Lisa Sanchez

University of California, Irvine

Spatial Practices and Bodily Maneuvers:

Negotiating at the Margins of a
Local Sexual Economy
At a recent conference, a friend introduced me to a woman who was presenting a paper on
"prostituted women." I recalled that the women I spoke with were opposed to being represented
as prostituted women, so I asked the woman how she came upon the term. "We use the term
because we believe prostitution is violence against women," she said, abruptly. Cautiously
attempting to open a dialogue about the problem of representation, I mentioned that the women
I spoke with were resistant to the term. In a voice more stern than before, she replied: "Dead
prostitutes don't speak! "
"Dead Prostitute's Don't Speak!": Rights Discourse, Identity Claims, and The Problem
of Representation
Since the mid-seventies and early eighties, prostitutes' rights organizations (PROs) and radical
feminists concerned with the legal status and quality of life of women in prostitution1 produced
radically different accounts of how women experience and form identities in relation to their
involvement in prostitution (Bell 1987; Freeman 1989). Prostitutes' rights organizations (PROs)
advocating legal reform2 framed the issue as a struggle for sexual freedom and worker rights
(Jenness 1993). In response to the liberal position of PROs, radical feminists argued against
legalization and constructed prostitution as forced sexual slavery or institutionalized sexual
violence (Barry 1979; Overall 1992). "s two of the most influential contemporary discourses,
PROs and radical feminists produce the "prostitute'Vprostituted woman"3 as one who either
chooses to prostitute herself or one who is forced to be prostituted. These reformist discourses
misunderstand the complexity of identity and mask situated differences in the practiced
experience of prostitution. Moreover, attributing identity and experience to a person in a way
that reduces her quarrels with the author's privileged knowledge to false consciousness does
violence to those subjects. In this paper, I seek to displace conventional constructions of the
subjectivity and practices of sex trade participants onto questions of embedded, embodied
practice.4
Identity politics strive to empower those who are situated similarly in their subordination.
Historically, their effectiveness hinges on the capacity of disenfranchised communities to form
a discourse of rights articulated around a collective identity and common goal. More recently,
however, scholars and activists recognize that collective identities and common goals are
constructed and situated forms of knowledge (Crenshaw 1989; Young 1990; Haraway 1991).
"As such, they represent the desires and experiences of some members of a community better
than others. The realization that the rhetorics of identity and community are internally dialogized,
and that the members of subordinated groups can be similarly situated while holding multiple

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subject positions means that we can no longer take the politics of identity, community, and
rights for granted.
Historically, western discourses of sexuality construct imaginary lines between "good sex" and
"bad sex" (Rubin 1984). According to Gayle Rubin, good B i.e., "normal," "natural" sex B
should ideally be heterosexual, marital, monogamous, reproductive, non-commercial sex without
toys (1984). Bad sex, under Rubin's schema, includes homosexual, unmarried, promiscuous,
non-procreative, commercial sex with fetish objects and toys. Drawing in part from the cultural
logic of these categories, people internalize their own set of sexual norms and set moral and
practical boundaries around them. These boundaries are reproduced between insiders and
outsiders of the sex trade, but they also play out between sex trade participants. Even women
in prostitution walking different blocks of the same street demarcate difference by drawing
these boundaries, "s one research participant put it, "I don't go out past a certain little boundary
. . . the girls that work [south of P Street] are known as someone that'll do anything for
twenty bucks."
Feminine sexual identity is externally inscribed and articulated, in part, through the performance
of good sex/bad sex categories (1984). Identifying with bourgeois feminine (hetero)sexuality
and demarcating difference through the constitution of the "whore as other" serves as a protection
against exclusion and sexual discipline for women who can and would invoke that privilege,
but it reinscribes the boundaries that make these disciplinary techniques possible. The discursive
practices of radical feminists reproduce the inscription of good sex/bad sex boundaries by
granting women no role in producing the "bad sex" of prostitution. They acknowledge the
existence of women in prostitution only through the erasure of their sexual agency. On the
other hand, PROs reproduce these boundaries by reifying the prostitute identity and arguing for
women's right to "behave badly."
Fanon expressed his understanding of the felt violence of identity as a fact of his blackness in
a simple phrase: '"Dirty nigger!'Or simply, 'Look, a Negro!'" (1967:109). In a brilliant essay
on the entanglement of speech and violence in hate crime, Rosga figures hate crime as "the
violent inscription of identity" (1997: 9). In this configuration, the hate crime victim is viewed
as the one who threatens the moral order. Crucially for our discussion here, s/he who inscribes
identity violently, "neutralizes the threat represented by the victim's identity, paradoxically by
re-inscribing that very identity as stigmatic" (1997: 9). Of course, some distinction should be
made between the inscription of identity for the sake of violence and the inscription of identity
as consequentially violent. Moreover, while the inscription of the prostitute identity hasn't
been used to establish hate motive in any legal case that I know of, the linguistic dehumanization
of sex trade participants no doubt facilitates the violence they experience.
I opened this paper with my own account of being inscribed with an identity and enclosed
within a discourse that is not my own. I did this to highlight the potential of identity politics to
do violence to those who participate in the sex trade and those who engage its discourses.
Judith Butler writes, 'The deconstruction of identity is not the deconstruction of politics; rather,
it establishes as political the very terms through which identity is articulated" (1990:148). The
unmasking of identities as fluid, contingent, and intersection^ demands that the method of
resisting political and economic subordination be refigured. Along with the move toward a
more nuanced and inclusive politics, it is incumbent upon feminists to acknowledge how their

