Svati P. Shah,
"Sexuality and 'The Left': Thoughts on Intersections and Visceral Others"
(page 4 of 7)
The Politics of Sex Work and the Left
"Abolition of the family! Even the most radical flare up
at this infamous proposal of the Communists. On what foundation is the
present family, the bourgeois family, based? On capital, on private
gain. In its completely developed form, this family exists only among
the bourgeoisie. But this state of things finds its complement in the
practical absence of the family among proletarians, and in public
prostitution. The bourgeois family will vanish as a matter of course
when its complement vanishes, and both will vanish with the vanishing of
capital. Do you charge us with wanting to stop the exploitation of
children by their parents? To this crime we plead
guilty."[12]
The Communist Manifesto references sexuality in two ways in
this passage, through the thread of the family and the thread of
prostitution, which are present throughout Marx's writings. Theorized as
part of the lumpenproletariat, prostitutes are social beings who by
definition live outside of society, classified neither as workers nor as
bourgeoisie, but always as Other. However, there is an oft-noted and
marked difference between the early Marx, who theorized that
prostitution is a commodification of the prostitute's body itself, and
the later Marx, in which he separates prostitute-ness from prostitution,
and uses the language of services provided by women who sell sex rather
than women "selling their bodies."[13]
In his earlier writings, those that were taken up by the prostitution
abolitionists of his day and by contemporary "Marxist feminists," Marx
shows himself to be in accordance with abolitionism, though for
different reasons than those of the abolitionists, who sought to abolish
prostitution on moral grounds. While many Marxists and first-wave
feminists debated the selling of sex around the turn of the twentieth
century, there seemed to be an uneasy consensus between them that
prostitution could not be understood within the framework of livelihood,
and should ultimately be eradicated. Even Emma Goldman, in articulating
a prescient critique of the discourse of "white slavery" as primarily
productive of a more vast governmental apparatus that penalizes laboring
migrants, emphasizes the early Marxian claim that prostitution is
equivalent to the commodification of women's bodies, and will only end
with the demise of capitalism itself.[14]
Catherine MacKinnon is iconic among contemporary Marxist feminists
who took up this position. Her 1982 essay in Signs, "Feminism, Marxism,
Method and the State: An Agenda for Theory," begins with her famous
assertion that "Sexuality is to feminism what work is to Marxism: that
which is most one's own, yet most taken
away."[15] MacKinnon's framing of
sexuality as desire "directed" in the service of male domination
precluded everything but a circular framing of sexuality and power, in
which women are always subordinated and dispossessed because of their
sexuality, which is unitary and structures femaleness, which is
subordinate.
"For MacKinnon, if sex is to gender what work is to
class—only more so, because the sexiness of sex eroticizes gender
inequality and does not simply coercively or ideologically enforce
it—then every feminist issue, every injustice and injury suffered by
women, devolves upon sexuality . . . sexual harassment, rape, and
prostitution are all modes of sexual subordination; women's lack of
authoritative speech is women's always already sexually violated
condition."[16]
For Brown, whose analysis here evokes Gayle Rubin's earlier theory of
the "fallacy of misplaced scale,"[17]
MacKinnon's formulation also
indicates a perpetual cycle of injury and redress. The closed circuit of
women's subordination, which rotates on the axis of hetero sex, provided
the analytic raft that anti-pornography activists used throughout their
attempts to legally ban pornography. With the many positions, twists,
and turns of the legendary feminist "porn wars" notwithstanding, for the
purposes of this argument it bears remembering that anti-pornography
activists used the rationale that because pornography is violence
against women, because it causes men to rape women, and because
it creates a culture of violence against all women, it should be
legally banned, regardless of any evidence or arguments that may disrupt
or complicate this causal chain. This appeal to the state to protect
women through the censorship of materials it deemed obscene, in
consultation with anti-pornography feminists presumably, was a classic
instantiation of the reification of injured identity in an effort of
redress. It is well known that this campaign to ban pornography failed,
and that counter-feminist positions argued against government censorship
of printed material defined (by whom?) as "obscene."
Although the battle to ban porn was lost, the infrastructure,
intellectual capital, organizations, and alliances with right-wing
social conservatives forged by anti-pornography activists stayed in
place, and moved from working against pornography to becoming a modern
anti-prostitution movement that proceeded to conflate prostitution and
human trafficking.[18]
Both the historical anti-pornography movement and
contemporary abolitionist anti-trafficking initiatives seek to expand
the power of states, and specifically of law enforcement. The effects of
this on sex workers throughout the world have been significant, with
brothel raids and arrests of individual sex workers standing as the
intervention of choice, whether or not they were trafficked into
prostitution.[19]
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