power

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

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

From the BBC story:

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

Note the applause from politicians when he makes these statements.

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

What Not to Wear - if you want to be French

The Guardian, Comment is Free,  6 August 2008

Laura Agustín

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

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

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

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

Since I’m at this conference considering the idea of ethics in relation to sex law, it might be a good moment to reprise this piece I wrote a few years ago. What do we think ethics are, who gets to define them?

Alternate Ethics, or: Telling Lies to Researchers

Laura Agustín

Research for Sex Work, June 2004, 6-7.

On the subject of ethics in sex work research, we usually think of the insensitivity and careerism of researchers whose interest is in obtaining information they will take credit for. I want to point to another problematic angle: the issue of whether those being researched are honest with researchers. Why, after all, should people who are being treated as objects of curiosity tell the truth?

We are all so surrounded by research projects that they seem to be a natural part of life, but what is research for? While often presented as pure advancement of knowledge, research is often integral to people’s jobs, whether they work in government, NGOs or universities, and the audience for whatever they find out is first and foremost whoever paid for the research.

Institutional research projects are required to explain the investigator’s ethical responsibility to the people researched. But the assumption is that once research begins, researchees will cooperate, freely telling researchers what they want to know. Since this side of the research relationship has not usually been given any choice about participating, it has also not been required to agree to an ethical standard of behaviour. Since no universal ethics exists, it is no criticism to say that research subjects simply may not tell (all) the truth to researchers.

Sad stories, omissions and outright lies

When a person working in an ‘irregular’ trade is approached by a professional-looking person from the straight world, and is not a paying customer, he or she is naturally viewed with suspicion. In the worst case, the visitor may be working for the police; in the best case, be someone giving out free condoms or needles. Of course, researchers have to find a way to ‘gain access’ to their subjects, making friends with the head of an NGO or a bar or convincing a doctor of their good intentions, and thus may be introduced as an ‘ally’. This goes for those conducting any kind of research using any kind of methodology. But even if the person comes with a good introduction, how does it feel to have him or her move toward you with the intention of asking personal questions? In most cultures, such a situation does not occur naturally. A Nigerian sex worker in a Spanish park once commented on outsiders asking questions:

I don’t understand what they’re doing, they don’t have anything to offer. The others that come are doctors, they give us medicine, exams. But these want to talk, and I don’t have any reason to talk to them.

It has long been recognised that people who are considered ‘victims’ or ‘deviants’ are likely to tell members of the mainstream what they believe they want to hear. Given that so much research with sex workers has focused on their personal motivations (wanting to know why they got into sex work, which is assumed to be bad), it’s not surprising that many make their present circumstances appear to be the fatal or desperate result of a past event. After all, if we were forced to be what we are now, we cannot be blamed for it. One Dominican woman told me:

All those social worker types feel sorry for me. They don’t want to hear that I prefer to do this work, so I tell them I have no choice. They want to hear that I was forced to do this, so that’s what I tell them. Anyway, I was, because my family was poor.

Ethics or self-protection?

There are other reasons to tell sad stories. When behind the research project sex workers know that a certain health-care service may be at stake, or that only if they can present convincingly as victims will they get help, it is not surprising if they tell stories that serve their own interests. Or, in the case of research for health promotion, workers may not want to talk about their own failures to use condoms or their own getting drunk—who does, after all? Or, in the case of research on ‘trafficking’, sex workers may not want to admit they thought boyfriends really cared about them, when it turned out they were only using them, or admit they paid people to concoct false travel documents for them. It really doesn’t matter whether their answers will be treated ‘confidentially’, because they simply may not want to talk about such intimate matters.

To put it another way, keeping secrets may help sex workers gain independence or control over projects to help them. Read the rest of this entry »

The Suffering of the Immigrant is still one of the best books I know about the experience of migration. The book demonstrates how suffering does not have to equal victimisation and, most importantly, how migration is the inevitable consequence of colonialism. The migrants discussed left Kabylia, in northern Algeria, and went to France.

Book Review by Laura Agustín in International Journal of Urban and Regional Research, Vol 29.3 pp 703-15, September 2005

Abdelmalek Sayad, 2004: The Suffering of the Immigrant. Cambridge: Polity Press.

Initially I thought this book’s title might signal the growing trend to victimize migrants, but I was wrong. On the contrary, The Suffering of the Immigrant presents the strongest possible arguments for recognizing migrants’ agency in the face of inherent, structural conditions that are all against them and whose consequences they must, undoubtedly, ‘suffer’.

