tourism
By shag carpet bomb • Mar 2nd, 2009 • Category: Feminist Fight Club, Laura Agustin, Prostitution, Research, Sex & Sexuality, Sex Work, Sex at the Marginsa few years ago, in some one or other of the various instantiations of some sex war over prostitution, I pointed out at punkass blog that I knew of at least two women who had migrated from a rural area to an urban area and that they did so wanting to be sex workers. This was in the Philippines. A radfem, Delphyne, I believe simply hooted at me, certain I was deluded. Every time I read Laura Maria Agustin, I think of that incident because Agustin undermines Delphyne’s insistence on a victimized identity for sex workers every step of the way.
For Delphyne — and often even for people railing against the condition of migrant labor in general — people only ever leave their country of origin because they *have* to. They imagine a migrant who is a passive victim of economic oppression, political oppression, what have you. A woman never picks up and migrates to another country — or from a rural area to an urban one — to become a sex worker because she *chose* to. This is beyond any sense for most people in these discussions.
Agustin wants to undermine this tendency — and she wants to undermine it even among the most enlightened of people who advocate for a more sex positive feminist approach, or even among those who advocate for a more justice-minded approach to thinking about immigration, migrants, etc. She begins the task of disrupting the hegemony of the victim identity in Chapter 2, “Working to Travel, Travelling to Work.”
Here, she opens the chapter by saying, “I begin with notions of travel in general, because so much stigmatising and bad publicity derives from wrong impression about what people are doing when they leave home.”
And what better idea to start with than the idea of tourism. If you immediately thought that she was talking about sex tourism and sex tourists, think again. She’s putting into question the idea that migrants cannot be thought of as tourists. She’s questioning the arbitrary boundaries put up between immigration, travel, tourism, migrancy, and so forth.
Think of white, middle class people you know who’ve gone to another country, as a tourist basically, but who’ve also set themselves off from mere tourists by pointing out that they are going to stay there for a long time, and they are going to probably get a job, to get to know the people and the culture better.
Think of business travelers who are traveling abroad for work, but who also take off some time for tourism.
Think of the oppositions that have been set up here, between work and leisure, between traveling to get away from work and traveling to work. From working in order to travel, from traveling in order to work.
Think of the person you unconsciously see in the role of traveler, tourist, migrant, immigrant, vagabond, hitchhiker, vagrant, business traveler.
In a section that isn’t well fleshed out, and should have been, Agustin tries to get the reader to think about the assumption that, as travelers abroad, Westerners go to other countries and engage in a gaze — a looking at the Other, to look at their culture, their food, their differences. But Agustin points out that we tend to deny this kind of looking/agency to migrants, migrant workers. We tend to see them as passive victims, in another country because they were forced to be there, and so overwhelmed by circumstances they haven’t the wherewithal to observe the new country, new culture with a purposeful, evaluating Gaze. AGustin writes:
“The modern tourist gaze is usually associated with Euorpeans, but travelers like Flora Tristan (1840, Peru) and Domingo Sarmiento (1849, Argentina) wrote extensive couner-accounts of the peculiar habits of Europeans. … Being less modern, in the European sense, does not impede travelers from gazing, questioning and joking about aspects of modernity, nor does it exclude them from engaging in tourism.”
I can’t help but laugh when I read this because I’m reminded of my friends at work from India, Pakistan, and Nepal. First, it’s very obvious hanging around them that they have judgments on — often negative — American culture. I remember sitting around at lunch once with the five of them riffing on the silly things Americans do. I had to laugh — because it was really funny.
And the other thing I’m reminded of is how, because I tend to be able to understand what they’re saying, people have asked me questions about my friends. And also, well, because I’m really tight with two people, they have often come to me to ask questions or, when they’re not in earshot, other USers have felt the need to tell me something negative — like ask about K’s recent trip to India to find a wife or something. What has happened is that I learn that USers have in their heads certain narratives about what people are doing here when they come to the u.s. to work. First, they tend to assume that the person came from desperate circumstances. Or, that if they didn’t then they came for cultural freedom reasons. But the idea that they might just be here to work, to visit the US and see the world a little… Or that they’ve come here, grown to like the place, and want to stay here — but aren’t here for quite the reasons they assume — like how really really free the country ostensibly is.
What has become clearer to me, reading Agustin is the interesting thing I thought one day, thinking about the personalities of the people in this circle. It seemed to me that, knowing about their lives, there must have been something that brought them here, that made them choose to come here. After all, others hadn’t come here, though they might have chosen to do so. Why? As Agustin asks, what is unique about the people who choose to travel, to migrate, to travel to work or work to travel:
Against the determinism that produces poor poeple as shunted about by purely external factors, Saskia Sassen writes:
“If it were true… that the flow of immigrants and refugees was simply a matter of individuals in search of better opportunities in a richer country, then the growing population and poverty in much of the world would have created truly massive numbers of poor invading highly developed countries, a great indiscriminate flow of human beings from misery to wealth. This has not been the case. Migrations are highly selective processes; only certain people leave, and they travel on highly structured routes to their destinations, rather than gravitate blindly toward any rich country they can enter.”
‘Only certain people leave’ applies in places of violence and crop failures as well as in urban ghettos. The questions of who becomes a migrant is deeper than traditional theorising suggests and can even be viewed as ‘individual resistance by way of physical relocation’. But the predominant discourse concentrates on economic factors, especially work, and, as such, is gendered.
