Introduction

My partner, Dr Ana Paula da Silva, does a lot of her research into prostitution in restrooms. One evening, she went into one and found a young woman crying alone over an industrial sink. Ana is an excellent ethnographer and a sympathetic person, so it didn’t take her long to find out what was wrong.

The young woman was working to support her family, in which she was the only labouring adult. She had been on the job for three months—some days for up to twelve hours—but had yet to be paid. She had met her household’s expenses by borrowing at exorbitant interest rates. Now, word had come down that her pay would be delayed for a fourth month running. She had no effective legal response and was at wit’s end. As she talked to Ana, she confessed that she was thinking of killing herself. Only the thought of her family being stripped of any income kept her going.

“After all”, she said, half declaring, half entreating, “as long as I keep working, they have to pay me some day. Right?”

Many of you reading this story in its present context—a volume on the global history of prostitution—are probably recognizing this young woman’s plight. After all, the received wisdom regarding those who sell sex highlights the variety of deceptions that are used to exploit them. We have read thousands of pages on sex worker enslavement, recruitment under false pretences, indebtedness… The terms “pimp”, “trafficker”, and “exploiter” fall glibly from our tongues. If there’s one thing the histories in this collaborative volume emphasize, it’s that prostitutes ² are often exploited and sometimes enslaved.

But I haven’t been entirely honest with you. Although Ana does much of her ethnographic work in restrooms, this particular incident didn’t happen in a brothel, but at her university. unisuor ³ is a private school in Rio de Janeiro. The woman in question was a newly employed professor with a master’s degree. Her monthly salary was around 4,000 reais, which at the time made it the equivalent of eight minimum wages or four times what fully 72 per cent of Brazilian workers earn (around 1,000 reais monthly in 2010). ⁴ In 2008, only 17 per cent of all Brazilian households were earning what she was earning. ⁵ All of this presumes, of course, that she was receiving her salary—which she wasn’t.

The dilemma faced by this young professor is nothing new to Brazilian workers, especially those who (like the majority of female workers) struggle in the economy’s lower reaches. ⁶ Brazilian workers are vulnerable to gross exploitation. Having a job does not necessarily mean that one receives a salary and for those caught in this cycle of late- or unpaid work, the means to confront one’s bosses are few and the opportunities to go into debt while awaiting payment are many.

It is certainly true that prostitutes and professors are not the same. Prostitution involves stigma and risks that professors do not face and these have real consequences for sex workers’ lives. What the above story illustrates, however, is the degree of exploitation and lack of options faced even by privileged female workers. Often when we talk about prostitution, the common labour practices of the neo-liberal globalized economy disappear and exploitation is conceived of outside its larger economic framework. Prostitution is analysed as if it were a separate field from life and labour in general, not just in moral or theoretical terms, but in terms of life as it is lived. Because of this, the question of why many women enter into prostitution is stripped of any real context.

Nowhere is this perhaps more apparent than in discussions about agency and prostitutes’ ability to choose sexual labour. Few people ask if maids, check-out counter girls, baby-sitters, street cleaners, or factory workers (and certainly not professors) “really want” to do their jobs. In fact, for almost every kind of labour except sex work, workers’ ability to choose and act tends to be simply presumed; they do that job because they chose to and they can leave any time they want. Agency, however, must be questioned when the work is sexual and the worker is female.

In this chapter, I will argue that sex work occurs in a specific engendered context and that in order to understand agency in sex work, we must first divest ourselves of the belief that the term is a synonym for free will, sovereignty, or untrammelled choice. Agency is much less, but also much more than that. We must also denaturalize prostitution itself, as well as the terms which surround sex work; these are not etic ⁷ or analytical categories, but rather accusations.

When I say that prostitution occurs in a specific engendered context, I am saying that when we look at agency, we need to perceive that sex work has generally taken place as part of what Gayle Rubin calls “the world historical defeat of women” ⁸ in which women’s sexual/reproductive capacities have been alienated and their labour situated as private services or obligations to men and not socially productive work or, indeed, as the woman’s own labour. ⁹

As both Rubin and anthropologist Sherry Ortner point out, it is precisely female sexual-reproductive capacities that seem to have created “woman” as a social category whose sexuality needs to be constrained and possessed, especially in the context of patriarchal hypergamic societies. ¹⁰ Women’s desires and interests have rarely been foregrounded in any form of socially legitimated sexual interaction and it is important to remember in this context that marriage has first and foremost been an economic and (re)productive arrangement between non-equal parties throughout most of human history. Only relatively recently has it taken on its idealized role in bourgeois western thought as a source of sexual and emotional fulfilment based upon equal partnership.

