Wednesday, September 10th, 2008...9:15 pm
Agustin on Mobility and Women
Laura Maria Agustin has a new blog, and she has published some of her older pieces on sex work, mobility, and the problematic “war on trafficking.” They’re fantastic.
Single men’s decisions to travel are generally understood to evolve over time, the product of their ‘normal’ masculine ambition to get ahead through work: they are called migrants. Then there is the case of women who attempt to do the same…
It is striking that in the year 2001 women should so overwhelmingly be seen as pushed, obligated, coerced or forced when they leave home for the same reason as men: to get ahead through work. But so entrenched is the idea of women as forming an essential part of home if not actually being it themselves that they are routinely denied the agency to undertake a migration. So begins a pathetic image of innocent women torn from their homes, coerced into migrating, if not actually shanghaied or sold into slavery. This is the imagery that nowadays follows those who migrate to places where the only paid occupations available to them are in domestic service or sex work.[3] The ‘trafficking’ discourse relies on the assumption that it is better for women to stay at home rather than leave it and get into trouble; ‘trouble’ is seen as something that will irreparably damage women (who are grouped with children), while men are routinely expected to encounter and overcome it. But if one of our goals is to find a vision of globalisation in which poorer people are not constructed solely as victims, we need to recognise that strategies which seem less gratifying to some people may be successfully utilised by others.
2 Comments
September 16th, 2008 at 12:39 pm
Spot on. There doesn’t seem to be any legitimate reason to think that women can’t use sex as a means for economic improvement just because it is, for them, more valuable a commodity than it is for men. Why not?
Using the resources available to you in order to improve your economic circumstance (assuming you desire to improve - you might be happy where you are) is human nature. It may generally manifest itself differently amongst men and women, as one would expect, but condemning the choice for women who use sex reeks of primitive biological instincts to preserve the tribe and its modern manifestation: sexual puritanism.
September 17th, 2008 at 4:31 am
The “gold digger” who uses her sexuality to get ahead has been a staple of popular literature for a long time. But the fact that a small minority of women does have control over their sexual lives and in fact use their sexuality to get ahead and improve their lives does not mean that a large number of women are not in fact “pushed, obligated, coerced or forced” into menial or sexual work. The woman trained as a nurse in Ukraine, who cannot find a job in her chosen profession and has to resort to prostitution is in fact a victim, not an empowered agent in control of her own life.
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