Toward the end, a highly placed public functionary arrives. Obviously, neither she nor the speechwriter has been present at the conference, since she reads, ‘As we have seen in the past few days, prostitution is always a form of violence against women’ and more of the usual rhetoric, which, in fact, since the first morning, we have not heard. There are two different reactions from the audience: the foreigners exchange befuddled glances as the translated speech reaches them through headphones, while the Spanish appear to accept the incongruence without surprise. This is, after all, what is always said in public in Spain, so it’s not strange to hear it now. Locals have probably been asking each other from the beginning how all these heretics infiltrated into a publicly funded conference in the first place.86 The woman on the podium, eyes down on her reading, is unaware of the unrest until a sex worker from Canada stands up to object; when the translated words reach her, the official is horrified.
After the Progresista’s speech, a woman in the audience launches into a tirade against her couched in the most virulent personal terms: she is a traitor to feminism. We now realise that the group that flounced out the first day is back with reinforcements. In full tilt, the heckler will not let go of the microphone, but the Progresista raises her voice to defend herself. The moderator is unable either to stop the shouting match or to make the usher wrest the microphone free. Other members of the audience jump into the fray, and the conference ends in disarray. It is a well-planned assault demonstrating firmly and visibly the moral frontier between good and evil.
This conflict resembles feminist battles over pornography in the 1980s, when one side campaigned against misogyny and exploitation while the other advocated for freedom of expression and sexual diversity.87 Rights activists such as those at this conference avoid overt moralising but certainly feel their proposals represent a superior morality: better justice toward workers, greater humanity toward clients, healthier understanding of sexual needs and desires, more understanding of how to prevent social and physical harm.88 This conference presented points of view seldom heard in Spain, but it also maintained the traditional boundaries between two sides of a debate. In the same way that Holland, with its regulation of brothels, was not invited to present its system at the event described earlier in this chapter, Sweden, with its criminalisation of clients, was not invited to defend itself at the second event. The organiser made no effort to bring coherency to a situation in which state officials directly contradicted invited speakers, which clearly opened the door to the ruckuses of moral crusaders. Yet these were inevitable the moment the conference was conceived.
The message of the speakers at this conference is far more complex than that of the fundamentalists. Writing of feminist campaigns against censorship in the 1980s, Lisa Duggan explains the dilemma:
We wanted to separate ourselves from the civil liberties framework to make a specifically feminist argument in defense of sexually explicit expression. We wanted to attack many of the standard oppositions of civil liberties discourse. For instance,we did not argue that ‘sex workers’ have ‘free choice’ of occupations, but emphasized that, within a limited range of very constrained choices in a sexist, capitalist economy,‘sex work’ is not always the worst option.89
Most present at this event, and at the others, are women. The majority of jobs in the social sector are held by women, as what was identified and carved out as a natural sphere for women long ago continues. Second, feminism is either an overt framework or implicit in woman-oriented services (for raped, battered or abused victims, for unmarried and single mothers, for employment and micro-enterprise counselling, for much psychotherapy, for self-esteem and sexuality counselling, for immigrant women, for women’s health and so on). Some projects receive funding because of their ‘gender perspective’, as governments put in place affirmative action or equity policies. Since so many organisations exist because of the women’s movement, many social agents owe allegiance to high-profile feminists in their region and may not feel able to take independent positions. Groups that survive through funded projects must write proposals within guidelines and using ideas known to please funders. At the state and international levels, where civil service rules ensure people’s careers, some feminists have come to be highly placed.
In these situations, the term hegemonic discourse takes on material meaning. In another room, a member of Red Cross Youth brings together a number of Spanish groups in an attempt to form a national network. It takes three of us, intervening several times in rhetorical conflicts between people who have never sat down together before, just to prevent angry walk-outs. The representative from one rescue project, who cannot bear to hear people talk from medical and rights perspectives, constantly wrings her hands, inciting others to fight back. Someone asks, ‘Do we all have to agree about what prostitution is in order to work together?’
The different morality at this conference relies on one overarching idea. In English, agency means the ability to make decisions and act, to determine what happens to some extent, even in highly structured and restrictive situations. In Spanish, there is no synonym; advocates speak of having the capacity to act, of women being protagonists and so on. The conflicts in ‘prostitution’ debates hinge crucially on whether poor people, migrants, women can be said to have any control over their lives, given the unjust structures of patriarchy, globalisation and capitalism they live in. Speakers at this event who advocate labour and human rights believe that even the least advantaged individuals have some power over their destiny; all poor people do not migrate, all poor women do not turn to selling sex. This vision sees individuals as creative.90 Ultimately this argument cannot be won either way; both sides believe their view is truthful and ethical.
Item 8: Pragmatism in the Provinces
My room in the famous old hotel is next door to Ernest Hemingway’s in the 1920s. Hemingway is credited with a major role in making Spain an international tourist attraction, but it is only now, seventy-five years later, that this province is seeing many black visitors on its streets, and they are not tourists. While I am in the city, a pro-immigration demonstration is held in the central plaza, with the motto ‘Open Up the Wall’.91 This province is wealthy, known for its isolation, for works of charity and solidarity and for being quirkily conservative and progressive at the same time.
