Feminism: February 2007.
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Home > Feminism: February 2007 > Criticism
The Harlot's Curse:
Feminism and Prostitution
by Kate Morris
Feminist engagements with prostitution tend to fall into two general categories: activist politics (changing the lived realities of prostitutes) and the politics of representations (changing the way that prostitution is represented and understood in culture). Underlying both these approaches is an interest in mobilizing prostitutes as political subjects. Therefore the critical discourse generated by both feminists and prostitutes has centred on a notion of identity politics.This analysis is an attempt to read different feminist representations of prostitution to reveal how feminist ideologies have operated to exclude prostitution and prostitutes from frameworks of female liberation. For many of these feminisms the tacit assumption is that progress will be marked by the eradication of prostitution, which suggests that feminism also attempts to make the destitute woman invisible. I want to consider what has been left out of feminist engagements with prostitution and what these blinds spots signify about different feminist ideologies, and perhaps more pertinently, what they reveal about feminism’s political power. The prostitute body, and by extension the prostitute as a subject in culture, pose questions that speak to the very basis of feminist theory and its various conceptualizations of femininity, sexuality, the body, and the particularly difficult category of Woman itself. In overlooking a framework of prostitution within theoretical feminist debates, feminists have purged themselves of the abject “dirty girls” who threaten the very institution that is purported to aid in their liberation.
At different points in history the prostitute body, and by extension the act of prostitution itself, have been variously coded and understood in culture. The prostitute body is a site on, and through which, discourses make claims about the appropriate nature of subjectivity and appropriate types of bodily activity. It follows that the image of the prostitute subject which emerges will be as varied and polymorphous as the discourses which attempt to define it. The prostitute is an identity defined through legal, political, medical, familial and economic discourses among others. And dependant on the discourse, the prostitute is alternately defined and coded as a criminal, an outlaw, a diseased body, a healthy body, a drug addict, a worker, an abused body, an empowered body, a pleasured body and a victim.[1] The prostitute body is required to be “simultaneously closed, open and empty” so that while having a basis in material reality, it can also be filled up with desired cultural imaginings which are constructed to signify differently depending on the particular discourse.[2] This polymorphous and contradictory aspect ensures that the prostitute can both take in these projected images and also put out. Despite attempts to define exactly what a prostitute is, the term, the concept, the act, the subject and the identity along with all of its political ramifications, seem to fit uncomfortably within these definitions even while the discourses themselves seem to give it “an analytical, visible and permanent reality.”[3] If as Foucault argues in The History of Sexuality, “an intensification of the intervention of power links to a multiplication of discourse,” what is signified by feminist discourse on prostitution and what kind of intervention is it?[4]
In a general sense feminism is polarized and divided on issues of sexuality, such that sex is understood as either the primary source of women’s oppression or the primary source of women’s liberation. By extension this dichotomy is manifested in feminist constructions of the prostitute body as either empowered or victimized, as well as indifferent prostitutes’ statements about their own experiences. But much like Foucault’s understanding of the homosexual, nothing goes into the prostitute’s definition (in discourse) that is unaffected by her sexuality: “it was everywhere present in [her], at the root of all [her] actions.”[5] This suggests that feminist discourses on prostitution have also “traced around bodies and sexes, not boundaries to be crossed, but perpetual spirals of power and pleasure” or sometimes, in the case of prostitution, disempowerment and abuse.[6] But the prostitute, as a sexed body, resists such either/or definition and this leads to a proliferation of the discourses on prostitution. It seems, therefore, that the prostitute body questions the feminist project to determine the nature of women’s liberation or oppression through answering questions of sexuality as it has often tried to do in the past. More simply, the prostitute may subvert the very potential of finding definitive answers to these questions through explorations of sexual morality. The prostitute body further questions a feminism that was divided through issues of sexuality and this resistance acts, retroactively, to interrogate the importance of sex and sexuality to frameworks of subjectivity and identity politics in feminist discourse generally. At the same time, however, prostitution necessarily foregrounds sexuality and the body.
