The Prostitution of Sexuality. Kathleen Barry

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СКАЧАТЬ agency and social location of domination, the dyad, the couple wherein sexual power is constantly constructed. In destructuring power, he made the relations of power disappear because he made their agents invisible. In trying to connect sex and power, Foucault dismantled the dyad, the nexus wherein sexualized human relations become dialectically hierarchical sexual power relations. But a theorist’s denial of reality does not change that reality; it only hides it. It is impossible to eliminate from the social landscape that which constructed it, the institutional and individual power structure. Without an analysis of power, Foucault’s “multiplicity of force relations” becomes mired in its own diversity. Domination becomes particularized into and unidentifiable among these multiple lines of power. For Foucault, individualized sexual relations of power, operational in dyads, are not collectivized to form systematic domination, because in his definition of sexual power he has eliminated class conditions, the referent for interpersonal, gendered relations of power. Sexual power would lose its interpersonal enforcement if there were no class-based, institutional, systematized, and state-based domination beyond and distinct from its individual manifestations.

      Foucault relativizes sexuality to each instance of it. The idea that sexuality is used to “serve the most varied strategies” and is “endowed with the greatest instrumentality” goes nowhere. There is no overall pattern, no consistency from one unit or one sexual relation to another.

      Power is relational. It actively engages oppressor and oppressed. In its “multiplicity of force relations,” power operates between classes—economic classes, the capitalist and proletariat; race classes, whites and people of color; and sex classes, men and women. Hegel’s description of the reciprocity of master and slave and Marx’s analysis of the economic relations of the capitalist and working classes identify power relations dialectically constructed into power hierarchies that are sustained by the advantages gained by oppressors in their exploitation of the oppressed. The power of oppression is as diffuse as it is direct. Direct violence, then, is only one aspect of oppression in the subordination of the “other.”

      Laborers go to work voluntarily and take a wage for their work that does not represent the full value of their labor; the difference between the value of their labor and the wage paid constitutes the profits of the capitalist. The relations of power between them are sustained in the wage-profit calculation. That is fundamental to the interaction in domination; it is the foundation of the relationship between oppressor and oppressed. A relational theory of power identifies the way subordination is frequently held in place through the active participation of the subordinated without blaming them for their oppression. Hegelian and marxist theories of power reveal dynamics of oppression that account for the interactive relational force that keeps oppression in place.

      The relational power of male domination reaches into the private, into and onto the body, through interactive sexual relations that are rendered into sexual exploitation by the power that forges the economic relations of women under patriarchy. Considering sexual exploitation as lived experience, identifying it in sexual acts, whether or not they involve consent, and analyzing sexual exploitation in terms of institutions that promote it, namely prostitution and marriage, gives oppression a substantive context and identifies it as a sex-class condition.

      Among the collective conditions of domination, only in the subordination of women are class relations of power simultaneously personal relations, where interactions that are as intimate as sexual relations are also the relations of power. Sexism and sexual exploitation of women as a class by men as a class are class relations that operate as individual interactions. A feminist relational theory of power, of the subordinated female gender class, must reveal power in personal interactions, in physical and emotional relations that operate at the most private and intimate levels of human existence.

      Patriarchy superimposes class conditions of power relations upon sex/gender relations between men and women, interperson-ally establishing a near-perfect fit between the class relations of power and gendered interpersonal relations. This has created a particularity to women’s oppression, making it unique in that it is constructed in gendered interpersonal relations that invoke sex. It is highly public, visible, and structural, and yet simultaneously it is personal—hidden, secreted, and bodily, physically, and emotionally internalized.

      Gender relations of sexual power are institutionalized and simultaneously individualized in prostitution, pornography, and marriage. Sex is a relational power that is realized in human relations that take place in private, usually hidden from view. In the French history of private life this is referred to as “the secret.”³⁴ As sexual relations are usually unseen and often unspoken, except in group sex and/or gang rape, power relations are structurally privatized and yet commercialized.

      When private interactive sexual power relations are made invisible, so is power in sex industries denied. As sex becomes industrialized, not only in business but also through multinational conglomerates, the use of sex in the power relations in which the United States dominates the Third World is made invisible. Consequently, the individual unit of interaction in the sexual relations of power is both realized and sustained by state policies and the industrial development of sex industries that commodify and exchange women.

      In the context of these sexual relations of power—the privatized, sexualized location of women’s oppression—when women leave home—as runaways in Western countries, as migrants in the Third World, in the absence of feminist political refuge or of viable economic alternatives—they are most frequently reduced to the public, political institution of sex: prostitution. Again, the power relations of racism and Western hegemony that close down economic alternatives for women of color invoke prostitution as a normative condition for women in poverty.

      Power is gain; it produces advantage and superior status by and for the dominating class through the subordination of the “other.” Because sexual exploitation actively harms women, the gain that men derive from it does not merely advance men. Sexual exploitation also forces women backward, regresses women into the harms it conveys, thereby thwarting women’s ability to achieve, to move forward, to grow and to develop.

       Feminist Political Consciousness vs. Ideology

      Over the last decade, as I have listened to women’s responses to my first book, Female Sexual Slavery, I have heard from some women that they found the book “too painful to read” or “depressing,” while others were “empowered” by it because their experiences had been revealed as exploitation and slavery, or simply because domination had been named and explored.

      Yet another reaction has been to classify this work as “victim feminism,” or “male bashing.” In the United States this is more than backlash. This highly vocal, media-hyped assault on feminism as a liberation movement is aligned with conservatives and liberals, who both attack feminism for “political correctness” (p.a). They silence social protest and political consciousness not only of sexism but racism, homophobia, and the environment by denying women’s oppression. Anti-feminism in the form of women’s defense of men is not new to the women’s movement. But the alignment with right-wing anti-“political correctness” forces is new. Katie Roiphe typifies a dangerous women’s movement collusion with both the right and the liberals against what they call the political correctness of feminism. With no data of her own, citing flawed critiques as her sources, Roiphe has challenged the existence of date rape and Mary Koss’s date rape statistics that reveal that 1 in 4 women will be raped in college. Roiphe, raising a women’s movement defense, is concerned that women are being seen only as victims, or “that men are lascivious, women are innocent.”³⁵ Roiphe questions women’s agency when rape takes place after a woman has been drinking or has taken drugs, as if the society is not gendered, is not patriarchal, and has no relationship to individual behavior.

      Since СКАЧАТЬ