Third World Development

Peter Hornbach

Paper #3 Question#3

According to Kelly, to what extent are women liberated AND exploited by their participation in regulated sex work? To what extent is this liberation and exploitation a product of economic modernization through neoliberalism? To what extent is this liberation and exploitation a product of cultural constructions of gender and inequality?

I believe there are two quotes in the text that aptly work towards answering the above three questions, particularly the first. The first quote comes from the informant Magda describing her rise to success through the vehicle of prostitution. I grew up in a very humble house. We ate sitting on a mat on the floor, tortillita with salt and lime. And since I have been a woman who has suffered, today I am the happiest woman in the world. I have what I have from nothing. Never did I think I would have a cassette player, or an air conditioner of two horsepower, or three pieces of property, thanks to God. I never imaged this, and three, four electric fans. (Kelly 2008, p.189-190) Magdas statement exemplifies the environment of deprivation and scarcity that the phenomenon of prostitution is largely fed by. The reason I would argue for the pertinence of such a quote is that it helps properly contextualize prostitution. It also helps demonstrate prostitution as more of an extension of deeper more fundamental themes of economic abuse, rather than something inherently abusive in and of itself. This paper will discuss the ubiquity of Mexican and Central American poverty and how such an environment provides a pool of powerlessness that can then be harnessed by the powerful for utilitarian purposes. In the most general sense, prostitutes, both legal and clandestine, are just one example of lower class people attempting to adapt to the violent disruption and deprivation of neo-liberalism. However, prostitutes obviously occupy a unique economic and symbolic position not experienced by the typical wage laborer. The transgression of moral boundaries, which increasingly contradict practical reality, allow for the attainment of a certain type of power and resistance against that which tends to nudge individuals toward prostitution in the first place. Acting outside the dominant structure of societal normalcy leads such individuals to be socially marked as bearers of dangerous, contaminating power. Its through this power that prostitutes, particularly regulated ones, experience a 2

life of contradiction. They can be seen as intriguing, yet contemptible; necessary, yet toxic; institutionally visible yet publically invisible; and both offenders and reinforcers of traditional gender norms. The second important quote comes from Foucault and speaks toward these contradictions by likewise speaking toward the institutional harnessing of an extra-institutional practice. Discipline, increases the forces of the body(in terms of economic utility), and diminishes these same forces(in political terms of obedience) (Kelly 2008, p.77). The essence of this one quote I think represents well how little the text is actually about prostitution. Rather, the pervading theme of Kellys work seems to more address the various relationships of power that can arise in a ubiquitous environment of powerlessness. Additionally, Kellys work is about the application of state legitimized discipline onto that which is seen as disordered and contaminating. Through this, the illegitimate power of that which is morally and medically dangerous becomes institutionally channeled for the legitimate purposes of the state. The individual result of this, following Foucaults logic, is the states channeling of individual human bodies into positions of utility for those in control of the larger economic/political structure. With that said, its important to discuss the significance of what structural utilitarian purpose sex workers are ultimately fulfilling. Kelly alludes to the non-coincidence of the Zona Galctica being set up within reasonable proximity to a military presence, existing to put down the Zapatista rebellion. For the most part though, Kelly frames the existence of the regulated brothel in terms of public, state driven, discourse and the states desired political image. Kelly comments on the fact that many of the administrators responsible for the regulation of sex work are also gynecologists. She talks extensively about the medical framing of sex work and how prostitution is treated in public discourse as a public health problem. Through the utilization of this framing, state control over the phenomenon of

prostitution becomes an instrument for projecting a particular image. The image is that the state cares about public health and perhaps even the protection of women in general. There are clearly several arguments that could be lodged against such a supposed image. However, none are quite as poignant as the simple fact that places like the Zona Galctica employ very small amounts of sex workers. The public health impact of the Galcticas 150 or so prostitutes would be nearly negligible in comparison to the droves of illegitimate sex workers from the surrounding area. And this is of course assuming that the states method of regulation even had the potential to improve public health if applied on a larger scale. For one thing, men are not screened or medically regulated before being allowed access to female prostitutes. Condoms might be distributed, but its not as if theres a government inspector in the room where the act takes place ensuring the condoms use. And an AIDS test every three months might eventually take an infected worker out of the legitimized system, but that says nothing for the roughly 200 clients per month that worker had contact with. The medicalized framing in public discourse also assumes that sexually transmitted diseases are somehow only transmitted by prostitutes, ignoring every other set of relationships that might likewise contribute to the spread of sickness. As Kelly alludes to, public health may be the public reasoning for state regulation, but its really the political image produced by that public reasoning that lies at the base of why places like the Galctica actually exist. State level brothels become symbolic of what anthropologist Guillermo Batalla would call Imaginary Mexico, as opposed to Mexico Profundo, or Deep Mexico. In an environment of neo-liberal poverty and wealth disparity it becomes important to portray a societal image of production, modernity and rising levels of health and public welfare. Doing so essentially works to justify neo-liberal policy even if such examples simultaneously exist alongside choking poverty, largely created by those same policies.