If we define prostitution as the exchange of sexual/reproductive/affective acts for livelihood, it encompasses a series of interactions that include so-called “transactional sex”, many stable affective/sexual relationships, and several types of pre-capitalist exchange (outlined by Mauss and more recently discussed by Graeber). ¹¹ Without wishing to reinforce the old saw that prostitution is the world’s oldest profession, it seems that we must accept the fact that the use of sex in instrumentalist exchange certainly pre-dates capitalism, patriarchy, and even perhaps the human condition. ¹² Capitalism, in other words, has not commodified women’s sexual-reproductive capacities; these were alienated as items of exchange long before the modern era, as Rubin, following Leví-Strauss, points out. ¹³ As Engels himself noted, the development of industry has actually provided the conditions through which women have begun to free themselves, if imperfectly, from this commodification. ¹⁴

It is within this historical context in which women’s work has been bracketed by unpaid obligations on the one hand, and restricted or devalued employment on the other, that we must understand agency in sex as work. We thus need to look at the conditions, freedoms, and restrictions involved in different forms of prostitution and how these combine with women’s needs, plans, and desires in the face of the other engendered opportunities available on their horizon of possibilities. In this view, prostitution should not be treated as a homogenous category, but rather as a series of diverse activities that can encompass a variety of lived exchanges, oppressions, and liberties. Women who engage in the sale of sex generally have these factors in mind and not a utopian promise of a world freed from the shackles of class and gender.

It is when we understand prostitution within this larger context that agency becomes important but not as a synonym for free will or opportunity. The reason one discusses agency is not to reify the individual human will but to understand the how’s and why’s of an individual’s actions in the face of a socially constrained horizon of possibilities. Unlike social determinists, moreover, those who take a relational perspective of agency see a dialectic existing between individuals and social structure. To properly apprehend this dialectic, one cannot explain micro-scale effects exclusively by looking at large order structures; one needs to specify and see how the macro is also constituted from the apparent chaos of the micro. In the case of prostitution, this means appreciating the plurality of sexual exchanges themselves and their interactions with other sorts of exchanges in a given socio-economic context.

Agency and Prostitution

Debates about agency and its relation to structure have a long history in the social sciences, reaching back to sociologist Émile Durkheim’s comments regarding the interplay between individual will and social facts. ¹⁵ The problem of agency revolves around to what degree, if any, human beings can make choices in the face of coercive social pressures.

O’Connell-Davidson understands prostitution to be a form of labour and prostitutes as women who exercise some degree of agency, however constrained. Her principal abolitionist interlocutors—people such as Sheila Jeffreys, Catherine McKinnon, Meghan Murphy, and Melissa Farley—oppose the very notion of sex as work, claiming that prostitution is ipso facto engendered violence comparable to slavery. According to these intellectuals, to talk about agency in such a situation borders upon the obscene.

The most commonly encountered abolitionist feminist view is that prostitution cannot be work because in it, the woman transforms her body into a good that is then alienated on the market. This argument is expanded through the addition of the “pimp” (a very poorly defined accusatory figure, as we shall see below), who is understood to actually own the prostituted woman’s body, transforming her into a slave. ²⁴

There are several problems with this viewpoint, beginning with the observable fact that bodies are not alienated and sold in prostitution any more than they are in the production of any other non-concrete good. As Brazilian sex worker rights activist Indianara Siqueira pithily remarked at a seminar at the National Law College in Rio de Janeiro: “Honey, if I sold my body, there’d be nothing left of it for you to see today.”

Of course, if a sex worker is in fact enslaved then her body may indeed become a commodity. This is not something that is limited to prostitution, however: any worker, once enslaved, becomes a commodity. But even if most prostitution were slavery, this would not disqualify it as work. No-one denies that slaves work: it is, in fact, their raison d’être. What qualifies work as slavery is not the labour that is performed, but the condition of the labourer as an unfree subject and commodity.

Abolitionist feminists make a more subtle point, however, when they claim that even freely consenting to prostitution is not work like other work. They anchor this argument in their understanding of human social relations as patriarchical, claiming that the position of women within a labour system that is conceptually organized around male dominance leads to the marginalization of women as labourers and, in fact, socially erases much of what women actually do, qualifying this as non-work. Given the greater context of the economic marginalization of women under capitalism and the institutionalized misogyny of patriarchy, abolitionists argue that no-one can truly say that women freely choose prostitution; rather, they are compelled to it by greater social constraints. In such a situation, according to these theorists, it is futile to talk about agency as social structure trumps individual will.

