View metadata, citation and similar papers at core.ac.

uk brought to you by CORE

provided by Digital Commons @ Butler University

Butler University
Digital Commons @ Butler University
Scholarship and Professional Work - LAS College of Liberal Arts & Sciences

2012

Sex, Work, and the Feminist Erasure of Class

Brooke M. Beloso
Butler University, bbeloso@butler.edu

Follow this and additional works at: http://digitalcommons.butler.edu/facsch_papers

Part of the Women's Studies Commons

Recommended Citation
Beloso, Brooke M. “Sex, Work, and the Feminist Erasure of Class,” Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society, Vol. 38, No. 1,
September 2012. Available from digitalcommons.butler.edu/facsch_papers/454/

This Article is brought to you for free and open access by the College of Liberal Arts & Sciences at Digital Commons @ Butler University. It has been
accepted for inclusion in Scholarship and Professional Work - LAS by an authorized administrator of Digital Commons @ Butler University. For more
information, please contact fgaede@butler.edu.
 Brooke Meredith Beloso

Sex, Work, and the Feminist Erasure of Class

O n Mother’s Day 1973, with a $5,000 grant from the Glide Methodist
Church in San Francisco, Margo St. James founded COYOTE (Call Off
Your Old Tired Ethics), which remains to this day one of the United
States’ most active and vocal sex worker rights organizations.1 Money raised
from the organization’s first fund-raiser that year helped launch the first of a
succession of infamous Hookers’ Balls (St. James 1980, 200–201). Con-
vinced by San Francisco sheriff Richard Hongisto that if “someone from the
victim class” spoke out, the National Organization for Women and gay rights
organizations would get behind the sex worker rights movement, St. James
decided to go public with her experience as a prostitute (St. James n.d.).2
Making common cause with anthropology professor Jennifer James—who
coined the term “decriminalization”—St. James and COYOTE succeeded in
securing NOW’s endorsement of decriminalization and, further, formed an
alliance with the organization for the purpose of fighting for the Equal Rights
Amendment (St. James 1980, 200–201).
But by 1985 St. James had moved to Europe, citing as her reason “the
conservative swing in the US and the women’s movement” (n.d.). Despite a
brief window of time during which the US women’s movement extended
its reach to encompass the voices and choices of sex workers, by the mid-
eighties guards had gone up and gates had come down. Not coincidentally,
it was during this same period that feminism made way for queer theory—
which many date to the now-infamous 1982 Barnard Conference at which
Gayle Rubin first presented “Thinking Sex: Notes for a Radical Theory of
the Politics of Sexuality” (1984) in response to the radical feminism (more
or less contemporaneously) launched by Catharine MacKinnon. The ad-
vent of queer theory radically troubled feminist politics’ privileging of the
ontological (rather than epistemological) status of “woman,” which had
been remarkably unchallenged up to that point. Queer theory wanted to

I would like to thank Kelley Walker at Mighty Quare Dewd for the inspiration to write this
piece.
1
WHO (Whores, Housewives, and Others—“others” here referring to lesbians) was
COYOTE’s forerunner.
2
Carol Leigh (aka Scarlot Harlot) coined the term “sex work” in 1978 (see Leigh 1997);
hence the semantic tension in a project such as this one, which spans the period before and after
the neologism’s uptake by sex worker rights’ groups.

[Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society 2012, vol. 38, no. 1]
© 2012 by The University of Chicago. All rights reserved. 0097-9740/2012/3801-0007$10.00

This content downloaded from 159.242.176.110 on Fri, 12 Dec 2014 15:11:40 PM

All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions
48 y Beloso

know less about normative sex, gender, and sexuality in their present in-
carnations and more about the many and varied permutations of nonnor-
mative sex, gender, and sexuality as they had always been or could be. There-
after, a certain stripe of feminist politics, one steadfast in its commitment
to an engagement with sex, gender, and sexuality as is, needed a raison
d’être around which to rally in the face of queer theory’s epistemological
interrogations. Things might have been different yesterday, and they might
be different tomorrow, but today (this politics argues) women are oppressed
first and foremost because they are women. And as MacKinnon has pas-
sionately insisted, feminist politics must rage against this oppression—rather
than rage against the categorical coherence of “woman” itself. Methodo-
logical approaches aside, for radical feminists—as ontologically oriented
feminists came to be known—sexual revolution consists in overthrowing pa-
triarchy.
Prostitution surfaced in this period as an especially worthy rallying cause
for radical feminism; in the eyes of radical feminists, prostitutes were victims
of patriarchy par excellence. For them, as Evelina Giobbe writes, “The
prostitute symbolizes the value of women in society. She is paradigmatic of
women’s social, sexual, and economic subordination, in that her status is the
basic unit by which all women’s value is measured and to which all women
can be reduced” (1990, 77). Instrumental to the rise of prostitution as the
measure of woman, I would argue, was the way in which Rubin and
MacKinnon persuasively and heavy-handedly translated Marxism into fem-
inism. In the process, they wrote out and wrote over class as a theory of
privilege and oppression—as a dynamic, antagonistic relation between labor
and capital that is always already a social relation under capitalism, structur-
ing and being structured by other forms of privilege and oppression that
need not necessarily be ranked in order to be considered (Allman, McLaren,
and Rikowski 2005).3 Inasmuch as both theorists not only turned away
from Karl Marx but turned on him as well, feminism was dramatically
declassified—much to the detriment of those struggling under the weight
of not only capitalism and patriarchy but also sexual apartheid.4 And in

3
Shannon Bell makes a similar argument, albeit in a different way. Isolating MacKinnon’s
role in this struggle, Bell argues that MacKinnon “superimposes her theory over Marx’s
primary concepts” (1994, 80). Rubin escapes critique entirely in Bell’s analysis. Rosemary
Hennessy rises to this occasion in her later Profit and Pleasure: Sexual Identities in Late
Capitalism (2000). However, Hennessy does not mention MacKinnon or broach the subject
of sex work, focusing instead on the lesbian (179–89).
4
I use the term “declassified” to suggest that in the wake of this theoretical move, feminism
was, broadly speaking, significantly less concerned with historical/dialectical materialism and
the class constitution of sex, gender, and most especially, sexuality.

This content downloaded from 159.242.176.110 on Fri, 12 Dec 2014 15:11:40 PM

All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions
 S I G N S Autumn 2012 y 49

keeping with Nancy Fraser’s recent work on the coarticulation of late

capitalism and second-wave feminism (2009), this declassification of femi-
nism has worked hand in glove with the popular uptake of neoliberal free-
market ideologies, which have for some time now championed the promo-
tion of (some) women’s cultural inclusion at the expense of (many) women’s
economic exclusion—giving rise to today’s seeming paradox wherein some
women and girls proudly wear “Girls Rule” shirts made by other women and
girls in sweatshops (Klein 2001).
In large part, this essay seeks to answer the question Wendy McElroy
poses in her 1999 “Prostitution: Reconsidering Research”: “If the feminist
stance on prostitution was based on observable fact, how could the same act
be liberating in the mid-seventies and enslaving a decade later?” More
specifically, I seek to scrutinize the fallout of a period characterized by
Siobhan Brooks as one in which “mainstream, white, middle-class feminists
of the 1960s and 1970s dominated the discussions on feminism and defined
the feminist issues of the era. As a result, sex work was primarily viewed as
something that objectified and dehumanized women” (1999, 181). I sub-
ject this period to close scrutiny also in the interest of defusing the present-
day political minefield on this topic—wherein “the public discussion on
prostitution has become an ideological brawl in which both sides bend
research to promote political agendas and to slander opponents” (McElroy
1999).
To this end, I trace the contemporary feminist debate on prostitution to
the period in which Rubin and MacKinnon deemed Marxism inadequate to
the task of theorizing women’s oppression. In seeking to surmount this
perceived inadequacy, both thinkers counterposed alternative theoretical
frameworks for analyzing women’s oppression that nonetheless relied upon
certain central tenets of Marxism. In a reliance that took the form of
strikingly similar translations of Marxism into what came to be known as
radical feminism (in the case of MacKinnon) and queer theory (in the case of
Rubin), both theorists problematically render class as, respectively, gender
and heterosexuality. And while these translations have launched many a
powerful critique of patriarchy and heteronormativity, they structurally
foreclose the possibility of their adherents’ comprehension of sex work as
a site of “the metamorphosis of the commodity itself,” wherein Marx
located “the most abstract form of crisis” under capitalism ([1861–63]
1969, 507–10).
Thus, while a genealogy of second-wave feminism reveals Marxism to be a
foundational theoretical pillar, it is a pillar of salt inasmuch as the way in which
feminism looks back at Marxism—vis-à-vis Rubin and MacKinnon—pre-
vents the two movements from working together to analyze and overcome

