Livable Intersections

Re/Framing Sex Work at the Frontline

Sara M. Kallock

• Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield International
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9781786604491
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Social Policy
• Index: Politics & International Relations

What is it like to live a life that is impossible? For many sex workers, life is lived at the crossroads of exclusion and assimilation, a crossroads where one is beset by vulnerability and regulation, where one is simultaneously blamed, victimized, and infantilized. Within this context of heteronormativity, sex working experiences are defined by multiple and overlapping forms of marginalization. Social support services are widely thought to provide a crucial bulwark against such unlivable realities by empowering service users to manage (and even overcome) their oppressive circumstances. Yet, such services are themselves often entangled with the social, cultural, and political processes that engender the disavowal of “sex” as a form of “work” and the attendant marginalization of sex workers. Bringing together insights from Judith Butler and intersectionality, Livable Intersections: Re/Framing Sex Work at the Frontline investigates the dynamics of frontline policy practice and in livability offers a new vision for designing, implementing, and valuing sex worker support services.

1

“Where Everything Falls Down”

It is a cold winter’s day, and my fellow conference-goers and I are bundled in the din of a buzzing cafeteria. Alice, a retired sex worker, a fork poised diagonally in her hand, locks her gaze on mine. I had just asked the group—postgraduates and early career researchers—what had led them to study sex work, the subject of our conference. Because, Alice responded, sex work is where everything falls down.

In those few words, something clicked into place for me: Sex work is slippery, a site where our ostensibly secure preconceptions about bodies, desires, rights, and power are complicated, becoming ill-fitted and unwieldy. It was, for me, a crystallizing moment.

This framing of sex work as a site of slipperiness is, however, not shared universally. When I first began to study sex work I lived in Belfast, Northern Ireland, and was introduced to the subject by a local activist who defined sex work as a site of violence and exploitation. Their certainty framed my initial inquiries as a young researcher, but as I spoke with sex workers, social workers, and law enforcement, a different narrative emerged. I returned to this mentor with questions, and each time—with increasing frustration at my queries—they explained away the possibility of alternative explanations and accounts of sex work.

But the more I read, the more questions I asked; the more experiences I cognized, the less certain I became that sex work is an area of social life that can be affixed under the frame she offered. I became increasingly moved by something that “exceeded” her analysis; that did not conform to the “established understanding of things”; that “troubled” my sense of the “reality” she presented to me (cf. Butler 2009, 9).

What I did not realize at that time—for I had not yet articulated clearly the concepts that would later become indispensable to my own analysis of sex work—was the reliance of my mentor’s framing of sex work on what Judith Butler calls the “logic of iterability” (Butler 1993, 105). This holds that the viability of any ideological frame is derived from its consistent, repetitive enactment over time. Its stability compels zealous reaffirmation. But such a structure is precarious, for “in the demand that the identification be reiterated persists the possibility, the threat, that it will fail to repeat” (Butler 1993, 102). Hence, framings are “never fully made and finally made . . . they are that which is constantly marshaled, consolidated, retrenched, contested, and, on occasion, compelled to give away” (105). I found in my intellectual forays that my efforts to affix a frame around sex work only further amplified its refusal to be contained.

This slipperiness suggests that we can apprehend “sex work,” but not precisely, and not sturdily. For in telling a story of sex work one ends up illuminating “something [that] remains outside the narrative, a resistant moment that signals a persisting inconceivability” (Butler 2004, 64). Thus “the image” of the sex worker as violent and exploited—so fervently defended by my mentor—and “which is supposed to deliver reality, in fact withdraws reality from perception” (Butler 2009, 75). For Butler, this is to be expected; the frame works by governing “the perceptible . . . [by] bringing an image into focus on the condition that some portion of the visual field is ruled out” (74). In framing the sex worker as victim, I was led to see that “the frame never quite contained the scene it was meant to limn . . . something was already outside, which made the very sense of the inside possible, recognizable” (9). “Frames” are never able to exert themselves entirely, for they “never quite [determine] precisely what it is we see, think, recognize, and apprehend” (9). I intuited—at least thinly—this dynamic, but it was not until Alice’s remark that I began to understand what could be gained by insisting on the unframeability of sex work.

