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

by Laura María Agustín

  I had a three-month visa, I came for tourism, to see if I could find work; I began in a restaurant, cooking, on the coast; there were many women from different countries. After the season, the restaurant closed and I began domestic work, and now I pick fruit. (Moroccan woman in Spain)130

  I arrived in Almería through a friend’s mediation. I began to work as a domestic, I was badly paid and mistreated. Sundays I came to the edge of the sea and cried. One Sunday a Moroccan man saw me crying, I explained my situation to him, he took me to his house. I was a virgin, he promised he was going to marry me ... he got me a residence card ... He found me work in a restaurant and let me stay in his studio, he told me I had to pay rent. I began to sleep with some clients from the restaurant ... Now, I would like to go to France, I want to get married ... My sister who lives in Bézier says she’s going to find me a Frenchman, to get a residence card. (Moroccan woman in Spain)131

  What employers call flexibility (closing up shop in one country, moving to another, relying on subcontracting or homework) often translates into oppressive conditions for workers. Flexibility can be reduced to regimes in which workers are passive objects:

  Transferability, ephemerality, servitude, diffusion. Transferability: to be transferred across places or labour procedures, according to market necessities; ephemerality: to be involved with projects of short duration, fragmented, and directly consumed; servitude: to be involved with tasks that necessitate the further decentring of identity and work and to be used as an auxiliary to the main economic activity; diffusion: not to hold any attachments or loyalties that may impede the completion of the labour process.132

  Such classifications do not recognise how workers use grassroots networking to their own advantage. As the story of the domestic worker in Almería shows, everyone becomes an opportunist, women as well as men. Everyone looks for chinks to exploit for their personal benefit: places to live, jobs, husbands. Ownership of high-technology or expensive items such as laptop computers is not necessary, as migrants use cybercafés, phonecall shops and mobile phones like anyone else. Networked social relations are everywhere.

  Living in More than One Place

  Since a real link is often imagined between culture and place, migrants are often envisioned as ripped up by their roots. But many studies suggest that migrants come to feel equally at home in multiple places. Research describes Dominicans who live in both Santo Domingo and New York or live ‘between’ them.133 These stories are about how people move, make homes and get jobs, as well as return to other homes and jobs, in series of trips that last indefinitely, involve extended and multiple families, and often branch into migrations to other countries.

  Although having more than one household in two different countries might be a source of emotional stress and economic hardship, it also arms family members with special skills to deal with uncertainty and adversity. They become more sophisticated than nonmigrant people in dealing with a rapidly globalising world.134

  This way of living is sometimes described as transnationalism, its protagonists people with ‘dual lives’, gaining their living through continuous contact across national borders.135 I remember one day in a rural Caribbean town when everyone turned out to greet a returned migrant known to sell sex in Germany. Festooned with gold jewellery and extremely pregnant, she had arrived to give birth to and leave her child with its grandmother, as well as to sell items of clothing brought in her suitcase. The grandmother’s house was, not suprisingly, the best in a town both poor and cosmopolitan.

  A lively debate currently questions whether working-class migrants can be cosmopolitan or whether that term must be reserved for elite, urbane globetrotters. Some fix migrant identity in a reluctant leave-taking and wariness toward the new, seeing their lives as a series of dry, instrumental decisions.136 Belittling treatments of migrants abound. Arjun Appadurai says Mira Nair’s India Cabaret is about the ‘tragedies of displacement’ of women from Kerala who go to Bombay ‘to seek their fortunes as cabaret dancers and prostitutes’. Characterising men who frequent these cabarets as migrants returned from the Middle East whose ‘diasporic lives away from women distort their very sense of what the relations between men and women might be’, Appadurai falls into moralistic universalising about sex and relationships.137

  Other thinkers, and I am one, see no reason for poorer travellers to be disqualified from cosmopolitanism. Bruce Robbins argues this for the protagonists of two novels, third-world nannies in the west whose discoveries about the metropole and ability to reflect on culture are as astute as anyone’s.138 A raft of terms attempt to describe such phenomena. 139 And if working-class people can be cosmopolitan, then some who sell sex also can. In many commercial-sex sites, migrants from Brazil are found working alongside others from Russia, Thailand and Nigeria. These are workplaces where employees in erotic uniforms spend their time socialising, talking and drinking with each other and the clientele, as well as with cooks, waiters, cashiers and bouncers. The experience of spending most of their time in such ambiences, if people adapt to them at all, can help produce cosmopolitan subjects.