This content downloaded from 159.242.176.110 on Fri, 12 Dec 2014 15:11:40 PM

All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions
50 y Beloso

women’s oppression under late capitalism. Grounding its relationship to

Marxism in the logic of analogy, rather than, say, contiguity, feminism loses
a certain ability to think gender, sexuality, and class together.5 As a site of the
metamorphosis of the commodity, sex work is critical to an analysis of the
lived intersectionality of capitalism and patriarchy in individual and collective
lives. Missing this analysis, feminists typically frame their discussions of sex
work—including those that are ostensibly pro–sex worker—in terms of
gender and sexuality rather than class. I argue that this flattening of sex
work—predicated upon MacKinnon’s and Rubin’s translation of class as
identity rather than as a dynamic, antagonistic relation between capital and
labor—has facilitated feminism’s and queer theory’s unwitting complicity
with capitalism, manifested in a lack of attention to women’s privilege and
oppression not as women and sexual minorities per se but as workers,
commodities, and even capitalists. Absent Marx’s conceptualization of class
as a dynamic relation under capitalism, feminists writing about sex work in
the wake of MacKinnon and Rubin generally fail to distinguish between
woman-as-laborer and sex as “the particular product of individual labor”
(Marx [1861–63] 1969, 509). Instead, feminists tend to conflate the two,
everywhere seeing prostitutes as victims who always happen to be women (or
girls) but never workers.
In contrast, I seek to excavate the intersectional, agentic subject of sex
work from beneath the ideological brawl that has for decades dominated all
discussion of prostitution. I am not proposing that feminism’s attention to
gender and queer theory’s attention to sexuality are anything less than
indispensable to critical consciousness-raising about sex and work, both
within and beyond the sex industry. But I am proposing that these are not
sufficient—moreover, that they produce engagements with sex work that
are sadly, tragically “misguided, dangerous and wrong”—when they stymie
critical consciousness of sex work as a specific relation under capitalism.6 I
seek to heed Marx’s injunction to mark the crucial difference between the
labor involved in production for direct consumption and the labor involved
in production for commodity exchange under capitalism. If we mark this
difference as specific to the labor involved in the production of sex, privilege
and oppression—which have nothing to do with the sex of prostitution per
se but rather with labor’s relation to the means of production under the
political economy of capitalism—become visible. Understood in this way,
sex work lifts the mask covering the extraction of surplus value from all

5
For more on the pitfalls of analogy, see Joseph (2002).
“Misguided, Dangerous and Wrong” is the title of testimony submitted by Rubin to a
6

1986 hearing on pornography by the National Organization for Women; see Rubin (1993).

This content downloaded from 159.242.176.110 on Fri, 12 Dec 2014 15:11:40 PM

All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions
 S I G N S Autumn 2012 y 51

laboring bodies, thereby denaturalizing the gendered and sexualized ten-

sions and inconsistencies that remain irresolvable under capitalism.

Whose Marx? (I): Gayle Rubin’s post-Marxism

In 1975, Rubin published “The Traffic in Women: Notes on the ‘Political
Economy’ of Sex,” wherein she seeks to explain sexual inequality. She
prefaces her essay with the caveat that “it lies outside the scope of this paper
to conduct a sustained critique of some of the currently popular explanations
of the genesis of sexual inequality,” among which number “the attempt to
extract all of the phenomena of social subordination from the first volume of
Capital” (Rubin 1975, 158). Rather, Rubin wants to “sketch some ele-
ments of an alternate explanation of the problem [of sexual inequality]”
(158). Immediately following this caveat, however, Rubin herself turns to
Marx. Quoting Marx’s 1847 Wage-Labor and Capital, Rubin frames her
alternate explanation of the problem of sexual inequality: “Marx once asked:
‘What is a Negro slave? A man of the black race. The one explanation is as
good as the other. A Negro is a Negro. He only becomes a slave in certain
relations. A cotton spinning jenny is a machine for spinning cotton. It
becomes capital only in certain relations. Torn from these relationships it is
no more capital than gold itself is money or sugar is the price of sugar ’ ”
(158). That Rubin takes sexual inequality to be a “phenomen[on] of social
subordination” (rather than a phenomenon of, say, biology) becomes clear
with her paraphrased interpretation of Marx’s question: “What is a domes-
ticated woman? A female of the species. The one explanation is as good as
the other. A woman is a woman. She only becomes a domestic, a wife, a
chattel, a playboy bunny, a prostitute, or a human dictaphone in certain
relations. Torn from these relationships, she is no more the helpmate of man
than gold in itself is money . . . etc.” (158). With this translation of Marx,
Rubin reveals the theoretical cards with which she will play out her alternate
explanation of the problem of sexual inequality: first, sexual difference
precedes sexual subordination (the species is sexed male and female before
it is gendered, or “domesticated,” woman and man); second, gender sub-
ordination (but not sexual difference) is the consequence of “certain rela-
tions”; and finally, these “certain relations” are social but not necessarily
economic.
While Marx’s question homes in on the metamorphosis of the commod-
ity under capitalism, whereby the black man “becomes” a slave, the spin-
ning jenny “becomes” capital, gold “becomes” money, and sugar “be-
comes” its price, Rubin’s question homes in on the transformation of the
woman into various incarnations of the helpmate of man. In other words,

This content downloaded from 159.242.176.110 on Fri, 12 Dec 2014 15:11:40 PM

All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions
52 y Beloso

Rubin’s paraphrase elides Marx’s enumeration of the equivalent metamor-

phoses of the black man, the spinning jenny, gold, and sugar into commod-
ities. Thus, where for Marx it is specifically the “certain relations” of
capitalism that transform material objects (including human beings) into
commodities, Rubin’s heretofore unspecified certain relations transform
human beings (who for her happen to already be women) into the domes-
ticated helpmates of men. Partitioning off the relations that transform
women into helpmates of men from the relations that transform (other)
material objects into commodities under capitalism precipitates Rubin’s call
“for such a concept” as a “sex/gender system”—a call further necessitated
by what Rubin perceives to be “the failure of classical Marxism to fully
express or conceptualize sex oppression” (1975, 159–60). Clearly, Rubin
does not intend in this essay to regard women as commodities under
capitalism, and her translation of Marx will be limited to the level of
analogy.7 To capture the distinction, for Rubin:

Marxism: “Certain relations” = an economy = capitalism

(and under these relations, a spinning jenny becomes capital)
Feminism: “Certain relations” = a sex/gender system = patriarchy
(and under these relations, a woman becomes the helpmate
of man)

Before turning to Sigmund Freud and Claude Lévi-Strauss in search of

what seems to her a better locus of articulation for an explanation of the
problem of sexual inequality, Rubin further elaborates upon this “failure of
classical Marxism,” lamenting that “there is no theory which accounts for the
oppression of women—in its endless variety and monotonous similarity,
cross-culturally and throughout history—with anything like the explanatory
power of the Marxist theory of class oppression” (1975, 160). For this reason,
Rubin counterposes her “sex/gender system,” which she defines as “the set of
arrangements by which a society transforms biological sexuality into products
of human activity, and in which these transformed sexual needs are satisfied”
(159). Where Marx defines the transformation of the natural conditions of
human existence (which may or may not include what Rubin characterizes as
“biological sexuality”) into products of human activity as labor, Rubin
disaggregates women’s oppression and class: society does the work of trans-
forming already-sexed bodies into hierarchically gendered people.
The disaggregative move Rubin makes here foregrounds not only her
1975 attempt to explain women’s oppression but also her later attempt, in

