| Ouch! Western feminists'
'wounded attachment' to the 'third world prostitute'
by Jo Doezema
Institute of Development Studies
University of Sussex
Brighton BN1 9RE
May 2000
May 2000. (A later version of this
paper appears in Feminist Review, No. 67, Spring
2001 pp. 16-38)
Introduction
The subject of 'trafficking in women'
has, since the mid 1980s, received increased
international attention. Currently, negotiations are
underway at the UN Crimes Commission in Vienna around a
new international agreement on trafficking in women (Draft
Protocol To Combat International Trafficking In Women
And Children Supplementary To The Draft Convention On
Transnational Organized Crime A/AC.254/4/add.3).
This new agreement has been the subject of lobbying by
feminist anti-trafficking NGOs. The lobby efforts are
split into two 'camps'. One, the Human Rights Caucus,
sees prostitution as legitimate labour. The other,
represented by the Coalition Against Trafficking in
Women (CATW), sees all prostitution as a violation of
women's human rights. While there are some similarities
in their representations of the 'third world trafficking
victim', CATW in particular views 'third world
prostitutes' as helpless victims in need of rescue. This
paper analyses CATW's position and the writings of its
founder, Kathleen Barry. It suggests that CATW's
construction of 'third world prostitutes' is part of a
wider western feminist impulse to construct a damaged
'other' as the main justification for its own
interventionist impulses.
The central argument of this paper is
that the 'injured body' of the 'third world trafficking
victim' in international feminist debates around
trafficking in women serves as a powerful metaphor for
advancing certain feminist interests, which cannot be
assumed to be those of third world sex workers
themselves. The term 'injured body' is drawn from Wendy
Brown's States of Injury: Power and Freedom in Late
Modernity (1995). In this work, Brown argues that
modern identity politics are based on a feeling of
'injury' caused by exclusion from the presumed 'goods'
of the modern liberal state.
This is not the first time that the
'injured third world prostitute' has figured in
international feminist campaigns. Antoinette Burton has
examined, in Burdens of History: British Feminists,
Indian Women and Imperial Culture, 1865-1915 (1994),
the manner in which Victorian feminists utilized the
position of the prostitute in Britain and in colonial
India as part of their campaign to prove that English
women were fit subjects of political enfranchisement. In
so doing, they deployed an image of Indian prostitutes,
and Indian women in general, in keeping with the
orientalism of Empire: that of Indian women as backward,
helpless and subject to barbaric tradition. In a more
recent paper, Burton (1998) applies Brown's theorizing
to the question of Victorian feminists' relationship to
Empire. This paper draws on all three works to frame its
inquiry into the ways in which colonial feminist
discourses around prostitution influence contemporary
feminist constructions of the 'injured body' of 'third
world trafficking victims'.
Firstly, I briefly highlight the
implications of Wendy Brown's theories of identity
formation for an analysis of CATW's discourse on
trafficking. Secondly, I turn to Antoinette Burton's
application of Brown's theory for the light it sheds on
the historical use of colonial 'suffering bodies' in the
construction of modern feminist identities. I then
return to Wendy Brown to examine the ways in which the
'injury' at the heart of Barry's analysis of women's
subjugation combines with the colonial legacy to fix the
'third world trafficking victim' as victimized 'other'.
Finally, I examine CATW's demands on the UN in light of
Brown's arguments about the possible repressive
consequences of the identity/injury nexus.
It is important to register two
related sets of issues that are beyond the scope of this
paper to address. Firstly, CATW feminists are not alone
in their attachment to third world prostitutes
'suffering bodies'. Feminist anti-trafficking
organizations that nominally support sex worker rights
can slip into orientalist representations of third world
sex workers. Too often, these organizations set up a
dichotomy between 'voluntary' western sex workers and
'victimized' third world sex workers. This distinction
carries its own political dangers, which have been
explored by Alison Murray (1998) and in my own earlier
work (Doezema 1998).
Secondly, the campaign against
trafficking in women is not conducted solely by western
feminists, and third world women's organizations
participate in CATW. The orientalist use of the
'suffering body' of prostitutes by western feminists is
fairly easy to read off. Where do third world feminists
fit in? A full answer to this question is beyond the
scope of this paper, but it is important to register
that the 'suffering body' is not a one dimensional image
whose sole function is to reassure western feminists of
their moral rightness and superiority. She figures in
non-western feminist (and other) discourses as a
metaphor for a number of fears, anxieties, and relations
of domination (Tyner 1996, Cabezas 1998, Pike 1999,
Doezema 2000). For example, the figure of the 'suffering
third world prostitute' serves well to symbolize the
excesses of the global march of capital, and its
negative effects on women. To view the campaign against
trafficking in women as an example of imposed 'western
feminism' ignores the national/cultural context in which
these campaigns are formed. Writing on Nepal, for
example, Pike (1999) demonstrates how deeply current
anti-trafficking campaigns are embedded in culture and
national history. Of course, many third world feminists
reject the image of 'the third world women as helpless
victims of either patriarchy or a "crude,
undifferentiated capitalism"' (Sangera 1998: 1). A
number of third world feminists and sex workers are at
the forefront of political efforts to resignify the
place of the prostitute in feminist politics (Kempadoo
and Doezema 1998).
