Abstract
This article introduces the concept of abnormativity as way of theorizing the realities of subjects who suffer from marginalization and/or erasure, specifically sex workers. It then develops livability as a playbook of political action which attends to the abnormative lives of sex workers by balancing resistance to institutionalized forms of marginalization with queer critical approaches to heteronormativity. It proposes this framework as suitable for frontline sex-worker support projects, outlining the limitations and benefits of three ethico-political models that aim to address the conditions of abnormativity: the politics of recognition, intersectional recognition, and critical intelligibility. It argues that each of these models is insufficient on its own, but that intersectional recognition and critical intelligibility can be mobilized productively together as the politics of livability.
Living outside the norm
Sex work—defined as the myriad practices that involve the exchange of sexual services for goods or fees—often eludes prevailing moral, ethical, and political ideals. It is an abnormative formation, a sexual undertaking located outside the hegemonic registry, where heteronormative expectations, paradigms, and values are challenged and available playbooks 1 of ethico-political action slip into obsolescence. ‘Abnormativity’ plays on the notion of abjection (see Butler, 1993; Kristeva, 1982). It refers to subjects whose proclivities, bodies, psychical constitutions, life projects, everyday undertakings, and identifications place them outside the hegemonic normative order. However, whereas ‘abject’ 2 primarily refers to subject formations that are disavowed symbolically, and are therefore unintelligible within the terms of the prevailing normative scheme, here it additionally refers to the processes of material disenfranchisement that attend to intelligible-yet-marginalized subjectivities and sexual practices. The term thus includes those who occupy—indeed, who must occupy—subordinate positions within normative orders that construct themselves as exclusionary hierarchies, such as heteronormativity. Sex work serves as an exemplar of abnormativity because sex-working experiences fall across this range: the exchange of bodily intimacy for money violates the prevailing normative economy of desire and its configuration with heteronormativity, and this leads to both material disenfranchisement and socio-normative erasure (see Laing et al., 2015; Mai, 2012; Smith, 2012; Stout, 2014; Zatz, 1997).
Sex workers know well the realities of abnormativity, and much of the research on sex work excavates and illuminates the contours of this living. But less understood is how the fallout of abnormativity is lived by those who work with sex workers, the frontline practitioners charged with meeting their health and social needs and the communities in which they operate. This interface-status imbues their work with profound paradox: as policy actors, they are expected to be constrained by the institutional and normative order that consigns sex workers to abnormativity, but to carry out their duties, missions, and objectives they too must wrestle with the lived contingencies of abnormativity, with the marginalization of zero-tolerance policing, with the predatory harms perpetrated by clients, and the impossibility of conveying to partners, policy-makers, and the public at large the dignity of lives and desires that embody this taboo. Frontline sex workers both mediate and are marked by the fallout of abnormativity.
Elsewhere (see Kallock, forthcoming), I examine the details of this paradox, investigating how institutional dictates and norms animate the work of frontline sex-worker support services in the UK. Here, my aim is to identify the ethical and political precepts that could animate services for sex workers in ways that make living on their own terms possible. I call this ethico-political playbook ‘livability’. In the following sections I interrogate three models of ethico-political action that attempt to attend to abnormative lives: the politics of recognition, the politics of intersectional recognition, and the politics of critical intelligibility. I argue that these approaches are insufficient on their own, and that a different model is needed to adequately attend to abnormative lives, one that excavates the productive tension(s) between these approaches. This, I claim, can be found in the politics of livability. 3
Recognition
The politics of recognition theorizes sex work as a distinctive identity, or a project undertaken within the context of another identity. In this section, I show how this commitment to identity compromises the adequacy of this model for a playbook of ethico-political action for frontline workers. The concept of ‘recognition’ was introduced in the works of GWF Hegel and its principal contribution is the claim that the self is constituted intersubjectively, that is, through relations with Others. Two prominent theorists have drawn on this concept to theorize identity as a basis for political action: Charles Taylor and Axel Honneth. For Taylor, identity refers to the ‘background against which our tastes and desires and opinions and aspirations make sense’ (1979: 32), whilst for Honneth, identity consists in the ‘specific capacities’ (Fraser and Honneth, 2003: 143) and ‘activities’ (2003: 144) that constitute the ‘reference point for collective demands’ (2003: 163) for individuals or groups. The aim of political action under recognition is to create a set of social relations in which ‘individuals learn to see themselves as both full and special members of the community by gradually being assured of the specific capabilities and needs that constitute them as personalities through the supportive reaction patterns of their generalized interaction with partners’ (Fraser and Honneth, 2003: 173). Ideally, relations of recognition reflect a positive and affirming image of the ‘self’ back to itself. By contrast, relations of misrecognition occur ‘when the people or society around [a group of people] mirror back to them a confining or demeaning or contemptible picture of themselves’ (Taylor, 1979: 25). In both cases, identity is seen to express a ‘core self’ (Erikson, 1968) that is dialogically mediated and registered through fixed categories that individuals express and possess and under which they can be grouped.