What is curious about this position, however, is that these feminists do not seem to take their own arguments regarding the marginalization of women’s labour to its logical conclusions. After all, according to Friedrich Engels, one of the founders of the critique of patriarchical capitalism, in bourgeois marriage the wife “differs from the ordinary courtesan only in that she does not hire out her body, like a wage-worker, on piecework, but sells it into slavery once and for all.” ²⁵ In other words, the wife stands in relation to the prostitute as the slave does to the worker. In fact, the voluntarism of the marriage contract itself is understood by Engels as being determined by the same social coercive forces which abolitionist feminists claim make a mockery of the idea of choice in the context of prostitution.

Readings of abolitionist feminist critiques of sex work reveal that there is rarely a discussion of this point; it is as if prostitution were either the nadir or origin of women’s oppression. And yet, as so many of the contributions in this book point out, prostitution was and often is a means of escape from even more onerous and un- or underpaid forms of work carried out within traditional women’s roles. For it is a fact that while prostitution (absent actual slavery) does not necessarily entail possession of women’s bodies, engendered family roles have often historically meant exactly that.

Ultimately, both O’Connell-Davidson and her abolitionist interlocutors fall into the same problem vis-à-vis agency; while attacking the liberal view of agency as the right to consent and contract, they unfortunately end up reifying agency itself. Both construct a utopian condition (what O’Connell-Davidson calls the “full powers of agency”) around a non-existent alternative to engendered market-based capitalism in order to critique sex work. While such a critique is interesting, if used as the basis for an understanding of truly occurring prostitution, it violates one of the key principles of social-scientific investigation: it classifies social facts as moral constructs that should be evaluated a priori according to pre-established philosophies. ²⁶ When set against the opportunities presumably available in a postcapitalist, postpatriarchical utopia, the choices made by women facing servile marriage, low-wage labour, or prostitution can seem very pitiful indeed. “Full powers of agency”, understood as freedom from engendered socio-economic constraint, don’t exist, however, and actually occurring agency cannot be measured in relation to them.

When one anchors the concept of agency in the idea of free choice, one obfuscates actually occurring social praxis in which people make constrained choices that are nevertheless perceived by themselves and others as very real. As relational theorists point out, people make decisions within a socio-culturally defined field of possibilities and these decisions significantly alter their life trajectories. ²⁷ It is difficult, from this point of view, to claim that individuals have “more” or “less” agency, as agency is not a reified object which can be quantitatively measured but rather the innate ability of individuals to refract social forces in accordance with their interests, calculations, and choices, thus (re)producing social structures. Within this point of view, asking how much agency an individual has is rather like asking which ocean is wetter.

The feminist critique of engendered capitalism is well-taken; life as it’s lived is certainly not a level playing field where everyone competes as free agents. Some people have more opportunities than others. Opportunity, however, is not agency and to mistake it as such is to confuse object with subject. Furthermore, in the world of labour as it’s lived, it must be remembered that few if any workers have a wide variety of options—even university professors. This, of course, was the reality faced by the young woman in unisuor’s restroom: given the social constraints and commitments in which she was embedded, she couldn’t simply “up and leave”. Her employers, conscious of this fact, had neatly trapped her in a cycle of precarious labour and indebtedness. Her options were very constrained, even though she was engaged in a more comfortable (and certainly less stigmatized) form of labour than most sex workers.

Agency has thus become something of a red herring in discussions of sex work; it is most often used to construct a false dichotomy between voluntary and involuntary prostitution or to claim that, in the face of a coercive and engendered capitalist economy, no-one can ever “freely” choose sex work (as if one could “freely” choose most other forms of labour). In the name of weighing a reified “agency” (and thus supposedly determining whether or not a given form of prostitution is slavery or quasi-slavery), questions are asked of sex workers that are rarely asked of other labourers. “Do you really want to work as a prostitute?” is one of these. “Do you regret choosing this path?” is another.

Sex Work and Economies of Makeshift

An important effect of the reified view of agency is that it doesn’t allow us to see sex work as a logical continuation of (or a revolt against) normative gender relations under patriarchical capitalism. One thing that I commonly encounter in my fieldwork—and which many of the texts in this volume also demonstrate—are women who sell sex as an extension of other, socially respectable, engendered roles. An excellent example of this can be found in Dasgupta’s ²⁸ article on Calcutta. Because of traditional Indian taboos against remarriage, women who choose to be housewives and mothers can find themselves bereft of both economic support and sexual fulfilment upon the death of a partner. It is not surprising, then, to find that 78 per cent of the women who voluntarily chose sex work in Dasgupta’s study are widows. The sex working, family-supporting mother or daughter is also a classic example of this phenomenon. Rio de Janeiro prostitutes often emphasize that they’ve chosen sex work in order to provide better educational opportunities for their children or healthcare for their parents. In these situations, prostitution is situated as an adjunct for the reproduction of the family and a necessary extension of women’s roles within it.

In eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Bruges, twentieth-century Nairobi, early twentieth-century Rio de Janeiro, early twentieth-century Buenos Aires, mid-twentieth-century Nigeria, twentieth-century Bolivia and, in fact, in almost every context presented in this volume, increased female immigration to cities, combined with poor or uncertain wages in engendered labour markets, led women to combine sex work with other forms of (generally unstable and poorly paying) labour. Seasonal work, piece work, and dependent labour all characterize much of what is traditionally considered “women’s work”, making the salaries obtained through these forms of labour insufficient or uncertain. These conditions of engendered labour make sex work a viable and/or necessary option for many women in an economy of makeshifts. ²⁹

One should not be too quick to label sex work in this context a “survival strategy”, however, especially if one means to set it apart from other work through this. All work is ultimately a survival strategy. To claim that certain women are “vulnerable” to sex work while not seeing them as “vulnerable” to other forms of women’s labour is to naturalize prostitution as inferior labour. It is also important to remember that “women’s work” has often combined labour and sex in ways which may not be neatly categorizable. In the chapters on nineteenth-century Rio de Janeiro, Buenos Aires, Havana, Bruges, and Singapore we find reports of domestic labour being intermixed with the provision of sexual services. ³⁰ Furthermore, as Mechant points out, domestic labour in particular makes women highly dependent on the family as an employer and thus particularly liable to lose everything upon unemployment. This, in turn, often results in a domestic worker’s rapid entry into prostitution upon dismissal. ³¹

Other forms of socially acceptable women’s work may involve systematic sexual exploitation, as is the case with women’s labour in the construction trade in Calcutta. ³² It should be pointed out that this sort of coercion is hardly restricted to “lower class” occupations. Shortly after Ana left unisuor, for example, the university’s male chancellor was discovered in the school’s parking lot engaging in sexual relations with a young female professor; she was immediately fired and he continued on with his post. Rumours abounded that the professor in question had been the target of sexual coercion.

For a woman to sell sex at least presumes that she has sex to sell, in other words, that it is hers. ³⁵ This position stands in direct contrast to a wide range of historically occurring forms of sex and gender control which situate female sexuality as the possession of another, almost always an older man. If one of the horrors of “pimping” is that a man possesses a woman’s sexuality, it must be recognized that this has historically been a base condition for “respectable” women throughout history. As Simone de Beauvoir pointed out forty years ago, sex work can indeed be empowering for some women in that it at least asserts—as the title of Cristiana Schettini’s review of sex work in early twentieth century Rio de Janeiro points out—that women have their own bodies. ³⁶ If we accept that economic power increases women’s options in the world, then getting paid for sex can indeed be liberatory as many sex working women point out, especially if it stands in opposition to not getting paid for sex and having to do it anyway.

But finally, as so many authors in this collaboratory effort show, sex work pays well when compared to other forms of women’s work—often ridiculously well. This is, of course, why many women choose to work selling sex. Moreover, prostitution can also involve more flexible and even more attractive work conditions than other kinds of commonly available labour.

It’s true, as anthropologist Susan Dewey points out, that sex workers may exaggerate their income, stating as “typical” what in fact might be extraordinary and receiving liquid earnings that are ultimately comparable to those achieved in other forms of low-wage labour. ³⁷ However, many of the articles in this volume report sex work earnings that are much higher than any other comparative form of feminized labour. Mechant remarks, in fact, that the price for sexual services has remained remarkably consistent in Bruges over the centuries at the equivalent of one (male) day’s wage. ³⁸ This, interestingly enough, seems to be another pattern which repeats itself in many different contexts. Hammad and Biancani, for example, report that lower-class prostitutes in Cairo in the early twentieth century charged 10 piastres a head while native masons during the same period made 6–12 piastres per day. ³⁹ In Rio de Janeiro in 2009, the cheapest prostitutes charged 15–20 reais per act at a time when the minimum wage was around 500 reais a month, or 16.6 reais a day. Meanwhile, the prostitutes working in the city’s most luxurious saunas—women whose clients typically made 10,000 reais a month or more—were charging 350 reais.

The ability to earn in one sex act what a male earns in a day is a non-trivial means of achieving one’s socio-economic goals which can counterbalance the stigma of prostitution and the need to perform sex without desire. Thus, while prostitution may not take women’s sexual desires into consideration, it often provides a more satisfactory means of achieving a woman’s other desires than any form of labour available on her horizon of possibilities. The ability to choose to be a prostitute rather than, say, a wife or a maid is not necessarily a small thing, even if it doesn’t provide “sovereignty” (and is there a profession that does?).

