Mobilizing shame and disgust: abolitionist affective frames in Austrian and German anti-sex-work movements

ABSTRACT

This article analyses anti-sex-work mobilization in Austria and Germany since 2014. An affective perspective on the websites of these groups shows how their framings run the risk of establishing a disciplinary regime of governing people, of a restrictive, heterosexist norm of sexuality, and of gender inequality. Abolitionist strategies in the two countries thus produce an affective governmentality excluding those who should not belong to the affective community, i.e. those who do not submit to limiting their sexuality to the private realm of monogamous relationships. Finally, the article suggests that the abolitionist affective mobilisation feeds into the self-affirmation of traditional branches of women’s movements in the two countries.

KEYWORDS:

• Sex work
• prostitution
• abolitionism
• affect
• governmentality

1. Transformative prostitution regimes: contexts and introduction

Austria’s prostitution regime has been characterized by pragmatic regulationism. Since the 1980s, feminist organizations, and since the 1990s, a sex-work movement, have been fighting for the recognition of sex-workers’ rights but with moderate success. In 2012, prostitution was legalized as work; Austrian legislation no longer sees the selling of sex as immoral (Amesberger et al. 2018). Nevertheless, selling sex is still state regulated through zoning laws and compulsory health checks, for instance. Germany on the other hand, legalized prostitution in 2002 with the law on regulating prostitution (Prostitutionsgesetz – ProstG, BT-Drs. 14/5958). Like in Austria, prostitution is no longer a moral offence – sex-workers are empowered to claim their wage, to work as both employees and self-employed, and they have access to social security. Hence, Germany moved towards a sex-work regime that makes prostitution a legal activity and business.

The German law of 2002 provoked an outcry from conservative governments in some German Länder, like Bavaria. It also brought forward an abolitionist movement, led by the well-known feminist Alice Schwarzer and her monthly magazine ‘Emma’. The abolitionist mobilisation accelerated in Germany after 2010, when renegotiations of the law started.¹ In 2016 the law was amended following many years of discussion (Prostituiertenschutzgesetz, Bgbl. T I/50, 27.10.2016), introducing compulsory health checks for sex-workers and registration to receive a permit (effective July 1^st, 2017).

Similarly, the legalization of prostitution in Austria provoked an abolitionist reaction. The ‘Association for a feminist discourse’ (Verein feministischer Diskurs) was founded in 2012 by a small group of nine women who launched the ‘Stop the Purchase of Sex’ (Stopp Sexkauf) campaign.² Both Austrian and German abolitionist groups joined the campaign, ‘Stop the Purchase of Sex!’, that is internationally well-connected, e.g. with the European Women’s Lobby (EWL). The campaign lobbies for the Swedish model of punishing clients but at the same time wants to ‘support prostitutes’.³ The main argument of abolitionist movements and campaigns in the two countries is that prostitution is violence against women, which I will identify in this article as affective framing.

Studies on women’s movements only recently discussed ideological and value differences between women’s movement actors (Outshoorn 2010, Sauer 2010). Only some of these works analysed the affective implications of these divisions within the women’s movements (e.g. Guenther 2009). However, in moral policy areas like veiling, pornography and prostitution the women’s movement has been divided over strategies and aims for a long time, i.e. on the very notion of justice for women. And these struggles deploy affective strategies.

This article will map the affects involved in abolitionist mobilizations.⁴ My aim is to carve out affective strategies of abolitionist campaigns – strategies to affect people, to dis-affect with the feminist sex-work-movement and especially with male clients. One aim of the affective campaigns is, this article wants to show, to govern people’s sexuality. I am interested in the images of love, sexuality and partnership that are constructed through abolitionist strategies, that, as I will show, target affects. The affective perspective on anti-sex-work mobilization aims at showing that, and how, an illusion of ‘love-versus-disgust’ is created in a heterosexual patriarchal context, and how this construction runs the risk of establishing a disciplinary regime of governing people, a biopolitics of restrictive sexuality, of gender inequality, and, a heterosexist norm of sexuality. Abolitionist mobilization therefore might not be able to overcome patriarchal capitalist settings of gender and sexuality. To the contrary, abolitionist affective strategies run the danger of producing exclusive forms of ‘affective citizenship’ (Fortier 2010), excluding those who should not belong to the affective community, i.e. those who do not submit to limiting their sexuality to the private realm of monogamous relationships. Finally, I want to suggest that the abolitionist affective mobilisation feeds into the self-affirmation of women’s movements. Women’s movements in the two countries have been challenged in the last decade by queer movements and through migrant women’s mobilisation.

The article will first discuss the role of emotions and affects in social movement theory. Then I will briefly introduce my sources and methods and finally present the results of my research.

2. Affects, emotions and social movements. Dimensions of governing

Until the 1990s social movement theories – be it resource mobilization or political process theories – focussed on rational political actors in social movements (for a critique: Gould 2010, Ruiz-Junco 2013, p. 45). They did so in order to introduce a new – rational – paradigm in studies of social movements in opposition to the idea of the late 19^th and early 20^th century that mass movements and mass mobilization are emotional and affective and hence irrational per se (in the tradition of Le Bon and Ortega y Gasset; for a critique: Gould 2010: 18ff.). Therefore, ‘the dispassionate and calculating rational actor replaced the unthinking and irrational psychological misfit’ in new social movement studies up to the 1990s (Gould 2010, p. 23).

Feminists since the 1970s have criticized mainstream social movement theories of ignoring patriarchal constellations, that shape opportunity structures or the resources available for movement actors, for instance (Marx Ferree et al. 2002). A number of studies were able to show how feminist movements were successfully challenging existing politics, breaching the limits of the patriarchal system and introducing women’s interests and women’s movements aims into the political process (Mazur and McBride 2010, Outshoorn 2010). Some studies on women and affect rather early argued that women are not irrational but that their political claims legitimate and introduce a new concept of politics, which encompasses emotional and affective dimensions (Jaggar 1989).

Only in the late 1990s, the emotional, and later the affective turn reached mainstream social movement studies (Goodwin et al. 2000, Flam and King 2005). ‘Emotions pervade all social life, social movements included’ (Jasper 1998, p. 398), or, as Lamb-Books (2016, p. 129) states, ‘emotional energy makes movements move’. Emotions, compassion, fear or anger, for instance, have been seen as key for many social movements (Jasper 1998, p. 405). Studying the ‘emotions of protest’ (Jasper 1998) emerged as new way of analyzing social movements (see also Brown and Pickerill 2009).

