour la femme de rester chez elle que de quitter sa demeure et de s’attirer des ennuis; les ‘ennuis’ abîment la femme de façon irréparable (elle est ainsi groupée avec les enfants), alors qu’il va de soi que l’homme rencontrera des ennuis et qu’il en viendra à bout. Mais si l’un de nos buts est de trouver une vision de la mondialisation dans laquelle les plus pauvres ne jouent pas uniquement le rôle de victimes, nous devons reconnaître que des stratégies qui semblent moins gratifiantes pour certaines personnes peuvent être utilisées avec succès par d’autres. Ainsi, cet essai ne pose pas les questions à savoir si le service domestique peut être agréable ou si la prostitution devrait être vue comme un ‘travail’.

Les mauvais débuts ou les moments tristes, effrayants ou mêmes tragiques que traversent les gens qui migrent pour le travail ne les marqueront pas nécessairement pour toujours, et peuvent ne pas définir toute leur expérience de vie. L’impuissance relative lors d’une étape de la migration ne sera pas nécessairement permanente; les gens pauvres profitent aussi ‘d’identités multiples’, les échangeant au cours de leur cheminement de vie, composé de différents besoins, étapes et projets. En insistant sur la qualité intermédiaire de la migration lors de conditions moins qu’idéales, l’existence des pires expériences n’est pas niée. Les abus des agents qui vendent des entrées dans les pays industrialisés s’étendent aux migrants qui travaillent comme serviteurs domestiques et dans les ateliers clandestins, les maquiladoras, les mines, dans les industries agricoles, sexuelles ou autres, qu’il s’agisse de femmes, d’hommes ou de transgenres. Mais ces histoires tragiques ne sont heureusement pas la réalité de la plupart des migrants.

Déplacement ou égarement? Questions de volonté et de ‘choix’

La recherche chez les prostituées migrantes et les travailleuses domestiques révèle peu de différences essentielles dans leurs projets migratoires et démontre que les migrations qui ont pu commencer comme une sorte de mal de place (un sentiment de rejet, de n’avoir pas de choix raisonnable) ne sont pas condamnées à être des histoires tristes en permanence. Même les plus pauvres et celles qui ont été partiellement ‘trafiquées’ ou ‘bernées’ recherchent et trouvent des endroits dans lesquels elles peuvent être elles-mêmes, elles s’enfuient, changent d’emploi, apprennent à tirer parti d’amis, de clients, d’employeurs et de petits criminels. En d’autres mots, elles font comme d’autres migrants et dans tous les cas, sauf les pires, elles tendent éventuellement à trouver un chemin les menant vers une situation qui leur convient mieux, qu’il s’agisse de trouver une bonne famille chez qui faire le ménage ou un bordel dont le propriétaire est correct ou de bons contacts pour travailler à la pige.

Les migrations ne sont pas non plus totalement motivées par des soucis économiques. Exposés aux images médiatiques dépeignant les voyages à l’étranger comme étant essentiels pour l’éducation et les loisirs, les migrants potentiels apprennent que les pays industrialisés sont des lieux de vie très confortables et sophistiqués. Ils sont excités à l’idée de rencontrer des gens venant de d’autres pays. Ce ne sont pas tous les pauvres qui décident de migrer; de ceux qui le font, les plus nombreux sont des gens intéressés et capables de prendre les risques inhérents au déracinement, dans le but de ‘se faire une place au soleil’.

Le cas qui m’occupe ici est celui des femmes et des transsexuels ayant migré vers l’Europe, mais les discours qui les représentent comme étant victimes d’un ‘trafic’ existent partout autour du monde et sont étudiés par plusieurs organismes internationaux. Au moment de la rédaction de ce texte, la majorité des prostituées migrantes en Europe proviennent de l’Afrique de l’ouest, de l’Amérique Latine, de l’Europe de l’Est et des pays de l’ex-Union Soviétique. Les travailleurs domestiques ont commencé à s’unir en dépit des frontières ethniques pour exiger le respect de leurs droits fondamentaux. Ce n’est pas le cas des travailleuses du sexe, ce qui en fait une population impossible à insérer dans les structures migratoires classiques, dans lesquelles des associations sont habituellement formées, constituant une étape essentielle à ‘l’installation’ des migrants. Pour toutes sortes de raisons législatives et sociales, la moindre n’étant pas les politiques répressives de la police et des agents de l’immigration partout en Europe, les prostituées ont tendance à se déplacer constamment, de ville en ville et de pays en pays. Ce mode de vie itinérant crée une relation particulière entre l’individu et son ‘chez soi’ qui l’empêche de faire ce que le migrant est ‘censé’ faire afin de s’établir et de devenir un bon citoyen (de seconde classe); les Roma souffrent du même phénomène. Alors que le nomadisme est considéré romantique quand il est lointain (comme chez les Bédouins), on tend à le voir comme un problème social en occident.