'States of Injury'
The essays collected in Brown's States
of Injury: Power and Freedom in Late Modernity
(1995) explore issues of 'political power and
opposition' (1995: 3), drawing on the work of Marx,
Nietzsche, Foucault and Weber. This paper does not
attempt to engage fully with Brown's challenging and
complex arguments, nor does it attempt to evaluate them
in their entirety. My reading of Brown is thus
necessarily partial. Rather, I apply some of Brown's
arguments to generate insights about the relationship
between certain types of western feminism and the
'injuries' of third world trafficking victims.
The emergence of 'injured identity'
Central to Brown's analysis of
political power and opposition is the emergence of 'politicized
identities', such those based on gender, sexuality, or
race, as oppositional political groupings. She sets
herself the task of finding out how politicized identity
can effectively challenge structures of domination. In
so doing, she does not attempt to argue 'for' or
'against' identity politics as such. Rather, she brings
a genealogical approach to the question of identity
politics. That is, she considers both the historical
circumstances that led to politicized identity's
emergence and the ways in which these shape politicized
identity's demands on the state. In her words: 'Given
what produced it, given what shapes and suffuses it,
what does politicized identity want?' (1995: 62).
It is Brown's contention that
politicized identity 'wants' protection rather than
power. This desire all too often risks shoring up
structures of domination, rather than undermining them.
Why is this so? Brown agrees with (among others)
Foucault and Marx that oppositional movements arise out
of already existing structures, to redress wrongs that
are perpetrated by those structures. As such, these
movements are reactionary, and configure their arguments
in already existing terms. Brown argues that politicized
identity was both a product of and a reaction to the
manifest failure of liberalism to deliver on promises of
universal justice for all: to the exclusion of certain
'marked groups', such as women or gays, from the liberal
goods of freedom and equality. Politicized identity's
demand to be included in these goods, however, does not
question the fact that these goods arise out of
structures that led to the 'injuries' of marginalization
in the first place.
Brown suggests that politicized
identity's potential for transforming structures of
domination is severely limited because of its own
investment in a history of 'pain' (1995: 55). The 'pain'
or 'injury' at the heart of politicized identity is
social subordination and exclusion from universal
equality and justice promised by the liberal state
(1995: 7). This historical pain becomes the foundation
for identity, as well as, paradoxically, that which
identity politics strives to bring to an end. In other
words, identity based on injury cannot let go of that
injury without ceasing to exist. This paradox results in
a politics that seeks protection from the state rather
than power and freedom for itself. In seeking protection
from the same structures that cause injury, this
politics risks reaffirming, rather than subverting,
structures of domination, and risks reinscribing injured
identity in law and policy through its demands for state
protection against injury.
Foucault's analysis of what he called
disciplinary power is an important element in Brown's
understanding of the paradox of identity politics: that
identity politics may actually reinforce the structures
of domination they emerge to oppose. In the History
of Sexuality (1980) and Discipline and Punish
(1979), Foucault postulated that individuals are not
simply constrained by external structures, but that
'subjects' are produced and regulated by disciplinary
structures and discourses. (For Foucault, this did not
mean that overcoming domination was impossible: rather
he suggested that wherever power operated, so did
resistance). Foucault thus accounts for how disciplined
subjects both consent to and construct their own
discipline. However, Brown goes further than Foucault,
asking how it can be that that a subject not only stops
desiring freedom, but actually begins to desire its
opposite (1995: 64). To answer this question, she turns
to Nietzsche's concept of ressentiment, developed in On
the Genealogy of Morals (1969).
Feminism and Ressentiment
According to Brown, politicized identity,
including feminism, displays many of the 'attributes
of…. ressentiment' (1995: 27): the tendency on the
part of the powerless to reproach power with moral
arguments rather than to seek out power for itself. The
turn to Nietzsche accounts for Brown's use of terms like
'pain' and 'injury' to indicate the effects of
marginalisation and subordination. Nietzsche postulates
that the cause of ressentiment is 'suffering': this
suffering causes the individual to look for a sight of
blame for the hurt, as well as to revenge itself upon
the 'hurter'. Brown describes the 'politics of
ressentiment' as follows:
Developing a righteous critique
of power from the perspective of the injured, it ['the
politics of ressentiment'] delimits a specific site of
blame for suffering by constituting sovereign subjects
and events as responsible for the "injury"
of social subordination. It fixes the identity of the
injured and the injuring as social positions, and
codifies as well the meanings of their actions against
all possibilities of indeterminacy, ambiguity, and
struggle for resignification or repositioning…the
effort to "outlaw" social injury powerfully
legitimizes law and the state as appropriate
protectors against injury and casts injured
individuals as needing such protection by such
protectors (1995: 27).
