Wear Clean Draws  (because there’s 5 million ways to kill a ceo)

if you have any interest at all in sex work, sex positive feminism, migrants, migrant workers, the prostitution wars then you really must read Laura Maria Augstin’s _Sex on the Margins_. I’ve mentioned her work before, quoting her articles and blog, and posting an interview with her on Doug Henwood’s radio program, Behind the News.

I ordered the book awhile back, but a snafu meant that I only recently got the book through interlibrary loan, with only a couple of weeks to read and review it, before it’s due back. I had been reading Moishe Postone’s _Time, Labor, and Social Domination_ but since I purchased that book, it can wait.

Meanwhile, an excerpt from Agustin’s introduction:

Sex at the Margins examines the intersection of two groups of people: those who migrate to Europe and engage in domestic, caring and sexual labour, and those working in the social sector with these migrants.

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Overwhelmingly… media, academic, government, and most NGO voices either infantilise these migrants or ignore their existence.

Sex at the Margins examines current ideas about this phenomenon of travel and work…

I’m cutting out here because I want to highlight the word she used: travel. Instead of talking about this in terms of migrancy, which signifies a kind of transiency en route to someplace else, an eventual settling, Agustin’s keen to write about these folks as travelers — which implies a rather different idea — more of a sense of agency, I think, less of a sense of victimization.

To continue:

Sex at the Margins examines current ideas about this phenomenon of travel and work, demonstrating the discursive gaps and silences through which poorer and undocumented people slip, especially women who sell sex. Usually, these slippages are blamed on abstractions — society, the state — but this book argues that those declaring themselves to be helpers actively reproduce the marginalisation they condemn. I aim to connect domains usually treated separately — studies of migrations and service work, the sex industry, feminism, philanthropy and social projects — to show that these separations cannot be justified once all the cards are on the table.

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Taken together, these experiences showed me that how people on the southwestern side of the Atlantic talked about their own trips had little in common with European ways of talking, and this is still mainly true. The crux of the difference concerns autonomy: whether travellers are perceived to have quite a lot versus little or none at all. I decided to try to find out how this difference comes about and what it is made of, but where I expected to find theory to enlighten me, I found little: either the whole problematic was reduced to a few simplistic concepts, or they were ignored. Thus when I looked at work in the fields of migration and diaspora studies people selling sex were not there (until extremely recently), migrant women from poor countries being figured as domestic workers and migrant men as engaged in construction and agriculture. Studies of services, the concept usually invoked to describe migrant women’s work, omitted sex. There was a new area, ‘trafficking’, which dealt with the criminal aspects of the worst kind of migration and could not be imposed on all migrants. People selling sex were dealt with and normalised in AIDS research , but there the interest was reduced to condom use and other aspects of ‘risk behaviour’. Nowhere did d I find these migrants treated as having a range of interests, occupations and desires - as being people who read newspapers, cook, go to church, films and parties or who count themselves as activities in any political or social cause. At the beginning, then, I was dealing with absences and silences, except in one area.

Within feminist theory, a hyper-production of writings existed on the concept of ‘prostitution’, repetitively arguing about whether or not it is always and intrinsically violent and exploitative. In this literature, it was common for each side to do little more than criticise the other. There were also scores of research studies about women who sell sex in the street, tending always to try to explain *why* in the world they did it, the assumption being that it was uniquely perverse and devastating.

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I wanted to know about the abundant social programming aimed at helping these migrants. Given the lack of information, the incoherence of so much social action was not surprising. But why had social agents not come up with their own theories, based on their experiences? Are they so caught up in their projects that they do not stop to measure the effects on the people they want to help? By and large, they accept the ‘prostitution’ discourse — and the’ prostitute’ as victim — as fact, not as social construction. From there, they position themselves as benevolent helpers, in what seems to them to be a natural move. Through historical research, I found that this self-positioning began at a time in European history when interest was awakened in the art of government and the welfare of the governed. Those who were concerned, the growing middle class, saw themselves as peculiarly suited to help., control, advise and discipline the unruly poor, including their sexual conduct.

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This book argues that social helpers consistently deny the agency of large numbers of working-class migrants , in a range of theoretical and practical moves whose object is management and control: the exercise of governmentality. The journeys of women who work in the sex industry are treated as involuntary in a victimising discourse known as ‘trafficking’, while the experiences of men and trangenders who sell sex are ignore.d The work of migrant women in Europe, not only in sex but in housework and caring, is mostly excluded from government regulation and accounts, leaving these workers social invisible. Migrants working in the informal sector are treated as passive subjects rather than as normal people looking for conventional opportunities, conditions and pleasures, who may prefer to sell sex to their other options. The victim identity imposed on so many in the name of helping them makes helpers themselves disturbingly important figures. Historical research demonstrates how this victimising and the concomitant a assumption of importance by middle-class women, which began two centuries ago, was closely linked to their carving out of a new employment sphere for themselves through the naming of a project to rescue ad =control working-class women.