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

as I mentioned in an earlier post, Agustin’s second chapter, “Working to Travel; Traveling to Work,” in her book, Sex at the Margins, intervenes into a set of binary oppositions we hold about traveling, work, migrancy, agency, autonomy, and victims.

The discourse around migrancy, Agustin argues, too often views women as having no agency. They are, rather, victims of economic oppression, political oppression, or some combination and the explanation as to why they’ve migrated, particularly if they are employed in the sex industry, is that they were victims of circumstances beyond their control and, thus, played no active role as an agent who might have chosen to leave home to work in the sex industry.

This isn’t always true, as Agustin points out through a selection of her interviews with migrant women working in the sex industry. She’s quick to point out that she doesn’t mean to say that no one is ever forced to “leave home” or that no one is ever tricked or conned or forced into sex work. Rather, she says that the stories women told her do not hew to the tendency for people to assume that people are employed in sex work because they have utterly no other choice or have been drugged or forced into it or, possibly, are psychologically damaged and incapable of making rational decisions in their own self-interest.

Agustin shows how this victimization narrative tends to disqualify the stories of the majority of the women she worked with, interviewed, and counseled over the course of 15 years.

Her task in this chapter is to uncover how the the discourse on migrancy is riddled with binary oppositions: work/leisure, worker/tourist, gazer/object, home/abroad, work/pleasure, legal/illegal, formal/informal, backward /modern, victim/criminal.

However, as Agustin argues — a little too simplistically for my tastes:

opposites rarely exist in pure forms, and the label migrant does not adequately describe the travels and work of millions of people. Specifically, the field of migration studies is guilty of ignoring women who sell sex and consigning them to the miserable field of ‘victims of trafficking’.

Hence, Agustin wants to shift the focus a bit in order to look at the life stories of the women she’s worked with and interviewed. She wants us to see how they are not stories of pure victimization, but as more complicated stories about people who are also engaged in gazing, pleasure-seeking, working, traveling, and touring the world — discourses these women are typically not considered part of precisely because such discourses assume an active agent.

About the newest term within which migrant women who sell sex are framed, trafficking, Agustin shows how the approach, likewise, paints women’s lives in a one-sided way, in a way we wouldn’t tolerate were we talking about any group of women besides sex workers. Like other frameworks, the trafficking discourses erases the agency of women. But how can that be when Agustin has dozens of her own interviews, as well as many more from research conducted over the past ten years, research which includes the voices of women who say:

I wanted to be independent. I have a big family, but I didn’t get along with them. I wanted to be on my own. I saw the neighbours who are doing OK, who have money because there’s someone in Italy. (Nigerian woman in Italy).

I left my job in the Ukraine because it was boring there.I wanted to go abroad and experience the world. After my experience in Italy I came to Turkey two years ago because I was looking for a chance… When I came to Turkey I didn’t know about the opportunity work as a sex worker. I first worked as a translator in Karakoy. (Ukrainian woman in Turkey)

Agustin concludes this chapter with the standard, and generally ignored, caution: “The words of these migrants tell us not that there are no abuses or problems but that ‘trafficking’ is a woefully inadequate way to conceptualise them.” p. 48