What is particular about agency within this general context is that in spite of claims that women entering into sex work have “no real choice”, many sex working women are very clear that this is indeed a real choice for them. It is often the best available way to meet the multiple engendered demands to which they are subject, escape other demands, and create opportunities that would otherwise not be open to them. In fact, it may be precisely because they are mothers, daughters, wives, widows, divorcees, and/or desirous of the glamorous, on-the-go, consuming, independent, professional lifestyle held out to them as the feminine ideal by much of today’s globalized media that so many women enter into sex work. In short, they are often chasing opportunities and not just being driven by need.

When we claim that women are “vulnerable” to trafficking and prostitution, while forgetting that they are also vulnerable to un-, underpaid or coerced labour and forced immobility, we forget that migration and sex work are often seen by women as a means of escaping onerous, but more socially acceptable, engendered duties. This is particularly obvious in Chacha’s discussion of prostitution in Nairobi, where migration to the city and a life as a “disrespectable” woman was a means of escape from the traditional demands placed on women for unpaid agricultural labour by the rural patriarchical gerontocracy. ⁴⁰ Ekpootu details similar situations in Nigeria, highlighting how not only female migrants from the rural interior, but also middle-class, urban university students involved in “runs” see prostitution as a means of providing an entry into modern, urbanizing, individualizing consumer culture. ⁴¹

At the same time, sex workers are also usually very clear about the dangers and stigmas they are subject to; they are aware that they are often seen by other members of society as “the lowest of the low” and that this makes them vulnerable to harassment, exploitation, and violence. Prostitution is generally not understood by them to be positive (though, of course, there is a significant minority that disagrees) and it is not what they would “freely choose” if given the proverbial three wishes. Nevertheless, they often see it as the best choice available along their horizon of possibilities.

It is thus in the field of truly existing opportunities and desires that women exercise the decision to engage in sex work and not against the backdrop of some utopian full autonomy where all possibilities are equally available. Nevertheless, these decisions are real and have real consequences. It is women’s negotiation of the possibilities and perils of sex work—in short, their agency—which often determines whether or not sex work allows them to achieve their goals, traps them in a regressive life cycle, ⁴² or, indeed, enslaves them.

Agency and the Social Organization of Prostitution

When we apply a relational understanding of agency to prostitution, we begin to see that the questions we should be asking have to do with what options are opened or closed for a person who engages in sex work. How does sex work link to, reinforce, negate, or modify other social roles, especially engendered roles? How do people negotiate the possibilities created by sex work while trying to avoid its pitfalls? How does this work intersect with other social forms and institutions?

In order to give a reasonable account of prostitution as work, we must study it as a set of lived cultures and not as a singular, abstract, ideologized category. It is only by situating sex work within life as it’s lived by socially-constrained actors that its meanings become clear. The ultimate poverty of the eternal arguments between “sex positive” and “abolitionist” feminists and their respective political allies is that these debates reify extremely abstract definitions of prostitution to the point where they have little, if any, link to actually occurring social practices.

We know, for example, that certain sex working women in mid-nineteenth century Florence could live as isolated registered prostitutes in casa particolari and that this allowed them “to gain an appearance of normality, make more complex relationships” and achieve a notable degree of autonomy. How and why did these women become casa particolari prostitutes as opposed to brothel prostitutes, however? What did they have to do to negotiate this status? How did they protect it? In twentieth-century Rio de Janeiro, we can see that a distinct bifurcation developed between prostitutes confined to the lower-class Mangue red-light district and those who worked in the “artistic” cafés and clubs of the bohemian Lapa and Copacabana districts. We do not know, however, how sex working women became inserted into these moral regions or what the relative benefits—if any—were of working in one district or the other. In early twentieth-century Singapore brothel prostitution, Chinese Ab Ku were divided into “sold”, “pawned”, and “voluntary” categories depending upon their financial relationship with the house. How well do these essentially European categories translate their original Chinese content, however? What were the rights of a “sold” woman? Was she pure chattel or were other, more subtle, distinctions of servitude in play? How did women pass from one category to the other? How likely was it that their debts could be paid off?

All of this volume’s contributors could easily address these questions and many more, given enough time and space. A certain degree of abstraction must be accepted in a project that brings together close to two dozen authors with a synchronic and diachronic focus that spans six continents and half a millennium. Without a deeper cultural-studies, micro-historical, or ethnographic-based engagement with the multitudinous varieties of sex work presented here, however, little of any substance can be said regarding the agency of women involved in sex work, because it is only at the micro level where individuals negotiate with social structures that agency is revealed.