Whereas many contemporary commentators refer to migration as a phenomenon of ‘globalization’, Abdelmalek Sayad makes no bones about which stage of globalization we should be looking at: the north’s imperialist colonization of the south. Most commentators agree that current migratory flows are related to free-market capitalism’s need for flexibility, moving its workplaces around the world while workers move to find them. And probably few would deny that ‘earlier’ colonial relations were implicated, especially where migrants move to their former ‘mother countries’.

But Sayad obliges us to consider a more serious proposition, that migrations are a structural element of colonial power relationships that have never ended. His case study is the Algerian migration to France in the second half of the twentieth century, during which time many migrants passed from being French (citizens of the colony) to Algerian (citizens of an independent Algeria) and back to French (as legal workers and residents in France), with the complication that the majority were Berber peasants. The colonial relationship is seen in the subordination of the economic and social life of rural colonies to the industrial activity of the country in which peasants become ‘workers’.

Sayad’s arguments, however, go much further than this particular case. First, he demonstrates how discourses of migration focus on the situation of ‘immigrants’ — meaning, on how receiving countries view immigration as their own social problem. Read the rest of this entry »

Since my current project is thinking about the idea of Gender Equality, I’m looking back at different eras of my life when women were not talked of as they are now. I’m listening to Janis Joplin, whose laments about men and love do not make women into victims. I’m not saying it was better when women suffered in silence, love was meant to justify everything and we didn’t know how widespread violence against women was in ordinary daily life. I’m trying to understand, though, how we got to a place where lots of people refer to women routinely as inherently vulnerable and men as ever-aggressive perpetrators of gender crime. I went back to a little essay I wrote nine years ago when I kept running into references to Empowerment. Here it is again, and here is that non-victim Janis.   

The Em- of Empowerment

Laura Agustín

Research for Sex Work, 2000, 3, 15-16.

The verb is transitive: someone gives power to another, or encourages them to take power or find power in themselves. It’s used among those who want to help others identified as oppressed. In Latin America, in educación popular, one of the great cradles of this kind of concept, the word itself didn’t exist until it was translated back from English. To many people, if they know it at all, the word empoderamiento sounds strange. It’s an NGO word, used by either volunteer or paid educators who view themselves as helpers of others or fighters for social justice, and is understood to represent the currently ‘politically correct’ way of thinking about ‘third world’, subaltern or marginalised people. But it remains a transitive verb, which places emphasis on the helper and her vision of her capacity to help, encourage and show the way. These good intentions, held also by 19th-century European missionaries, we know from experience do not ensure non-exploitation.

In the current version of these good intentions, ‘first world’ people and entities use their funds to help or empower those less privileged. They spend money to set up offices and pay salaries, many to people who remain in offices, often engaged in writing proposals that will allow them to ‘stay in business.’ These organisations have hierarchies, and those engaged in education or organisation at the ‘grassroots’ level often are the last to influence how funds will be used. Those closer to the top, who attend conferences, live in Europe or have career interests in the organisation, know how proposals must be written to compete in the crowded funding world. This condition of structural power should not be overlooked by those concerned with empowerment, who more often view themselves as embattled, as non-government, as crusaders situated ‘against’ conservative policies. Yet, when a concept like empowerment comes from above in this way, we needn’t be surprised at the kind of contradictions that result—literacy programmes that don’t keep people interested in reading, AIDS education that doesn’t stop people’s refusing to use condoms.

To empower me as a sex worker you assume the role of acting on me and you assume that I see myself as an individual engaged in sex work. If I don’t see myself this way, then I am disqualified from the empowerment project, despite your best intentions. The ‘identity’ issue here is crucial; funders and activists alike are currently interested in valorising cultural and individual difference.While it is a great advance to recognise and ‘give voice to’ human subjects who were before marginalised or disappeared, the problem remains that if you want to inject pride in me that I am a worker and supporter of my family and I don’t recognise or want to think of myself that way, the advance won’t occur, in my case. Read the rest of this entry »

The UN recently released yet another report on trafficking which says:

a disproportionate number of women are involved in human trafficking, not only as victims (which we knew), but also as traffickers (first documented here). Female offenders have a more prominent role in present-day slavery than in most other forms of crime.

