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Re: MACHO ALERT: Women and World-System (Limits of Libertarianism and Moral Panic Rhetoric) by Mine Aysen Doyran 20 January 2001 19:33 UTC |
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http://ews.ewha.ac.kr/ews/m7acws/9722.htm
AJWS Vol. 3 No. 2. pp. 8-29.
Contemporary Western Feminist Perspectives on Prostitution
Alison M. Jaggar Philosophy and Women's
Studies University of Colorado
at Boulder Boulder, Colorado
Abstract
This paper contrasts two prominent positions in contemporary Western
feminist discourse about prostitution. The first is radical feminism,
which emerged in the early 1970s; the second is libertarian feminism,
which emerged in the late 1980s. The paper analyses the underlying
assumptions and public policy recommendation of each position; it
argues
that each illuminates important aspects of the situations of some
prostitutes but ignores or denies others. An approach to prostitution
capable of providing an adequate guide to public policy must be less
dogmatic or "essentialist" than either radical or libertarian
feminism;
it should investigate how the sex trade operates in specific locations
and
the varying meanings it has in different cultural contexts. Such
investigations must be feminist not only in their commitment to ending
the subordination of women but also in their respect
for choices made by women who already must often endure not only
exploitation but also stigmatization, discrimination and exclusion.
In this paper, I sketch two prominent positions in contemporary
Western
feminist discourse about prostitution, discuss the strengths and
inadequacies of each, and conclude by indicating an approach?as
opposed
to a substantive analysis?that I find
more promising.
***The 1990s: Prostitute's Rights and Libertarian Feminism
What I call here `libertarian feminism' has roots in several Western
cultural tendencies that converge on the issue of prostitution. These
tendencies include the increasing strength of a liberal discourse of
individual rights, the increasing commodifi-cation of sexuality via
pornography, sex shops, and so on,2 the postmodern reclamation of
submerged and often stigmatized discourses and, above all, the entry
of prostitutes themselves into feminist debate. These new participants
not only demand
rights as sex-workers but seek to defend prostitution in terms that
are
explicitly feminist. Some merely make the liberal assertion that the
state has no legitimate interest in banning or hampering prostitution
because it is harmless but some go further, asserting that
prostitution
has positive social value and even portraying prostitutes as sexual
pioneers and prostitution as a form of political resistance. Those who
hold this view have been described as postmodern feminists. I shall
start by sketching the weaker defenses of prostitution and then move
to
the stronger, so-called postmodern, justifications.
Many prostitutes' rights advocates contend that prostitution is not as
bad as it is painted and certainly no worse than many other socially
accepted practices. For instance, they argue that prostitution is
better
than most jobs available to women because it provides good pay for
short
hours and considerable control over the work environment. The
prostitute
is said to decide what services she will and will not supply and how
long she will spend with her client, and prostitutes sometimes assert
that they get paid for what other women have to give free. In addition
to being a better bargain than many other types of paid employment
open
to women, some have argued that prostitution is better than being
married because a prostitute is much more independent than a wife.
In defending prostitution as a legitimate profession, libertarian
feminists simultaneously assert the agency of prostitutes. Responding
to
charges that prostitution is a public nuisance and a social
embarrassment, they insist that women's right to
freedom of speech entitles them to solicit and that women, as well as
men, have the right to stand around on street corners; other
businesses
advertise and women's solicitation of men is a lot less threatening
than
much male harassment of women. Libertarian feminists acknowledge the
limited range of employment opportunities available to women but
insist
that, within this range, most prostitutes choose their occupation,
rather than being forced into it. Thus some Western prostitutes and
their feminist advocates are developing a discourse of prostitute
empowerment rather than victimization and entrepreneurship rather
than exploitation.
Some prostitutes emphasize that prostitution provides a needed social
service, a kind of sex therapy in a non-judgmental context, asserting
that prostitutes really listen to men and are sensitive to the needs
of
their clients. One prostitute asserted that women should have similar
services available to them, implying that prostitution is not, after
all, a distinctively gendered institution. Political theorist Shannon
Bell argues that, through these sorts of claims, prostitutes are
transvaluing accepted values, assigning new meanings to prostitution.