More problematic, however, are certain conceptual and analytical questions that become apparent in a large-scale, comparative project such as this. One of the most salient of these is a relative lack of discussions regarding clients. They are rarely described and generally only appear (when they appear) vaguely categorized by status/class (“high” or “low”), race/ethnicity, and occasionally occupation (“soldier” being the most common). Men, in general, are not problematized in this volume. Male and trans- prostitutes can be seen peeking around the corners of some of the articles, but most authors (including myself) ignore them, even though red-light districts the world over contain male and trans- prostitutes. Likewise, males involved in the organization of prostitution are generally presented in an unambiguous, flat, and essentialized manner, typically bounded by the qualifiers “pimp” and “client”, as if these terms were self-explanatory and transcultural.

This brings up what is perhaps the worst vice of prostitution studies, from a relational, agency-oriented point of view: the unconscious and almost unquestioned use of emic and even accusatory categories as if they were analytical devices. Unquestioning use of these terms makes it difficult to recover any agency at all, given that they presume as stable those meanings that are bitterly and constantly (re)negotiated in life as it’s lived. I’d like to briefly deal with three of these problematic terms in particular: pimp, trafficking, and prostitute.

Pimp is an ugly and imprecise term that is inevitably weighted with all sorts of moral prejudices and has been polluted by an English-language bias that symbolically links the word to Hollywood-inspired, racialized thug stereotypes. More problematically, it is essentially a legal accusation. Many third parties are involved in the social organization of prostitution, including landlords, the owners and managers of hotels/bars/clubs, security personnel, chamber maids, bartenders, taxi drivers, and so on. All of these people are more properly neutrally termed “market facilitators” and all of them extract surplus—directly or indirectly—from prostitutes’ sexual labour. Unfortunately, many countries simply define a pimp as someone who makes money from the sexual labour of others. In places like Brazil, India, and France, the concept is widened to include anyone who receives direct or indirect benefits from prostitutes, monetary or otherwise. This means that the children, husbands, lovers, roommates, parents, and dependents of prostitutes can be labelled as pimps.

Prostitution studies are full of examples of men and women involved in sexual/affective relationships with prostitutes and who work as these women’s aids, managers, and security personnel. Prostitutes also exercise their agency by hiring third parties to work for them. An example of this can be seen in Ekpootu’s article on Lagos ⁴⁴ in which she reports that women employ “boma” and “jaguda” boys as client-finders. In Rio de Janeiro, sex working women in Copacabana likewise often employ street children to pass out pamphlets to tourists. These third parties are routinely accused of being pimps and exploiters even when they serve as welcome support for prostitute women. Schettini’s article ⁴⁵ shows that “artistic” traveling prostitutes in early twentieth-century South America often engaged male companions who could intercede for them in the face of excessive demands for sex work on the part of club or theatre owners. These male “circuit breakers” could be accused by local authorities (allied with local venue owners) of “pimping” precisely as a means of stripping prostitutes of this protection and opening them up to greater exploitation.

At the same time, these hirelings and lovers/boyfriends/husbands-cum-managers can also be exploiters and even pimps in the classic, thuggish sense. Ekpootu reports that the same sorts of boys hired by Lagos prostitutes might also coercively manage younger girls. And in both Rio de Janeiro and Buenos Aires accusations of pimping and trafficking were often levelled by prostitute women against men who had, at other moments, been their companions. In other words, relationships between prostitutes and people accused of being pimps involve dense and often contradictory demands and roles involving support, love, respect, fear, abuse, legal privileges, limitations, and engendered violence—much like marriage, in fact. These relationships are not reducible to a simple equation of villains and victims and to do so, again, buries any possibility of recovering—let alone understanding—the agency of women involved in prostitution and the empirical structures of the organization of sex work.

Trafficker and trafficking are likewise legal accusatory categories. It is worth reflecting upon the fact that both of these terms were originally formulated in the context of the nationalist tensions that led up to and followed the First World War. As historian John Torpey points out in The Invention of the Passport, the universalization of this document took place at a time in history when vigilance of national frontiers was being taken to new heights. With the advent of capitalist modernity and the decline of servitude and slavery, the power of authorizing or prohibiting the movement of individuals was centralized in the hands of the state. The creation of the modern passport system thus “signaled the dawn of a new era in human affairs, in which individual states and the international state system as a whole monopolized the legitimate authority to permit movement within and across their jurisdictions.” This monopolization was not neutral. It manifested certain interests, principally an overweening preoccupation with what Torpey calls “masterless men”: free and rootless individuals moving about and answering to no-one. ⁴⁶

