I pass on to the Latinas, who do not question why the Progresistas and other outreach projects come to see them but simply take advantage of as many services as possible. They like to chat and tell personal stories: how they travelled, what happened when they arrived, where they have lived, how they are coping, what their boyfriends are up to. They don’t wonder why others might be interested in these stories, either. Back home, it’s common for middle-class people to contact them, for one reason or another.
Later, the Progresistas say it’s true they don’t have enough condoms for everyone, but also that they refuse to be duped or considered fools by women they want to work with (and, by the way, without being paid). They say giving out condoms is only a ‘way in’ to the women, who, they acknowledge, already buy their own, as well as everything else they need to do business. They see their chief offerings as their presence and ability to provide information and promote self-reliance among workers. They also say there is no difference between themselves and women who sell sex; all women are sisters. Solidarity and the desire to help are transparent, benevolent ideals to be accepted at face value. This means that if they approach people with sacks of condoms and smiles on their faces, they expect to be understood.
However, even supposing migrants understood Spanish perfectly, there is no reason to expect them to interpret any particular value in any particular way. The solidarity that the Progresistas refer to has two elements: first, their own with ‘prostitutes’ (the term they use), which consists of working to help get rights for them; and second, the solidarity that Progresistas want to promote among women who sell sex across national, ethnic, colour and gender lines. The problem is, even if the concept were to exist identically in other cultures, it is not clear that they would care about people from other cultures or countries, who they might perceive as inferior or simply irrelevant. Or some people might wish to get rid of the competition, believe that Latinos are immune to disease, for example, or any of an array of other reasons.
In Spain, references to solidarity are common and unreflexive.5 The concept’s meaning has changed a great deal since it was the subject of great debate in France in reaction to the ultra-individualism of the late eighteenth century. Emile Durkheim and Ferdinand Tönnies both used the idea of solidarity to theorise about different sorts of social bonds.6 By the later nineteenth century, solidarity came to be seen as
the instrument par excellence for securing the ideological reconciliation of individualism and collectivism, bringing in its train a host of state-organised and associationist institutions calculated to repair the damage wreaked by uninhibited self-seeking without restoring the retrograde, despotic, illiberal ancien régime.7
In the present, according to Amelia Valcárcel, solidarity emerges with the realisation of the need for mutual help: in the case of women, that they are a collective. This solidarity is not simply a compassionate lending hand but puts collective above individual needs, occurring among equals, not in hierarchical relations.8 But volunteers doling out condoms do not want to face the inescapable inequality of these relationships.Volunteers can withhold gifts, demand certain interactions and never risk losing their own citizens’ rights, even when protesting against the state. Undocumented migrants occupy a different space entirely, where the absence of citizens’ rights and the risk of deportation are only highlighted by efforts to help them with special vehicles, gift-giving and discourses of solidarity. The fact that the Progresistas need the condom as an excuse to talk to workers throws further doubt on the project.
How can we understand the Progresistas’ desire for sex workers to show solidarity for each other? Maintaining that all women are the same and that ‘prostitutes’ are simply workers who deserve rights, they seem unaware of many feminists’ critique of the notion that all women share an essence. For those historically excluded, ‘homogenizing and systematizing the experiences of different groups of women’ just erases ‘marginal and resistant modes and experiences’.9 Such critiques, common in postcolonial contexts, are scarcely heard in Spain, which remains colonialist, above all with Latin Americans.10
Empowerment is another concept describing what the Progresistas would like to accomplish. A word used by those who view themselves as fighters for social justice, empowerment is the current politically correct way to talk about helping. But empower is a transitive verb whose subject is the person doing the empowering, a technology aimed at ‘constituting active and participatory citizens’ and simultaneously linking subjects with their own subjection.11 Empowerment seeks to get subjects included in society, equipped with
the right to have rights, to be a subject by right ... to belong to a body politic in which [they have] a place of residence, or the right to be actively involved – in other words the right to give a sense and a meaning to [their] action,words and existence.12
Those who desire to empower sex workers must assume that they view themselves as engaged in sex work. The identity issue is crucial: while empower-ers want to valorise cultural and individual differences and give voice to the mute, if those to be empowered do not think of themselves that way then the empowerment project cannot succeed and may turn into an unwanted imposition. Many migrants who sell sex do not consider themselves sex workers.13
The insistence on social inclusion cannot account for people who don’t mind being excluded, at least in part. When subjectivity and subjection, resistance and oppression are made into opposites,14 there appear to be only two choices, but many people avoid the attentions of states, perhaps particularly regarding their sex lives.
‘Self-esteem’, another concept that aims to transform people’s relationships with themselves, is frequently used about the poor and stigmatised.15 This liberation is meant to come about through operations on our ways of being, what Foucault called a technology of the self.16 For the Progresistas, who want to help and who have a limited vocabulary to express themselves (rights, solidarity), concepts like empowerment and self-esteem may provide more tools with which to do their job.