The proprietor of two sex clubs, Don X, meets people in the lobbies of expensive hotels, where he seems to feel safer. He tells how at mid-life he was casting about for a more lucrative new career and hit upon opening a club for which he would bring the girls himself from outside Spain. He makes trips to Kiev via Paris and Berlin with the help of a few contacts, and since he treats his girls well they now do the ‘trafficking’ for him, setting things up with friends back home. He freely admits he has got rich off them and wants to open more clubs, but he rejects the idea that this makes him immoral and is offended that the media talk about people like himself as vicious criminals. He wants his workers to have normal labour benefits, which is why he approached several different social agents in the city about the possibility of getting them work permits and social security protection.
Before Don X made his move, the region’s only social programming for people who sell sex consisted of traditional rescue, rehabilitation and reintegration projects. I interview the members of a religious project (for ‘severely marginalised women’) who are now almost out of a job. They tell me that not so long ago, uneducated Spanish women worked on the streets, took drugs, had pimps – a type now gone. The employment department of this organisation began to see increasing numbers of migrants working in sex clubs after 1995, when highway hotels began to be converted. The employment manager views the situation practically: he can look for jobs for women who come to him, but the only other work he can offer them is domestic service, which pays terribly.
Don X made a proposal to Don Y, at the Labour Ministry: X would officially register his employees as workers so that they could receive social security benefits
. Y visited X’s clubs and talked in private with the women. He claims to be purely pragmatic: ‘Spanish women are not signing up for the job. This way everything is legal, there can’t be any problems, for us or for the police. The object was to legalise these little girls.’ Y’s problem was what job category to register them under, since there is none for selling sex; the rubrics used by paper-fixers are artist, dancer or entertainer. But Y wants to be honest, so he chooses an older classification, camareras de alterne (bar hostesses, with the implication that they offer sex). Thirty women have been registered so far. The cases for regularisation being proposed by X (and now other club owners) are reviewed at weekly meetings in Y’s office attended also by a police official, the employment manager from the religious organisation and an NGO worker with migrants.
The result of this completely atypical collaboration bypasses the usual moralistic confrontation of positions and debates on which system should be used to ‘control prostitution’ and proceeds directly to getting legal status for workers. Weekly meetings are oriented toward individual cases, the goal to reduce the number of illegal workers one by one in the province. The religious entity is interested in solving more cases of clients with problems; the Labour Ministry wants to have more legal migrants within its responsibility and the club owner wants to justify his enormous earnings by doing some good. The NGO worker is concerned to help individual women: ‘I don’t care if the club owner is a petty criminal, or if some people are paying and taking bribes, I just want those women to get employment protection and social security.’ Only the police commissioner’s motivations are somewhat obscure.
Away from centres of public debate, a pragmatic use of the concept of sex work is perhaps easier. In this province, leftist party proposals to change ‘prostitution’ law had come to nothing;92 migrants working with no civil or labour rights did not advocate for being called sex workers or for their occupations to be recognised or legalised; no Progresistas-type project demanded rights. Yet, in the quietest possible way, the work theory was put into practice and the situation of many migrants was dramatically improved. One afternoon, I ran into two Ukrainian women from one of X’s bars having tea in the main plaza, alongside middle-class Spanish and tourist clientele. Several years later I am told hundreds of women have been granted work permits in the same way.
How did this solution come about in this particular place? The answer lies with Don X, an entrepreneur from outside the social sector who took the initiative to satisfy his own conscience. X was able to catalyse a different practice because his own identity and job did not depend on the existence of a group of people he had to save. This case demonstrates that male insiders in the sex industry may help bring about positive solutions for workers – important, because many who work with victims cannot conceive of working with men, whether they are business owners, clients or intermediaries like travel agents and taxi drivers.93 This case also shows how social agents may participate in creative, productive solutions to injustice.
Making Sense of the Field Work
Social programming reifies and reproduces the classic ‘prostitution’ discourse. Some practices blatantly attempt to control knowledge: excluding diverse opinions from panels of experts and audiences, censoring publications, withholding funding, discrediting people on personal grounds, racism. Other practices appear benevolent: ending sexist language, using rights and solidarity talk, condom distribution, shelters, consciousness-raising on gender violence, cultural sensitivity. Still others might seem innocuous: ethnic classifications, questionnaires on sexual risk.
