Tag Archives: culture

Interviews by Johnny Lemuria and Maggie McNeill

Screen Shot 2017-04-28 at 20.38.09Two bloggers have interviewed me on the occasion of publishing a new book. First I’ll show you Maggie McNeill’s, because it’s written; after that I’ll give the link to Johnny Lemuria’s listenable podcast interview.The Honest Courtesan has kindly given permission for me to reproduce the full conversation here.

Dr. Laura Agustín, author of the blog The Naked Anthropologist and the book Sex at the Margins, the seminal work on “sex trafficking” hysteria (in which she coined the term “rescue industry”), has written The Three-Headed Dog, a novel dramatizing the problems faced by migrants. It’s another way of introducing readers to the issues the “sex trafficking” paradigm attempts to paper over, which Dr. Agustín has studied for over 20 years and understands in a way very few others do. I recently read the novel, and Dr. Agustín graciously agreed to answer some questions about it.

MM: Sex at the Margins has been and continues to be a work of major importance to the sex workers’ rights movement; I know it really helped me to shake off the dualistic thinking about “willing” vs “coerced” sex work, and it’s invaluable in getting people to look at their preconceptions around why people (especially women) leave their original home countries to work. So why did you decide to write fiction instead of a 10th-anniversary edition?

LA: The essence of Sex at the Margins doesn’t need updating, by which I mean women’s migration to work as maids or to sell sex, the use of smugglers, the rise of the Rescue Industry. Someone else can document the growth and proliferation of that last, if they can stomach it, but the core ideas haven’t changed. I wanted to write stories to reach people who don’t read books like Sex at the Margins and who only hear about the issues from mainstream media reports. The Three-Headed Dog provides a way to learn about social realities and be gripped by stories at the same time.

MM: I write fiction myself, so that makes sense to me. But what made you choose the crime genre? Why not do a “straight” novel?

LA: Crime seemed like the right frame, because everyone thinks smuggling and undocumented migration are at least technically crimes – leaving the idea of trafficking out of it. I am a fan of some kinds of mystery writing, and the formula of a detective who searches for missing migrants provides infinite opportunities for all sorts of stories and characters.

MM: I think you just started to answer one of my questions! At the end of the book several questions are unresolved, and I would have liked to know more about Félix, the detective. Is this the first of a series?

LA: I’ve got too many stories to tell for one book. The Dog was getting long and complicated, so I decided to make it the first in a series. In the detective genre it’s common for some questions to remain dangling, and readers know they can learn more in the next installment. If I’d been writing 150 years ago I might have done weekly installments in a magazine, as Dickens did with The Pickwick Papers. In the next book, which I’ve started, Félix’s search takes her to Calais and London.

MM: I was very intrigued by Félix, and it seems to me that she might be based on you. Would I be correct? And are any other characters based on people you know?

LA: The characters created themselves in my mind out of the many thousands of migrant friends and acquaintances I’ve had in my life. Including myself. But they sprang forth and told me who they were. I identify with much of Félix’s character, but I identify with much of the smuggler Sarac’s character, too.

MM: I like that Félix has some history of sex work, and that she still seems to be comfortable taking gigs that dip into the edges of sex work.

LA: She certainly was a sex worker during the European tour she did when younger with her friend Leila, who now lives in Tangier. I think she still takes sexwork gigs when it suits her. I expect she’ll tell us more about that in the future.

MM: Not many novels have well-developed and nuanced sex workers as major characters, and when we appear as minor characters we’re mostly there to be rescued or murdered. But these characters, even the minor ones, are much more developed than that. There was one character, Marina, who was clearly intending to do sex work, but what about the others? I couldn’t be sure.

LA: This is Marina’s second time sexworking in Spain. Félix looks for two other characters in spas (massage joints) in Madrid, and one of those is adamant about not intending to be a maid. They’re Latin Americans who belong to a long tradition of working in indoor businesses like bars and flats, or sometimes in the street. They arrive with contacts and some prior knowledge of what they’re getting into, so it’s a serious problem when the smuggler makes them de-plane in Madrid instead of Málaga. Of the other characters, Promise, the Nigerian, planned to sexwork in the street, and Eddy, the boy who goes missing, doesn’t intend anything but is moving in that direction.

MM: It seemed to me that their ending up in Madrid was a very big issue, even beyond the lack of connections. Is Madrid so very different from Málaga?

LA: Yes, Madrid is a harder place, a capital city and centre of echt-Spanish culture. Málaga is on the Costa del Sol, crossroads for many kinds of migration, smuggling, tourism and crime. It’s a long stretch of coast that ends in a point only 32 kilometres from Africa across the Mediterranean Sea. Nowadays many non-Spanish Europeans from colder climates have homes there in quasi-closed communities. The coast is by no means a piece of cake, but it’s not a cold, self-important northern city. Personally I feel a great sense of history there and lived in Granada during the years I worked on Sex at the Margins.

MM: So it’s a good place to find jobs that aren’t strictly legal?

LA: This is about informal economies that exist in parallel to formal ones (which means they’re included in government accounting). Informal economies are even larger than the formal in some developing countries. In Spain it is not illegal to sell sex, but undocumented migrants have no right to be in the country at all, much less work there. The same is true when they get jobs in restaurant kitchens, on construction sites, picking fruit and working as maids and cleaners. The informal economy rolls along, the jobs are available and migrants are more or less glad to get them despite the clandestinity.

MM: And as you discussed in Sex at the Margins, it’s this informal economy that’s depicted as “trafficking” nowadays, even when there’s no coercion involved per se.

LA: The group that arrives by plane at the beginning are undocumented migrants. They’ve got papers to show at the border: passports and tourist visas. Fakery was involved, and these young people are planning to get paid work, so they’re going to misuse the visas. A guy who’s part of the smuggling travels with them. The project is based on the migrants getting jobs and income so they can pay back debts they or their families took on when they bought travel-agency-type services (known in crime-circles as smuggling). Technically they’re all committing crimes, but to the migrants they feel like minor crimes, given the well-known availability of jobs when they arrive. Everyone knows people who’ve done it and sent money home. Do smugglers sometimes resort to nefarious practices? Of course; it’s an unregulated economy. But if smugglers want to stay in the business they guard their reputation. Word spreads.

MM: I’m sure the rescue industry folks would find fault with the fact that the book isn’t about people “rescuing” these migrants from their smugglers.

LA: I wrote this book out of love, not as polemic. I’d have to get paid very well to devote myself for long to analysing moral entrepreneurship; I don’t find crusader-figures interesting. I don’t see the world in black-and-white, I like ambiguity and shifting ground. In Félix’s interior life, questions of helping and saving play a part, but she refuses the rescuer-role.

MM: And really, even the villains aren’t the mustache-twirling cardboard characters so beloved by those who promote the “sex trafficking” narrative. I’m thinking about Sarac, the smuggler, and Carlos, the sex club owner.

LA: The smugglers are squabbling amongst themselves and not very appealing, but they aren’t monsters or driving anyone into bondage. They charge for their services. Sarac worked as a soldier/mercenary, now does “security” and is involved in people-smuggling. He wants to do something new, but not pimping. Carlos operates hostess clubs in Madrid. Those are not illegal, but he may employ illegal migrants. He’s part of an established tradition, and he makes good money on the women’s work.

MM: I think American readers have some very confused ideas about the sex industry and migration in Europe. Do you think The Three-Headed Dog will appeal to them and help clear up some of those misconceptions?

LA: Undocumented migration and working in underground economies are worldwide phenomena no matter what local culture or national laws prevail. Ways to earn money by selling sex vary in the details, but sex workers recognise each other across national borders and talk about the same problems and solutions everywhere. Sometimes places where laws are uglier provide more opportunities. Since the migrants are working illegally in Spain they have a lot in common with all sex workers in the USA, right?

MM: True; all of us are illegal here, whether we were born here or not. Is there anything else you’d like to tell the readers that I haven’t thought of?

LA: Yes, I want to point out that even if you don’t own a Kindle, you can still buy the Kindle version of The Three-Headed Dog and download a free reading app right there. And you can read more about sex industry jobs here at the Naked Anthropologist.

Next: The Lemurian Hour podcast conducted via Skype audio.

Screen Shot 2017-05-02 at 13.33.00This is a project of author and artist John L Robinson, aka Johnny Lemuria, whose introduction says This is a decadent podcast; if you can’t handle that you should go elsewhere. Actually I didn’t say anything decadent, though some abolitionists think I’m one of Satan’s handmaidens.

Or listen here:

Thank you, Johnny and Maggie. Anyone else interested in an interview? Contact me on the form to your right.

–Laura Agustín, the Naked Anthropologist

Who is the Three-Headed Dog? Surveillance and migration

patinir07745cc7-7700-4981-99f6-4117beda5bccCharon Crossing the River Styx was painted by Joachim Patinir between 1515 and 1524. A reproduction hangs on the wall of a bar in Málaga’s centro histórico where the detective protagonist of The Three-Headed Dog is often found. The original hangs in the Prado, which also plays a part in the book. The soul in the boat is shown in mid-voyage, at the point where a choice must be made between going to paradise (the hard route) or to Hell (the easy one).

