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Lawrence Block is a successful mainstream writer whose plotlines often include call girls and prostitution issues, in a routine, humane way. Matthew Scudder, the detective protagonist in one of Block’s series, has a long-term, friendly, sex-for-favours relationship with a New York call girl that eventually turns into marriage. Block doesn’t avoid portraying the dangers and problems inherent in prostitutes’ lives, but he gives us other sides of the picture, too. In Eight Million Ways to Die one woman explains her lifestyle. 

This is something different, she said. The johns who come here, they don’t think they’re johns. They think they’re friends of mine. They think I’m this spacey Village chick, which I am, and that they’re my friends, which they are. I mean, they come here to get laid, let’s face it, but they could get laid quicker and easier in a massage parlor, no muss no fuss no bother - dig? But they can come up here and take off their shoes and smoke a joint, and it’s a sort of a raunchy Village pad, I mean you have to climb three flights of stairs and then you roll around in a waterbed. I mean, I’m not a hooker. I’m a girlfriend. I don’t get paid. They give me money because I’ve got rent to pay and, you know, I’m a poor little Village chick who wants to make it as an actress and she’s never going to. Which I’m not, and I don’t care much, but I still take dancing lessons a couple mornings a week and I have an acting class every Thursday night, and I was in a showcase last May for three weekends. We did Ibsen, and do you believe that three of my johns came? (p 145)

I was living in the Village the year this was published, 1993, and my friend Mona was just like this character. Mona didn’t call herself a prostitute, and I didn’t either. Using a casual feminist analysis, we thought she was doing what a lot of wives do, in a careful, choosy way and without ceremony. In a context in which rents are sky-high and lots of people are trying to make it in demanding professions, Mona’s choice was sensible. She got to take her lessons and audition for parts, and, in the rare case that she got one, she was free to accept it.

Mona probably wouldn’t have been interested in a movement to advance sex workers’ rights. But that movement is interested in Mona, because she illustrates how sex-for-money can occur in casual, unproblematic ways that are part of normal life. If you recall the obsessive quality of hustling culture that John Rechy conveyed so well, this Village chick sounds serene - or spacey. But her easiness with her life is also common. In order to bring out more of these situations, I proposed a field called the cultural study of commercial sex. Scholarship without moralising.

Click here for the pdf of one of my favourite articles and the first I published in a purely academic journal. In it I try to figure out why sexual services are widely thought to be so different from other kinds of services. I look critically at several traditional economic concepts, such as productive v unproductive labour, emotional and caring work and how the construction of a formal employment sector disappears the informal sector, where so many women carry out their lives.

A Migrant World of Services

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. Read the rest of this entry »

In a battle of statistics and ‘evidence’ last week on the Guardian’s comment website, both sides claimed to have the correct, evidence-based analysis of the extent of trafficking in the UK. To my thinking, this is a fruitless debate. That is, I agree with the 27 academics arguing that figures have been extrapolated and manipulated shamelessly by fundamentalist-feminist politicians. I was one of the first people, many years ago, to say so and take the flak. But the painful conflict is not about numbers It’s about definitions, visions of the world, passions, sex and money. My contribution to this business has been, from the beginning, to complicate conversations that present black versus white versions of something that is very grey indeed. For those who would rush to legislation my vision is not satisfying because it says ‘Wait, stop, slow down. Until you comprehend the myriad elements present amongst people who leave home to go to another country and sell sex, you shouldn’t be passing laws about them. Of any kind.’ This is not useless ‘postmodern’ dithering. It is a position that says that until you understand the minimum about how people experience their own lives, you cannot responsibly take actions to help them.

Leaving Home for Sex is the first piece I published that defined what my work would be for the next few years. At the time it was unusual enough not to use the term prostitutes, but I wasn’t and still am not in a position to make a clear substitute with the term sex workers. Here I was trying to describe how selling sex can be an occupation that works out okay for migrant women without their taking on a definite identity based on it. This is also the piece that suggested that many migrant sex workers can be viewed as cosmopolitan subjects. The reference to ‘challenging place‘ derives from the editorial focus, for a journal issue, on women and place, the local and the global. I couldn’t fit migrant workers into that framework, and this was the result.

Challenging ‘Place’: Leaving Home for Sex

Laura Mª Agustín

Development, 45.1, Spring 2002, 110-117.

As soon as people migrate, there is a tendency to sentimentalise their home. Warm images are evoked of close families, simple household objects, rituals, songs, foods.[1] Many religious and national holidays, across cultures, reify such concepts of ‘home’ and ‘family’, usually through images of a folkoric past. In this context, migration is constructed as a last-ditch or desperate move and migrants as deprived of the place they ‘belong to’.Yet for millions of people all over the world, the birth and childhood place is not a feasible or desirable one in which to undertake more adult or ambitious projects, and moving to another place is a conventional—not traumatic—solution.

