Sex at the Margins: Migration, Labour Markets and the Rescue Industry
Page 7
99 Bilger,Hofmann and Jandl 2006; Neske 2006; Pastore et al 2006; CICP 2003
100 Carchedi et al 2000
101 Comment by Jacqueline Bhabha, 3 October 2004 at the Gendered Borders conference,Amsterdam.
102 Kangaspunta 2003
103 Tampep’s statistics on the percentage of migrants among sex worker populations were estimated in 1999 at: 90% in Italy, 25% in Sweden and Norway, 85% in Austria, 62% in the north of Germany and 32% in the south, 68% in Holland and 45% in Belgium. The Spanish figure, 50%, covers only street prostitution in Madrid (Tampep 1999). Since 1997, when the previous study of this kind was done, the percentage of migrants in the sex industry increased in all European countries.
104 The first comes from the International Office on Migrations and the second from AGISRA (Arbeitsgemeinschaft Gegen Internationale Sexuelle und Rassistische Ausbeutung), both quoted in Azize-Vargas et al 1996.
105 May, San Francisco Chronicle, 6 October 2006
106 For example, Johnson 1999
107 Kelly and Regan 2000: 5, my emphasis
108 Hughes 2002
109 Declaration on the Elimination of Violence against Women, United Nations General Assembly Resolution 48/104: 20 December 1993
110 Agustín 2003a
111 Kelly, Burton and Regan 1996
112 Kapur 2002: 5
113 See, for example, Mani 1990; Kapur 2002: 6 and Pupavac 2002. In the last, social agents trying to help refugees from Kosovo defined them as not resilient, ‘dysfunctional’ and incapable of recovery, rendering them politically illegitimate.
114 Goodey more reasonably advocates a ‘victim-centred’ policy on ‘trafficking’ without falling into essentialising migrants as victims (2004: 40).
115 Ditmore 2002
116 CATW 2003; IHRLG 2002
117 Cynthia Enloe characterises the situating of women with children as ‘womenand-children’, a concept suiting the propagandistic ends of patriarchy (1991).
118 Marie 1994: 19. For other critiques, see Irwin 1996; Doezema 2000; Campani 2001; Pickup 1998; Kapur 2005.
119 Kapur 2005: 118
120 Alexander 1996; Carchedi et al 2000; Skrobanek 2000; Mai 2001; Agustín 2002b, 2003b, 2003c
121 Hughes 2002
122 Stallybrass and White 1986; Ong and Peletz 1995: 6
123 Rodríguez 1996: 23
124 Ruggiero 1997 discusses the difficulty of distinguishing between services provided by officials and criminals.
125 Stalker 2006;Acosta 2002
126 Castells 1997
127 Hannerz 1996: 60
128 Massey 1994: 149
129 Castells 1997: 10
130 Rodríguez and Lahbabi 2004
131 Rodríguez and Lahbabi 2002: 217
132 Psimmenos 2000: 84
133Between Two Islands, Grasmuck and Pessar 1991; and One Country in Two, Guarnizo 1992; see also Georges 1990
134 Guarnizo 1994:77
135 Portes et al 1999: 217-8; see also Smith and Guarnizo 1998; Kapur calls people who cross borders and occupy an inferior status ‘transnational migrant subjects’ (2005: 109).
136 Hannerz 1990: 243
137 Appadurai 1996: 38-9
138 Robbins 1994; Kincaid 1990; Mukherjee 1988
139 Werbner 2006
140 Clifford 1997: 24
141 hooks 1992
142 Gupta and Ferguson 1992: 9
143 Walkerdine 1997: 50
144 Danna 2004: 84 .
145 Gülçür and Ilkkaracan 2002: 415
146 Hall 1989: 24
147 Sayad 2004
148 Herman 2006: 214
149 Agustín 2006
150 See list in note 60.
3
A WORLD OF SERVICES
In employment market terms, European demand is strong for migrant women in three areas: cleaning, cooking and housekeeping inside private houses; caring for sick, disabled, elderly and young people inside private houses; and providing sex in a wide variety of locales.1 The great majority of these jobs, casually referred to as services, are not regulated or formalised, in part because of the enduring exclusion of traditional female labour from definitions of economic productivity. In cultures where one’s waged occupation is considered crucial to one’s identity, there is scarcely a lower-prestige job than ‘maid’, yet cleaning and caring are said to be ‘dignified’work (in comparison to selling sex). The result of these contradictions is rampant exploitation for employees. How can one understand societies that first encourage the migration and employment of people to do particular jobs and then refuse to recognise or value them? Though all migrants are affected by these contradictions, those employed in the sex industry – widely assumed to make up half of the whole – are most consistently ignored.