In political process theory, emotions are seen as a resource, which movements strategically produce and deploy (Gould 2004, p. 158). Hence, emotion ‘is viewed […] as a motivational force’ on three levels in social movement studies (Gould 2010, p. 23): first internally, second externally, i.e. to target constituencies, and third to change the ‘emotion culture’ of a society (Guenther 2009). I will briefly discuss these three dimensions as they are important for my case study of abolitionist movements in Austria and Germany.

First, internally: emotions are important to mobilize people to join a movement, to create solidarity within the movement, thus creating a movement’s identity (Ruiz-Junco 2013, p. 46, Yang 2000, p. 594). To take part in contentious politics people must ‘evaluate their situations, consider their sometimes ambiguous or contradictory desires, confront their fears, assess their own values as well as those of mainstream society and navigate possible conflicts therein’ (Gould 2004, p. 161). To integrate new members, movement activists generate and disseminate a specific form of meaning, and emotions are part of these interpretative meaning-making processes (Gould 2004, p. 162). Movements need to interpret feelings and guide ‘participants in what and how to feel’, to ‘authorize selected feelings and actions while downplaying and even invalidating others’ (Gould 2010, p. 33). Yang (2000, p. 594) stresses that ‘individuals actively seek emotional achievement through action’ in social movements. Emotional achievement refers to ‘the attainment of self-validating emotional experiences and expressions through active and creative pursuits’ (Yang 2000, p. 594). This turns the perspective of movements’ emotional work towards the question of why people engage and invest emotions in social movements.

Second: Social movements are defined as ‘those forms of action analytically implying conflict, solidarity and a breaching of the system limit’ (Melucci 1996, p. 30). Emotional strategies of social movements include ‘moral shocks’ (Jasper 2011, p. 289) to produce conflict in social situations that are perceived as unjust or scandalous, and hence, to impact on the existing political system to transform policies, norms and institutions. Movements thus seek ‘emotional resonance’ (Gould 2004, p. 159–160.), i.e. a reaction to the deployed emotions either from state actors or from other citizens as a starting point for pushing towards policy change.

Third, movements not only use affects and emotions to mobilize people, but to change the ‘emotion culture’ (Guenther 2009). Emotion culture refers to the ‘feeling rules’ (Hochschild 1983/2003) or the ‘emotionology’ (Fineman 2008) of a society, established norms about how to feel and about which emotions and affects should be deployed and which should not, i.e. a set of tacit rules on how to feel and on what feelings are allowed and what are not allowed. Emotion cultures are characterized by long-standing ‘moral emotions’, which ‘involve feelings of approval and disapproval based on moral intuitions and principles’ (Jasper 2011, p. 287). Moral emotions include ‘satisfaction’ (or dissatisfaction and shame) ‘when we do the right (or wrong) thing, but also when we feel the right (or wrong) thing’ (Jasper 2011). The concept of ‘emotion chains’ (Williamson 2011, p. 46) points to the temporal dimension of emotions in emotion cultures, which persist or change over time and which can be used at different times in history. To change these (long established) feeling rules is an important dimension of social movements’ strategies. Hence, social movements want to create an ‘emotional opportunity structure’ (Ruiz-Junco 2013, p. 46) which suits their political aims. The concept of an emotional opportunity structure refers to ‘the institutions within which social movements operate, carry their own emotional expectations, permitting and rewarding some feeling displays and rendering others futile or unintelligible’ (Whittier 2001, p. 250).

Emotional, or, as I will label affective framing, refers to ‘framing activities that social movements engage in to achieve emotional resonance’ from their constituency (Ruiz-Junco 2013, p. 49 and 52; also, Cadena-Roa 2005). Affective framing includes ‘emotional labour’ (Hochschild 1983/2003) within social movements, that is ‘emotional channelling, i.e. the channelling of fear into anger or of anxieties into moral indignation and anger’ (Jaspers after Ruiz-Junco 2013, p. 46–47) or ‘channelling emotions such as anger and estrangement into empowerment and collective action’ (Ruiz-Junco 2013, p. 48). On the one hand, emotions mobilize conflict with existing norms and institutions but they are on the other hand the ‘”glue” of solidarity’ (Collins after Jasper 1998, p. 399). Emotions are a means to create a feeling of belonging to a group – and thus they are also important in explaining why movements disintegrate.

Gould criticizes these three methodological perspectives described above as they portray emotions as cognitive and rationalist concepts (Gould 2010, p. 23). In opposition to this rationalist approach, she discusses the notion of affect in order to point to ‘the noncognitive, nonconscious, nonlinguistic, and nonrational qualities of emotion’ (Gould 2010, p. 25). This ‘affective ontology’ (Gould 2010, p. 28) perceives social movements as ‘important sites where amorphous affective states get translated into named emotions’ (Gould 2010, p. 34). Therefore, social movements aim at creating ‘affective states’, i.e. the ‘desire to feel reciprocity and a sense of belonging’ through ‘interpreting feelings and guiding participants in what and how to feel’ (Gould 2010, p. 32).

While social movement theory stresses the role of affects for emancipatory or progressive movements, I would like to shift the focus to women’s movements, which are aiming to restrict sex-workers’ life trajectories and choices and hence, to conflicts within women’s movements. In the following section I therefore will expand the social movement perspective with a focus on governing and governmentality, on self-governance and self-technologies in a Foucauldian sense (Foucault 2000, p. 341). Social movements contribute to governing through affects and thus, to an ‘affective governmentality’ (Sauer and Penz 2017), which includes: affective governing through first state institutions, state administrations, norms and laws, second through civil society organisations, and third through self-governance or self-technologies (Sauer and Penz 2017, p. 45–47). Affective governmentality thus stresses the existence of state power and domination in an affective mode that touches the bodies and minds of individuals who ‘freely’ decide to be governed. Such an affective regime also includes discipline and punishment. Hence, affects modulate processes of power and domination. The concept of affective governmentality emphasizes the fact that by mobilizing affects, by doing and undoing affects, corporeal aspects are at stake in the process of subjectivation, i.e. of creating and involving people’s minds and bodies in becoming a free, yet governed subject. Since the 19^th century, sexuality has been developed as an important field of governmentality and power (Foucault 1998). Thus, struggles over prostitution are struggles over sexuality and heteronormativity.

Social movement campaigns contribute to this process of affective governmentality and ‘affective subjectivation’ (Sauer and Penz 2017, p. 52) through their efforts to change policies, norms and established alternative affect cultures. Affective mobilization of social movements, as I will show in my case study, contributes to processes of normation and normalisation, i.e. power relations through boundary drawing, partly inclusion and exclusion.⁵

Overall, the theoretical approach to my analysis of abolitionist movements in Austria and Germany includes the dimensions of affective framing, the transformation of affect cultures by social movements and the notion of affective governmentality, i.e. of governing people and self-governance through affects.