Screen Shot 2016-07-15 at 16.12.48In Greek mythology the dog Cerberus guards the gates of Hell for his master Hades, god of the underworld. One might expect the dog to trouble only souls trying to escape, but there is ambiguity in some sources about what he does to those trying to get in. Once you have a border you have to patrol it in both directions. Cerberus is Surveillance.

surveillancecameraCerberus has three heads. Some contemporary surveillance mechanisms don’t look so different. In the present day he is fences, walls, CCTV, infrared sensors, helicopters, planes and speedboats. Guards with binoculars and machine guns, checkpoints with Interpol databases, detention centres and sometimes, yes, sniffer dogs.

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Surveillance against strangers must be one of the oldest human activities, when borders might indicate the territory of a family clan. Nowadays most controls don’t summarily shoot down intruders on sight, but the camps they get put into are sometimes a kind of living death.

downloadGetting around Cerberus is the most urgent task of undocumented migrants. In The Three-Headed Dog a group of youngsters from the Caribbean have to get through border control with faked papers at Madrid’s Barajas Airport. The smuggler advises them how to finesse questions posed by border agents. Once past that point a long series of challenges begin as the migrants start trying to insert themselves into local life without drawing the notice of interior guard dogs. The border is never permanently crossed.

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Laura Agustín, The Naked Anthropologist

Interview with Radio Ava, sexworker radio in London

Screen Shot 2017-03-12 at 23.48.44In February I was interviewed by RadioAva (DIY sexworker radio, a project of x:talk) about The Three-Headed Dog. When I arrived at the pub in mid-afternoon a fight was blowing up in the back room, glass splintering and chairs crashing to the floor. Soon the place was full of cops and two clutches of drunken young white men were being moved out the door while shouting out epithets: Knackers! Travellers! The perfect setting for an interview.

barroombrawl1In this interview I talk about creativity and pleasure, about my own likes and dislikes. The interviewer describes her feelings about the characters, surprising me by saying she found sexworker Marina ‘too perfect’. Here I confess to identifying not only with the detective narrator, Félix, but also with a villain of the story called Sarac. What are they supposed to do? I say, referring to men reared in tribal and national wars who now may turn to people-smuggling. I talk about cultural relativism as a way of understanding lives unlike our own.

I hear my self in this interview. I hear myself saying more than once I wanted to put it out there, referring to a sense of urgency, that stories of migrants who sell sex are so rarely heard that The Three-Headed Dog can exist as an historical document to be discovered by future historians – like this interview, which is located on the wonderfully-named mixcloud.

Screen Shot 2017-03-13 at 00.54.34Listen to it while doing some chore. Note the bar-clinking in the background. On the same show: Pandora Blake and the ECP. Good company. Thank you, all.

Note: there are musical interludes interspersed with segments of me and Carmen talking. They are all migration-inspired and most were provided by me. They aren’t identified on the podcast, so I’ll do a separate piece about them soon.

-Laura Agustín, the Naked Anthropologist

Reader reviews of The Three-Headed Dog

womanblur2leiterReviewers of The Three-Headed Dog have been showing they get it: The detective-narrator is a woman with a complicated and conflicted interior life. It’s about how migrants sneak across borders and how they get along. These are lives usually mentioned, if at all, under law-and-order headlines: people-smuggling, the underworld, human trafficking, crime. Or desperation, exploitation, abuse. It’s noir – maybe some kind of ‘crossover’.

I published this novel myself on Amazon. Many people still think bricks-and-mortar publishing houses filled with employees are necessary to prove books are real and good. My own history with these houses goes back to the 1970s, and I don’t agree. There is snobbism about self-publishing and prejudices against ebooks: I don’t have those; I’m pleased to be in charge.

What interests me are conversations with folks who read the book, whether they loved it or not. A few of them have left reviews on the book’s Amazon and Goodreads pages.

Screen Shot 2017-03-10 at 16.38.48Hillerman, Mankell and Block: I could hardly be more pleased about the detective comparisons. But for a reader to compare Félix’s haunted interior life to Elena Ferrante really takes the cake. The detective’s ethical sense, how to weigh up conflicts, is for me an important element of noir, however terse. The private eye, unlike the cop, gets to decide what to do with being tied to laws or a strict code of behaviour (doing things ‘by the book’.)

Screen Shot 2017-03-10 at 16.29.59Interesting to see the world I write about as impenetrable and confirms it was right to write about it. I like dives, too. This is an excerpt from a longer review.

Screen Shot 2017-03-10 at 16.43.23There is a mention of the word trafficking in the book, by a character who is neither stupid nor bad but simply parrots stereotypes presented in the media. The book is about people-smuggling or undocumented migrants.

Screen Shot 2017-03-10 at 16.46.24This review and others like it mean a lot to me because it comes from someone open to learning about underground lives that exist at the edge of most people’s vision. Overhearing phone conversations on the bus or in the corner shop, most people find out something about undocumented migrants, but, given media disinterest or silence, never find out more.

Screen Shot 2017-03-10 at 16.47.36When I read the comparison with Miss Smilla’s Feeling for Snow – also known as Smilla’s Sense of Snow – I was happy. It’s one of very few novels I know in which imperialism plays a big part. Smilla is a half-Greenlander in Denmark, not an undocumented migrant, but as aware of two different worlds as anyone could possibly be. A book that couldn’t have been written by anyone else: What a compliment.

susiedogScreen Shot 2017-03-10 at 16.39.24Gripping is a great tribute, and a few others have said the Dog is a page-turner (funny when swishing on a screen). They mean the reader is hooked on the story and wants to know what comes next. That’s not easy to achieve!

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Yes, there’ll be more. Working on it now. It starts in Spain and travels to England via Calais.

–Laura Agustín, the Naked Anthropologist

Sexwork and migration fiction (4): To go with sex tourists or smugglers?

urlOf all the characters destined to work selling sex in The Three-Headed Dog, Marina has the most experience. Now in Spain for the second time, Marina comes from a backwater of la República Dominicana. Sharing the island of La Española (Hispaniola) with Haití, Dominicana is a poor, weakly governed nation popular with tourists on tight budgets. Many of these are called sex tourists by critics, meaning a central purpose for their visit is to buy sex and romance with natives, in a typically tropical setting. Marina reflects on how she got started in her present career.

d5d43c2ca5485db793354630fd176c90… if nice trees and flowers were enough to live on she would never have left home. She would have made do with slaving away as shop assistant in her aunt’s colmado or as a maid to some pretentious lady in the city, either way for pennies. Instead she took a job as hostess in a beer-hall, and her mother sobbed like it was the end of the world. It was okay for a while, but Marina was always looking to better herself.

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http://www.hookstrapped.com/peter-brian-schafer-portfolios

She got taken on at an open-air nightclub in a larger town. It had twenty rickety tables, strings of coloured lights and loud music equipment. There was a platform made of two-by-fours where a single spot was turned on women dancing naked. It was close enough to beaches that tourists rode up on flimsy motoconchos, guys of all different nationalities, some who could barely stay on the bike. Motos with five Dominican kids would pass them roaring with laughter. Marina learned which men danced the best, which were most polite, and which gave the biggest tips.

scene_typique_ambatalok_nosy_tnThe craziest thing was the lines they spun! Come with me to Berlin, you’ll be a queen. There’s no one like you in my hometown. You’re a real woman, like we don’t have anymore. What a beautiful colour your skin is. Foreigners said island girls were sweet and willing to do anything they were asked. She fell for it only once, but the Romeo gave away his plan when he let slip how nice she would be able to make his apartment. If she wanted to be someone’s wife, she could have stayed home.

Marina wants to strike out on her own, not tied from the outset to anyone who believes he has the right to control her. She wants to go abroad like other women she has known; traditions to go to Europe are old in her country. She chooses to buy papers and services from small-time ‘travel agents’. On her second trip to Spain things go wrong, but not because of smugglers’ evil intentions against her; rather they are competing with each other for pieces of the smuggling pie.

Discussions of the fate of women like Marina generally talk over their heads. The wrongness of sex tourism and lack of options for females under patriarchy are the topic, while the pragmatic decisions women make in the here and now are sidelined. In The Three-Headed Dog, as in Sex at the Margins, their actions are the story.

hqdefaultMany times, their goal is to make enough money to build a simple house back home. Other times, they decide to try to stay abroad.

Laura Agustín, the Naked Anthropologist

Being and being reviewed: Books as pieces of self

600Being and being reviewed is a play on the English title of Kajsa Ekis Ekman’s book Varat och varan: Being and being bought. Hers is an ideological diatribe on the commodification of women who sell sex and surrogate mothers, full of sound and fury, as well as lies, including one or two about me. It makes women’s bodies and selves into transcendental things.

croppedLAhandsTo put a book out into the world is to say I did this, take it and like it. It’s a kind of commodification, whether you give it away or give it a price. Strict marxists might insist the book is the product of labour and that one is only commodifying that. But I think it’s ambiguous, and I’m not worried about commodifying myself or pieces of myself. I don’t think I’ll lose my humanity by opening private places up to strangers.

Screen Shot 2017-02-13 at 00.19.01Olly ‘gives away his degree’ via book commentary on his youtube channel Philosophy Tube. (I might say he commodifies himself.) In a recent broadcast he reviewed Sex at the Margins. Nine years after publication, there it is, being reviewed. And guess who is reviewed right after me? Hannah Arendt. (See how I muddled the boundary between the book and myself?) You can hear it at about minute 3.20.

Here’s the thing: Olly describes the book in a way that doesn’t perfectly match what I’d say myself. If I were in the room with him I’d argue. But it’s his reading, his experience, and he’s already done with it. The book is an object in the world, not mine to control. It’s a piece of me that others interpret through their own selves.