The regulated brothel exists to be folded into a structural complex of propaganda promoting the supposed modernizing virtues of laissez-faire capitalism. The implementation of policy that ultimately resulted in communities losing their public lands becomes publicly justified through the construction of shopping malls, movie theaters, and regulated brothels on that same land. Its because of this that regulated sex workers experience a kind of exploitation thats twistedly cruel in its irony alone. Regulated sex workers become like living billboards for the same state structure and economic philosophy that helped create their lives of poverty, struggle, and eventual sex work in the first place. This is probably the most scathing critique of regulated prostitution ultimately having anything to do with public health: the fact that prostitution exists to regulate. This is not to say that prostitution itself is some new invention of neo-liberal conditions. Its simply to say that its rise as a widespread practice likely would not be occurring in the presence of more and greater economic options. And if the state level government truly cared a thing about public health, that spectrum of options would not have been so abruptly and dramatically stripped away in the first place. The state cares about public health only to the extent that a fixation on health provides cover for policies that simultaneously serve to destroy it. Additionally, the regulation of sex work legitimizes the states authority as something that not only has power over people but over norms as well. Female prostitution is representative of a challenge to the established moral order concerning female sexuality. The states involvement and segregation of these behaviors from the general public of Tuxtla is symbolic of the state reasserting these disrupted sexual norms. The transgressing women become tucked away out of sight, reaffirming the moral repugnance of their transgression. This happens while men may board a bus to and from the Galctica in plain sight. The acceptance of male participation and lack of male regulation is one of many ways in which legal prostitution publically reasserts norms of male sexuality. Eighteen is the minimum age for sex workers while male patrons need only be fourteen.

The implication is that for men sex is an expected part of manly development, rather than a polluting threat to their virtue. Simply the fact that women are being financially supported by men in exchange for what would normally be a womans domestic duty, implies the insertion of gender norms into institutional structure. Like so many other industries, what prostitution essentially does is to extract one particular aspect of domestic life, alienate it from the attachment and emotion of kinship, and sell it back to individuals as a commodity. Through this, the loss of social power often experienced by prostitutes is subsequently consumed by their clients. The prostitutes abandoning of that which would define her as a proper woman becomes utilized by clients as a means of feeling more like a proper, powerful man. In short, the norms transgressed by women in the Galctica allow men to more firmly center themselves within their own norms. This is not without its contradictions however, the most prominent being the fact that many sex workers have considerably more economic power than their clients. A zone worker can potentially make up to ten times the amount of an average wage laborer. They also have the ability to refuse service to whomever they like and to use this ability as a means of filtering the way their clients treat them. When I mention a prostitutes loss of social power Im referring to the broader ability of an individual so identified to move and function within the channels of the dominant, legitimate society. Within the Galctica however, a sex workers socio-economic power is considerable, especially in comparison to women engaged in more proper forms of employment. This can often however become a bittersweet form of liberation, marred by the tenuousness of their position. For many workers, always present is the threat of exposure to ones family and the kind of social death that can subsequently occur. Kelly makes it clear that there is often a firm distinction between Galctica workers and illegal sex workers. The former does not associate themselves with the 6

latter. Many of the regulated workers see themselves as honest women doing honest work and do not see themselves as morally deviant from cultural norms in any other way than perhaps their secretive lives as prostitutes. And so, the threat of exposure as something that might be seen as abhorrently deviant and immoral is a serious vulnerability. That tenuous connection with support networks of family and friends, largely existing within the dominant culture, represents a potentially exploitable weakness. Such a weakness can work to counteract the sense of power and liberation experienced within the confines of their relatively cloistered profession. In conclusion, the world of regulated prostitution in Chiapas is a world of contradictions. Its an institutional harnessing of an extra-institutional practice being utilized for the promotion of the same economic philosophy that helped create the desperate conditions it originally flows from. Its an assertion of traditional gender norms through their outright renunciation and alienation from their traditional context. Its people existing simultaneously in a state of economic legitimacy and moral illegitimacy and being granted financial power while simultaneously being stripped of moral worth. Its women being liberated from the norms of a shared gender ideology while simultaneously restricted and degraded by their exclusion from it. And ultimately its an adaptation to difficult option-less circumstances, the legal promotion of which tends to naturalize the conditions that necessitate such a thing. Prostitution is far from being simple enough to universalize in terms of causation. One thing can be said with certainty however. The majority of prostitutes are not from upper class backgrounds full of options, power and prestige. Its often the ubiquitous lack of these things in a social environment that truly define the rise of prostitution as well as the exploitation and liberation associated with ones involvement in such a practice.