7
For more on this, see Ebert (1996, 46).

This content downloaded from 159.242.176.110 on Fri, 12 Dec 2014 15:11:40 PM

All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions
 S I G N S Autumn 2012 y 53

her 1984 sequel essay “Thinking Sex,” to explain the oppression of sexual
minorities. Rubin’s declassified sex/gender system sets the stage for the vast
majority of feminist and queer theory written in the wake of her essay and
cannot easily be dismissed as mere lack of attention to intersectionality
(Crenshaw 1995) or multiple jeopardies (King 1988). Rather, what Rubin
does in positing Marxism’s and feminism’s externality to each other is to
assert that women’s oppression is not always necessarily also class oppression
and to analytically separate the certain relations of women’s oppression from
those certain relations of capitalism that have rendered black men, spinning
jennies, gold, and sugar into commodities. According to Rubin, “We need
to understand the relations of its [sex/gender] production, and forget, for
awhile, about food, clothing, automobiles, and transistor radios” (1975,
166). In other words, we need to forget about the way in which women and
their labor become commodities under capitalism in order to understand
the way in which women become the helpmates of men, for these are
products of two distinct systems of oppression (1975, 203; see also Hen-
nessy 2000, 181).
The wedge that Rubin drives between capitalism and patriarchy provides
feminism with a working definition of class as an ontological, static category
rather than an epistemological, dynamic relation; henceforth, “class” will
serve as a reified identity marker on par with race, sex, sexual orientation,
and so on, a stand-in for “socioeconomic status”—which in small part it was
for Marx, but not only or simply so. “The Traffic in Women” also defini-
tively (and dangerously) establishes women’s oppression as a phenomenon
of social subordination that can conceivably be gotten rid of without getting
rid of capitalism (see Fraser 1997, 285). Notwithstanding her excision of
feminism from Marxism and of women’s transformation into the domesti-
cated helpmates of men from “the metamorphosis of the commodity itself”
under capitalism, Rubin concludes her essay with a call for “a Marxian
analysis of sex/gender systems . . . along the lines of Marx’s discussion in
Capital of the evolution of money and commodities” (1975, 204–5). And
yet it is precisely this line of inquiry that Rubin forecloses in her postulation
of the sex/gender system as a process whereby human beings are trans-
formed into the helpmates of men but not into commodities.

Whose Marx? (II): Catharine MacKinnon’s post-Marxism

In 1982, MacKinnon published the hallmark essay “Feminism, Marxism,
Method, and the State: An Agenda for Theory.” She begins this essay with
a radical rearticulation of Marxism that has by now, more than a quarter of
a century later, become nearly synonymous with a substantial subset of

This content downloaded from 159.242.176.110 on Fri, 12 Dec 2014 15:11:40 PM

All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions
54 y Beloso

feminist theory: radical feminism. MacKinnon writes: “Sexuality is to

feminism what work is to Marxism: that which is most one’s own, yet
most taken away. . . . Work is the social process of shaping and trans-
forming the material and social worlds, creating people as social beings
as they create value. . . . Implicit in feminist theory is a parallel argument:
the molding, direction, and expression of sexuality organizes society into
two sexes—women and men—which division underlies the totality of so-
cial relations” (515–16). MacKinnon further analogizes Marxism to fem-
inism:

Capitalism: “Class is its structure, production its consequence, capital

its congealed form, and control its issue.” (515)

Patriarchy: “Heterosexuality is its structure, gender and family its con-

gealed forms, sex roles its qualities generalized to social persona, repro-
duction a consequence, and control its issue.” (516)

Moreover, in a footnote, she substitutes the “desire” of sexuality for the

“value” of work, as “that substance felt to be primordial or aboriginal but
posited by the theory [Marxism] as social and contingent” (516). But as
Joan Acker and Kate Barry note in their “Comments on MacKinnon’s
‘Feminism, Marxism, Method, and the State,’” where Marx takes care to
delineate the historically contingent composition of value (e.g., “surplus
value” under capitalism), MacKinnon’s analogous rendering of radical fem-
inism’s “desire” as Marxism’s “value” transcends the specificity of (sexual)
desire under capitalism and thereby “elevates this meaning of sexuality to the
level of a pan-historical constant” (Acker and Barry 1984, 177).
To more slowly unpack the string of terms MacKinnon here so elegantly
collapses: sexuality stands in for work, heterosexuality stands in for class,
gender and family stand in for capital, and reproduction stands in for
production (as a “consequence” of structural inequality). Following classic
analogical structure, however, MacKinnon leaves “control” in place as the
verb propelling both ensembles of (ostensibly equivalent) nouns. Like Ru-
bin, MacKinnon thus reveals from the outset the theoretical cards with
which she will play out her own explanation of the problem of gender
inequality: first, sexuality and its embodiment as sexual difference is prior
to—it “underlies”—society; second, sexuality, inasmuch as it is “most one’s
own,” is innate rather than acquired, developed, or constructed; and, finally,
heterosexuality, as the gateway through which sexuality is channeled into
reproduction, gender, and family, is parallel to, but not mutually imbricated
in, class as the gateway through which work is channeled into production
and capital. To capture the distinction, for MacKinnon:

This content downloaded from 159.242.176.110 on Fri, 12 Dec 2014 15:11:40 PM

All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions
 S I G N S Autumn 2012 y 55

Marxism: control exercised through class produces capital

(which process “creates, organizes, expresses, and directs”
value; 516)
Feminism: control exercised through heterosexuality reproduces gen-
der/family
(which process “creates, organizes, expresses, and directs”
desire; 516)
Critically, MacKinnon delimits Marxism’s class to capitalism’s structure
rather than taking class to be the dynamic, antagonistic relation between
labor and capital born of an ongoing struggle for control of the means of
production. For her, production, as a consequence of the class structure
through which work is channeled into capital, is an end for capitalism rather
than the means by which surplus value is extracted from labor. Despite
MacKinnon’s professed retreat from “the debate over which came (or
comes) first, sex or class” (1982, 527), her explanation of sexual inequality
requires that her reader accept the premise that heterosexuality and class are
mutually exclusive, rather than mutually constitutive, structures of inequal-
ity; sexuality—“that which is most one’s own”—is like work but is not itself
work (515).8 As analogous to class-as-structure-of-capitalism, heterosexu-
ality is impervious to the dynamic, antagonistic relation between labor and
capital. Furthermore, although MacKinnon defines “work” under Marxism
as “the social process of shaping and transforming the material and social
worlds,” as a substitute for work, sexuality will be limited in its influence
upon the material world to the way in which it “organizes society into two
sexes” (515). Thus, as Acker and Barry note: “MacKinnon’s definition of
sexuality is not parallel to the Marxist concept of work. Work is the process of
creatively transforming the material world; sexuality is the process of creating
desire. This is a particular concept of sexuality, rooted in a psychological and
ideological realm” (1984, 178). In other words, for MacKinnon sex is not
work and work is not sexual. As for Rubin, Marxism functions solely at the
level of analogy.
In contrast to Rubin, however, MacKinnon evinces no sense of patriarchy
as one possible sex/gender system among many; there is for her similarly no
sense of capitalism as but one possible political economy (mode of produc-
tion)—an idea essential to Marx’s theory of revolution. While MacKinnon
elsewhere acknowledges that Marxism is not monolithic (1982, 527 n. 23),
a severely truncated, ahistorical version of Marx’s theory of class privilege

8
MacKinnon poses the following rhetorical questions: “Is there a Marxist method without
class? a feminist method without sex?” (1982, 527). More germane questions in this context
might have been, “Is there a feminist method without class? a Marxist method without sex?”