The recrudescent nationalism and fears of revolution of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries found expression in a growing body of international jurisprudence that sought to create social defences against two specific types of engendered “footloose” individuals: the male anarchist/Bolshevik and the female prostitute/white slave. ⁴⁷ As many authors have pointed out, the white slavery panic very rarely focused upon repressing actual, provable instances of slavery, but more generally upon restricting the growing mobility and perceived immorality of women and their male companions, particularly those of certain classes and ethnic groups. ⁴⁸

Women, it must be remembered, were generally not understood to be full and sovereign citizens during this period but rather dependent individuals under the tutelage of male “protectors”. To obtain a passport and travel internationally, women often had to have a chaperone. Original documents from the American Embassy in Rio de Janeiro regarding Brazilian demands on migrating women during the first decades of the twentieth century indicate that this meant that a woman needed to be married, provably widowed, a minor and traveling with family, traveling as a registered employee, or in possession of a good conduct certificate signed by members of her local clergy and ratified by her country’s passport bureau. ⁴⁹ In other words, it wasn’t enough to just have a passport in order to migrate if one was a woman; one had to prove one’s respectability by situating oneself as a mother, wife, employee, or devout Judeo-Christian. In short, that meant proving that one’s sexual morality was beyond suspicion, typically by linking oneself as the dependent of a male authority figure.

It is in this context that the accusation of trafficking was created. While portrayed as unscrupulous slavers (which some certainly were), traffickers were first and foremost those people who aided “suspect” women in avoiding immigration restrictions. Beginning in 1904, trafficking became legally defined through successive international treaties as the crime of transporting women for the purpose of prostitution. ⁵⁰ The concept had little to do with slavery and the treaties discussing trafficking rarely mentioned slavery until 2002, when trafficking was reworked by the un’s Palermo Protocol. In Brazil and many other nations, trafficking is still simply legally defined as aiding and abetting the movement of prostitutes; whether or not one profits from this movement or even if it involves coercion or practices similar to slavery is beside the point in the eyes of the law.

By using the term trafficking to unreflexively label any assisted migration of prostitutes, we forget that for a great part of history, women could only legally migrate if they could show that they weren’t prostitutes. Migrants involved in sex work were ipso facto trafficked according to the law because the very definition of “trafficking victim” was “migrant prostitute”. This does not mean, however, that they were necessarily enslaved, which is what the post-2002 international legal definition of trafficking implies and what most twenty-first century readers understand it to mean.

A reflexive understanding of trafficking that seeks to recover prostitute women’s agency must take this history into consideration. It should investigate the motivations and conditions of female migration, what alliances and performances were needed in order to accomplish it, and how sexual exchanges of all sorts can be related to this nexus of agents and structures. Furthermore, it must be remembered that trafficked objects are passive, while human agents are not. The political rhetoric of anti-trafficking ironically objectifies women in ways that that are strikingly similar to pornography, as the current predilection for portraying naked, boxed, caged, and shrink-wrapped female bodies on anti-trafficking billboards and posters graphically demonstrates. While many sex working women obviously encounter violations of their rights and bodies during trajectories of migration, these do not magically transform them into pork-chops: such women continue to be endowed with and exercise agency. Attempts to understand trafficking and its relationship to the social organization of prostitution that do not take this fact into consideration are doomed to be fruitless.

Finally, prostitution itself must unpacked as an analytical category. A vast variety of instrumental exchanges of sex for livelihood appear in the articles in this volume. In the face of these, several authors have attempted to categorize prostitution as the commercialized sale of alienated sex. However, when we look at, say, Cairo in the twentieth century (to draw just one example from the rich body of work contained in this volume), we quickly perceive that the category “prostitute” was not necessarily used in this sense by the authorities or, indeed, by the women selling sex. It was an accusation applied to certain women by the colonial—and later the independent Egyptian—state. Indeed, as we move farther back in time in western Europe (the region which would ultimately export the concept of prostitution around the world in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries), we see the term calving off from the more general term “whore”, which was used to describe “disreputable” women of all sorts. In spite of the theoretically more precise typification of “prostitute”, however, colonial authorities the world over (and, indeed, authorities in metropolitan states) applied the term to ordinate ⁵¹ a bewildering variety of instrumentalist exchanges of sex which did not neatly slot into rationalized, essentialized legal concepts regarding prostitution.

We thus find in Cairo, Bruges, Buenos Aires, Florence, Nigeria, Rio de Janeiro, Mexico City, Paris, Sydney, and many other places the odd category of “clandestine prostitute” which refers to women who are seen by the authorities as “really” being prostitutes but have somehow escaped official classification as such. These women seem to have engaged in a variety of sexual exchange practices in the course of other work or relationships. Given my experiences in interviewing carioca women who exchange sex for presents, money, and nights on the town with foreigners in the Lapa and Copacabana tourism districts, I very much doubt that many—if not most—of these women saw themselves as “prostitutes”. If we unreflexively adopt accusatory terms of this nature as analytical categories, we run the risk of foregrounding state biopower and its capacity to classify and ordinate behaviour and, once again, we lose track of agency. It’s worth remarking in this context that very few men and women desire to be labelled as a prostitute precisely because the term was developed in the context of criminalization, state repression, and social stigmatization. People are not “prostitutes”; they are engaged in activities classified by other political and moral actors as “prostitution”. An agency-based understanding of prostitution and its social organization should respect this distinction and eschew the naturalization of state-originated legal and accusatory categories.

