Liminality and the Sex Worker in Michel Houellebecq's Platform

Abstract

In his novel Platform (2001) Michel Houellebecq examines the interrelationship between high levels of social alienation in the West and sex tourism in the developing world (an interrelationship consolidated by the commercial products of mass tourism). With reference to Hall and Ryan's theory of liminality in Sex Tourism: Marginal People and Liminalities (2001) this article shows how the novel depicts (primarily female) sex workers and their clients as liminal and interdependent entities, operating in an equivocal and shadowy state between the legal and illegal, the self-empowering and the self-abasing, the mundane and the out-of-the-ordinary. By applying concepts of liminality and its corollaries to Houellebecq's work, the article seeks a better understanding of the portrayal of the sex trade's grey areas (including their exploitative, dehumanizing basis). At the same time, this approach casts light on a new dimension of Houellebecq's notion of ‘sexual liberalism’ (the extension of free market individualism into the domain of sexual competition) to show that such a system not only brutally picks its winners and losers but, in the world of sex tourism, perpetuates an interdependency of faceless victims and elusive perpetrators.

Keywords:

• tourism
• sex
• alienation
• liminality
• marginality
• transgression

Notes

1 For a detailed account of the polemics which arose following the publication of Platform, see Ní Loingsigh (2005: 73–5).

2 See also Bowd (2002), Crowley (2002), Noguez (2003) and Arrabal (2005).

3 The most significant precedent for applying theories of tourism to literature and specifically Houellebecq is Morrey (2017). Morrey specially demonstrates that the principles of mass tourism (as articulated by Ryan Bishop, Lilian Robinson, Chris Ryan and Dean MacCannell) can be fruitfully employed in an exegesis of Platform and its depiction of tourist behaviour (including sexual procurement).

4 Echoing their findings, feminist theory has in recent years also provided a more complex and equivocal analysis of prostitution, with some writers considering the female sex worker as a member of a profession which deserves respect and recognition, rather than merely viewing her as a victim of patriarchal privilege. See Christine Overall, ‘What's Wrong with Prostitution? Evaluating Sex Work’, Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society 17:4, 1992, pp. 705–24 and Jane Scoular, ‘The “Subject” of Prostitution: Interpreting the Discursive, Symbolic and Material Position of Sex/Work in Feminist Theory’, Feminist Theory 5.3, 2004, pp. 343–55.

5 In the case of Thailand, refer to: ‘Prevention and Suppression of Prostitution Act 1996’, Countries and their Prostitution Policies, at https://prostitution.procon.org/sourcefiles/ThailandBE2539.pdf (accessed 1 December 2019).

6 My translation (original article published in Portuguese).

7 My translation.

8 Varrod affirms of Houellebecq that his ‘silence sur la prostitution forcée est assourdissant’ [‘silence on forced prostitution is deafening’] (Varrod 2001: 117).