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own social position and history of experience situates the knowledge they produce. Having
deconstructed the identity politics of opposing feminist groups, I am compelled to situate my
own position as the researcher who will interpret the knowledge and experience of those who
participated in this study. I will not claim a position in the binary logic of good sex/bad sex
identities except to say that I refuse to disavow identification with the prostitute. This move
can be read as an intentional rejection of the privilege of the good sex category, or it can be read
as a refusal to divulge critical information to those who would abuse it.
This paper is part of a larger project inspired first by my familiarity with the "Evergreen"5 sex
trade and some of its participants, and second by my bewilderment with the polarizing feminist
politics of prostitution. Having lived in Evergreen, I relied upon a friend of fifteen years to
introduce me to women and men currently engaged in the local sexual economy. Shane is a
life-long resident of Evergreen who is familiar with the local sexual economy. His acquaintance
with dancers and women in prostitution revolved around his social life and his involvement in
the illicit drug economy. For many years, street youth have identified Evergreen as a place
where they can congregate in public places with relatively few hassles. Having moved to the
northwest from Los Angeles as a teenager, I was situated similarly to others who experienced
the urban forest as simultaneously harsh reality and liberating haven.
The boundary between empathy and collusion in the management and surveillance of
marginalized women is often unclear. Today, as a researcher and academic presently typing
into my computer screen, I am geographically and demographically removed from the Evergreen
street scene, and many of the players in the sex trade have come and gone. I come to this study
with a foot in each of those worlds but two feet in neither. Shane's presence along with the
knowledge and experience I bring to this study helped to break down some of the barriers that
the authority of conventional scholarship normally evokes. Still what I write is a representation
of the knowledge and subjectivity of those who participated in the study. I think that the women
I spoke with would recognize themselves in this article, but I can only hope that my selfconscious attempt to represent their experience contests the kind of knowledge that does violence
to identity.
How does one begin to talk about what people do when they do not act under conditions of their
own choosing? Theoretical and empirical scholarship that characterizes agency under fire as
resistance has fallen into favor with many scholars and activists these days (Scott 1990; LazarusBlack and Hirsch 1994; Merry 1995). Coutin's study of the production of the legal identities of
Salvadoran immigrant workers illustrates that even under the erratic logic of immigration law,
the members of disempowered communities learn that the law can extend benefits while
simultaneously wielding a power to be resisted (1993). Similarly, the graffiti artist uses space
in a way that marks out territory as it resists political and legal authority (Ferrell 1993). Resistance
tells part of the story of Evergreen sex trade participants, but it evokes a more focused political
subjectivity than their testimonies can account for.
The favored model of political resistance assumes that power is articulated in a way that it can
be decoded by resisting subjects. This assumption cannot be made in the dispersed and
naturalized play of power in the Evergreen sex trade. The micropractice of power in the Evergreen
context is spatialized. Michel de Certeau conceptualizes spatial practices of power in terms of
strategies versus tactics (1984). Drawing upon the analogy of war, he describes strategy as a

