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Theorising maybe: A feminist/queer theory convergence

Carisa R. Showden Feminist Theory 2012 13: 3 DOI: 10.1177/1464700111429898 The online version of this article can be found at: http://fty.sagepub.com/content/13/1/3

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Article

Theorising maybe: A feminist/queer theory convergence

Carisa R. Showden
University of North Carolina at Greensboro, USA

Feminist Theory 13(1) 325 ! The Author(s) 2012 Reprints and permissions: sagepub.co.uk/journalsPermissions.nav DOI: 10.1177/1464700111429898 fty.sagepub.com

Abstract In this article, I examine the seemingly incompatible epistemologies of sex offered by dominance (governance) feminism and queer theory. While these bodies of work, especially when applied to US legal and political activity on prostitution, are commonly viewed as divergent sparring partners, I propose a convergence of the two in the form of a revived and enhanced sex-positive feminism. If dominance feminism is the theory of no to heterosexualitys male gender power, and if queer theory is the theory of yes to the defiant possibilities of sex, sex-positive feminism is a theory of maybe: it examines practices of gender and sexuality in multiple contexts to find the ways in which heterosexuality can sometimes reify, and other times resist, the transfer of eroticised dominance and submission to political practices of patriarchy. After tracing the split between feminism and queer theory and arguing for a sex-positive queer feminism, I use the example of prostitution to consider some theoretical and practical implications of this shift in feminist lenses. Keywords prostitution, queer theory, radical feminism, sex-positive feminism, sex wars, sex work

At a recent US academic conference, I presented a paper on feminist arguments for decriminalising prostitution. Its premise was that decriminalisation might serve as an incomplete but positive step towards both opening up sexuality norms and ameliorating some of the dangers of the practice of prostitution. If that is true, decriminalisation could facilitate some of the goals of abolitionism while also serving other purposes. I expected spirited intellectual engagement that (I hoped) would help me hone and strengthen the argument. Instead, the response from

Corresponding author: Carisa R. Showden, Department of Political Science, University of North Carolina at Greensboro, 237 Graham Building, PO Box 26170, Greensboro, NC 27402-6170, USA Email: carisa_showden@uncg.edu

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Feminist Theory 13(1)

many feminists in the audience was angry denunciation. Once I had been informed that all prostitutes are total victims and crack whores and there is no distinction between tracking and prostitution, I was clearly supposed to concede that any eorts to create structural conditions for agency within prostitution were signs of my ignorance. My failure to grant these points seemed further proof that not only was I an idiot, I was also either a bad feminist or an anti-feminist. I was a bit stunned; and the more I reected on this interaction, the more I started to wonder if I had to stop calling myself a feminist. But that I am unwilling to do. Feminist debates about prostitution are largely driven by more general theories of sexuality. Thus, since that panel, I have been left pondering whether there is any room for disagreement in a feminist theory of sexuality, and if so, where? It seems clear that the crux of the impasse I had hit is an epistemological one: what dierent theorists on the left know not only about what sex is but also how it produces the world. This is, of course, the cannon fodder of the long-standing feminist sex wars, except that I missed the bulletin about the war apparently having been won by one side. The sex wars as they exist now are purportedly between feminism and queer theory, both of which know sexuality very dierently; the incommensurability of feminisms and queer theorys epistemologies of sex have, seemingly, led to inimical political commitments. In this article, I explore conicts between feminist and queer theory, particularly in the United States, in order to argue that feminisms possibilities are more robust than some contemporary accounts of the dierences between the two would suggest. My argument proceeds in three parts. First, I briey outline the current narrative about feminisms sexual epistemology and its split from queer theorys, arguing that the apparent sharpness of that division relies largely on a descriptive reductionism that does not entirely match the reality of either theoretical development or political praxis. The epistemological dierences between feminism and queer theory about how sexuality functions both materially and discursively, while real, are made to seem more acute than they are by the eacement of critical divisions between feminisms. In particular, as dominance (radical) feminism has become governance feminism on the question of prostitution, other voices, voices specically feminist in that they take gender as their animating core of analysis, have been delegitimised.1 Dominance feminism thus has come to wield a specic kind of power a dominance of its own that needs to be challenged. Second, I argue that a potential solution to this critical split is not to cede the political ground to dominance feminism, nor to give up on feminism and throw in with queer theory all the way, but for a dierent version of feminism to oer a sustained challenge to the dominance view of sex and desirable policy outcomes on issues related to sexuality. A revived sex-positive feminism can provide solutions to some serious problems with queer theory while supplying an alternative vision to dominance feminisms on the question of feminist sexual epistemology and political resistance. Finally, I consider some theoretical and practical implications of this shift in feminist lenses, using the example of prostitution, both as a practice and as a

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subject of policy. Prostitution needs a specically feminist policy framework because, as queer theorists have pointed out, feminism assumes a certain heterosexual orientation toward the world. And while queer theorys challenge to this assumption is important, prostitution is largely a heterosexual problem.2 A theoretical framework sucient for contending with prostitutions ills (and limited promises) ought to be a framework that foregrounds the problems that arise from many current practices of heterosexuality, but that can cope with sexuality in a multi-faceted way, and be cognisant of the dangers, and not just the benets, of using the dominating powers of the state to regulate human sexuality. This theoretical framework can emerge from a pragmatic convergence between feminism and queer theory in the form of an emboldened sex-positive feminism. My argument is here in conversation with and building on the work of theorists ` le Aina Barale, Carolyn Dever, Maxine Eichner, and such as Linda Garber, Miche others who have argued in dierent ways that both feminism and queer theory are useful, but incomplete, if adopted separately. They are, as Garber writes, two terms that are mutually implicated (2001: 1). In thinking about these mutual implications, what I hope to add to the discussion is not just a call for a critical theory of sexuality that takes seriously both queer theory and feminism, or a set of questions each side might consider, but a naming of this possible convergence and some consideration of the ramications of working politically at this intersection. In making these claims, I do not mean to imply that any one theory has uncontested, or unmediated, inuence on specic policies. As Jo Phoenix has demonstrated, policy objectives such as abolition, harm minimisation, or regulation are often derived from theory but tend to be adopted in multiple and contradictory ways. Further, models of state intervention (actual legislation, such as criminalisation or legalisation) are also usually mixed and only loosely related to the stated objectives (2009: 1319). Finally, there is no guarantee that a policy will be implemented in such a way that its objectives will actually be achieved; indeed, with contradictory aims, it would be impossible for most legislation to meet its goals fully. As many governmentality feminists in the United Kingdom who study the implementation of prostitution laws have discovered, the intersection of neoliberalism with prostitution policy produces more similar than dissimilar outcomes even with highly dierent legislative models.3 Still, while the relationship between theory, policy, and outcome is not a closed loop, both theory and law matter in their operations as norms of subjectication, and, as political scientist Barbara Sullivan has shown, regulatory models are not wholly unrelated to outcomes.4 Certainly the eects of dominance feminism have been palpable in US prostitution law even as other theories and governance imperatives have been at work as well. Thus, one background assumption in this article is that, although theory does not determine policy, its normative political impact should not be discounted. It is, in fact, partly the success of dominance feminism in setting the normative prostitution policy framework in the US and parts of Northern Europe that has led me to this inquiry into feminisms sexual epistemology.

