Choices Women Make: Agency in Domestic Violence, Assisted Reproduction, and Sex Work

4 Working It: Prostitution and the Social Construction of Sexual Desire

Prostitution engages questions of freedom and autonomy as it is undertaken by some women with severely limited options and by other women with many options, and the confluence of their analyses of what they are doing and why helps to lay bare the constitutive effects of external options on the social construction of sexual desire. That sex work is engaged in by women from across the economic spectrum—although much more frequently by poor women—is significant in the way it illuminates how sexuality undergirds the economic relationships between men and women as well as between different classes of women, and the role of embodied labor (and embodied knowledge) in opening up avenues of agency and freedom. In this chapter, I pick up on the themes of victimization and agency, as well as the social construction of desire attending to the identity “woman” in the context of sex work. I examine three different feminist arguments about agency in sex work in order to think about what needs to change for a more open legal and economic discourse within which women’s sexual agency can develop. I argue here, with many emendations, that prostitution could be part of a more open sexual discipline producing both male and female desire.1 There are many forms of sex work, and these different sites and types of work exist on a hierarchy of respectability and legality in the 135 c h a p t e r 4 34# Working It Prostitution and the Social Construction of Sexual Desire 136 Working It dominant cultural and legal frameworks of the United States, as well as among sex workers themselves. Exotic dancers make it clear that they are not prostitutes, and phone sex operators make it clear that they are neither dancers nor prostitutes (see, e.g., Rich and Guidroz 2000; Morgan 1998; Frank 2002, 57–58). The primary hierarchy here is between looking (or hearing) and touching. And within the various types of sex work, there are more and less stigmatized versions of that type of work, depending on where it is done and who is doing it. In the case of prostitution, for example, call girls exist at one end of the prostitution hierarchy, streetwalkers near the other end, although even within streetwalking there is a difference between those who work primarily for drugs and those who work primarily for money. Race is the other major hierarchy within sex work, with white women and lighter-skinned black women generally able to earn more money than darker black women. “White” strip clubs will limit the number of black and Latina dancers they have on the floor at any one time, just enough to “exoticize ” the stage, not enough to turn a “gentleman’s club” into a “black” strip club. As I discuss in more detail below, these hierarchies of sex workers and sex work tend to correlate with the level of physical danger one faces; the higher up the rung, the less the physical danger (see, e.g., Lever, Kanouse, and Berry 2005; Lewis et al. 2005; Brooks 2007; Chapkis 1997, 98–106). Although I initially tried, I found that I could not wrest into coherence an adequate exposition on the questions of agency across the various hierarchies between and within each kind of sex work in one relatively short chapter. A cross-sex-work venue comparison would require a separate volume. So, in this chapter, I limit my discussion primarily to prostitution —with a short comparison with pornography to highlight some of the salient issues of the embodied ethos of prostitution that I am trying to develop here—and solely to sex work in the United States. Prostitution is the form of sex work that is illegal in all forms in the United States, with the exception of a few counties in Nevada, and the most stigmatized among the culture at large and within the sex work domain. Working It 137 Yet it offers greater potential for opening up the subjectifying discourses of sexuality than any other form of sex work. Perhaps this is why it is illegal. Three Models of Prostitution Sex as Violence (Abolitionist Feminism) Abolitionist, or radical, feminists argue that all sex work is inherently a form of violence against women. In prostitution (and pornography), women are selling themselves; this is so because the act of sex is a fundamental form of...