Les écrivains qui se sont penchés sur les migrations et les diasporas gardent un silence presque total sur les prostituées migrantes. Pourtant, quels excellents sujets d’étude : elles traversent à répétition et avec intrépidité les frontières, et d’ordinaire elles arrivent avec peu d’information, peu de bagages et peu de connaissance de la langue locale. Mais les seuls aspects de leur vie qui soient examinés (par tous, pas seulement par les lobbyistes anti-prostitution) sont leur statut de victimes marginalisées et leur rôle présumé dans la propagation du VIH/SIDA; ce sont là des injustices stigmatisantes. Cependant, l’on peut présumer que si le groupe utilisant la prostitution afin de passer en Europe et de faire un bon salaire était composé majoritairement d’hommes, le mouvement serait vu comme un geste créatif et non pas constamment qualifié de tragédie.

Trouver son plaisir dans la marge

Un élément crucial de cette réaction sexospécifique est la présomption très répandue que le corps d’une femme est tout d’abord un ‘endroit’ sexuel. Les expériences sexuelles de la femme ainsi que ses organes sexuels seraient essentiellement reliés à son estime de soi. Bien que ceci soit vrai pour beaucoup de femmes, ce n’est pas universel, et pour beaucoup de prostituées, le fait de se servir de son corps pour faire un profit n’est pas si bouleversant ou important; d’ailleurs elles rapportent habituellement que leur première semaine au travail s’est révélée difficile, mais qu’elles se sont adaptées par après. Certains théoriciens affirment que quelque chose de l’ordre de l’âme ou du soi réel est ‘aliéné’ quand une relation sexuelle se produit en dehors du contexte de ‘l’amour’, et que cette expérience fait subir un tort irréparable à la femme, mais ces hypothèses demeurent moralisantes et impossibles à prouver. Certaines femmes se sentent blessées par la pratique de la prostitution alors que d’autres y trouvent du plaisir, ce qui signifie qu’il n’existe pas une seule expérience corporelle partagée par toutes—ce qui n’est pas une surprise, après tout. De toutes façons, même les prostituées qui n’aiment pas leur métier disent que c’est mieux que beaucoup d’autres options qui ne leur plaisent pas plus; apprendre à s’adapter aux nécessités et à ignorer les aspects désagréables d’un métier est une stratégie humaine normale.

Lorsque l’on sentimentalise les ‘migrants déracinés’, l’on oublie la kyrielle de façons qu’ils pourraient être misérables dans leur pays natal. Beaucoup de femmes, d’homosexuels et de transsexuels quittent les préjugés des petites villes, des emplois sans avenir, des rues dangereuses, des pères autoritaires et des conjoints violents. La ‘maison’ peut aussi être un endroit ennuyeux ou suffocant, comme le démontre l’énorme variété de lieux de divertissement que l’on trouve à l’extérieur des maisons. Dans beaucoup de cultures du tiers monde, seulement les hommes ont le droit de jouir de ces plaisirs, d’occuper ces lieux; en Europe, tout le monde y a droit. Les gens qui font de la prostitution ont aussi une vie privée, vont voir des films, fréquentent des bars, des discothèques, des restaurants, assistent à des concerts, des festivals, des fêtes d’église et vont dans les parcs. Leur désir de laisser derrière eux le travail et d’être ordinaire est pareil à celui de tous; dans le contexte des espaces urbains, ils deviennent des flâneurs et des consommateurs, comme n’importe qui.