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Chronicles of an epistemological divide

To see the arguments at stake in the current impasse on sexuality and power generally, and prostitution specically, one needs to examine the evolution of critical theories of sex and power. There are two dierent, but deeply related, narratives of this history. One takes place within feminism, the second between feminism and queer theory. Both stories produce recognisable, but partial, biographies of their main actors. Story One is the familiar narrative of dominance (so-called anti-sex) feminism and the sex radical (pro-sex) feminism that arose largely in response. Dominance feminisms theory of sex is associated most closely with Catharine MacKinnons work on sexual harassment and pornography, and Carole Patemans master/subject model of the sexual contract.5 This framework has been developed by Sheila Jereys, Melissa Farley, Janice Raymond, and Rebecca Whisnant, among others, in the analysis of the roles that pornography and prostitution play in producing and sustaining womens social and political subordination relative to men. The crux of the dominance feminist view of how sexuality creates gender, which becomes political power dierence as norms of sexuality construct gender hierarchies, is articulated succinctly in MacKinnons Toward a Feminist Theory of the State: Sexuality . . . is a form of power. Gender, as socially constructed, embodies it, not the reverse. Women and men are divided by gender, made into the sexes as we know them, by the social requirements of heterosexuality, which institutionalizes male sexual dominance and female sexual submission. If this is true, sexuality is the linchpin of gender inequality (1989: 113). Further, [t]he man/woman dierence and the dominance/submission dynamic dene each other. This is the social meaning of sex and the distinctively feminist account of gender inequality (pp. 113114). If feminisms goal is to eradicate gender inequality (which is power inequality), then, on this view, heterosexuality must be dismantled. Heterosexuality creates men as dominators and possessors of power and women as subordinated victims of power; only by eradicating dominant/submissive sexual relations can dominance and subordination in social and political institutions be eliminated.6 To adopt Janet Halleys useful summary of dominance feminism, we can say that it meets three denitional minima: M>F; M/F; carrying a brief for F. That is, feminism is a theory of subordination and domination (M>F), in a world always and primarily divided by gender (M/F); because feminism sees womens interests as subordinated, the function of feminism is to cultivate the grounds for anti-subordination (that is, to promote womens equality relative to men, to carry a brief for F).7 In response to the dominance analysis, sex radical, or pro-sex, feminists argued that control of womens sexuality is enforced by legal and social mechanisms that either deny or punish womens pursuit of sexual pleasure and autonomy. Thus, undermining patriarchy requires theorising yes: encouraging women to claim and explore desire, pleasure, and explicit sexual knowledge and self-dened eroticism.8 Sex radicals agree with dominance feminists that there is an intimate relationship between sexuality, political power, and a gendered world order; but for sex radicals, the way to disrupt patriarchal connections of sex with power is to focus on

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womens right to experience perhaps even demand more sex, not less. While also agreeing that danger is always a possibility in sex, the sex radicals argued that so are resistance and pleasure. Sexuality can be a site of self-denition, a way to contest, not just reiterate, patriarchal assumptions about what women want and are worth. In the 1980s and 1990s, sex radical feminists often aligned themselves with sexually marginalised groups (sex workers, transsexuals, lesbians and gay men, among others), and examined how sex acts and sexual identities could provide alternate ways of using sexual power and living as sexual beings. These are fairly intractable divisions, and, according to current mainstream accounts of the development of feminisms theory of sex, this story reached its nouement sometime in the 1990s. In specic arenas, notably US legal theory, de dominance feminism apparently won the war,9 and one of its most successful campaigns was in the political theory of and policy arguments over prostitution, discursively conating prostitution with tracking and rape, and successfully promoting abolitionist policies in many places.10 Sex-positive feminism, meanwhile, spawned a non-feminist successor: queer theory.11 Thus, Story Two: here the challenge to dominance feminisms epistemology of sex comes from outside the feminist frame. Gayle Rubin suggested as early as 1984 that while feminism is an appropriate theoretical lens for analysing gender, it may not be sucient for understanding questions of sex. This was not an argument for a total split, only a suggestion that a gender frame was a partial one.12 But as this view was taken up, it developed into a methodological distinction allocating sexuality to queer studies and gender to feminism.13 Driving this division of objects of study was the seemingly essential heterosexuality (and heterosexism) of feminism. As Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick argued in Epistemology of the Closet, because feminisms raison de tre is to analyse and critique the gender division between men and women because there must be men and there must be women for feminism to be cognisable feminism is, logically, heterosexual and heterosexist (1990: 16). If the point of ones theory is to explain womens subordination to men, then a heterosexist world view seems inescapable. A descriptive heterosexuality supports, as Judith Butler explains, the normativity and irreversibility of that binary and posit[s] relations of complementarity or asymmetry between its terms in ways that only shor[e] up, without marking, the heterosexist assumptions of the paradigm (Butler, 1997: 2). The sex (queer theory)/gender (feminism) split was contested, early and notably by Butler in her 1994 article Against Proper Objects. There she argued that rather than split from feminism, queer projects ought to work within feminism to make the feminist project the undoing of the M/F distinction. But while Butler and other poststructuralist feminists attempt to theorise gender without the heterosexuality they queer gender and such approaches could easily be posited as, in part, either a continuation or revivication of pro-sex feminism, they often get read as really queer theory. This happens partly because Butlers theory of performativity has been so inuential in queer theory and partly because she relies on a poststructuralist theory of power in her theory of gender trouble. In contradistinction to a