Despite sharing ‘identity’ as the foundation of political action, Taylor and Honneth delineate different arenas in which a politics of recognition proceed. Taylor conceptualizes political recognition as a blueprint for designing social institutions to protect the cultural interests and integrity of minority groups (such as the Quebecois in Canada) who face discrimination and extinction. He calls for the institutional and cultural valorization of non-dominant identities, practices, or goods, and justifies this appeal by highlighting the impact of non-recognition or misrecognition on the dignity of persons within these groups (Taylor, 1979: 25–26). For him, relations of recognition occur at the communal level and the aim of the politics of recognition is to affirm the ‘equal worth’ of disparaged cultural collectivities. For Honneth, recognition is grounded in the ideal of reciprocity and is steered by the aim of individuated self-realization. It is most clearly manifested in relations of love, legal respect, and esteem (or solidarity), as such interpersonal encounters support the self’s positive ‘practical’ relationship to itself (Honneth, 1992: 193). Such relations consist of ‘empathetic engagement and interestedness’ (Honneth, 2008: 27) and are achieved by ‘taking over the perspective of another person, resulting [in the] understanding of the other’s reasons for acting’ (2008: 34). He critiques relations of reification, that is, relations grounded in ‘structural one-sidedness’ in which ‘the symbiotically sustained dependence of one partner is then ultimately just the complement to the aggressively tinged omnipotence fantasies upon which the other partner is fixated’ (Honneth, 1995: 106). Honneth argues that such relationships constitute ‘a deviation from a defensible ideal of interaction’ (1995: 106). They are characterized by cerebral evaluation and affective detachment (cf. Honneth, 2008) and are manifested in physical maltreatment, legal exclusion, and cultural denigration (Honneth, 1992: 194). For Honneth, politics should aim to establish the conditions that undercut reification by promoting reciprocal sympathetic relations, for only through such relations is self-realization possible.
All claims to recognition are derived from injustices that are linked to particular group membership or to congruence with a particular relational ideal. The value of recognition is thus conceived along lines of re-valuing identity-x through affirmative political efforts to secure the self-determination of misrecognized groups, or to establish a shared standard of affective morality geared towards the full realization of personal identity formation. Although neither Honneth nor Taylor explicitly address sex work, analyzing the application of recognition to this area is illuminating and relevant, especially given its recent uptake amongst some activists and scholars (see O’Neill, 2007).
The sex working experience can be theorized in two ways under the politics of recognition. First, it can be used to diagnose and contest the misrecognition of the ‘sex-worker’ identity. The rhetoric of LGBT-rights movements often invokes the parlance of recognition, especially when making claims for legal recognition of same-sex relationships. Sex-working activism chimes nicely with the sex-positive and queer elements of these movements (see Agustin, 2007; Chateauvert, 2015; Edelman, 2011; Lopes, 2006; Majic, 2014; Nestle, 1998; Pendleton, 1997; Pheterson, 1998; Stout, 2014). Activists taking this approach claim that ‘whore sexuality’ is a unique form of sexual expression, one that even contributes to the common good (see Kallock, 2018; Pendleton, 1997; Queen, 1997; Schwarzenbach, 1990; Showden, 2011). Following Honneth, discrimination against sex workers denies their scope to realize their fullest ‘sexual self’ without incurring social stigma, thus impairing their ability to realize their identities fully. Following Taylor, such discrimination also fails to valorize sex work as a distinctive sexual ‘culture’ or ‘community’.
However, these applications of recognition stretch their central premises into incoherence. Whilst the politics of recognition emphasizes the importance of distinctive cultural value, it emphasizes even more the ‘equal dignity’ (Taylor, 1979) and ‘self-esteem’ (Honneth, 1992) of the individual. Both Taylor and Honneth stress the need to evaluate collective claims against these fundamental commitments. This means that individual rights, worth, and self-respect trump communitarian claims to any cultural valorization. Given this inclination, it is more plausible to claim that the politics of recognition theorizes sex work as reifying exploitation, or an instance of gendered misrecognition, rather than a source of positive self-realization. In other words, sex work is a form of misrecognition.
The second way the politics of recognition can be applied is by framing sex workers as unwitting and helpless victims in need of rescue. This is consistent with an abolitionist perspective on sex work, which claims that what is being bought in commercial sex is the asymmetrical objectification of women in its fullest sense (see Barry, 1995; Dworkin, 1981; Farley, 2004; Kallock, 2018; MacKinnon, 1993, 2011; Pateman, 1999). For instance, O’Connell Davidson claims that the motivation driving clients to purchase sex is to ‘possess the woman’ in order to gain recognition from her as the master does from his slave’ (O’Connell Davidson, 1998: 158–162, emphasis added). Notably, this perspective frames this form of misrecognition as something that exclusively impacts women.
Both applications work by flattening the variance of sex-working populations and the uneven, fluctuating character of the sector. For instance, the ‘sex work’ identity does not convey the degree to which the modus operandi, risks and burdens, and rewards of sexual labor differ between regions (Grove and Smith, 2014; Kempadoo and Doezma, 1998), across intra-sector echelons (Bernstein, 2007; Hubbard and Sanders, 2003; Laing et al., 2015; Roberts et al., 2010), and in terms of technologies and expertise (Campbell and Sanders, 2007; Cowan, 2012). Moreover, many sex workers characterize their relation to the sector as fluid, something with which they engage on temporary terms (Sanders, 2005). These disjunctures make it difficult to construct political claims that unilaterally apply across the spectrum of sex-working experiences. 4
Another major contributor to the debate on—but detractor from—the politics of recognition is Nancy Fraser. She takes exception to both Taylor and Honneth’s conceptions of recognition, arguing that their reliance on the ‘identity model,’ and the bootstrapping of that model to an ideal of affective relationality, culminates in a slippery slope into separatism (see Fraser, 1997a, 1997b, 2000). According to her, ‘recognition claims often take the form of calling attention to, if not performatively creating, the putative specificity of some group and then of affirming its value’ (1997a: 16). This puts ‘moral pressure on individual members to conform to a given group culture’ (Fraser, 2000: 112) or to subscribe to a pre-ordained, external ideal of self-realization. Emphasizing group specificity risks the hypostatization of ‘authentic’ cultural expression (cf. Fraser, 2000: 119) and ‘reinforces intragroup domination’ (2000: 112) along patriarchal and class lines. 5 Fraser also argues that the emphasis on misrecognition distracts analysis from diagnosing how lived experiences of ‘groups’ are shaped by political and economic disparities (Fraser and Honneth, 2003).
