How to talk about prostitution ? The review of the review Din offers some avenues for reflection from the word of prostitutes and recent works in the humanities, and is part of the line that the review develops number after issue.
The debate on prostitution often has to determine if it is a “ TRUE »Work or exploitation of women, a trade or a survival strategy. All the articles stand out for this way of understanding prostitutional practices and opens up “ fronts Prostitution, to use a metaphor used in this same issue about AIDS: the tensions that prostitution generate about sexuality and work, but also money, migratory phenomena, racial questions …
Two requirements allow you to move the problem. First, the refusal to constitute prostitution in the pretext that everyone could affirm their attachment to freedom or their refusal of the commodification of sexuality and make the words and experiences of prostitutes the starting point of reflections: whether in the struggles in favor of the recognition of the rights of the workers and sex workers, in the description of the interactions between prostitutes and their customers, these words and these experiences are heterogeneous and sometimes heterogeneous and sometimes heterogeneous and conflicting – there is no experience of “ there Prostitution. Making your place to a disqualified word and invisible practices raises the question of the position of researchers and more broadly of those who are outside of prostitutional practices: it is one of the interests of the file to multiply the places from which the speeches are held, the authors who can be militant, prostitute, engaged in the associative world, observers … and hold several positions at the same time.
The interview with Ava Caradonna, Cadyne and Malika Amaouche, who have differentiated positions in the fight for the rights of prostitutes ; Stéphanie Pryen’s article which reports on her field survey by dialoguing with a social worker ; The publication of prostitutes’ letters illustrate the requirement not to speak on behalf of the others.
This deployment of positions makes it possible to make prostitution something other than a debate object, but of practices which concern those who define themselves as prostitutes as well as all individuals. While recent policies contribute to circumscribing prostitutional practices outside everyday and ordinary (and this file is also constructed as a response to the internal security law of 2003), the articles show that it is no longer so much the prostitution which must be accountable, as a set of knowledge and beliefs which are destabilized by a phenomenon too often perceived as homogeneous and relegated to the margins. Thus in her interview, Catherine Deschamps shows how prostitutional practices are anchored in shared conceptions of sexuality and money, how prostitution questions feminisms and lead them to redefine ; Pascale Jamoulle articulates the evolutions of sexuality and neo-liberalism, and questions the notion of fantasy. In addition to this file, a long interview with Mike Davis, where he returns to his theoretical and militant journey, is added to the interviews with previous numbers and contributes to giving the magazine his seat.