Ressentiment's investment in
powerlessness means that it prefers moral posturing over
political argument:
His [Nietzsche's] thought is
useful in understanding the source and consequences of
a contemporary tendency to moralize in the place of
political argument, and to understand the codification
of injury and powerlessness… that this kind of
moralizing politics entails (Brown 1995: 27).
Brown's opposition between 'morals'
and 'politics' seems at first difficult to accept,
especially for feminists. What are we to base our
politics on, after all, if not some notion of what is
right, what is just, what is good, for women — all
moral notions? However, in encouraging politics rather
than morality, Brown does not suggest that we get rid
of, or can do without, the 'right', the 'just' and the
'good'. What she does say is that ideas of what is
right, just, or good that are based on moral notions of
what we think we are lead to a politics of ressentiment,
of 'reproach, rancor, moralism and guilt' (1995: 26).
She argues that we need to develop new spaces in which
to decide politically, collectively, what is good, just
and right, derived not from identity-based notions of
'who I am' but from a new ethics of 'what I want for us'
(1995:75).
The tendency to turn towards the state
for protection, rather than questioning state power to
regulate and discipline, is one that Brown sees as
especially problematic for feminism. She notes women
have particular cause for greeting such politics with
caution. Historically, the argument that women require
protection by and from men has been critical in
legitimating women's exclusion from some spheres of
human endeavor and confinement within others. Operating
simultaneously to link "femininity" to
privileged races and classes… protection codes are
also markers and vehicles of such divisions among women.
Protection codes are thus key technologies in regulating
privileged women as well as intensifying the
vulnerability and degradation of those on the
unprotected side of the constructed divide between light
and dark, wives and prostitutes, good girls and bad ones
(1995: 165).
The notion of 'injured identities'
offers a provocative way to begin to examine how and why
CATW feminists are positioning the 'trafficking victim'
in their discourse. Brown's examination of the
historical formation of late modern politicized
identities places the problematic of 'logics of pain in
the subject formation processes'(1995: 55) central. This
has immediate resonance: CATW's campaign against
trafficking in women constantly reiterates the literal,
physical pain undergone by 'third world prostitute'
bodies. If 'politicized identity's investment… in its
own history of suffering' (Brown 1995: 55) is a
constituent element of late modern subject formation,
this may help explain why CATW and Barry rely so heavily
on the 'suffering' of third world trafficking victims in
their discourses of women's subjugation. It also raises
questions about CATW's efforts to seek protection for
trafficking victims through 'protective' legislation.
Wounded history
The possibility of applying Brown's
work to examine the role of the 'suffering prostitute
body' in the construction of certain feminist identities
was suggested to me by Burton's (1998) application of
Brown's analysis. Burton uses Brown's work to analyse a
particular production of Victorian feminism: Josephine
Butler's Native Races and the War (1900). In this
tract, Butler appealed to the sufferings of Black
African men under Afrikaner rule in order to justify
British involvement in the Boer War. In her analysis,
Burton extends Brown's theory, arguing that
What remains underexplored in
Brown's theoretical framework is the extent to which
ostensibly autonomous political communities and actors
have historically relied on the injuries of
"others" to (re)-focus the attention of the
state on their own desire for inclusion in the body
politic (1998: 339).
Burton suggests this is because
Brown's 'genealogy of western liberalism and its
affiliates is only implicitly, rather than explicitly,
colonial' (1998: 339).
Burton's application of Brown's theory
is highly suggestive for an analysis of uses of the
'suffering bodies' of 'third world prostitutes' by
contemporary feminists. In Burton's analysis, two
aspects of 'suffering bodies' of 'others' as used by
Victorian feminists stand out. First was the highly
gendered use of this body. Many of the 'suffering
bodies' deployed by Victorian feminists were female:
female slaves in the Caribbean, women, especially
prostitutes, in India and prostitutes and poor women in
England. But this was not always so, as the analysis of
Native Races and the War demonstrates. The most
significantly gendered aspect, however, was not the
gender of the 'suffering body', but rather women's
supposed ability, based on essential feminine
characteristics, to identify with the 'suffering
bodies', and therefore, to represent them politically.
The second aspect of the 'suffering body' was the
distinct class/colonial position of the 'suffering body'
in relation to the 'saving body': 'saving bodies' were
middle class and white; the 'suffering bodies' working
class or black and colonial (Burton 1998: 341).
In the following section, I revisit
Burton's (1994) work on Victorian women's campaigns
against prostitution in India in the light of Burton's
own later application of Brown's theory. This opens up
wider possibilities for exploring the construction of
the 'third world trafficking victim' in CATW's
discourse. It allows us to examine in what way the
Victorian feminist reliance on 'suffering others' might
impact on contemporary discourses. It can also help shed
light on the relations of domination and subordination
that are hidden in the production of feminist narratives
about the 'third world trafficking victim'.
Victorian feminists and
prostitutes' 'suffering bodies'
Victorian feminists' arguments around
prostitution were grounded in discourses of slavery
(Irwin 1996). According to Burton (1998), the extension
of anti-slavery discourses by Victorian feminists'
beyond their original political context in the early
anti-slavery movement points to the importance of
'suffering others' for Victorian feminists in
establishing their claim to be included in the body
politic. The use of 'slavery' by feminist and
non-feminist campaigners was extremely powerful: as a
site of 'irrefutable injury' it served to demonstrate
the need for women's involvement: first in public
philanthropy, and later directly in politics (Burton
1998).