Screen Shot 2017-02-14 at 13.32.13Then my new book Three-Headed Dog was reviewed recently by Noah Berlatsky of The Hooded Utilitarian.  A Novel Without Borders is a good title and it’s a good review in more than one sense. Noah understands Eddy, for one thing:

Eddy isn’t the typical victim of sex trafficking narratives; he’s not a girl, for one thing, and he’s probably gay. He’s not the typical young person you see in novels, either—he’s neither precocious, nor chosen, nor ambitious. His goals are mostly short term; warmer clothes, a better haircut, a job. Short-sighted, without many connections, it’s likely he’ll be taken advantage of, in big ways or small—but then, being taken advantage of is the fate of most people.

tree-branch-shadows-on-snowThe novel-without-borders idea refers to the difficulty of fitting the book into contemporary genre-categories. Amazon and other book dealers make one choose them (and then they fudge the choices). Noah argues that noir needs ‘mistrust, deceit, dramatic betrayals’. For me, the first two are part of all fiction and the third forms an overt part of The Dog’s plot. Noir’s defining feature is moral ambiguity, and my choosing it as genre was easy and natural to me. I’d argue with him if we were having a drink in a bar. But my own conviction doesn’t trump any reader’s experience.

From Customer Reviews on the Amazon page:

Laura Agustin has created an intriguing character in Felix and I hope to encounter her again.

I loved reading the tale of Felix. Can’t wait for more.

Both these reviewers seem to know there is likely to be more: that is the nature of detective fiction. In some ways those are the most important reviews of all. If you read The Three-Headed Dog, leave a line or two of comment on the Amazon page. Doing that makes the algorithm at Amazon pick up and show it in searches for non-insiders looking for books about migration, trafficking, smuggling and above all borders. If you enjoy Goodreads review it there.

borderoceanAnd speaking of algorithms, the way to avoid them in terms of seeing posts on this blog is to subscribe by email or RSS. On facebook and twitter you’re at the mercy of time and the robots.

Laura Agustín, The Naked Anthropologist

Sexwork and migration fiction, part 3: Location and nation

two-women-sitting-at-a-bar-1902.jpg!LargeEvery reviewer has to mention a different defect in the book under review: That was my conclusion when reviews of Sex at the Margins were proliferating. Some of the defects pointed to said more about the reviewer than the book, like the English academic who dismissed the research because it had taken place in Spain. I laughed a lot at that one. If you’re interested in migration and globalisation then nation becomes a funny category.

The other day I was interviewed by an investigator interested in undocumented migration in The Three-Headed Dog. We met in a blue bar and drank from stemmed glasses. She agreed I may publish a few points of our conversation, on the subject of place, location and nationality. Her name is Zelda.

mapZelda: Why did you situate The Three-Headed Dog in Spain? Is the plot special to the Costa del Sol? Or could it be moved to Britain or Italy or the state of Florida?

Laura: Spain has long been part of my own life and I lived in Granada while I was reading and doing fieldwork for and then writing what became Sex at the Margins. The Costa del Sol is one of the most fluid and confusing places I know, full of every sort of human mobility, and therefore appealing to me.

The stories in The Dog could be moved in terms of every important concept: How migrants reason and feel about what they’re doing and the sorts of networks they live in. The way they have to look for jobs and housing, the existing in and crossing out of social margins. Those are universal dynamics for undocumented migrants anywhere in the world. But margins feel different according to the terrain and the historical moment. migrantes-coahuiIf the scene were set elsewhere plot-mechanics would vary according to local laws and policing, cultural ideas about sex and women’s mobility, the availability of black-market jobs and the ease of getting out if things go wrong. If there is a coast, boats are an option. Sometimes trains are easily hopped.

Zelda: What about the migrants, are they interchangeable? Could the group of Dominicans on the airplane just as well be Chinese? What about the young Romanian smuggler, could he be Greek? Could Polish Tanya be French? Does anything about nationality matter?

Laura: The human responses portrayed are not unique to any nationality, but some of the mechanics of migration would have to change if you were to make arbitrary switches. For example, Tanya might humanly be French, but she’d be less likely to set up a cleaning service in Madrid. Or the Dominican club-owner, Carlos: If he were Chinese he might certainly run a hostess-bar, but it would be in another part of Madrid, and have a different style, perhaps with gambling, and would the protagonist Félix plausibly have become his close friend?

125969_day labor_GMK_The key to making the story work in any particular place is knowing how migrant networks function and the patterns that have developed based on (1) the possibility of getting visas to other countries and (2) colonial and other dependency/linguistic histories that lead to family relationships. For instance, Brazilians have visa-freedom to travel to Portugal, which is part of Schengen territory, meaning they cross easily into Spain and rest of Europe. Dominican women have a long history as maids and sex workers in Spain – over generations. These are migrations that give meaning to the word transnational.

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Zelda: Can migrant women become sex workers anywhere, whether there’s some kind of regulated sex work or not?

Laura: The two jobs available everywhere to undocumented women are maiding and sex work, but if the plot were picked up and put down in Hong Kong, say, then adjustments would be needed to the kinds of sex businesses where migrants are likely to get employed. And to take up any kind of sex work without knowing the local context and laws, without knowing a few people on the inside, who can give informed advice, is highly risky. This is why there are roles for ‘protectors’ in the migration process, and most of them are not monsters. The plot would have to reflect this.

Zelda: What about racism? Aren’t some countries worse in that way? Wouldn’t that make a big difference to where you set the story?

imgresLaura: In the book, several of the Dominicans reflect on racial hierarchies that affect them in Spain, including those that give some dark ethnicities more cachet than their own. All cultures have ideas and prejudices about Others. But also mixing and hybridity are everywhere, even if more in some places than in others. The consequences are always the same: natives feel threatened, some promote xenophobia, governments talk about tightening borders. But there are colonial histories that can make natives feel that some foreigners are closer to themselves than others, whether their skin is blacker or not.

Zelda: So colonial things, like language. Dominicans who go to Spain already speak Spanish, which has to be an advantage, right? What would happen if you changed the group on the plane to Chinese? Isn’t the whole thing much harder if it’s a new language?

20130516-3L: Not as much as you imagine. Félix visits a Chinese migrant who runs a big variety store and who stands up well to extortion attempts because she has community behind her. Migrants come via networks whether they are legal or not. And migrants from different communities often communicate more easily with each other in the new language, because they all speak more slowly or with a common vocabulary. Then, too, sharing language can work the other way: when Dominicans speak, Spanish listeners know where they are from and bring negative cultural baggage to bear.

Z: The Costa del Sol has all kinds of ethnic groups in it, but you mention places like a Danish church and the urbanizaciones where everyone living there is the same nationality. Don’t a lot of migrants stick to their own kind? Isn’t there insularity among other Europeans who have made second homes on the coast?

CDN-Annons-tidning-2014-09-Svenska-400Laura: There is, but not forever for everyone. Europeans trying to settle and start businesses feel ambivalent about what they’ve left behind and anxious to hold onto their national selves. You see signs in Swedish or German, shops with food items imported so other cuisines can be maintained. But over time things loosen up for a lot of people, they become more curious and less fearful, they make new connections and cultures blend. And for some people, being in a mixed place with a shifting sense of belonging becomes interesting. They don’t find it so easy to answer the question Where are you from? It’s more about This is where I am now. I wrote about this kind of cosmopolitanism among sex workers in Leaving Home for Sex, many years ago.

For more about The Three-Headed Dog, a noir/mystery novel on sexwork and migration, see
Sexwork and Migration Mystery
Melodrama and Archetypes
Jobs in the Sex Industry

-Laura Agustín, the Naked Anthropologist

Sexwork and migration fiction, part 2 : Jobs in the sex industry

1257051160_850215_0000000000_sumario_normalI wrote The Three-Headed Dog to get away from the straitjacket of a debate where one side is always moralising and the other reacting with rational debunking. In terms of academic discourse I long ago proposed The Cultural Study of Commercial Sex, with the aim of expanding topics of interest from a narrow (but still vague) idea about prostitution, with its attendant moral baggage.

I don’t know how long improvements might take, either to the debates or academic production, but I stick by my assessment of many years back that In 200 years the situation has not improved for women who sell sex, but the social sector to help them has grown exponentially. I mention 200 years because that is when the contemporary idea of prostitutes as victims needing to be saved began (I did historical research for Sex at the Margins).

Most people never hear or see useful, complicated or interesting information about jobs in the sex industry. They don’t realise how common it is to work there; their friends that do don’t tell them. How can they learn anything new if all they see are ‘debates’ and screamy trafficking headlines? Reading fiction is one possible way.

In The Three-Headed Dog the search for a missing boy takes the detective-narrator into a number of sex-industry businesses.

1273511051_0* Bars with hostesses and beds available in back: Félix, the narrator, goes dancing with Carlos, who runs several hostess bars in Madrid. At the end of the night Félix persuades him to take her to one, despite his conviction that she is the wrong kind of woman to be there.

* Residential flats where a number of sex workers are available at the same time to clients who make appointments. Marina has worked in the past in flats in Torremolinos, but inexperienced managers have taken over, causing havoc.

Club_de_alterne_40064* Large sex clubs on highways where workers live for a few weeks at a time: Marina decides to go on this circuit in northwest Spain after several bad experiences in flats.

* Bars with dark rooms for sex and pick-ups: Eddy gets a job washing dishes in a gay bar in Madrid.