When I began studying sex work, I believed largely that it was replete with violence, distress, and emptiness. In retrospect, I think I sensed some degree of resilience in the figure of the sex worker, but my initial preconceptions were derived from the widely shared sensibility that sex workers live a life that is not to be desired. Since the ostensive “sex wars” of the 1980s, feminists have been significant players in pedaling this narrative. In waging a radical insurrection against patriarchy, they fomented a challenge to what they saw as its starkest manifestation: the literal sale of women’s bodies to the sadistic appetites of men. The preponderance of violence that purportedly afflicts the sector, the overwhelming presence of ciswomen, and the popularity of hyper-feminine affect all reinforced this narrative. At first glance, sex work seems to be a cut-and-dry case of patriarchal oppression.

The pernicious effects of capitalism also seem definitive of the sector. Sex work commodifies an area of human life ostensibly untouched by capitalism: intimacy. Capitalism forces us to regard and divide our being-in-the-world into entities whose value flows from their exchangeability on the market rather than other considerations, such as our moral status as human beings capable of love, justice, and openness. Capitalism, particularly in its most acute consumerist formation, makes us competitors with one another, in a race to sell whatever we can, a race to the bottom that seems to be encapsulated in the exchange of desire and intimacy for money or other benefits. The translation of sexual desire into a form of currency seems to depict the apotheosis of atomization within late capitalism.

These were the spoken and tacit frames through which I first began thinking about sex work. I believe they are also the frames through which my early mentor thought about sex work. However, Alice’s remark illuminated their provisionality, leading me to think that clinging to them is to close oneself off to the complex and fluid reality of sex work, and to risk participating in the repression of sex workers’ agentic potentiality.

Accepting the unwieldiness of sex work required coming to terms with the nature of sex itself. Sex brings us to the edge of our existence, to what Levinas calls the face of the Other (Butler 2006). Through our bodies we are constantly open to others, in ways we desire and ways we fear. As much as sex can be an experience of harmonious love and joy with others, it can also be a site of terror and violence. The body is a site of titillating access and of pain and anguish. Sex reminds us that we are social beings. At least in the West, shared sensibilities around sex tend to celebrate the openness it entails, but in doing so also reifies a version of openness defined by harmony and likeness: I love you and have sex with you because we are knowable to one another. This is an approach to sex that excises our fundamental openness to difference, which sex work foregrounds.

Sex work reframes our conceptions of sex, reminding us of our complex openness to others. In selling sexual services, sex workers engage in bodily openness to others, but also demonstrate strategies for delimiting the psychic expanse of desire—not with marriage or chivalrous pledges of love, but with crisp cash. As Ann McClintock (1995) argues, sex workers constitute boundary markers, points at which the aperture of corporeal vulnerability opens and closes. The “fee” erects a withholding, allowing (ideally) the sex worker to give of herself to others only what has been negotiated. Many sex workers don’t perform certain sex acts, and don’t permit access to certain parts of their body. And in these respects, sex workers remind us that all sex is a kind of negotiation, defined sometimes by struggle and sometimes by caress. The idealization of intimacy as some pure and harmonious exchange is fundamentally suspect; most relations under patriarchy and capitalism have a transactional component. Intimacy is a negotiation, one with political dimensions. Although sex can be thought of as a feature of the “private” and “individual” sphere, sex work brings the sociality of sex into full relief. Sex work makes sex a public matter, something that must be configured through political as much as personal action. And this chafes against the entrenched sensibilities that typify sexuality in the West. We openly cherish sexual intimacy as a mode of openness, but only to a certain extent. We deny that sexual intimacy can be detached from desire and yet still be valuable. This understanding of “openness” is greatly impoverished, belying a tendency to retain sex to the sanctity of an atomized individual. This is closure, not openness.