How does this decision to move take place? Earthquakes, armed conflict, disease, lack of food impel some people in situations that seem to involve little element of choice or any time to ‘process’ options: these people are sometimes called refugees. Single men’s decisions to travel are generally understood to evolve over time, the product of their ‘normal’ masculine ambition to get ahead through work: they are called migrants. Then there is the case of women who attempt to do the same.

Research in a marginal place: Geographies of exclusion

For a long time I worked in educación popular in various countries of Latin America and the Caribbean and with latino migrants in North America and Europe, in programmes dedicated to literacy, AIDS prevention and health promotion, preparation for migration and concientización (whose exact translation does not exist in English but combines something about consciousness-raising with something about ‘empowerment’). My concern about the vast difference between what first-world social agents (governmental, NGO workers, activists) say about women migrants and what women migrants say about themselves led me to study and testify on these questions. I have deliberately located myself on the border of both groups: the migrants and the social, in Europe, where the only jobs generally available to migrant women are in the domestic, ‘caring’ and sex industries. My work examines both the social and the migrants, so I spend time in brothels, bars, houses, offices, ‘outreach’ vehicles and ‘the street’, in its many versions. Data on what migrant women say come from my own research and others’ in many countries of the European Union; women have also been interviewed before or after migrating in Latin America, Eastern Europe, Asia and Africa. Data on what social agents say come from my own research with those who work on prostitution issues in those countries, including as evaluator of projects for the International Labour Office and the European Commission.

Although researchers and NGO personnel have been working with migrant prostitutes for nearly twenty years in Europe, publication of their findings remains outside mainstream press and journals. Most of the people who have met and talked with many migrant prostitutes are neither academics nor writers. ‘Outreach’ is conceptualised as distinct from ‘research’ and generally funded as HIV/AIDS prevention. This means that the published products of outreach research are generally limited to information on sexual health and practices; the other many kinds of information collected remain unpublished. Some of those who work in these projects have the chance to meet and exchange such information, but most do not. Recently, a new kind of researcher has entered the field, usually young academic women studying sociology or anthropology and working on migrations. These researchers want to do justice to the reality around them, which they recognise as consisting of as many migrant prostitutes as migrant domestic/‘caring’ workers. Most of these researchers do oral histories and some have begun to publish but it will be some time before such findings are recognised. Stigma works in all kinds of ways, among them the silencing of results that do not fit hegemonic discourses.[2] The mainstream complaint says ‘the data is not systematised’ or ‘there is no data.’ In my research, I seek out such ‘marginalised’ results.

Discourses of leaving home

It is striking that in the year 2001 women should so overwhelmingly be seen as pushed, obligated, coerced or forced when they leave home for the same reason as men: to get ahead through work. But so entrenched is the idea of women as forming an essential part of home if not actually being it themselves that they are routinely denied the agency to undertake a migration. So begins a pathetic image of innocent women torn from their homes, coerced into migrating, if not actually shanghaied or sold into slavery. This is the imagery that nowadays follows those who migrate to places where the only paid occupations available to them are in domestic service or sex work.[3] The ‘trafficking’ discourse relies on the assumption that it is better for women to stay at home rather than leave it and get into trouble; ‘trouble’ is seen as something that will irreparably damage women (who are grouped with children), while men are routinely expected to encounter and overcome it. But if one of our goals is to find a vision of globalisation in which poorer people are not constructed solely as victims, we need to recognise that strategies which seem less gratifying to some people may be successfully utilised by others. Therefore, this essay is not about whether domestic service can ever be pleasant or prostitution should be accepted as ‘work’.[4]

The bad beginnings or sad, frightening or even tragic moments of people’s migrations to work need not forever mark them nor define their whole life experience. Relative powerlessness at one stage of migration need not be permanent; poor people also enjoy ‘multiple identities’ that change over life-courses composed of different stages, needs and projects. By insisting on the instrumentality of migrating under less than ideal conditions, the existence of the worst experiences are not negated. The abuses of agents who sell ways to enter the first world extend to migrants who work as domestic servants and in sweatshops, maquiladoras, mines, agriculture, sex or other industries, whether they are women, men or transgender people. But these most tragic stories are fortunately not the reality for most migrants. Read the rest of this entry »

Having published the anti-rescue poster from Thailand yesterday, I’m following up with this. If you are allergic to academic writing or reading about history then you’ll probably skip it, but for those who wonder how this sort of rescuing started, there’s good material here. I published this article in an online journal’s special edition on governmentality, a concept that doesn’t have a more colloquial name (and that IS NOT THE SAME AS POWER). In my study of efforts to help and save prostitutes, I found that the ‘help’ offered was mostly control and that helpers benefited more than victims from the projects and programmes offered them. Governmentality theory described how this works, and I consider it the theory that explains much of our present-day lives, whether in the Nanny State or Mother Sweden or, indeed, the United Nations.