3. Sources and methods

The sources used in this study consist of texts from online campaigns and websites of abolitionist movements in Austria and Germany.⁶ The Austrian and German campaigns ‘Stop sex purchase’ are linked to websites in the two countries as well as to a great variety of international abolitionist websites. The articles by the German activist Ingeborg Kraus for instance are linked to the Austrian campaign website ‘www.stoppsexkauf.at’. Websites in the two countries also include German translations of international documents into German. For Austria, I gathered material from the website of the ‘Association for a feminist discourse’, which launched the Vienna Appeal against the ‘Purchase of Sex’ (Wiener Appell;⁷ similar to the ‘Paris Appeal Abolition 2012’ and the ‘Appel de Bruxelles’). For Germany, I studied ‘Kofra’ in Munich (also part of the ‘Stop Sex Purchase’ network), ‘Solwodi’, the campaign ‘Karlsruher Appeal’ (https://karlsruherappell.com), ‘Sisters. Für den Ausstieg aus der Prostitution e.V.! (For the exit from prostitution)’, the ‘Emma-Appell gegen Prostitution’⁸ and ‘Terres des Femmes’.

I conducted an affective frame analysis of website documents which expands the method of a Critical Frame Analysis (Verloo 2005) beyond rational frames towards affective frames. The basic element of this analysis is a frame, a notion taken from Erving Goffman’s work (Goffman 1974). Frames are defined as ‘interpretative schemata’ that ‘signify and condense the “world out there” by selectively punctuating and encoding objects, situations, events, experiences, and sequences of action in one’s present or past environment’ (Snow and Benford 1992, p. 137, also Snow and Benford 1988). Frames are ‘organized ideas’ that provide ‘coherence to a designated set of elements’ (Marx Ferree et al. 2002, p. 105). In other words: Frames are forms of explaining or making sense of cognitive structures (Bacchi 2009) and – I would add – affective structures. Hence, framing is ‘concerned with the negotiation and (re)construction of reality by social/political actors’ (Triandafyllidou and Fotiou 1998, p. 2). Frames refer to shared beliefs, images, symbols and narratives of a community, be it a group, a social movement or a nation (Triandafyllidou and Fotiou 1998). Furthermore, frames refer to values and to affects attached to these values, images and narratives. The goal of an affective frame analysis is to identify interpretive, conceptual and affective schemata, i.e. the affective frames, in textual documents, which try to produce and to promote not only certain understandings of social and political issues but also either affective attachments to or dis-affection from the issues. This refers to ‘motivational framing’ by social movements to attract constituency, introduced by Benford and Snow (2000, p. 617f.).

Methodologically, Verloo (2005) suggests to investigating the constructed problem on the one hand and the solution of the problem on the other. Hence, her method of a Critical Frame Analysis consists of this dual structure – a thorough analysis of the ‘problem’, the diagnosis of a social situation, and of the ‘prognosis’, that is suggestions to solve or at least deal with the problem. The affective frame analysis in this tradition uses the ‘sensitizing questions’, developed by Verloo (2005) and adds questions about affects attached to problems and solutions, to ‘active actors’ who are made responsible for the problem and solution, as well as to ‘passive actors’ who are affected by a problem and a solution (Verloo 2005).

To identify ‘affect’ in the document I referred to the growing literature on affective methods. I examined the affectivity of problems, solutions, actors and thus the frames following Natalya Godbold (2015, p. 165): To detect affects, Godbold looked for ‘tones’, like fearful or agitated tones by those who speak in the documents. Kleres (2010) suggests a ‘narrative analysis’ of emotions, where he distinguishes between two dimensions: At the lexical level, ‘emotion words’ refer ‘descriptively to emotional states’ (Kleres (2010, p. 194), for instance the use of words like ‘shame’ or prostitution as ‘brutalising desire’. At the syntactical level entire sentences point to emotional experiences. The underlying analytical assumption of such an affective frame analysis following Kleres, is that ‘emotions are inextricably interwoven with the meaning dimension of texts to the point where the distinction between cognition and emotion becomes blurry’ (Kleres 2010, p. 197). In Kleres’ narrative analysis, non-conscious, unreflective affects become visible. Also, the emotion narrative analysis introduced in the affective frame analysis allows the detection of ‘moral batteries’, which ‘consist of a positive and a negative emotion, and the tension or contrast between them motivates action or demands attention’ (Jasper 2011, p. 291). Pride and shame, pity and joy create such moral batteries.

The affective frame analysis aims also at detecting not only affective resources of the abolitionist movement but to uncover references to ‘amorphous affective states’ (Gould 2010, p. 34) in these campaigns, which refer to prostitution, sex-work and the governance of sexualities. The abolitionist movements’ framings, I want to show, aim at ‘bodily experiences as well as more nonconscious forms of knowing and sense-making; to the often ambivalent and contradictory nature of our feelings; to inconsistencies and incoherences within our thoughts and between our cognitive and felt responses to the world’ (Gould 2010, p. 31). I therefore also draw on Newman’s (2012, p. 470) notion of ‘emotional registers of discourse’. Methodologically, this means a focus on the hegemonic discourse to which affects might be attached, and thus referring to power relations in governing developed through the affective discourse.

Hence, affective frames and narrations point to discourses of how people should feel towards sex-work and towards sexuality, for instance in the context of love and intimacy without involving money. This discourse includes the rationality of power and sexuality, i.e. which form of sexuality should be disciplined and forbidden, of governing and self-technologies, like not to offer sexual service for money.

In the remainder of the article I will present my results by first describing the affective mobilization strategy of the abolitionist movements in the two countries, i.e. a focus on affects as resources of social movements. Then I will analyse how the abolitionist movement actors try to challenge and change the affect culture in those countries and third I will present how the campaigns feed into the affective governance of sex-work, i.e. into discipline and self-technologies of sexuality by focusing on more unconscious affects, in Gould’s words.

4. Governing sexuality and governing through sexuality. Affective strategies

4.1. Mobilization through affective framing

In this first section I will focus on affects as a mobilizing resource of the abolitionist movements in Austria and Germany. Abolitionist movements pressure policy makers to criminalize prostitution and to punish clients on the one hand, on the other hand, they also target a wider audience, including feminist groups of the sex-work paradigm, sex-workers’ clients, and their wives. In the confrontational situations in the two countries, affects are an important means to both recruit followers and to garner public attention.