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” A woman never picks up and migrates to another country — or from a rural area to an urban one — to become a sex worker because she *chose* to. This is beyond any sense for most people in these discussions.
I know a fine counter-example. Gorgeous Chinese woman with good English, spends about half her time working in Amsterdam, the rest living in luxury in China. If she worked in China, she’d get the going rate, something under $20 a trick or $150 a night. She prefers the higher income.
When she’s in China she takes lessons in ballroom dance and only sleeps with handsome young men.
Excuse me of a long comment. And it’s not even mine. In 2007 the German socialist-feminist published a book on Rosa Luxemburg. The first chapter, The Politics of Women, has a very interesting discussion of the extreme care she and her students needed in order to actually hear what Rosa had to say. I’ve translated a passage from that section that examines how Rosa talked about proletarian women, travel and consciousness. In Luxemburg’s description, Haug finds exactly the empathy lacking in the radfem analysis and the same respect for integrity and independence that Agustin espouses:
… Reading the little article “The Proletarian Woman” posed an particularly informative and contradictory challenge for us. The text seemed to us to inappropriate to our times, despite its pathos, it offered no possibility to identify ourselves with it in the way we wanted to, in fact we found the choice of words and the images basically misogynistic. We were disturbed the most by this passage:
“For the propertied bourgeois woman, her house is her world. For the proletarian woman, the world with its sorrow and its joy, with its utter cruelty and its crude grandeur. The proletarian woman wanders from Italy to Switzerland with the tunnel worker, camps in barracks, and dries her baby’s diapers while singing among the rocks dynamited into the air. As a migrant field hand in the spring she sits on her modest bundle in the noise of the train station, a scarf on her simply parted hair, and waits patiently to be shipped from the east to the west. On the lower deck of an ocean liner she wanders with every wave that the poverty of crisis washes from Europe to America among the many languages of the hungry proletarians, only to return again to misery of home, to new hopes and disappointments, to the new hunt for work and bread, when an American crisis boils up and the tide turn back.”
At first, we read this text in search of some kind of model female image. What we found made us angry … so well behaved, unaffected, and inoffensive in miserable conditions. … Our conceptions of women’s politics were not to be found in it. …
A subsequent reading showed: Luxemburg doesn’t even describe who the proletarian woman is. Instead, she displays her in three situations, as she moves through large, international, even intercontinental spaces. The places have no particular functions. In fact, the proletarian woman is equally likely to encounter ‘suffering and joy,’ ‘hope and disappointments’ in each of them. Homeland and family, which, contrary to all experience, we are accustomed to thinking of as places of refuge, do not even turn up in that way. Conversely, foreign countries and public places do not play the role of hostile alien surroundings. Because the proletarian woman is everywhere where there is work, in equal measures a stranger and a native. We arrived at the conclusion, startling for us, that in these few lines, Luxemburg moves beyond the division of the private from the public and the customary responsibility of social instances like the family to be places of warmth, well-being and comfort. Instead she suggests to us: Be human in what you do in every place; and in the very same whole patience she describes is the call not to wait for the other place, the other security, but to be here and now conscious, confident and happy in life in train stations, on ocean liners and in quarries. …
The family is in effect disposed of in the second paragraph of her talk by the assertion that capitalism has ripped the woman out of it. In the separation of the public and private domains that is still mentioned here ‘domestic confinement’ appears just as inacceptable as the ‘yoke of social production.’
If I understand this position correctly, Luxemburg argues that women traveling for work, for all the hardship they may encounter, have entered a freedom, a personhood beyond what the bourgeois woman knows. A traditional Marxist approach from 1898.
It’s all about answering reactionary arguments on their own terms whithout challenging them, innit ?
I picture the following scene down the local diner :
Reactionary : “This foreigner has come here to eat our food, she should go back to her country !”
Liberal : “But don’t you see she HAS to come here and eat our food, she was starving in her country !”
Then comes a socialist : “You’re both wrong : they’ve come here to try and make a living while living a life as well - all workers want to travel, whether for a better job, a change a scenery, being with a loved one, being in a place with more cinemas, or a combination of all those. They are part of us, and we share the same interests - this is not about being selfish or generous, it’s about fighting for a right which should be basic for all - not be confined to the place you were born. And anyway she’s just brought you lunch.”
I see my comment is awaiting moderation. All I can say, is if you’re expecting moderation from me, you’re going to have a long wait. All immoderate, all the time.
about the moderation - sorry. i got sick of dealing with the spammers and have had no time to upgrade wordpress or install relevant antispam plugins and such. so, i put it all on moderation which means i sometimes don’t get to approving comments right away.
more on all this later.
Rereading now, I see I managed to leave out the name of Frigga Haug who wrote the book.
I’d rather be moderated than not noticed at all.
Obviously the Luxemburg quote/Haug commentary do not directly concern themselves with sex work. What they do show is how the radfem position implicitly relies on nationalism and domesticity as the warrants for its judgements. Given the widely discussed gendered articulations of nationalism, the particular role of domesticity in those articulations, and the significance of domesticity in constraining women’s freedom, it seems like an odd stance for a feminist of any kind.
From this perspective, although the animosity to sex work and workers appears as a revulsion at the mistreatment of women, it is tempting to speculate that the transgression of domestic sanctity and nationally bound libido amplifies the vehemence. Though how you might put the conclusion on an empirical footing beats me.
But I suppose the crux comes down to work. Domesticity valorizing women excluded from the activities of production, wage labor freeing them into those activities, and sex work as (just) a special form of that work.
Hell with vodka, let’s talk.