The campaign that marked the expressly
political, rather than philanthropic, use of the
'suffering body' of the prostitute by Victorian
feminists was known as abolitionism (Bland 1992).
Abolitionism was directed against the Contagious
Diseases Acts enacted in Britain in 1867. These
acts, intended to reduce venereal disease among troops,
set up a system whereby prostitutes were subjected to
fortnightly internal examinations, and could be detained
in 'lock hospitals' if found infected. The campaign, led
by Josephine Butler, and consisting of unions,
socialists, and other reformers along with feminists,
objected to the acts for the 'double standard' of
morality they encoded. The purification of the state,
these feminists argued, could only be achieved through
women's suffrage (Walkowitz 1980).
While early campaigns against
prostitution made metaphorical use of the slavery trope,
with the advent of the anti-white slavery campaigns it
became a literal description of the condition of
prostitution. WT Stead's 'Maiden Tribute to Modern
Babylon', published in the Pall Mall Gazette
(1885), galvanized public opposition to 'the white slave
trade'(see Walkowitz 1992). In this fantastically
sensational series, he claimed to provide investigative
evidence of hundreds of young English girls deceived,
coerced and/or drugged into prostitution and accused
poor parents of selling their daughters to 'white slave
traders' (Stead cited in Fisher 1997: 132). In an
earlier paper (Doezema 2000), I traced the narrative
elements of 'white slavery': innocence, established as
youth and sexual purity, helplessness, degradation and
death. The rhetorically explosive combination of sex and
slavery served to whip up public support for the
abolitionist cause (Walkowitz 1980, Grittner 1990, Guy
1991, Irwin 1996).
Allegations of 'white slavery' from
Britain to the East meant an increased focus on
prostitution in the colonies (Chatterjee 1990). However,
British feminists were more concerned with the
regulation of Indian prostitutes through the Contagious
Diseases Acts than with the fate of British 'white
slaves' in India. The Contagious Diseases Acts in
India were enacted shortly after those in England and
were meant to serve the same purpose: to protect the
health of British soldiers. As in England, this was to
be achieved by compulsory examination and detainment of
prostitutes for venereal disease. After the successful
campaign for repeal of the acts in England and Wales,
feminist abolitionists, led by Josephine Butler, turned
their attention to India (Burton 1994). After a
sustained campaign, the acts were rescinded in 1888.
However, repeal of the acts did not mean the end of
regulation, which continued in many areas, and
abolitionists continued their efforts (Ballhatchet 1980,
Burton 1994, Chatterjee 1990, Chatterjee 1992).
The ways in which Indian prostitutes
were portrayed by Victorian feminists had many
similarities with the portrayal of working class
prostitutes 'at home'. As 'suffering bodies' of
prostitutes at home (in England, America and elsewhere)
served to provide Victorian feminists a way of arguing
the necessity of their political participation in
domestic government, so the 'enslaved' Indian prostitute
served to demonstrate the need for women's involvement
in the politics of empire in order to purify it and stop
the suffering caused by men (Burton 1994). As Liddle and
Rai argue
The subject Indian woman in a
decaying colonized society was the model of everything
they [Victorian feminists] were struggling against and
was thus the measure of Western feminists' own
progress. British feminists saw Britain as the centre
of both democracy and feminism, and when they claimed
political rights they also claimed the right to
participate in the empire (1998: 499).
In adapting discourses of prostitution
to the colonial situation, feminist abolitionists drew
on dominant colonial discourses of India. In these
orientalist discourses, the position of women became a
key marker of 'civilization' (Midgley 1998). In contrast
to British women, the condition of 'Indian women' in
general was seen as one of helpless subjection to
backward traditionalism (Liddle and Rai 1998). The
'child bride', the 'burnt widow' the 'captive of the
zenana' and the prostitute all served as signifiers for
Indian womanhood in its entirety (Liddle and Rai 1998).
In the implicit equation set up by feminist
abolitionists, the 'suffering body' of the Indian
prostitute became that of all Indian women and stood for
the condition of India as a whole (Burton 1994, Liddle
and Rai 1998). The 'suffering body' as metaphor for
India established it unequivocally as backward and in
need of rule: the gendered nature of this body staked
out British feminist terrain in Empire.
There is a further contrast between
campaigns against prostitution in Britain and in India.
Anti-white slavery campaigns in England managed to
garner much public support because of the image of
'their' women, white women, being sexually used by
'dark' foreigners (Guy 1991). There was little concern
for the fate of 'native' prostitutes in most anti white
slavery campaigns (Guy 1991, Grittner 1990). While there
were a number of European prostitutes working in India (Ballhatchet
1980) it was the Indian prostitute, rather than the
European 'white slave', that took the lion's share of
abolitionists' attention. One explanation for this is
India's position in Empire. As Burton (1994) argues,
India was seen as an extension of 'home ground' for
feminist abolitionists.