Abolitionist campaigners want the public to be affected; they seek affective frame alignment. Their ‘emotional pedagogy’ (Gould 2010, p. 33) aims at creating bodily effects. Because sex-work is coded in bourgeois patriarchal societies as a deviant and at the same time desired form of sexuality, a (bodily) activity essential for the reproduction of society sex-work not only touches the intellect, but people’s bodies and feelings. Therefore, the abolitionist campaigns seek to physically affect a possible audience and want to provoke bodily feelings and intend to get ‘under the skin’. As Rachel Moran, an Irish former sex-worker states in a speech against prostitution to the Northern Ireland Assembly, ‘let me directly assert that, regardless of what position you currently hold or what you have come here to argue, you understand the noxious and abusive nature of prostitution. You do: you just felt it.’ (Moran 2014, n.p.) People should be literally affected by abolitionist campaigns. This affective and thus bodily appeal aims at (re-)negotiating sexuality, the body and power.

I detected six affective framing strategies in the material that aim at bodily affecting the public as treated below.

4.1.1. Blaming the political adversary

For abolitionist activists, the primary political adversary is the ‘deeply inhuman, patriarchal system’, a system of violence, embodied by male clients of sex-workers (Appell, n.d., www.stoppsexkauf.at/wiener_appell.htm). This system is represented by two groups of opponents: first, the representatives of legal systems that decriminalized and legalized sex-work and second, the feminist pro-sex-work movements. Abolitionist affective campaigning wants to blame and humiliate the two groups, place guilt on them or make them feel ashamed and responsible for the violent situation of prostitutes.

To create disgust is one strategy against policy-makers: The German prostitution law of 2002, abolitionists claim, transformed Germany into the ‘brothel of Europe’ (Kraus 2016, p. 2; similar: Presseerklärung 2014, n.p.; Schlegel 2014, p. 3, Schwarzer 2013, n.p.). Kraus appeals to national pride by comparing Germany with France and Sweden. While the situation of women in prostitution caused indignation and outrage in France and Sweden and led to the punishment of clients, Germany has preserved this violent setting (Kraus 2016, p. 8). In a similar vein, in an open letter to chancellor Angela Merkel – an appeal not only to Merkel, the chancellor, but also to Angela Merkel, the woman – Kathleen Barry (2015), an activist from the US-based ‘Abolish Prostitution Now’ movement, blames Germany’s prostitution law for violating women’s human rights and thus setting a ‘sad example worldwide’. On Kofra’s homepage, an author denounces female politicians who do not resist the German prostitution law as ‘submissive’ towards their male party comrades, accusing them of ‘willingly collaborat[ing] with the party masters’ (Schröder 2014, p. 39).

The abolitionist movements in the two countries also want to create counter movements and counter narratives to those branches of the feminist movement that claim a sex-work position. Therefore, abolitionist campaigns accuse sex-worker activists and feminists of being ideologically blind towards violence against women in the sex business. Kraus labels sex-work feminists and the claim that some people voluntarily do sex-work as ‘irrational’ as a ‘fata morgana’, i.e. a statement that only exists in phantasy (Kraus 2016, p. 4). Society, Kraus goes on, leaves prostitutes abandoned: ‘The whole society tells them something wrong, that what they do is a job like any other job.’ (Kraus 2016, p. 5) Abolitionists try to affectively guide policy-makers, sex-worker activists and feminist movement activists away from a sex-work approach, which is branded as insensitive, and argue for a ban of prostitution through punishing clients.

4.1.2. Authentication as affective mobilization strategy

Another important strategy of the abolitionist movement is the affective mobilization through personalization and authentication. Former sex-workers argue in favour of the abolitionist movement in affective and moving talks. A speech by Rebecca Mott, a British former sex-worker, started the campaign ‘End Demand. End demand for sexual exploitation’. It was translated into German and linked on several German websites. In this speech, she declares: ‘I will speak from the personal, but only in order that it is used as an example of the harms of prostitution […] I do not speak for pity or to shock – I speak as a witness to the daily genocide of the prostituted class’ (Mott 2014, n.p.). Similarly, Huschke Mau (n.d., n.p.), a German former prostitute, in a letter to the German women’s minister Manuela Schwesig at the time, points to her own experiences of violence in prostitution, the damage she suffered from violence and the traumas she has to deal with. She concludes that all women in prostitution are victims of past and/or present sexual violence. Mott (2014), again a former sex-worker, speaks about her experience: ‘I can speak to multiple rapes, I can speak to knowing physical, mental, sexual torture, I can speak to the prostituted disappearing round me’. These authentic voices and experiences intend to affectively convince the audience that prostitution is violence against women and a traumatic bodily experience.

4.1.3. Female solidarity: mobilizing compassion with victims of male violence

Women, as the target of abolitionist movements, should be enabled to ‘feel’ how it might be to ‘sell one’s body’ against one’s own will, to be only a ‘commodity’ and not a person, how it feels to be violated and raped (Brussels Call, European Women’s Lobby n.d., n.p.). The affective frame of sexual violence wants to have an affective impact on all women in a context in which gender-based violence is deeply institutionalized in social structures as well as in state institutions. Abolitionist movements in the two countries build on the bodily experiences of many women in patriarchal contexts where sexuality is indeed a way of wielding power over every woman, in order to provoke women’s immediate, affective solidarity with the movements. To receive the affective attention of women, abolitionist organizations construct female sex-workers as victims of male violence, of horrible sexual practices and of ‘sexual exploitation’ (Stop Sexkauf 2016, n.p.). The Vienna Appeal (Appell, n.d.) characterizes prostitution as ‘violence, humiliation, harassment, rape and forced labour’ and ‘slavery’.⁹ Or as Moran puts it: ‘The harm and damage of prostitution is not open to subjective interpretation; it is an objective reality’ (Moran 2014, n.p.).

At the same time, abolitionist groups aim at mobilizing compassion, pity and empathy for these victims (Presseerklärung 2014). Kraus, a German abolitionist activist, claims that most women in prostitution ‘are traumatised, without hope and full of fear’ (Kraus 2016, p. 4). She moreover evokes an image of war and sees prostitutes at the battle-front. And she paints a picture of women in the sex business being in permanent fear, in a ‘parallel world without rights’, like in prison (Kraus 2016, p. 3). Similarly, Huschke Mau focuses on the alienation through ‘emotional labour’ (for the concept of emotional labour see Hochschild 1983/2003) in prostitution and the commodification of sex. ‘Through imitating and selling tenderness, tenderness is not part of you any longer, it becomes part of the entertainment repertoire and hence, meaningless and split off’ (Mau 2016, n.p.). This affective framing aims at provoking compassion with prostitutes as victims of violence and exploited workers while at the same time denying sex-workers of any agency.