My goal is not to classify actions as bad or good or to determine whether they ‘really’ help or not but to reveal how social agents and their projects remain at the social centre of attention while failing materially to improve the situations of people who sell sex. Helping requires a wide array of figures, most of whom are paid a decent wage, granted positive social status and encouraged to gain ever more knowledge about the people they want to help: their languages, their cultural traits, their values, details of their intimate life. Each of these produces more responsibilities and tasks for helpers to carry out, whether they are educators, epidemiologists, doctors, editors, drivers, legal scholars, nuns, psychologists, police, mediators, functionaries, job counsellors, conference speakers, academics or volunteer activists. These are
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. But ... also in terms of their governmental technologies, the complex of mundane programmes, calculations, techniques, apparatuses, documents and procedures through which authorities seek to embody and give effect to governmental ambitions.94
More responsibilities necessitate more social programming; the social sector expands and diversifies while the supposed aim, social inclusion for people who sell sex, does not succeed. That the majority of social agents continue to spend time and energy battling over the correct feminist or moral position, or which policing regime to back, also maintains their own importance. Many social agents turn criticism from themselves by blaming the law, international bodies, the communications media, violent men – never themselves. This chapter argues that reflexivity is in order.
NOTES
1 Foucault’s biopower or biopolitics (1979b)
2 Rose and Miller 1992: 175
3 These have been called both regimes of government and regimes of practices (Dean 1999).
4 Clifford and Marcus 1986.
5 Osborne 1991; Estébanez 1998
6 See also Donzelot 1991: 172.
7 Hayward 1959: 269.‘La solidarité se développe en même temps que renaît l’espérance ... Jamais, peut-être, depuis l’établissment des ordres monastiques, on n’avait vu une telle ferveur d’union par le monde; il se fonde partout des Sociétés coopératives, des syndicats, des Ligues, des Compagnies, pour ne pas dire des Eglises. On n’a guère affaire en tous lieux qu’à des groupes au lieu de personnes.’ (Paul Desjardins [1896: 33], quoted in Hayward 1959: 267)
8 Valcárcel 1997
9 Mohanty 1991: 71
10 One hears about Iberoamérica, for example, as if it were a big happy family. When publicity for the 1992 celebration in Seville of the Columbian voyages of discovery described them as El encuentro de dos culturas (the meeting of two cultures), one comedian changed it to El Encontronazo (a meeting more like an annihilating collision for one side).
11 Agustín 2000b
12 Cruikshank 1994
13 Agustín 2005a
14 Cruikshank 1994: 31
15 Cruikshank 1993
16 Foucault 1988: 18
17 Speakers include proponents of abolitionism in international and European politics from the European Women’s Lobby, the Coalition Against Trafficking in Women, the UN, the Mouvement Pour l’Abolition de la Prostitution et de la Pornographie, the US Johns Schools, the University of North London, and the Swedish parliament.
18 Bourdieu 1979: 79
19 Attested to by four experts in the field of migration
20 For a report on a similar bitter public battle see Asturias 2000.
21 Becker 1963
22 Reforming women in 1830s NewYork aimed to ‘warn other God-fearing Christians of the pervasiveness of sexual sin and the need to oppose it’ (Rosenberg 1971: 566).
23 Wilson 1992: 28
24 Bilden 1999; Meulenbelt 2002
25 To take one example, Janice Raymond’s first book argues that sex/gender identity is fixed by the genitals at birth (Transsexual Empire 1979).
26 hooks 1984;Anzaldúa 1987; Spivak 1988; Mani 1990; Mohanty 1991
27 I am interested in the possible comparisons with ‘Born-Again’ Christianity. Evangelist churches in Appalachia are said to be ‘on fire’, and the charismatic passion of a l
eader often represents righteousness.
28 I was myself persecuted this way and lost employment; many other activists have reported similar stories and we have seen blacklists of people and groups distributed to government bodies. In nineteenth-century reformist battles, people attacked each other as ‘unrespectable’. This would not make sense nowadays, so other kinds of slurs have to be found.
29 MacKinnon 1990: 3-5
30 Celia Valiente characterises this as ‘institutional’ or ‘state’ feminism (1996). According to Valiente, institutional feminism has predominated in Spain since the death of Franco.
31 Personal communications from diverse groups
32 Rose and Miller 1992: 200
33 Personal communication from the present director. The NGO had previously produced a non-research-based, polemical report on ‘trafficking’ but carried out real research the second time.
34 GAATW 2000
35 Fundación Dolores Ibárruri 1998;ACSUR-Las Segovias 1999; Rempe 2001
36 Proyecto Esperanza 2001, 2002a, 2002b
37 Adoratrices 1983, 1987
38 Las Oblatas del Santísimo Redentor, las Adoratrices Esclavas del Santísimo Sacramento y de la Caridad, las Dominicas de la Presentación, Hermanas de Nuestra Señora de la Caridad del Buen Pastor, Hermanas Trinitarias, Hijas de la Inmaculada Concepción para el servicio doméstico y protección de la joven and Sirvientas de la Pasión. Secular institutions pursuing similar goals included the Patronato de Nuestra Señora de la Merced,Asociación Católica Internacional de Obras para la Protección de las Jóvenes, Villa Teresita and Cáritas. Some of these groups have changed their names during their history (Bada 1999).
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