More significant though was the
context of international domination and subordination
that configured Victorian feminist arguments against
Indian prostitution. Victorian feminists theoretically
considered Indian women to be 'equal' to British women.
However, this was more an example of Christian rhetoric
than actual belief (Burton 1994). Discourses of
'civilization' and of orientalism placed western and
'oriental' women at opposite ends of the civilization
spectrum (Midgley 1998, Liddle and Rai 1998). British
women's claims for inclusion necessitated the inequality
of British and Indian women: Indian women served as the
perfect 'foil' to indicate the 'advanced' situation of
middle-class Victorian feminists. The international,
imperial nature of the feminist campaign against the Contagious
Diseases Acts in India homogenized the condition of
British women as advanced, strong and civilized at the
same time as it homogenized Indian women as backward,
helpless, and inferior (Burton 1994).
A modern form of imperialism?
Feminist scholars of empire argue that
contemporary feminist discourses cannot be considered
out of their historical context (Midgley 1998, Liddle
and Rai 1998, Burton 1992). The campaign against
trafficking must be seen in the light of the history of
Imperialism, colonialism, and decolonization:
campaigning efforts by feminists in the first, the
third, and the former communist world are shaped by this
history. While, as Liddle and Rai (1998) point out, the
third world of today is not the 'Orient' of colonial
times, colonial discourses still 'retain a hold on the
Western imagination as expressed in certain contemporary
women's studies writings' (1998: 497). It is not an
accident of history, but the legacy of empire, that
'third world prostitutes' suffering bodies' are at the
forefront of certain feminist campaigns today. Yet, as
Kempadoo notes, the work on examining the impact of the
imperial legacy on contemporary feminist conceptions of
prostitution has barely begun:
Nevertheless the need for
feminist theory to engage with racialized sexual
subjectivities in tandem with the historical weight of
imperialism, colonialism and racist constructions of
power has only been raised recently in the context of
this feminist theorizing on prostitution (1998:
13).
This section will address two
questions. Firstly, it will look at the ways in which
the 'injuries' of the prostitute are central to the
construction of the identity 'women' in the political
theories of Kathleen Barry and the activism of CATW.
Secondly, it will look at the ways in which the colonial
legacy of imperial feminism impacts on how the
'sufferings' of the 'third world prostitute/trafficking
victim' are incorporated into this identity.
The 'injury' of prostitution
Wendy Brown examines the genealogy of
late-modern political identity formation in North
America in terms of the ways in which identities such as
those of gender, race, or homosexuality are constructed
on the basis of perceived historical 'injuries'. Barry's
analysis, in The Prostitution of Sexuality: The
Global Exploitation of Women (1995) of the role of
prostitution in women's oppression proceeds along the
same 'injury/identity' nexus analysed by Brown. In
Barry's analysis, women's subordination is the result of
sex. Sex is defined as 'the condition of subordination
of women that is both bodied in femaleness and enacted
in sexual experience' (1995: 278). Women's subordination
is seen as analogous to that of class subordination,
that is, women's 'class position' is one of sexual
subordination to the dominant 'class' of men. The
'injury' of sex is thus that which constitutes the
'class' of women. For Barry, as well as other feminists
such as Andrea Dworkin, Sheila Jeffries, and Catherine
MacKinnon, sex is power: male power over women.
Barry sees prostitution as the
ultimate expression of male dominance.
My study of sex as power…
inevitably, continually, unrelentingly returns me to
prostitution. …one cannot mobilize against a class
condition of oppression unless one knows its fullest
dimensions. Thus my work has been to study and expose
sexual power in its most severe, global,
institutionalized, and crystallized forms…
Prostitution — the cornerstone of all sexual
exploitation (1995: 9).
The harms of prostitution are
expressed in highly graphic terms which ironically echo
traditional, religious/patriarchal moralizing against
prostitutes. Hoigard and Finstad, (1992) whose work is
held up as exemplary by Barry, refer to sex workers'
vaginas as 'garbage can[s] for hordes of anonymous men's
ejaculations' (quoted in Chapkis 1997: 51). Barry
herself says that prostitutes become 'interchangeable'
with plastic blow-up sex dolls 'complete with orifices
for penetration and ejaculation' (1995: 35). A member of
CATW recently characterized prostitutes as 'empty holes
surrounded by flesh, waiting for a masculine deposit of
sperm.' Seen in this way, prostitutes 'pain' becomes the
foundation of the identity 'woman'. 'Prostitution makes
all women vulnerable, exposed to danger, open to attack.
To be vulnerable is, by definition, to be "able to
be hurt or wounded or injured"' (Barry 1995: 317).
'Woman' thus becomes an 'identity' solely constituted
through the 'injury' of male sexual power; as the most
'injured', the prostitute is most fully identified as
'woman'.
I am taking prostitution as the
model, the most extreme and most crystallized form of
all sexual exploitation. Sexual exploitation is a
political condition, the foundation of women's
subordination and the base from which discrimination
against women is constructed and enacted (1995:
11).