To say that sex work is “where everything falls down” is to highlight the ways in which the social meanings of sex can be—and are constantly being—shifted, often in unsanctioned directions, through negotiation and critique. To accept that sex work is “where everything falls down” is to accept that conceptions about sex work are necessarily in flux. The understanding of sex work as a dialectical management of the openness of sex does not currently inform the discourse around sex work, especially among frontline actors. The purpose of frontline actors should be to effect a transformation into a new type of normativity,¹ and this requires being open to implicit critiques of sex contained within sex work, and to flexing the prevailing norms of sexuality in order to make the doing of sex work a livable possibility. Frontline workers are actors with immense political and social capital, capable of serving as strategic allies of the sex-working community by using that capital to contest the criminalization and stigmatization of sex work. But too often this is not the case, and projects tend to opt for individuated forms of empowerment that flow with the broader depoliticization of gender, sex, and social welfare issues. New tools must be forged and deployed, and it is this challenge that motivates the analysis undertaken in this book.

This book postulates a new direction for conceptualizing and practicing the relationship between sex workers and the frontline professionals with whom they interface, one that is geared robustly toward emancipatory and enfranchising ends for sex workers. My aim is to develop an ethico-political approach to sex work that promises sex workers not merely survival, but genuine flourishing. Sex work, I posit, is compatible with this aim. To do this, I turn to the concept of livability developed by Judith Butler, a critical queer theorist who conceives emancipatory politics in terms of challenging “the norms that confer intelligibility” (Butler 2001, 634), and thus, the capacity to count as a human. Legal theorist Kathryn McNeilly embarks on a similar investment, applying livability to the issue of reproductive and abortion-rights activism in Ireland (2013; 2015; 2016). We both conceptualize livability as an analysis that centers the discursive and material structures that bear on the persistence and flourishing of persons in conditions of precarity (McNeilly 2015).² Drawing on Butler’s reflections and arguments on vulnerability, precarity, performativity, and framing, we develop livability as a vital alternative to the value-framework of “bounded physical life and sovereign subject[ivity]” (142) that saturates the social discourse around bodily processes and pursuits.

Nonetheless, the theoretical work I develop here differs from that of McNeilly, and to some extent Butler herself, both of whom admit that they see livability as a tactic,³ a tool for excavating how the frame of the “human” is “produced, reproduced and deproduced” (McNeilly 2016) through discourses of gender and grievability (see Butler 2004; 2009), health, and human rights (McNeilly 2013; 2015). I examine how the framing of sex workers’ lives are translated at the interface of policy and embodied experience, investigating how livability is enacted by the institutions that concretize discourse and policy into the material realities with which sex-working subjects must contend as they strive to persist and flourish in conditions of criminalization, economic exclusion, stigmatization, and physical risk. Accordingly, the following work develops “livability” as more than a “theoretical tool” (2016), “starting point” (2015, 149) or “stage” for launching critical interventions (2015, 150), but as a substantive ethico-political project that yields specific ends and components of practice, such as an ethos of openness, programs of livelihood and agency, and a politics of normative critique.⁴

In the remainder of this chapter I set the stage for the development of livability and its application to the issue(s) of sex-work service delivery by outlining key definitions of sex work, the theoretical debates on sex work, methodological considerations and approaches, and synopses of the book’s chapters. Below, three framings of sex work are interrogated: abolitionism, sex radicalism, and sex laborism. The purpose of this discussion is twofold. In terms of the theoretical component of this book, these debates serve as heuristic foils for the development of livability in chapter 2. The frames of “whore” outlined below are not neatly compatible with livability; as we shall see, aspects of sex radicalism and laborism are carried over into livability, but the limitations of all the perspectives are discussed in each section. Second, these perspectives shape how discourses are enacted at the “coalface” of sex-work policy, and therefore are made evident in the empirical investigation of frontline practice. These are not merely abstractions, but living modalities through which sex-work politics and ally-ship crystallize. Before this section, discussion of some preliminary definitions is warranted.

Definitions

Sex work involves the exchange of goods, services, or a fee for sexual services. Sexual services include telephone sex, “camming,” erotic dance and lap-dancing, peepshows, sexual massage, sexual surrogacy, mail-order weddings, adult film performances, BDSM specialization, sugar-babying, and prostitution. Unless otherwise specified, much of the analysis presented in this book refers specifically to “prostitution,” generally understood as the form of sex work involving the exchange of a fee or other goods for either oral or genital sex, or another form of sexualized physical interaction such as cuddling, hand-jobs, mutual masturbation, sex toys, or role-play.