This content downloaded from 159.242.176.110 on Fri, 12 Dec 2014 15:11:40 PM

All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions
56 y Beloso

and oppression serves for MacKinnon as Marxism’s quintessential definition

of class, which she subsequently translates into the structure of heterosexu-
ality as gateway to bipolar gender (533). Where for Marx both class and
capitalism are subject to and programmed for abolition ([1847] 1963, 161),
for MacKinnon “male power produces the world before it distorts it”; for
her, heterosexuality (and the sexual inequality it perpetuates) “is a closed
system” (1982, 537). Only through this apocryphal inheritance of a natu-
ralized, closed-system understanding of class from Marx is MacKinnon able
to posit as analogous a naturalized heterosexuality structuring sexual in-
equality.
MacKinnon concludes with a call to arms for feminism: “As Marxist
method is dialectical materialism, feminist method is consciousness raising”
(1982, 543). Here again, however, MacKinnon reduces Marxism to a straw
man. Ignoring the long-standing debate within Marxism not only over
what dialectical materialism is but also over whether or not it is a method
and, if so, of what, she elides the class-consciousness-raising central to any
and every rendering of Marxist method. MacKinnon’s dismissal of dialecti-
cal materialism in favor of feminist consciousness-raising as a means of
fighting sexual inequality hangs upon her rejection of a severely truncated
and therefore distorted definition of dialectical materialism.9 And while it is
impossible to overestimate the achievements of feminist consciousness-
raising, this method’s intrinsic difference from and superiority to dialectical
materialism is not self-evident.
Further inscribing an artificial opposition between feminist method and
Marxist method, MacKinnon lauds the capacity of feminist consciousness-
raising to perceive gender relations as not only personal but also political and
laments Marxism’s inability to perceive class relations as not only political but
also personal—as if to imply that Marxism is somehow oblivious to the way in
which one’s relation to the means of production (e.g., where we fall in the
division of labor) shapes both our subjectivity and our relationship to others
similarly or differently related to the means of production. This is perhaps
best evinced by that foundational precept of The Communist Manifesto:
“The bourgeoisie has torn away from the family its sentimental veil, and has
reduced the family relation to a mere money relation” (Marx and Engels
[1848] 1986, 50). In making this move, however—MacKinnon closes with
the claim that feminism, as Marxism’s “final conclusion and ultimate cri-
tique,” turns Marxism “inside out and on its head”—MacKinnon posits a
post-Marxist feminism wherein the history of women’s oppression is most

9
See Marx ([1847] 1963). For more on this as specific to MacKinnon, see Halley (2006,
238–42).

This content downloaded from 159.242.176.110 on Fri, 12 Dec 2014 15:11:40 PM

All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions
 S I G N S Autumn 2012 y 57

decidedly both not only and not also a history of class struggle (1982, 544).
Like Rubin, MacKinnon theorizes women’s oppression as a phenomenon of
social subordination that can conceivably be gotten rid of without getting rid
of capitalism.

MacKinnon versus Rubin

In their initial essays, both Rubin and MacKinnon understand class as one
vector of women’s oppression beneath an overarching umbrella of patriar-
chy. While for Rubin, patriarchy is but one possible “sex/gender system” of
many, for MacKinnon it is the lens of hierarchy sine qua non through which
all relationships of domination and subordination are intelligible. Both
counterpose to Marxism a systematic theory of sexual inequality grounded
in the social relations between two separate “classes” of men and women
analytically disaggregated from what Rubin refers to as “the areas of social
life for which it [Marxism] was originally developed—class relations under
capitalism” (1984, 308). In other words, it is possible under both articula-
tions of feminism to determine whether an individual is male/dominant or
female/subordinated before or beyond that person’s relation to the means
of (economic) production, according to that person’s position with respect
to what Rubin calls “the social structure of gender” (1984, 309) and what
MacKinnon calls “sexuality as the primary social sphere of male power”
(1982, 529). Thus, it comes as no surprise that when Rubin opens “Think-
ing Sex” with the assertion that “the realm of sexuality has . . . its own
internal politics, inequities, and modes of oppression” (1984, 267), one
hears echoes of MacKinnon’s definition of sexuality in “An Agenda for
Theory”: “Sexuality is that social process which creates, organizes, expresses,
and directs desire, creating the social beings we know as women and men, as
their relations create society” (1982, 516). For both theorists, sexual value
has no originary relation to Marx’s concept of value, and vice versa.
It is, then, from the common ground of a sexuality unhinged from the
(economic) means of production that Rubin and MacKinnon write the two
essays that (respectively) follow “The Traffic in Women” and “An Agenda
for Theory.” With their sequel essays, Rubin and MacKinnon meet in the
arena of an almost entirely declassified feminism—in the sense that both have
divorced themselves from what Heidi Hartmann has famously characterized
as “the unhappy marriage of Marxism and feminism” (1981, 1). Although
the two dramatically part ways in these sequel essays (“Thinking Sex” reads as
a heated response to “Toward Feminist Jurisprudence”), as we have just seen,
the severely truncated Marxist foundations upon which their sequel argu-
ments rest are strikingly similar. Notably, MacKinnon cites Rubin’s first essay

This content downloaded from 159.242.176.110 on Fri, 12 Dec 2014 15:11:40 PM

All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions
58 y Beloso

favorably in her own first essay, as one of several “attempts at synthesis” of

Marxism and feminism that does not “cast feminism, ultimately, as a move-
ment within Marxism” (1982, 524 n. 17). So well do Rubin and MacKinnon
argue in these first essays for viewing patriarchy and capitalism, feminism and
Marxism, as mutually exclusive hermeneutic categories and trajectories of
oppression, that in their wake, “any analysis that engages the material condi-
tions of gender and sexuality is thus dismissed as supplying Marxist answers to
feminist questions, as if feminist questions are somehow outside the history of
relations of production” (Ebert 1996, 47).
Widely considered a contestation of MacKinnon’s radical feminism,
Rubin’s “Thinking Sex” first appeared in the 1984 collection Pleasure and
Danger: Exploring Female Sexuality. Dismayed by radical feminism’s ne-
glect and perpetuation of forms of sexual oppression not easily or at all in-
telligible as gender oppression, in this essay Rubin advocates radical sexual
pluralism as a challenge to erotic chauvinism. In so doing she argues for a
specific theory of sexual oppression as distinct from gender oppression. In
section 6 of “Thinking Sex,” titled “The Limits of Feminism,” Rubin
pointedly takes MacKinnon to task for having “made the most explicit
theoretical attempt to subsume sexuality under feminist thought” (1984,
308).10 Rubin argues not only against this attempted subsumption but also
against MacKinnon’s “definitional fusion” of sex and gender, on the
grounds that “lust” both precedes and exceeds this fusion (1984, 307–8;
see also Ebert 1996, 51). And while Rubin made a similar claim with respect
to gender (as a social construct distinct from the biological given of sex) in
“The Traffic in Women,” she now makes this move with respect to sexuality
(as distinct from gender) in her sequel essay. Recapping her earlier excision
of feminism from Marxism, Rubin reminds the reader of “Thinking Sex”
that “there is an instructive analogy in the history of the differentiation of
contemporary feminist thought from Marxism. Marxism is probably the
most supple and powerful conceptual system extant for analyzing social
inequality. But attempts to make Marxism the sole explanatory system for
all social inequalities have been dismal exercises. Marxism is most successful
in the areas of social life for which it was originally developed—class rela-
tions under capitalism” (1984, 308).
Having deployed the analogy of her earlier derivation of feminism from a
truncated version of Marxism in order to make a powerful case against

Rubin later explained: “She [MacKinnon] wanted to make feminism the privileged site
10

for analyzing sexuality and to subordinate sexual politics not only to feminism, but to a
particular type of feminism. On the grand chessboard of life, I wanted to block this move”
(Rubin and Butler 1994, 71).