"The prostitute is constructed as healer rather than disease producer,
as
educator rather than degenerate, as sex expert rather than deviant, as
business woman rather than commercial object"(Bell, 1994: 100).
The fact that prostitutes, hitherto stigmatized and/or excluded from
both mainstream and feminist discourses, are now staking their claim
to
be subjects rather than simply objects of discourse is seen by Bell as
a
manifestation of post-modernity(Bell, 1994: 100). She analyses
prostitutes' public demand for the legal right to be recognized as
citizens just like all others not as a demand for equality in spite of
difference but a demand for equality based on the distinct difference
of
being a prostitute.
Thus, Bell writes:
Prostitutes' rights discourse, by appropriating the rights discourse
of
hegemonic and feminist liberalism and articulating these rights
demands
in the context of collective identity politics, transgresses the
liberal
framework while adhering to it. Identity
politics is based on the active affirmation of the experiences,
dignity,
and rights of historically marginalized or excluded people, going
beyond
the conventional liberal construction of all human beings as
essentially
the same and therefore entitled to the
same(abstract) rights(Bell, 1994: 100).
Just beneath the surface of prostitutes' apparently liberal demand for
legal rights and equality, Bell asserts, there exists "a doubly
transgressive ethical gesture: an affirmation of a negative identity
and
a revaluation of values through the recognition of
commercial sex as being just as valid and worthy as noncommercial
sex"(Bell, 1994: 101).
This interpretation of prostitutes' rights discourse focuses on the
counter-hegemonic aspects of prostitution. It construes prostitution
as
making a positive `pro-sex' political statement, undermining narrow,
anti-sexual, so-called `politically correct' values. For instance,
prostitution is said to assert tacitly that extramarital sex,
anonymous
sex, recreational sex and sexual novelty and variety are morally
unobjectionable; it is also said to challenge the stereotype that
women
should have only one partner. For this reason, one prostitute
representative, Margo St. James of the prostitutes' rights
organization,
COYOTE(Call Off Your Tired Old Ethics), declares, "Prostitutes are the
only emancipated women."
Bell identifies the prostitute as a new political subject, engaging in
the radical democratic struggle for the extension of equality to more
and more areas of life. One aspect of this struggle involves a new
understanding of prostitution: whereas liberals and Marxists
conceptualize prostitution as work and radical feminists conceptualize
it as sexual abuse, prostitutes' rights advocates portray prostitution
as a self-determined activity midway between sex and work, sometimes
as
a kind of sexual performance art. Although presenting prostitution as
work is the discursive strategy most likely to be effective in
influencing government policies and social attitudes, the
International
Committee for Prostitutes' Rights(ICPR) identified the sale of sex as
an
act of "sexual self-determination, linked with the right to refuse and
to initiate sex, the right to use birth control(including abortion)
the
right to have lesbian sex, and the right to have sex across lines of
color and class"(Bell, 1994: 110).
Bell regards prostitutes' public sexual performances as having special
significance and she characterizes these performers as "sacred
carnival
theorists of the female body." Her analysis links up with claims made
by
others, such as stripper Amber Cook,
that sexual entertainers are artists because they get to define what
is
erotic, to express their own sexuality, and often find the work
creative
and empowering. One chapter of Bell's book describes the work of six
North American prostitute performance artists, whom she sees as
reunifying the sacred and the obscene in the same female body(Bell,
1994: 137). In Bell's
interpretation, these performers, "reconstitute themselves in the
performance medium as living embodiments of resistance, re-mapping,
redefining, and reclaiming the deviant body, the body of the sexual
outsider and social outcast"(Bell, 1994: 139).
Prostitute performance presents a particular female body, the body
that
dominant discourse and feminist discourse have marked as the obscene,
the other, from the position of this body-speaking. Yet the artist is
not only this body, or even primarily this body; she is many things at
once: an artist/actress, erotic/sexual being, intellectual/critic,
political/social
commentator(Bell, 1994: 142).