Undefined Sectors, Undefinable Jobs
Service jobs in what economists call the formal sector are varied, one government website listing beautician, cashier, embalmer, florist, hairdresser, nail technician, newsagent, pharmacy assistant, salesperson, service station attendant, ticket writer. In all these, one person pays another to help get what the consumer needs. Some relationships are dry; others involve emotions or physical contact. Service jobs not formally recognised and counted by governments are not included in such lists: these are the ones available to migrants.
Behind this incoherency lie distinctions between the perceived usefulness and agency of persons, and the ‘productive’ or ‘unproductive’ nature of their labour. In ancient Athens, men who maintained households were granted the status of citizen, while women and slaves who performed household work were not. In the eighteenth century, the Physiocrats deemed only agriculture to be economically productive; later, Adam Smith called services unproductive because they do not contribute to the accumulation of physical wealth. John Stuart Mill began to argue that some services do contribute to economic growth, but analysts then shifted their attention to another pair of concepts, market versus nonmarket labour, disqualifying unpaid work. By the twentieth century, economists agreed that all paid services are productive, leaving housewives to languish as unproductive,‘unoccupied’ and ‘dependent’,2 a ‘prejudice bred by Western capitalism and its interest in industrial labor markets’.3
Economic philosophising and political ideologies translate into government policies, census-taking and calculations of growth. In the late nineteenth century there were British proposals to include housework in government accounting in order to present a picture of Britain ‘as a community of workers and a strong nation’, while Australia divided its population into ‘breadwinners and dependents ... to provide an image of a country where everyone did not need to work, and thus to appear to be a good place for British investment’.4 But what do the jobs actually have in common, and what makes them come to be considered work?
If [another] person could be paid to do the unpaid activity of a household member, then it is ‘work’; so clearly cooking, child care, laundry, cleaning and gardening are all work, as a household servant could be hired to perform these activities. On the other hand, it would not be sensible to hire someone to watch a movie, play tennis, read a book, or eat a meal for you, as the benefits of the activity would accrue to the servant, the third person, not the hirer.5
Some call housework reproductive labour, because it replicates social life by maintaining families and the houses they live in. But this brings up questions of what is ‘necessary’ to human life.
Nobody has to have stripped pine floorboards, handwash-only silk shirts, ornaments that gather dust. All these things create domestic work, but they also affirm the status of the household, its class, its access to resources of finance and personnel, and the adequacy of its manager, almost invariably a woman.6
Employers here have a disease, it’s a disease of cleanliness ... There are employers that look for something to clean even when the house is already clean. (Filipina in Italy)7
Necessity is a subjective term, and some tasks may have a priceless symbolic value to emplo
yers. Consider the sales pitch of an employment agent who offers domestic servants on the market:
Imagine coming home at the end of a workday, and all the stress is off. The kids are happy, the laundry is washed and folded, you can smell the chicken cooking in the oven. The girls don’t want to stick around with you and your husband at the end of their work day, so you have all the time alone you want ... they leave to their room and you are home with your kids. It gives you peace of mind and it gives you your equilibrium.8
This vision conveniently ignores the unjust issues inherent in the idea of adult employees ‘going to their room’. Employers widely expect maids to be available continuously, even when they are in their bedrooms. With timetables rarely fixed, many maids work twelve-to-eighteen-hour days; to be free of demands, they have to leave the house, but many are given only Sunday off. Domestic servants are routinely expected to carry out a seemingly unlimited range of tasks – walking dogs, helping at neighbours’ parties – that many people consider excessive. This amorphous, never-ending labour is excluded when governments assess productivity; even housewives are omitted from counts of both employed and unemployed.9 In 1997, the Office of National Statistics published estimates about unpaid work in Britain, finding that
If a monetary value were put on such work, at 1995 values it would have been at least equivalent to £341 billion, or more than the whole UK manufacturing sector, and perhaps as much as £739 billion, 120% of gross domestic product ...Yet ... the dominant public and social-scientific understanding of ‘work’ remains paid work. Since the ONS figures confirmed that women do much more unpaid work than men, and that although men do more paid work, they also have more leisure, men’s work is more acknowledged, as well as more highly rewarded, than women’s work.10
The performance of housework ensures that the labour force is cared for and also contributes to the economy through the consumption of vast amounts of manufactured products,11 so the non-recognition of housekeepers is blatantly illogical.