To counter these shortcomings without jettisoning recognition altogether, Fraser proposes a ‘critical theory of recognition’ (Fraser, 1997a: 12), which examines the ‘varieties of identity politics [that] best synergize with struggles for social equality’ (1997a: 12). She rethinks injustices of misrecognition, and their correlating remedies, as matters of institutional disparity and therefore as distinct but not isolated from material politics. Misrecognition is thus reformulated ‘as a consequence of institutionalized patterns of cultural value that constitute one as comparatively unworthy of respect or esteem’ and thereby deny one’s status as ‘a full partner in social interaction’ (Fraser, 2000: 113–114). Institutions materialize discursive norms, but discursive norms (and the normative categories on which they are premised) are not the only or primary sites of struggle. Instead, struggles for recognition must be analyzed and weighed against struggles for material parity in the areas of economic distribution and political representation. Political struggle is thus informed by a materialist history rather than a ‘merely cultural’ (Butler, 1997a: 42) analysis of discursive normativity. This orientation chimes nicely with the politics of intersectional recognition but, as I show in the section on critical intelligibility, leaves some abnormative lives unattended.
Intersectional recognition
The politics of intersectional recognition suggests that reconceptualizing identity categories as ‘intersectional’ generates a formulation of identity politics that better accommodates the historical complexity and untidiness of power and the lived experiences it generates. Sex workers are untidy subjects—subjects who live at the intersection of multiple norms, identities, and life projects. This untidiness not only makes it difficult to catalogue sex workers under a cohesive social specificity, it makes it difficult—if not impossible—to address their multi-layered oppression and the needs such oppression produces. Feminist intersectionality analyses provide a lens for analyzing this complexity, and thus acts as a vital corrective to the politics of recognition.
Kimberlé Crenshaw was one of the first scholars to reframe identity as ‘intersectional’. In her studies of domestic violence, rape, and work-discrimination experienced by women of color she highlights the extent to which anti-racist and feminist movements occasioned ‘mutual elisions’ (Crenshaw, 1991: 1252) of ‘intra group differences’ (1991: 1242). She argues that the strategic logic of the ‘single axis framework’ limits ‘inquiry to the experiences of otherwise-privileged members of the group’ (Crenshaw, 1989: 140). Along these lines, Ange-Marie Hancock (2007) critiques the tendency of recognition identity politics to ‘close ranks’ (2007: 65). By grounding political analysis and action in ‘group solidarity’ ‘identity politics’ resort to ‘unitary’ categories of difference which ‘[serve] to bind people into a political group based on a uniform set of experiences’ (Hancock, 2007: 65). These elisions install a divisive and regressive ‘Oppression Olympics’ whereby ‘groups compete for the mantle of ‘most oppressed’ to gain the attention and political support of dominant groups as they pursue policy remedies’ (Hancock, 2007: 68). Instead, proponents of intersectionality claim that identity politics should be concerned with the way oppressions interact with each other.
The problem with allocating recognition on the basis of a unified ‘identity’ specificity is that it occludes the ways in which subjects are positioned by ‘distinctive yet interlocking structures of oppression’ (Hill Collins, 1993). 6 By contrast, an intersectional lens highlights how one is positioned by the ‘social order of things’ (Anthias, 2012), that is, the boundaries and hierarchies of one’s social context—the power structures that subjects navigate as they develop a notion of self, make political claims, and engage in interpersonal relations (Anthias, 2008). 7 On this view, ‘abnormativity’ is a mode of social positionality that emerges as an individual engages with and through overlapping processes of material and political marginalization. Intersectionality highlights the historical context and, specifically, the way in which particular social categories (identifications, bodies, life projects, geographical histories, and neuro-psychical constitutions) are defined and then allocated privileges and protections. By understanding how disenfranchisement of certain individuals and groups happens, intersectional recognition provides a robust and fine-grained method for identifying and addressing oppression, one that is more attuned to the concrete workings of power than the politics of recognition. 8
One of the most prominent institutional dictates under contemporary power relations is the imperative to appear as a ‘stable self’ (see Butler, 1997a, 2001; Puar, 2012), or, as Crenshaw (1989, 1991) illuminates, either one identity or another—not an interaction of both. Those who live across multiple categories of positionality cannot appeal to shared norms because those norms require ‘tidy’ alignments with particular ideals, identifications, bodies, and so on. The politics of recognition echoes this demand, dictating the need for political claims to be made under a shared relational ideal (i.e. that one relate to others in x-way) or under a shared group’s specificity (i.e. that one shares x-characteristic). Such dictates are inconsistent with the intersectional claim that subjects live, act, and think in ways that are variegated, fluid, and profoundly indeterminate (see Showden, 2011: esp. Ch. 1). An intersectional lens refuses to insist on a neat taxonomy of identities analyzed in isolation from one another, encouraging instead an investigation of how intersecting social categories mutually articulate and constitute one another. Abnormative lives are thus seen as subject to interacting processes of racism and sexism. Their experiences sit in the messy space where systems of power converge.