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top-down dominance model of power, Butler (following from Michel Foucault) employs a performative and productive model of power as discursive, subjectifying, and owing in capillary relations between people and institutions. In this model, dominance as ossied relations still exists, but it is not total.14 Such a theory makes possible the idea of resistance. And queer theory is, at its core, a theory of resistance. Despite Butlers argument that the only way to hold feminism accountable for its heterosexism is to force analyses of sex into analyses of gender, much of queer theory has developed in a eld of opposition to feminism, and this clarity about what it is not is perhaps its most unifying and descriptively substantive feature. Queer theory is, as Adam Isaiah Green notes, a theory of both radical deconstruction and radical subversion (2007: 2829). To be queer, then, is to be unshackled from rm substantive denitions and to live in opposition to hegemonic norms, particularly about what kinds of sex acts are appropriate. Queer, as Nikki Sullivan writes, is better thought of as a verb (a set of actions), rather than as a noun (an identity, or even a nameable positionality formed in and through the practice of particular actions) (Sullivan, 2003: 50). And those actions include anything that protests both the idea and content of normal behaviour and static, norm-regulated identities. Further, while feminism stakes its analytical ground on gender dierence and gender identity as it follows from sexuality, queer theory argues that sexual practices are not the source of identity. The meanings of sex acts are socially constructed and, therefore, re-constructible. This makes sex acts the vehicle of resistance rather than necessary practices of subordination.15 So while (dominance) feminism presumes unity through identity the political subject women, crafted through shared experiences queer is anti-identity. Acts do not reveal anything ontologically signicant about ones subjectivity. Queer theory is, nally, rmly deconstructive, but at best only implicitly and uncomfortably constructive. It is then perhaps not surprising that dominance feminism has triumphed in the legal and political sphere, where positive projects are necessary for action to happen. There are many feminist critiques of queer theory, but central to my purposes here is the argument that queer theory fails to provide the norms by which one can judge when acts are subversive, normatively disruptive, politically empowering, and discursively paradigm-challenging. Just engaging in queer acts, or engaging in acts with a queer sensibility, is not enough to render those acts subversive. As Maxine Eichner (2009) argues, while dominance feminism is too totalising and inattentive to the ruptures in the gender hierarchy, queer theory is too quick to assume that putting a positive spin on sex acts makes them resistant.16 The problem then is not just that queer theory provides no way to judge when acts are resistant, but that in this omission, it fails to harness the potential embedded in the theory of power developed by Foucault, Butler, and others: In generally attaching a positive valence to sex . . . queer theory sacrices poststructuralisms promise of yielding more nuanced, textured analyses of sexuality that grapple with the complexities of power in this area (Eichner, 2009: 10).

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Eichner contends that queer theory requires some more developed normative theory of the appropriate terms of sexual citizenship than simply promoting resistance for resistances sake (2009: 13). Or, as I have argued in a dierent context, what is needed is an ethics to enable us to judge when an act is, or is not, subversive and why.17 I invoke ethics in the Foucauldian sense, the conscious practice of freedom (Foucault, [1984] 1997: 284), where someone develops a practice through which she can, as Mark Bevir explains, negotiate [her] relationship to [moral] requirements and restrictions (Bevir, 1999: 75). Such a critical social theory of sex is one that would situate and dierentiate resistant practices in discursive frames. This could, as Eichner also points out, bring back to feminism (tting in the denitional minima) greater possibilities for individual and collective agency for women without assuming that some undierentiated potential for agency is always already there. But this is only possible if the denitional minima of feminism are articulated outside the dominance frame, so that M/F is one signicant aspect of social power; M>F sometimes follows from this; and the brief for F is carried, but in dierentiated ways depending upon situated analyses of how M/F and M>F are articulated in any one institution or policy area. That is, following the lead of antiessentialist and intersectional feminisms, not only can one be feminist without being unduly reductive about womens subjectivity, but, further, one can look to see how gender operates in the world without assuming a priori that subordination exists in the particular situation under examination. We could, in essence, reduce even further the minima Halley provides: assume gender (though not necessarily static or binarised), and look for, but do not assume, the presence of either subordination in general or subordination precisely along gendered lines.18 Halley dened feminism precisely to argue why a break, such as the one between feminism and queer theory, is necessary.19 Before I protest her divergentism and argue instead for a pragmatic convergence, I want to highlight what Tracy Higgins has rightly pointed out as one of Halleys more important critiques of dominance feminism: it is not getting rid of power or subordination. Feminists are not powerless; they themselves do or wish to wield certain kinds of power. So feminist gains might not mean less oppression for everyone but different oppression resulting from an exercise of feminist power (Cossman et al., 2003: 632; emphasis added). When Halley writes about dominance feminism as governance feminism, she means precisely that it has exercised a signicant inuence in law-making and public policy on many issues of sexuality, including prostitution. It takes what it knows about sex and wields that knowledge as power in dening how other women are allowed or should be allowed to experience sexuality and make use of their sexual rights.20 And because what dominance feminism knows about sexuality is so certain, yet so utterly at odds with what others who ought to be allies know about sex, this epistemological divide has signicant consequences. The problem for those of us trying to develop a critical theory of sex is that contextualising both subordination and resistance seems to leave us in the chasm