It’s tedious to convert the footnotes to ‘live’ status, but some day I’ll do it. For now you must go down and then back up manually if you want to read them along with the text.

rhizomes,10, spring 2005

Helping Women Who Sell Sex: The Construction of Benevolent Identities

Laura María Agustín

Abstract: Social interventions aimed at helping the group positioned as most needy in Europe today, migrant women who sell sex, can be understood by examining that time, 200 years ago, when ‘the prostitute’ was identified as needing to be saved. Before, there was no class of people who viewed their mission to be ‘helping’ working-class women who sold sex, but, during the ‘rise of the social,’ the figure of the ‘prostitute’ as pathetic victim came to dominate all other images. At the same time, demographic changes meant that many women needed and wanted to earn money and independence, yet no professions thought respectable were open to them. Simultaneous with the creation of the prostitute-victim, middle class women were identified as peculiarly capable of raising them up and showing the way to domesticity. These ‘helpers’ constructed a new identity and occupational sphere for themselves, one considered worthy and even prestigious. Nowadays, to question ‘helping’ projects often causes anger or dismissal. A genealogical approach, which shows how governmentality functioned in the past, is easier to accept, and may facilitate the taking of a reflexive attitude in the present.

This article addresses the governmental impulse to name particular commercial-sex practices as ‘prostitution’ and its practitioners as ‘prostitutes.’ Although it is conventional to refer to ‘the world’s oldest profession,’ the term prostitution has never described a clearly defined activity and was constructed by particular social actors at a specific time for specific reasons. [i] Within feminism, the phenomenon called prostitution is the centre of an intransigent debate about its meanings, one aspect of the conflict revolving around what words should be used to describe women who offer sexual services for sale: prostitute, sex worker, prostituted woman, victim of sexual exploitation. The use of one label or another locates the speaker on one or the other side of the debate, which essentially asks whether a woman who sells sex must by definition be considered a victim of others’ actions or whether she can enjoy a degree of agency herself in her commercial practice. In the prostitution discourse, those who sell are women and those who buy are men; it is a gendered concept, despite the enormous numbers of transgenders and men who sell sex and the transgenders and women who buy it. The anxiety to define and classify concerns the position of women, and this anxious debate should be seen as a governmental exercise carried out by social actors whose own identities are at stake. Academics and other theorists and advocates for one or another vision define themselves as good feminists or caring persons through their writing and advocacy. Being ‘right’ about how to envision women who sell sex is necessary to these identities, which explains the heated, repetitive nature of the debate. At the same time, for most of those who actually carry out the activity that excites so much interest and conflict, the debate feels far away and irrelevant. Read the rest of this entry »

Il y avait des footnotes dans cet essai, mais pendant le proces de convertir en endnotes les numeros sont perdus. Les endnotes sans numeros se trouvent au bout de la page.

Remettre en question la notion de ‘place’: Quitter son pays pour le sexe

ConStellation, 8, 1, 51-65.

Laura Mª Agustín

D’abord publié dans Development, 45.1, printemps 2002, dans le cadre du projet dirigé par la Société de Développement International (Rome) sur ‘La Femme et les conséquences politiques de sa place’.

Dès que les gens migrent, ils ont tendance à songer à l’endroit où ils sont nés sentimentalement. Ils évoquent de chaleureuses images de leurs proches, des objets de la vie de tous les jours, de leurs rituels, des chansons, de la nourriture. Dans toutes les cultures, beaucoup de fêtes religieuses et nationales réifient certains concepts comme le ‘chez soi’ et la ‘famille’, habituellement par des images d’un passé folklorique. Dans ce contexte, la migration est perçue comme étant un ultime recours, un déplacement désespéré et les déplacés comme étant privés de l’endroit auquel ils ‘appartiennent’. Pourtant pour des millions d’individus tout autour de la Terre, il n’est ni réaliste, ni désirable d’entreprendre des projets plus adultes ou plus ambitieux au lieu de naissance; et changer de lieu de vie est une solution conventionnelle — pas traumatisante.

Comment cette décision de se déplacer se produit-elle? Les tremblements de terre, les conflits armés, les maladies ou le manque de nourriture contraignent certaines personnes, ne leur laissant pas beaucoup de choix ni de temps pour considérer leurs options: ces gens sont parfois appelés des réfugiés. Quand un homme célibataire décide de voyager, son geste est généralement vu comme une évolution entendue, le produit de son ambition ‘normale’ et masculine d’améliorer son lot par son travail: on l’appelle un migrant. Puis, il y a le cas de la femme qui tente d’en faire autant. Read the rest of this entry »