A Migrant World of Services (or Aren’t Sexual Services Also Services?)
22 March 2011 in migration, sex work by | 6 comments | 
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Three people asked me about sex work as a service last week, so I thought I would re-run A Migrant World of Services , my first article published in an academic journal, in 2003. In it I tried to figure out why sexual services are thought to be so different from other kinds of services, why selling sex is disqualified by so many people who say it cannot be a job or a service. I looked critically at traditional economic concepts such as the distinction between productive and unproductive labour and the distinction between formal and informal employment sectors. These concepts are entirely arbitrary and produce oppression for no good reason. The majority of women’s work in homes is called unproductive (…) and probably the majority of women’s jobs outside the home are called informal, which means they get screwed both ways, to put it bluntly. The article also looks at the idea of emotional and caring work, central to many services.
A Migrant World of Services (pdf)
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.
–Laura Agustín, the Naked Anthropologist
Tags: feminism, informal economy, migration, services, sexuality
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