Responding to the intersectional untidiness of sex-workers’ lives can be difficult for frontline services, especially when service users present multiple and interacting personal and social needs, such as drug addiction, domestic violence, homelessness, mental illness, or a criminal record. Service delivery is often implemented via neat categories of response, focusing thereby on one aspect of the client’s social positionality at the exclusion of another. This is institutional; many agencies are simply not equipped to address the ways in which these issues bear on one another, and instead provide only a partial response to the conditions of disenfranchisement that an abnormative status engenders. Practitioners are embedded in their own trajectories, able only to respond within a certain scope of action: police just focus on criminal and ‘disorderly’ behavior; probation officers just focus on compliance with diversionary mandates; family services just focus on children; addiction-support workers just focus on substance abuse; and health workers just focus on sexual and public health. Within this service matrix there is a tendency to adopt a bureaucratic ‘tick box’ approach, to measure sex workers against generalized standards, and to treat needs in isolation from one another, sometimes at the expense of one another. Operating under their own mandates, each lacks awareness of how their interventions overlap to produce cross-cutting modes of disenfranchisement (see Kallock, forthcoming).
This approach to service delivery is the result of applying the politics of recognition. A delineation of the sex-work experience as a unified phenomenon—of ‘identity’ or ‘group specificity’—is not only inadequate, it is outright harmful. Cataloguing the multitude of sex-working experiences under a single signifier results in superficial analysis, broad-brush responses, and pernicious stereotyping. Instead of illuminating the complexity of sex work, a focus on ‘identity’ or relational behavior displaces an interrogation of structural power shaping their lives, disposing policy actors to instead treat sex workers as individuals in need of regulation, containment, rescue, or responsibilization (Hill, 2014; Kantola and Squires, 2004; Scoular and O’Neill, 2007). The politics of recognition thus elides a reality that intersectional recognition vividly highlights: that recognizing the needs and agency of sex workers properly does not require fidelity to a particular ideal or pre-specified identity; rather, it demands that ‘sex work’ be recognized as a complex effect of power, one that cannot be resolved through tokenistic or reductive methods and whose moral status is ambivalent. It presumes that sex-worker’s needs, agency, and dignities can only be attended to by recognizing the ways in which institutions position an individual or community, and militates against simple categories and reductive responses, disposing policy actors instead to be aware of and tackle the cross-cutting effects of structural power. In this respect, intersectional recognition purports that ‘oppression’ and ‘privilege’ are (the most) significant categories of political and ethical prerogative.
Although the politics of intersectional recognition provides a framework for addressing the untidiness of abnormative lives, and diagnosing the ways in which that untidiness both complicates and exacerbates the workings of power, it contains one pivotal shortcoming: in focusing on material manifestation of power, it fails to tackle properly the discursive norms through which individuals are categorized and positionality is conferred. This is not to say intersectional recognition evades the notion of norms altogether; it certainly encourages us to question the ways certain categories, groups, and individuals are positioned by and within political institutions and modes of representation. But it does not invite us to question the premises of these groupings. Ultimately, it is mired in the effort to map what Jasbir Puar (2012) identifies as the ‘grids’ of ‘subject positioning’ (2007: 50) and what Judith Butler alludes to as the ‘multiplication of subject-positions along a pluralist axis’ (1993: 114) As was the case under the politics of recognition, intersectional recognition is locked in the logics of categorization, compelled by its own premises to locate individuals within static grids of identity and group specificity. This is in large part because proponents of intersectionality have focused their interventions on legal and representative institutions, such as political leadership quotas, both of which operate on the basis of a reflexive, self-contained subject with pre-established faculties and characteristics. Puar argues that because such ‘structures… demand the fixity of the rights-bearing subject,’ a politics of intersectionality that is primarily geared towards the correction of legal and political disparity has ‘simultaneously reproduced the disciplinary demands of that subject formation’ (2012: 62). It shifts the analysis of power rather than showing us how power can be undone. It merely rehashes—rather than interrogates—the normative matrix through which the very oppression, marginalization, and exclusion of positionality-x is cultivated. Recognition and intersectionality attend to the symptoms of sex-work erasure, but not to the erasure itself. The erasure of abnormative lives can only be contested by interrogating the logics of oppression and occlusion through which abnormativity is designated. To do this, I turn to the politics of critical intelligibility.
Critical intelligibility
The inability of intersectional recognition to tackle the terms of recognition makes it a shaky fulcrum from which to fully leverage a politics for abnormative lives, but an additional point of leverage can be developed from Judith Butler’s work, one which I call the politics of critical intelligibility. This politics takes the instability of shared categories, such as ‘identity’, but also normative ideals of intersubjective rapport, desire, and value, as its starting point. It directly tackles the normative premises of shared categories, thereby providing a crucial corrective to both the politics of recognition and intersectionality.
Butler purports that recognition and intersectionality rely on an appeal to ‘synthesis,’ understood as the establishment of a point of agreement, commonality, or familiarity—in short, likeness. For Taylor, synthesis is achieved through compliance with collectively determined social norms. The progression towards synthesis is expressed in his reading of the dyadic encounter between Self and Other, in which he concludes that recognition is achieved through the dialectical process by which ‘parts’ become ‘whole’ (Taylor, 1979: 47). Synthesis thus refers to the sense in which the individual and society become coextensive, that is, when the wills of individuals (the parts) are reflected in shared forms of social life (the whole), and vice versa. For Honneth, synthesis is established through a shared and reciprocal ‘communicative stance’ (1992: 50) of sympathy. It is only ‘through this emotional attachment to a ‘concrete other’ that a world of meaningful qualities is disclosed to a child… as a world in which he must involve himself practically’ (Honneth, 1992: 45). Through these early experiences of ‘love’ we acquire a capacity to appreciate and take up the perspective of others and can recognize that Others are—like the self—reluctant to be dominated. Synthesis thus comprises a particular relational ideal that defines one’s social positionality.
