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

So, why the title of the earlier post, pt 1 of a discussion of Agustin’s Chapter, ‘From Charity to Solidarity,’ from her book, _Sex on the Margins? I entitled that post, “Did you hear the one about a sex club owner and some nuns?”

Agustin draws on her fieldnotes, which she sets of in sans serif type, and then follows with analysis of those notes in conventional serif type. These fieldnotes are taken, typically, right after a field researcher leaves the field. You try, as best you can to record events, and then you follow up with some analysis. Sometimes, as Agustin points out, it’s a little more messy than that, and the note-taking gets mixed up with the analysis. Which is unavoidable. (I would like to get into the messiness that are discussions of objectivity and subjectivity, colonization within sociological and anthropological research, etc. But it’s more than this series and this bitch can bear at the moment. Suffice it to say, this are important issues from a research ethics POV.)

The blogpost title has to do with the different fieldwork sites Agustin used to illustrate her work:

* The Progresistas, which is an activist group in Spain that hands out condoms to sex workers.

* An event, ‘Prostitution and Trafficking in Women for Sexual Exploitation’

* An order of Roman Catholic nuns in Spain

* a group she calls Anti-AIDS who see themselves as outreach educators to at-risk groups such as sex workers

* Agustin’s experience of being invited to speak at a public seminar (in Spain) on sexual violence. Her lecture is entitled, “Migration and trafficking: myths, truths, and a lot of ambiguities.’

* An analysis the production and content of several AIDS prevention pamphlets published by a coalition: an EU sponsored AIDS prevention campaign, Spain’s national health institute, and NGOs, including a number of West African migrants’ associations.

* The ‘Seminario Internacional Sobre Prostitution,’ a seminar for human and labor rights organizations for sex workers and migrants

* The story of Don X, a sex club owner, who works with a contact at the Labour Ministry in order to get his workers “normal labour benefits: work permits and social security protection.

1. The Progresistast hand out condoms at a large urban park where they work mainly with sex workers — women and men, including a large contingent of trans men and trans women — who are from Latin America, West Africa, and Eastern Europe.

When the car pulls up to distribute condoms, people run up to it to get their condoms. The Progresistas, though, carefully monitor recipients and refuse to give anyone more than one sack to each. Over and over again the more experienced Progresistas try to educate the prostitutes, as well as newer outreach workers, that the point is solidarity. They must share. The Progresistas believe they must teach the value of solidarity because, in their view, that is the only way sex workers will ever get more rights and better working conditions — by being solidaristic.

Agustin entitles this section ‘Imposing Solidarity.
Her reasons are evident after she relates her discussion with the sex workers. She is unsettled by the experience of watching the Progresistas argue with the sex workers about how many sacks of condoms they can have. So much so, she walks away from the scene and tells herself that she’ll never accompany the Progresistas again.

After the scene, she hangs out with the sex workers. Some, such as the Latinas, tend to mind their own business. They take advantage of as many services as possible and do so quietly, just shrugging off the way the Progresistas behave.

Others are more vocal. The women from Nigeria are irritated that the Progresistas speak only Spanish. They speak English and want to know why the Progresistas don’t learn English so they can communicate better. Another woman is pissed enough to mock them. She hands Agustin a flyer for a store her friend has opened and says, “There, I’m just doing the same as they are.”

As Agustin says, “In Spain, references to solidarity are common and unreflexive.” The Progresistas operate under the assumption that all women are the same. They deserve rights and dignities that all women should have. This seems harmless enough, but this tendency blinds them to the ways the women they are “helping” are different. They don’t necessarily value the solidarity the Progresistas take for granted as an ultimate value - a value they seem to think is one all women should share.

(NOTE: which makes me think of brownfemipower’s recent attempts to maintain solidarity among women of color bloggers. Yes, her actions seem admirable to me, but reading this passage again, and seeing how solidarity can be imposed on different groups of people, and how it can be wielded in the name of some sort of common essence of what women are about or ought to be about if only they were free of patriarchal society… it makes me question solidarity as a value that doesn’t need problematizing. Maybe such solidarity feels imposed to other groups of women. Maybe, like the Nigerian sex workers, other women in bloglandia are feeling manipulated by the demand to be solidaristic in the name of some ultimate goal they may not share. As Agustin and others have shown, this solidarity isn’t necessarily an unproblematic way of dealing with conflict or organizing or political action.)

Agustin also notes that, these days, the term “empowerment” is a more acceptable way to think of what the Progresistas are trying to do. People sometimes say they want to help empower other women. But, she says, empower is a transitive verb and the subject is the person “doing the empowering.”

