Prostitution.pdf

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The ‘subject’ of prostitution

Interpreting the discursive, symbolic and material

position of sex/work in feminist theory

Feminist Theory

SAGE Publications

(London,

Thousand Oaks, CA

and New Delhi)

vol. 5(3): 343–355.

1464–7001

DOI: 10.1177/1464700104046983

www.sagepublications.com

Jane Scoular Strathclyde University

Prostitution is often viewed in feminist theory as the sine qua non of the

female condition under patriarchy. Frequently cited as ‘the absolute

embodiment of patriarchal male privilege’ (Kesler, 2002: 19), the highly

gendered nature of commercial sex appears to offer a graphic example of

male domination, exercised through the medium of sexuality.

This construction is, however, as convincing as it is problematic. By

reviewing the work of Shelia Jeffries, Judith Walkowitz, Gail Pheterson,

Shannon Bell, Jo Doezema, Kamala Kempadoo and Jo Phoenix, I aim to

illustrate that feminist writers, by assuming different theoretical lenses,

offer diverse interpretations of the subject of prostitution – both in terms

of women’s subjective positions and as a problem of a particular type.

Prostitution therefore rather than having a singular meaning is more

usefully viewed as an important crucible for testing the central mainstays

of feminist theory. As Donna Guy notes:

Full of apparent contradictions and discrepancies, the history of modern prosti-

tution control offers a dynamic perspective on the private lives of women as well

as the public functioning of medicine, patriarchy and the nation state and

emphasizes the need to understand how gender and sexuality are interrelated

inextricably to race, cultural diversity and economic circumstances. (Guy, 1995:

182)

As this quotation suggests, and as I will demonstrate in the course of this

article, there are limitations in viewing prostitution as straightforwardly

paradigmatic, given the contingencies and diversity of the structures under

which its materializes.

keywords identity, post-modernism, prostitution, sex work, violence

The very idea of prostitution – radical feminist perspectives

Prostitution remains morally undesirable . . . because it is one of those most

graphic examples of men’s domination over women. (Pateman, 1983: 56)

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Feminist Theory 5(3)

The prostitute symbolizes the value of women in society. She is paradigmatic of

women’s social, sexual and economic subordination, in that her status is the

basic unit by which all women’s value is measured and to which all women can

be reduced. (Giobbe, 1990: 77)

Radical feminist insights into prostitution have done most to highlight the

harms experienced by women in this area and have illustrated the inequal-

ities in prostitution within the context of a gendered analysis of the state

and sexuality. The deﬁning characteristic of work in this area, expressed

in the writings of Kate Millet (1975), Kathleen Barry (1979, 1995), Carole

Pateman (1983, 1988), Catherine MacKinnon (1987, 1989) and Andrea

Dworkin (1987, 1989), is an understanding of prostitution as violence

against women – violence not only in the practice of prostitution but more

fundamentally in the very idea of ‘buying sex’ which is considered so inex-

tricably linked to a system of heterosexuality and male power that it

represents ‘the absolute embodiment of patriarchal male privilege’ (Kesler,

2002: 19). 1

Shelia Jeffries’ work The Idea of Prostitution (1997) is a useful reference

point as it aims to defend this ideological position which, she states, since

the late 1960s has ‘analysed prostitution uncompromisingly as the ultimate

in the reduction of women to sexual objects which can be bought and sold,

to a sexual slavery that lies at the root of marriage and prostitution and

forms the foundation of women’s oppression’ (Jeffries, 1997: 2). The notion

of sexual slavery, ﬁrst coined by Barry, is one that Jeffries maintains

throughout this book as she seeks to counter critiques that focus on prosti-

tution as women’s deviant sexuality:

[Prostitution is] male sexual behaviour characterised by three elements variously

combined: barter, promiscuity, and emotional indifference. Any man is a prosti-

tution abuser who, for the purposes of his sexual satisfaction, habitually or inter-

mittently reduces another human being into a sexual object by the use of money

or other mercenary considerations. (Jeffries, 1997: 4)

An understanding of prostitution as a practice that contributes to women’s

oppression, and as a foundational idea that pre-determines it, informs the

contemporary campaigns by radical feminists in the political and legal

arenas to establish all prostitution as a violation of women’s human rights,

thus ‘exploding the false distinction between forced and voluntary prosti-

tution’ (Jeffries, 1997: 10). Through the Coalition Against Trafﬁcking in

Women (CATW), Jeffries and other prominent radical feminists focus atten-

tion on trafﬁcking as the sexual slavery of women and children and seek

to challenge its ‘widespread support’. 2 This ‘support’ is considered to

emanate from an apparent array of actors (sex liberals, queer theorists,

pimps, sex tourists and postmodernists) who consider alternative inﬂu-

ences or frameworks such as work, choice and sex. Jeffries cites this diverse

group as ‘united in their resistance to a feminist politics of prostitution’,

preferring to ‘sustain women’s exploitation’ in this ﬁeld (Jeffries, 1997: 6).