Kathleen Barry and CATW claim to base
their analysis on the 'true' experiences of prostitutes.
In Barry's theory, sex in prostitution 'reduces women to
a body' and is therefore necessarily harmful, whether
there is consent or not (1995: 23). Consequently,
prostitutes' 'true' stories of pain and injury serve
both to demonstrate the rightness of her theory and are
claimed as the empirical basis for that theory. The
testimonies of prostitutes thus assume the status of
absolute truth. However, only certain versions of
prostitutes' experience are considered 'true'. Barry
constructs the 'injury' of sex in prostitution in a
circular manner. Prostitution is considered always
injurious because the sex in it is dehumanizing.
However, the sex takes on this dehumanizing character
because it takes place within prostitution. In this
neat, sealed construction, there is no place for the
experiences of sex workers who claim their work is not
harmful or alienating. For Barry and CATW, the notion of
a prostitute who is unharmed by her experience is an
ontological impossibility: that which cannot be.
This appeal to the essentially
invariable nature of prostitutes' experience is at odds
with Barry's interpretation of the constructed nature of
sexuality as a 'political product of gender
hierarchy'(1995: 22). Barry's analysis of women as a
sexual 'class' completely constructed by men is very
similar to that formulated by Catherine MacKinnon
(1987,1989). Brown's critique of MacKinnon is highly
useful for this paper because of the similarities
between MacKinnon and Kathleen Barry. Brown cites
MacKinnon as an example of feminist theorizing that
contains 'the sharp but frequently elided tensions
between adhering to social construction theory on one
hand, and epistemologically privileging women's accounts
of social life on the other'(1995: 41). Brown elaborates
on these 'symptomatically modernist paradoxes' (1995:
42) in MacKinnon's work:
while women [in MacKinnon's work]
are socially constructed to the core, women's words
about their experience… are anointed as Truth, and
constitute the foundations of feminist knowledge…
even when social construction is adopted as method for
explaining the making of gender, "feelings"
and "experiences" acquire a status that is
politically if not ontologically essentialist
(1995: 42).
This is not simply an arcane academic
debate about the status of knowledge in feminist theory.
Like MacKinnon, Barry claims that women's experience, in
this case, the experience of prostitution, bears out the
'truth' of sexual subordination. Not only does this
result in the constructionist/essentialist paradox
described above, it also requires 'suspending
recognition that women's "experience" is
thoroughly constructed, historically and culturally
varied, and interpreted without end' (Brown 1995: 40).
Brown suggests that the urge to reify 'women's
experience' stems from a reluctance to leave behind the
moral certainties of 'truth' for political power
struggles: in others words, from an inability to
renounce a politics of ressentiment.
In claiming the 'injured prostitute'
as the ontological and epistemological basis of feminist
truth, Barry forecloses the possibility of political
confrontation with sex workers who claim a different
experience. It is this move — the insistence that
there is one 'truth' about sex workers experience, and
that this truth must be the basis of feminist political
action, that Barry reveals her essentially moral stance
and thus her investment in ressentiment. This moralism
serves to obscure the operations of power in her own
constructions of prostitute experience. I now turn to an
examination of the nature of this power.
Power, identity, and imperialism
How is power exercised in Barry's
writing about 'third world prostitutes'? Liddle and
Rai's (1998) recent paper on orientalism in feminist
discourse is a useful place to begin exploring this
question. Liddle and Rai identify three ways in which
'discursive [authorial] power takes on the character of
orientalism [and] …power of an orientalist character
is exercised' (1998: 512). Two of these will be
discussed below. Firstly, Liddle and Rai argue that
orientalist power is exercised discursively when 'the
author denies the subject the opportunity for
self-representation' (1998: 512). A second discursive
operation of orientalist power occurs when patriarchal
oppression or women's resistance to it is represented in
such a way that western cultures, and western feminism,
come out as 'more advance on the scale of civilization'
(1998: 512).
In Barry's work, the subject of the
prostitute is constructed partially through the lens of
orientalism: in Liddle and Rai's words, she 'denies the
subject the opportunity for self-representation' (1998:
512). First world sex workers are both pitied and blamed
for adopting a politics of sex worker rights. While
pitied for having to 'actively incorporate
dehumanization into [their] identity' (1995: 70), first
world sex worker activists are at the same time held
responsible for women's oppression: 'to
"embrace" prostitution sex as one's
self-chosen identity is to be actively engaged in
promoting women's oppression in behalf of oneself'
(1995: 71). Third world sex workers, however, are not
even credited with knowing what sex worker rights are
all about. Referring to third world sex workers, Barry
writes:
"Sex work" language has
been adopted out of despair, not because these women
promote prostitution but because it seems impossible
to conceive of any other way to treat prostitute women
with dignity and respect than through normalizing
their exploitation (1995: 296).