4.1.4. Mobilizing the guilty consciences of feminists and female politicians

‘Abolition is the best position for women’s equality advocates. […] (It) is the only approach that is consistent with the legal concept of substantive equality and with feminist understandings of violence against women’ (Day 2008, p. 52). Abolitionist campaigns use a gender equality and emancipation frame to appeal to the consciences of feminist actors: ‘The truth is that women had to fight for the vote. We had to fight for contraception. Now, we have to fight for freedom from commercial sexual exploitation. Underpinning all those battles is one fight: the fight to be recognised as fully human.’ (Moran 2014, n.p.) Therefore, prostitution is framed as a ‘declaration of bankruptcy’ towards gender equality struggles (Heiliger 2015, n.p., similar Prostitution ist kein Herrenrecht 2015). Hence, the German prostitution law is seen as resulting in the ‘re-patriarchalisation of gender roles in our society’ (Stop Sexkauf 2016, n.p.).

This strategy of affective framing of an anti-equality dimension of prostitution aims at shifting identities, especially of women’s movement actors or women’s politicians by channelling shame, anger and outrage against the patriarchal system – institutionalized in prostitution and personalized in male clients.

Using feminists’ language, Mau proclaims the sexual self-determination of women – the old claim of the women’s movement – against prostitution. In prostitution, Mau states, female self-determination is impossible as prostitutes are victims of male violence without agency. She also appeals to gender justice. ‘There will never be a gender just society as long as men can buy and abuse women’ (Mau n.d., n.p.). Similarly, Kraus (2016, p. 1) appeals to human dignity and justice – values, which are part of the feminist movements’ claims and which are highly affective at the same time (Presseerklärung 2014, n.p.). This refers to Jasper’s notion of social movements using affect to denounce social situations as unjust. In these ‘injustice frames’, ‘the passion for justice is fuelled by anger over existing injustice. Since protest is aimed at what one dislikes, negative emotions have a prominent role […] Abstract norms of justice gain some power from the positive emotions associated with them – hope, joy compassion’ (Jasper 1998, p. 414).

Another affective strategy is to blame prostitution as anti-democratic, that it is contrary to the democratic ethos.¹⁰ The ‘Stop Sexkauf’ Network Munich describes prostitution as male authority to dispose over women and characterizes this situation as ‘unworthy of democracies’ (Stellungnahme 2015, n.p.; similarly, Schlegel 2014, p. 5, a Social Democratic member of the German Parliament).

To conclude, affective strategies to mobilize feminists and politicians for the abolitionist movements focus on combining feminist and democratic norms and values against sex-work in an affective way.

4.1.5. All women should be negatively affected by prostitution: your husband might be a client, too!

The abolitionist campaigns in Germany and Austria seek to target ‘normal’, ordinary women by arguing that ‘[p]rostitution concerns all women’ (Mau 2016, n.p.), including explicitly the wives of clients (Mau n.d., n.p.): ‘Punters are everywhere – they are in your families, you may work alongside them, they may be the men that you choose to socialise with.’ (Mott 2014, n.p.) The statement by Rachel Moran, is translated and linked on German and Austrian websites. ‘There are women up and down this island whose husbands are buying sex, week in and week out. Those women are left to deal with damaged marriages and, in some cases, irreparably damaged physical health, yet those women – the wives and partners of sex-buying men – are rarely seen to merit a mention. […] destroyed marriages and shattered families’ (Moran 2014, n.p.).

To affect all women, abolitionist activists frame clients of sex-workers as ‘normal men’ who are married but who hide their desires from their wives and children. At the same time, clients are presented as men, who dislike female independence, who want docile women and hence harass their wives and partners by buying sexual services (Mau 2016, n.p.). Consequently, Sonja Plessl, a leading activist of the Austrian abolitionist campaign, suggests that male clients should be denounced to their wives (Plessl 2015, n.p.).

This framing strategy thus aims at mobilizing a larger audience of women by affecting them as wives of sex-workers’ clients. Through this affective interpellation, wives are on the one hand seen as victims of their husbands, on the other hand, they are made responsible for their husbands buying sexual services.

4.1.6. Critique of commodification. Anti-capitalist affects

The critique of the commodification of sexuality and the female body is a very affectively charged strategy of abolitionist campaigns: ‘It is not a utopian experience for any woman to have her body reduced to the status of a living commodity for the benefit of a sex-buying man’ (Moran 2014, n.p.). This critique includes an anti-capitalist framing, intended to appeal to the women’s movement as well as to leftist parties and leftist party women. The Vienna Appeal for instance denounces the ‘high profits’ in the sex business and criticizes the capitalist profits of pimps and ‘hagglers’ (Schacherer) (Appell, n.d.). Women in prostitution are ‘exploited maximally according to the rules of the hardest capitalism’ (Kraus 2016, p. 3).

In a similar vein, images of 19^th century labour conditions in prostitution appeal to the affects of the public. The German law, Kraus claims, leaves sex-workers without protection, but gives the ‘free market’ the power over sexual practices and prizes (Kraus 2016).

Interestingly, sex-work feminists are rarely directly addressed in abolitionist campaigns, but are presented as part of the capitalist exploitative sex-industry. Mau (n.d., n.p.) describes the adversaries of the abolitionist campaigns generally as the ‘prostitution lobby’, which aims at influencing prostitution policy in Germany (also: Appell 2014b, n.p.). In the flyer for the 2014 international conference ‘Stop the purchase of sex’ in Munich, ‘Karlsruher Appeal’ claims, that framing prostitution as sex-work, as ‘freely chosen work’ is a rhetoric of the ‘prostitution lobby’, disseminated by ‘brothel owners and dominas’ (Appell 2014b).

Also, the claim for social justice and prostitution as a class issue is an affective campaigning strategy. ‘We must reclaim the narrative of social justice in relation to prostitution’ (Story 2016, p. 123). Some abolitionist activists recall the notion of a new class struggle. Mott (2014, n.p.) talks about the ‘prostituted class’ (similarly Story 2016, p. 118), hence introducing sex-work in the frame of labour exploitation. Overall, using affect to mobilize against prostitution targets different audiences and draws on different arguments and affects to create the image of sex-work as violence against women and exploitative labour.