As Diane Elam argues in Feminism and Deconstruction: Ms. En Abyme “feminism cannot afford to lose sight of the body,” but how the body is seen and described within feminist discourse determines not only the body which is seen, but also the subject that it supposedly represents.[7] For radical feminists of the 1980s like Catherine MacKinnon, “woman is…a being who identifies and is identified as one whose sexuality exists for someone else…what is termed women’s sexuality is the capacity to arouse desire in that someone else.”[8] Woman therefore becomes the passive recipient of masculine desire, and the prostitute becomes the perfect symbol of female oppression. Within this framework the prostitute is necessarily outside of not only the project of women’s liberation but is also barred from that liberation itself. Interestingly, MacKinnon’s notion of liberation excludes the subjectivity of “disenfranchised” prostitutes whose very existence seems to justify MacKinnon’s claims even while the prostitute subject (as MacKinnon represents her) undermines the validity of any such claims. In this context it is useful to consider Elam’s notion that any feminism which thinks “it has all the answers about women, [which] never questions its own composition and exclusionary practices, is destined to practice some of the worst forms of social injustice in the name of liberation.”[9]
While much of the rhetoric of the body has been denaturalized and de-essentialized, the rhetoric of the prostitute body has remained intact and has even been confirmed by MacKinnon-style feminist representations, which, it should be mentioned, overlook the possibly liberating effects of sexuality. Within feminist discourse, the very language that is used to describe the prostitute is “so bound up in the body, so mimetic in its expression, that it collapses the semiotic distance between sign and referent,” that is, between feminisms ideological and representational needs and some idea of the ‘real’ of prostitution.[10]
The tacit assumption of these constructions of prostitution is that progress would be marked by the disappearance of the prostitute from culture. Thus as Margo St-James—a representative from COYOTE, a sex trade worker’s rights organization—states: “when [feminists] slide into their ‘Oh, they’re all victims, we must save them!’ trip, it supports the continued stigmatization [of prostitutes].”[11] Furthermore these feminist constructions are in fact negations of the prostitute subject as she is defined through the very use of her body which these feminist discourses—seeing sex as oppressive—seek to oppose. In this respect the prostitute is caught in a representational bind. She is relegated to the space between previous notions of femininity as sexualized for the purposes of masculine desire and current feminist notions of “women” that seek to eradicate all such forms of femininity. From this perspective it becomes possible to consider the idea that feminists are, or at least have been, engaged in a common-sense perception and representation of prostitution. In this sense prostitution shows the ways in which the “common ground of sisterhood, long held as white feminism’s ideal, was always more utopian than representative. Worse, it was coercive in its unacknowledged universalism, its unrecognized exclusions.”[12] Feminisms’ “common ground” has operated historically to foreclose various categories of difference within the category “woman,” such that abject bodies (based on race, class and sexual orientation) are not only excluded from feminist discourse, but are also negated through the production of discourse itself. Perhaps though, prostitutes have suffered most from these exclusions because their very livelihood is what is at stake in these types of feminism.
The “difference feminist” struggle is not only “to assert an identity but to assert difference” within gender categories.[13] Rather than a reduction to essential characteristics of woman, difference feminism asserts the poly-vocal notion of women. However just as “woman” marks a “point of dispute where language itself becomes a problem, where one person’s injustice cannot be registered in the language of the other” so too does the category of the prostitute within feminist discourse.[14] In the 1985 conference Challenging Our Images: The Politics of Pornography and Prostitution, Penny Miller articulates this “blind spot” in communication between feminists and prostitutes:
“But it’s different when it comes to sex” I ask you “Well, why is it different?” You believe only in “Let’s find a way for prostitutes to escape.”…What is so terrible about fucking for a living?…Who am I, and who am I to you?…Who am I to you if I enjoy my job? Are we without dignity? Have we got a problem? Are we sick?[15]
This quote reveals the extent to which the prostitution feminist debate engages in questions of legitimate speech and who is authorized to speak. It also reveals a direct confrontation as to where prostitutes (“who am I?”) can be located in the feminist project, and, conversely, where feminism is situated within prostitution debates. In any case the “common ground of sisterhood” emerges as anything but common and a gap in language can here be detected between feminists and prostitutes. This gap functions to turn feminist claims around, such that the feminists are put in their place, as it were, and reminded of the extent to which they too occupy a particular subject position with feminism’s own political agenda and ideological aims.