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between a feminist sexual epistemology and a queer one. The results of our analyses are deemed both insuciently feminist and insuciently queer. For example, dening prostitution as a practice dierentiated by actors and places fails the queer theory test by emphasising subordination in many areas, and fails the feminist theory test by arguing that the sex, in and of itself, is not going to solidify patriarchy. So what? Well, to the degree that governance feminism governs, and queer is not-governance deantly disengaged from positive construction, prostitution policies as normative forces suer from the silencing of alternative visions and power plays, as does feminist theorys explanatory force beyond policy concerns. Story Two gives us two actors (feminism and queer theory) with fundamentally opposed views of what we know about and from sex. There is no middle ground that do not do violence to the very principles that make each theory what it is. Thus, one has to choose sides, though both sides have serious aws. The problems with feminism stem from its role here as the theory of no.21 Sexual practices produce subordination. Heterosexual practices, in particular, are the source of gendered power imbalances. So to be feminist is to say no to heterosexuality (sex with dierence, where dierence is domination). Some argue there is room here for yes, even yes to sex between men and women, but only on the basis of equality where equality is ill-dened. For dominance feminism, then, the only way to freedom is to get rid of heterosexual desire desire for dominance and submission in sexual practices, as these practices produce political forms of oppression. The problems with queer theory arise from its deant opposition. If feminism is the theory of no, then queer theory is the theory of yes! If it feels good (empowering), it must be good (empowering). One signicant measure of freedom here is that sex and identity are divorced from each other. Whatever sex acts one does are not determined by, nor do they produce, a particular subject position or indicate particular political possibilities. Sex becomes unmoored from gender. So if dominance feminism is the theory of rigid structures, queer theory is anti-structure. And damningly, it is anti-norm. It oers up no way to assess when transgression is eective or why. What would make a sex act successfully queer? And what resources would enable persons to engage in it? Where Story One ended in triumph for dominance feminism and defeat for sex radicalism, Story Two seems to end in stalemate. Now, at a theoretical level, divergentism can be protable; it forces social theorists to stand outside comfortable paradigms and see social problems from multiple angles. The epistemological incommensurability of dominance feminism and queer theory brings into stark relief the weaknesses (and strengths) of both perspectives on how power works. But given those weaknesses, some form of convergentism is needed so that, when theory informs practice, the same people are not consistently marginalised. With that said, not all theories can be converged. The epistemological gap between dominance feminism (sex is the problem) and queer theory (sex is the solution), isnt bridgeable. But the epistemological distance between sex-positive feminism

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and queer theory is bridgeable through, perhaps, a sex-positive queer feminism, a theory of maybe.22 This theory of maybe is one already situated within feminist theory, just not the narrow vision of feminism that has become the subject of the feminist versus queer theory sex wars. Some sex-positive feminism, for example, oered a subject neither fully dominated nor blithely transgressive; the subject had agency, but only partial, or constrained, agency. While Kathryn Abrams (1995: 314324) is likely right that much sex radicalism left unclear what this constrained agency looks like and how it develops, this sense of the constituted/constituting nature of power, subjectivity, and agency creates a place within feminist theory for an ethics of evaluation allowing us to judge when yes to sex is resistant, when it is not, and why. This shift to agency constrained by the particularity of ones situation can begin to help us locate the political norms that are necessary to take seriously the very real structural components to sexual danger, the sexual construction of gendered power relations, and the reasons that no is sometimes the most necessary and resistant response to sexual encounters. But it can also help locate the reasons that yes is sometimes an empowering, and resistant, response, when individual deance is a more politically engaged institutional critique.23 Most importantly, it reminds us that whether no or yes seems warranted, the contestatory power of either response is itself partial; sex alone will not be sucient to challenge the social order of gender nor the dominant discursive paradigms of sexuality. A revived sexpositive queer feminism, then, needs to clarify the contexts that enable more or less resistance in sexual acts and sexual relations.

Where the norms are: A modest sex positivism

In sum, then, queer theory may have helped theorists focus on precisely the function that a revivied pro-sex feminism needs to serve within feminism. But this theory is still feminist it carries a brief for F; sees subordination, even if it posits the workings and scope of it dierently; and focuses on gendered sexual relations. There are, though, limits to some versions of sex-positive feminism, which is why I propose expanding on specic insights it provides, not necessarily adopting old sex positivism wholesale. Much sex radicalism is criticised for being articulated by a minority, privileged subset of sex workers and sex worker activists. While many are privileged, this alone is not enough to negate the positive contributions they have to oer. A more serious criticism is that some pro-sex feminists, like dominance feminists, made sex the central gure of womens liberation, where the quest for a politically correct feminist sexuality . . . is replaced by the quest for a politically incorrect sexuality that transgresses movement standards (Glick, 2000: 21). But that some forms of pro-sex feminism were individualistic and ahistorical (2000: 21) does not diminish the value of more nuanced positions within sex positivism in bringing together situated ethics, politically engaged critiques, and queer arguments both for

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decoupling sex from stigma and shame and for softening the link between sex and identity. Sex-positive feminism like queer theory advocates for womens yes, but also steers us closer to maybe through arguments about both sexuality and sex work as sites of multiple meanings and structural inequalities that need to be engaged directly rather than refused. Sex-positive theorist Wendy Chapkis argues that sex is a cultural tactic which can be used both to destabilise male power as well as to reinforce it . . . . Practices of prostitution, like other forms of commodication and consumption, can be read in more complex ways than simply as a conrmation of male domination. They may also be seen as sites of ingenious resistance and cultural subversion (1997: 2930). Sex radicals argue that, by displaying and practising sexuality in ways that are not rewarded or approved by the dominant culture, they are challenging views of who women are and what women want. While this sounds like a straightforward queer theory Yes!, it also points toward when yes might be ill-advised, or at least less resistant than recuperative.24 First, some sex radicals argue that sex work can serve a therapeutic function, allowing people to grow in their self-knowledge and to approach sex in a healthier way.25 They do not deny that women can be harmed by sex work, but rather claim that there are women who can and do choose this kind of labour for the benets it brings them and society. Allowing them that choice permits women sexual autonomy and sexual experimentation while acknowledging that dominant male sexual practice is . . . in dire need of therapy . . . . Therapy which works to free sexual fascination and satisfaction once and for all from its present connection with violence, domination, and subservience (Schwarzenbach, 2006: 237). The therapeutic argument then is not that sexuality is some natural state or set of acts needing to be liberated; rather, it is a socially constructed set of practices needing reconstruction. Claiming that sexuality needs more avenues for expression while premising that need on a call to challenge dominant modes of sexual practice is queer, as it assumes that more kinds of sex facilitate resistance. At the same time, the reasons that such resistance is needed include problems of subordination, violence, and powerfully constricting gender norms (specically of male toughness and female passivity both in general and in sexual interactions specically). This is hardly a banal if it feels good, it must be empowering ethic. This essentially ethical argument, which views therapeutic sex acts as practices of freedom, can be related to a second, essentially identity-based, argument. Some sex radicals argue that sex work either develops or liberates a new kind of sexuality: whore sexuality (or stripper sexuality), which is akin to other nonnormative sexual preferences or orientations such as homosexual, bisexual, or polyamorous (Johnson, 2006: 163). This form of sexuality tries to erase the distinction between good women and bad women based on sexual behaviour. Whore sexuality is certainly motivated by transgression, but it ts only uneasily within an ethics that is more broadly sex-positive queer feminism. The dierence between developing whore sexuality as an ethical mode of action, and liberating an identity that is currently repressed, is signicant, but not always clearly articulated in sex-positive