This content downloaded from 159.242.176.110 on Fri, 12 Dec 2014 15:11:40 PM

All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions
 S I G N S Autumn 2012 y 59

MacKinnon’s (similarly truncated version of) feminism, Rubin now posits

sexual apartheid as a form of social subordination that can conceivably be
gotten rid of without getting rid of capitalism or patriarchy. Just as “Marx-
ism is most successful in the areas of social life for which it was originally
developed—class relations under capitalism,” and “feminism is the theory
of gender oppression,” Rubin’s new “radical theory of sex” will address
areas of social life either immune to, or somehow otherwise beyond the
purview of, both class relations under capitalism and gender relations under
patriarchy (1984, 309). Truncating a feminism derived from a truncated
Marxism to “the theory of gender oppression,” Rubin demonstrates the
need for a “theory of sexuality.” Where she earlier posited gender as
a transhistorical object of social subordination, she now posits lust as a
transhistorical object of social subordination. And while her call for a
Marxian analysis of the sex/gender system at the conclusion of “The Traffic
in Women” evinced the epistemological tension in her translation of Marx-
ism into feminism, in “Thinking Sex,” Rubin now dispenses entirely with
class as a theory of privilege and oppression: “Like gender, sexuality is
political. It is organized into systems of power, which reward and encourage
some individuals and activities, while punishing and suppressing others. Like
the capitalist organization of labor and its distribution of rewards and
powers, the modern sexual system has been the object of political struggle
since it emerged and as it has evolved. But if the disputes between labor and
capital are mystified, sexual conflicts are completely camouflaged” (1984,
309; emphasis added). Sexuality is no longer for Rubin analogous to work
(as for MacKinnon); rather, it is “a human product as are . . . forms of
labor . . . and modes of oppression. [Further] it is not . . . understandable in
terms of class” (1984, 277, 293; see also Ebert 1996, 64; Hennessy 2000,
185). In marked contrast to “The Traffic in Women,” economy does not
appear as a conceptual apparatus in “Thinking Sex,” except as an after-
thought to the realm of sexuality. Gone is class as a dynamic, antagonistic
relation between labor and capital encompassing within its scope such
sexual containers as the family; mystified disputes between labor and capital
are not camouflaged sexual conflicts, or vice versa, for Rubin.
In contrast, MacKinnon argues in “Toward Feminist Jurisprudence” that
sex and gender are synonymous and that there is no such thing as “un-
gendered reality or ungendered perspective” (1983, 636). While Rubin’s
essay is a litany of arrests, sanctions, deployments of antiquated sex law,
police crackdowns, censorship, restrictive ordinances, omnibus legislation,
zoning laws, licensing and safety codes, sentencing increases, and myriad
other forms of the legal codification of sexual oppression (1984, 270–71),
MacKinnon’s essay is a cutting indictment of the state as inherently male, as

This content downloaded from 159.242.176.110 on Fri, 12 Dec 2014 15:11:40 PM

All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions
60 y Beloso

nothing more and nothing less than the legal codification of male suprem-
acy. Rubin argues that “sex law is the most adamantine instrument of
sexual stratification and erotic persecution” (1984, 288); MacKinnon ar-
gues that “the law sees and treats women the way men see and treat
women, . . . embodying and ensuring male control over women’s sexuality
at every level, occasionally cushioning, qualifying, or de jure prohibiting its
excesses when necessary to its normalization” (1983, 644). MacKinnon’s
reading of the law as the normative arm of patriarchy is for her analogous to
Marx’s reading of the law as the normative arm of capitalism, complete with
the distinction many Marxists make between formal and structural freedom
under capitalism.11 Like Marx’s worker who is free to do anything she or he
wants but choose a different relationship to the means of production,
MacKinnon’s woman is free to do anything she wants but render true
consent.

Feminism’s marginalia
In a footnote to her now classic essay “Mapping the Margins: Intersection-
ality, Identity Politics, and Violence against Women of Color,” Kimberlé
Crenshaw admits to having fallen prey to the sort of bracketing off of
significant trajectories of privilege and oppression to which I suggest Rubin
and MacKinnon fell prey in their watershed essays written in the period
leading up to Margo St. James’s emigration—wherein one sees sex workers
increasingly alienated by feminism. Crenshaw turns a self-critical eye upon
her own work, observing that “in mapping the intersections of race and
gender, the concept [of intersectionality] does engage dominant assump-
tions that race and gender are essentially separate categories. By tracing the
categories to their intersections, I hope to suggest a methodology that will
ultimately disrupt the tendencies to see race and gender as exclusive or
separable” (1995, 378). She further adds that “while the primary intersec-
tions that I explore here are between race and gender, the concept can and
should be expanded by factoring in such issues as class, sexual orientation,
age, and color” (378; emphasis added).
But instead of tracing the categories of sex, gender, and class to their
intersections, and acknowledging and grappling with the class constitution
of gender and sexuality (or, alternately, with the gendered and sexual
constitution of class), Rubin and MacKinnon render class struggle that
“which can only be thought—when it can” in terms of “exclusion, erasure,

11
Wherein formal freedom means the freedom to work for a wage, while structural
freedom means the freedom from want.

This content downloaded from 159.242.176.110 on Fri, 12 Dec 2014 15:11:40 PM

All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions
 S I G N S Autumn 2012 y 61

violent foreclosure, abjection” (Butler 1993, 8). As such, class struggle

manifests as a “disruptive return” (Butler 1993, 8) to the systematic theo-
ries of sexual inequality they derive from a Marxism turned “inside out and
on its head” (MacKinnon 1982, 544). And one of the places this obfusca-
tion of class struggle becomes most noticeable is in the widespread exclu-
sion, erasure, violent foreclosure, and abjection of sex-working women’s
voices and choices from what St. James loosely characterized (from afar) as
“the women’s movement.” Moreover, in the decades since Rubin and
MacKinnon rewrote Marxism as feminism and queer theory, it has grown
exceedingly difficult for feminists and queer theorists to describe the indi-
vidual factors condensed in the global crises of late capitalism in terms of
class—much less in terms of sex, gender, and sexuality. In this sense, the
marginalization of sex workers functions as a placeholder for feminism’s
broader marginalization of class as a theory of privilege and oppression. For
feminists, the movement of the contradictions between exchange value and
use value, and between money and commodity, wherein Marx located the
real drivers of the most abstract form of capitalist crisis contained in the
metamorphosis of the commodity, has stalled (Marx [1861–63] 1969, 509–
10). And it is my contention that the discursive hegemony consolidated
by Rubin and MacKinnon over feminist and queer theory—at Marxism’s
expense—has by and large stymied, rather than fostered, feminist and queer
critiques of capitalism, including and especially critiques from which those
struggling under the weight of capitalism, patriarchy, and sexual apartheid
stand to benefit most. But should we as feminists and sex workers learn to
recognize the common threads of our historical marginalization under
capitalism, we might choose to leave behind our ever-trenchant tendency
to see gender and sexual inequality as somehow extricable from economic
inequality—rather than choose to leave behind our sisters and brothers in
their differently envisioned and waged struggles for social justice. Making
this choice, we both invigorate feminism as a formidable critique of capital-
ism and ensure that feminism’s finish line is not a lonely place.

Inviting class into the feminist debate on prostitution

In the interest of beginning to reckon with what we have lost in the
translation of class from a theory of privilege and oppression into an identity
analogous to gender and sexuality, I want to perform a bit of a hermeneutic
experiment: I want to see what comes into focus when we invite a Marxist
theory of class into the feminist debate on prostitution. To this end, I take up
Rosemary Hennessy’s (2006) articulation of cultural oppression as a “sec-
ond skin” that capital uses against the worker in order to extract surplus value