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spatialized form of power requiring a willful and powerful subject (1984). In contrast, tactics
are temporal and defined by the absence of power (1984). In the present case study of the
Evergreen sexual economy, both power and violence are strategized through spatial practice.
They circulate rather tacitly through legal practice, through the proprietary powers of sex trade
entrepreneurs, and through the bodies of customers and perpetrators of violence.
The constitution of sex trade practice as an activity that someone has either freely chosen or
been forced into serves to distance people from its embodied reality by making it always about
some other women - - those who have chosen freely (but differently than "you or I"), and those
who have been forced into it (by circumstances that may be harsh, but not the ones that "you
and I" find ourselves in). Juxtaposed against the abstract liberal subject and her negation as
passive victim, the micropractices of power in the sexual economy and the quotidian logic of
bodily acts raise important questions about how we understand sex trade practices and how we
constitute the identities of the practitioners. My reading of women's testimonies suggests that
agency, under these conditions, is contingent. It takes form in embodied, copresent interactions
negotiated and renegotiated between interacting parties for the duration of each interaction.6
The constitutive quality of identity formation is articulated through performative repetitions of
embedded, embodied practice. The tension between power and resistance in these women's
narratives amounts to a poetics of chaos as the condition of everyday existence - - a punctuated
routineity played out in acts of avoidance to bodily pain and acts that "make do."
In this paper, I recount the stories of a small group of women involved in the sex trade in a
predominantly white, working-class community in the Pacific Northwest United States. Using
a qualitative approach, I draw from observations and taped and untaped conversations with
women, their customers, and police officers during a three year period. The ethnographic
method I employ strives to contextualize women's stories within the dynamics of the geographic
and social interaction space in which their daily activities take place. What follows is an
ethnography of context and an interpretation of the local knowledge of eight women. I have
tried to avoid some of the intrusiveness of research by approaching the women I spoke with as
the experts of their own lives. Thus, the perspective of the study is outward looking. Rather
than turn these women's stories inward to reflect on them individually, I turn them toward their
lived contexts to reflect on the play of power and privilege in local sex markets.
Sex, Law, and Order in the Evergreen Sexual Economy
In the present case study of the Evergreen sexual economy, the regime of legal codes, zoning
and regulatory ordinances, and law enforcement practices shapes the larger structure of
interaction environments and the microstructure of practice both in its presence and in its absence
as a regulatory force (Sanchez 1997). Since the mid-eighties, residents of the city of Evergreen
have witnessed tremendous growth in legal sex businesses. For example, the state constitution
defines nude dancing as a form of symbolic speech and guarantees the "right to free expression"
by a standard tougher than the federal free speech guidelines (local newspaper 4/93). Strip
clubs increased from 10 in 1989 to over 100 in 1995 after a Ninth Circuit Court judge ruled that
full nudity could no longer be prohibited by city ordinance because it discriminated against
business establishments selling alcohol (local newspaper 5/90).7 "long with the growth in strip
bars, pornography stores, escort services, "live-nude" modeling businesses, and "tanning salons
for gentlemen" have flourished.

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The women in the study participated in three aspects of the local sex trade: street prostitution,
escort services, and nude dancing. Contrary to some researchers claims that the multiple niches
of the sex trade can be separated into distinct entities and practices, the boundaries between the
places and practices of the Evergreen sex trade are blurred, "although there are more sex clubs
in poor and working-class neighborhoods in Evergreen, the businesses are not concentrated
into "red light zones." Rather, they are scattered throughout business districts and residential
neighborhoods.8 For young women who use the bus stops and boulevards to get across town or
to go to the grocery store or local sandwich shop, the insistent presence of the sex business is a
fact of everyday existence. Alongside these legal businesses, potential customers driving the
boulevards frequently harass or solicit young women occupying those spaces regardless of
whether they have ever turned a date. It is within this context that a number of the young
women I spoke with were first solicited.
In the next section, I focus on the testimonies of eight women. Four of them started out in street
prostitution and one of those also worked escort services, one started as an escort but also
worked the street, and three of them worked for strip clubs and private dance agencies. The
most consistent factors influencing these women's initial involvement in the sex trade include
age, class, socioeconomic position, housing, and drug use. Six of the women were age 18 or
under at the time of initiation, and two were in their twenties. The youngest participant, now
20, was 12 when she first became involved in prostitution. Two of the women had stable
housing at the time of initial involvement, one stayed with her grandparents temporarily, and
five stayed in motels, searching daily for a place to stay. Each of the women had struggled to
support herself for an extended period of time with only minimum success. The unemployment
rate in Evergreen is 16% for young women age 16 to 20 as compared to 7% on the average for
all Evergreen residents who can be counted by the census (State Bureau of Labor Statistics,
1994).
In addition, three of these young women were addicted to heroin and two used cocaine, speed,
and alcohol frequently. Three were drug and alcohol free. For some of these young women,
drug use came at significant financial cost and drew much of their time and energy into procuring
and using drugs, and recovering from drug use. Significantly, however, drug use and prostitution
does not always take shape as a simple cause and effect relationship. Some women began
prostitution to support their drug habit, some women began using drugs to deal with the risks
and insults of prostitution, and others stayed away from drugs completely or kept their use to a
minimum. All women claimed that using drugs or finding some other way to alter their
consciousness at least temporarily made the felt experience of prostitution more manageable.
The practices women describe in the narrative analysis to follow involve bodily contact and
cannot be reduced to a single moment of choice. They are better understood as a series of
copresent, embodied interactions negotiated and renegotiated for the duration of each interaction.
Although women frequently use a language of choice to describe their actions, their narratives
are shaped by their social situation, by the context of practice, and by the desires and demands
of their customers. Under these conditions, the women who participated in this study at best
negotiate an interaction that satisfies the needs and desires of both parties. Often, however,
agency in these interactions plays out as active or passive resistance and survival tactics.