Fraser too posits a site of synthesis, but she develops it by way of collapsing the normative workings of power into its material manifestations. In a well-known exchange with Butler (see Butler, 1997a; Fraser, 1997b), she claims that injustices of misrecognition, such as those pertaining to sexual identification and practice, are manifested in ‘institutions and social practices, in social action and embodied habitus, [and] in ideological state apparatuses’ and thus ‘far from occupying some wispy ethereal realm, they are material in their existence and effects’ (Fraser, 1997b: 282). Similarly, economic relations are material in character; realities given form through the capitalist imperative of accumulating surplus value—not the oppression or occlusion of a specific social positionality. Fraser posits the material as the rallying point from which political and economic relations can be transformed to accommodate abnormative lives; a point from which possibilities ‘possibilities of countersystemic ‘agency’ and social change… appear not in an abstract transhistorical property of language, such as ‘resignification; or ‘performativity,’ but rather in the actual contradictory character of specific social relations’ (1997b: 287). For her, materiality serves as the site of synthesis from which political action can be envisioned.
Butler is not ignorant of the beneficial value of ‘recognition’; indeed, she accepts that in modern, liberal societies ‘recognition’ is ‘that which we cannot not want’ (Butler and Athanasiou, 2013: 76, emphasis added) precisely because registering others in socio-normative terms is central to intersubjective engagement. Whereas Taylor, Honneth, and Fraser contend that ‘having’ recognition is a positive gain, Butler is less sanguine that a mode of recognition based in synthesis provides an adequate playbook for political action. For her, the Hegelian maneuver of rendering the ‘parts’ into a coherent ‘whole’ reduces the Other to the Self, resulting in likeness prevailing over difference. This is problematic for her because ‘likeness’ serves implicitly as a carrier for a particular socio-normative agenda and moral worldview, the imposition of which occasions the erasure of different subject modalities. Appeals to recognition thus necessarily precipitate the exclusion of those lives which abrade the types of relations recognition idealizes, or the appeal to identity and group specificity. Put bluntly, ‘unity is purchased through violent excision’ (Butler, 1997a).
This critique suggests that however complex and nuanced in their conceptualization of power, recognition leaves subjects utterly underprepared to engage with the unfamiliar, that is, with those who differ from the prevailing norms, who do not engage with others in line with shared norms of inter/action, or with whom one cannot agree or sympathize. Recognition and—more so—intersectional recognition can attend to disenfranchised lives that can acquire a toe-hold in prevailing discourses and contest their marginalization, but not to those that are considered taboo or for whom no ‘name’ or ‘utterance’ exists. This has consequences for how the very humanity of abnormative sexual beings is perceived, that is, whether they make sense as persons. Throughout her work, Butler probes and critiques the mechanisms of ‘social power that produces [an] intelligible field of subjects’ (2004a: 48), asking how the ‘norms of personhood’ preclude certain lives from recognition as human. For Butler, the prerogative for political analysis, critique, and action is to diagnose the ways in which norms operate as a ‘measurement and a means of producing a common standard’ (2004a: 52); as a mode of regulation ‘which makes regular’ (Butler, 2004a: 55); as ‘a principle of valorisation’ (2004a: 49) by which subjects are allocated moral and political value. She highlights how some lives cannot ‘count’ as subjects under the prevailing scheme of recognition, for achieving recognition under the rubric of ‘synthesis’ either entails a profound erasure of whatever qualities place abnormative lives at odds with prevailing normative categories, or invites profound material disenfranchisement and suffering. Instead of being recognized, such subjects are merely apprehended; their presence is registered on a corporeal level but not on the socio-discursive level. 9 In contrast to the political models outlined here, the politics of critical intelligibility codifies an effort to rehash ‘difference’—that is, the abnormative—as a generative tension rather than a sectarian device Abnormativity is a basis for launching a counter-political imaginary that takes difference from the scheme of intelligibility as its primary ethical impetus.
Butler develops a conceptual toolbox that allows her to excavate modes of alterity from the very terms of hegemony and redeploy them in the name of insurrectionary gains. Whereas Fraser focuses on the material workings of power, Butler’s methodology focuses on the cultural norms through which formations of sexuality are deemed intelligible and therefore respectable. The concept of ‘performativity’ (see Butler, 1990) is important, providing a means by which she can expose such formations as a ruse. Rather than view sexuality as either a core identity (qua recognition) or a fluid yet definitive position within a bounded hierarchy of institutional power (qua intersectionality), Butler frames gender and sexuality as ‘fabrications manufactured and sustained through corporeal signs and other discursive means’ (1990: 185). Reframing identity as ‘performative’ emphasizes the ways in which intersecting markers of identity comprise fluid performances that call into formation modes of identificatory subjectivity while foreclosing ‘different’ others. By emphasizing this fluidity, performative conceptions of sexuality undermine the notion that some sexualities are ‘natural’ and therefore have a stronger claim to intelligibility and respectability.