Caring labour cannot ultimately be separated from other kinds of housework, usually referring to personally helping people live their daily lives in their own homes – meals, exercise, health, cleanliness and sleep (sex is never mentioned). The increase in paid caring jobs happens as ‘the personal and emotional content of home life is becoming more and more concentrated in a relatively small number of activities, such as sharing meals or telling bedtime stories, for which substitutes cannot be purchased.’12
Definitions of caring vary, some saying it requires face-to-face interaction, or that the person in need must be incapable of taking care of him- or herself.13 Some distinguish between care of the body and care of the mind,14 or between moral, emotional and material care.15 There are employers who stipulate that people working in their houses must be ‘affectionate, like old people or be good with children’.16 The whole area is fraught with subjective and cultural norms. Consider how, in the present-day west,washing and dressing are assumed to be tasks people do for themselves, when they could be delegated to servants. On the other hand, westerners routinely pay others to cut and fix their hair, when they could do it themselves. Are these activities work, needs or leisure pursuits?17 For many of those employed as carers, employers’ expectations of emotional labour are excessive.
I’m telling you, on top of what they are paying you for, the physical work, there is also psychological work ... Sometimes, when they say to me for example, that I should give her lots of love, I feel like saying, well, for my family I give love free, and I’m not discriminating, but if it’s a job you’ll have to pay me. (Dominican woman in Spain)18
And why should women, particularly, fulfil these roles? A man presenting himself as a candidate for live-in work nowadays seems like an anomaly, although boarding a Filipino couple remains an elite status symbol and men were once commonly employed as domestics. Psychoanalytic feminism, the sociology of emotions and the ethics of care all argue that differing treatments of boy and girl children result in differing capacities for intimacy, but are women innately better at caring?19 Certainly societies widely believe that they are, across cultures: women are thought to ‘know how’ to care. One theory suggests that to develop an ethic of care ‘people must experience caring for and being cared for by others; women do and men don’t, with the result that men are morally deprived’.20 The painful contradiction here is that those considered morally superior are expected to work in a feudal, exploitative employment sector. Productivity is positioned as masculine; reproductivity and nonproductivity as feminine.21
Arlie Hochschild considers one moral consequence of the employment of migrant women as carers:
Are first-world countries importing maternal love as they have imported copper, zinc and gold from third-world countries in the past? Love is not simply a ‘resource’ that can be taken from one person and given to another, but nor is it entirely unlike a resource. Is time spent with the first-world child ‘taken from’ a child further down the care chain? Is the Beverly Hills toddler getting ‘surplus’ love just as the mine owner gets surplus value from the worker digging for gold?22
Many migrant domestic workers describe the pain of leaving children behind, but some start new families abroad, some hire women at home to take care of children left behind, and some find that sending money to support families back home compensates for feelings of guilt, inadequacy or rage at being separated from them.23
Introducing Sex into the Equation
Economic growth is judged on very partial statistics, deriving (in a UK example) from ‘tax returns, VAT records, payroll data and company records’. Cash transactions not reported to tax and customs entities were excluded in the UK sample but were valued at £700 million for stolen goods, £800 million for gambling, £9.9 billion for drug dealing and £1.2 billion for ‘prostitution’.24 Which sex businesses were included in the last category is not known.