Concepts sociaux de la ‘place’ des prostituées

Plusieurs projets d’ONG en Europe oeuvrent avec des prostituées migrantes et cherchent à encourager leur auto-organisation pour la défense de leurs droits fondamentaux. Cependant, de tels projets demandent inévitablement que le sujet s’identifie comme prostituée, ce que font peu d’entre elles; la femme s’identifie plutôt comme migrante de Cali ou de Benin City ou de Kherson travaillant temporairement dans l’industrie du sexe, pour arriver à ses fins. Ceci signifie que les questions d’identité l’intéressent moins que d’avoir le droit de continuer à gagner de l’argent comme elle le fait, sans se faire harceler et violenter d’un côté, et sans subir la pitié et les projets pour la ‘sauver’ de l’autre .

Très souvent, le discours de la solidarité établit une dichotomie sur la ‘place’ que doivent occuper les migrants : de un, leur pays natal (qu’ils aimaient et qu’ils ont été obligés de quitter) et de deux, l’Europe (d’où ils ne veulent pas être déportés). Les relations compliquées qu’entretiennent les migrants avec leur pays natal, qui n’est pas toujours un endroit qu’ils désirent visiter ou dans lequel ils aimeraient retourner vivre, sont exclues des discussions les concernant. Et quand les prostituées migrantes sont représentées comme étant des victimes d’un ‘trafic’, on présume qu’elles ont été arrachées de chez elles contre leur gré, ce qui donne aux immédiates mesures de déportation peu subtiles des allures de gestes bienveillants (phénomène que certains activistes ironiques ont nommé du ‘re-trafic’). Divers théoriciens ont souligné que le travail des migrantes qui s’occupent d’enfants, de gens âgés et de personnes malades crée des ‘chaînes’ d’amour et d’affection qui comprennent les familles qu’elles ont quittées, les familles pour lesquelles elles viennent travailler et les nouveaux liens tissés à l’étranger. Cette vision plus nuancée du rôle de la ‘place’ dans la vie des femmes migrantes n’est cependant pas habituellement appliquée aux travailleuses du sexe.

Les milieux comme lieux de travail

Toute cette théorie concerne peu la femme concentrée sur son avancement, pour qui sa relation aux ‘endroits’ est dramatiquement affectée par l’industrie au sein de laquelle elle oeuvre, une série de milieux. Une femme provenant d’une région rurale du tiers monde peut arriver en Europe et, avec les bons contacts, bientôt gagner 5000 Euros ou plus par mois. Ce chiffre ne vise pas celles que l’on appelle parfois les prostituées ‘de luxe’ qui travaillent avec des clients ‘d’élite’ (qui peuvent gagner beaucoup plus), mais correspond à la somme moyenne gagnée dans de grands ou de petits clubs et bordels tout comme dans les appartements, dont les noms et les caractéristiques particulières changent d’un pays à l’autre.

Avec cette somme, une migrante peut assez rapidement rembourser les dettes encourues lors de sa migration. Pour la gagner, elle travaille dans des clubs, des bordels, des appartements et des bars multiculturels et multilingues. Ici on trouvera des gens de la Guinée Équatoriale qui travaillent avec des Brésiliens et des Russes, des Nigérians avec des Péruviens et des Bulgares. Les milieux sont des ‘lieux de travail’ pour celles qui y vendent des services sexuels; elles passent de nombreuses heures dans le bar, elles socialisent, elles parlent et boivent entre elles et avec la clientèle et d’autres travailleurs aussi, comme les chefs, les garçons de table, les caissières et les videurs. Pour ce qui est des appartements, certaines y vivent alors que d’autres ne viennent que pour faire leur quart de travail. Le fait de passer le plus clair de leur temps dans de telles atmosphères, pour peu qu’elles s’y adaptent le moindrement, produit des sujets cosmopolites, qui, par définition, entretiennent une relation spéciale avec la ‘place’. Les cosmopolites considèrent que le monde leur appartient, mais qu’ils n’y sont pas chez eux, et il n’y a rien dans le concept qui les empêche d’être pauvres ou d’être prostitués.