Sillies . . . if they only had listened to what some of us were saying from the beginning, they wouldn’t find themselves so surprised now. By which I mean that those who help move people around in informal networks are very often friends and relations of the people doing the moving, so why shouldn’t they be women as often as men? If you take away Crime as the framing of this sort of movement, then you don’t have to expect the criminals to be men. The work of smuggling does not require particular physical strength. As an article about coyotes on the Mexico-US border shows, women can be highly adept at people smuggling and trafficking.

Note in the following excerpts that the words trafficking and smuggling are used interchangeably. The original story was published in Spanish, where what English-speakers are calling trafficking is often called la trata and smuggling el tráfico or el contrabando. The article is not about that dread term sex trafficking, and as you’ll see, those trafficked are not seen as victims. I’ve highlighted some suggestive quotations in bold.

Women Are the New Coyotes

La Opinión,  Claudia Núñez, 23 December 2007

Gaviota has six phones that don’t stop ringing. Her booming business produces net profits of more than $50,000 a month. She has dozens of customers lining up for her in a datebook stretching three months ahead.

“The old story of the man who runs the ‘coyotaje’ business is now just a myth. It’s finally coming out that the big business of human trafficking is in female hands. As long as they make it known that they are women, they have lots of business all along the border,” explains Marissa Ugarte, a psychologist, lecturer and founder of the Bilateral Safety Corridor Coalition of San Diego, Calif.

Female coyotes tend to employ other women – most of them single mothers – to line up customers, arrange food and lodging for the undocumented, and participate in cross-border money laundering.

“A real ‘coyote’ organizes everything for you. From who and where to take the ‘goats’ across, and where they will stay on this side of the border, to who will deliver them to the door of the customer (the immigrant’s family). The other ones who just take you across the river or through the desert – those bastards are just sleazebags . . .  says Gaviota, whose smuggling network operates in Laredo, Tex. and transports migrants into the United States at border crossings or across the Rio Grande, depending on the customer’s budget.

“The business is a real money-maker,” says Ramón Rivera, a DHS spokesperson in Washington, D.C. “These women inspire confidence in the immigrants and when the authorities stop them and take them to court, they give them shorter sentences because they are mothers, daughters, because they are women. . . . Read the rest of this entry »

Because the prostitution controversy is about women who sell sex to men, most of male sex work passes unnoticed. And people who do talk about it often slip into the assumption that it’s a phenomenon happening between men, whether you call them gay or MSM. Consider host bars, which welcome female clients to be treated as men are in Japan’s numerous hostess bars.

The basic work is providing company whilst customers sit in the venue: good conversation, graceful flirting, lighting cigarettes and making sure drinks are correctly poured and always full. The relationship takes place in public but has an intimate quality. Venues differ, and sometimes employees are obliged to meet customers outside the clubs. Wages are low, and employees depend on the commissions they earn on promoting the sale of drinks, whose prices can be very high indeed.

I have read good research about Japanese hostess clubs but not about  host clubs. You can find a lot of media reports that all say the same thing about how they work. They say that even professional Japanese women are supposed to be passive and submissive. They correlate the rise of  host clubs with such women’s desires to have a place where they can be assertive and uninhibited. It is often said that a lot of the customers at host bars are hostesses who arrive after their own wearing shifts.

I’ve been studying the sex industry for 15 years, and I understand that the conflict about prostitution - and therefore about trafficking - derives from the belief that biological women are innately vulnerable to sexual violence. Therefore, information about men who sell sex (or are exploited) is usually marginalised, unless the men are technically boys.

But what about women who buy sex from men? Evidence about that is usually dismissed, too, by those who want to abolish commercial sex. When it’s not dismissed, the women are denounced as ‘acting like men’ - exploitative, objectifying, dominating, selfish. This critique comes up most in treatments of middle-class women tourists in poorer countries, where it’s common for local men to act as guides, advisers, drivers, cultural mediators and lovers. More everyday situations of women paying men are said to be few and exceptional, except for cheerful accounts of places like Chippendales.

The simplification of complexity is well illustrated by the idea of putting physical obstructions at national borderlines to keep people out. The stereotype of illegal migration imagines three clear roles: the migrant trying to cross, the smuggler or trafficker helping to flout the law and the police officer attempting to stop them. The reality is often much more complicated. The other day a story from Moldova pointed to corruption as a major problem in controlling migration there, and now here is a more tightly focussed account from the Mexico-US border.  I understand corruption to mean, in both cases, that those on the police and government side of the equation - who are paid to prevent people from getting in - take money in exchange for making entry easier. This can happen whether the activities in question are labelled smuggling or trafficking.