4.2. Changing the affect culture: creating the ‘Other’, constructing belonging and non-belonging

This chapter wants to go beyond the analysis of affect as resource of the abolitionist campaigns and presents the affective power of abolitionist strategies. The abolitionist movement tries to change the affect culture, the normative set of allowed and non-allowed affects at specific times or in specific places and spaces, and to establish new ‘feeling rules’ (Hochschild 1983/2003) about prostitution. It wants to create ‘alternative signifying practices that foregrounded other emotions’ (Ruiz-Junco 2013, p. 51) by referring and re-arranging ‘emotion chains’ (Williamson 2011, p. 46) present in the prostitution discourse.

To do so, abolitionist groups need to connect with societal affects towards prostitution. The abolitionist mobilization is evolving in a highly affective landscape, as moral policies and strategies towards prostitution have been ‘politics of affects’ since the 19^th century. Today, sex-work is still embedded in a rather contested affect culture in Austria and Germany. The feeling cultures in Austria and Germany stigmatize and demonize sex-workers. The countries have an established regime of shame and disgust towards selling sexual services (for Austria: Amesberger et al. 2018; for Germany: Kontos 2009). Sex-workers have long been perceived as deviant women with deviant affects and abnormal desires. Hence, the affective culture is characterized by disgust on one side and shame and historically channelled guilt towards the female sex-worker on the other side. Sex-workers on the other hand should feel ashamed because they are seen to behave in contradiction to good morals, against public security, and are constructed as a threat to society, public health and to (heterosexual) families. For a long time, the perception of male clients has been de-emotionalized. They have been perceived as affective neutrals and as victims of their sexuality or of seductive sex-workers. In Austria, for instance the administrative court in 1983 ruled that a sex-worker should not be paid her wages because she seduced the male client, a victim of his sexual desires – and of the sex-worker (Amesberger et al. 2018).

Societies in Austria and Germany are moreover characterized by moral panic towards prostitution. On one hand, affective culture towards sex-work has since the 19^th century been a mixture of fear of uncontrolled sexuality, anger, disgust, revulsion and the attraction to the forbidden, of lust and sexuality on the other hand (Kontos 2009). Jaggar (1989, p. 160) talked about ‘outlaw emotions’ referring to affects that are deemed unacceptable, as for instance queer sexuality or, we might add, sex-work. Or, in the words of Jasper, prostitution has been and still is characterized by a ‘moral battery’, consisting ‘of a positive and a negative emotion’ (Jasper 2011, p. 291) resonant with the tensions between love and commodity or money, lust and shame, fear and curiosity, insecurity and compassion or empathy, hatred and love. These moral batteries motivate and spur abolitionist action up to today.

However, this affect culture has been unsettled since the 1990s, when sex-workers’ movements tried to change the affects attached to sex-work and aimed at constructing a new identity, i.e. transforming shame into sex-workers’ pride (e.g. Laing et al. 2015). The movement claimed rights for sex-workers and shifted the interpretation of prostitution in a different direction than the double standard of patriarchal bourgeois interpretation. Sex-workers politicized their unacknowledged or bypassed shame and demanded recognition and due respect. Sex-workers’ struggles wanted to disrupt the feeling rules in order to end the stigmatization of sex-workers and the criminalization of sex-work (Laing et al. 2015).

Although the sex-work movement has been successful in de-criminalizing prostitution, the affect cultures in Austria and Germany are still characterized by mixed and ambivalent feelings. On the one hand, selling and buying sex is felt as something wrong, dangerous and challenging – for instance the commodification of love or of the female body (Kontos 2009). On the other hand, the affective frame of empathy and compassion with prostitutes as victims is also present in the public discourse (as discussed above). Due to these ambivalent feelings towards prostitution, the abolitionist movements aim at affectively ‘resolving’ these ambivalences and contradictions in the direction of disgust towards buying sexual services by men.

Abolitionist movements want to change the affect culture that has developed over the recent years in the context of the legal acceptance of sex-work in Austria and Germany. To do so, the abolitionist movements ‘authorize selected feelings and actions while downplaying and even invalidating others’ (Gould 2010, p. 33) through affective framing, i.e. by contesting affects such as compassion with or, the pride of, sex-workers and instead introducing outrage and disgust towards prostitution, especially towards male clients (as discussed above). The abolitionist movements blame men, clients of sex-workers, who are depicted as a personification of the violent patriarchy, similar to the tradition of blaming the male perpetrator in policies against violence against women.

Overall, abolitionist campaigns aim at re-coding and re-signifying the ‘emotionology’ (Fineman 2008) of prostitution from an affective landscape, characterized by moral disgust towards female sex-workers, in the direction of disgust towards male clients. Kraus (2016, p. 6) sees prostitution primarily as a male problem. Therefore, the abolitionist slogan is not ‘Stop prostitution’ – but ‘Stop Sex Purchase – Stop buying of sex’ (Appell, n.d.). The abolitionist campaigns of the early 21^st century mobilize in the direction of shame reversal, of affect reversion and re-coding affects towards male clients as violent and exploitative perpetrators.

The abolitionist movements manage and shift affects, and aim at channelling them into anger, anxiety, disgust and guilt – away from sex-workers and in the direction of male clients. Abolitionists want to provoke a moral shock by discursively creating the image of men using and abusing the bodies of exploited women. This shock implies a ‘visceral, bodily feeling’ (Jasper 1998, p. 409). And, ‘(S)hocks depend on pre-existing patterns of affect, which channel the interpretation’ (Jasper 1998). In the case of the abolitionist movements, this affective pattern is a reference to violence against women – a pattern, which denounces male clients as violent perpetrators.

All analyzed organisations of the abolitionist campaigns create a disgusting and repugnant male ‘Other’ by mobilizing shame, fear and anger towards male clients. This disgust towards male clients shall be provoked first by framing them as rapists, as sexually abusing sex-workers, as torturers who want to torment women, as sexual perpetrators, who are not punished by the law (Mau 2016, n.p., Kraus 2016, p. 6, Moran 2014, n.p.). Abolitionist movements evoke negative affects towards clients, the ‘prostitutors’, by portraying them as despising women, callous and indifferent (Archiv 2014, n.p., Mott 2014, n.p.). This framing personalizes a violent patriarchal structure through affective ascriptions: Clients of prostitutes ‘lack empathy and guilty consciences’, they are ‘anti-social’, strive for ‘de-personalised sex’ and they want to dominate women (Kraus 2016, p. 8–9, Mau 2016, n.p.). Abolitionists quote from ‘punters’ online forums’ to demonstrate the inhuman image clients have about women (Mau 2016).

