39 Vázquez García 1998
40 ‘In 1909, of a total of 606 public welfare establishments, 422 were run by religious agents, the majority women. It should be noted that between 1851 and 1900, 64 new female congregations (orders) were born of which 44 were founded for benevolent ends’. (Varela and Álvarez-Uría 1989: 100)
41 Varela and Álvarez-Uría 1989: 100
42 Carasa Soto 1989
43 Nash 1989: 158
44 EMSI 2001
45 Kristeva 1991; Kymlicka 1995; and de Lucas 1996; see also Juliano 1993
46 This area overlaps that of ‘development’, in which first-world helpers travel to poorer countries to give aid and expertise, and it is similarly problematic. See Escobar 1995.
47 Tampep 1994, n/d; Associazione On the Road 1998; Signorelli and Treppete 2001. The usual example cited is that of the pregnant woman wanting an abortion who needs to pass through the decision-making and medical intervention process common in the west.
48 Estébanez 1990; Estébanez et al 1998; Llácer 1999; Belza 2000a-d; Castilla 2000
49 Hacking 1986: 35
50 Latour and Woolgar 1979; Rose and Miller 1992: 185
51 Sobo 1995;Van Kerkwijk 1995
52 ten Brummelhuis and Herdt 1995; Patton 1994; Parker and Aggleton 1999
53 Dean 1999: 167
54 Cuanter 1998; Bueno 1999; Sigma Dos 2001–2
55 Another question is whether and why people asked such questions consent to answer them, or answer them truthfully.
56 Browning 1998
57 Rose and Miller 1992: 182
58 Personal communications from the activists who originally invited me.
59 Andrea Dworkin theorised penetration by the penis of the vagina as imperialism (1987). Mary Daly said: ‘If life is to survive on this planet, there must be a decontamination of the Earth. I think this will be accompanied by an evolutionary process that will result in a drastic reduction of the population of males’ (in Bridle 1999).
60 I discuss the miserable nature of this tendency in Agustín 2001b.
61 Tamzali 1997: 17
62 Mouvement du Nid 1993
63 Dean 1999: 132
64 Mill [1859] quoted inValverde 1996: 360
65 Smith 1974; Harding 1987; Stone-Mediatore 2000
66 Spivak 1988
67 O’Rourke 1991
68 Hamilton 1997: 157
69 My own contribution to bringing out voices can be read in Agustín 2005a.
70 Hecht 1998
71 Lowman 1985: 513
72 Hecht 1998: 188
73 Ministerio de Sanidad y Consumo 2000
74 Díaz and González 1997: 173
75 Médicos 1998: 3
76 Médicos 1998: 23
77 Castillo 2000
78 Consejo de la Mujer 2000
79 Velasco 1999
80 Oso 1998; Ioé 2001
81 Bhabha1983: 23
82 Agence France Presse 2001
83 Jo Bindman (1996); Gail Pheterson (1989, 1996); Jo Doezema (2000); Marjan Wijers and Lap-Chew (1996); Don Kulick (1998); Lin Lean Lim (1998)
84 Agustín 2004b
85 Note the parallel here with the comment, above, that a pro-rights nun cannot be a nun.
86 I provided a list of names of potential speakers to the organiser, with their various specialities, but they did need to be approved by the funder, so the mystery is genuine.
87 Duggan and Hunter 1995: 40
88 Bell 1994; Chapkis 1997; Nagle 1997
89 Duggan 1995: 8
90 McNay 2000
91Abre la muralla; the reference being to the ancient walls that surrounded many Spanish cities
92 For example, Izquierda Unida Navarra 1999
93 Agustín 2000c
94 Rose and Miller call these ‘problematics of government’ (1992: 175).
7
PARTIAL TRUTHS
Belittling ideas about people who sell sex are perpetuated through police discrimination, media stereotypes, gender inequality, poverty, xenophobia and state policies on sex and migration. When I began my study, research already demonstrated the constructed nature of the ‘prostitution’ concept in the nineteenth century, so I set out to examine its reproduction in the present. I used the notion of a sex industry in order to embrace today’s proliferating forms and changing meanings about buying and selling sex, a complexity that contrasts sharply with the usual reductionism and that encompasses more acts, places and people. First I analysed two major areas, migration and services, where migrants who sell sex ought to be discussed and studied but rarely are.
The migration discourse relies on numerous questionable dichotomies: work and leisure, travel and settling, legal and illegal. The label migrant goes to poorer people who are conceived as workers with no other desires or projects, but when migrants are women who sell sex, they lose worker status and become ‘victims of trafficking’. The obsessive gaze on poverty and forced sex disqualifies working people’s participation in global flows, flexible labour, diaspora and trans-nationalism. Women are victimised more, but the migrant label is dis-empowering for men, too.
Within discourse on services, cleaning and caring are treated with some subtlety, but debate on the sale of sex focuses on ideologies and moralising, despite the efforts of a minority of writers. Selling and buying of sexual services remain undertheorised and are disqualified from proposals to improve regulation and benefits for service workers.
