Sex at the Margins: Migration, Labour Markets and the Rescue Industry

by Laura María Agustín

  In my field work, I found that the theorising, with its silences and fixations, can be understood as the desire first to know and then to control people whose activities are considered deviant. The focus I bring to this study belongs to a postcolonial framework that questions missions to help non-Europeans, particularly the maternalistic tradition – even when it is called feminist – to rescue non-European and poorer women.

  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 transgenders who sell sex are ignored. 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 socially 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 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 and control working-class women.

  Sex at the Margins portrays social agents’ current practices in services, education, outreach, publications, conferences and policy-making, and shows how they perpetuate a constructed class – ‘prostitute’ – which justifies their actions and serves an isolationist immigration policy. When possible, I let the words of those who sell sex describe their own experiences; the translations of testimonies not originally in English are mostly my own.

  I hope that this book will be of interest to both non-academic and academic readers. For the former, I have taken out the insistent citation behaviour required by the latter; for the latter, I have preserved the references in notes at the end of each chapter.

  I have found the concept of discourse extremely helpful. The discourse on a subject refers to a language or way of talking that develops, through use, a series of conventions and becomes institutionalised through use. The discourse defines the socially accepted, mainstream or apparently official version, the version that seems obvious or natural. At the same time, this discourse always leaves out experiences and points of view that do not fit, silencing difference and producing unease in those who do not see themselves included. To understand the concept of discourse is to remember that what we say about any given subject is always constructed, and there are only partial truths.

  NOTES

  1 This argument is developed in Agustín 2002a.

  2 Almodóvar 1999

  3 Hannah Godfrey, The Observer (UK),19 January 2003

  4 Kate Holt, The Observer (UK), 3 February 2002

  5 Donna Hughes, National Review Online,1 May 2006

  6 NGO is the general term for an array of projects large and small, also known as charities, non-profit organisations, foundations, etc. They may provide direct services, do research, publish and/or fund other projects.

  7 Krom 1993

  8 Agustín 1999a

  2

  WORKING TO TRAVEL, TRAVELLING TO WORK

  The story begins with ideas about migration, because social helping projects classify people according to labels, such as ‘migrant domestic worker’ or ‘migrant prostitute’. I begin with notions of travel in general, because so much stigmatising and bad publicity derives from wrong impressions about what people are doing when they leave home to work.

  Migrancy is at best a temporary identity, referring to a stage of life when people are in transit. Migrants are often assumed to have moved from their country with the intention of settling down in another, but research shows that some who think they are leaving for good actually return, others never consider their journey to be other than temporary no matter how long it lasts, and some who settle abroad still feel permanently uprooted, meaning that physical location and even legal status are not good indicators of affiliation to a migrant identity. Societies on the receiving end want newcomers to ‘integrate’, which depends on migrants’ desires and abilities to adapt, assimilate and lose an identification with migrancy. Yet receivers make this difficult by constantly finding migrants lacking in necessary skills and culture and making legality and security hard to acquire.

  So it seems to me that these travellers have in common a process, not an identity: they have all left their countries and they have to earn money to live. When a particular group of them is treated sensationally in the press or defined as needing to be rescued, the difference is not in the people themselves but in how they are supposed to have arrived and how they are making a living. Jobs selling sex form part of a vast, unregulated, unprotected, informal economic sector. Migrants engage in many other commercial activities, such as selling leather goods, silk scarves and sunglasses on the street, that are also unrecognised and uncontrolled, but these provoke neither the passionate desire to help nor a scandalised media gaze. The association with sex overwhelmingly affects how migrants are treated, excluding them from migration studies and stories, disqualifying them as travellers and workers, and constructing them as passive objects forced to work and travel in ways they never wanted.

  Theories of tourism and migration are changing, in part because of this kind of ambiguous situation. Rather than surveying them exhaustively, I expose odd silences in the theories to reveal a story common to all, in which migrants are considered separate, uncreative and unsophisticated. In this metanarrative, leisure is considered an aspect of western modernity that facilitates tourism, which is characterised by the absence of work, while migration is undertaken by less modern people impelled by identifiable causes to leave home. The tourism and pleasure seeking of people from ‘developing’ societies rarely figures, as though migration and tourism (and working and tourism) were mutually exclusive. Why should the travels to work of people from less wealthy countries be supposed to differ fundamentally from those of Europeans? To answer this, I examine concepts of labour migration and the so-called feminisation of migration, as well as theories of global flows and transnationalism.