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Punctuated Routineity as the Condition of Everyday Life, or: The Quotidian Logistics
of Bodily Maneuvers
Cory began prostitution when she was "just old enough to go away and make a choice, just old
enough that [she] had some options." She used a language of practical consciousness to describe
her daily activities:
You just kinda keep going and make yourself do it because when you got
fifty dollars in your hand, all of the sudden, now you know tomorrow you're
not gonna be sick. So, it makes it pretty easy to go back out. Until you get
hurt. Then the first time you get hurt you get scared when you go back out.
[Have you been hurt before?] Yeah. Raped, getting beat up and stuff. [How
often would you say that happened?] Probably about a hundred times. The
hurt just kinda goes along with it. Getting stranded, having your clothes
stolen, having your money stolen, robbed at gun point, whatever, all of that.
Just hurt.
The movement in Cory's narrative account of her initial involvement and continued participation
in prostitution is one of increasing constraint: what is first described as initiative becomes
necessity, becomes abuse. In Cory's case, her continued involvement in prostitution was largely
motivated by the pursuit of bodily comfort. Daily efforts to keep a roof over her head, pay her
court fines, and avoid the pain of heroin withdrawal, punctuated by the violence that "just goes
along with [prostitution]," shape her lived experience.
Helen and Mary, ages 17 and 19, had been living out of motels and on the street together for
over a year when I met them. They left home together following a stay at an inpatient treatment
center for juveniles - "the adolescent treatment center for emotionally disturbed children . ..
teens, adolescents," as Helen called it. Without money or other resources, the girls had initially
tried cleaning motel rooms in exchange for a place to stay, but they were usually evicted after a
short period of time because of their young age. "after a few months of moving from motel to
motel, not only had temporary housing options for the girls worn thin, but so had their money
and their resistance. When Helen and Mary were offered money for sex one night they accepted
with little hesitation. Although they downplayed the significance of this event, they had
developed a 75 to 100 dollar-a-day heroin habit after becoming involved in prostitution. Not
all of the women I spoke with had been displaced from their homes at a young age, and not all
of them had drug problems. Amanda was working as a secretary when the owner of an escort
service asked if she would be interested in working for her. She explained her involvement as
follows:
If two consenting people want to do that and it's comfortable for them, so
be it.
. . . When I was raped at gunpoint this was a way for me to get men to give
me their money for me having the control. [So you thought of it that way?]
That's right, revenge. It's like, you want it, you pay for it, I'll tell you when,
I'll tell you how, I'll tell you why.

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Amanda's characterization of prostitution as a contractual arrangement and her explanation of