Conclusion: Seeing Beyond Prostitution to Agency

Prostitution studies have suffered from two major vices: an ethnocentric tendency to view prostitution from “the top down” via a framework of naturalized moral and political standards, and the reification and unreflective use of accusatory categories created by state ordination. Both of these problems have militated against a relational understanding of sex work as cultural phenomena and eschewed the recuperation of agency by foregrounding macro-scale social structures and (more problematically) legal accusations in descriptions of sex work.

The histories collected in this volume lay out a rich variety of phenomena that have been labelled “prostitution” and allow us to envision how much work still needs to be done in order to fully understand these phenomena and their relationships to surrounding cultural categories. If nothing else, the articles presented here serve as a warning to those who would attempt to homogenize and flatten the intersection between sex and work into a one-size-fits-all category.

We can, however, see certain global trends in the material presented here that relate specifically to the question of agency and the organization of sex work. One of the most important of these are the laws that have been made with regards to prostitution over the past 500 years. Simplifying (but not greatly), we can say that the hegemonic legal structures through which prostitution is conceived in the world today seem to have been born in modern Europe during the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries and exported via colonial imperialism throughout the rest of the world. It is notable in this respect that some of the first globalized international treaties ever signed dealt with the migration and ordination of “fallen” or “disreputable” women, antedating the League of Nations by several years.

The rubrics of prostitution have thus been internationalized almost exclusively according to western models and this situation continues today with surprisingly little effective contestation. Basically, there seem to be three main models of prostitution legislation that have come out of the West over the past few centuries: regulation, abolition, and prohibition. Much ink has been spilled dealing with the supposed benefits and pitfalls of these systems, but few people have noted their inherent similarity: all three legislative models presume that prostitution is a problem and seek to address that rather than address the demands, desires, and issues of people engaged in sex work. Furthermore, all three criminalize certain aspects or forms of prostitution, situating the sale of sex as essentially a problem to be managed by the police rather than by other social authorities. Finally, all three turn a blind eye to certain socially acceptable exchanges of sexual-reproductive capacities for sustenance, most particularly in the context of monogamic, patriarchical, and heterosexual marriage.

Most of the articles presented here chart a shift from the “French model” of regulation to the “British model” of abolition and on to (in certain cases) what could arguably be called the “American model” of prohibition. It is notable that these shifts occurred more or less around the same time, which is a clear indication that they were not being generated solely by local conditions but rather also by international pressures. It is also striking that these shifts from policy to policy created changes in the forms of sexual commerce occurring “on the ground” but never eliminated or even provably reduced the incidence of prostitution. None of the three policies have ever come close to meeting their stated moral and political goals in any of the countries studied here. They have, however, repeatedly reformulated the social and legal constraints around which prostitution must organize. One can argue, then, that the only proper way to study the effects of laws on prostitution is through a relational understanding that works from the ground up; analysing what limitations or opportunities laws present for sex workers is a much more fertile field for socio-historical research which seeks to understand so-called prostitution than the laws themselves and the stated goals of their architects.

From the point of view of the women engaging in prostitution, shifts from one legal paradigm to another rarely appear as beneficial because they do not contemplate sex work as anything other than a morally noxious category which must be either done away with or segregated from respectable society. In other words, again, these legal approaches seek to solve prostitution as a problem and do not focus on the problems of prostitutes. Strikingly, it is almost impossible to find instances of government intervention which attempt to situate sex workers as the primary stake-holders in the legislation being contemplated in their name. The newest trend in prostitution law, the so-called Swedish model, has been notorious in this respect, going so far as to deny sex workers any possibility of having an active voice in their country’s prostitution debates and instead medicalizing these women as mentally ill, addicted, or brainwashed. ⁵² Whether states see sex workers as “criminals” or “victims”, a singular fact remains: they are rarely contemplated as full citizens in possession of their rights. Rather, they are understood, at best, as what anthropologist Paul Amar calls “para-humans”: human subjects of governmentality “always already-disabled or insecure, [victims] needing parallel, emergency, paralegal, or extralegal protective action or rescue intervention in order to assume the provisional status of citizen.” ⁵³