* Spas/massage parlours: Businesses of varying quality and style where sex is on the menu alongside health treatments. Félix investigates two in Madrid.

* Cruise ships: Marina considers taking a stewardess job.

DSC07713* Streets: Promise works with a few friends close to Málaga’s centro histórico. Eddy makes friends with a rent-boy who works in Madrid’s Puerta del Sol.

These are of course not all possible venues; I did a basic typology some years back of the sex industry in Spain.

SUCESOS-INMIGRACION-PROSTITUCIONNone of the characters talks about doing completely independent escorting. That’s not significant, just not part of this particular story. Most here are migrants who have gotten into debt paying smugglers and false-papers makers and who expect to work in businesses where managers organise a workplace and workers do shifts. We don’t know the details about anyone’s street-work.

22606957325_39f94c53cb_bThe sex industry is represented in other ways in the book. Félix’s friend Carlos has long experience employing chicas de alterne, but another migrant man wants to start a smuggling and pimping network. Eddy takes up with a ‘sex tourist’ (perhaps, it’s a pretty useless concept). There are sentimental clients and an outreach worker angry about disruption to provision of health services in flats caused by managers’ turf wars. There are various employees in the spas, and migrant maids considering going into sex work. A couple of men are seen arranging photos of women on a webpage in a cybercafé.

For readers steeped in reductionist media discourse to read a story where these are the characters and jobs might help understand better. For more on why I wrote a piece of noir on sexwork and migration, see
Sexwork and Migration Mystery and
Melodrama and Archetypes.

-Laura Agustín, The Naked Anthropologist

Migrants in novels: James Ellroy, The Black Dahlia

imageIt wasn’t always all called trafficking. Whether or not migrants were officially or sentimentally designated refugees, they were portrayed as taking action. Getting screwed – certainly – but that’s another thing. If your goal is to get over the border without official documents, then you make pay-offs.

Migration has long been included as part of normal, if unjust, social life, in many works of literature. In James Ellroy’s 1987 The Black Dahlia the Los Angeles cop-narrator heads south from Tijuana looking for his lost partner. The year is 1947.

Car traffic was scarce, with a steady trickle of pedestrians walking north: whole families lugging suitcases, looking scared and happy at the same time, like they didn’t know what their dash across the border would bring them, but it had to be better than sucking Mexican dirt and tourist chump change.

Approaching Ensenada at twilight, the trickle became a migration march. A single line of people hugged the northbound roadside, belongings wrapped in blankets and slung over their shoulders. Every fifth or sixth marcher carried a torch or a lantern, and all the small children were strapped papoose-style onto their mothers’ backs… The wetback line originated out in the scrubland, and only cut through Ensenada to reach the coast road–and to pay tribute to the Rurales for letting them through.

It was the most blatant shakedown I had ever seen. Rurales in brownshirts, jodhpurs and jackboots were walking from peasant to peasant, taking money and attaching tags to their shoulders with staple guns; plainsclothes cops sold parcels of beef jerky and dried fruit, putting the coins they received into changemakers strapped next to their sidearms. Other Rurales were stationed one man to a block to check the tags… (216-17)

immigrant_crossing_san_diego_03-18-2004This is Baja California just south of Tijuana and a border that used to be so easy to cross that this sign was widely visible to warn drivers on the US side. To get to that line required the permission of police along the way, achieved via bribes. I regard this migration as a close relation of that portrayed in The Three-Headed Dog.

The Black Dahlia herself sold sex out of bars in downtown LA. More about that another time.

-Laura Agustín, the Naked Anthropologist

Sexwork and migration fiction, part 1: Melodrama and archetypes

landscape-1482233776-rexfeatures-5608654aI wrote a novel, The Three-Headed Dogfor more than one reason. Here is the first of a series in which I tell why, not in any greatly structured way – more thinking aloud. Part 1 highlights how two sides of activism (sex worker rights versus anti-prostitutionism) generally argue their positions, with an eye on the ‘fictional’ methods of abolitionists.

Anti-prostitution campaigners favour melodrama for public hearings on law and policy, bringing women to testify to their victimhood and – this is important – survival. The harrowing tales of forced sex aim to provoke feelings of compassion for suffering that makes listeners worry how many others might tell the same story. Politicians, policy-makers and judges on the podium, as well as spectators, activists and others in the audience are presented with a melodramatic spectacle that churns their feelings, narrowing the distance between themselves and women they otherwise do not resemble.

If you’ve sat amongst the spectators at such events you’ve seen the nodding and other reactions that bubble around you to signal that This is the real story, the only one you need to know. At a recent hearing into Backpage’s possible trafficking-guilt, three parents talked about their lost daughters in a manner that did not prove anything but how upset they felt. Crusaders may also present less emotive testimony, but they never stay long on the fully rational plane. This is a campaign strategy. We are meant to feel lucky that a victim has survived to tell the tale and shiver at the probabiity that most victims do not.

Melodrama relies on the use of archetypes, basic character types that (maybe) ring the same bell in all human beings. The testifying survivor reflects two: the Fallen WomanArt_Shay_Fallen_woman_2044_67 and the Woman Rescued and Reformed. Empathy with the survivor testimony requires a vivid imagining of what she went through before escaping, when she was forced to sell sex, manipulated by bad men and brought so low in the social hierarchy that she’s shown wallowing in the gutter. I’ve written about the Fallen Woman archetype more than once.

awakeningconsciousThe Woman Rescued and Reformed is harder to portray. William Holman Hunt depicted her as The Awakening Conscience (1853), arising from her seducer’s lap upon seeing the light of virtue. It is currently not fashionable to imply that an ex-prostitute was ever at fault, collaborated in her degradation or enjoyed her woeful life. Nowadays anti-prostitution crusaders insist she was a pure victim from the moment she was first seduced. But the archetypes remain in our minds.

At the same public hearings, the appeals to instinctive archetypes and emotions are opposed by Reason: speakers who proceed logically, debunk sensational claims and forgo theatricality. The pro-sexwork-as-work side backs values like fairness and diversity, avoids making extreme claims and calls for policy backed by the evidence of academic research. This is by and large done in a non-emotional mode, appealing to scientific thinking and intelligence. No frisson of excitement ripples through the audience.

These two modes of argument have been in operation for a long time in this field, and neither side has budged from its convictions. On top of realising that that would never change, I became alienated by the paucity of questions addressed: Did the woman know she was going to sell sex? Would she sell sex if she had better options? And so on. I was bored by the impossibility of ever talking about the thousands of other details, ambiguities, jokes, practicalities and philosophies that have no place in conversations framed as ‘debate’ or hearings on law. Pieces written for academic journals are read by a tiny few insiders. And if the only evidence allowed is that turned up in highly constrained research projects then what I want to talk about doesn’t fit there either.

AN00164637_001_lI have every confidence that novels are a wonderful way to reveal unfamiliar worlds. There are, of course, truckloads of melodramatic anti-trafficking novels out now, as there are films. My own way would never be melodrama, but I understand that particular images resound with wide audiences. I am a lifelong appreciator of some kinds of crime novels, and this genre seemed right for me. Particularly right is noir, where it is usual to turn assumptions about criminality and victimhood on their heads. Images of the World Upside-Down hung beside me during the years I was writing Sex at the Margins. Disruption of stereotypes. The end of essentialisms. Strange bedfellows. Irony upon irony.

In The Three-Headed DogI begin to tell some of what has been stored for long in my head in order to say: This is what it looked like at the beginning of the 21st century. These are some stories that rarely got heard. They are stories one can read and still ‘disapprove’ of migration and sex work, but perhaps now capable of seeing the people involved as sentient beings colouring the landscape, moving through the bush, laughing in restaurant kitchens and buying fruit at the market.

Screen Shot 2017-01-16 at 09.54.56More soon.
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-Laura Agustín,
the Naked
Anthropologist

Sexwork expressionism from Edvard Munch, or Everyday life in a brothel

Christmas in the Brothel is from 1905. There’s a tree, a woman with little black book and pencil, a man reading, figures in the background and empty space. To me it shows ordinariness, everyday life. The word brothel is in the title, but it could be any bar. If you like Christmas you may like that they celebrate it in the brothel, too. Or if you feel unhappy at Christmas you may like to know there was a place to go and be alone with other people.

Munch painted other pictures that don’t have such a keyword in their names but represent brothel scenes.

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Viewers may read anything they like into these depictions: Whether the characters are happy or sad, whether they drink too much, whether the venues are nice or nasty. Munch frequented them, that much is clear.

Laura Agustín – The Naked Anthropologist

Fantasies that matter: Images of sex work in media and art

ansicht_3933I am looking forward to being in Hamburg, Germany, in August, for this unusually interesting event. My own talk is called Disqualified: Why sex workers suffer social death and will focus on how representation of women who sell sex as damaged victims disqualifies them from rights and justifies a whole Rescue Industry devoted to pushing them around. Some of this was covered in Prostitution Law and the Death of Whores.

The whole event will take place in English, so if you are near Hamburg, consider a visit. Venue: Kampnagel, Jarrestraße 20, D-22303 Hamburg. Write to tickets [at] kampnagel.de to reserve a place. Or you may show up at the box office and hope tickets are available on the day(s).