Item 2: A Culture of Indignation
A grand hall is the setting for an event on ‘Prostitution and Trafficking in Women for Sexual Exploitation’. The organiser of this event is a member of an international ‘anti-trafficking’ organisation. Few of us in the field knew about this event before the last moment, and when we found out and tried to sign up, we were told there were no places left. Meanwhile, a highly placed politician, on discovering that we had not been invited, sent out a couple of invitations of her own. I received one. All the originally invited panellists had shared a strict abolitionist line, but the politician also demanded that speakers from several local projects be included.
The hall is a large, ornate symbol of high culture in the centre of the city. Marble columns, flags, formal flower arrangements and official seals festoon the room. The height of the stage promotes a sense of great difference between those above and those below, about 300 middle-class women who work in government and mainstream NGOs. The speakers are well-known on the abolitionist circuit; many have performed together in other countries.17 We hear that ‘prostitution’ is slavery, and violence against women, that in ‘prostitution’ men force women to have sex with them, that ‘trafficking’ and ‘prostitution’ are the same thing and that the only solutions are abolition and punishment of exploiters. For three days these ideas are repeated over and over, with rarely a word from the audience. I feel I am at a cult meeting. One speaker exhorts us to develop the capacity for indignation, establish a culture of indignation,
A psychiatrist who proclaims the universally harmful effects of ‘prostitution’ on women is supported by a local woman who runs a flat where troubled women can spend the night; she mentions mental retardation as a typical attribute of ‘prostitutes’. A Swedish male is cut off abruptly in his presentation on why men ‘use prostitutes’ when he makes a slightly compassionate remark; the moderator accuses him of taking typical male advantage of the situation (it’s not clear how). Ano
ther academic discusses her study of advertisements for personal services in Spanish newspapers, apparently believing literally their information about ethnicity, nationality and gender; she provides quantitative data on how many of each advertise (several people in the audience chuckle about this). For three days, Holland is referred to repeatedly as a demon, without explanation, and no Dutch speaker has been invited.
Among other telling moments during the three-day conference, a well-known US academic does a high-tech presentation of Internet pornography. When a ‘rape camp’ website is projected onto a large screen, many members of the audience leave their seats and hurry forward for a good look. From the back of the room, this looks like prurience. Another ghastly moment for me personally comes when a member of a large ‘anti-trafficking’ group describes the destructive power of people who work for rights of ‘prostitutes’. Pausing dramatically, she intones, ‘There might even be some of them right here in the room with us.’ My blood runs cold – could she know I am here?
Near the end, wine and canapés are served in an elegant period room, all polished wood, flowers and beautiful pictures. Given the nonstop representation of poverty, misery and violence imposed by the conference, the rich setting is offensive. I speak to an enraged Bolivian woman who cannot believe what she has seen at this conference: ‘Our countries are supposed to be backward, but now I realise the opposite is true. At least we say what we feel in public, we are not intimidated.’ We have both noted the constant, agitated whispering occurring outside the meeting room, compared with the audience’s compliance inside it.
Last-minute political pressure on the organisers leads to the inclusion of local city projects in the programme. Anti-AIDS, after witnessing the tone of the prior two days, back out on the ground that it’s inappropriate for them to take a political position (nonsensical since they work within conventional discourses of social exclusion, health prevention and harm reduction). This leaves the Progresistas’ representative as the lone proponent of rights. Speaking last, she is mocked and misquoted by one of the organisers. Amidst the hubbub, a desperate voice from the audience asks whether it wouldn’t be possible to hear what some ‘prostitute’ has to say. At that, the representative of an international women’s programme, wearing dark glasses, grabs the microphone and barks: ‘We don’t have to talk to prostitutes to know what prostitution is.’
‘Consensus’ is claimed at the end of the conference, when the organisers announce they are writing up a document to send to the European Commission which will represent Spain’s opinion. Outraged, a well-known activist nun stalks out.
A number of symbols of cultural capital contribute to the weight of this event: the audience pampered with deluxe souvenirs and wines; their travel and five-star hotel paid with government funds; enormous flags and brilliant rich lighting in a luxurious, prestigious hall. These material conditions, like the state emblems, constitute what Pierre Bourdieu calls symbolic power, conveying to those present that correct knowledge and policy already exist on the topic under discussion. This, in turn, implies that there is no place for questioning or quibbling.18 The event is not a ‘conference’ in the sense that many understand. Here, individuals with important titles from different countries repeat a simplistic political line made to sound like good struggling against evil. Controlling invitations and silencing difference may give the impression of solid international unity. An unwitting audience may believe this or feel as bored as I did.