A second dimension of this abolitionist framing is that male clients want ‘to have women’s bodies at their command’ (Kraus 2016, n.p.; also Roesemaier 2013, n.p.). Men not only want sex – they want ‘to use women’ and to ‘control women’ (Mau 2016, n.p.). Customers of sex-workers are presented as having a medieval image of masculinity, which rests on the domination of women (Kraus 2016, p. 6). Mau (2016, n.p.) uses the notion of ‘toxic masculinity’ – an affective metaphor which suggests that this form of masculinity intrudes on and destroys the body of all women. Kraus ridicules that clients are motivated by their shyness or because they do not receive enough love. Against these claims, Kraus suggests not showing pity to buyers of sex (Kraus 2016, p. 7).

Finally, the campaigners assert that male clients share a ‘certain disdain of women’ (Mau 2016, n.p.) and that they ‘are looking at women in order to turn them into working animals’ (Mau 2016). The campaigns moreover want to make male clients feel ashamed and responsible for both the violation of women’s rights and for breaking-up their families. Male clients therefore should feel guilty and have bad consciences (Kraus 2016, p. 8).

To conclude: Male clients are portrayed as violent because they purchase sex, treat women in prostitution (and all women) badly and are not able to think of sexuality in terms of love, i.e. an affective attachment that cannot be bought and sold. Male clients disturb the good feelings of society, they irritate the comfort zone of heterosexual love and private relationships. They therefore should not belong to the affective community of good citizens, but should be excluded, outlawed and stigmatized (Presseerklärung 2014, n.p.): ‘Boy, don’t I wish that all punters had labels on their heads – then they may be shunned, or at the least easier to arrest.’ (Mott 2014, n.p.)

Pointing out these affective strategies of constructing an affective Other is not meant to demand pity for male clients of sex-workers but, to the contrary, wants to criticize the personalization of the patriarchal and capitalist setting of sex-work which helps to conceal structures of discrimination, exploitation and violence in sex-work. These are indeed the power structures of (hetero)sexuality, which at least some sex-workers want to overcome. However, their agency is not part of the abolitionists’ affective campaigning.

4.3. Governing sexuality through affects. Affective subjectivation

Bourgeois patriarchal discourse draws boundaries between allowed and disallowed feelings and affects. It excludes ‘dangerous affects’ connected to sexuality and women. Hence, affects are a means to determine who belongs and who should not belong to a society (Ahmed 2010). Abolitionists want to create a sense of belonging through shared affects and by demarcating the Other, the male client, as abnormal. Men only want to ‘act out their sexual lust’ (Pascale Boistard, quoted in Kraus 2016, p. 5), they argue. Huschke Mau, a German former sex-worker, constructs the ‘other sexuality’ by depicting ‘perverse’ sexual desires of clients (Mau 2016, n.p.). Sex buyers, Kraus claims similarly, have become more perverse and their practices more violent and dangerous (Kraus 2016, p. 8). Prostitution is seen as ‘brutalizing desire’ (Appell 2014a, p. 61) and hence, sexual practices such as ‘anal sex, sex without condoms, bondage and domination’ (Raymond 2014, p. 32) are outlawed. Also, abolitionists want to discipline male sexuality by deconstructing myths about the alleged ‘sexual instinct’ of men (Heiliger 2015, n.p.). Kraus refers to the ‘fantasy’ of male sexuality as being a ‘need which cannot be suppressed’ and that men have a ‘right to sex’ (Kraus 2016, p. 2). She stresses that these images are not the ‘male nature’ but a cultural product (Kraus 2016, p. 9).

Affective governance in the abolitionist discourse should affect the sexuality of all citizens, the sexual behaviour, desires and sexual fears and insecurities of women and men alike. The discourse aims to discipline and, at the same time, naturalize the sexuality of all citizens. The abolitionist campaigns position a pure and natural sexuality against these outlawed sexual practices, implicitly they are targeting women’s sexuality. ‘Sex without a trace of amorousness, without mutual desire […] this is not a question of morality but only blatantly sad. This means the devaluation of sexuality as a life elixir, which only works through emotional sensuous involvement and through mutual lust’ (Meier-Seethaler 2014, p. 43). Only sexuality connected to eroticism and to love, sexuality, which is not ‘sold or bought’ is tolerable. ‘The return of sexuality is sexuality’ – but not money.¹¹ The social value should be ‘consenting and not commodified sexual relations’ (Landesfrauenrat Baden-Württemberg 2014, p. 5). Shame remains part of sexuality: i.e. shame over deviant sexual desires or of selling sexuality outside the private realm and outside of an intimate relationship. Signatories to the ‘Vienna Appeal’ (Wiener Appell) stress that they do not advocate a ‘puritanical morals’, that they do not shy away from a debate about sexuality but that they want to discuss sexuality in a contenxt that respects everyone’s humanity. Thus, their slogan is: ‘YES to eroticism!’ (JA zu Erotik!).¹² Sexuality is presented as something naturally powerful, which needs to be freed from commercial sex. ‘Prostitution is an obstacle to establishing truly free, respectful and egalitarian sexuality in society’ (Brussels Call n.d.). Or, put differently: ‘(S)exual desires are a great force for women and men, which solidifies relations and strengthens people’ (Humbert 2014, p. 48).

The abolitionist campaigns thus include strategies of affective subjectivation through sexuality. Creating the male affective Other results – or aims at resulting – in a female sexual subjectivation, while ‘natural’ sexuality is included in a heterosexual matrix in which the male Other should transform his sexual desires and affects towards love in a private, intimate relationship.

Affects are a way of governing societies through boundary drawing and the classification of sexuality (Foucault 1998). Both sexuality and affect are means of governing and of creating governable subjects, for instance the ‘happy object’ (Ahmed 2010) of heterosexuality grounded in love and the abject with deviant sexual desires or selling sex for money. Governing sex-work in abolitionist campaigns thus is a way of governing sexuality and governing through sexuality.

5. The abolitionist paradox: re-establishing patriarchal feeling rules. Conclusions

Affective governance of the abolitionist campaigns aims at disciplining and norming sexuality by initiating a moral discourse, not only on sex-work, but on sexuality itself. The discourse excludes specific sexual practices by linking sexuality to love and by evoking disgust, revulsion, fear, unease and discomfort towards those sexual practices that are presented as violent. Only specific forms of sexual practices are legitimized in the abolitionist discourse. Affective governance is thus norming sexuality and gender relations without challenging the power structure of heterosexuality. Sexuality is presented as a practice, which should only be performed in relationships of love. At the same time, male sexuality is normalised as violent – and different from female sexuality. Men should therefore curb their sexual desires and govern their sexuality. Overall, governing sex-work through such ambivalent affects, fosters established heteronormative monogamous feeling rules of love and sexuality. The abolitionist discourse conceals patriarchal structures in which sexuality and gender relations are embedded and instead stresses male violence and domination. Hence, the abolitionist discourse at the same time negates female agency.