INTERNATIONALES SOMMERFESTIVAL: KONFERENZ: FANTASIES THAT MATTER. IMAGES OF SEXWORK IN MEDIA AND ART

Alice Schwarzers Aufruf zum Verbot von Prostitution hat in den deutschen Medien eine rege Diskussion entfacht. Jenseits der moralischen und politischen Frage, wie mit Sexarbeit umzugehen sei, ist dabei auch deutlich geworden, dass die Debatte von Projektionen, Fantasien und Mythen dominiert wird. Verlässliche Informationen zur Sexarbeit gibt es auch deshalb nicht, weil dieses Berufsfeld immer noch stark stigmatisiert ist und Sexarbeiterinnen und Sexarbeiter selbst kaum an der öffentlichen Repräsentation ihres Berufs teilhaben. Gemeinsam mit dem Missy Magazine veranstaltet das Internationale Sommerfestival eine Konferenz auf der Bildwissenschaftlerinnen, Sexarbeiterinnen, Künstlerinnen und Medienmacherinnen in Vorträgen, Diskussionen und Performances die Bilder von Sexarbeit untersuchen, die – nicht nur die aktuelle – Diskussion dominieren. Was erzählt das Bild, das sich die Gesellschaft von Sexarbeit macht, über ihr Verhältnis zu Frauenarbeit, Sexualität und Sexualmoral, Gender, Migration und Armut?

DAS PROGRAMM:

[Fr] 08.08.

18:00 ERÖFFNUNG und BOSOM BALLET (Annie Sprinkle) /// p1

Nach einer kurzen Eröffnung der beiden Konferenz-Gastgeber Margarita Tsomou (Kulturwissenschaftlerin/Missy Magazine) und Eike Wittrock (Theaterwissenschaftler/Internationales Sommerfestival) zeigt Annie Sprinkle zur festlichen Eröffnung der Konferenz das BOSOM BALLET (Brüste-Ballett) – eine ihrer legendären Performances.

18:15 IMAGE_WHORE_IMAGE. THE POLITICS OF LOOKING AND LOOKING BACK Vortrag von Antke Engel (D) /// p1

Antke Engel, Leiterin des Instituts für Queer Theory (Hamburg/Berlin), eröffnet die Konferenz mit einem Vortrag zu künstlerischen Bildern von Sexarbeit und betrachtet die Politik der Repräsentation im Spannungsfeld von Fremd- und Selbstbild. Engel ist freie Wissenschaftlerin im Bereich feministischer und queerer Theorie und hat seit den 1990ern maßgeblich das Feld queerer Geschlechter- und Sexualitätenforschung im deutschsprachigen Kontext wie auch auf internationaler Ebene geprägt.

19:30 BAISE MOI Gespräch mit Filmausschnitten mit Coralie Trinh Thi, Drehbuchautorin, und Stefanie Lohaus, Missy Magazine Herausgeberin /// p1

BAISE MOI (Fick Mich!) schockte 2000 das Kinopublikum mit einer schonungslosen Darstellung von Sexualität und Gewalt, formuliert aus weiblicher Perspektive und vor dem Hintergrund »realer« Erfahrungen mit Sexarbeit. Coralie Trinh Thi, Drehbuchautorin des Films, wird gemeinsam mit Missy Magazin-Herausgeberin Stefanie Lohaus Ausschnitte aus dieser kontroversen filmischen Darstellung von Sexarbeiterinnen kommentieren und diskutieren.

22:00 MACHO DANCER Performance von Eisa Jocson (PHL/B) /// p1

Für ihr Solo MACHO DANCER hat sich die bildende Künstlerin und Choreografin Eisa Jocson eine Form des erotischen Tanzens, die vornehmlich in philippinischen Schwulenbars praktiziert wird, angeeignet. Zu Powerballaden und Soft Rock bewegen sich junge Männer in einer hyperstilisierten Form von Männlichkeit, lassen langsam ihre Hüften kreisen und präsentieren ihre Muskeln. In der Übertragung auf ihren (weiblichen) Körper verschwimmen dabei Geschlechterbilder, und die Mechanik dieser ökonomischen Körper-Performance wird sichtbar.

[Sa] 09.08.

11:00 PROSTITUTION PRISM REFLECTIONS: FROM FACT TO FANTASY Vortrag von Gail Pheterson (F) /// p1

Gail Pheterson hat mit ihrem Buch »Huren-Stigma«, das im Original bereits 1986 erschien und das als internationales Standardwerk gilt, einen wesentlichen Beitrag zur feministischen Debatte um Sexarbeiterinnen geleistet. Die Autoren des Klassikers zum Stigma ist seitdem für ihre Publikationen zu Prostitution international bekannt – sie ist Dozentin und Forscherin am Centre de recherches sociologiques et politiques, Paris CRESPPA-UMR 7217, CNRS und der Université Paris 8 und wird über die Thesen ihres letzten Buches Le prisme de la prostitution (Paris, L’Harmattan, 2001) vortragen.

12:00 BREAD AND ROSES: RETHINKING SEXUAL AND ECONOMIC JUSTICE Vortrag von Nikita Dhawan und María do Mar Castro Varela (D), anschließend Gespräch mit Luzenir Caixeta (AUT) /// p1

Nikita Dhawan ist Juniorprofessorin für Politikwissenschaft mit Schwerpunkt Gender/Postkoloniale Studien an der Goethe Universität Hamburg, im Rahmen des Exzellenzclusters »Die Herausbildung normativer Ordnungen«. Maria do Mar Castro Varela ist Professorin an der Alice Salomon Hochschule für Angewandte Wissenschaften, Berlin. Sie beide gehören zu den innovativsten Denkerinnen der intersektionellen Verschränkung von Migration und Feminismus im deutschsprachigen Raum. Zusammen werden sie über die Frage der Repräsentation migrantischer Sexarbeit referieren. Anschließend findet ein Gespräch mit Dr. Luzenir Caixeta, Mitbegründerin und Koordinatorin des Forschungsbereichs von maiz (Autonomes Zentrum von und für Migrantinnen, Österreich) statt, das für seine Arbeit mit migrantischen Sexarbeiterinnen über Österreich hinaus relevant ist.

14:30 DISQUALIFIED: WHY SEX WORKERS SUFFER SOCIAL DEATH Vortrag von Laura María Agustín, anschließend Gespräch mit Camille Barbagallo (GB) /// p1

Laura María Agustín ist Soziologin, arbeitet zu undokumentierter Migration, Menschenhandel und der Sexindustrie und hat mit ihrem einflußreichen Buch »Sex at the Margins: Migration, Labour Markets and the Rescue Industry« (Zed Books 2007) neue Thesen zur Rolle von NGOs und Hilfsorganisationen in der Sexarbeit in die internationale Debatte gebracht. Nach ihrem Vortrag wird sie mit Camille Barbagallo, Forscherin an der Goldsmiths Universität London, diskutieren warum die Stimme bzw. die Versuche von Selbstrepräsentation seitens der Sexarbeiter_innen in der Öffentlichkeit entweder nicht gehört oder disqualifiziert werden.

16:00 ZOOM IN: PROSTITUTION/POLITICS HAMBURG Gespräch mit Ulrike Lembke (HH), Undine de Rivière (HH) und Gerhard Schlagheck (HH) /// p1

Das Panel wird sich mit der konkreten Situation in Hamburg – der »Stadt der Huren« – beschäftigen sowie die Debatte um das deutsche Prostitutionsgesetz aufnehmen. Ulrike Lembke ist Juniorprofessorin für Öffentliches Recht und Legal Gender Studies an der Rechtswissenschaft der Universität Hamburg – sie soll unter anderem auch der Frage nachgehen wie geltendes Recht gesellschaftliche Verhältnisse widerspiegelt, d.h. warum etwas als rechtmäßig gilt oder nicht. Undine de Rivière ist Sexarbeiterin in Hamburg, Sprecherin des Berufsverbandes für erotische und sexuelle Dienstleistungen und wegweisendes Mitglied des »Ratschlags Prostitution Hamburg«. Gerhard Schlagheck leitet das »Basis-Projekt«, die einzige Anlaufstelle für männliche Stricher in Hamburg. Sie beide sollen konkret über ihre Auseinandersetzungen mit der rechtlichen Situation in Hamburg sprechen.

18:00 WATCH ME WORK Performance von Liad Hussein Kantorowicz /// k4

Liad Hussein Kantoworicz ist Performerin (UDK Masterstudiengang SODA), Sexarbeiterin, Autorin, Queer-Aktivistin und Gründerin der ersten Gewerkschaft für Sexarbeiterinnen im Mittleren Osten. Darüber hinaus arbeitet sie für eine israelische Erotik-Chat-Webseite, bei der die Kunden für intime Gespräche und persönliche Live-Performances pro Minute zahlen.

In der Performance WATCH ME WORK ermöglicht sie einen Echtzeit-Einblick in diese Cyber-Sexarbeit und lässt sich aus verschiedenen Perspektiven bei ihrer gleichsam intimen wie höchst theatralen Performance beobachten.