Other kinds of censorship are also common. People have been shouted into silence in public settings.19 The ideology so important to those who would censor holds that ‘prostitution’ is violence against women, and that even listening to other ideas is wrong.20 These censors are moral entrepreneurs, Howard Becker’s term for those who assume authority for knowing what correct behaviours are, who label others deviant and who head moral crusades against social evils.21 Often, as at this conference, inducing indignation is an overt goal.22
The desire to ‘abolish prostitution’ represents a utopian vision of how societies should be: free of gender inequity, sexual obsession and the commodification of bodies. There is no inherent reason for abolitionists to employ tactics of censorship, personal attacks, and disinformation, and some abolitionists maintain their utopian beliefs while also collaborating on pragmatic solutions. For this reason, I do not characterise extremist behaviour as abolitionism but as fundamentalist feminism. Elizabeth Wilson refers to secular fundamentalism when discussing the difference between understanding revolution as change and uncertainty versus understanding it as faith:
By fundamentalism I mean here a way of life, or a world-view or philosophy of life, which insists that the individual lives by narrowly prescribed rules and rituals: a faith that offers certainty … The search for the ‘new life’ can be exhilarating, but it can lead to extreme anxiety and personal collapse; by contrast, the price paid for certainty is rigidity and an incomprehension and intolerance of those who do not follow the ‘true way’. Those who don’t believe must be either destroyed or saved.23
Others refer to feminist fundamentalism as the idea that woman is good (or victim) and man is bad (or perpetrator).24 These feminists believe there are authentic roots and principles to which all feminists ought to return; they would not have been in agreement with nineteenth-century advocates of domesticity; many are vocal lesbians, believe in women’s right to abortion and advocate for equal rights for women. They feel beleaguered, betrayed and at war with other feminists who see things differently from them, which explains the frequent verbal violence. Fundamentalist crusades are characterised by homogeneous, consistent, easily understood ideas.
Fundamentalists speak of ‘women’; they believe in a female essence that is violated by patriarchy everywhere; they are certain of what is male and what is female.25 This appealing notion erases differences amongst women, however, both within cultures and across cultural boundaries. Postcolonial feminists as well as many first-world women object to an inclusiveness that only reflects middle-class, ‘white’, heterosexual, Euramerican experiences.26 Criticism is especially severe of the tendency to make third-world women into ‘always, already’ victims, passive, acted upon and not acting.
Fundamentalist feminists are not worried by this criticism; they passionately evoke a spirit of Woman that needs both protecting and liberating; signs, symbols and keywords connote that spirit.27 Likening their campaign to the nineteenth century’s against slavery, and feeling they are at war, they respond with denunciations, telling attendees at events and funders that rights activists are ‘paid by the sex industry’ or ‘known associates of traffickers’. They maintain and circulate blacklists, denounce activists to their employers and threaten loss of funding if recipients invite the wrong people to events.28
In a split within feminism, some believe that the women’s movement was betrayed and must return to what it was:
a movement in which people understood the need to act with courage in everyday life, that feminism was not a better deal or a riskless guarantee but a discipline of a hostile reality. To say that the personal was political meant, among other things, that what we do every day matters. It meant you become what you do not resist.29
Catherine MacKinnon’s piece appears in The Sexual Liberals and the Attack on Feminism, a collection lamenting the betrayal of women who have turned away from founding feminist principles or who have ‘internalised patriarchy’.
Problems can arise when individuals influenced by such an ideology occupy for many years posts dedicated to improving the situation of women. Such jobs can involve the funding of women’s projects, publications, conferences and events, and what those in charge do not like may not get funded.30 Money may only be given to projects that define ‘prostitution’ as sexual exploitation and gender violence. For a year or so, one prominent campaigner held meetings of all funded projects related to ‘prostitution’ for the purpose of leaving no one in doubt about what positions, actions and services would be approv
ed. The attendees at these meetings always remained silent, because, they say, they felt safer not speaking than running the risk of saying the wrong thing and losing subsidies. One project was allegedly excluded because of its director’s failure to denounce ‘prostitution’.31 In this way, one campaigner has directly affected the history of a particular social movement. In Nikolas Rose and Peter Miller’s terms, power ‘flows’ to her because she determines what gets written down, compared and evaluated.32
She is, however, not alone in wielding this kind of power. Another NGO concerned with migrants was partially funded by a national body to do research on ‘trafficking’, but when the research failed to find enough cases of victims and compared the testimonies of women selling sex with those of domestic workers, the funders boycotted the formal presentation.33
Item 3: The Religious Social
The house, modern, large, solid and comfortable, one of a series of lookalikes in a new barrio, is a safe house for victims of ‘trafficking’ managed by an order of Roman Catholic nuns. ‘We don’t go out looking for business,’ says one sister. ‘The police call us, or clients do, or women themselves. They have escaped from a club and gone to the police, or they are at the airport. We ask them to tell us their situations, and if they really want to get away then we go and explain what we offer.’ One of the nuns’ employees, a legal specialist with several languages, often goes to the first interview.
Sex at the Margins: Migration, Labour Markets and the Rescue Industry Page 19