When it is not arguing for “the common ground of sisterhood,” most of the feminist discourse on prostitution hinges around the notion of experience. However as Diana Fuss has argued, “bodily experiences may seem self-evident and immediate but they are always socially mediated…experience is not merely constructed but also is itself constructing.”[16] While feminist discussions often focus on the causal aspects of the prostitute subject—the hows and whys that create prostitution in society—there is very little engagement with the constructing aspects of the prostitute subject in culture. Therefore in much the same way that the gay and lesbian movements questioned heteronormativity, one of the significantly constructive questions raised by the developing prostitute’s rights movement is that it questions compulsory monogamy. It is telling that while much of feminist discourse has questioned the institution of marriage and its oppressive potential for women, monogamy remains as a dominant hegemonic value. With marriage under scrutiny, why has monogamy sustained its self-evident position in culture and likewise feminist discourse? It seems that the prostitute subject questions the privileging of “sexual exchange, which takes place in the context of love, commitment, and some form of responsibility through time [as] necessarily more ethical than sexual exchange that is anonymous and perhaps limited to a single encounter.”[17] It should be mentioned that the HIV/AIDS pandemic reinstated (not through coercion but consensus) compulsory monogamy as the end point to the free-love of the sexual revolution. But the prostitutes’ rights discourse has generated new meanings of prostitution. According to this discourse, the prostitute is constructed as “healer rather than disease producer, as educator rather than degenerate, as sex expert rather than deviant, as business woman rather than commercial object.”[18] In this respect the discourse negotiates the identity of prostitution, thus expanding the politics to include new subjectivities through their reconstitution in culture, representation and language.
Identity politics marks the “tendency to base one’s politics on a sense of personal identity…a working theoretical base upon which to build a cohesive and visible community.”[19] Although the formation of such coalitions has mobilized many rights movements, Diana Fuss questions the notion that “identity necessarily determines a particular kind of politics.”[20] Fuss argues for a more nuanced understanding of both identity and politics within contemporary critical discourses. Furthermore she suggests that identity cannot be framed as “unitary, stable and coherent” as is often the assumption of essentialist understandings of identity and those based on experience. By contrast a deconstruction of identity asserts identity as difference rather than self-presence. Although a deconstructive reading of identity seems to obliterate the importance of identity altogether, Fuss argues for the maintenance of the “fiction of identity” that is made possible in a deconstructive framework. Furthermore, a psychoanalytic notion of identity posits the “subject as always divided and identity is purchased at the price of the exclusion of the Other.”[21] As such the identity categories that are created through identity politics are themselves discursive formations that always operate to produce certain types of knowledge and power. Importantly then, Fuss argues that “the determining factor in deciding essentialism’s political or strategic value is dependent upon who practices it.”[22] By extension it seems that identity politics ensures the proliferation of multiple representation of identity and as such it appears as an inclusive practice. With each new representation subjectivity seems to become more accurately and equally represented and, with this accuracy, culture in general seems to move towards some notion of progress. However, I would argue that any projection of identity that is rooted in a notion of unity is necessarily exclusive. The notion of exclusivity that I am using stems from Derrida’s construction of the binary: “the indefinite process of supplementarity has always already infiltrated presence, always already inscribed there the space of repetition and the splitting of the self.”[23] From this perspective any identity category forecloses its own inadequacy as “substitution fills and marks a determined lack.”[24] It seems then that identity politics always become (and are continually becoming) a sort of micro-politics which raises the question whether there will be any common ground left after everyone has been given a voice, though perhaps it is the illusion of this common ground that is necessary for political activism. The danger is in the creation and recreation of a cacophony of private, and therefore non-communicative and incomprehensible, languages and discourses, as I think this fragmentation is in fact a symptom of the metadiscourses of capitalism. Furthermore Fuss argues that “it is telling…that anti-essentialists are willing to displace ‘identity,’ ‘self,’ ‘experience,’ and virtually every other self-evident category except politics. To the extent that it is difficult to imagine a non-political feminism, politics emerges as feminism’s essence.”[25] In this sense the fact that much feminist debate surrounding prostitution relies alternately on a notion of essence, experience and politics to naturalize and justify its action within this sphere speaks to the extent to which the prostitute body challenges both essentialist and anti-essentialist feminism.