The below excerpts are from a news report about Lowell Bergman’s documentary on smuggling; his comments were made during a recent briefing at the University of California.

Corrupt U.S. Agents Aid Human Smuggling at Border

New America Media, Annette Fuentes, 6 Feb 2009

‘Building a fence and wall at the border and putting more border agents down there creates a bigger pool of potential corruption targets.’

The build-up of security agents on the border, especially since Sept. 11, 2001, hasn’t slowed illegal migration . . . Those who would have tried crossing alone are more likely to pay a smuggler to shepherd them across. ‘If people try to get across the border, they eventually get across . . .  Part of the fee to the smuggler is the guarantee that they’ll get you across. If they fail the first time, they’ll try again.’

. . . Proponents of the militarization of the border have used the threat of terrorist attacks in the wake of Sept. 11, 2001 to justify the build-up. But Bergman noted that there is no evidence that terrorists have ever entered through the Mexico-U.S. border. Of all those apprehended at border crossings, there is no record of non-Mexicans. . .

. . . there has been no effective internal oversight of border agents since the creation of the Department of Homeland Security. Multiple agencies, each with some responsibilities for immigration, customs and law enforcement, have meant no coordinated approach to investigations. ‘They completely lost any idea of what was going on . . . Only now are they beginning to find out, and they are overwhelmed by the number of leads and cases to follow up on.’

The FBI . . . now has about 200 open cases of human smuggling involving corrupt border agents. But the agency is swimming against the tide. ‘People coming through checkpoints . . . is still a growth industry.’

Here the whole black and white, law-and-order idea loses ground, and we see instead a multi-national social setting. Placing people at a border to enforce it provides them with opportunities to make money doing exactly what their formal job pays them to prevent. This is, of course, a widespread phenomenon amongst police of all kinds. Many people take law-enforcement jobs not out of an inspired devotion to the State but because they can get those jobs.Maybe they perform many aspects of their jobs correctly, but they don’t believe in ‘the law’ enough to resist opportunities to freelance. 

Here are three more examples of specific cases where those with power were paid to smooth crossing the border: a Dominican diplomat in New York, a filipino in New Jersey and a US customs officer and Chinese smuggler of people via Ecuador.

The following story comes from Moldova, a country whose citizens are often said to be more likely to be trafficked or traffickers than others in Europe. Given that stereotype, it is interesting that this news, while brief, is more nuanced than most coming out of richer countries.

Human trafficking cases decline as illegal migration expands
Info-Prim Neo, 16.12.2008

The number of cases involving persons actually being trafficked tends to decline in favor of an increase in the number of illegal migration cases, according to the Board of the General Prosecutor’s Office of Moldova, Info-Prim Neo reports.

The Office said in a press release there have been recorded 510 trafficking-related offenses in 11 months of this year; of them, 209 were cases of trafficking of adults, 28 cases of trafficking of children, 152 cases of sexual exploitation, 106 cases of illegal migration, and 15 cases of child smuggling.

The prosecutors remark an alarming trend of trafficking cases where relatives and acquaintances have complicity. Cases where previously trafficked persons became traffickers represent another alarming trend. These cases are particularly difficult to investigate and examine in court.

According to the prosecutors, an element that facilitates human trafficking is corruption among persons in positions of authority. Trafficking and corruption are mutually reinforcing as they foster bribery and undermine the efforts made to counter these phenomena.

In the course of December the General Prosecutor’s Office is to finalize a series of acts that will make a priority to find criminal links between traffickers and persons in posts of authority.

The first good thing here is the absence of the abhorrent term sex trafficking : This authority is not making the fact of selling sex into a particular evil category. Next, the term illegal migration is used in the same breath as trafficking. Finally, they distinguish between child trafficking and child smuggling. I don’t believe it’s easy to make such distinctions, but I’d rather see them than the usual vast, reductionist statements.