This content downloaded from 159.242.176.110 on Fri, 12 Dec 2014 15:11:40 PM

All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions
62 y Beloso

(profit) from him or her.12 Also to this end, I take up Crenshaw’s aforemen-
tioned concept of intersectionality as an important tool with which we may
more accurately identify the myriad forms of cultural privilege and oppres-
sion both before and beyond gender—the various second skins that laboring
bodies freely (at least, in the formal sense) offer up to capital in the market-
place—upon which economic exploitation is predicated. In so doing we see
that the rhetoric of, alternately (and for many interchangeably) prostitution
as the measure of woman and woman as the measure of prostitution (e.g.,
Giobbe 1990) leaves largely unexamined not only the mode of production
predicated upon the mass exploitation of labor in the interest of profit
(capital accumulation) but also the participation of feminism itself in the
“microphysics of power” (Foucault 1995, 139) that constitute the macro-
political oppression and exploitation of people in the sex industry.
Parsing sex work as the metamorphosis of the commodity through an
intersectional second skin, we see that the plight of the prostitute—when, in
fact, there is a plight (more on this below)—often lies not in her woman-
liness, per se, but rather in the degree to which her impoverishment, her
gender, her race, her sexuality, her age, her religion, her legal status, her
looks, or her ability (mental and physical) can be used against her in the
extraction of surplus value (profit) from her labor.13 And the question of
whether these can be used against the sex worker has little to do with the
presence or absence of formal freedom between any given sex worker and
her clients. Rather, the exploitation of the sex worker hinges upon any
number of structural second skins of cultural oppression (such as patriarchy,
white supremacy, heterosexism, ageism, religious chauvinism, nationalism,
looksism, ableism, and so on) that both allow capitalists to slap a particular
wage on a particular service provided by a particular body and establish that
wage and its working conditions not in accordance with the principle “from
each according to his ability; to each according to his need” (Marx [1875]
2010, 347) but rather in relation to other forms of labor available for sale
and purchase at a particular moment in time.
Much like Chandra Talpade Mohanty’s Western feminist who misses the
veil as a marker of agency when she wears only her imperialist, oppression-
seeking glasses (1991, 346–67), the feminist who sees only victims every-
where she or he looks at prostitution misses entirely the ingenuity and
agency of the human being who chooses to work in the sex industry rather
12
Hennessy uses the term to capture the constitutive or culturally ascribed inequality
accompanying any given worker to his or her encounter with the capitalist in the marketplace
(2006, 390).
13
With “legal status” I am referring to citizenship, work papers, and the degree of
criminalization to which a given sex worker is subject.

This content downloaded from 159.242.176.110 on Fri, 12 Dec 2014 15:11:40 PM

All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions
 S I G N S Autumn 2012 y 63

than, say the sweatshop industry (or even, for that matter, the knowledge
industry; see Anonymous, Ph.D. 1999), because the wages and working
conditions are, to his or her mind, better. According to the prevalent
feminist logic of prostitution as the measure of woman, Ashley Dupré is a
better canary in the coal mine of gender inequality than Chun Yu Wang, and
Eliot Spitzer is a better fit for the role of canary-killing cat than, say, Jack
Abramoff.14 Hence, too, the often uncritical feminist embrace of a figure like
New York Times columnist Nicholas Kristof, who rants and rages against the
exploitation of female prostitutes halfway across the globe, even as he sings
the praises of sweatshops. The faulty logic at work here—that closing sweat-
shops forces people into prostitution—not only problematically relies upon
Kristof’s own moralizing determination that the sex industry unilaterally
offers comparatively worse wages and working conditions than the sweat-
shop industry but also, incredibly, offers sweatshops as a solution to the
problem of poverty driving many to work in any number of different capac-
ities for very low wages in terrible conditions.15 Conversely, woman as the
measure of prostitution misses entirely the exploitation that men can expe-
rience in the sex industry, not because they are women but because they
are men, impoverished, gender nonconforming, of color, or gay, or young,
or undocumented, or criminalized, non-English speaking, conventionally
“ugly,” or living with physical or mental disabilities, and so on.16 Woman as
the measure of prostitution misses, too, the exploitation that transpeople can
experience in the sex industry, not because they are women but because they
are trans, impoverished, of color, gay, young, undocumented or criminal-
ized, non-English speaking, conventionally “ugly,” living with physical or
mental disabilities, and so on (see Ryan 2006).
But lest the intersectionalization of some sex-working subjects’ oppres-
sion and exploitation inadvertently reinforce blanket stereotypes associated
with the plight of the prostitute, I want to shift the focus of attention to the
privilege—the agency—that also becomes visible when we invite class into
the feminist debate on prostitution. For, once having grasped class as a

14
Chun Yu Wang is the author of Chicken Feathers and Garlic Skin: Diary of a Chinese
Garment Factory Girl on Saipan (2009). During the mid-1990s, Abramoff successfully lobbied
on behalf of Saipan sweatshop owners against the enforcement of laws restricting such abhor-
rent working conditions as forced abortions. See Goodman (2006).
15
Should Kristof and his followers train their sights on the International Monetary Fund,
the World Bank, and other minions of neoliberalism and global capitalism, people might have
choices other than survival sex work or sweatshop labor, upon release from geopolitical debt
bondage.
16
This is particularly evident in the (straight) porn film industry, wherein men are notori-
ously paid significantly less than women.

This content downloaded from 159.242.176.110 on Fri, 12 Dec 2014 15:11:40 PM

All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions
64 y Beloso

theory of privilege and oppression, one begins to see that both within and
beyond the sex industry some women are more equal than others (to
paraphrase George Orwell). Taking seriously both privilege as the flip side
of the coin of oppression and the complex intersections of these two along
any number of axes of cultural privilege and oppression that Crenshaw and
others in her wake have theorized as constitutive of intersectionality, we see
that privilege along one axis can mitigate oppression along another, even
within the sex industry itself. As Siobhan Brooks (quoted in Soldano 2010)
succinctly puts it, “Not everybody can sell their sex equally.”17 Taking
seriously both privilege as a mitigator of oppression and class as a dynamic,
rather than reified, relation between labor and capital, we also see that the
selfsame person may be today’s woman-as-laborer, selling sex as “the
particular product of [her] individual labor,” and tomorrow’s woman-as-
capitalist, buying and selling sex as “the particular product[s] of [other]
individual[s’] labor”—and vice versa (Marx [1861–63] 1969, 509). One
might think here of former nude model and stripper Danni Ashe, aka “the
billion download woman,” who is now an Internet entrepreneur overseeing
a “stable” of more than one hundred women and reportedly grossing more
than $300,000 in monthly revenue (Russell 1998), and former stripper
and “queen of porn” Jenna Jameson, who recently sold the highly prof-
itable Internet pornography company she created in 2000 to Playboy
Enterprises. Moreover, as Angela Davis (1983, 17) has observed, intimate
labor of all sorts has throughout history served for many women as an
exploitative means to a liberatory end.18
Last but not least, through the lens of class analysis one begins to see the
mutually imbricated privilege and oppression structuring what Laura Agus-
tín has recently theorized as “the rescue industry” (2007) and Jo Doezema
describes as “Western feminists’ ‘wounded attachment’ to the ‘third world
prostitute’ ” (2001), whereby a radical abolitionist feminist such as Donna
Hughes makes an excellent living as an endowed women’s studies program
chair with her research funded by the State Department, while the women
and men employed in the massage parlors she helped shut down in Rhode
Island (a state with one of the highest unemployment rates in the nation)
endure forcible unemployment, detainment, deportation, and incarcera-
tion.19 In this vein, and in one of the English language’s greater ironies,

17
Indeed, as Cynthia Enloe has observed, white privilege can mitigate the (variously
structured) oppressions of sex work to such a degree that white women selling sex to white
men are often not seen as prostitutes at all; in contrast, racism can exacerbate the oppressions of
sex work by rendering women of color hypervisible as prostitutes (2000, 84).
18
For more on this, see Kempadoo (2001).
19
For more on this, see Happy Endings? (2009).

This content downloaded from 159.242.176.110 on Fri, 12 Dec 2014 15:11:40 PM

All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions
 S I G N S Autumn 2012 y 65

the “abolitionist” feminist seeking the aid of the police state (rather than,
say, the welfare state) in his or her fight against prostitution is frequently if
unwittingly at cross-purposes with the prison abolitionist feminist, who sees
the criminalization of sex work as but one more poverty-to-prison pipeline
and the police themselves as no small source of oppression for sex workers.20
One begins to see here, too, the widely divergent relationships to labor and
capital structuring the “will to empower” (Cruikshank 1999) of New York
Times columnists Bob Herbert, who tried to rescue an unnamed young
woman selling sex on Atlanta’s Metropolitan Parkway in 2006, and Kristof,
who has in recent years tried to rescue women selling sex in Cambodia.
Selling the stories of these women as “reality porn” (Debbie Nathan quoted
in Broeske 2006), Herbert and Kristof participate in what Katha Pollitt
recently described as “a long tradition of privileged men rescuing individual
prostitutes as a kind of whirlwind adventure” (2004). In so doing, they earn
wages for “the particular product of [their] individual labor” (Marx [1861–
63] 1969, 509–10) and a profit for the New York Times, but in the wake of
these stories, the women they seek to rescue merely return to what are, to
their minds, the best wages and working conditions available to them: sex
work.