I found the roots of these exclusions in a phenomenon called the Rise of the Social, when a newly empowered bourgeoisie came to believe that their high level of evolution and sensibility qualified them to rehabilitate inferiors. Educated women carved out an employment sphere through discovering a mission to save the less fortunate, especially ‘prostitutes’, who were redefined as victims. Despite a charitable discourse, many ‘social’ jobs were disciplinary, locating those to be rescued where they could be watched, controlled and trained in obedience. Philanthropists and helpers had good intentions, but their projects benefited themselves rather than their less lucky sisters.
In field work, I studied individuals engaged in social projects aimed at assisting particular other people. Helping discourses describe objects needing help: the poor, the disadvantaged, victims, undocumented migrants, the socially excluded. Some social agents refer to offering services, others to saving and rescue, still others to empowerment. Whether related to HIV/AIDS prevention, rescue or rights, these projects are widely considered rational and benign, and those who carry them out as charitable and solidary. The goal of the field work was to look beyond social agents’ statements of missions, however, to reveal some of the tactics and practices involved in their everyday occupations. Most of these reproduce the ‘prostitute’ discourse and perpetuate the divide between helpers and helped, giving primacy to their own roles.
This is crucial: the social constructs its own objects in order to study, organise, manage, debate and serve them. Regimes may appear completely benign on the surface: medicine – healing, the alleviation of physical suffering; teaching – enlightenment of the ignorant; rehabilitating offenders; protecting the vulnerable from abuse; rescuing victims from violence; reducing risk and harm. But terms like harm, enlightenment, rehabilitation and so on are defined by would-be helpers. Those who are to be helped may well not define these terms in the same way, but their opinions are rarely taken into account.
In Europe, a fundamental contradiction accounts for the incoherent programming dedicated to migrants, as standard rhetoric on social inclusion and civil rights runs into exclusionary national immigration policies. Since so many migrants do not have permission to work legally or enjoy citizens’ rights outside their home countries, the single most widely voiced help they want is papers: whatever bureaucratic documents are required.Very few social agents are able to help more than a few individuals in this way even if they want to, and few projects dare make this kind of help overt or public: this is a tension between goals and results tha
t cannot be resolved.
Do I believe that those concerned with social justice and helping should sit on their hands and do nothing? Frequently asked this question, I always reply No: the desires of helpers, activists and theorists, whether utopian or pragmatic, are as valid as any other. I advocate neither nihilism nor indifference; to the contrary, I think constructive change is possible. The questions I pose to those desiring to help are: When embarking on a social project that concerns other people, how do you decide what your actions will be? Do you choose what is most rewarding to you personally? Do you try to find out what the objects of your help actually want? How do you accomplish that? What do you do if you find out that you cannot realistically provide what they desire? Or if you don’t like it? In other words, who defines social projects? Consider the conversation among experts in Brussels in 1851 on the lack of separate bedrooms in houses of the poor:
Ebrington: The separation of the sexes is indispensable for morality and decency. A minister said to me: ‘I have done all that I could, but the common bedroom has gotten the better of me’.
Ducpétiaux: In cases where this separation is not possible, can’t we achieve the same effect by suspending bedding from the ceiling for the children?
Gourlier: One would have to separate the hammocks from the rest of the room by a kind of curtain; but it would be there one day and be taken down the next.
Ramón de la Sagra: Would you prefer hammocks, or a bed where parents and children are all brought together?
Gourlier: Supposing that this separation were not achieved, then our efforts would come to nothing. The children would see the parents from their hammocks, and thus the requirements of decency would not be satisfied.1
Present-day exchanges on social problems belong to the same tradition: how to prevent young girls from becoming pregnant, everyone from eating too much, men from buying sex, women from selling it. The power to define problems, terms and solutions rests with social agents, who debate how to get Others to behave differently, even save them from themselves – the disadvantaged, unruly, victimised, unhappy, offensive, addicted. Feminists of all stripes are implicated in this assumption of Knowing Best and having a duty to find proper solutions. My critique, far from implying that there are no injustices or troubles to be solved, points to the constructed character of ‘social problems’. As constructions, they can change. No single objective reality or monolithic power exists; rather, we all participate in a web of dominations that are contingent on ourselves. For women’s movements, part of the change requires admitting
that not every incident and every species of women’s social and historical power merits our applause . . . In the case of female moral reform, the laudable ability to maneuver for social influence fell short of the feminist goal . . . The power of women’s networks, be it manifest in female moral reform or the New Right, deserves more than either congratulations or condemnation. It requires serious, critical attention to both its historical permutations and diverted feminist possibilities.2
Were government employees, political appointees, feminists, NGO spokespersons, academics and other social agents able to shed their certainty of knowing how everyone else should live, they might be able to dispense with neocolonialism, admit that agency can be expressed in a variety of ways, acknowledge their own desires, and accept that Europe’s dynamic, changing, risky diversity is here to stay. We would also benefit from moving on from the myth of a clear boundary between commercial sex and many normalised sexual activities. Leave behind certainties, listen to Others – leave home.3
NOTES
1 Donzelot 1979: 44
2 Ryan 1983: 184
3 The title of this book for many years was Leaving Home for Sex. I develop these ideas in Agustín 2005b; see also a special edition of Sexualities dedicated to the cultural study of commercial sex (2007).
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