  The particular travel I’m looking at involves women, men and trans-genders who work in personal and home services in Europe. Since many people do more than one of these jobs, I don’t attempt to keep them separate and later show that the boundaries between them cannot be maintained. I also blur the line between men’s and women’s migrations, since migrant men from the third world are often presented as feminised, vulnerable and victimised and because they work in service jobs, too. On the other hand, I pay more attention to women, not because there are not many transgenders and men in the situations discussed, but because women provoke the scandal. For this reason, I closely examine concepts of ‘trafficking’, an account of women’s travel that ties it up with the sale of sex.

  I have carried out several kinds of field work during my nearly fifteen years of study. In the area of the México–US border known as The Valley, near Brownsville and Matamoros, I did participatory action research with a group of migrants from Central America, Cuba and México who were applying for political asylum in the US. At the suggestion of one of them, residents in a Roman Catholic refuge taped the stories of their journeys, beginning with the complex and sometimes desperate situations they were living in before they left.1 In the Dominican Republic, I interviewed people living on remittances from women working in Europe. I did research among migrant women selling sex in Spain.2 Apart from these more formal situations, I have been making friends with people trying to travel to work for decades, all over Latin America and the Caribbean, and talking with migrants all over Europe, not only from Lati
n America but also from West Africa, Eastern Europe and countries of the former Soviet Union. Some of these felt they were victims and were living in shelters.

  Travel and Travellers to Europe

  On the European continent, the desire to make a European Union places emphasis on what defines a member, a European, as opposed to a non-member, outsider, non-European. In matters of culture, there is considerable tension between a project to mark out Europe as an entity and efforts to conserve and protect particular national identities from outside influence. The current drive toward pan-European policies means members would like to agree on a single immigration policy, but all have complicated migration histories, and several had or have colonial dependencies. Members perceived to have inadequate border controls (like Spain) or to be too liberal towards migrants (like Holland) are under pressure to ‘close up’ their borders better. These divergences of policy do not apply when the outsiders are called tourists.

  Tourism

  For several decades now, tourism has been a major source of income for some European countries, and others consider it to be their future economic salvation. Tourists are generally defined as people who have time and money to spend on leisure and who journey somewhere to do it: they travel for pleasure. Many scholars define tourism through the absence of work. For Erik Cohen, ‘tourism only remains functional so long as it does not become central to the individual’s biography, his life-plan and aspirations’.3 So tourists are believed to leave their regular jobs behind to indulge consciously in not working, the word vacation referring to vacant time.

  Despite these ideas, European tourism advertises itself as not only pleasurable but educational, and some tourists are said to be doing hard work, arriving with long lists of items to be seen and appreciated, in pressed and crowded conditions, at a high cost and without necessarily having a very good time. But though seeing the world may be educational, it is not a necessity, so tourists are not considered to be on the brink of making important life decisions, acting under duress or intending to stay, characteristics associated with refugees, exiles and migrants.

  Most of the concepts developed in the sociology of tourism are masculine. Since women have been theorised as experiencing space and time differently from men,much of what defines tourism may change as more information on women’s tourism comes in. Many women have different ideas about work, too, so the positioning of tourism as Other to work may change. I believe the dichotomy work/no work is misleading and that there are multiple forms of travel that have aspects of both. Deconstruction of this taken-for-granted duo allows me to make postcolonial and class analyses of various themes involved.

  Returning the gaze

  John Urry gives us the concept of the tourist gaze,4 which, like other gazes, has been called peculiarly male. Some claim that flâneurs, wandering urban observers in the nineteenth century, could only have been men.5 Laura Mulvey theorises the male gaze as a visual power held by male spectators, particularly in relation to female objects: ‘pleasure in looking [as] split between active/male and passive/female’ in patriarchal society (in reference to the idea of scopophilia, the pleasure of looking at other people’s bodies).6 While work guiding film, photography and other visual arts suggests the gaze’s inherent masculinity, there is no evidence that disempowered or oppressed women and men do not also gaze, or gaze back, at the eyes that make them objects. For Malek Alloula, writing of French postcard photos of undressed Algerian women:

  These veiled women are not only an embarrassing enigma to the photographer but an outright attack upon him. It must be believed that the feminine gaze ... is a little like ... the photographic lens that takes aim at everything ... Thrust in the presence of a veiled woman, the photographer feels photographed; having himself become an object-to-be-seen, he loses initiative: he is dispossessed of his own gaze.7

  Leonore Davidoff, writing of the long-lasting love between a nineteenth-century English gentleman, Arthur Munby, and a domestic servant, Hannah Cullwick, shows the essential equality of their desires and how Hannah changed her social destiny even while exaggerating her role of grimy cleaner.8 Katherine Frank notes that ‘men’s interactions in strip clubs are with women who look back at them, from the stages (“Remember to make eye contact!” managers urged)’.9 These are all examples of how people in disempowered and overtly sexist situations assert agency, take action, resist.