Most commentators view carers and domestics in the same light, and a few include people who sell sex,25 but many refuse strenuously on the grounds that selling sex can never be work. These arguments begin with a presumption as to what sex is supposed to be: the expression of love for a particular partner.26
It certainly signifies the nadir of human dignity if a woman surrenders her most intimate and most personal quality, which should be offered only on the basis of a genuine personal impulse and also only with equal personal devotion on the part of the male ... 27
Sexual services, that is to say, sex and sexuality, are constitutive of the body ... sexuality and the body are, further, integrally connected to conceptions of femininity and masculinity, and all these are constitutive of our individuality, our sense of self-identity.28
‘Prostitution is disgusting because what you’re doing is so intimate. It’s different ... it just is.’29
For these critics, sexuality and the body are at the core of individuality, a given, needing no explanation. Karl Marx believed that ‘prostitution’ was only the specific expression of the wage-labourer’s general condition in capitalism, and Friedrich Engels found that ‘prostitution’ and marriage were the same except that the one involves ‘piecework’ and the other permanent slavery.30
Debates usually exclude the arguments of buyers of sex, some of whom are precisely not looking for the kind of intimacy assumed most desirable and valuable.
This is good value. It’s neat and tidy. You walk out the door and you’re free. Physically, emotionally, in every way.31
I’ve got three children of my own and grandchildren, and I spend a lot of time with them and enjoy it. I’m just not interested in any sort of permanent or even semi-permanent arrangement.32
In order to get a woman to have free sex with you, you have to find someone who is attracted to you and wants to have sex with you. For most of us, this takes a lot of work. If you go after a one night stand, then you’re having sex with a stranger, just as you would with an escort . . . If you want to keep fucking her, then you’re going to have to develop som
e kind of relationship with her. If you start a relationship, you run into one of the biggest problems with free sex: you both have to want it at the same time.You can’t just get it when you want it.33
These subtleties rarely surface in the battle over how to define ‘prostitution’, a key field in the development of different kinds of feminism. In just the past twenty years, hundreds of academic and other research articles and books have centred on a single issue: whether selling sex can ever be acceptable, a job freely chosen, or must be conceived as violence and exploitation. Most publications can be read in terms of ‘anti’ and ‘pro’ stances. A number of recent works deliberately eschew a simplistic stance, but the nature of this conflict means that a stance seen as nonmoralistic by one side is demonised as immoral by the other side.34
Research is often used as a weapon against those whose ideology differs, as researchers insist that their local results can be generalised to enormously diverse contexts. Research done on a small scale but in different countries may be titled ‘prostitution in four countries’, or five, or nine. Research done with people who do not consider themselves victims, any argument that an individual may prefer to sell sex, and any absence of moral indignation are all interpreted as ‘promoting’ the sex industry. Methodologies are frequently not described, including ethical questions such as how interviewers got to talk to people who sell sex, and many researchers do not appear to realise how stigmatised individuals may react to being questioned. The prestige of sponsoring institutions is used to assert the definitive ‘truth’ of research. These problems are endemic to social research in this field.35
Traditional analyses of ‘prostitution’ also do not address the involvement of large numbers of migrants without civil rights in the place where they are working, which substantially complicates ideological discussions.
Beyond Ideology
Debates assume that an object of study exists. To perpetuate the ‘prostitution’ debate, participants must ignore a wide variety of activities constituting the sex industry, which occur in different cultural, economic, geographic and social contexts. Services include manual, oral and penetrative stimulation of genitals, anus and other body parts; massage; erotic conversation in person, by telephone or via the Internet; dance on stages, tables, between viewers’ legs, watched on websites or in ‘peep shows’ (and variously called striptease, lapdancing, poledancing, tabledancing, exotic dance); bondage and domination that may include spanking, whipping, crossdressing and other fetishes (with clients either dominant or submissive); sexual healing and therapy; attentive company at dinners and events; nude services like table waiting and telegram delivery; and acting in sexual cinema and videos. The industry also includes the sale of sex toys, clothes and gear, erotic literature, videos and DVDs.