This strategy includes the following three dimensions. First, abolitionists frame prostitution as an issue of unequal, exploitative gender relations and of violent and oppressive patriarchy. However, their mobilization of gender equality sentiments does not contextualize sex-work in bourgeois, patriarchal, heternormative sexual relations. This runs the risk of reproducing an affective regime of heteronormative sexuality, of female sexuality, which is ‘natural’ and pure and an aggressive, violent male sexuality. Abolitionists tend to re-establish the sexual dispositif¹³ of monogamy, of romantic love in the privacy of a heterosexual relationship – a dispositif that has been the foundation of the capitalist, patriarchal, affective order for the oppression of women and men since the 19^th century (Kontos 2009). Thus, people are supposed to govern themselves and their sexuality within the private realm of heterosexuality.

Second, affective governance of sex-work in abolitionist campaigns includes a specific form of biopolitics. Not only should specific sexual practices be excluded from the sexual field, but male clients should be excluded from the citizenry as affective ‘Others’. Abolitionist activists aim to affect people in order to convince them of the political aim to abolish prostitution. This strategy results in creating male clients as a group that should be excluded, while women who sell sex should, at least, be partially included – due to their status as victims and only if they leave prostitution. Hence, abolitionists establish an exclusive form of affective citizenship. In doing so, they normate¹⁴ the population on the grounds of sexuality as sexuality is confined to the private realm of love.

Third, the affective strategy of abolitionist groups points to the profound differences within the women’s movements on prostitution and sex-work. Moreover, the women’s movements in Austria and Germany have been troubled and are being challenged by post-colonial and queer movements. Abolitionist groups in Austria and Germany are trying to affectively feed into the self-affirmation of feminist activities that rest on the binarisation of men and women, and on patriarchy as a clear-cut structure of male violence against female victims. Sara Ahmed characterizes an affective strategy of creating a victim as paternalistic. ‘The over-representation of the pain of others is significant in that it fixes the other as one who “has” pain, and who can overcome that pain only when the Western subject (or in our case: the egalitarian woman) feels moved enough’ (Ahmed 2004a, p. 35). Following this idea, Andrea Maihofer points out that affects are effective in processes of self-affirmation of a vague ‘we’ – here the feminist we – through constructing the Other (Maihofer 2014, p. 262).

My affective perspective on abolitionist campaigns tried to show the importance of affects as both a resource of social movements and as a way of governing sexuality and thus of exercising power over people. Moreover, affective strategies of abolitionist movements and thus as powerful political forms, my analysis claims, need to be contextualized in the transformative contexts of the women’s movements in Germany and Austria. These transformations of and challenges to a largely white, heterosexual women’s movements in the two countries build the background of affective struggles over sexuality and sex work.

Acknowledgments

I would like to thank Brigitte Bargetz, Katja Chmilewski, Katharina Hajek, and Gundula Ludwig, the participants of the COST workshop in Copenhagen, March 2017, and the ECPG workshop in Lausanne in June 2017 for their comments on a very first draft of the paper. Thanks to my co-editors of this special issue who critically revised and carefully edited the article. Many thanks to Verena Kettner who helped me to adapt the article to the JPP style.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Birgit Sauer

Birgit Sauer is professor of Political Science at the Department of Political Science, University of Vienna. She was member of several international research co-operations and projects on gender, migration, racism and right-wing populism. Recently she conducted two research projects on state transformation and affective governmentality. She was director of the graduate school ‘Gender, Violence and Agency in the Era of Globalisation’ (GIK) at the University of Vienna. Her research fields include gender and governance, feminist state and democratic theory, politics, affects and emotions, right-wing populism. Recent publications include: ‘Affective governmentality: A feminist perspective’ in Hudson, C., Rönnblom, M., and Teghtsoonian, K., (eds.) Gender, Governance and Feminist Analysis. Missing in Action? London/New York: Routledge 2017, p. 39–58 (with Otto Penz), Populism and the Web. Communicative Practices of Parties and Movements in Europe, London: Routledge 2017 (co-ed with Mojca Pajnik).

Notes

1. https://www.emma.de/thema/emma-appell-gegen-prostitution-111249, accessed 3 March 2017.

2. www.stoppsexkauf.at, accessed 8 March 2017.

3. http://zwanzigtausendfrauen.at/2011/03/plessl-sonja; Access: March, 3, 2017.

4. In this article I use the term affect instead of emotion, as introduced in the large body of literature on the ‘affective turn’ in the social sciences (e.g. Clough and Halley 2007, Gregg and Seigworth 2010). I use the term emotion if it is used in the referenced literature. In this article I do not follow Sara Ahmed (2004b) who uses affect and emotion synonymously nor Brian Massumi’s (2002) work on affect as a-social. I regard both concepts, affect and emotion, as bodily expressions, socially constructed and not opposed to cognition and rationality.

5. Foucault (2007, lecture 3, 25 January 1978) distinguishes between normation as the alignment of conduct according to a given norm, which excludes the ‘abnormal’, and normalization as the alignment of conduct with existing practices, which are thus perceived as ‘normal’.

6. Between March 1, and 20 March 2017 I accessed eight representative websites related to abolitionist groups in Austria and Germany (Wiener Appell/Stop Sexkauf, Kofra, Karlsruher Appell, Emma Appell gegen Prostitution, Solwodi, Sisters, Terre des Femmes, and European Women’s Lobby). I analyzed 25 documents, which were posted between 2010 and 2017, when the new prostitution legislations were publicly debated in the two countries. I selected those documents which discussed the new prostitution legislation and which shared the different ‘appeals’ against legalising sex-work.

7. www.stoppsexkauf.at/wiener_appell.htm, accessed 3 March 2017.

8. https://www.emma.de/thema/emma-appell-gegen-prostitution-111249, accessed 3 March 2017.

9. www.stoppsexkauf.at/wiener_appell.html, accessed 9 March 2017.

10. www.stoppsexkauf.at/wiener_appell.html, accessed 10 March 2017.

11. www.stoppsexkauf.at/wiener_appell.htm, accessed 5 March 2017.

12. http://zwanzigtausendfrauen.at/2011/03/plessl-sonja, accessed 8 March 2017.

13. Michel Foucault (1998) introduced the concept dispositif to point different sets of institutions, practices, knowledge structures and discourses which maintain power relations.

14. For Foucault’s definitions of normation and normalization see footnote 6 above.