  The modern tourist gaze is usually associated with Europeans, but travellers like Flora Tristán (1840, Perú) and Domingo Sarmiento (1849, Argentina) wrote extensive counter-accounts of the peculiar habits of Europeans. Sarmiento describes how he caused Paris crowds to form by staring, flâneur-like, at cracks in walls and wonders how these French could possibly be the same people that made the revolutions of 1780 and 1830:

  What Humboldt saw in the jungles and pampas, Sarmiento sees in the shops of the Rue Vivienne, the collections of the Jardin des Plantes, the museums, galleries, bookstores, and restaurants ...10

  Being less modern, in the European sense, does not impede travellers from gazing, questioning and joking about aspects of modernity, nor does it exclude them from engaging in tourism.

  Hybrid Categories: Tourists that Work and Working Travellers

  Travellers are sometimes said to seek exotic, intellectualised or esoteric trips untypical of tourists.11 Some travellers say their trips are unplanned, open-ended and longer than tourists’, and that they work along the way. They are proud of not travelling in groups, of spending little money, of trying to speak local languages, of meeting local people and appreciating ‘real culture’ more than tourists supposedly do:

  [W]e experienced the country in a totally different way than a Tourist. A Tourist wants to observe and experience only the best of the culture. A Traveler travels with humility and respect of the culture . . . While working with the people we made friendships with them. By doing that we are immediately connected . . . and always will be.12

  Many travellers who position their experiences as more authentic than tourists’ and want to ‘interact with the culture’ get jobs. Unless they are wealthy, they need to make money if their travels continue long enough, whether they call themselves vagabond, beach bum, drifter or travel writer. Combining travel and work is perhaps a hybrid form of tourism, indicating that the supposed contradiction between leisure and work is not true.

  Business travellers engage in tourism while travelling, their expense accounts increasingly important to European city economies as they entertain themselves and clients in theatres, cabarets, restaurants, bars, sports arenas and sex clubs. Sports professionals, entertainers, musicians and theatre companies work while touring and do tourism when not working. Sailors, soldiers, airline and train personnel, commercial fishermen, farm workers, long-distance truck drivers and a variety of others travel as part of their jobs. Academics, consultants, missionaries, ‘development’ workers, diplomats and social-sector personnel attend conferences, do field work and provide expertise while also seeing the sights. Explorers search for oil, minerals, endangered species and archaeological artefacts. Many of these people spend long periods away from home, their work lives punctuated by leisure and tourist activities. Religious pilgrims may work and engage in tourism on their way. And then there are the people called Roma, gypsies, and Travellers, whose itinerant way of life includes working while on the road.

  Many theorists distinguish between all these people and migrants on the grounds that the latter settle: for example, ‘If the nomad can be called the Deterritorialized par excellence, it is precisely because there is no reterritorialization afterwards as with the migrant.’13 People from wealthier countries who decide to settle abroad are often called expatriates, not migrants, or émigrés, which may imply politically motivated self-exile.14 In comparison with postmodern, first-world, innovative individuals, migrants are made to seem earthbound and barely modern.

  What and Who Is a Migrant?

  In 2005, the UN estimated that only 3 per cent of the world’
s population were migrants (191 million) and that 30–40 million might be unauthorised (undocumented). They also estimated unauthorised migrants in Europe in 1998 to be around 3 million, but the Migration Policy Institute’s estimate is 7–8 million. Some figures also state that ‘illegals’ are 10–15 per cent of migrants already present in Europe and 20–30 per cent of those entering it.15

  The combination Europe migration until fairly recently referred to Europeans who left to colonise other parts of the world, either as immigrants or during inter-European wars and ethnic conflicts. Since World War Two, this situation has reversed, with European countries receiving ever more migrants. Since the 1980s, economic booms in Europe and the disarticulation of ‘iron curtain’ countries have promoted mobility.16

  Most governments publish statistics not on immigrants per se but only on different statuses related to immigration, such as visas,work permits and municipal registrations; official countings of ‘migrant workers’ inevitably include only people with legal status. Statistics depend on how calculations are done, and results can vary widely. The attempt to distinguish legal from illegal or unauthorised is, furthermore, too crude to be useful. The figures cited above illustrate the muddle.

  Categories of unrecorded, or inadequately recorded, labour migrants include EU nationals such as posted workers, transit migrants of all nationalities, suitcase traders from different countries of origin, the self-employed,‘forced’ migrants and hidden migration including clandestine movements. Additional statistical definitional problems arise from the equation of unrecorded as illegal, and with the many outstanding areas of unharmonised legislation on migration across Europe. ‘Category switching’, the movement of an individual over time between different administrative categories and legal statuses, further complicates the question of obtaining up-to-date data on recorded migration.17