Conclusion
If we as feminists are to honor the central tenets of the feminist standpoint
epistemology that gave rise to women’s studies as the academic arm of
feminism—that knowledge production is never objective and must always
be checked against dissenting perspectives—then we must check the fem-
inist debate on prostitution against the dissenting perspectives of the sex-
working subjects about whom so much has been and is being said. By taking
sex workers’ choices and visions of liberation at least as seriously as our own
choices, we stand to realize that the exploitation endemic to some sex work
is not just something that happens to prostitutes; rather, it is part and parcel

20
On the welfare state, Davis observed that “the dismantling of the welfare system under
the so-called welfare reform law will probably lead to further expansion of the sex industry”
(quoted in Brooks 1999, 183). In contrast to the prison abolitionist feminist’s suspicion of and
resistance to the police state, Take Back the Night events frequently feature the police as
champions and protectors of women’s nights. For more on this relation, see Williams (2007)
and Hoffman (2008). This irony is of course underscored by the contemporary co-optation of
the legacy of nineteenth-century slavery abolitionists in order to silence people working in the
sex industry who do not consider themselves to be slaves. See Enloe (2000, 2003) and White
(2007) for transnational engagements with the police state as provocateur, often in savior’s
clothing, of the oppression and exploitation of sex workers.

This content downloaded from 159.242.176.110 on Fri, 12 Dec 2014 15:11:40 PM

All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions
66 y Beloso

of everything that happens under the sign of capitalism. Radical-feminism-

cum-abolitionist-feminism has too long masked its disavowal and disloca-
tion of the economic exploitation endemic to capitalism as heteropatriar-
chy. Sex work has become one of neoliberal feminism’s favorite scapegoats,
whereby many of us can deny the reality that under the current political
economy, “what has been repressed, the idea of sin, is capital itself” (Ben-
jamin [1921] 1996, 289). To seek to save one’s soul by saving prostitutes
is thus to imagine that, under capitalism, all privilege is not purchased at
the expense of another’s exploitation. It is to imagine that some of us are
above the law of capital and that capitalism is not an adversarial, zero sum
system.
Feminist and queer theory that rolls right past or right over the intersec-
tional, agentic subjectivity of sex workers is premised in the falsehood that
atonement—rather than “guilt pervasive”—is possible under capitalism
(Benjamin [1921] 1996, 289). To proclaim that prostitution harms all
women, everywhere, is to cover over the harm that we all do every day, to
varying degrees, as participants in our political economy. To overlook our
own complicity, as producers and consumers, in the pricing of sexual ser-
vices and the construction of cultural hierarchies that enable economic
exploitation in every labor sector is to refuse to flip the intersectional coin.
Inasmuch as sex work functions as feminist and queer theory’s imaginary
outside, whoromyopia is in no small part a means of preserving the fantasy of
an imaginary outside to capitalism—the fantasy that some of us living under
capitalism have ingeniously managed to finagle a way of not selling out.21 It
is to trade the farsighted feminist project of expanding the range of mean-
ingful choices available to human beings for the shortsighted project of
taking one choice away from them—whether by evacuating the choice to
work in the sex industry of all meaning by dismissing it as false conscious-
ness, or by so criminalizing this choice that to make it is to find oneself
squashed beneath the iron heel of the prison industrial complex. Whoro-
myopia is thus also predicated upon the fantasy that some of us have
somehow managed to get a special purchase on a true consciousness about
sex work (miraculously uninflected by our own relations to the means of
production), while others of us have, sadly, fallen prey to false consciousness
about sex work.
To correct for whoromyopia is to give the lie to the notion that
equality—including but not limited to gender and sexual equality—is pos-

21
I use the term “whoromyopia” to describe the limited view of sex work and sex workers
held by feminists who have lost class as a theory of oppression. I am indebted to Kent Brintnall
for this formulation.

This content downloaded from 159.242.176.110 on Fri, 12 Dec 2014 15:11:40 PM

All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions
 S I G N S Autumn 2012 y 67

sible under capitalism. And if we truly want to be more than “merely

cultural” (Butler 1997)—if we are to seize heteronormativity by the roots
rather than by its offshoots—then we must challenge the political economy
that has taken and continues to take advantage of anything it can, including
feminism, in order to take advantage of millions. We must find a way to
recontextualize the various second skins that, for so many of us, capital turns
against us into instruments of our own exploitation. We must, instead, turn
these second skins into instruments of solidarity with all workers under
capitalism, including sex workers. Failing this, we may rest assured that
capital will proceed unchecked in the appropriation of gender and sexual
oppression—and any number of other forms of cultural oppression it can
appropriate—to both further entrench and mask the direct correspondence
between those who enjoy the freedom to choose their own relationship to
the sexual body as a means of production and those who enjoy freedom
from want (an infinitesimal percent of the global population at best) and to
have us fall for the ruse that desire could somehow ever be autonomous
from need. Together, we can do better than this. The time has come to
radically reread class into the feminist debate on prostitution and to reckon
with all that we—“whores, housewives, and others” (among others)—have
lost in translation.
Program in Gender, Women’s, and Sexuality Studies
Butler University

References
Acker, Joan, and Kate Barry. 1984. “Comments on MacKinnon’s ‘Feminism, Marx-
ism, Method, and the State.’ ” Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society
10(1):175–79.
Agustín, Laura María. 2007. Sex at the Margins: Migration, Labour Markets and the
Rescue Industry. London: Zed.
Allman, Paula, Peter McLaren, and Glenn Rikowski. 2005. “After the Box People:
The Labor-Capital Relation as Class Constitution and Its Consequences for
Marxist Educational Theory and Human Resistance.” In Capitalists and Con-
querors: A Critical Pedagogy against Empire, ed. Peter McLaren, 135–65. Lan-
ham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield.
Anonymous, Ph.D. 1999. “I’d Rather Be a Whore than an Academic.” Bad Subjects,
no. 46. http://bad.eserver.org/issues/1999/46/anonymous.html.
Bell, Shannon. 1994. Reading, Writing, and Rewriting the Prostitute Body. Bloom-
ington: Indiana University Press.
Benjamin, Walter. (1921) 1996. “Capitalism as Religion.” In Selected Writings. Vol.
1, 1913–1926, ed. Marcus Bullock and Michael W. Jennings, 288–91. Cam-
bridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press.