Thus, "Partly, prostitute performance art is about the refusal to fit
into predetermined categorizations; prostitute artists use their
bodies
as sites of resistance to reunify what patriarchy has pulled
apart"(Bell, 1994: 142).
Convergence and Contrasts in Feminist
Public Policy Recommendations
Despite fundamental disagreements in their conceptualizations of sex
work, the policy recommendations of radical and libertarian feminists
are not entirely opposed to each other. For instance, radical and
libertarian feminists do not necessarily disagree about directions for
long term social change: as feminists, both can agree that the range
of
livelihood options available to women should be broadened by
eliminating
the distinctively gendered constraints on women's employment
opportunities, including inferior education and disproportionate
domestic responsibilities. Nor do radical and libertarian feminists
disagree on every aspect of current policy: all feminists agree that
forced prostitution is indefensible and there is no controversy about
the need to enforce immediately the numerous international treaties
against trafficking, including trafficking in children. Feminists can
also agree that states should establish shelters for women fleeing
prostitution, as for battered women. All feminists must insist that
these shelters not be punitive but rather offer rehabilitation and
retraining programs, similar to those sometimes provided for other
groups such as high school drop outs, runaways and drug abusers--some
of
whom are also prostitutes. It should also be uncontroversial that
women
should never be forced to enter or remain in the shelters against
their
will.
With regard to the situation in which prostitutes defend their right
to
pursue their trade, radical and libertarian feminists also come
together
in opposing conservative recommendations to prohibit and thus
criminalize prostitution, even though they have
different reasons for their views. The majority of radical feminists
who
oppose prohibition do so because they regard the prostitute as a
victim
and do not want to penalize her further; they believe that prohibiting
and thus criminalizing prostitution is likely to produce disastrous
consequences for the many women who, for whatever reasons, would
continue to engage in sex work. In addition to making it more
difficult
for women in prostitution to earn a living, prohibition increases
their
vulnerability to arrest and prosecution, thus making them more
susceptible to blackmail and possibly more dependent on their pimps.
However, a few radical feminists find even de-criminalization
problematic because it presumes a distinction between forced and
chosen
prostitution whose validity they deny(Barry, 1995, cited by Ferguson,
1997).?
Libertarian feminists oppose prohibition for the entirely different
reason that, in their view, it is an infringement of the prostitute's
right to practise her trade; hence, they vigorously resist any
proposals
to ban prostitution for the protection of the prostitutes,
proposals which they regard as paternalistic and disingenuous. They
note
that no one suggests closing the subways or cabs at night because
passengers or cabdrivers may be attacked. They acknowledge that
prostitutes sometimes are attacked but so,
they point out, are other women; indeed, most battering occurs in
long-term relationships. They assert that the violence prostitutes
endure is mostly a result of the low-status and illegality of the
occupation.
On the libertarian feminist analysis, the main problem with
prostitution
is not the nature of the work but rather the laws that interfere with
prostitutes' practice of their trade and discriminate against them.
Laws
against advertising, for instance, force
prostitutes on to the street where laws against solicitation violate
their freedom of expression without threatening men's freedom to
harass
women. Laws against brothels make it possible for landlords to
blackmail
prostitutes and laws against pimping isolate prostitutes socially and
deprive them of domestic companionship. Labeling women as prostitutes
deprives them of many civil rights; such women may lose custody of
their
children, be deported if they are immigrants, lose the chance of any
other employment so that they are trapped in prostitution, and be
refused entry to other countries either as tourists or immigrants. If
the violence endured by prostitutes results primarily from the low
status of their occupation and the legal restrictions on it, which
libertarian feminists view as a form of sex discrimination, the policy
solution is clear: prostitution should
be made respectable by being professionalized. It should be recognized
as a decent and honorable occupation, like any other.
