Sexuality and “The Left”: Thoughts on Intersections and Visceral Others

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.” ¹

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.” ²

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. ³

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.” ⁴ 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.” ⁵

For Brown, whose analysis here evokes Gayle Rubin’s earlier theory of the “fallacy of misplaced scale,” ⁶ 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. ⁷ 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. ⁸

1. The Communist Manifesto. www.anu.edu.au/polsci/marx/classics/manifesto.html.[↑]
2. Marjolein Van Der Veen. “Rethinking Commodification and Prostitution: An Effort at Peacemaking in the Battles over Prostitution.” Rethinking Marxism 13.2 (Summer 2001): 30-51.[↑]
3. Emma Goldman. “The Traffic in Women.” 1910. 10 May 2009. trotsky.org.[↑]
4. Catherine MacKinnon. “Feminism, Marxism, Method and the State: An Agenda for Theory.” Signs 7.3 (1982): 515-544: p. 515.[↑]
5. Wendy Brown. “The Mirror of Pornography.” States of Injury: Power and Freedom in Late Modernity. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1995. 77-95: p. 81.[↑]
6. Gayle Rubin. “Thinking Sex: Notes for a Radical Theory of the Politics of Sexuality.” In Carole Vance, ed., Pleasure and Danger, New York: Routledge, 1984. In this essay, Rubin defines the “fallacy of misplaced scale” as one of the defining ideological features of the ways in which sexuality is conceived in American discourse, and defines it as the overestimation of the importance, burden, and significance of sexuality and sex acts in any given context. Sexuality needing only be contextualized by itself in order to take on monumental fear, threat, love, etc., is the “fallacy of misplaced scale.”[↑]
7. Ronald Weitzer. “The Social Construction of Sex Trafficking: Ideology and Institutionalization of a Moral Crusade.” Politics and Society 35.3 (2007): 447-475.[↑]
8. Open Society Institute. “Rights, Not Rescue: A Report on Female, Trans, and Male Sex Workers’ Human Rights in Botswana, Namibia, and South Africa.” 6 Aug 2009. www.soros.org (PDF). While “brothel raids” are less common in the U.S., because brothels are less common, there is a demonstrated relationship between anti-prostitution rhetoric in U.S. government and the policies on prostitution that it supports abroad, raids and rescue being one of these.[↑]