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feminism. An undierentiated whore sexuality, or a call for whore sexuality that fails to take into account the life experiences and opportunities for the women engaging it, collapses too easily into an idea of sexual desire as a natural urge that has been suppressed. This corresponds more to a dominance model of power than to a Foucauldian one. Further, such an identity simply posits itself as other: dominant models tell me to be good, so I am going to be bad. Hence, I am resisting power and rewriting dominant scripts. This does not mean that sexpositive whore sexuality has nothing to oer a critical theory of sexuality, only that its transgressive potential has to be measured against norms and opportunities arising from the situation(s) within which prostitutes (and other bad girls) are acting and remain queerly focused on actions and social constructions rather than identity-based claims. Finally, sex radicals agree with their critics that much sex work as currently practised is abusive, but insist that abuse is not inherent in sex as labour or commodied sex itself. Instead it is a function of more generalised congurations of power: that is, sex is not the only arena in which men exercise the power to abuse women.26 And it is the power to abuse, rather than sex or sex work, that needs to be criminalised and eradicated. On this view, calls to end prostitution for womens own good when not accompanied by calls, for example, to end marriage despite its signicant patriarchal, and often violent, trappings make it seem that abolitionism is ultimately about trying to control womens sexuality, not protect or promote it. Merri Lisa Johnson argues that [t]he persistent link between sex work and danger comes across as natural, but this expectation mysties the ideological work of the link. It is a load-bearing wall in the social construction of proper femininity (2006: 178). Because feminine has been coded to mean weak in relation to masculine, sex work is seen as naturally dangerous.27 To denaturalise the link between danger and sex work, the meaning of feminine needs to be challenged. One way sex-positive feminism launches this cultural protest is through arguments for legal and political changes away from abolitionism and criminalisation of prostitution. It hopes these protests will have two long-term eects. The rst is to regure what it means to be female in relation to what it means to be male. Emboldened by queer theory, sex-positive queer feminism would expand this reguring so that femininity is more than just the mirror of masculinity, dened perhaps in other terms, such as femininities in relation to each other. This responds to Butlers early argument that feminism needs to be the site of complicating or undoing the M/F distinction. Here heterosexuality (M/F) is part of a sex-positive queer feminist project, but not the whole of it. The second desired eect is to challenge views of feminine sexuality as submissive or imperilled. Concern about the dangers of sex work and womens sexuality could then be focussed on abuse rather than on sex treating the aberrations as such, rather than assuming the violence is natural or normal. Sex radicals assert that criminalising prostitution restricts womens sexual freedom by contributing to the stigma surrounding prostitution specically and sex

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more generally. Many further argue that sex has multiple meanings depending upon the context in which it is engaged, but that legal and regulatory schemes atten nuance, thereby promoting a singular meaning of sex for all citizens.28 And while I, too, would insist that sex acts can have multiple meanings, the interpretive limits imposed by the historically and culturally specic contexts in which they take place must always be borne in mind. We need to take seriously the sex radical critiques of existing juridical limits on sexual activities and cultural norms of good womanhood. But we should also remember, as legal scholar Jane Scoular writes, that sex work should be viewed with ambivalence: It is an activity which challenges the boundaries of heterosexist, married, monogamy but may also be an activity which reinforces the dominant norms of heterosexuality and femininity (2004: 348). Because sex and sex work have many meanings, but those meanings and the ability to deploy them are restricted by the material conditions under which prostitutes labour (and clients and outsiders come to understand sexuality), the sex radicalism perspective needs to be amended to t more clearly within a Foucauldian power frame. Note the convergence of feminist and queer epistemologies here. On the queer hand, sex does not have to reveal anything about ones core identity, and sex is a mode of transgression. But on the feminist hand, sex is about power, subordination is part of sex, and sometimes that subordination is problematic. Because of its anities with both queer theory and feminism, this sex-positive queer feminism is feminism as maybe: a qualied endorsement of sexual practices as politically resistant but fully within the denition of feminism as a theory of subordination and hegemonic heterosexuality. This theory can provide located, specic, non-universal norms of sexual resistance by excavating specic sites of sexual and political practice in order to see how subordination works in the particular location under study and what might count as resistance within these contexts given dierentiated practices, conceptual frameworks, and material resources. These excavations need not assume in advance that because the practice involves commercialisation, or sexual interactions, or men, that it will be bad or good for women. By remaining agnostic on this question, sex-positive queer feminism might be better able to locate resources that can facilitate resistance without assuming that equality or non-subordination is universally required for it. One danger of such local analyses is in potentially failing to see systemic links between practices in multiple sites. These links are important, and radical feminism has produced compelling analyses of these imbricated structures. But structural links are not the same as practices of power that precisely map onto each other in their intentions and eects. Both the linkages, and the dierences, are important in developing a theory of freedom and equality. In the frame of our two narratives of the sex/gender wars, while there are obvious anities between queer theory and sex-positive feminist theory, they are, fundamentally, dierent bodies of arguments. If we revive sex radicalism, we are continuing the rst story, not the second. Even if we think of sex-positive feminism as the queering of feminist theory, it is not queer through and through: it is animated by its brief for F; and

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while it has a more complicated relationship to the function of subordination questioning the linear through-line posited by radical feminism from heterosexual intercourse to womens civil rights, political standing, and social welfare it still has a theory of subordination and harm. Pro-sex feminism can, nally, stay within the heterosexual frame (M/F) without assuming its totality. As feminism, sex radicalism starts from the assumption that M/F is a signicant, though not exclusive, feature of sexuality and power relations, but still contests the epistemic rigidity that dominance feminism proclaims for sex. One does not need to go all the way to queer theory to get the epistemic critique of dominance feminism. It is possible to know something about sex that is outside the dominance feminist frame and still carry a brief for F.

