Nicola Mai - Mobile Orientations: An Intimate Autoethnography of Migration, Sex Work, and Humanitarian Borders

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Mobile Orientations

Mobile Orientations

An Intimate Autoethnography of Migration, Sex Work, and Humanitarian Borders

Nicola Mai

The University of Chicago Press

CHICAGO & LONDON

The University of Chicago Press, Chicago 60637

The University of Chicago Press, Ltd., London

2018 by The University of Chicago

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission, except in the case of brief quotations in critical articles and reviews. For more information, contact the University of Chicago Press, 1427 E. 60th St., Chicago, IL 60637.

Published 2018

Printed in the United States of America

27 26 25 24 23 22 21 20 19 18 1 2 3 4 5

ISBN-13: 978-0-226-58495-9 (cloth)

ISBN-13: 978-0-226-58500-0 (paper)

ISBN-13: 978-0-226-58514-7 (e-book)

DOI: https://doi.org/10.7208/chicago/9780226585147.001.0001

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Mai, Nicola, author.

Title: Mobile orientations : an intimate autoethnography of migration, sex work, and humanitarian borders / Nicola Mai.

Description: Chicago ; London : The University of Chicago Press, 2018. | Includes bibliographical references and index.

Identifiers: LCCN 2018008600 | ISBN 9780226584959 (cloth : alk. paper) | ISBN 9780226585000 (pbk. : alk. paper) | ISBN 9780226585147 (e-book)

Subjects: LCSH: Male prostitutesEurope. | Sex workersEurope. | Foreign workersEurope. | Male prostitutionEurope. | Sexual orientationEurope. | EuropeEmigration and immigration. | ProstitutionEurope. | Human traffickingEurope.

Classification: LCC HQ119.4.E85 M35 2018 | DDC 306.74/3094dc23

LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2018008600

This paper meets the requirements of ANSI/NISO Z39.48-1992 (Permanence of Paper).

Contents

No, I did not decide, what was I going to do? My family is suffering in Nigeria and I have no papers, what else can I do? They should give us papers instead of fining clients! It is only going to make things more difficult for us than they are already. They should give us work if they want us to stop doing this!

Joy said this all at once when I asked whether she felt she had made her own decision to work in the sex industry. The survey was part of a research project to understand the effects in France and the United Kingdom of sexual humanitarianism, a concept I have introduced to analyze the impact on migrant sex workers of policymaking and social interventions based on their assumed vulnerability to trafficking and exploitation. The concept of sexual humanitarianism refers to the global emergence of a neo-abolitionist epistemology that legitimizes targeted forms of control and protection of social groups defined as vulnerable in relation to their sexual orientation and behavior.

Joys words perfectly embody the epistemological dissonance at the core of this book: the dissonance between the complexity of migrant sex workers experiences of agency and the ways in which that complexity tends to be ignored by antitrafficking policies and interventions. Throughout my experience of researching the sex industry, I faced the axiomatic sexual humanitarian belief that the majority of migrants working in the industry were victims of trafficking. resulting in almost twenty years (and counting) of research and, ultimately, in the book you are reading now. My ability to tap into the complexity of peoples involvements in the sex industry developed only gradually. At the very beginning of my research, I entered the field with precisely the stereotypical assumptions that I challenge in this book. I somehow knew that there had to be a problem behind peoples involvement in the sex industry. I spent the following twenty years unlearning those assumptions (hooks 1995, 157) with the help of a lot of people who were patient enough to explain and show their working and migratory lives to me.

Since the beginning of my doctoral studies in 1997, I have talked to many migrants working in the sex industry. I have met them through specialized services, sex work organizations, and independently, in the context of different research projects. While undertaking such projects, I addressed them primarily as workers, and asked nonmoralizing and nonpathologizing questions while also addressing the real stigmatization and exploitation they encountered in their working and social lives. My research on the relationship between migration and the sex industry started with three years of fieldwork in Albania between 1998 and 2001. My original focus on heterosexual experiences of sex trafficking in Albania gradually expanded to include female, male, and transgender migrants working in the sex industry in a variety of origin and destination contexts, including Belgium, France, Germany, Greece, Italy, Morocco, Romania, Spain, the Netherlands, Tunisia, and the United Kingdom.

In none of those places, with the partial exception of the initial phase of my first fieldwork in Albania (1998-2001), did I encounter the prevalence of victimhood that is generally presented as self-evident by political, academic, and nongovernmental actors advocating the criminalization of clients and the abolition of prostitution as the best ways to fight sex trafficking. On the contrary, the majority of the people I metincluding minors (adolescents between the ages of fourteen and seventeen) and third-party agentsexplained to me the different ways in which they had decided to work in the sex industry. A minority told me that they had embraced sex work enthusiastically and that they found it emancipatory or liberating. An even smaller minority considered themselves victims of trafficking and exploitation. But the vast majority referred to what they did as work. No, not sex work, and definitely not a job like any other. Just workno small matter, given the relevance of the dimension of labor for understanding why people work in the sex industry, and given how little this dimension is acknowledged within sexual humanitarian research and representations.

In my Albanian fieldwork during the early postcommunist years, I witnessed young women and men working in the sex industry according to intensely patriarchal patterns of economic and emotional domination (Mai 2001a). Later in that fieldwork I had the opportunity to observe the fluidification and renegotiation of those relationships in relatively more consensual terms. I decided to further examine this process of fluidification by studying the subjectivities of young men from Albania and Romania who were involved in the sex industry as both sex workers and third-party agents. In the years that followed, as my entry points into the nexus of migration and the sex industry multiplied, I started to meet a majority of nonvictims. At the same time, I gradually gained the confidence of people who had at first presented to me as victims. As a result, a more diverse range of experiences became visible to me.

Historically, prostitution has been framed by policymaking and ideological approaches that range along a spectrum between prohibition and regulation. These approaches emerged in relation to different feminist understandings of womens ability to exert their agency in the context of patriarchal oppression. Since the early 1990s, liberal feminists recognition of womens agency when consenting to sell sex has been challenged by neo-abolitionist feminists, who understand prostitution as paradigmatic of a system of male power and seek its abolition by removing the demand for sexual services (ONeill and Scoular 2008, 13). This shift is best represented by the global resonance achieved by the Swedish model, a globally hegemonic, neo-abolitionist epistemology and policymaking framework which equates sex work with violence against women, and which introduces the parallel decriminalization of sex workers and criminalization of male clients as an ideal instrument to fight trafficking (Skilbrei and Holmstrm 2013).

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