her motivation for getting involved shows a striking contrast between agency as articulated
through cultural common sense notions of free contract and gendered structures of violence
and inequality. As Jody described it, the ad said, "make $ 1000 a week, travel around the country.
I was thinking, Oh, how exciting,' you know." After answering the ad, the girls were sent to
New Mexico for training, and then from New Mexico to the East Coast to begin dancing. As
Shari put it:
It was a week we were there and quote unquote training. What had happened
was the president of the agency would take four or five girls who he had
collected from around the West Coast to his condo. And he had other girls
over on the East Coast where he shipped us a l l . . . . Once you got to the East
Coast you were paid like fifteen dollars pay and then we lived off our tips.
So, but our training was, he'd just have us all go up to his condo and he'd sit
there and we'd dance in front of him and he'd tell us what to do while he was
high
It felt shady. Yeah, I really do believe it was a crooked operation.
Violence punctuates the daily practices of the women I spoke with. " conversation with Cory
highlighted the entanglement of violence and everyday practice: "You gotta 'em close . . . and
you never wanna close your eyes when you're with 'em . . . because it's just that fast and
they've got a knife out and you don't have too many options too quick." Cory went on to detail
an attempted rape at knifepoint in which she states, "The guy got pissed off at me because I
wouldn't shut the fuck up." Verbally and physically resisting her attacker, she said that she was
"justpushin' as hard as [she] could push," and repeated, "I'm not givin' it up until you get that
[knife] away from me":
I just wanted to get out of there as fast as I could.... He says, "Well, if I get
it away from you, you're gonna run." I said, "I'm not gonna run," and so we
went back and forth, and I said, "Get it away from my neck" and I had like
maybe a dozen little poke holes that I wasn't aware of at that time, but I could
feel it. Finally he just got so pissed off that I grabbed the door handle and he
shoved me out on the ground [without my clothes].
Cory's narrative of violence underscores the felt experience of embodied practice as both parties
in the encounter focused on bodily maneuvers and physical space. Cory's attacker used his car
along with physical force bolstered by a weapon to confine Cory's movements. Of primary
concern, he wanted to keep Cory from "running" so that he could complete the rape. Cory also
focused on the constraints of physical space (the car, the door handle), the threat of proximity
and body language (movements, eye contact, body posture, having only one hand on the wheel),
and the urgency of time ("I just wanted to get out of there as fast as I could"). When I asked
Cory about the tactics she used, she responded, "I just wanted to get out alive... . Sometimes
you're better off just to get it over with, 'cuz they'll let you out, [but] I just didn't want to battle
with him." The spatial power of practice coupled with the routineity but unpredictability of
violence makes it difficult for women to defend themselves in these situations. On the one
hand, Cory thought that if she succumbed to the rapist's demands, she would either do battle,
get hurt, or both. On the other hand, she thought that she might be better off just to get it
over with.

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By comparison, Meagan did not fight with her attacker in the rape she described:
One of the times I was raped, I was 14 and I was pregnant, and [the guy] had
paid me and I went to put the condom on to give him a blow job and then I
felt something cold on my neck. He had a knife to my neck and I laid back
and he raped me. He was nice though. I know it was never a power kind of
thing and I know he didn't wanna hurt me. He knew I was pregnant. I was
showing. So he said, "I won't hurt you," and he took the money back. It was
more of a free kinda thing.
Although Meagan clearly identified this situation as a rape, she also described it as an unpaid
date or a failed negotiation of consent: She was going to give this man a blow job, but he
wanted full access to her body, free of charge, "s Meagan stated, 'They don't see it as a big
crime, 'cuz like this guy told me, you're already doing that, so why should / have to pay?'
Meagan's description of this man as a "nice guy" who didn't intend to hurt her in spite of the
fact that he raped her and used a weapon could be interpreted as one way of managing her
objective powerlessness in that situation.
Unlike the situation Cory described, apparently Meagan thought she would be better off to just
"get it over with." She did, however, attempt to deal with the situation after the fact by reporting
it to the police. But, she said, the police officer "didn't give me the time of day." "He said, 'It's
your fault you're out here.' I've got other things to do than worry about that." Having had her
claim disregarded, Meagan used extralegal channels to deal with the problem.
The tables got turned around on him though at the end because I did get his
license plate number [even though] no one [referring to the police] listened
to me. I had a guy that worked at the DMV and I had the man's license plate
number and I found out where he was at and so a bunch of people, you know,
beat him up. That made me feel better.
Taking control of a woman's personal space and the physical space in which these interactions
occur is a key strategy men use to exploit and victimize women. Two violent situations Helen
described involved being picked up and taken to an isolated space. In one case, she stated that
a man took her to an abandoned parking lot and sodomized her, and in the second case a man
took her into the woods and "just scared [her] half to death": "I mean, I'm glad, he could have
killed me. He did nothing! He didn't even rape me! . . . He took me to do it and he parked his
car and then he threw me out of the car. . . . He gave me a black eye." Although Helen
interpreted the second incident as "nothing" - - not even rape! - - each of these cases involved
legally punishable harms. But both Helen and Mary avoided taking legal action because they
had learned that reporting a problem to any adult or official meant that they would be placed
back into the custody and control of their parents or another treatment center. Helen and Mary
had vowed to resolve things their own way; they "[watched] each other's backs" and relied on
survival reflexes and chance.
Women in formally legal aspects of the sex trade face violence on a regular basis as well. This
fact suggests that the violence is evidence of a deeper kind of oppression than illegality alone
can exact. In Jody's words:

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Sometimes they can get really threatening and they could do something like
strike out. "t this one club I was working at, it was like I had the record for
the most amount of time being touched. It makes me so angry, I have a real
problem with people touching me and telling me what to do. I guess that's
why I like the free expression of dancing, you know, I get to do what I want.
Jody's paradoxical account of having held "the record for the most amount of time being touched"
while engaging in the "free expression of dancing" highlights the tension between expressing
herself as she envisioned and resisting violence and abuse in everyday practice. It underlines
the conflicting intentions and desires of the men who share in their social space. Shari described
similar kinds of confrontations with men in the strip clubs:
Guys want you to look them in the eye because it makes them feel more
comfortable sitting at the meat rack9 not like they're animals just sitting
there. I know a lot of the guys tend to flock to new dancers... . They like to
try to see how far they can manipulate them because they don't know the ins
and out's of everything . . . just see what they'll do for a dollar.
Heidi's description of her experiences with customers was equally telling. In a discussion
about Evergreen's "notorious regulars," she said that one man was "infamous for coming up to
a girl and asking her if he could actually beat her up:"
It was pretty much that he would pay them a certain amount of money and all
their hospital bills if they agreed to it. He's asked me to meet him three times
outside the club. I stood him up all three times, but as far as dancing in the
club, he would ask me to put on nipple clamps or wear your g-string
backwards. He was into humiliating women, you know.
Heidi described her experience with "Hundred Dollar Dan" as humiliating, but she also said
that he "always had a kind of respect." Quoting Heidi, "He always told me that if I thought he
was getting out of line, I should let him know." "So," she concluded, "it was all up to the girl."
Like many of the women I spoke with, in her account of her own personal experience, Heidi
focused on what she viewed as within her power to do (i.e., telling a man that "he was getting
out of line") rather than on the coercive context and the imbalance of power between women
and "paying customers."
As these women's stories illustrate, ownership and domination of the physical spaces of the sex
trade are a key element of male power. Jody articulated the spatial quality of male privilege in
a conversation about the tactics she developed to reclaim her physical and emotional space:
I'm very boundary oriented. I don't accept any degrading remarks. This is a
man's playground, you know - - where he's king. But that doesn't mean he
can subject me to any kind of abuse, and that means crossing my physical
and emotional boundaries. I mean there have been times when somebody's
been able to get in so deep that I walked off the stage crying. But now I feel
I'm in c o n t r o l . . . I draw enough boundaries to where this is my space and
nobody gets near me.

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For these women, gaining control means drawing boundaries around the physical and emotional
space of their own bodies. While women attempted to maintain control by setting these
boundaries, their accounts of everyday life attest to the fact that those boundaries are routinely
violated. Thus, even the most fundamental right of property - ownership of the body - is contested
for women in these spaces. In contrast, male customers and sex club owners are afforded
superior rights and privileges through real and assumed ownership of the place of practice, "s
one man expressed:
I felt really bad for this one girl 'cuz those guys were just passing her around.
They weren't really being mean to her, but she knew her place, like she knew
not to even question what they told her. She wasn't even a person really,
kinda like she was more . . . property.
Close attention to the quotidian logic of practice highlights how negotiations of consent frequently
break down. Although not all interactions with clients were violent, coercive or even unpleasant,
conflicting intentions and desires between women and their clients were the rule rather than the
exception. The assumption that women's consent is "all or nothing," and that these women
clearly fall on the "all" side of the equation, was best illustrated in the statements of the men I
spoke with. " conversation with Jeff illustrates this point:
Helen was the youngest one who really liked the sex with me, she was 17, but
the ones that are like 14 or 15, they really don't like it much.. . . I've spent
hours doing nothing but cruising. This 7-11 on Pratt Street is probably one
of the two most heavily worked areas. I cruise by. I see who's out. And a lot
of times it wouldn't be a date, it just might be one I want. [So sometimes
they're not really working?] Oh yeah, but me not picking' 'em up is not
gonna stop 'em, so at least if they need the money that bad and I'm gonna do
sex with 'em, at least they're not gonna get hurt by me. But I got addicted to
it. [How is it addicting?] Just, the ease of it. Just get the money and go out
and find one you like. Maybe, finding something you like and then just do her.
The language that Jeff used to refer to the women he dated shows that, to some extent, he
thought of them as things instead of people. For many women, the inscription of the prostitute
identity means that they forfeit the right to refuse consent in these men's eyes. It is not too
large a leap to say that violence is enabled by the initial linguistic dehumanization of the victim.
Jeff's statement that it doesn't matter whether or not a woman is "working," he just picks up
"one he wants" is a striking illustration of the effects of this kind of logic.
The formation of identity for the women who participated in this study mirrors the multiple
logistics and contradictions of practice. For the older, more experienced women, the articulation
of identity resembles, in part, traditional contract logic and PROs rhetoric, but it is conflicted
and multi-faceted. As Shari put it:
You gain some kind of respect when you become experienced and get seniority.
They give you a little more respect on what you have to say even though they
may not listen to you. "s long as you're not threatening them and their
livelihood, you can speak a little more freely and set your boundaries.