Abnormative performativities are thus re-configured as a vital component of political struggle. They constitute the marginalized ‘outsides’ to the normative order—spaces of disruptive action; playbooks for doing identity, sexuality, work, and kinship differently (Butler, 2002; Lovell, 2003). In particular, sex work can be occupied as a counter-systemic location through which material relations can be disrupted and reworked. In her rejoinder to Fraser (Butler, 1997a; see also Fraser, 1997b), Butler proposes that her framing of identity politics as ‘merely cultural,’ and therefore less urgent and important, elides the extent to which sexuality actively structures the operations of capitalism. Rather, Butler contends that ‘cultural’ struggles, such as LGBTQ movements, are in fact pivotal to a concerted resistance to capitalist economies because the capitalist mode of kinship, central to its economic functioning, is predicated on compulsory schemes of patriarchy and heteronormativity: ‘normative gender serves the reproduction of the normative family’ (Butler, 1997a: 40; see also Carver and Chambers, 2007; Rich, 1980; Rubin, 1975). Sexual norms define what it means to be a ‘productive’ citizen of the capitalist society. She writes, ‘to the extent that naturalized sexes function to secure the heterosexual dyad as the holy structure of sexuality, they continue to underwrite kinship, legal, and economic entitlements, and those practices that delimit what will be a socially recognizable person’ (Butler, 1997a: 44). Butler goes on to highlight the material disparities that non-heteronormative persons experience, arguing that such disparities arise primarily from a capitalist system that is perpetually energized by the ‘redomestication and resubordination’ (1997a: 38) of abnormative modalities of kinship.
These claims cohere with the sex-positivist strand of sex-work activism, which contends that sex work illuminates the ways that practices of intimacy, work, and kinship can be re-formulated to shift the terms of gender and sexual normativity sanctioned by capitalist normative order (see Delacoste and Alexander, 1998; Kallock, 2017; Nagle, 1997; Showden, 2011; Schwarzenbach, 1990). Sex workers violate heteronormative norms of sexuality by mixing intimacy and money (Zatz, 1997), and they violate the prevailing model of gendered kinship by supporting their family through multiple and transitory sexual encounters with numerous father-figures, thereby displacing the sexual and economic ‘head of household’ with a female figurehead who guarantees the survival of the family through her aberrant sexual agency. As a result of these aberrations, sex work is seen to not only ‘pollute’ (Shrage, 1989: 355) sex workers’ own interpersonal and moral standing, it also directly undoes—‘perverts’—the norms of gendered kinship, making it possible to accuse sex workers of endangering the lives of dependents by denying them a grounded father-figure and exposing them to the influence of misogynistic and perverted men (see Dworkin, 1981; O’Connell Davidson, 1998). Yet, as we have seen, such categorizations of the sex-work experience offer a flattened conception of the sex worker. This notwithstanding, their prevalence in political discourse makes it difficult for sex workers to acquire and hold the privileges and protections that to pertain to ‘personhood,’ such as the right to public presence (O’Neill, 2007), to obtain legal redress (Hubbard, 2004), to direct the terms of their labor (Gall, 2014), to run businesses (Hubbard, 2009; Sanders, 2006), avoid persecution from vigilantes (Hubbard and Sanders, 2003; Sagar and Croxall, 2010), to access medical and social services (Brewis and Linstead, 2000), and contest depreciating representations of themselves and the sector as a whole (Lowman, 2000). But by transgressing these norms, and engaging unabashedly in a form of ‘bad’ sex, sex workers challenge implicitly the legitimacy of monogamy, reproductive sexuality, and intimacy (Kallock, 2018; Showden, 2011). Sex work serves as that crucial ‘outside’ from which the capitalist imperative to re-produce producers can be resisted precisely because it evades reproductive outcomes altogether and instead engages subjects in sexual desire for the sake of other ends.
This valorization of transgression as the primary tactic of political actions can, however, present undesirable outcomes (Wilson, 1993). For instance, sexual practices that bypass consent, involve serious physical harms and suffering, or draw their energy and attraction from the prospect of exploitation or violence each ‘transgress’ and ‘destabilize’ commonly held norms around consent, equality, agency, and physical and mental integrity. In virtue of their presumptive marginality such practices are ‘abnormative,’ but it seems regressive to embrace them. 10 Given this, the implicit demand to dispense with shared norms could be said to throw the baby out with the bathwater. Norms and the categories they engender present problems, but also opportunities. As proponents of intersectional recognition contend, the recognition of identities, or shared values can provide a meaningful horizon to one’s sense of self (Alcoff, 2000; Showden, 2011), and shared commitment to categories of behavior, identity, values and principles provide a prism through which one can diagnose and contest the terms of one’s oppression or erasure. For critical intelligibility to be anything other than a wild spin into relativism, it must be tethered to an ethical horizon geared towards common principles; for example, nonviolence (Butler, 2004b), agency (Butler, 2001; Lovell, 2003; Showden, 2011), critical capacities (Benson, 1990, 1994), and the needs of ‘immediate life’ (Engels, 1884, quoted in Butler, 1997a: 39) In other words, it should be tethered to efforts to equally enfranchise and empower all subjects as they negotiate the complex of socio-political categories through which they engage in a multitude of life projects, acquire a sense of self, act on desires, identify themselves, and engage in political and interpersonal interchange. It is this tension between the imperative to identify with shared normative categories, and the imperative to destabilize and rework them, that serves as the site for the politics of livability.
Livability
Both the politics of intersectionality and critical intelligibility demonstrate that attenuating the cultural stigmatization of abnormative sexualities is no simple matter. Intersectional recognition highlights the shifting and complicated impact of intersecting oppression, illuminating, rightly, that sex work is an inherently untidy area of social life, one where matters of institutional oppression, cultural stigma, political representation, and material disparity can only be explained within and through one another. Critical intelligibility, meanwhile, illuminates how the erasure of sex-work sexuality as an intelligible formation of sexual performativity is predicated on—figuratively speaking—the consolidation of heteronormative discourse, including, but not limited to, the production of neo-liberal citizens through the patriarchal nuclear family. On this account, sex work does not fit into the discourses available to us, and it prompts us to discard and rework the norms we use to make sense of sexuality, kinship, citizenship, and—most vitally—personhood.