The importance of this work, which has provided a vital space to articu-

late the harms women have experienced and continue to experience

‘under’ eroticized power relations, can be overshadowed in the critiques

Scoular: The ‘subject’ of prostitution

345

that emerge from alternative voices in the sex industry and from post-

modernists. An uncompromised account of domination does offer oppor-

tunities for action in the face of the seeming nihilism of more abstract

postmodern theories and the de-politicization created by the normalization

of heterosexual power differentials and the apparent market inevitability

of their commodiﬁcation.

Nevertheless, the move from empirical, and at times partial, accounts of

women’s experiences in prostitution to an ideological position is

frequently achieved at the expense of a recognition of women’s agency and

the complexities and contradictions inherent in analysing selling sex

across space and time, without regard for the structuring roles of culture,

class and race.

The alienated subject of prostitution

The importance of gender in structuring the sale of sex informs a radical

perspective on prostitution. Rather than representing freedom or diversity,

the practice of women selling sex is considered the epitome of the oppres-

sive sexual relations, ‘the public recognition of men’s mastery’ (Mac-

Kinnon, 1993: 13). Sexuality is considered as the primary dynamic in the

ordering of society, represented in MacKinnon’s maxim: ‘Sexuality is to

feminism, what work is to Marxism; that which is most one’s own and yet

that which is most taken away’ (MacKinnon, 1982: 515). Carole Pateman,

in The Sexual Contract , engenders the political ﬁction of the social contact

to demonstrate the centrality of sexual possession to male–female relations

in European societies and the role of prostitution in maintaining this

dynamic: ‘womanhood . . . is conﬁrmed in sexual activity, and when a

prostitute contracts out the use of her body she is thus selling herself in a

very real way’ (Pateman, 1988: 207, emphasis in original).

There are, however, a number of problems with such accounts. By over-

determining gendered power-dynamics critics have noted that domination

theory simply essentializes and fails to move outside the phallocentric

imaginary (Cornell, 1995; Brown, 1995; Scoular, 1996). 3 This is evident in

the quotation above where, in one rhetorical swoop, all women are reduced

to prostitutes and prostitutes to their sex acts. Not only does this reify an

image of the prostitute as sexual subordinate, it also sustains the myths and

norms of the sex industry, of potent men and submissive women, rather

than transforming them (Shrage, 1994: 134). Gender and sexuality clearly

play important structuring roles in prostitution but it is a phenomenon that

cannot be reduced to either gender or sexuality (Zatz, 1997: 279). 4 In doing

so radical feminist theories reduce women’s identity to a single trait,

regardless of the structuring roles of money, culture or race. In identifying

sex more than other bodily mediated activities, such as childcare, nursing

or domestic activities, radical feminists ascribe a particular value to sex,

which is then used to argue against its commodiﬁcation (Oerton and

Phoenix, 2001: 387). Pateman, for example, deﬁnes the difference between

paid sex and loving sex as: ‘[the] difference between the reciprocal expres-

sion of desire and unilateral subjection to sexual acts with the consolation

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Feminist Theory 5(3)

of payment: it is the difference for women between freedom and subjec-

tion’ (Pateman, 1988: 204). Barry echoes this when she notes that ‘when

sex is not explicitly treated as genuine human interaction, it dehumanises

the experience and thereby dominates women’ (Barry, 1995: 28).

Not only does this conﬁrm current normative understandings of

‘genuine’ sex as in some way outside power, it also, as Zatz observes,

accepts the culturally speciﬁc processes that separate work from relation-

ships of intimacy. The economic dimension is important in this context.

Although seen by radical feminists as just an exacerbating variable, in an

always-dominant sexual hierarchy, the presence of money has important

structural consequences. 5 Feminists have highlighted the public/private

norms of instrumental rationality and love that operate to obscure the role

of desire in the market and to place burdens on groups, especially women,

whose labour in an affective private world goes unrecognized (Zatz, 1997:

303; Olsen, 1983: 1497). Prostitution, however, challenges this dualism.