Essentialist definitions of “woman” place the distinctive characteristics of femininity in the body and the experience of the body such that women may gain control and freedom through it. However the prostitute in many respects defies this notion of bodily authority. By contrast if anti-essentialist claims necessarily deny the primacy of all self-evident categories in favor of politics, then the visceral and embodied aspect of prostitution is negated, thus undermining the significance of prostitution as it necessarily foregrounds sexuality as an experience of the body and subjectivity. In this respect the prostitute body both occupies a boundary between conflicting feminist notions of sexuality, the body, and “woman”, while these feminisms founder on the kind of sexuality that prostitution is predicated on. This critical blindness within feminist discourses implies the extent to which sexuality persists as a source of discomfort even within the discourses that supposedly liberate it. Prostitution is thereby foreclosed from the realm of the thinkable and speakable within feminist discourses that seem to reconstruct sexuality as the meaningful union of a legitimate couple, rather than attempt to figure a divided and multiple definition of sex from within.
Notes
[1] Bell, Shannon. Reading, Writing and Rewriting the Prostitute Body. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1994, p 99.
[2] Segal, Naomi. “The Common Touch.” In After Diana: Irreverent Elegies. Eds. Mandy Merk. London: Verso, 1998, p 142.
[3] Foucault, Michel. “The History of Sexuality, Volume 1.” In The Norton Anthology of Theory and Criticism.New York: W.W. Norton and Company, 2001 pp 1648-1666.
[4] Ibid.
[5] Ibid.
[6] Ibid.
[7] Elam, Diane. Feminism and Deconstruction: Ms. En Abyme. London: Routledge, 1994, p.60.
[8] MacKinnon quoted in Shannon Bell, Ibid. p. 80.
[9] Elam, Diane. Ibid. p. 32.
[10] Felleman, Susan. “Fluid Fantasies: Splash and Children of a Lesser God.” In Camera Obscura, 19 (January 1989): 119.
[11] Good Girls/Bad Girls: Sex Trade Workers & Feminists Face to Face. Ed. Laurie Bell. Toronto: The Women’s Press, 1987, 86.
[12] Elam, Diane. Ibid..46.
[13] Ibid. p 33
[14] Ibid.
[15] Good Girls/ Bad Girls.Ibid. p. 49.
[16] Fuss, Diana. “Reading Like a Feminist.” In Difference, 2:1 (summer 1989): 89.
[17] Bell, Shannon. Ibid. p. 95.
[18] Ibid. p. 100.
[19] Fuss, Diana. “Lesbian and Gay Theory: The Question of Identity Politics.” In Essentially Speaking. New York: Routledge, 1989, p. 99.
[20] Ibid.
[21] Ibid. p. 102.
[22] Fuss, Diana. “Reading Like A Feminist.” Ibid. p.86.
[23] Derrida, Jacques. Of Grammatology. Trans. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak. Baltimore and London: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1997, p. 163.
[24] Ibid. p. 157.
[25] Fuss, Diana. Ibid. p. 90.
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