As with Victorian feminists and their
campaign to rescue Indian women, third world sex workers
are seen as so 'enslaved' that their only hope is rescue
by others. The helpless of Indian prostitutes was
central to Victorian feminists arguments, and the
slavery trope served to demonstrate the need for
intervention: 'Ideologies of slavery, whether pro-or
anti-, were premised on the notion that the slave, even
when capable of resistance, was most often helpless in
the face of either natural incapacity or culturally
sanctioned constraint' (Burton 1998: 341). The
helplessness of the Indian prostitute served as an
effective foil to the saving capabilities of British
feminists (Burton 1994). The same holds true now: 'In
true colonial fashion, Barry's mission is to rescue
those whom she considers to be incapable of self-determination'(Kempadoo
1998: 11).
Third world sex workers' organizations
reject this racist portrayal of themselves as deluded
and despairing (see Kempadoo and Doezema 1998). Neither
is 'sex work language', as Barry implies, a western
concept picked up by ignorant third world sex workers
who are incapable of understanding its ramifications.
While the term 'sex work' was coined by Carol Leigh, a
western sex worker (Leigh 1998), its rapid and
wide-spread adoption by sex workers the world over
reflects not stupidity, but rather a shared political
vision. As Kempadoo (1998) documents, sex workers in the
third world have a centuries-old history of organizing
to demand an end to discriminatory laws and practices.
Building on this history, sex worker rights
organizations are today flourishing all over the third
world: 'Sex workers' struggles are thus neither a
creation of a western prostitutes' rights movement or
the privilege of the past three decades' (Kempadoo 1998:
21).
Third world sex workers have seen
through the patronizing attitude of those like Barry who
would save them for their own good. It is worth quoting
at length from the 'Sex Workers' Manifesto'
(1997), produced at the First National Conference of Sex
Workers in Calcutta (attended by over 3,000 sex
workers).
Like many other occupations, sex work
is also an occupation… we systematically find
ourselves to be targets of moralizing impulses of
dominant social groups, through missions of cleansing
and sanitising, both materially and symbolically. If and
when we figure in political or developmental agendas, we
are enmeshed in discursive practices and practical
projects which aim to rescue, rehabilitate, improve,
discipline, control or police us. Charity organizations
are prone to rescue us and put us in 'safe' homes,
developmental organizations are likely to 'rehabilitate'
us through meagre income generation activities, and the
police seem bent upon to regularly raid our quarters in
the name of controlling 'immoral' trafficking. Even when
we are inscribed less negatively or even sympathetically
within dominant discourses we are not exempt from
stigmatisation or social exclusion. As powerless, abused
victims with no resources, we are seen as objects of
pity (Durban Mahila Samanwaya Committee (DMSC) 1997:
2-3).
The 'hierarchy of civilization'
I now turn to the second of Liddle and
Rai's contentions about the workings of orientalist
power in feminist discourse: that orientalist power is
invoked discursively when male oppression and female
resistance are characterized in such as way to reinforce
a 'hierarchy of civilization'. Barry's work, and the
campaign rhetoric of CATW, clearly locate trafficking
within 'backward', traditional societies (see Kempadoo
1998). As in Victorian feminists' Indian campaign,
'traditional and religious practices' are seen as the
root of the problem of trafficking:
Trafficking focuses particularly
on indigenous and aboriginal women who are from remote
tribal communities where traditional family and
religious practices either devalue girl children or
reduce girls to sex service, which enables and
encourages parents to sell their daughters (Barry
1995: 178).
Referring to a remark by a Pakistani
women's rights leader that Bengali girls trafficked into
Pakistan don't know what country they are from, Barry
comes close to calling these women sub-human:
'Illiteracy and rural village patriarchal feudalism
abnegate human identity for many of these women' (1995:
171). Concerning Thai women, she remarks 'In Thailand,
religious ideology and patriarchal feudalism reduce the
value of women's lives to that of sexual and economic
property, which in turn validate prostitution'(1995:
182) Her analysis is based on that of Troung (1990),
whose work, though of immense value, is not free from 'a
sense that non-modern cultures live in a different,
backward, or eternal time' (Lyons 1999: 3).
This attitude-that third world women,
and prostitutes in particular — are victims of their
(backward, barbaric) cultures is pervasive in the
rhetoric of CATW and in those western feminist
organizations that have joined their CATW's campaign
around the Vienna Protocol against trafficking.
According to Planned Parenthood President Gloria Feldt,
In the U.S., we tend to see the
issue of trafficking and forced prostitution through
the lens of our affluent democratic society. In many
cultures, women and girls have no power and very
limited rights so that their vulnerability to sex
trafficking is high (quoted in Soriano 2000: 3).
The co-director of CATW stated
recently
In the global South and East,
victims of the sex trade are often young women and
girls who are desperately poor in cultures where
females are expected to sacrifice themselves for the
well being of their families and communities (Leidhold
1999: 4).
In CATW inspired feminist discourses,
the 'third world' sex worker is presented as backward,
innocent, and above all helpless — in need of rescue
(Murray 1998, Doezema 1998, 2000). Through her, the
superiority of the saving western body is marked and
maintained.
