Re: Alison Jaggar: Contemporary Western Feminist Perspectives on Prostitution

[Yoshie Furuhashi <furuhashi.1@xxxxxxxxxxx>]

Mine posted:

>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
<snip>
>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).

While in principle I find Alison Jaggar's dialectical criticism of
radical & libertarian feminisms very helpful, I must add that what is
missing in her analysis is a criticism of imperialism, especially
"humanitarian imperialism" of the Third Way, which uses the concept
of "human rights" in order to justify violations of sovereignty.  Is
she aware that human rights organizations such as Human Rights Watch
have had a role to play in preparing the public opinion for imperial
interventions in Yugoslavia, for instance?  If she is, her awareness
doesn't manifest itself in this 1997 article _at all_, which I find
disturbing.  Of course, I do not mean to suggest that everything
reported by Human Rights Watch and similar organizations is
untruthful merely by virtue of their having been accomplices in
NATO's war and other interventions, but I cannot uncritically accept
their findings either.

What is striking about imperialist attacks upon Yugoslavia is that
roles played by Western feminists (especially radical feminists like
Catherine MacKinnon) in portraying Serbia as employing a conscious
strategy of "mass rapes" for "ethnic cleansing":

*****   ...Catherine MacKinnon, Professor of Law at the University of
Michigan, claims that rape is being used to help make Bosnia a
Serbian state by implanting Serb babies in Muslim mothers.  The
international community, she says, is refusing to face up to the true
nature of the conflict there - that this is not just a campaign of
Serbia against non-Serbia but is a form of genocide directed
specifically against women.  'The fact that these rapes are part of
an ethnic war of aggression being represented as a civil war means
that Muslim and Croatian woman are facing twice as many rapists with
twice as many excuses and two layers of impunity serving to justify
the rapes.  This is ethnic rape by official policy of war - rape as
ethnic liquidation.' [3]...

[3]  Catherine MacKinnon, `Crimes of War, Crimes of Peace`, to appear
in Of Human Rights (Basic Books 1993).

<http://www.oneworld.org/ni/issue244/rape.htm>   *****

"Sexual slavery," "trafficking in girls and women," etc. have
likewise become key terms in efforts to mobilize the Western public
opinions in interventions in the Balkans, Africa, Asia, & elsewhere,
especially because of such terms' sensationalist values which make it
very difficult for anti-imperialists to question the truths of
reports on "sexual slavery," etc. without appearing heartless:

*****   Text: Introduction to 1999 Human Rights Reports
(Transnational networks seen key to future rights advances)

Events of 1999 in such places as Kosovo and East Timor demonstrated
the growing power of transnational public-private networks to promote
human rights and democracy, according to the U.S. State Department's
1999 Report on Human Rights Practices.

In an introduction to the report, which was released February 25,
Assistant Secretary of State for Democracy, Human Rights, and Labor
Harold Hongju Koh said such networks "increasingly wield influence
comparable to the power of individual nation-states, in their
capacity to spotlight abuses, mobilize shame, generate political
pressure, and develop structural solutions."

Koh said some of the most successful transnational networks have been
those that partner with governments in support of democracy-building
or human rights initiatives. In the Kosovo and East Timor cases, he
said, nongovernmental organization (NGO) efforts enriched those of
governments, while governments in turn helped build and coordinate
the work of NGOs....

...1999 Country Reports on Human Rights Practices
Released by the Bureau of Democracy, Human Rights, and Labor
U.S. Department of State

February 25, 2000...

...Trafficking of women and children remains endemic in many parts of
the world; in response, the Department of State has for the first
time established a separate section in each Country Report to
highlight U.S. concern about this serious problem (see Section C.2
below)....
<http://www.usinfo.state.gov/regional/ea/uschina/hrintr99.htm>   *****

Marxist-feminists have to undertake several difficult tasks:

* to produce empirical investigations of rapes & other violations of
women _without_ swallowing reports produced by the media, human
rights organizations, the U.N. agencies, etc. wholesale;

* to create a critical framework of analysis of sex work that
portrays women neither as "helpless victims" in need of rescue nor as
enterprising individuals of libertarian feminist conceptions;

* to discuss actual cases of violation without producing accounts
that may be used for the mobilization of imperialist interventions in
affairs of nations on the periphery (such as Yugoslavia).

It behooves us to recall that in both various nationalist discourses
(by all nationalities) and imperialist discourse on women in the
course of the dissolution of Yugoslavia, ideological combatants have
capitalized upon the images of women as *vessels* and *victims*:
Serbian, Croatian, & Slovenian nationalists argued, "Albanian women
are having too many babies, they have the highest fertility rate in
Europe, while _our_ women are having too few babies"; Serbian
nationalists said, "Serbian women are terrorized by Albanian men in
Kosovo"; Croatian, Bosnian-Muslim, & Albanian nationalists, together
with imperialists, argued, "Serbian men are raping Muslim, Croatian,
and Albanian women in 'mass rape camps' to do 'ethnic cleansing' and
create the 'Greater Serbia'."  As it happens, that Albanian women
have the highest fertility rate in Europe is a _fact_ (high
fertility, however, was simply a reflection of rural & agricultural
lives of Albanians whose pre-modern family structures had yet to be
destroyed, not a result of a conscious design to Albanize Kosovo as
was alleged sometimes), but even facts can become grist for the
ideological mill.  And when facts are lacking, myths must be
invented, as in the case of "mass rape camps" for "ethnic cleansing."

Yoshie