By definition, you can’t empower other women. You can only empower yourself. Sex workers have to want to empower themselves, which means they have to want to be identify as a sex worker. But, as Agustin bluntly reminds readers:

“Many migrants who sell sex do not consider themselves sex workers.” (p 158)

What she means is, migrants who sell sex often don’t give a rat’s about empowerment issues because they don’t have work permits or residency status and usually want those things, before they would ever bother worrying about cultivating their self-identity as a sex worker. Others are afraid they’ll get caught, arrested, sent home, and/or that their families will find out. And still others are ashamed of being sex workers and want to get out — an attitude toward selling sex that Agustin doesn’t ignore, in spite of her detractors who often say she does ignore the stories of women who don’t identify as sex workers who want to empower themselves as sex workers. A careful read of this book shows that Agustin thinks nothing of the sort and does not ignore the fact that some sex workers aren’t interested in empower, nor do they want to be sex workers.

2. The second site for her field work is an event billed as “Prostitution and Trafficking in Women for Sexual Exploitation” organized by a member of an international anti-trafficking organization.

Agustin gained entree to the event, along with some other people “in the field”, because a politician learned that they hadn’t been invited. The politician sent them her own invitations, to be sure they could attend. The politician also demanded that speakers from local outreach projects also be included because she was troubled by the fact that the original speaker line up represented only the abolitionist line.

The event takes place in an ornate building with glossy hardwood floors, formal flower arrangements, sculptures, artwork, and plenty of official seals adorning the walls. The attendees are about 300 “middle class women who work in government and mainstream NGOs” and the speakers are “well-known on the abolitionist circuit.”

The dominant frame includes the following:

– prostitution is slavery
– prostitution is violence against women
– prostitution involves men forcing women to have sex
– trafficking and prostitution are the same thing
– the only solutions are abolition and punishment of exploiters

Agustin entitles this section, “A Culture of Indignation” because one of the speakers tells attendees that they must “develop the capacity for indignation, establish a culture of indignation.” (p 159)

I’ll quote from her directly because she says it best, from her fieldnotes describing the event where a local woman who runs a flat for “troubled women” says that

“retardation (is) a typical attribute of ‘prostitutes’. A Swedish male is cut off abruptly in his presentation on why men ‘use prostitutes’ when he makes a slightly compassionate remark; the moderator accuses him of taking typical male advantage of the situation (it’s not clear how). Another academic discusses her study of advertisements for personal services in Spanish newspapers, apparently believing literally their information about ethnicity, nationality and gender; she provides quantitative data on how many of each advertise [several people in the audience chuckle about this]. For three days, Holland is referred to repeatedly as a demon, without explanation, and no Dutch speaker has been invited.
…
Another ghastly moment for me personally comes when a member of a large anti-trafficking group describes the destructive power of people who work for rights of prostitutes. Pausing dramatically, she intones, “There might even be some of them right her in the room with us.” My blood runs cold — could she know I am here?”

If I hadn’t already encountered this online, I would have been surprised at the disdain and outright horror heaped about anyone who advocates for sex workers’ rights.

Agustin continues:

Near the end, wine and canapes are served in an elegant period room… Given the non-stop representation of poverty, misery and violence … the rich setting is offensive. I speak to an enraged Bolivian woman who cannot believe what she has seen… “Our countries are supposed to be backward, but now I realise the opposite is true. At least we say what we feel in public, we are not intimidated.”

The woman is referring to the people who are outside the meeting room, obviously agitated by what is going on inside but, for various, reasons feel they cannot speak out and against the dominant ideology at the conference for reasons Agustin explains later.

As I noted earlier, there was last minute pressure put on the organizer to include the perspectives of people working in local outreach projects. They invited the Anti-AIDS group ad the Progresistas. The Anti-AIDS group, once they get wind of the dominant ideology of the program, decide to back out, claiming that they can’t take a political position.

The Progresistas represent the only local group that support a sex workers’ rights position.

(The Progresista worker who speaks) is mocked and misquoted by one of the organisers. Amidst the hubbub, a desperate voice from the audience asks whether it wouldn’t be possible to hear what some prostitute has to say. At that, the representative of an international women’s programme… grabs the microphone and barks: ‘We don’t have to talk to prostitutes to know what prostitution is.’ (my emphasis and the reason for the title of this post)

‘Consensus is claimed at the end of the conference, when the organisers announce they are writing up a document to sent to the European Commission which will represent Spain’s opinion. Outraged, a well-known activist nun stalks out.

Agustin, as I noted earlier, describes what goes on as silencing and censorious of dissent. She is careful not to call it a conference because it isn’t run like conferences typically are. Rather, she says, people from many countries “repeat a simplistic line made to sound like good struggling against evil. Controlling invitations and silencing difference may give the impression of solid international unity. And unwitting audience may believe this or feel as bored as I did.”

Agustin goes on to talk about what she calls fundamentalist feminism, which I discussed in an earlier post, “Moral Entrepreneurialism and Fundamentalist Feminism.”

to be continued