Theory, politics, and prostitution

One way to think about sex-positive queer feminist norms is that they are multiple and therefore must be balanced. To balance them one must consider the various constraints on subjects in practice. If what is required to realise particular norms (anti-subordination or sexual autonomy or economic stability) is dierent practices in similar institutions, and if the norms most needed for resistance are also variable, then one resulting argument is that some situations of prostitution are more ethically defensible than others. A sex-positive queer feminism then leads us to think about sex generally and prostitution specically as multiple; rather than prostitution we are led to think about prostitutions. This is problematic, perhaps, from a legal perspective, which, as I noted above, might be one reason why Halley and others argue that MacKinnons work won the legal feminist sex wars. But politics and policy can be (slightly) more nuanced and context-sensitive. Here sex-positive queer feminism needs to be (warily) more governance-oriented. It needs to infuse prostitution policy with a dierent ethics to take the norms it brings to queer theory and make them work for women, to ght the subordination produced by stigmatising deviant sex as well as the subordination produced by poverty and coercion into sex. The epistemological shift I am endorsing matters ethically for public policy debates, even recognising the inconsistent relationship between a policys goals and its actual material eects, as these debates create frameworks of understanding and subjectication. This convergentist epistemology is neither precisely (dominance) feminist nor queer. While feminism and queer theory know sexuality dierently it either is or it is not heterosexual, subordinating, and the source of womens social ills they also know sexuality the same: it is through either the rejection of sex or the embracing of sexual acts in all their manifestations that we will be led to the new frontier of gender relations. In Elisa Glicks formulation, queer theory says we can fuck our way to freedom (2000: 22) and, it seems, dominance feminism says we can not-fuck our way there. So there is an epistemological break between them, but a break premised on an ontological agreement: sex, sexuality, sex acts are the be-all and

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end-all of liberation or resistance. Or at least good sex (however dened) is the personal practice leading to political change. But what if it is not? What if sexuality and sexual modalities can intervene in the consciousness of the people fucking, but this consciousness raising has really quite mediated and distorted eects on the larger institutional contexts within which these sexual actors live, work, and play? A more nuanced reading of sexuality, and one that accepts neither epistemological framework of sex precisely as dominance and queer theorists have served it up so far, might make more modest claims for its theory. Yes, rights to sexual pleasure and sexual knowledge are essential to ones health and well-being and (following Cornwall, Corre a, and Jolly, 2008) are fundamental to a human rights framework, but the specic sex acts that people engage in are not, in and of themselves, essentially revelatory or politically engaged. Too much focus on specic acts puts all the eort into self-styling and personal empowerment, and not enough into securing more general collective rights to sexuality without stigma.29 Decentring sex as the central activity of identity formation and political status does not make it unimportant; it simply means that sex does not occupy the vanguard position in identity construction, political subordination, or political resistance. This version of sex-positive feminism is in some ways more sex negative than dominance feminism: it is less positive that sex is capable of producing subjectivity, at least in whole. If sex is not all that and then some, there are still arguments to be had about how and why to regulate sex acts; but taking the onus o the sex part of prostitution, for example, as either dooming women to oppression or freeing them to reinvent themselves and the sexual order, might just open up spaces to see other aspects of prostitution: the material eects of legalisation or criminalisation on the prostitutes themselves. If, ironically, sex-positive queer feminism can take some of the special out of sex and make it one signicant form of human interaction among others, then perhaps policy makers can be guided by a sense that is both more and less free market. More in that not all commodied sex is necessarily bad; less in arguing that regulating conditions of commodication is the role of good government. This is the point at which my interlocutors have asked for a more forceful normative defence: why should feminists shift to a sex-positive queer approach such as the one I have outlined here, particularly in thinking about prostitution? I would say rst, as Kimberly D. Krawiec convincingly argues, both commodication and coercion objections to prostitution based on the special status of sex help feed its continued marginal legal status, and it is this marginal status that benets everyone except the women supposedly protected by the tolerated, but not embraced sex market (2010: 1743).30 Further, surveys of sex workers across types of prostitution venues reveal that some prostitutes experience sex work much as abolitionists have described it, but many do not.31 Given that many people, including some sex workers, do not in fact experience sex acts as signicantly tied to their identity, it seems somehow wrong anti-feminist, in fact to insist on public policies premised on precisely this assumption. Given also the normative power