Protection or Discipline
According to Wendy Brown, the result of
strategies that are based on ressentiment, that is,
demands to the state for redress of injured identity,
can end up re-inscribing, rather than neutralizing, the
injured identity itself. As examined in the first
section, the 'politics of protection' are particularly
dangerous for women because of the way they have been
used to control and divide women. Brown suggests that we
should be even more cautious about attempts to protect
women sexually:
if the politics of protection are
generically problematic for women and for feminism,
still more so are the specific politics of sexual
protections, such as those inherent in feminist
antipornography legislation and criminalization of
prostitution… such appeals for protection… involve
seeking protection from masculinist institution
against men, a move more in keeping with the politics
of feudalism than freedom. Indeed, to be
"protected" by the same power whose
violation one fears perpetuates the very modality of
dependence and powerlessness marking much of women's
experience across widely diverse cultures and epochs
(p.165).
Barry and CATW configure their demands
for an end to 'injury' in terms of an appeal to the
universal ideal of human rights. Yet their political
goals betray the extent to which demands for protection
mesh with attempts to discipline the very 'suffering
bodies' whose 'injuries' are seen as the very stuff of
the identity 'woman'.
At the Vienna negotiations, CATW's
lobby group back a definition of 'trafficking in women'
that would severely restrict women's ability to migrate
both within a country and between countries. They call
for all those who assist a woman to migrate, when at the
end of the migration the woman works in prostitution, to
be charged as 'traffickers' (CATW 1999). This means that
a relative who drives a potential sex worker from one
city to the next, or even an airline on which a
potential sex worker flies, could be charged with
'trafficking' (Jordan in Soriano 2000). It is not
difficult to see how these restrictions fit in with
notions prevalent in much of the world about keeping
women close to home and hearth (Guy 1992, Yuval-Davis
1997, Wijers 1999, Doezema 2000). In another example,
Barry cites as a model a 1993 policy adopted by the
Vietnamese Government to eradicate prostitution.
Prostitutes who were 'willing to lead a normal life'
were offered an unspecified amount of money to do so (Quy
quoted in Barry 1995: 300). However, 'unwilling'
prostitutes were 'gathered in special centres for
reformation for at least a minimum of six months' (Quy
quoted in Barry 1995: 301). Barry champions the
imprisonment of sex workers in the guise of 'protection'
— this is indeed a chilling illustration of the
politics of ressentiment at work.
Conclusion
Let us be clear: empire is no longer.
Contemporary forms of international domination
('development' 'globalization') are heavy with a
colonial past but their mechanisms of power are not
those of empire. Decolonization, independence movements,
new social movements, grassroots organizations and NGOs
have brought new actors to the international political
stage, and power cannot be read simply off geographical
lines. Thus contemporary utilizations of prostitutes
'suffering bodies' by western feminists cannot be
analysed as a perfect analogue to utilizations by
Victorian feminists. Nonetheless, if power is not the
sole preserve of former imperial nations, they still
have the lion's share of economic might and political
power, and feminists' ambivalent reaction to
contemporary international relations of domination in
some ways mirrors that of their Victorian counterparts.
In Burton's analysis, the construction
of Victorian feminist identity through the body of
enslaved Indian prostitute proceeded via an interaction
between the opposites of identification and opposition:
identity was affirmed through, on the one hand, feminine
ability to identify with suffering, and on the other,
through establishing the superiority of English women to
colonized women. For CATW feminists, the 'suffering
body' of the 'third world prostitute' serves the
function of marking the contrast between herself and
'emancipated' women as well as symbolizing the ultimate
'injury' of the identity 'women'. Through her,
abolitionist feminists both western and non-western
argue for women's inclusion in international human
rights: the kidnapped, raped, beaten, ill 'third world
prostitute' stands as a powerful symbol for the
exclusion of women from 'universal' human rights due to
their sexual subordination. The 'third world
prostitute', oppressed by tradition and religion,
exploited by western patriarchal capitalism, carrying
the baggage of the colonial legacy of presumed
backwardness and sexual innocence, is the perfect figure
to hold up to the world as the image of sexually
subordinated womanhood. Her victimhood, established by
over a century of feminist, abolitionist, and
colonialist discourse, is indisputable.
In Brown's analysis, the desire for
protection of injured identities leads to collusion with
and intensification of disciplinary regimes of power.
The process of identity formation in the work of Barry
and CATW is a complicated one. It is constituted out of
both identification with the 'suffering body' of the
prostitute — 'woman as whore' — and through the
neo-imperial opposition to the 'backward' third world
prostitute. Through CATW's complicated process of
identification/'othering', however, it is the discipline
of certain bodies that is being sought in the name of
protecting all women. CATW's strategy at the Crimes
Commission betrays ressentiment's desire to identify
victims, apportion blame, and support repressive
measures in the name of protecting women. It is small
wonder that many governments delegations sympathize with
their position. While the negotiations are still
ongoing, and the outcome is uncertain, there are
indications that the Crimes Commission will opt for an
approach that aims to 'protect' women from prostitution
by limiting their freedom. CATW should not be surprised
when sex workers the world over appear less than
grateful for these efforts on their behalf.
References
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