Il est facile de trouver des travailleuses du sexe migrantes qui ont vécu dans plusieurs villes européennes: Turin, Amsterdam, Lyon. Elles ont rencontré des gens provenant de dizaines de pays et parlent un peu plusieurs langues; elles sont fières d’avoir appris à être flexibles et à tolérer la différence. Qu’elles parlent avec amour de leur pays natal ou non, elles ont dépassé la sorte d’attachement patriotique qui mène à la ferveur nationaliste et font partie du groupe qui pourrait bien être l’espoir du monde, celui qui juge les gens par leurs actes et leurs idées et non pas leur apparence ni leur origine. Voilà la force du cosmopolite.

Certaines personnes doutent qu’il puisse exister des relations de travail normales dans ces milieux. Ce doute semble faire de tous les autres lieux de travail des endroits moins aliénants: bureaux, cliniques et hôpitaux, usines, maisons, mines, ateliers clandestins, fermes, écoles et universités, etc… Mais l’industrie du sexe est énorme, comprenant clubs, bars, discothèques et cabarets, lignes téléphoniques érotiques, sex-shops avec cabines privées, salons de massage et saunas, services d’escorte, certaines agences matrimoniales, appartements, cinéma pornographique, restaurants érotiques, services de domination et de soumission et prostitution de rue. Beaucoup de ces emplois sont à temps partiel, occasionnels ou des emplois parallèles, et les conditions de travail pour ces millions d’emplois autour du monde varient énormément. On ne peut donc pas faire de généralisation en termes de ‘place’. Il y a souvent un grand roulement dans le personnel, mais ce phénomène est aussi caractéristique des emplois dans le milieu du cinéma et des arts de la scène, et aussi du travail de bureau ‘temporaire’ et dans le domaine de l’informatique (où personne ne met en doute que des relations normales puissent avoir lieu). Selon l’individu, les relations avec les collègues peuvent traverser les frontières ethniques ou non; les possibilités sont plus grandes là où l’on trouve une grande variété de personnes sans aucun type prédominant. C’est le cas dans les milieux, maintenant que les migrantes constituent la majorité des prostituées à travers l’Europe—jusqu’à 90 pourcent en Italie (Tampep 200).

. . . et les milieux comme frontières

Les milieux ne sont pas que multiethniques; ils sont comme des sortes de pays frontaliers: des endroits de mélange, de confusion et d’ambiguïté, où les ‘lignes’ qui séparent les choses sont floues. Comme tant de prostituées migrantes d’Europe sont étrangères, les langues parlées dans les milieux incluent les pidgins, les créoles, le langage des signes et les lingua francas, où les Espagnoles apprennent à communiquer avec les Nigérians, les Italiennes avec les Russes, les Françaises avec les Albanais. De la même façon, beaucoup de clubs ressemblent à des carnavals, où le monde est à l’envers, où la prostituée est comme le pícaro, la semi-étrangère qui dupe son prochain au lieu de travailler honnêtement, remplissant le rôle de “l’étrangère cosmopolite … qui exploite l’état liminal d’être ni tout à fait l’un ou l’autre des points fixes dans une séquence de statuts et en fait une chose permanente” (Turner 1974, 232).

Les milieux sont des sites d’expérimentation et de spectacle, où les uns jouent la masculinité et les autres la féminité. Des enquêtes aussi éloignées les unes des autres que Tokyo et Milan démontrent que pour beaucoup de gens, l’acte sexuel accompli à la fin d’une soirée en ville ou d’un puttan tour n’est pas le cœur de l’expérience, qui réside plutôt dans le partage avec des amis d’une soirée où l’on discute, l’on boit, l’on regarde, l’on conduit, l’on flirte, l’on fait des remarques, l’on consomme de la drogue et, de façon générale, l’on se comporte en ‘hommes’ (Allison 1994, Leonini 1999). La prostituée dans son uniforme de travail fait ce qui rapporte de l’argent : dans le cas de la transsexuelle, une hyperperformance de féminité. N’importe quel service sexuel contracté n’occupe habituellement pas plus de quinze minutes; pourtant, les travailleuses et les clients passent de longues heures à se tourner autour, en marge de l’acte sexuel.

Dans l’institution patriarcale qu’est l’industrie du sexe, ce sont les hommes qui ont la ‘permission’ publique d’expérimenter avec leur masculinité et d’entrer en relation avec des gens qu’ils ne rencontreraient pas ailleurs. La disponibilité des femmes migrantes, des hommes homosexuels et des transsexuels signifie que des millions de relations se produisent chaque jour entre des personnes de cultures différentes. La réduction de ces relations à des ‘actes’ indistincts et leur élimination de la considération culturelle à cause du fait qu’elles impliquent de l’argent ne peut être justifiée. Pour ceux qui théorisent que le sexe c’est la culture, les pratiques sexuelles sont construites, transmises, changées, et même mondialisées, et les travailleuses du sexe migrantes sont les porteuses du savoir culturel.

Tous s’accordent pour dire que l’industrie du sexe existe dans le cadre d’une structure patriarcale. Les critiques continueront de déplorer la perte de leur ‘chez soi’ des prostituées migrantes et la quasi-impossibilité qu’elles s’organisent formellement. Mais rendons aussi à César ce qui est à César : il faut reconnaître la débrouillardise de la plupart des femmes migrantes et leur donner la possibilité de vaincre leur victimisation et de ressentir plaisir et satisfaction dans les situations difficiles et les endroits qui leur sont étrangers.

Références

Agustín, Laura. 2000. “Trabajar en la industria del sexo.” OFRIM Suplementos, 6,
Madrid. Traduction anglaise, “Working in the Sex Industry”, à
http://www.swimw.org/agustin.html

Allison, Anne. 1994. Nightwork: Sexuality, Pleasure and Corporate Masculinity in a
Tokyo Hostess Club. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Appadurai, Arjun. 1996. Modernity at Large. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.

Hefti, Anny Misa. “Globalization and Migration”. Présentation à la conférence Responding to Globalization, 19-21 Septembre 1997, Zurich.

Leonini, Luisa, éd. 1999. Sesso in acquisito: Una ricerca sui clienti della prostituzione. Milan: Edizioni Unicopli.

Nielsen Netratings, publié dans Ciberpaís, 9 Mars 2001, p. 13, Barcelone.

Parker, Richard, Barbosa, Regina Maria et Aggleton, Peter. 2000. Framing the Sexual Subject: The Politics of Gender, Sexuality and Power. Berkeley: University of California Press.

Sibley, David. 1995. Geographies of Exclusion. Londres: Routledge.

Tampep (Transnational AIDS/STD Prevention Among Migrant Prostituées in Europe Project). 1999. ‘Health, Migration and SexWork: The Experience of Tampep.’ Amsterdam: M. A de Graaf Stichting.

Turner, Victor. 1974. Dramas, Fields and Metaphors. Ithaca: Cornell University Press.

Endnotes

En anglais, le mot ‘home’ à lui seul sous-entend toutes ces choses, mais ce n’est pas le cas dans toutes les langues.

David Sibley a contribué des preuves irremplaçables de ceci dans son chapitre sur la recherche sociologique rigoureuse de W.E.B. DuBois sur ‘The Philadelphia Negro’, qui n’a jamais été acceptée par l’Académie (1995).

On retrouve dans le service domestique plusieurs des mêmes caractéristiques qui mènent à l’isolement que dans le travail du sexe, et les deux sont entrepris simultanément par de nombreuses femmes qui cherchent à faire plus d’argent plus rapidement.

Comme le disait une membre de Babaylan, un groupe de travailleuses domestiques migrantes: “Nous ne voyons la migration ni comme une dégradation ni une amélioration … de la position de la femme, mais comme une restructuration des relations entre les sexes. Il n’est pas absolument essentiel que cette restructuration soit exprimée par une vie professionnelle satisfaisante. Elle peut se produire par l’affirmation d’une autonomie dans la vie sociale, par les relations avec la famille d’origine ou par la participation dans des réseaux et des associations officielles. L’écart entre la rémunération dans le pays d’origine et le pays d’immigration peut en lui-même créer cette autonomie, même si le métier dans le pays d’accueil est celui de domestique logée ou de prostituée.” Anny Misa Hefti: 1997 (mes italiques)

Conclusions publiées par des chercheurs en Espagne et communications personnelles avec des chercheurs en Espagne, au Royaume-Uni, en Italie, en France, en Belgique, en Allemagne, en Hollande et en Suisse.