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of the law, sex works illegality contributes to a view of women as either good girls or bad girls based on promiscuity. Finally, a discursive shift that describes sex as sometimes good and sometimes bad, but insists on attention to womens knowledge of sex from their own experiences of it, might eventually promote a legal regime that takes womens knowledge with similar seriousness, perhaps even eventually leading to changes in how rape claims are taken up by judges and law enforcement ocers. Listening to how the woman claiming rape frames the encounter could become more central while beginning to marginalise currently hegemonic narratives about what indicates that a woman wanted it. Discourse matters in the construction of subjectivity and consciousness, of jurists no less than the rest of us. Even if the eects of theory on law and policy are highly mediated, a more nuanced theory of sex is needed for its own sake in addition to policy purposes. With its more modest epistemology of sex, sex-positive queer feminism provides a way of contesting that it is the sex itself that is the problem with prostitution, arguing instead that it is when sex is combined with economic coercion, or violent pimps, or desire only to feed a drug addiction, for example, that prostitution is a problem. This shift in conceptions of power where dominance is one, but not the primary, modality, and the production of subjectivities and normative assessment and material weight of any acts one engages in is multivalent reects a complex reality more accurately. One can begin to articulate the domination that exists in, for example, human tracking without conating human tracking with prostitution (thereby ignoring forms of human tracking that arent for purposes of sex tracking) or prostitution with tracking (thereby ignoring forms of prostitution that are more like sex work and less like forced labour or rape). Here, though, is the epistemological break within feminism that simply cannot be bridged. Radical feminists say that sex ought not be commodied, because their epistemology of sex is an epistemology of the self. The commission of sex acts cannot be separated from self-hood; therefore, commodied sex is slavery. In this view, a better marketplace of sexual transaction is, literally, inconceivable. But what sex-positive queer feminism knows about sex it gets by looking at the world through lenses of both feminisms denitional minima and queer theorys power plays: that sex can be a site of domination, but that it can also be a site of productive, opaque, and diuse power relations. Given this, then, a sexpositive queer feminism would know that sex ought not be commodied under particular circumstances. On this view, sex does not say anything essential about women, but practices of commodied sex under certain conditions are indictments of unequal structural opportunities. The point of sex-positive queer feminist norms is to help activists challenge the conditions producing political subordination, not to challenge women for having sex. And the only way to get to that challenge is to stop putting so much identity-bearing weight on sex acts. Further, a queer feminism, as opposed to queer theory, can also employ its Foucauldian power frame to approach prostitution in the way that many radical feminists claim we ought to pay more attention to and that is not directly addressed

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by queer theory. Prostitution is often framed as a question of why women choose to go into this line of work. But the answers are not terribly complicated in most cases, and only for a minority of prostitutes is it specically for reasons that follow directly from a queer theory position of destabilising the meaning of sex acts. The more interesting radical feminist question is why so many men use the services of prostitutes.32 The Foucauldian power framework oers a more satisfying toehold on an answer because it asks how mens subjectivities are formed and points to ways of resisting the reading of political power out of sex acts into gendered social relations. It also points to a more nuanced answer to the motives and political understandings of the far-from-monolithic group of men who purchase sex from women.33 In the same way that moving away from a domination model of power makes it possible to conceptualise womens actions and motives in terms of constrained agency rather than forcing women into being either agents or victims, productive, subjectifying versions of power relations make mens subjectivity both more complicated and more open to potential reform. On the dominance view, there is no reason for men to change given the benets they currently receive. Further, a dominance frame where most sex is nearly indistinguishable from rape makes dominance feminism all but useless in theorising a complex male sexuality. But such work is an important aspect of a critical theory of sex given the number of women who seem to want to continue to have sex with men, and the number of men and women who nd various uses of power, but not over-arching structures of dominance, erotic. Finally, much feminist theory and sex worker activism that is focused on legalisation or decriminalisation maintains this focus in part because of the critique of the stigma that surrounds sex and sex work. The argument is that the more stigmatised that social norms make sex workers, the more sex workers become legitimate targets of abuse, and the harder it is for them both to seek redress for harm and to leave sex work. This stigma is also problematic because of its function in reminding all of us that good girls dont and that womens sexuality needs to be monitored so that it continues to serve as the moral compass for the national body. Even if most forms of prostitution cannot be ethically defended as good sex or even good employment, criminalisation of prostitution is problematic as it serves as an eective strategy in the war for control over womens sexuality, sexual rights, and sexual pleasures. Structures of subordination are reinforced not only by what is permitted, but by what is forbidden. Easing the legal restrictions on prostitution may be, in fact, more in line with dominance feminism and its ultimate abolitionist project than many would like to admit.34

Conclusion
The deep incommensurability between radical feminism and queer theories of sex cannot be overcome or merged into a happy (or even unhappy) middle ground. What the balance of freedom and equality require in one theory is often antithetical

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to what is required in the other. But this deep incommensurability is not between feminism and queer theory, it is between one version of feminism and queer theory. There are ways to reconcile feminist critiques of subordination and feminist desires to generate a more open habitus of sexuality for women with queer theorys reliance on subversion, play, and resistance. This matters theoretically, as the way we see the world shapes how we understand what is possible and desirable in it. So a sex-positive queer feminist theory claims, on the one hand, a more modest view of the future one where freedom isnt attainable, but degrees of openness and agency are and, on the other hand, a more expansive one, where freedom is dened in myriad ways within a complex notion of equality in dierence. Whether this equality is based on multiple intersecting identities or not through identities at all, but through practices and positionalities that shift and can be shifted is a question I have been able only to raise in this article but not discuss in any detail. The question of identity politics and its necessity for a robust feminist theory is obviously fraught, but is again being fought within feminism and not only between feminism and its others.35 This recognition of the incommensurability of feminist and queer epistemologies of sex also matters politically, especially given the rise of governance feminism over the last thirty years. Its not enough for voices of dissent within feminism to work culturally; sex-positive feminist theorists must also engage in the specic political institutions that help to produce the discursive and material vectors through which power ows. Such political engagement is more dicult for non-dominance feminists. This is partly because dominance feminism (along with liberal feminism) is already more solidly xed as the voice of feminism in US jurisprudence especially, but also because governance violates both the anti-regulatory queer inuence on sex-positive feminism, and the poststructuralist feminist cautions against working in the state because it requires calcifying power relations and identities, operates through false universals, and forces women to claim to be victims in order to be heard.36 Clearly, then strategising about how to inuence policy will be an on-going debate, but one that feminism beyond dominance needs to be party to. Otherwise, the brief carried for F may too often be a brief against her. Acknowledgements
The author thanks Erin Carlston, Linda Garber, Holloway Sparks, and the two Feminist Theory anonymous reviewers.

Notes
1. Dominance feminism is the label for the specific variant of radical feminism that developed primarily in feminist legal theory but was also adopted by feminist political theorists. It is the theoretical framework that shapes what is variously called state feminism or governance feminism due to its influence in the crafting of, for example, some UN protocols, the work of the NGO the Coalition Against Trafficking in Women,

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2.

3. 4.

5. 6.

7.

8. 9.

10.