This content downloaded from 159.242.176.110 on Fri, 12 Dec 2014 15:11:40 PM

All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions
68 y Beloso

Broeske, Pat. 2006. “400 Dead Women: Now Hollywood Is Intrigued.” New York
Times, May 21. http://www.nytimes.com/2006/05/21/movies/21broe.html
?pagewanted=all.
Brooks, Siobhan. 1999. “Sex Work and Feminism: Building Alliances through a
Dialogue between Siobhan Brooks and Professor Angela Davis.” Hastings Wom-
en’s Law Journal 10(1):181–87.
Butler, Judith. 1993. Bodies That Matter: On the Discursive Limits of “Sex.” New
York: Routledge.
———. 1997. “Merely Cultural.” Social Text 52/53 15(3–4):265–77.
Crenshaw, Kimberlé Williams. 1995. “Mapping the Margins: Intersectionality,
Identity Politics, and Violence against Women of Color.” In Critical Race The-
ory, ed. Kimberlé Crenshaw, Neil Gotanda, Gary Peller, and Kendall Thomas,
357–83. New York: New Press.
Cruikshank, Barbara. 1999. The Will to Empower: Democratic Citizens and Other
Subjects. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press.
Davis, Angela Y. 1983. Women, Race and Class. New York: Vintage.
Doezema, Jo. 2001. “Ouch! Western Feminists’ ‘Wounded Attachment’ to the
‘Third World Prostitute.’ ” Feminist Review, no. 67, 16–38.
Ebert, Teresa L. 1996. Ludic Feminism and After: Postmodernism, Desire, and Labor
in Late Capitalism. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press.
Enloe, Cynthia. 2000. Bananas, Beaches and Bases: Making Feminist Sense of Inter-
national Politics. Updated ed. Berkeley: University of California Press.
———. 2003. “The Globetrotting Sneaker.” In Women: Images and Realities, ed.
Amy Kesselman, Lily D. McNair, and Nancy Schniedewind, 587–91. Boston:
McGraw-Hill.
Foucault, Michel. 1995. Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison. Trans. Alan
Sheridan. New York: Vintage.
Fraser, Nancy. 1997. “Heterosexism, Misrecognition, and Capitalism: A Response
to Judith Butler.” Social Text 52/53 15(3–4):279–89.
———. 2009. “Feminism, Capitalism, and the Cunning of History.” New Left
Review 56:97–117.
Giobbe, Evelina. 1990. “Confronting the Liberal Lies about Prostitution.” In The
Sexual Liberals and the Attack on Feminism, ed. Dorchen Leidholdt and Janice
Raymond, 67–81. New York: Pergamon.
Goodman, Amy. 2006. “Forced Abortions and Sweatshops: A Look at Jack Abram-
off’s Ties to the South Pacific Island of Saipan and How Tom DeLay Became
an Advocate for Sweatshop Factory Owners.” Democracy Now, January 4. http://
www.democracynow.org/2006/1/4/forced _ abortions _ sweatshops _ a _ look
_ at.
Halley, Janet. 2006. Split Decisions: How and Why to Take a Break from Feminism.
Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.
Happy Endings? 2009. Directed by Tara Hurley. Providence, RI: It’s Not Easy Pro-
ductions.

This content downloaded from 159.242.176.110 on Fri, 12 Dec 2014 15:11:40 PM

All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions
 S I G N S Autumn 2012 y 69

Hartmann, Heidi. 1981. “The Unhappy Marriage of Marxism and Feminism:

Towards a More Progressive Union.” In Women and Revolution: A Discussion
of the Unhappy Marriage of Marxism and Feminism, ed. Lydia Sargent, 1–41.
Boston: South End.
Hennessy, Rosemary. 2000. Profit and Pleasure: Sexual Identities in Late Capital-
ism. New York: Routledge.
———. 2006. “Returning to Reproduction Queerly: Sex, Labor, Need.” Rethink-
ing Marxism 18(3):387–95.
Hoffman, Jessica. 2008. “On Prisons, Borders, Safety, and Privilege: An Open Letter to
White Feminists.” Alternet, April 4. http://www.alternet.org/reproductivejustice
/81260/.
Joseph, Miranda. 2002. Against the Romance of Community. Minneapolis: Univer-
sity of Minnesota Press.
Kempadoo, Kamala. 2001. “Women of Color and the Global Sex Trade: Transna-
tional Feminist Perspectives.” Meridians 1(2):28–51.
King, Deborah. 1988. “Multiple Jeopardies, Multiple Consciousness: The Context
of a Black Feminist Ideology.” Signs 14(1):42–72.
Klein, Naomi. 2001. “Naomi Klein: Global Crusader: Anti-Corporate No Logo Au-
thor Grew Up in Montreal, a Typical Teen Mall-Rat.” Interview by Donna
Nebenzahl. CommonDreams.org, June 16. http://www.commondreams.org
/headlines01/0616-01.htm.
Leigh, Carol, aka Scarlot Harlot. 1997. “Inventing Sex Work.” In Whores and Other
Feminists, ed. Jill Nagle, 223–31. New York: Routledge.
MacKinnon, Catharine. 1982. “Feminism, Marxism, Method, and the State: An
Agenda for Theory.” Signs 7(3):515–44.
———. 1983. “Feminism, Marxism, Method, and the State: Toward Feminist
Jurisprudence.” Signs 8(4):635–58.
———. 1984. “Reply to Miller, Acker and Barry, Johnson, West, and Gardiner.”
Signs 10(1):184–88.
Marx, Karl. (1847) 1963. The Poverty of Philosophy. New York: International.
———. (1861–63) 1969. Capital, Part II. Vol. 4, Theories of Surplus Value. Mos-
cow: Progress.
———. (1875) 2010. Critique of the Gotha Programme. In The First Interna-
tional and After. Vol. 3, Political Writings, ed. David Fernbach, 339–59. London:
Verso.
Marx, Karl, and Friederich Engels. (1848) 1986. The Communist Manifesto. New
York: Penguin.
McElroy, Wendy. 1999. “Prostitution: Reconsidering Research.” Spintech, Novem-
ber 12. http://www.zetetics.com/mac/articles/spin1199.html.
Mohanty, Chandra Talpade. 1991. “Under Western Eyes: Feminist Scholarship and
Colonial Discourses.” In Third World Women and the Politics of Feminism, ed.
Chandra Talpade Mohanty, Ann Russo, and Lourdes Torres, 333–58. Bloom-
ington: Indiana University Press.

This content downloaded from 159.242.176.110 on Fri, 12 Dec 2014 15:11:40 PM

All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions
70 y Beloso

Pollitt, Katha. 2004. “Kristof to the Rescue?” Nation, March 1. http://www

.thenation.com/article/kristof-rescue.
Rubin, Gayle. 1975. “The Traffic in Women: Notes on the ‘Political Economy’ of
Sex.” In Toward an Anthropology of Women, ed. Rayna R. Reiter, 157–210. New
York: Monthly Review.
———. 1984. “Thinking Sex: Notes for a Radical Theory of the Politics of Sexu-
ality.” In Pleasure and Danger: Exploring Female Sexuality, ed. Carole S. Vance,
267–319. Boston: Routledge & Kegan Paul.
———. 1993. “Misguided, Dangerous and Wrong: An Analysis of Anti-Pornography
Politics.” In Bad Girls and Dirty Pictures: The Challenge to Reclaim Feminism,
ed. Alison Assiter and Avedon Carol, 18–40. London: Pluto.
Rubin, Gayle, and Judith Butler. 1994. “Sexual Traffic.” differences 6(2–3):62–99.
Russell, Ron. 1998. “Sexbucks.com: On the Internet, Where Porn Means Mega-
Profits, L.A.’s Cybermistresses Are in the Vanguard of a Boom Industry.” New
Times L.A., September 17. http://www.danni.com/press/newtimes _ 091798
.html.
Ryan, Joelle. 2006. “Transgender Sex Workers.” In Encyclopedia of Prostitution and
Sex Work, ed. Melissa Ditmore, 499–506. London: Greenwood.
Soldano, Lauren. 2010. “College Seeks New Faculty Member for Women’s Studies
Department.” Campanil, February 18. http://www.thecampanil.com/college
-seeks-new-faculty-member-for-women.
St. James, Margo. 1980. “What’s a Girl Like You . . . ?” In Prostitutes, Our Life, ed.
Claude Jaget, 189–201. London: Falling Wall.
———. n.d. “Margo St. James: Founder of the Prostitutes’ Rights Movement in the
U.S.” Prostitutes’ Education Network. http://www.bayswan.org/margostory
.html.
Wang, Chun Yu. 2009. Chicken Feathers and Garlic Skin: Diary of a Chinese Gar-
ment Factory Girl on Saipan. As told to Walt F. J. Goodridge. New York: Passion
Profit.
White, Melissa Autumn. 2007. “Transnational and Intimate Crossings: The
‘Threatening Body’ of the ‘Migrant Sex Worker.’ ” Reconstruction 7(1). http://
reconstruction.eserver.org/071/white.shtml.
Williams, Kristian. 2007. Our Enemies in Blue: Police and Power in America. Cam-
bridge, MA: South End.

This content downloaded from 159.242.176.110 on Fri, 12 Dec 2014 15:11:40 PM

All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions