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

So, yesterday, I related Agustin’s discussion of her fieldwork with the Progresistas, an organization that advocates for the rights of sex workers, mostly by handing out condoms. They believe that solidarity — among sex workers and between all women — is the method for obtaining women’s rights. As a consequence, they have a tendency to enforce the norm of solidarity on groups of women who don’t always appreciate their cultural values.

I also summarized her reactions to a abolitionist gathering intended to create solidarity around prostitution understood as violence against women, all of whom are conceived of as victims of a sex trade that forces them to engage in sex work against their will: either through forcible coercion, economic coercion, or social coercion in which women only appear to choose sex work because they are falsely conscious or perhaps, as one woman argued, because most of the women she sees are ‘mentally retarded.’ In their view, no one would be engaged in sex work if they had real choices.

They create “solidarity” at the event by shutting down opposition, refusing to invite participants who might advocate differing approaches, research, and opinions, and by shaming anyone who seems like they might give the least bit of sympathy to the possibility that there are other positions on prostitution, trafficking, and the agency of women engaged therein.

3. The third site for Agustin’s field work is an order of Roman Catholic nuns who operate a safe house in a barrio in Spain, though I’m not sure which city or town. The nuns sometimes engage in demonstrations and participate in actions targeted at sex workers’ rights campaigns, education, and outreach. The nuns work with women when they’ve chosen to seek help: “We ask them to tell us their situations, and if they really want to get away, then we go and explain what we offer.”

Since they cater to migrants who, at the time of the fieldwork, were mainly from Eastern Europe, West Africa, the Ukraine, and Russia, the sisters offer help “regularising their migration status” or helping women return home depending on what the women want. The also offer classes in the language and culture, as well as assistance with legal issues, finding work, and psychological counseling.

A culture clash occurs over the value placed on sharing in the safe house, which is exemplified in the way they take their meals: they are leisurely and conversation is expected. However, some women aren’t interested in small talk and simply want to eat and leave. This is disconcerting to the nuns, even though they also seem to be aware of the cultural differences. They seem to be personally hurt by the behavior, possibly because they derive pleasure from the conversations themselves. They seem to want communion with other women.

The nuns, Agustin says, tend to be up front about their reasons for being there: they are looking “for personal and spiritual fulfillment.”

Which is interesting. Instead of maintaining that they are there to assist the women, their focus is on their own personal and spiritual fulfillment and doesn’t seem to emphasize self-sacrifice of their own desires and needs for the sake of helping others

When she asks them how they define “trafficked” women, they maintain that “the women themselves must say they have been forced, obligated, coerced or deceived and want to get out.” (p 165) When Agustin wants to know what would happen if a woman changed her mind and wanted to return to sex work, they are befuddled by the question. For the nuns, if the woman wants to go back, then she should go back. As Agustin points out, the nuns uphold the definition of ‘trafficking’ promoted by the Global Alliance Against Trafficking in Women (GAATW). The Alliance “believes that sex work and migration can be plausible projects for autonomous women,” a minority view in Spain that has little support.

The one thing I found interesting, and I was surprised I didn’t know this given an acquaintance in grad school: nuns are not ordained by the Church and don’t belong to the church hierarchy. They have quite a bit of freedom to do as they wish. I had a friend in grad school who was studying nuns as a feminist project. She’d mentioned that she’d get puzzled looks, quite often, because most people don’t think of nuns as especially feminist. Nor, apparently, had Agustin at the outset. But she was quickly corrected by the nuns, though she never says that they label themselves feminists.

The nuns, needless to say, are bemused by Agustin’s assumptions that nuns are supposed to adhere to papal policies. When she asks how they reconcile their work with papal decrees, they turn it around and ask Agustin why she’s so concerned with the pope. They’re not, so why should she be?! :)

They have evolved their own feminist project, in which they realise themselves during the process of helping women who have requested help. Their stated mission is the liberation and promotion of marginalised women; they are not in the business of moral judgments. One sister laments, “When I see the Pope on television I am appalled to think what kind of image we send to the rest of the world.”

As Agustin notes: “there is a we after all.” (p 166)

That said, Agustin points out that, of course, the nuns are engaged in helping and are similar to the middle class women who emerged with “the rise of the social” (a concept I hope I have time to elaborate. alas!). These women didn’t need to work but wanted “to be useful” so they focused their “love and energy on lower-class women who sell sex.” In Spain, this took on a particular hue because Spanish gender ideology “required educated women to be devoted, domestic and maternal angels while men were public and political providers. Women working outside the home and participating in social movements provoked hostility and had to deal with extremely unfavourable work conditions and remuneration.” Quoting Mary Nash, Agustin notes that, in some ways, they shared a social stigma with the women they were trying to help:

Women who transgressed the norms and invaded the public sphere were likened to public women, that is to prostitutes. The public woman, with this double connotation of prostitute and woman occupying the public space traditionally reserved for males, was subject to a specific gender repression. (p 167)

dayum people! I’m tired. I was hoping to do more, but I’m whupped. Just a bit more. I think it’s somewhat problematic, the way Agustin tells this, oh I don’t know, I guess you’d call it a morality tale. Something. Like I said, there’s no reason to believe this isn’t true. It’s not that. It is, rather, that the story unfolds in a way that feels much too pat. It’s, I guess, a form of polemics: to tell these tales in a way where the “heroes” in a sense turn out to be the people we least expect. In this case, the people who treat sex workers with the most dignity or at least engage in activities that those of us who support sex workers’ rights tend to support, are the very groups that are typically seen as unlikely to support those very approaches. Specifically, the religious (nuns) and the male exploiters (the owner of sex clubs who’d gotten enormously rich off sex workers).

Moreover, the people who we also tend to think would support sex workers’ rights through their actions — the Progresistas and Anti-AIDS, as well as supposedly more enlightened groups that produce educative pamphlets designed to prevent the spread of sexually transmitted diseases — turn out engage in practices that make us cringe. I’ll explain more about that later in another post. But basically, while those groups are admirable from a sex workers’ right POV, they still tend to do things that undermine women’s agency, reinscribe colonialist thinking, re-enact the victimization discourse in spite of their manifest desires, and undermine solidarity and cultural respect in spite of their own stated goals.

*heads off to search for a pillow and someplace to unwind*

xo