Harcourt and Donovan (2005) draw a distinction between “direct” and “indirect” prostitution, claiming that “direct” prostitution refers to sex acts of which “the primary purpose of the interaction is to exchange sex for a fee,” while “indirect” prostitution refers to sexual interactions in which the primary purpose of the interaction might be to gain a good, service, or fee by other means which are similar to prostitution; thus, the interaction might “not be recognized as prostitution” (201, 203). On this view, “direct” prostitution covers a broad range of sex work, including street prostitution, massage parlors and brothels, and escorts, while “indirect” prostitution includes lap-dancing, BDSM specialization, or sexual massage, as well as survival sex or the exchange of sex for drugs.

Within the broader currents of political discourse on sex work (and, to a lesser extent, within feminist debates), instances of sex work are often characterized as a form of “trafficking.” I take umbrage with this characterization because it flattens distinct sex-working experiences and reinforces the Third World as a site of white interventionism (Doezema 2001). The conceptual interchange of “sex work” and “sex trafficking” represents a rhetorical maneuver designed to bolster the prominence of the abolitionist perspective and/or to create and reinforce the perceived need for apparatuses of criminalization to deter or punish international crime networks. Trafficking refers to the coerced movement of people across borders for the purposes of forced labor of some kind, including prostitution. Trafficking for the purposes of prostitution exists, but emerging scholarship emphasizes the need for “a complex redefinition of human trafficking based on grounded observations and local realities” (Kempadoo et al. 2016). Unless stated otherwise, I take “sex work” and “sex trafficking” to be two unique social phenomena that require their own specialized analysis. I intend to focus on the former, and, for the most part, this distinction coheres with my empirical sample: Although the organizations with whom I spoke encounter migrant sex workers and victims of trafficking, most see themselves as working primarily with non-trafficked, adult sex-working populations.

Common Ground

As we shall see next, the feminist models of sex work differ on the question of trafficking, with abolitionists endorsing the concept wholeheartedly and the others resisting it. Nonetheless, they agree on some fundamental descriptions about the commercial sex sector. They acknowledge a diverse range of push/pull factors influencing why wo/men begin sex-working, from direct coercion to the economic. They also acknowledge the diversity of subsectors within the industry, and the fact that the sector is trending away from the street toward online and indoor platforms (Matthews 2005). Each of the perspectives acknowledge that the commercial sex sector has a highly gendered character; as O’Neill (1997) points out, the feminization of poverty has been exacerbated by a lack of economic opportunities for low-skilled workers and a dearth of welfare policies that support single-female heads of households. These trends have impacted women acutely, a pattern that abolitionists are keen to highlight. Each acknowledges that interactions within the industry are shaped by the position of women in a patriarchal society, and therefore can involve deeply misogynistic behaviors. Although the role of exploitation within the industry is contested among these perspectives, each acknowledges that it occurs. Third-party relationships involve varying degrees of coercion, manipulation, and violence, and it is in reference to these “degrees” that feminists scrutinize the sector (O’Connell Davidson 1998, 47–58).

Regardless of where the perspectives stand on the question of coercion or exploitation, each of these perspectives recognizes that sex work involves a range of serious short-term and long-term hazards. Sex workers face a number of physical risks to their health, such as unwanted pregnancies, sexually transmitted diseases (STD), and blood-borne viruses (BBV). Those most at risk to BBV transmission are usually street-based sex workers, because they are more likely to be engaged in intravenous drug use (Church et al. 2001; Cooper et al. 2001; May and Hunter 2006). Each perspective also acknowledges the risks of violence prevalent across the industry, and that this risk is not uniformly experienced. The likelihood of physical and sexual violence from clients depends on a number of factors, includin...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half-Title
• Series
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of Abbreviations
• Acknowledgments
• 1 “Where Everything Falls Down”
• 2 Livability
• 3 The Sex-Work Framescape
• 4 Positioning Projects
• 5 Frames of Empowerment
• 6 Framing Sex Work
• 7 Reframing the Possible
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index
• About the Author