Then these authorities mention, which everyone who studies migration knows very well, that relatives and friends are very often those who facilitate migrants’ journeys and jobs, whether those turn out happily or not. What outsiders decry as exploitation are often family strategies to get ahead. Are families often repressive instruments that punish girls more than boys? Yes. Should we lump all such family members into one messy bag called trafficking? It doesn’t help anyone. Migrants who’ve been selected as the most capable of being able to help the family as a whole do often suffer, but their greatest consolation can be knowing that they are helping their family. So dividing an exploited person from those she identifies with and loves is not kind. I would like to see things change, but not by imposing an idea about gender equality that does not take into account local realities.

The main point the Moldovan authority wants to make is the link between trafficking and corruption. Corruption is another word that can be misused and end up covering way too much, including ordinary local customs. But again, migration scholars know that getting the right papers to allow travel and work depends in many cases on the complicity of officials of all sorts: consider the cases of using false papers described here. And for those interested in some historical perspective, consider what refugees from Germany say about being smuggled in the 1940s, in a book by Dorothy B. Hughes.

I’m feeling a bit overwhelmed, as the year ends, with the volume of public discourse that has not only migrant and poorer women but women in general as passive, exploited victims who have little or no control over what they do. There seems to be an increasingly morbid interest in showing how women and children are abused, damaged, helpless and vulnerable - especially sexually vulnerable. Oh, I know, there’s also an over-abundance of images of powerful politician-women and celebrities. I’m talking about regular folk. The following selection of pictures offers an antidote.

Seducing woman

Sewing woman

Drinking woman

Reigning woman

Migrating woman

 Street trading women

Factory working woman

 Inspiring woman

I’ve been collecting this sort of image lately as I think they’ve become a bit unfamiliar nowadays. I’m fretting about what is meant by ‘gender equality’ and why it as a policy, or framework, seems to be leading us backwards to the idea of special, fragile, female vulnerabilities. More on that next year.

In 2005 I proposed a cultural-studies framework for thinking about the sex industry. I then disseminated an announcement calling for articles using the new framework, for a special edition of the journal Sexualities, which publishes work from any academic field that ‘describes, analyses, theorises and provides a critique on the changing nature of the social organisation of human sexual experience in the late modern world.’  Which means the exchange of money for sex can be looked at just the way any other activity involving sex can.

The journal also likes ethnographic work, which means using information gathered amongst specific people in actual places rather than purely theoretical, such as whether you consider prostitution to be inherently exploitative or perverted or harmless or any other abstract term.

Although I received many responses to my announcement, most did not venture far from the traditional focus on the meaning and morality of prostitution, even when they used the term sex work.

Soi Cowboy, Bangkok

I chose eight articles, which then went through the usual academic review process, in which specialists in the fields discussed in the work give their opinions about it. All the articles were examined by at least two and sometimes three or four reviewers, people I found by searching high and low all over the globe. I had reviewers working on these articles in Japan, Australia, Israel, France and a long list of other places. For the same article they did not always agree, however, about whether the articles needed to be modified and how.

The best thing about this special edition is the absence of anything like victimising rhetoric or research results that prove anyone’s misery. Hurrah!

Here’s the Table of Contents for Sexualities, Vol 10, No 4, October 2007. If you have access to academic journals, the link to these pieces is here. 

• Introduction to the Cultural Study of Commercial Sex: Laura Maria Agustín, Guest Editor
• Performance, Status and Hybridity in a Pakistani Red-Light District: The Cultural Production of the Courtesan: Louise Brown
• Marketing Sex: US Legal Brothels and Late Capitalist Consumption: Barbara G. Brents and Kathryn Hausbeck
• No Money Shot? Commerce, Pornography and New Sex Taste Cultures: Feona Attwood
• Rent-Boys, Barflies, and Kept Men: Men Involved in Sex with Men for Compensation in Prague: Timothy M. Hall
• Sex Work for the Middle Classes: Elizabeth Bernstein
• Shifting Boundaries: Sex and Money in the North-East of Brazil: Adriana Piscitelli
• Thinking Critically about Strip Club Research: Katherine Frank
• Questioning Solidarity: Outreach with Migrants Who Sell Sex: Laura María Agustín

Below is the full text of my Introduction to the Cultural Study of Commercial Sex (Sexualities 2007; 10; 403). Or here is the pdf. (I’m having trouble with this file; if you need it, write to me on the contact form in the sidebar).

Laura Maria Agustín

The articles in this collection explore how the meaning of buying and selling sex changes according to the social, cultural and historical processes in which transactions are situated. Read the rest of this entry »