Feminists Walking in Darkness
Harvard’s schizophrenic position on gender segregation of its gym is only one manifestation of the utter confusion that pervades academia and its crazy aunt “women’s studies.” Feminists in academia are split on the issues of pornography and prostitution. Those opposing pornography find themselves uncomfortably allied with anti-feminists and Christian conservatives. Those advocating legalization of prostitution find themselves uncomfortably allied with the English language. Prostitution has been gussied up as “intimate labor,” and the definition is expanding to sweep in traditionally noble work in the home: maids, nannies, nurses, and wives. Prostitution can be grouped with these others because they all result from the tyranny of patriarchy. (You have to ignore the fact that prostitutes generally do not work in the home.)
Last fall, the University of California at Santa Barbara held a conference entitled “Intimate Labors: An Interdisciplinary Conference on Domestic, Care & Sex Work.” No less that 50 papers were presented by professors from across the U.S. and Canada. The paper titles and abstracts give us a peek at this exciting field of scholarly research.
John Kaiser lays out a nice introduction:
“Intimate labor” is itself a compelling choice of words, as it draws attention to distinctions around what may be analyzed as “intimate” or not and what may be considered to be “labor.” One useful way of exploring intimate labor as a category of analysis is to think about the importance of contexts in the way intimate labor articulates with power, gender, race, sexuality, class, age, and other lines of experience.
It’s apparently important not to focus on gender alone, but to bring in other factors like race and class. Immigrant status is a favorite and migrants are everywhere.
The UCSB conference is so rich in material, it seems to be ripe for a new kind of Bulwer-Lytton contest. Reading the abstracts is like reading the opening line of a bad novel; the prose is as contorted and the concepts are as disjointed and nonsensical. I can handle only three examples today.
Lachelle R. Hannickel wins the award for fantasy. She begins her abstract by creating her own ambiguous word and noting its ambiguity:
The (im)migrant worker has long occupied an ambiguous position in France.
(Yes, in France and elsewhere.) But this is especially true with domestics.
The role of the (im)migrant domestic has been particularly difficult to define, as she works and, in many case, resides, in the private space of the home.
I can understand the concept of an immigrant domestic, but what is a migrant domestic? Does she migrate from one home to another, or does she merely migrate from the kitchen to the laundry room?
Laura Agustin can’t figure out where customer service ends and sex begins, and has trouble distinguishing prostitutes, singers, and tour guides:
What’s the difference between loving and caring? Or caring and cleaning? What about tending, assisting, listening, advising, explaining, putting at ease? Where does sex begin - with the flirting, the first kiss or the bed? What happens when one of these activities metamorphoses into another - when, for example, the carer offers caresses or the prostitute wraps a warm towel around a spent penis? . . . [T]ea-sellers, karaoke performers, tourist guides, hostesses, . . . migrants offering quasi-domestic services in their homes and prostitutes who sell from the street all describe situations in which a positive feeling for a customer can appear at any moment and result in a less mechanized, more affectionate and intimate encounter.
Migrants offering services in their homes? Well, never mind. Laura wins in the romance category. We have prostitutes with hearts of gold, a first kiss, and an affectionate encounter with a tea-seller. Positive feelings are just around the street corner.
Neel Ahuja wins the thriller award, slaying academia’s favorite bogeyman.
In my presentation, I will review the history of the 1942-1943 venereal disease dragnets that the U.S. and Panamanian governments collaboratively carried out in the Republic of Panama. Officials attempted to strictly segregate white U.S. soldiers stationed in the Panama Canal Zone from multiracial (Asian, black, and Latino) Panamanian and Caribbean migrant women. As an initiative aimed at criminalizing sex work near major U.S. military bases, the dragnets ultimately criminalized the public life of women in Panamanian cities as new medical diagnostic technologies helped enforce hospitalization of large numbers of women associated with venereal disease.
Sex work here becomes a locus of political struggle as it is in part a result of U.S. presence and as it threatens the racial-sexual logics of wartime U.S. imperialism (in both its military and client state manifestations). The fact that the dragnets spurred women’s political resistance to U.S. empire demonstrates the ways in which the development of new carceral approaches to medicine and health across colonized space provided important terrains of subaltern political mobilization.
This thriller abstract has it all. The evil U.S., suppression of the intimate worker trade, racial prejudice, prejudice against migrant prostitutes, and denial of the freedom to be “associated with venereal disease” - all carried out as part of wartime U.S. imperialism. But it has a happy ending apparently as multiracial call girls migrate peacefully across colonized space to threaten racial-sexual logics and to resist having to go to the hospital for treatment.