11. 12. 13. 14. 15. 16. 17.

and state-level policies and legal decisions in the US and Sweden especially (see Halley, 2006: 2022, 3234; Doezema, 2001; Svanstro m, 2004). Gay mens prostitution is not primarily defined by a heterosexual binary nor inflected with heterosexist problematics. But the vast majority of prostitution in the world is still men buying sex from women, and that is the particular prostitution framework I am addressing here. See, e.g., Phoenix (2007) and Scoular (2010). Jane Scoular (2010) argues that even though dissimilar laws can have rather similar effects, this does not make the law irrelevant in re-thinking sex work, as the law structures the different ways that power operates on and through subjects and social spaces. Further, Sullivan (2010) found in her comparison of Australias varied regulatory schemes that the mode of regulation of sex work did matter in the effects public policies had on sex workers safety, positive rights, and capacities as people and workers. The mode of regulation mattered most, in fact, for street-based workers, the worst-off group of prostitutes. (See also Phoenix, 2009.) See, e.g., MacKinnon (1989, 1993a, 1993b), Pateman (1988: especially chapter 7). For more on the feminist sex wars see Abrams (1995) and Ferguson (1984). Sheila Jeffreys (1990) has specified that heterosexuality is any sexual relations involving dominance and submission, no matter the bodies participating. Carolyn Dever describes the analytical space shared by dominance feminism and early lesbian feminism (1997: 22) a different kind of convergence than what I am arguing for here. Halley (2006: 1720). Halley argues that it is not necessary for feminism to meet these particular criteria, but, in the United States, it always does (2006: 5). And while cultural feminism (e.g., Carol Gilligan, Robin West) also meets the definitional minima, the primary differences between cultural and dominance feminism arise in areas of reproduction and motherhood, not sexuality. There are some differences in their moral theories of sex, but, ultimately, cultural and dominance feminism are more similar than different in their sexual epistemologies and theories of sexual power (Halley, 2006: 6079). See Kathryn Abrams (1995: 311); Katherine Franke (2001: 207). On the triumph of the dominance model in legal feminism see, e.g., Abrams (1995), Franke (2001), Halley (2006). There are other assessments of the outcome of the sex war, of course. See, for example, Garber, discussing debates in lesbian feminist theory and practice, but not sex work: The Sex Wars had happened, and sex clearly had won (2001: 210). For work conflating prostitution to trafficking and/or rape, see Raymond (1995), Farley (2000, 2004), Jeffreys (1997), MacKinnon (2005). For feminist arguments complicating the conflation of prostitution and trafficking, see Phoenix (2009: 612) and Sanghera (2005). See Eichner (2009: 6) and Franke (2001: 182). Rubin and Butler (1997: 95). Butler (1997: 3). See Barale for more on the mutual distrust between feminism and queer theory, and for references to works that try not to reify it (1997: 9597). Michel Foucault ([1984] 1997: 283). Eichner (2009: 8); Sullivan (2003: 4349). Eichner (2009: 1016). In Showden (2011: 34), I argue with regard to womens agency (but not queer theory) that theories of resistance that develop out of poststructuralism need more specific

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18.

19.

20. 21.

22. 23.

24. 25. 26. 27.

28.

29. 30.

31. 32. 33. 34.

norms for judging what makes actions resistant, and, in later pages, I illustrate what resistance might look like in specific cases. Brenda Cossman raises this point in what she calls Feminism After the Break (Cossman et al., 2003: 623624, 634). This idea also follows from women of colour intersectionality theories of identity that chart a middle course between deconstruction and multicultural identity politics. As Leslie McCall explains, such work seeks to complicate categories and use them critically rather than simply accept or reject them (2005: 1780). When Halley argues that theorists need to break from feminism to see aspects of the world that cannot be described as M/F, she does acknowledge that divergentist theories offer intersectional descriptive and normative claims. She simply says that they are not, properly speaking, feminist when they do so; they have taken a break from feminism in order to make their analyses (2006: 20, 8990). It is her refusal to admit intersectional analyses to feminism that I am most strongly protesting. Halley (2006: 2022, 3235). Katherine M. Franke discusses legal feminism as stuck in no in her call for legal feminism to theorise yes. As she says: It cannot be right that feminists should leave to queer theorists the job of providing an affirmative theory of sex that accepts and accounts for the complex ways in which denial, shame, control, prohibition, objectification, and power enable or capacitate desire and pleasure (2001: 207). In a different context, Barale, too, argues for a queer feminist theory (1997: 104; and see Garber, 2001: 7). Eichner makes a similar argument (2009: 17). See also Showden (2009, 2011: chapter 4). In her discussion of the split between sex-positive and radical feminism, Lynn Chancer, like Abrams, focuses on agency and the need to link individual resistance to collective (read: political) demands (Chancer, 2000: 7879, 86). Some of the arguments in this paragraph and the next five are condensed from Showden (2011: chapter 4). This argument is more common among high-end workers like masseuses and escorts than streetwalkers (Weitzer, 2000: 45). See, e.g., Lewis et al. (2005: 150) and Chapkis (1997: 98106). Lenore Kuos research found that streetwalking is dangerous, but sex work writ large is not nearly as unrelentingly dangerous as abolitionists argue, and that the source of the danger was as or more often facilitators than customers (Kuo, 2002: 8485). Sarah Chun noted a similar phenomenon with exotic dancers (1999: 233). Both Scoular and ONeill (2007) and Sullivan (2010) explore how different legalisation and decriminalisation regimes have complicated and contradictory effects on the stigma of sex work. Glick makes this point in her critique of queer theory (2000: 3132). Brents and Sanders (2010) similarly demonstrate how legal restrictions on sex work benefit the corporate economic interests of sex businesses while making it more difficult for individual sex workers to fare well in sex work as individual operators. See Kuo (2002: 95, citing Vanwesenbeeck), and Wijers (2008). Miriam (2005: 2); Schotten (2005); Pateman (1988: 193194). Monto (2000); Lever and Dolnick (2000); Frank (2002). Bernadette Bartons 2002 study of strip club workers is suggestive here, and helps confirm Johnsons critique of the ideological load-bearing wall supporting the sex work and violence link. See also Brents and Sanders (2010).

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35. See Hekman (2004) for extensive discussion of the identity politics debate in feminist theory. 36. See, e.g., Brown (1995).

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