It is at this point that the divergence in their respective public
policy recommendations finally reflects the deep disagreements between
the perspectives of radical and libertarian feminism. Libertarian
feminists advocate the legalization and state regulation
of prostitution, moves which would maintain a minimum standard of
working conditions, make contracts for service and payment enforceable
and generally legitimate prostitution, raising its status and making
it
more like any other job. Radical feminists object that legalizing
prostitution and taxing it on the same basis as any other work would
express the state's acceptance of prostitution and its willingness to
benefit from sex work, thus normalizing the sexual exploitation of
women. They also note that the legalization of prostitution would
create
a permanent public record identifying women who had ever engaged in
prostitution. Thus, despite their shared opposition to legal
prohibition, radical and libertarian feminists sharply disagree on
what
policies should be recommended in situations where the coercion of
prostitutes, if it exists, is not unmistakable or
incontestable. Basically, libertarian feminists support the
professionalization of prostitution whereas radical feminists advocate
at most a grudging and temporary tolerance.
The Limits of Radical and Libertarian Feminism
Despite their concurrence in advocating the decriminalization of
prostitution, radical and libertarian feminists offer portrayals of
sex
work and sex workers that are so opposed as to be the inverse of each
other. According to one portrayal, the prostitute is a degraded sexual
object whereas according to the other, she is a powerful sexual
subject;
on one view, the prostitute is a disempowered sexual victim, on the
other, a practitioner of a sacred craft; one analysis presents
prostitution as the provision of `nourishing, life-giving' sexual
services, the other as a trade that is debasing, dangerous and
ultimately deadly. Both accounts are, in my view, simplistic,
reductionist and quite inadequate for feminism.
Libertarian feminists sound extremely parochial when their analysis is
applied to a global context. They largely ignore the enormous and
rapidly growing international and worldwide traffic in women--and
girls--for prostitution, including sex tourism, and forced marriage.
The
1995 Human Rights Watch Global Report on Women's Human Rights focuses
on
the
well-documented traffic in women from Burma to Thailand, Nepal to
India,
and Bangladesh to Pakistan, although these are certainly not the only
countries involved in such traffic. The report finds that this traffic
relies on slavery-like practices, illegal confinement, forced labor,
debt-bondage, and torture. Such traffic is forbidden, of course, by
national laws, as well as by many international conventions since the
Convention on the Suppression of Traffic in Persons and the
Exploitation
of the Prostitution of Others first denounced trafficking in persons
in
1949. Despite these bans and treaties, Human Rights Watch has
found that many state parties fail to protect women and girls from
coerced trafficking and forced prostitution or fail to prosecute
vigorously those who commit such abuse(Human Rights Watch, 1995: 199).
Many police officers and other local government officials facilitate
and
profit from the trade in women and girls: for a price, they ignore
abuses that occur in their jurisdictions; protect the traffickers,
brothel owners, pimps, clients and buyers from arrest; and serve as
enforcers, drivers and recruiters. If a woman is taken across national
borders, immigration officials frequently aid and abet her
passage(Human
Rights Watch, 1995: 196).
Prostitutes in these coercive situations have little access to medical
care and are extremely vulnerable to injury and disease. They are
especially likely to suffer from sexually transmitted diseases(STDs),
including HIV infection, because they are not allowed to negotiate the
terms of sex. The AIDS pandemic has actually encouraged forced
prostitution in countries such as Thailand and India, where clients
fear
of infection has led traffickers to recruit younger women and girls,
sometimes as young as ten, from remote areas perceived to be
unaffected
by AIDS. Human Rights Watch found that of the nineteen Burmese
women and girls they interviewed who had been tested for HIV, fourteen
were found to be positive(Human Rights Watch, 1995: 225). If
prostitutes
are not infected directly by clients, they may be infected through the
needles used to give them contraceptive injections.
The libertarian feminist analysis is inadequate even if its range of
applicability is restricted to sex work in the West. Just as it
ignores
the situations of many prostitutes in Eastern Europe, Africa, Asia,
and
Latin America, so it also ignores the situations of many prostitutes,
often illegal immigrants, who are held in slave-like conditions in
many
large cities across North America. It similarly dismisses the voices
of
many Western prostitutes, such as the voices of women in WHISPER(Women
Harmed in Systems of Prostitution Engaged in Revolt), a North American
grass-roots movement that is both local and national but not
international. Like prostitutes' rights organizations, WHISPER is a
first-person movement based on women's experience in prostitution but
it
relies on a radical feminist analysis which portrays prostitution
entirely as sexual exploitation and aims at
getting women out of "the life"(Bell, 1995: 123-4). WHISPER
"recognizes
all commodification of women's bodies for sexual exchange as
violations
of human dignity and therefore of human rights"(Bell, 1995: 125). It
insists that prostitution is "a system of violence against women," so
that all prostitutes are battered women.
Consideration of such situations reveals the limits of libertarian
feminist analysis. It is true that the North American based
International Committee on Prostitutes Rights(ICPR) explicitly
recognizes that Western prostitution is shaped by the interconnections
among racism, capitalism, and patriarchy so that in the United States,
for instance, "of the 10 to 20 percent of prostitutes who are street
workers, 40 percent are women of color; 55 percent of women arrested
are
women of color; and 85 percent of prostitutes in jail are women of
color"(Bell, 1995: 111). The ICPR also recognizes that "Prostitution
exists, at
least in part, because of the subordination of women in most
societies."
But, as Bell notes, the libertarian feminist discourse of prostitutes'
rights is inherently incapable of addressing the social structures
shaping Western prostitution, which produce its characteristic gender,
class and race inequalities(Bell, 1995: 111). Within the libertarian
framework, the market is the only means for prostitutes to achieve
economic and sexual self-determination.
Radical feminism, of course, emphasizes just those harms and
constraints
which are neglected by liberal feminists and it is precisely the
exclusivity of its focus on harms and constraints which provokes much
criticism. Central to the radical feminist
analysis is the denial of any distinction between forced and voluntary
prostitution, a denial which grounds radical feminism's refusal to
recognize prostitution as a profession(Barry, 1986-87: 1). Libertarian
feminists insist that it is condescending and disrespectful to dismiss
prostitutes' declarations that they chose their occupation by
asserting
that in fact they were psychologically coerced or `brainwashed.' Since
everyone's choices are surely influenced by unconscious processes, why
should prostitutes' decisions be singled out for skeptical challenge?
Libertarian feminists charge that it is similarly condescending and
disrespectful to claim that prostitutes are controlled by male pimps,
when in fact the women may regard the
men as their lovers.
Although radical feminists see themselves as working to `rescue' or
rehabilitate prostitutes, it is paradoxical that the radical feminist
invalidation and dismissal of many prostitute voices replicate the
marginalization and exclusion of prostitutes, practiced
by the dominant society. In consequence, many prostitutes regard the
radical feminist analysis of prostitution as dogmatic, insulting and
paternalistic. Feminist solidarity, in their view, is better expressed
by supporting sex workers' demands than by insisting on `rescuing'
women
who do not regard themselves as in need of rescue.
Beyond Dogmatism
Although the radical and libertarian feminist perspectives on
prostitution are opposed to each other in substance, they share a
common
methodological fault, a fault that Western feminists often call
`essentialism.' Essentialism consists in refusing to recognize counter
examples to universal claims and this dogmatism can be observed in
both
radical and libertarian feminist arguments. In addition to their
shared
essentialism, I suggest that both radical and libertarian feminist
perspectives romanticize prostitutes as outcasts, victims or rebels;
in
so doing, they follow a long Western tradition of romanticizing as
outsiders
marginalized people such as drug users, runaways and the homeless,
people who in fact are often not only poor but also emotionally
disturbed and desperate.
Kamala Kempadoo has investigated prostitution in the Caribbean and
neither of the two feminist models I have discussed here is adequate
to
make sense of her findings. She observes that many women in the
Caribbean frequently choose sexual labor as one among several income
generating strategies to supplement other sources of livelihood, such
as
domestic service, factory work, or teaching(Kempadoo, 1996-7: 50).
Thus,
many women who engage in sexual labor in the Caribbean are not
desperately poor or entrapped as radical feminism portrays them; but,
as
they juggle their roles as mothers, wives, teachers
and so on, they are also far from assuming the heroic identity of the
sexual rebel.
Many prostitutes conform neither to the radical nor the libertarian
analysis: they are neither entirely free nor completely enslaved. Like
most people, they choose between a limited range of options and like
most of us, they would benefit from having their range of options
enlarged. Because prostitutes' situations are not all similar,
addressing the controversy over
appropriate policy requires attention to particular cases. Rather than
beginning with a set of a priori assumptions about prostitution, the
commonalities and differences between various practices in various
locations need to be investigated empirically, in order to determine
the
likely consequences of the different policy options. However, these
investigations must
pursue feminist questions and be guided by feminist methods.
Western feminist work since about 1980 has been very much preoccupied
with the issue of difference among women, especially, although not
exclusively, racial/ethnic difference. One interesting feature of
Kempadoo's work is the light it sheds on the importance of the
racial/ethnic identity of prostitutes to their clients, a factor
neglected hitherto in many analyses of prostitution. Kempadoo finds
that
a specific `racial' category of woman is eroticized in the Caribbean:
the `sensual mulatta' of mixed African-European descent was the object
of the sexual fantasies of European colonizers and today she is
preferred by
the predominantly black Caribbean clientele. Kempadoo observes that
large proportions of women in the global sex trade are culturally,
nationally or ethnically different from their clients. Sex tourism, of
course, relies on the attraction of local women to foreign men and we
have seen already that many of the prostitutes in Thailand, India and
Pakistan come from elsewhere in Asia. The BBC reports that increasing
numbers of the prostitutes in Beijing come from Eastern Europe, Russia
or Vietnam. In the late1980s,approximately 60% of the prostitutes in
the
Netherlands were from Third World countries; in the 1990s, an
increasing percentage are from Eastern Europe. Fifty percent of the
prostitutes in Paris are immigrants.
Kempadoo argues that contemporary prostitution cannot be understood
without an analysis of how the global migration of sex workers
capitalizes on the exoticization of foreign women and the symbolic
meanings that sex with women from different cultures has for their
clients, especially meanings involving racial and national power and
dominance. For instance, it has been suggested that Korean men's
prostitution of Thai women expresses a symbolic conquest of the Thai
nation. Thus feminist investigations into prostitution must not only
explore the range of options available to women but also be sensitive
to
the
specific historical context of the sex trade in particular locations
as
well as to the range of meanings that sex work has both for
prostitutes
and their clients.
One necessary condition of this investigative work being acceptable to
feminists is that the investigators must listen sympathetically but
critically to the voices of the prostitutes themselves. Such listening
does not mean that investigators should take everything they say at
face
value, given that prostitutes, like other people, generally desire to
present themselves in the best possible light. The investigators must
be
aware that some prostitutes may wish to rationalize their work as
voluntary and dignified, concealing its abusive and degrading aspects;
they should realize that other prostitutes may seek to evade
responsibility for their decisions by presenting themselves as
helpless
victims. Those investigating prostitution must neither dismiss nor
romanticize the words of prostitutes.
Although empirical research is necessary to interrogate the sweeping
assumptions often made by those who discuss prostitution, yet it is
not
sufficient to settle the controversies over the formulation of public
policies. Adequate evaluation of the varying policy options cannot be
determined in ignorance of the social facts of prostitution but
neither
can it rely exclusively on empirical research, since such research
raises rather than resolves a number of difficult conceptual and
ethical
as well as methodological questions. One cluster of conceptual
questions, often seen as the province of philosophy, concerns
individual
autonomy or freedom: given that choices are always made within a
specific social context, at what point do inevitable social
constraints
and unavoidably limited social options become so constraining and
limiting as to be coercive? Another large cluster of ethical questions
concerns sexuality: is sex work intrinsically or morally different
from
other kinds of work? Is sexual objectification or the eroticization of
dominance and subordination harmless in certain contexts? Is sex
morally
respectable only if linked with intimacy and love, or may it also be
accepted as a means of recreation and pleasure or as a means of
honorable livelihood? How is gender produced and reproduced in various
sexual activities? What are the links between sexuality and women's
subordination? On the me-thodological level, we must ask how we may
respect speakers while remaining aware of the possibility that they
are
mistaken or self-deceived? On the level of feminist social analysis,
we
must consider how to evaluate practices that may have both repressive
and emancipatory aspects. Which decisions are private and which are
political? Above all, what is collaboration with the subordination of
women and what is resistance to it? Future feminist thinking
about prostitution must address these questions.
Notes
1. These arguments appear to be supported by the fact that average age
of entry into prostitution is fourteen(Weisburg, 1996:
94).
2. In the United States, the commodification of sexuality is to some
extent counterbalanced by the conservative `family values' movement
but
this movement is often so virulently misogynist and heterosexist that
it
holds little attraction for Western
feminists, although they have occasionally made alliances with it,
most
notably around the issue of pornography.
3. Because radical feminists regard prostitutes as coerced, they
believe
that even if decriminalization is accepted for humanitarian reasons,
it
is necessary to retain bans on solicitation, pimping and harboring in
order to protect prostitutes from
those who exploit them; in contrast, libertarian feminists, such as
the
Canadian Organization of Prostitutes(CORP), argue that such bans would
deprive prostitutes of freedom of speech, a place of work, domestic
relationships and intimate
companionship.
References
Barry, Kathleen(1995), The Prostitution of Sexuality, New York: New
York
University Press.
_______________(1986-7), "UNESCO Report Studies Prostitution," WHISPER
Newsletter, 1: 3.
Bell, Shannon(1994), Reading, Writing, and Rewriting the Prostitute
Body, Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana
University Press.
Delacoste, B. Frederique and Priscilla Alexander(eds.)(1987), Sex
Work:
Writing by Women in the Sex Industry,
Pittsburgh: Cleis Press.
Ferguson, Ann(1997), "Prostitution as a Morally Risky Practice from
the
Point of View of Feminist Radical Pragmatism"(forthcoming), Daring to
be
Good: Essays in Feminist Ethico-Politics, eds. Bat-Ami Bar-On and Ann
Ferguson, New York: Routledge.
Giobbe, Evelina(1994), "Confronting the liberal lies about
prostitution"(abridged version), Living With Contradictions, ed.
Alison
Jaggar, Boulder: Westview Press: 120-126; The Sexual Liberals and the
Attack on Feminism, eds. Dorchen Leidholdt and Janice G.
Raymond(1990),
Tarrytown, NY: Pergamon Press: 67-81.
Goldman, Emma(1917/1970), The Traffic in Women, New York: Times Change
Press.
Human Rights Watch Women's Rights Project(1995), Global Report on
Women's Human Rights, New York, Washington, Los Angeles, London,
Brussels: Human Rights Watch.
Jaggar, Alison M.(1994), "Prostitution"(abridged version), Living With
Contradictions, ed. Alison M. Jaggar, Boulder: Westview Press.
Kempadoo, Kamala(1996-7), "Sandoms and Other Exotic Women:
Prostitution
and Race in the Caribbean," Race and Reason 1.
Pateman, Carol(1994), What's Wrong with Prostitution?" Living With
Contradictions, ed. Alison M. Jaggar, Boulder: Westview Press.
Pheterson, Gail(1989), Vindication of the Rights of Whores, San
Francisco: The Seal Press.
______________(1996), The Prostitution Prism, Amsterdam: Amsterdam
University Press.
Weisberg, D. Kelly(ed.)(1996), Applications of Feminist Legal Theory
to
Women's Lives, Philadelphia: Temple University Press.
Copyright(c) 1997 by the Asian Center for Women's Studies. All rights
reserved.
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