Actuellement, d’autres endroits concernés par le discours sur ces questions sont l’Inde, le delta du Mékong, le Nigeria et la République Dominicaine, de même que le Canada et les États-Unis.

Les efforts que déploient la police et les agents d’immigration pour ‘nettoyer’ les sites fréquentés par les prostituées ou pour embarquer les travailleuses ‘sans-papiers’ varient d’une ville à l’autre en Europe, changent de jour en jour et ciblent, dépendamment des politiques du moment, les travailleuses dans la rue, dans les bars ou dans les bordels. Presque toutes les travailleuses craignent l’attention policière.

L’exception la plus notable à ce silence est négative et emblématique. Dans son exposé sur le film India Cabaret de Mira Nair, Arjun Appadurai commence en décrivant les jeunes femmes de Kerala qui “viennent à Bombay pour faire fortune comme danseuses de cabaret et prostituées”, un rendu assez neutre de la situation. Cependant, deux phrases plus tard, sans aucune justification, il parle de “ces tragédies de déracinement”, et il reproche aux hommes qui fréquentent ces cabarets d’être des rapatriés du Moyen-Orient, “où leur vie diasporique et sans femme déforme totalement leur sens de ce que pourraient être les relations homme-femme”. Appadurai ne donne aucune référence ni appui théorique pour étayer ces opinions typiquement moralistes sur ce que ‘devraient’ être la sexualité et les relations (Appadurai 1996, 38-9).

Je ne parle pas ici d’individus particuliers qui aiment véritablement leur métier dans l’industrie du sexe et qui veulent faire reconnaître leurs droits en tant que travailleuses du sexe. Certaines de ces personnes se sont organisées et lobbyent contre la criminalisation de la prostitution et pour les droits des prostituées.

Notez que ces projets sont solidaires des travailleuses du sexe et non pas composés de travailleuses du sexe.

Plusieurs noteront qu’avoir le droit ‘d’avancer’ dans l’industrie du sexe dépend de la position sociale préalable.

La réalisation tardive que ces arguments favorisent les politiques conservatrices d’immigration—celles dont le but est fondamentalement de fermer les frontières et d’exclure les migrants—a mené à diverses propositions nationales qui permettraient aux personnes trafiquées de demeurer, qu’elles décident de dénoncer leurs exploiteurs ou pas.

La surprise que pourrait causer ce chiffre est reliée à la couverture médiatique qui se concentre presque exclusivement sur la prostitution de rue ou les pires sites d’exploitation intérieurs. Il est possible de gagner cette somme si l’on a été présentée ou si l’on s’est présentée soi-même à ce marché; il faut aussi posséder les habiletés pour y opérer et apprendre à gérer ce genre de somme (un problème fréquent est la consommation à grande échelle qui tend à annuler les revenus élevés). Travailler moins d’heures ou de jours ou faire des pauses entre les contrats réduit les revenus. Pour en lire plus sur les ‘habiletés’ nécessaire, voir Agustín 2000.

Le dernier ‘endroit’ à être occupé par les prostituées migrantes est le cyberespace, un espace cosmopolite sans frontières. La stigmatisation des prostituées et le désir de beaucoup des clients de cacher leurs envies fait du cyberespace ‘l’endroit’ idéal pour tous, et dans une rapide prolifération de formes, les services sexuels sont offerts ou complétés dans des cybersalons, sur des babillards électroniques, dans des pages avec des images et du son enregistré, dans des publicités directes avec numéros de téléphone, et grâce aux netcams, dans des spectacles privés et plus ‘publics’. Ici les femmes se révèlent être des consommatrices, peut-être à cause du manque ‘d’endroits’ où elles peuvent se procurer du sexe anonyme, public ou commercial. Considérons une étude menée en Europe selon laquelle les femmes composaient jusqu’à 26 pourcent des visiteurs des sites pornographiques. (Nielsen Netratings 1999)

“La contextualisation de la sexualité dans le cadre de l’économie politique souligne à quel point les notions prédominantes sur la sexualité, les sexes, et le désir sont alimentées par une mentalité colonialiste qui présume une rigidité interculturelle et la constance des catégories sexuelles et la durabilité des limites géographiques et culturelles imposées par les chercheurs occidentaux.” (Parker, Barbosa, et Aggleton: 2001, p. 9).