Insofar as intersectional recognition provides a more robust and salient substitution for the politics of recognition, I maintain that the latter can be dispensed with. This notwithstanding, the remaining candidates are hardly satisfactory in themselves. Both contain limitations: intersectional recognition fails to challenge the normative scheme, whilst critical intelligibility fails to offer an ethico-political horizon to which transgression can be harnessed. Yet both offer important insights: intersectional recognition a robust analysis of the effects of identity-based recognition; the politics of critical intelligibility a robust analysis of the premises of recognition itself. Each is also uniquely limited: in avoiding transgression intersectional recognition can preserve erasure; in scorning categories, critical intelligibility can cloud the workings of power. Yet, this tension need not be viewed as a source of dismay; rather, it points us towards the ways in which these paradigms serve as vital correctives for one another, generating an altogether different political model—one that emerges from the productive tension between these two approaches, from the ways in which they compensate for each other’s limitations, as well as they ways in which they cancel each other out. 11 I call this politics livability, and in this final section I consider how the strengths of the aforementioned models could be operationalized by frontline services working with sex workers to undercut the stigmatization of sex workers by outlining four tactics of livability: nonjudgmental praxis, person-directed care, integrated consciousness raising, a community-based approach, and normative flexing.
Nonjudgmental praxis is the cornerstone to creating and sustaining livable engagements with abnormative lives. A judgmental attitude is manifested in condemnatory, disparaging, and prescriptive remarks or behaviors, such as refusing treatment until a particular behavior is adjusted or altogether desisted from. A judgmental attitude implies adherence to a set of norms and is triggered when someone must be disciplined back into compliance. ‘Nonjudgmental’ is a prominent buzzword among frontline support workers, many of whom know—at least implicitly—that disapproving and prescriptive attitudes or policies generate distrust and withdrawal. But there is another advantage of nonjudgmental praxis. Suspending ‘judgment’ allows service users to be present in their abnormativity. To be nonjudgmental is to set aside any belief that clients ought to tidily identify with shared social categories, and to set aside the imperative to comply with prevailing norms of identity, behavior, and sexuality. By generating a recess in which hegemony is adjourned, non-judgementality creates pathways for abnormative lives to appear in their abrasive untidiness and unintelligibility. Such spaces provide opportunities for abnormative subjects to antagonize the entrenched norms held by the institutionally and culturally privileged.
Nonjudgmental praxis is an operationalization of the openness promoted under critical intelligibility and the tolerance for untidiness encouraged under intersectional recognition. But it also establishes the practical and discursive space in which person-directed care and integrated consciousness-raising can occur. These tactics are concerned primarily with amplifying and centralizing the voice and agency of sex workers in the development and delivery of services. Person-directed care refers to the interpersonal dynamics that inhere between practitioner and service user. For many frontline practitioners, especially those working under statutory agencies, service engagement is steered by performance quotas, standardized protocols, limited service options, and top-down agendas (Kallock, forthcoming). This can lead to impersonal, one-size-fits all solutions that force both the practitioner and the client to conform to pre-given ‘boxes’ that may not reflect or attend to the reality of the client’s needs. The practitioner—or agency—directs the terms of care. By contrast, person-directed care posits the needs and desires expressed by the client at the center of the moment of service engagement. Practically speaking, the function of the practitioner in this interchange is to provide the client with the tools to articulate her own needs and inclinations. It puts the client in the driver’s seat.
Of course, person-directed care can only happen if there is an organizational mandate to implement it. Integrated consciousness-raising refers to measures that can be taken at the agency-level to integrate the voices of sex workers in the operations and agendas of frontline services. Practically speaking, it includes training and hiring sex-working peers to deliver services to the service-user community and to participate in the agenda-setting and steering of the administrative, strategic, and political operations of the agency. Where participation is difficult to enable, for example among street sex-working women who may lack the time, energy, or skills to participate in organizational operations, long-term goals should include initiatives that work to equip interested members of the client community towards such participation; for example, through language classes, transportation assistance, and safe spaces for community discussion. Feedback surveys also serve to raise awareness of the impact and effectiveness of services and can highlight erasures.
Both person-directed care and integrated consciousness-raising provide bulwarks against the encroachment and entrenchment of outside agendas and the hegemonic norms that usually underpin them, and thus are in tune with critical intelligibility. And because they facilitate a more fully-fledged and concrete understanding of the workings of power in sex workers’ lives they exemplify the materialist ethics encapsulated under intersectional recognition. Most importantly, both reflect the productive tension between intersectionality and critical intelligibility. Neither tactic discards the category of ‘sex worker’ or the needs that are widely recognized as part-and-parcel of the sex-working experience; rather, they leave interpretation open to those who are internal—rather than external—to that experience, thereby allowing a richer appreciation of the distinctiveness of sex working to crystallize, or assumptions to shift when erasures become apparent. Installing the voice of users in the service delivery process thus upsets sedimented power dynamics and the forms of oppression and marginalization such dynamics engender whilst also facilitating the interrogation and flexing of norms.