20:30 MY LIFE AS A METAMORPHOSEXUAL SEX WORKER. ALWAYS RECREATING MY SEX WORKER SELF Performance von Annie Sprinkle (USA), mit Beth Stephens und Gästen /// p1

Die legendäre Pornodarstellerin, Künstlerin und Sexarbeitsaktivistin der ersten Stunde, Annie Sprinkle, kehrt für eine ihrer Lecture Performances nach Hamburg zurück. Sprinkle ist eine der bekanntesten Vertreterinnen des sexpositivem Feminismus und eine Ikone der sexuellen Aufklärung in den USA und darüber hinaus. Sie hat Sexualität praktisch und theoretisch erforscht, vom Heiligen bis zum Profanen. Ihre Arbeit an der gemeinsamen Emanzipation von Frauen und Sexarbeiterinnen ist international wie historisch von großer Relevanz. Ihre Performance »Post Porn Modernist« tourte durch mehr als 19 Länder und wurde zu einer wichtigen Intervention im Sex-War innerhalb der feministischen Bewegung der 80er Jahre in den USA:

Auf dem Sommerfestival wird sie anhand von Videos, Fotografien, Mini-Performances und einem Ritual der heiligen Eco-Hure aus ihrem ereignisreichen Leben und von ihren politischen Aktivitäten berichten, die sich derzeit auf Liebe, Beziehung, Brustkrebs, Altern und den Schnittpunkt von Ökologie und Sexualität – Sexecology – konzentrieren.

[So] 10.08.

12:00 COLLATERAL DAMAGE Mithu Sanyal im Gespräch mit Carol Leigh AKA Scarlot Harlot

Carol Leigh AKA Scarlot Harlot ist nicht nur, weil sie den Begriff Sexarbeit erfunden hat, eine der international wichtigsten Figuren der Sexarbeiter_innen Bewegung. Sie gilt als einer der »Muttern« der Sexarbeiter_innen-Bewegung, sie ist Autorin, Sexeducator, Produzentin, Filmemacherin, hat mehrere Veröffentlichungen, mehrere Festivals gegründet und leitet nun das San Francisco Sex Worker Film and Video Festival.

Während der Konferenz werden durchgehend Auszüge als Preview ihres neues Dokumentarfilms COLLATERAL DAMAGE: SEX WORKERS AND THE ANTI-TRAFFICKING CAMPAIGNS als Installation gezeigt.

Über die Arbeit an dem Film spricht sie mit Mithu Sanyal, der preisgekrönten Journalistin und Autorin des mehrfach übersetzten Buchs über die Kulturgeschichte des weiblichen Genitals »Vulva – Die Enthüllung des unsichtbaren Geschlechts« (Wagenbach Verlag, 2013).

12:30 SELFREPRESENTATION: SEX WORK AND ART WORK Abschlussdiskussion mit Liad Hussein Kantorowicz, Coralie Trinh Thi, Eisa Jocson, Annie Sprinkle und Carol Leigh AKA Scarlot Harlot /// p1

Das Abschlusspanel der Konferenz bringt die Medienmacherinnen und Künstlerinnen der Konferenz zusammen, um über die eigenen Strategien von Selbstrepräsentation im Spannungsfeld zwischen Selbst-und Fremdbild zu reflektieren.

PERFORMANCES IM RAHMEN DER KONFERENZ:

Eisa Jocson: MACHO DANCER (08.08. / 22:00)

Liad Hussein Kantorowicz: WATCH ME WORK (09.08. / 18:00)

Annie Sprinkle: MY LIFE AS A METAMORPHOSEXUAL SEX WORKER. ALWAYS RECREATING MY SEX WORKER SELF (09.08. / 20:30)

Seite teilen

KONZEPTION Margarita Tsomou, Eike Wittrock.

Die Konferenz ist eine Zusammenarbeit mit der Körber-Stiftung und dem Missy Magazine.

Information: mail [at] kampnagel.de

–Laura Agustín, the Naked Anthropologist

Women doing things again, on their own

fernandocoelhoGirlsYear beginning, low light and infantilising coverage of women combine to make me feel a bit lost for words but full of desire to publish pictures that resist the miserablism. Some of the women portrayed are probably offering sex for sale, but be careful about stereotyping when you imagine which ones they are. The exercise is to look not at whatever ‘patriarchal structures’ or economic problems push women into doing one thing or another but to see them as playing the cards they were dealt.

lesbianI avoid the language of choice, and the term agency is unfriendly but it’s what I mean. This is not about identities or job titles but existing in and moving through the world. It’s also not about love or family in any obvious sense or anyone’s nationality or what culture they were brought up in. Look elsewhere for downtrodden, caged, unhappy, passive, immobile victims with mouths bandaged so they cannot speak. I ran a bunch of photos a couple of times some years back – see Women Doing Things.

I suppose they are a peek into my subconscience, too. Anyway, happy 2014.

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–Laura Agustín, the Naked Anthropologist

Segregation, colonialism and unfreedom at the border

I spent one hour and 20 minutes in the queue at Stansted’s UK Border recently. There were probably 1000 people in the hall, divided into the usual EU passports versus Rest of World. Signs saying Tougher Controls Mean a Longer Wait are dotted around. In fact, tougher controls do not have to mean outrageously long waits, even if more questions are asked of each traveller. Some interrogations last several or more minutes, but if enough agents were allotted, waits could still be reasonable. If, however, management allot only two agents to the 200 people on the non-EU side and interviews take at least a minute – well, things get bad.

On top of this, however, some policy had particular groups of people jumping the queue automatically: not only a disabled person but the five people associated with her, not only the small child holding a flight attendant’s hand but the seven teenagers associated with him. Four such groups occupied one of the agents for half the hour and a half I waited, leaving only one agent to work the 200 in the queue. It was not the eve of a significant tourist event but a Friday evening when ordinary city-break tourists arrive for a London weekend.

The ‘transition’ Home Office website says functions of the UK Border Agency (abolished earlier this year) will be split in two.

On 1 April 2013 the UK Border Agency was split into two separate units within the Home Office: a visa and immigration service and an immigration law enforcement division. By creating two entities instead of one, we will be able to create distinct cultures. First, a high-volume service that makes high-quality decisions about who comes here, with a culture of customer satisfaction for business-people and visitors who want to come here legally. And second, an organisation that has law enforcement at its heart and gets tough on those who break our immigration laws.a high-volume service that makes high-quality decisions about who comes here, with a culture of customer satisfaction for business-people and visitors who want to come here legally.

The claim of distinct cultures sounds ridiculous to me, but on their own terms they failed miserably the other night. No one came out to apologise to the throng, which, if you want to be nationalistic about it, included several families where one partner had a British passport but the other did not, plus their small children. No one came to explain the delay, or offer cups of water or smiles to demonstrate that a ‘distinct culture’ exists to welcome the majority of travellers to the UK.

When one of the agents closed up and left, I sighed loudly and began talking to the woman next to me. Discussing the length of interviews I mentioned how an official wanted to know the nationality of my friends in Britain. The woman said I thought it was just Asians who were treated like that. The landing card gives the impression that crossing is a formality, but the oral questions make it clear that we in the queue are thought liable to be liars, cheats or worse. If this belief is really at the heart of UK border policy then I would like them to make such a closed, imperialist attitude overt on the landing card.

All who travel often can tell anecdotes about long waits and stupid questions at borders. The UK border is a bad one getting worse all the time but not unique. My object here is not to evoke a stream of crazy anecdotes about worse border-encounters. Instead, I am pointing out how my frequent long sessions at UK airport-borders add up to evidence of the field-work kind. It’s not just well-known journalists and their mates that get detained and delayed and ill-treated at airport borders; officials do not have to imagine you have interesting data on electronic devices to begin invasive questioning. The segregation into separate queues is not based on colour or ethnicity though that comes into play. No, it’s a separation by passports that grant different degrees of citizenship. If you don’t have the right kind you can be mistreated for hours with no way to complain or escape. You cannot go backwards or opt out; you are trapped. And given the situation, the longer you wait the more likely you are to be meek and mollifying when your turn arrives – which is a form of coercion.

These places are closed to reporters and photographers; I have no idea what protection one has, or rights. I do not know what happens if someone falls ill in the queue. Chinese visitors are targeted with an absurd and costly process to come as tourists, which can quite properly be called colonialist.

I believe the British government has an outdated view of Chinese visitors, perhaps rooted in colonial times. They wrongly fear many Chinese will overstay. We have to respect our borders, but such unfounded fears are harming the UK economy. – Chief Executive at London’s Hippodrome Casino

Some estimate the UK is already losing billions of tourist pounds. Why bother to apply if through the easy process of obtaining a Schengen visa you can visit lots of other European countries? Sure the UK has a popular brand, but for most of the world it is neither indispensable nor better than the same cliché-level brand of France or Italy.

Having arrived efficiently on a short flight from Copenhagen, I reached my central London destination three full hours after landing at Stansted. This is really outrageous. Usually I manage to maintain a curious attitude, like in Border Thinking. Sometimes I fail.

–Laura Agustín, the Naked Anthropologist

Fallen Women: persistence of an image

A new film about staging La Traviata is using the most old-fashioned and clichéd image in its publicity: that of Violetta on the floor in the classic pose of Fallen Women. Yes, I know the opera and I know the novel it’s based on (La dame aux camélias 1848) and I am capable of appreciating romantic imagery and tradition. But to choose just this pathetic and highly charged pose to advertise a supposedly innovative film seems perverse and uncreative to me.

I’ve written before about the iconography of the Fallen Woman: her position on the ground, sometimes twisted, sometimes being reached out to by a kind person (usually a man). In La Traviata (1853) Violetta is dying of consumption, so she’s also seen in pathetic poses in bed, but using the floor image in publicity photos drives home the idea that her essence is this: morally low, a kept woman, demi-mondaine, courtesan or woman

who’s gone astray (traviata). At the beginning of the story Violetta is a happy-go-lucky good-time girl (though ill). Finding true love with Alfredo she is portrayed as morally redeemed and self-sacrificing.