  Anyway, at what point does a person stop being a migrant and become something else? At the beginning newcomers may feel reluctant and wary, but most do not remain in this stage for long. James Clifford’s travel theory seems to have a place for ordinary working people, whether they sell or consume sex or not. Taking in popular notions like New York City as part of the Caribbean and Los Angeles and Miami as Latin American capitals, Clifford focuses on encounters between the local and the global.140 bell hooks, noting that the concept of home is different for those who have been conquered, occupied or forced into slavery, is sceptical,141 but I think an emphasis on flexibility and mobility, rather than identity and fixed location, allows people in low-prestige jobs to figure as something other than victims. Finally, Akhil Gupta and James Ferguson, considering today’s deterritorialisation of identity, suggest that ‘refugees, migrants, displaced and stateless peoples ... are perhaps the first to live out these realities in their most complete form’.142

  These ideas take us away from the traditional focus on migrants’ losses, which tends to sentimentalise ‘home’ with warm images of close families, simple household objects, rituals, songs and foods. Religious and national holidays reify concepts of home and family as part of a folkoric past. In this context, migration is constructed as a last-ditch or desperate move, in which migrants are deprived of the place they ‘belong to’. Yet for millions of people all over the world, the birth and childhood place is not a feasible or desirable one in which to undertake adult or ambitious projects, and moving to another place is a conventional – not traumatic – solution.

  In the sentimentalising that occurs around ‘uprooting’, the myriad possibilities for being miserable at home are forgotten. Many people are fleeing from small-town prejudices, dead-end jobs, dangerous streets and suffocating families. And some poorer people like the idea of being found beautiful or exotic abroad, exciting desire in others. Valerie Walkerdine criticises middle-class abhorrence of children’s talent contests popular with the working class:

  Girls form ambitions and desires around aspects of femininity which are presented to them. In fact ... the lure of ‘fame’, particularly of singing and dancing, offers working-class girls the possibility of a talent from which they have not automatically been excluded by virtue of their supposed lack of intelligence or culture.143

  The same can be said of many who end up selling sex. Whether or not they are misled or mislead themselves about the meaning of an offer to work, they have their own desires.

  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)144

  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 beca
use I was looking for a chance . . . When I came to Turkey I didn’t know about the opportunity to work as a sex worker. I first worked as a translator in Karakoy. (Ukrainian woman in Turkey)145

  Many travellers and migrants believe they have the right, after enduring conquest, looting and colonisation, to ‘reconquer’ Europe. Consider Stuart Hall’s wry account of ex-colonial citizens of the British Empire:

  [The British] had ruled the world for 300 years and, at last, when they had made up their minds to climb out of the role, at least the others ought to have stayed out there in the rim, behaved themselves, gone somewhere else, or found some other client state. But no, they had always said that this was really home, the streets were paved with gold, and bloody hell, we just came to check out whether that was so or not.146

  Few people would deny that historical colonial relations are involved in migration, especially where migrants move to their former ‘mother countries’. But Abdelmalek Sayad considers a more serious proposition, that migrations are a structural element of colonial power relationships that have never ended. His case study, the Algerian migration to France in the second half of the twentieth century, shows how the economic and social life of a rural colony was subordinated to another country’s industrialism, peasants became ‘workers’, and immigration was turned into a social problem. With this move, the dominant member of the migration relationship firmly maintains control over knowledge and management of the ‘problem’, according to which immigrants are always lacking necessary skills and culture.147

  Many argue that national borders should not exist at all:

  I don’t come from the sun or moon, I’m from earth just like everybody else and the earth belongs to all of us. (Kurdish migrant in Holland)148

  In this chapter I have described concepts that for one reason or another disqualify the experiences of a large number of people travelling today. These concepts rely on opposites: work/leisure, worker/tourist, gazer/object, home/abroad, work/pleasure, legal/illegal, formal/ informal, backward/modern, victim/criminal. Direct 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’.149

  Despite being largely excluded from normal discourses of pleasure-seeking, work and travel, migrants who work in low-prestige jobs fit into – and prove – interesting contemporary ideas of flows, trans-nationalism and cosmopolitanism. To look at them in these ways, we have to grant the possibility that less empowered, or simply poorer people, are not by definition passive victims. We have to realise that there is more than one form of autonomy, the western one, which can only occur within western ‘progress’ and modernity. Considered as people in flux and flexible labourers, rather than people with identities attached to the jobs they carry out, these travellers become ordinary human beings working to overcome specific problems.

  I want to emphasise the quantity of empirical studies carried out in many parts of the world, and which use reputable, ethical, social-science methodologies, on which I am able to draw information about (and direct quotations from) migrants stigmatised by sex.150 When I began to collect these in 1998, I found fewer than ten; eight years later I am able to cite 55. Since there must be many more, the total refutes accusations that migrants who talk this way are an insignificant minority. 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.

  NOTES

  1 Proyecto Libertad 1994

  2 Agustín 1995, 1996b

  3 Cohen 1979: 181

  4 Urry 1990

  5 Wolff 1985. In Chapter 4 I argue that this idea does not hold up to a class analysis, and that European city streets were also populated by women.

  6 Mulvey 1975: 11

  7 Alloula 1986: 14

  8 Davidoff 1979

  9 Frank 2002: 89

  10 Pratt 1992: 192

  11 Munt 1994

  12 Global Perspectives 2001

  13 Deleuze and Guattari 1986: 52

  14 Bailey and Hane 1995

  15 ‘UN Trends inTotal Migrant Stock 2005’, Migration Policy Institute 2006; Committee on Migration, Refugees and Demography conference on the situation of illegal migrants in Council of Europe member states, Paris 2001

  16 Held et al 1999: 304

  17 Singleton and Barbesino 1999: 20

  18 See Hacking 1991; Black 2003

  19 Lim and Oishi 1996: 87

  20 Dean 1999: 100, after Foucault 1979b

  21 Sassen 1999: 2

  22 Ruggiero 1997: 234

  23 Pedraza 1991: 306

  24 UN Department of Economic and Social Affairs 2005

  25 See Sassen 1996 and 1998; Bauman 2000

  26 Rudolph 1996: 288

  27 A contradiction occurs when local authorities decide to permit work by tourists, as happened in Groeningen, Holland, a few years ago, for women who sold sex.

  28 Henry 1987: 139

  29 What I deliberately mix together has been schematised by Enzo Mingione into seven categories: Formal, Mixed Formal/Informal, Pure Informal, Illegal, Work Not Exchanged for Income, Extraordinary Work for Self-Consumption, and Normal Domestic Work (Mingione 1985: 20).

  30 O’Reilly 2000: 237

  31 Sassen 1998: 155

  32 Ruggiero 1997: 231-2

  33 Henry 1987: 147

  34 Rudolph 1996: 299

  35 Sassen 1998; Pyle and Ward 2003

  36 For example, Morokvasíc 1984 and 1991; Lutz, Phoenix and Yuval-Davis 1995

  37 Mendoza 2001: 51

  38 King and Zontini 2000: 47

  39 Wolff 1993: 229

  40 Agustín 2004c

  41 Moch 1992

  42 Stoneking 1998; Davin 2005a

  43 Zlotnik 2003. Wolff’s positioning of women as lacking ‘access’ to travel may apply better to the nineteenth-century middle class, with its new ideas about women’s place in the home.