Zatz (1997: 303) describes it as a ‘bifurcated event’ – an act that cannot be

identiﬁed as singularly a market transaction or the realization of private

desire. The confusion this creates fuels the whore stigma, which as Mc-

Clintock (1992: 73) observes, reﬂects deeply felt anxieties about women

trespassing the dangerous boundaries between private and public. It is also

met with criminalization which attempts to force back public elements of

prostitution into the realm of private sexuality, thus keeping the economy

and sexuality symbolically separated: ‘By denying prostitution the status

of work criminalization helps patrol the boundary between the sex/affec-

tive labour routinely assigned to and expected of women and practices

deserving of the ﬁnancial and status rewards of “work” ’ (Zatz, 1997: 287).

Failure to recognize the role of stigma and law in structuring the marginal

status of sex work means, as Zatz perceptively notes, that radical feminists

often underestimate how much of what they identify as harmful in prostitution

is a product, not of the inherent character of sex work or sexuality but rather of

the speciﬁc regimes of criminalization and denigration that serve to marginalize

and oppress sex workers while constraining and distorting sex work’s radical

potential. (Zatz, 1997: 289)

Sex radicals

The most obvious critique that emerges in response to domination theory

is from those whose experience lies beyond a myopic interpretation of

complex social practices. As Doezema notes, ‘In claiming the “injured

prostitute” as the ontological and epistemological basis of feminist truth

[radical feminist work] forecloses the possibility of political confrontation

with sex workers who claim a different experience’ (Doezema, 2001: 28).

This tension, is vividly captured in Gail Pheterson’s accounts of the ﬁrst

Congress of Whores (in 1989) where, describing themselves as ‘feminists

in exile’ 6 (Pheterson, 1989: 17), prostitutes organized not only to campaign

against legal discrimination but also to resist accounts which cast them as

mere victims. Pheterson highlights the beginnings of counter movements

of ‘sex workers’ in the West which formed directly in response to legal

Scoular: The ‘subject’ of prostitution

347

discrimination but also in response to feminist hesitations around viewing

prostitution as work (Bell, 1987; Delacoste and Alexander, 1988).

In A Vindication of the Rights of Whores , Pheterson (1989) subverts

Wollstonecraft’s early liberal feminist manifesto to ground an ongoing

campaign for the civil rights of women in the sex industry. Seemingly

ﬂippant at times, for example, the demand for the right ‘to charge for what

other women give for free’ (Delacoste and Alexander, 1988: 273), sex

worker narratives do offer important counter-hegemonic insights: ‘its open

challenge both to the identiﬁcation of sex acts with acts of desire and to

the opposition between erotic/affective activity and economic life’ (Zatz,

1997: 277).

Alongside postmodern work that has theoretically reﬁned and bolstered

sex worker discourse, support has been garnered from those who similarly

oppose dominant notions of appropriate sexual behaviour and campaign

against the legal constraints on their apparent ‘deviant’ identities. While

this alliance is understandable given the lack of unconditional support

from large parts of the feminist movement and the shared experience of

engaging in sexual activity outside the legitimated boundaries of married,

heterosexual monogamy, assimilating sex work with ‘deviant’ sexualities

is, at times, problematic.

As diverse as the work in the area of sexuality is, there is a tendency

amongst the most rhetorical writers to cast the deviant category itself as

normative, especially when striving for legal recognition, at the expense of

more pluralistic struggles around sexuality (Bower, 1994; Herman and

Stychin, 1995; Stychin and Herman, 2000). Sex worker discourses, at

times, fall into this mode of thinking. Pheterson, for example, maintains

that law ‘contributes to the stigmatization and suppression of all active and

autonomous expressions of female desire’ (Pheterson, 1989: 23, 194;

Shrage, 1994: 134). By equating the restrictions on women’s sexual activity

with the suppression of an apparent ‘natural’ sexual drive she inadver-

tently reinforces dominant notions of sex as pre-social and conﬁrms the

centrality of sexuality to subjects’ identity. Such an approach ignores the

role of law and material structures in producing, as well as constraining,

sexual preferences and acts (Foucault, 1978).

By moving beyond this, identity politics, whether for gay rights or for

sex workers’ rights, risks afﬁrming a ‘fully constituted and bounded’

identity which is in fact ‘created’ by the power structures it aims to

critique. As Minow notes,

Just as conventional notions of objectivity failed to recognize the authority of the

voices of the relatively powerless, alternative notions of authority in subjective

accounts are defective in their inattention to material, historical experiences

beyond individual subjectivity. (Minow, 1993: 1437)

By contrast, work in sexuality which recognizes the historical and cultural

contingency of dominant forms of sexuality (Foucault, 1978; Rubin, 1984;

Weeks, 1985; Bell, 1994) helps develop a less normative approach which

casts prostitute rights not as ‘another conﬁguration of sexual desire and

pleasure’ but as a strategic movement that attempts to resist the structuring

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