Possibly the gay lady may come to the ‘bitter end’ some day, but at present, except from the moral point of view, she is not an object for commiseration. She at least has all that she deliberately bargains for—fine clothes, rich food, plenty of money, a carriage to ride in, the slave-like obedience of her ‘inferiors’, and the ful­some adulation of those who deal with her for her worth. Very often (though under the circumstances it is doubtful if from any aspect this is an advantage) she finds a fool with money who is willing to marry her; but whether she is content to accept the decent change, and to abide by it, of course depends on her nature. – James Greenwood, The Seven Curses of London, Curse IV: Fallen Women, 1869

Whether the staging is brought into the present or not, Violetta always has a scene on the floor to drive home her moral abjection. Why else would she be on the floor? People who fall get back up right away; if they can’t, they are too injured. In Violetta’s case the injury is moral. Of course people also play on the floor, but Violetta is not playing in these scenes.

A limp Violetta can signify death but also helplessness, unconsciousness, submissiveness, despite the fact that she is tremendously strong both before and after redemption through love. In the beginning she is so good at gaiety that everyone around her has fun. Later she remains faithful to Alfredo despite his father’s meanness and sacrifices her own happiness for her lover. I dislike this plot, but there is no doubt Violetta is not a limp rag of a woman.

Observe the similar pose used to portray a woman hypnotised by Charcot: drooping, weak, the passive object of every male student’s gaze. She was diagnosed as suffering from ‘hysteria’, considered to be a sexual dysfunction at the time (1885). If he were not holding her up, she would fall to the ground. I personally wish all these images of traditional passive femininity would stop being used by anyone in the present, especially someone making the film of an opera and story full of other possibilities.

–Laura Agustín, the Naked Anthropologist

My Erotic Award as Campaigner: win for a reasonable point of view

In the evening’s opening act a woman emerges from a plastic Chinese bag – those big plaid ones, but still, not easy to fold oneself into. With her head only showing she expels a ping-pong ball from her mouth, a sex-tourism joke that gets a huge laugh. Fully emerged, she holds up a series of signs indicating she is Lilly from Thailand, looking for a husband, wanting a British passport. The audience love it.

What a pleasure, that these jokes could be the cheery opening to the night’s events, unaccompanied by politically correct disclaimers like Remember there is a lot of misery and oppression in this horrible patriarchal world of capitalism. Just hijinks from Lilly, who keeps grinning and bowing. Instead, the audience is assumed capable of appreciating ironies. The event was the Erotic Awards taking place at the Night of the Senses, the 26th year of a kinky charity ball held to benefit Outsiders, which raises awareness about sex and disability.

I have never once thought of myself as a campaigner: mostly I just talk and write about ideas that are considered shocking by a lot of people who are campaigning for something: tighter migration controls, the abolition of prostitution, criminal penalties for people who engage in sex-money transactions. Campaigns have a clearly stated goal, like the slogans in this photo, whereas my work can be described as encouraging critical thinking about sex, money and migration and public policies affecting them. I require people to think for themselves rather than swallow a neatly digestible slogan. Campaigns are assumed to be energetic, focussed and goal-oriented, whereas I’m more meditative and reflexive.

Nonetheless, as I watch Lilly onstage I do feel I’ve contributed to the possibility that her act could be appreciated in this place at this time. I understand my win of the 2013 Erotic Award for Campaigner as the win of a point of view: that anti-trafficking rhetoric and policymaking have strayed too far from what most ordinary people know about their own friends, neighbours and communities, wherever they live in the world. Marriages of convenience, sex shows with ping-pong balls, exchanging sex for benefits, ‘help’ needed to get visas and passports are now widely understood to be part of ordinary and undemonic everyday life – not narratives of horror or slavery.

If you don’t know why I might have won as Campaigner, here are a few links:
My book Sex at the Margins: Migration, Labour Markets and the Rescue Industry
Other publications of mine
Videos of some of my talks

Award to Laura Agustín, Photo by Charlotte Cooper

–Laura Agustín, the Naked Anthropologist

Good-time girls and other non-professionals taking money for sex

Formalised money-sex exchanges get the attention and conflict: debates about exploitation and violence. Lots of other exchanges are ignored, a line is drawn between commercial and non-commercial sex. But that line is imaginary. Many people who expect to be compensated for their company will never call themselves sex workers or escorts, on the basis that they never ask for money. In Breakfast at Tiffany’s (the book, not the romanticised film), Holly Golightly distinguishes between professionals and others:

He asked me how I’d like to cheer up a lonely old man, at the same time pick up a hundred a week. I told him look, darling, you’ve got the wrong Miss Golightly, I’m not a nurse that does tricks on the side. I wasn’t impressed by the honorarium either; you can do as well as that on trips to the powder room: any gent with the slightest chic will give you fifty for the girl’s john, and I always ask for cab fare too, that’s another fifty.

Good-time girl (or guy) is only one of the names less professional people have been called. A few years ago I quoted a character in a  Lawrence Block book who described herself as a girlfriend taking money from friends. Another time I ran excerpts from a 1950s investigation that describes B-girls (B for bar) who are said to have drifted into prostitution after the easy promiscuity of bars. The police are perplexed because the girls look clean-cut.

Here’s another example, from The Sins of Our Fathers (1976), also by Lawrence Block. A young woman has been murdered, and there’s ambiguity about whether or not she was a prostitute. The investigator asks someone who had been her roommate a while back and then left the flat:

“What did she do, pass on one of her dates to you?”

Her eyes flared. She closed them briefly, drew on her cigarette. “It was almost like that,” she said. “Not quite, but that’s pretty close. She told me a friend of hers had a business associate in from out of town and asked if I’d like to date the guy, to double with her and her friend. I said I didn’t think so, and she talked about how we would see a good show and have a good dinner and everything. And then she said, ‘Be sensible, Marcia. You’ll have a good time, and you’ll make a few dollars out of it.’ . . . Well, I wasn’t shocked. So I must have suspected all along that she was getting money. I asked her what she meant, which was a pretty stupid question at that point, and she said that the men she dated all had plenty of money, and they realized it was tough for a young woman to earn a decent living, and at the end of the evening they would generally give you something. I said something about wasn’t that prostitution, and she said she never asked men for money, nothing like that, but they always gave her something. I wanted to ask how much but I didn’t and then she told me anyway. She said they always gave at least twenty dollars and sometimes a man would give her as much as a hundred. The man she was going to be seeing always gave her fifty dollars, she said, so if I went along it would mean that his friend would be almost certain to give me fifty dollars, and she asked if I didn’t think that was a good return on an evening that involved nothing but eating a great dinner and seeing a good show and then spending a half hour or so in bed with a nice, dignified gentleman. That was her phrase. A nice, dignified gentleman. . . I was earning eighty dollars a week. Nobody was taking me to great dinners or Broadway shows. And I hadn’t even met anyone I wanted to sleep with.”

“Did you enjoy the evening?”

“No. All I could think about was that I was going to have to sleep with this man. And he was old. . . Fifty-five, sixty. I’m never good at guessing how old people are. He was too old for me, that’s all I knew.”

“But you went along with it.”

“Yes. I had agreed to go, and I didn’t want to spoil the party. Dinner was good, and my date was charming enough. I didn’t pay much attention to the show. I couldn’t. I was too anxious about the rest of the evening.” She paused, focused her eyes over my shoulder. “Yes, I slept with him. And yes, he gave me fifty dollars. And yes, I took it. . . Aren’t you going to ask me why I took the money? . . . I wanted the damned money. And I wanted to know how it felt. Being a whore.”

“Did you feel that you were a whore?”

“Well, that’s what I was, isn’t it? I let a man fuck me, and I took money for it.”

I didn’t say anything. After a few moments she said, “Oh, the hell with it. I took a few more dates. Maybe one a week on the average. I don’t know why. It wasn’t the money. Not exactly. It was, I don’t know. Call it an experiment. I wanted to know how I felt about it. I wanted to… learn certain things about myself. . . That I’m a little squarer than I thought. That I didn’t care for the things I kept finding hiding in corners of my mind. That I wanted, oh, a cleaner life. That I wanted to fall in love with somebody. Get married, make babies, that whole trip. It turned out to be what I wanted. When I realized that, I knew I had to move out on my own. I couldn’t go on rooming with Wendy.”

This woman finds out about herself through an informal sex-money exchange some people call prostitution while others don’t. Another roommate might have been more enthusiastic about Wendy’s offer to share her lifestyle. Modest amounts of money are involved, but Wendy is spared taking a dull, ill-paid full-time job. Not much like more lucrative sugar-daddy arrangements? Or the same on a different scale? And does it matter?

–Laura Agustín, the Naked Anthropologist

The prohibition of things: Deterrence, Punishment and Rescue

The idea of a government outlawing activities accomplishes only one thing clearly: It tells citizens that government has decided something is Wrong and now outlaws doing it. Sending A Message is the principle act behind the Swedish state’s promotion of its law against buying sex, and it is the principle act behind all the other politicians and would-be policymakers who want the law for their countries. Everyone wants to be seen to be Taking a Stand against immoral behaviour. Try bringing evidence into the conversation and you will quickly learn how irrelevant it is; you can find Swedish promoters themselves saying things like We know it doesn’t work but we want to be in the forefront of Gender Justice. This is about standing up for how you think society should be and doing it publicly, and trying to save people from their own immoral selves by outlawing bad things that attract them.