  44 Sassen-Koob 1984: 1161

  45Corriere della Sera, quoted in Danna 2004: 85

  46 Agustín 2001a

  47 Ratliff 2004

  48 Oso 2003: 30

  49 Bueno 1999

  50 Ratliff 2004: 42.

  51 Gülçür and Ilkkaracan 2002: 419

  52 Cuanter 1998: 93

  53 Tolentino 1996: 54, on a 1985 ILO report, Women Workers in Multinational Enterprises in Developing Countries

  54 Sassen 1998: 87

  55 Morokvasíc 1984: 888

  56 Kofman 1999: 272; also Boyd and Grieco 2003

  57 Hondagneu-Sotelo 2000: 117

  58 Mahler and Pessar 2006: 42; Pessar and Mahler 2003

  59 Piper 2003: 25

  60 Among those that confirm information on informal migrations, love and sexual relations, commercial sex and ‘trafficking’, through empirical research and critical analysis, are Tabet 1989; COIN 1992; ALAI 1994; Kelsky 1994; Altink 1995; Murray 1991; Skrobanek et al 1997; Law 1997; Pickup 1998; Polanía and Claasen 1998;Anarfi 1998; Bueno 1999; Kennedy and Nicotri 1999; Cabezas 1999; Campani 1999; Ratliff 1999; Brussa 2000; Casal 2001; de Paula Medeiros 2000; Carchedi et al 2000;Agustín 2001a; Mai 2001; Brennan . 2001; Signorelli and Treppete 2001; Gibson et al 2001; Ruíz 2001; Gülçür and Ilkkaracan 2002; Cheng 2002; Andrijasevic 2003; Corso and Trifirò 2003; Likiniano 2003; Constable 2003; Oso 2003; Emerton and Petersen 2003; Monteros 2003; Lenz 2003; Danna 2004; Oliveira 2004; Cabiria 2004; Piscitelli 2004; Riopedre 2004; Schaeffer-Graebiel 2004; Yea 2004; Rodríguez and Lahbabi 2004; Janssen 2005; Unal 2005; Ribeiro and Sacramento 2005; Kastner 2006; Lu 2005; Solana 2005; Díaz Barrero 2005; CATS 2006; Davies 2006; Vogel 2006. In addition, several articles on the ‘smuggling’ of migrants to particular European countries support the more specialised research listed above: Neske 2006; Bilger et al 2006; Pastore et al 2006.

  61 Anderson 2000: 33

&nb
sp; 62 Oso 2000

  63 Mukherjee 1988: 98–9

  64 Bilger et al 2006: 64

  65 Agustín 2001a

  66 Bilger et al 2006: 82

  67 frauenlesbenfilmkollectif 2002: 1

  68 Massey et al 1993: 450

  69 Roberts 1992

  70 These cases are mentioned in Jaget 1975, Guy 1991 and Kelsky 1994.

  71 See list in Note 60.

  72 Richards 2004: 155.

  73 Pastore et al 2006: 98

  74 Oso 2003: 34

  75 Anderson 2000: 29

  76 frauenlesbenfilmkollectif 2002: 2

  77 Oso 2003: 32

  78 Gilbert and Koser 2006

  79 Kennedy and Nicotri 1999: 36

  80 Oso 2000

  81 Pheterson 1996: 18

  82 Bogdanova quoted in Pickup 1998:1000

  83 Herman 2006: 212

  84 Lazaridis 2001: 85

  85 Negre i Rigol 1988. See also Pastore et al 2006.

  86 Bonelli et al 2001: 81

  87 Bueno 1999: 380

  88 Bonelli et al 2001: 81

  89 Agustín 2001a

  90 Oso 2000

  91 Oso 2000

  92 Riopedre 2004: 25

  93 See note 60.

  94 Altink 1995: 2

  95 For example, Dirección General de la Policía de Córdoba 1999

  96 In the worst situations, sex workers denounce rescuers; see, for example,Ashok 2002, Empower Chiang Mai 2003 and Thomas 2006.

  97 Roberts 1986: 57

  98 Salt 2000: 32; years later this is still true.