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Similarly, while Cory sometimes self-identified as a "hooker" or "working girl," her narrative
was marked with tensions between self-definition and resistance to the stigma of the prostitute
identity:
Everybody and their brother is looking at you like, "Oh my god there's a
hooker. Well, she does anything for ten bucks." So it's really hard not to let
it inside. Still those are facts and they're real, and people still say those
things . . . and so to make it not so devastating, you can say, "Well, who the
fuck are they to judge anybody."
As these women's narratives illustrate, the contradictions of practice and the violence of everyday
life complicated the self-identification process. Some women handled these contradictions by
externalizing their abuse and distancing their being from their doing. Others internalized their
marginalization as deviance and self-blame. " conversation with Helen and Mary highlights
these differences:
L.S.:

Can you think of anything that might have changed your situation?

Mary: Not to be raped. [Mary's explanation for being "thrown" into the
treatment center and later running away from home is that her cousin raped
her.]
Helen: I'm just a bad kid. I think I would have ended up like this no matter
what. I need love, you know.
L.S.:

Do you ever feel afraid when you're out on the street?

Mary: Oh yeah, every day. Especially when a guy picks us up.

Helen: I'm scared at night. I don't like going in cars.
Helen and Mary's responses exemplify the way similar experiences in prostitution can produce
quite different formations of identity. While Mary externalized her involvement, Helen
internalized it as a consequence of being a "bad kid." At the same time, each of the girls
recognized the conditions of their practice as dangerous and oppressive. As part of the play of
identity and resistance, the ever-present threat of violence shaped these women's identities.
Conclusion
Historically, discourses on prostitution have oversimplified agency and misunderstood the
negotiated quality of sex trade practice by leaving in tact the assumptions underlying bourgeois
legal and cultural ideology. Feminist activists have both supported and rejected the notion that
women choose their identities and their practices, "t the heart of the discursive struggles of
reformist groups, modern liberal notions of identity and consent act as complementary
constituents in the construction of agency as individual choice/non-choice. The strategies of
both reformist groups tied women to the "prostitute" identity in confining ways. Although the
politics of identity is more obvious in the rhetoric of prostitutes' rights groups, radical feminists
also tied women to the "prostitute" identity. By definition, women were victims of prostitution.
Their victimization was constructed not as a specific set of offenses, but as an ongoing status
always tied to their involvement in prostitution.

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Power is both productive and repressive (Foucault 1980,1983). The production of the "prostitute"
as a stable identity category through the intersecting discourses of law and culture is a disciplinary
technique that makes sex manageable by producing categories relevant to issues of sexuality
and reproduction. Its power inheres in its ability to produce legal subjects, and to discipline the
very subjects it creates. Advocates sought to subvert the power of those discourses. Ironically,
however, activist discourses have perpetuated dominating practices by reproducing the categories
of the dominant discourse. These exclusions have worked to silence women and blame them
for their own victimization, further blocking their access to the fundamental rights and protections
most people take for granted.
Sex trade participation is a copresent activity. That is, it necessarily requires the participation
and often the bodily contact of two people. This fact complicates the way in which agency
works. In the copresent interactions represented here, agency cannot be reduced to choice, and
subjectivity cannot be thought of in individualistic terms. Instead, one must take into account
the intentions, desires, and discursive and material power of interacting subjects. The minute
details or quotidian logic of these negotiated interactions constitute a particular microstructure
of practice, one whose continuities have to do with power relations and whose disjuncrures
have to do with the particularity of context, identity, and social position.
The fact that women's activities can neither be interpreted as those of a free agent or passive
victim is testimony not to women's confusion, but to the contradictions in the places and practices
of the sex trade. The paradoxical formation of identity means that women frame their experiences
in relation to the conflicts and contradictions of daily practice. Their voices are reflective of
multiple positionings in the sex trade and multiple ways of facing its power. While elements of
the logic of contract and PROs rhetoric were common in women's talk about their daily lives,
these women were also quite conscious and concerned about their own victimization. Whether
they internalized or externalized their marginalization, none of the women represented themselves
as passive victims. They were active participants in the process of negotiating consent and
resisting the violent inscription of identity and the felt violence of physical discipline and abuse.
A strategy of power, writes de Certeau, "gains its advantage through the manipulation of space
it is the triumph of place over time" (1984, 35). In contrast, the space of a tactic is the space of
the other; "it must play on and with a terrain imposed on it. . . . It operates in isolated actions
[and makes use] of the cracks that particular conjunctions open in the surveillance of the
proprietary powers" (1984: 37-38). The activities of sex trade participants are carried out in a
space much like the "war zone" de Certeau describes. In this space, women must be elusive,
but always vigilant. Most of their energy is directed at negotiating consent, confronting violence,
and avoiding the surveillance of police officers and the community. In contrast, the local sex
trade is a space where customers and perpetrators of violence feel entitled to take what they
wish with or without consent, and they suffer little if any consequences for their behavior.
Following de Certeau's model, women in the sex trade operate within a space that those with
power and privilege have defined, "s part of the naturalization of male privilege, gendered
body language and spatial strategies are felt by women who engage in these interactions but
they are articulated in such a way that they remain largely unrecognizable to anyone as a form
of power. Women's narratives draw attention to the felt reality of their embodied practice.
They are spatialized and temporal in quality. Tactics of resistance and survival reflexes help