Although important in themselves, the success of these tactics is predicated on agencies also adopting a community-based approach to service delivery and a commitment to normative flexing. These presume a relationship between individuals and the structures of power in which they are embedded, and are aimed at reworking those structures in ways that allow abnormative lives to appear on their own terms without risk of censure. The community-based approach recognizes that sex workers confront debilitating institutional and communal barriers as they work, engage with services, or engage in collective action. It thus attends to the needs of sex workers and the power structures with which they struggle in terms of their ecological relationship to each other, rather than as isolated phenomena (see Campbell and Sanders, 2007; Pitcher, 2006). Instead of just attending to the possible biological harms sex workers can incur as they work, a community-based approach attends to the ways in which such vulnerabilities are exacerbated by environmental structures (such as a lack of street lights), the institutional context (such as concerns about arrest or law enforcement apathy), and the socio-normative context (such as the belief that sex workers cannot be sexually assaulted). 12 A community-based approach exemplifies intersectional recognition because it illuminates the ways power deploys social categories to materially disenfranchise particular factions whilst privileging others. Power is materialized through shared social categories; it is from the lived positions of those categories that its operations can be diagnosed and countered.
Whereas the community-based approach focuses on the material workings of power, normative flexing focuses on the normative workings of power. The core idea here is that shared categories of normative ideals can be reworked by enabling abnormative resignifications—by empowering, for example, performativities of ‘identity,’ ‘sexuality,’ ‘labor,’ and ‘intimacy’ that contravene heteronormativity. Frontline services can engage effectively in modes of political action aimed at transforming how sex work is conceptualized and responded to by institutions, communities, and individuals. By discussing sex work as a job, a form of sexual expression, or a negotiation of difficult social and economic realities—rather than as an occasion for moral sensationalism or reductive rebuke—these agencies can flex the norms of ‘sexual respectability’ through which statutory and non-statutory actors justify the stigmatization, disenfranchisement, and violation of aberrant sexual performativities. Whore-positive campaigns 13 and events that acknowledge the loss of sex working lives, such as the annual ‘International Day to End Violence Against Sex Workers,’ frame the lives of sex workers as worthy of grief, a condition Butler argues is central to securing recognition of personhood (Butler, 2004b, 2009). Addressing misinformation about sex workers is also vital. In England, some specialist sex worker support projects implement cross-agency knowledge-sharing initiatives that aim to change attitudes and preconceptions of non-specialist practitioners by busting myths and outlining best practice guidelines for serving sex workers (Kallock, forthcoming). These services sometimes engage in local policy forums with multi-agency partners, such as the police, or liaise between sex workers, business leaders, and residents to resolve local conflicts (Campbell et al., 2008). Within these forums, services focus on explaining how certain attitudes or policies stigmatize sex workers, undermine their service provision, exacerbate stigma, and violate the rights and well-being of sex workers. They encourage partner agencies to instead engage in dialogue with sex workers, to abandon zero-tolerance practices, and to work with support projects to address conflicts rather than penalize individuals.
These examples of normative flexing are clearly consistent with the politics of critical intelligibility, which calls for the disrupting and reworking of exclusionary social categories, and the welcoming of new performativities. Yet the flexing of the discursive frames through which frontline practitioners work have important material ramifications. By reframing sex workers as citizens entitled to the privileges, protections, and the dignities workers in other sectors hold, services intervene in the efforts of political institutions that respond to sex workers as helpless victims or sources of social degeneration. Where sex workers can obtain the means to legal redress or can work without facing overt discrimination, the prevailing justifications underpinning violence against sex workers can be weakened. Normative flexing thus balances intersectionality’s focus on materialism and with the critical intelligibility tactic of transgression. This deployment of critical intelligibility may be said to engender a new category of sex worker, but one that shifts the normative horizon so that sex workers can appear in their abnormativity without incurring material forms censure or repudiation.
In her rejoinder to ‘the neoconservativism within the left’ Butler posits that a ‘refusal to become resubordinated to a unity that caricatures, demeans and domesticates difference becomes the basis for a more expansive and dynamic political impulse. The resistance to unity carries with it the cipher of democratic promise on the left’ (Butler, 1997a: 44, emphasis added). Livability offers a playbook that chimes with this rallying cry. It points towards an effective way to manage the dual ramifications of marginalization and erasure—a way that is ethical because it enables abnormative lives to present on their own terms. In other words, it posits openness to difference at its center, and deploys methods for challenging the process of disavowal and oppression that diminish the capacity of sex workers to aspire to ‘live and breathe and move’ (Butler, 2004a: 31). By reframing sex work/ers as a life project in which a variety of wo/men participate for a variety of reasons, support workers and their partners avoid pouring energy into upholding heteronormative ideals, or treating some needs at the expense of others, and instead tackle the ways in which material and normative workings of power collectively wage violence on the life of sex workers. For a politics for abnormative lives this is the aim, this is the horizon of political action, and this is how the abnormative lives of sex workers can be accommodated properly.
Footnotes
Acknowledgements
This article would not have come together without the help and patience of many colleagues and friends. My gratitude to my former supervisors, Angelia Wilson and Francesca Gains, for their sagacious feedback, perceptive questions, and generosity of heart. Thanks as well to Paddy McQueen, Thomas Gregory, Nicola Smith, David Banach, and the reviewers for their incisive comments on drafts and their encouragement to move forward with the article. I thank too my partner Dean Redfearn, who was a tireless and supportive proofreader, interlocutor, and companion throughout, and to my grandmother Marie Smith for her intellectual, emotional and practical support. Lastly, I am most indebted to the organizations and sex workers who welcomed me into their ranks to tell me their stories and share their insights. Without their trust, I could never hope to understand.