Any other claim about what prohibitionist laws achieve when they outlaw social activities like sex, drinking and drugs is not supported by evidence. That’s because, after the law is passed and the message is sent, individuals deal with prohibition deviously. That is, social pressure is strong to go along with the moral stand taken, but on the private level folks don’t intend or aren’t able to stop taking their own pleasures. So buyers and sellers of drugs, alcohol and sex become creative, some of them maintaining a disapproving stance in public at the same time.

The main claim made by prohibitionism is its deterrent effect, which holds that people will be put off breaking the law a) simply because it is illegal; b) because they are afraid of being put in prison; c) because they do not want to be publicly shamed and lose social status, whether they go to prison or not. In Foucauldian terms a punishment has to be threatened that can rob the crime of all attraction, so the potential perpetrator stops. Shaming is thus proposed by those who would prohibit buying sex (names and photos published on a website, for instance). Heart-rending pictures of victims are distributed to add to the shame at wanting to participate. When those don’t seem to work, or when perpetrators go ahead and pay fines when they are caught instead of resisting charges, prohibitionists propose the ante be upped to obligatory jail sentences.

I wrote about deterrence early on in Sex Workers and Violence Against Women: Utopic Visions or Battle of the Sexes? The theory of deterrence sounds as though it might work to put people off getting punished, but people are not very logical or sensible when it comes to their bodily pleasures – eating, smoking, drinking, drug-taking, sex. I hope someone is documenting the techniques being used as part of a criminology project somewhere – let me know if you are! [Other uses of deterrence are more complicated, see Deterrence in Criminal Justice.] I do wish Foucault were here to talk with me about this.

The prohibition of alcohol in the USA provides insights, though we shouldn’t generalise about everything and everywhere on the basis of them. I only bring it up because Slate just published these elegant cards patrons could carry and show at the door of drinking clubs in midtown New York between 1920 and 1933, the years when making and selling alcohol was prohibited. Calling it a club didn’t make drinking there legal, but if drinkers belonged to insider networks they would get a card, and doormen felt safer letting them inside the venues (the theory being that police and their informants wouldn’t manage to get a card).

Slate says

These cards represent clubs both famous and obscure. The card on the upper right would have admitted a partygoer to the glamorous Stork Club in its second home, which it moved into after it had been “raided out” of its first on West 58th Street. . . All of these cards are for establishments located on roughly the same latitude in midtown Manhattan. In the Prohibition years, according to Irving L. Allen, the blocks between 40th and 60th streets in Manhattan were rife with speakeasies.

The cards show how deviance develops when a market exists for an outlawed activity. Buyers and sellers find each other, including in upper social registers where patrons obviously must include some of the very people who have Taken a Stand and voted in a prohibitionist law. The cards also show how little deterred alcohol-drinkers were.

Then, of course, and far more convincing: all kinds of buying and selling sex are prohibited by criminal law all over the US, except in those few rural counties of Nevada where brothels are allowed. How in the world anyone could propose prohibiting the buying of sex as a deterrent is beyond me.

–Laura Agustín, the Naked Anthropologist

The Cultural Study of Commercial Sex: Needed more than ever

When I first began reading about people who sell sex and people who want them to stop, in the late 1990s, I was struck by the repetitive nature of the majority of books and articles, both academic and non-academic. When research was done, it produced the same knowledge over and over, generally about women who sell sex in streets – which was odd since many were already pointing out the diminution and even dying out of most street prostitution. The Internet is the New Street, it was said – and that was 15 years ago.

When what I read was ideological, it centred on an abstract term, prostitution, but it soon became obvious that this term has no stable meaning, signifying a raft of different things to different people of different social classes and cultures. A great deal of academic research did exactly what had been done before but now in a new city – or country – or part of town! Identities tended to be essentialised, particularly regarding race, drug use and low income.

In 2005 I proposed that researchers use a broader framework to take in all exchanges of sex for money, presents or other benefits, anywhere and anytime (historical research included, in other words). I followed this up in 2007 when invited to edit a special journal issue for Sexualities that contained eight articles using the cultural framework. Given that so much research – not to mention campaigning for better laws and policies – relies on scanty knowledge of what is actually going on, this is more relevant than ever. Otherwise, you get collateral damage, penalising people and activities unintentionally (I am assuming most people do not approve of collateral damage, but some actually claim it is ‘necessary’ for the Greater Good).

The Cultural Study of Commercial SexSexualities, 8, 5, 618-631 (2005). Click the title to get the pdf.

The article begins like this:
Why create this framework

Societies’ twin reactions to commercial sex – moral revulsion and resigned tolerance – have paradoxically permitted its uncontrolled development in the underground economy and impeded cultural research on the phenomena involved. Affirmations that the global sex industry is growing and its forms proliferating are conventional in government and non-governmental fora, in the communications media and in scholarly writing. Commercial sex businesses and trafficking for sexual exploitation are blamed for massive violations of human rights, but the supporting information is unreliable, given the lack of agreement on basic definitions, the difficulty of counting clandestine objects and the fact that much of this stigmatized activity forms part of conventional social life.

Little work exists in a sex-industry framework, but if we agree that it refers to all commercial goods and services of an erotic and sexual kind, then a rich field of human activities is involved. And every one of these activities operates in a complex socio-cultural context in which the meaning of buying and selling sex is not always the same. The cultural study of commercial sex would use a cultural-studies, interdisciplinary approach to fill gaps in knowledge about commercial sex and relate the findings to other social and cultural concepts. Recent work has demonstrated how people who sell sex are excluded from studies of migration, of service work and of informal economies, and are instead examined only in terms of ‘prostitution’, a concept that focuses on transactions between individuals, especially their personal motivations. With the academic, media and ‘helping’ gaze fixed almost exclusively on women who sell sex, the great majority of phenomena that make up the sex industry are ignored, and this in itself contributes to the intransigent stigmatization of these women. While the sexual cultures of lesbian/gay/ bisexual/ transgender people are being slowly integrated into general concepts of culture, commercial sex is usually disqualified and treated only as a moral issue. This means that a wide range of ways of study are excluded. A cultural-studies approach, on the contrary, would look at commercial sex in its widest sense, examining its intersections with art, ethics, consumption, family life, entertainment, sport, economics, urban space, sexuality, tourism and criminality, not omitting issues of race, class, gender, identity and citizenship. An approach that considers commercial sex as culture would look for the everyday practices involved and try to reveal how our societies distinguish between activities considered normatively ‘social’ and activities denounced as morally wrong. This means examining a range of activities that take in both commerce and sex.

The purpose of this article is to point out the scarcity of research in these areas and reveal the kinds of issue that are up for study. Although public debate and academic theory on commercial sex abound, few participants are familiar with the wide variety of forms and sites involved; most are dealing with stereotypes and interested solely in street prostitution. This is an area where more information and images need to be disseminated, a project for which I make a small beginning here with some descriptive material from Spanish sex venues.

Since this is the beginning of what I hope will become a new field, I do not here offer any solutions to what is too often characterized as a ‘social problem’. Rather, I hope to interest others in taking up the call to study not ‘prostitution’ but the sex industry in new ways and to gather much more information on the object of governance before offering blanket solutions. This does not mean that important moral and ethical issues are not at stake nor that there is not widespread injustice in the industry. On the contrary, my proposal takes these injustices very seriously, laments the absence of workable solutions up to now and hopes that with better research these may be found.

Further headings are How study has proceeded so far, Definitions of the sex industry in general, Local particulars: examples from Spain, Elements of culture and researcher positionality and a raft of good References.

More examples of writing on sex-industry cultures outside the well-worn paths:

–Laura Agustín, the Naked Anthropologist

Sex on Sunday: Sleaze and survival, taxi-dancing in Times Square

The increase in coverage of anti-trafficking operations and Rescue Industry rhetoric is such that I only blog about a tiny fraction of it. I post much much more on facebook, short commentary on media articles, and sometimes interesting conversations ensue. You can subscribe to my facebook posts (I don’t accept many friend requests now). You can also follow me on twitter.

As part of my thinking about how the sex industry fits within everyday cultures, here are photos showing how striptease and taxi dancing were traditionally wedged into the Times Square landscape. Some venues survived the clean-up of the 1990s, especially on upper floors, but few are left now. Jeremiah’s Vanishing New York records losses such as these. Both he and I are perfectly aware that developers as well as a lot of middle-class folks consider these places to be sleazy, the adjective usually invoked for such small sex-businesses run on shoe-strings and charging little to the clientele, crunched into small spaces on streets that get less public sweeping than they need. Some see beauty in them or just appreciate the individuality of the facades, so unlike the shopping-mall homogeneity now dominant in Times Square, often called Disneyfication.

We don’t have to be overly sentimental or ignore sexism and other injustices perpetrated inside these little businesses to appreciate that they look like individual places – workplaces for some, entertainment places for others. It’s appealing, too, that dance venues are sandwiched between lighting shops and delis – note Parisian dancing above Whelan’s Drugs.

Taxi-dancing, which some of these palaces offered, involves a lot of waiting around for the dancers, who must try not to look too bored. It’s a break in the emotional labour of flirting while at the same time keeping distance.

Images of taxi-dance girls as immoral seductresses abounded not so long ago.

Although it sounds charmingly antique, taxi-dancing lives on in other parts of New York. And here are some non-taxi dance pictures from an earlier Sunday: erotic, exotic, artistic, talented). Below, taxi-dancing far from Times Square, in the state of Montana.

–Laura Agustín, the Naked Anthropologist