November, 1997]

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women to negotiate within the rigid confines of their social space, but they present little challenge
to the power and authority of sex, money, and law. The importance of hearing the multi-faceted
voices of women in the sex trade is not that they highlight contradictions or inconsistencies in
their own logic, but that they highlight contradictions in the logic of practice. When understood
within the framework of power relations, women's practices are carried out in the absence of
power and in the "space of the other."
Notes
1.
As a matter of scope and practicality, the study excludes some potential participants
at various social locations within the sex industry. The scope of the present study is limited to
female sex trade participants, including escorts, dancers, and women in street prostitution with
male clients. This does not diminish the importance of studies focusing on other aspects of the
sex trade, nor does it ignore the fact that alternative arrangements may differ phenomenologically.
2.
The position of liberal (PROs) and radical feminists on the issues of legalization and
decriminalization have gone through a number of transitions and are too complex to explain in
detail here. PROs have generally supported legalization and some support zoning, but some
now argue for decriminalization instead. Radical feminists do not support legalization, but
some have supported decriminalization. Generally, however, they sidestep the issue because it
conflicts with the larger goal of eradication.
3.
The use of language in studies of prostitution is political whether or not the author
acknowledges it. The task of describing the identities and subjectivities of sex trade participants
is problematic given the historical stigmatization and reification of the prostitute identity in a
wide variety of discourses. Putting both prostitute and prostituted woman in quotes is an attempt
to destabilize these meanings and to contest the focus on one's involvement in prostitution as a
central, defining characteristic of identity. Alternatively, I use the terms sex trade participants,
women in prostitution, or just women to refer to the participants in the study. Although I have
no major objection to the term sex worker, I have not used the term in this paper because I want
to call attention to the fact that the conditions that these women operate in do not qualify as
work. Even the dancers in this study did not earn a wage and some of them had to pay for their
shift at the club. As private contractors they worked for tips only. I will use any term in context
that a participant uses herself, however I did not find any of the terms developed within activist
movements to be used frequently in this case study. Rather women usually used names to
identify themselves and others, and they used the term dating or dancing most frequently to
refer to their activities.
4.
See Bourdieu (1977), de Certeau (1984), Coombe (1989), and Rajan (1993) for
examples of the notions of agency and practice that I am relying on in this article.
5.
Evergeen is a pseudonym for the northwestern United States city where I conducted
the field research described in this paper. Pseudonyms will also be used to protect the identities
of those who participated in this study.

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6.
Goffman (1967), Giddens (1979), and Friedland and Boden (1994) describe copresence
as embodied, face-to-face interactions that take place in the same physical space and time.
Also see Cornell and Thurschwell (1987) for a discussion of the related notion of intersubjectivity.
7.
By contrast, nudity was already allowed at some river beaches, in the making of
pornography, and in art classes.
8.
For example, proposed zoning regulations that would keep legal sex businesses at
least 1,000 feet from residences and schools have consistently been struck down on constitutional
grounds (local newspaper 4/93).
9.

The meat rack is the term used to describe the row of seats along the stage.

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