Elizabeth Bernstein’s review of Sex at the Margins

Although most academic book reviews are not interesting to read, some of the 20-some academic reviews of Sex at the Margins are really worth the effort. Elizabeth Bernstein, of Temporarily Yours fame, published this review of my book in 2009 in Gender, Place and Culture (Vol 16, 3). I delay reprinting these things for copyright reasons, and then suddenly and arbitrarily I decide it’s been long enough, as in this case.
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Sex at the Margins, a new book by scholar-activist Laura Agustín, is equal parts social theory, cultural ethnography, and political polemic. In a slim yet richly narrated volume, Agustín offers a deft, lively, and challenging account of the politics which currently circulate around ‘prostitution’ and ‘trafficking’ within the context of global migration.

In Agustín’s book, the scare quotes that she places around these and other terms are essential to one of her chief aims: to denaturalize the taken-for-granted and widely disseminated assumptions of so-called ‘helpers’ and ‘experts’ (including NGOs, social workers and, of course, researchers) who are commonly tasked with shaping policies around people and practices that they do not understand. As Agustín notes, an entire rescue industry has evolved in the West which paints migrants (particularly female ones who exchange sex for money) in monochrome as hapless victims in need of protection and assistance, rather than multi-faceted individuals with ‘a range of interests, occupations, and desires . . . who count themselves as activists in any political or social cause’ (p. 6).

Agustín already has a large oeuvre of published writings on sexual labor and migration, which this book builds upon. As in her earlier work, Agustín’s perspective here is unique and refreshing, precisely because she so frequently and so sharply challenges the very terms of debate that so many other commentators have simply presumed – calling into question the clear dividing line between ‘migrants’ and ‘tourists’ for example, as well as the lines between ‘leisure’ and ‘work’ and between ‘sex tourism’ and other recreational as well as practical forms of travel. As Agustín writes, ‘it is impossible to separate this kind of tourism from others; many who seek out interludes of paid sex have other agendas, such as ecotourism or seeing cultural monuments. The activities exist everywhere, not only on sunny beaches’ (p. 82).

Perhaps most crucially, Agustín challenges us to think about why so many social commentators consider certain jobs, like domestic service, to be unproblematic while other jobs such as prostitution are consistently deemed to be unacceptable. Over and over again, Agustín urges her readers to look critically at the ever-present assumption that sex must always and inevitably constitute a singular category of experience.

Agustín is a highly effective and humorous writer, able to express analytic and political subtleties through carefully constructed turns of phrase that are a rarity in the social science literature. ‘In the sentimentalizing that occurs around “uprooting”’, she writes, ‘the myriad possibilities for being miserable at home are forgotten. Many people are fleeing from small-town prejudices, dead-end jobs, dangerous streets, and suffocating families. And some poorer people like the idea of being found beautiful or exotic abroad, exciting desire in others’ (pp. 45–6). Although she gleans much of her data for this book from secondary sources, she is skilful at reading others’ texts against the grain, as when she quotes a sex worker who is featured in the book Backstreets (a classic anti-prostitution text) in order to argue that the job of prostitution clearly entails more varied forms of emotional labor than ‘just sex’ (p. 61) (Høigard and Finstad 1986). Agustín’s analyses are also refreshing because she takes as fodder for critique not only the hegemonic ‘antitrafficking perspective’ that currently prevails in both liberal and conservative political circles, but also the more oppositional ‘sex-workers’ rights’ framework which is often reluctant to recognize why migrants might reject it: ‘The interests of migrants who have no right to work and are concentrating on accumulating as much money as they can as quickly as possible may conflict with the interests of Europeans who want to legitimize the industry. Since the most important fact conditioning migrants’ lives is having or not having residence and work permits, they often feel that proposals about sex worker rights are irrelevant to themselves’ (p. 73). Though Agustín’s discussions traverse a wide range of historical and theoretical texts and academic literatures (including Foucaultian and neo-Foucaultian approaches, queer theory, and postcolonial studies), her writing remains clear and accessible to a broad readership.

The second half of Agustín’s book offers a critical genealogy of women’s philanthropic and ‘helping projects’, a contribution that is of particular importance at a moment in which humanitarian efforts and a rapidly transnationalizing NGO sector are on the rise. Yet this is also the section of the book where a number of intriguing questions get raised which may be beyond the author’s capacity to settle. For example, while Agustín aptly demonstrates how humanitarian efforts have historically been an important force in enabling bourgeois women to leave the home (under the guise of endeavoring to assist the less fortunate) it is not clear what precisely is at stake for their present-day counterparts.

From Agustín’s account, we can certainly infer that contemporary efforts, no less than those of their historical predecessors, encapsulate an agenda that is more about the interests, desires, and power struggles of the helpers themselves than those of the purported class of ‘victims’. But what precisely are those interests, desires, and power struggles and how do they compare and contrast with those of prior centuries? ‘Feminist fundamentalists’ as well as feminist progressives (‘progresistas’ in this text) all come out badly here, and the inescapable conclusion of the book is that the best solutions to people’s problems might very well reside outside the social sector. But how, in that case, might problems that are social rather than individual in nature, and massive in scope, best be addressed? If the entire social sector were to vanish overnight, what other constellations of power would rush in to fill the void?

Despite my appreciation not only of the author’s bold upheaval of the fields of sex work and migration studies, but also of her critique of the inherent beneficence of ‘the social’, for this reader at least, these are questions that the text leaves pending. The brevity of the text and the easy, well-written quality of Agustín’s prose are deceptive: this is a tough, challenging, and necessary book.

Reference

Høigard, Cecilie, and Liv Finstad. 1986. Backstreets: Prostitution, money, and love. Philadelphia, PA: Pennsylvania State University Press.

Elizabeth Bernstein
Barnard College, Columbia University, New York, USA

– Laura Agustín, the Naked Anthropologist

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