Intimate others and risky tenants: disentangling the economy of affect shaping women’s migratory projects in Italy

ABSTRACT

This article discusses how the Western imaginary that the market and intimacy are separate and hostile spheres affects some women’s migratory projects in Italy. It traces the place and meaning of this trope within contemporary feminist and sex workers rights’ activists debates on prostitution. Drawing from ethnographic research, it shows how migrant women prevail in and navigate jobs that transgress this normative separation – care and sex work – resulting in their positioning as ‘intimate Others’ or ‘risky tenants’. It argues that addressing women’s predicaments requires tackling the intersecting structures of inequality moulding the conditions under which they perform and exchange labour.

KEYWORDS:

• Sex work
• care work
• intimacy
• migration
• intersectionality

Acknowledgments

I would like to thank the women I encountered in the course of my research, Dr Ruba Salih, Dr Caroline Osella, and Professor Lynn Welchman (SOAS) for having supervised it, the editors of this Special Issue for their constructive engagement with my writing, and everyone who helped improve this paper.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1. The concept of ‘economy of affect’ builds on Foucault’s writings on governmentality and subjectification and describes how subjects are enmeshed in and navigate an affective texture that ‘enable[s] certain types of circulation and foreclose[s] others’ (Richard and Rudnyckyj. 2009, p. 59).

2. In this article I use the term ‘sex worker’ to indicate adults of any sex and gender who consensually perform sex acts in exchange of money. This category does not include minors or subjects forced into prostitution. Unless otherwise specified, my use of the term ‘prostitute’ has an historical connotation, corresponding to the period preceding the coinage of the term ‘sex worker’ (1970s). I use the term ‘prostituted’ (people) when conveying radical feminists and abolitionists’ position on prostitution.

3. In Italy the ‘image girl’ is a female service worker employed in some leisure and commercial venues to beautify a space and/or to provide enticing company to male guests and customers with the objective to seduce them into purchasing the goods displayed (e.g. in trade fairs) or consuming alcohol (e.g. in discos).

4. The mobile unit also distributed free condoms and lubricant to sex workers who asked for them.

5. Consistent with feminist economists’ approach to ‘care work’ as a field encompassing all activities aiming at social reproduction (e.g. from childcare to house chores), in this article I include domestic work(ers) under the rubric of care work(ers). Within the home, in fact, the boundaries between these two jobs frequently overlap – for example, a domestic worker might also care for the children in her employers’ absence.

6. While on the mobile unit I also encountered trans street sex workers, however, this article concentrates on women’s experiences only.

7. Pioneered by Sweden in 1999, it prescribes the criminalization of customers and the decriminalization of prostituted people. It is currently law in several Western countries (e.g. Canada, Iceland, and Ireland).

8. See also the comment of MacKinnon on the Swedish model (MacKinnon 2011, p. 301).

9. Having recorded sex workers’ experiences of sexual pleasure at work, Kontula (2008, p. 611) for example suggested that it is their different expectation of feeling it when performing sex for work or with their partner that constitutes their subjective boundary between ‘commercial’ and ‘private’ sex respectively.

10. Benoit et al. (2019) indicate these as ‘integrative’ rather than repressive policies encompassing, inter alia, composite and multi-level legal frameworks, empowerment initiatives and anti-stigma campaigns.

11. Interview, 4 October 2013.

12. According to Italian Institute of Statistics (ISTAT), in 2014 the average unemployment rate for youth aged 18–29 was 31.4%, but it was higher for women (33.0% vs. 30.1% for men). Nationality/citizenship-disaggregated data was unavailable. http://dati.istat.it/Index.aspx?DataSetCode=DCCV_TAXDISOCCU1 [accessed 4 June 2019].

13. Obstacles to the international interoperability of educational and professional titles are a standard measure through which nation states institutionalize differences in status and opportunities between citizens and migrants.

14. The so called ‘decreto flussi’ (flows decree) was introduced by the so-called ‘Turco-Napolitano law’ (Disciplina dell’immigrazione e norme sulla condizione dello straniero). Based on figures provided by the Ministry of Labour, it established the number of migrants per economic sector allowed entry in the country to work.

15. Caritas is a charitable association that belongs to the Catholic Church.

16. See footnote 5 for my definition of care work.

17. My concept of ‘intimate Other’ describes a subject who is central and yet invisibilised in the symbolic and material processes of construction of the intimacy of the Self. As part of subjectification processes unfolding in the shadow of the market/intimacy binary, this term differs from its use by Chang and Ling. (2011, p. 27) to describe a process of global restructuring co-constitutive of what they define as contemporary ‘techno-muscular capitalism’.

18. My use of the category of ‘race’ here and in the rest of this article rests on the acknowledgement that nationality is intrinsically racialised (Balibar 1991, p. 200), and so is Europeanness itself, with forms of differentiation based e.g. on citizens’ possession of the citizenship of a Western vs. Eastern European country (see for example Fox et al. 2015).

19. Data from the ISTAT indicates that two thirds of economically active foreign women work in four professional categories: they constitute 67% of the workforce employed as ‘not qualified personnel in charge of domestic services’, 55.5% of the ‘qualified professions in personal and likewise services’, 24.2% of the cleaning personnel, and 19.6% of the catering workforce (Ricciardi 2018). Note that this data records only regular employment. The percentages would likely be higher if the informal sector was included in the counting.

20. For example, they are paid on average at a rate of 4 Euros per hour, almost a quarter does not have a contract, and many of those who do report working more than the contracted hours (Marchetti 2016, p. 108).

21. More than half (52,9%) report back pain since taking up the job, a third (31,6%) suffer from insomnia, and over a quarter (27,5%) from anxiety or depression (Vianello 2016, p. 131).

22. For example, a woman quoted by Mihala and Vinci (2019) said: ‘Italy syndrome starts at home, [t]hey start to look at you like you are an ATM, a cash machine.’

23. Field notes, 17 February 2013.

24. For example in the research by Zucca (2016) one fourth of the women (25,7%) were 55 years or older, over a third (36,9%) was in the 45–54 age range, and a quarter (25,9%) in the 35–44 age range. Women under 35 years were 11,5% of the total.

25. Field notes, 17 February 2013.

26. Field notes, 24 March 2013.

27. The unlikeliness of this occurrence was also possibly exacerbated by the power relations unequally shaping our encounter, as signified by my position seated inside the van.

28. Field notes, 7 April 2013.

29. I use the term ‘prostitute’ in substitution of a more self-derogatory term used by Gina.

30. Field notes, 8 September 2013.

31. Field notes, 23 December 2012.

32. Field notes, 8 September 2013.

33. Ten years passed from the first presentation of the bill in Parliament and its endorsement (see Bellassai 2006).

34. E.g. even a sex worker’s husband (art. 4.3, note the gendering of the subject in the text of the law), or her maid (art. 4.5) can be indicted.

35. Art. 3.2 includes ‘whoever owns or administers a house or another venue and rents it out for the purpose of opening a tolerance house’; art. 3.3 includes ‘whoever is the owner, manager or person in charge of a hotel, furnished house, boarding house, bar, club, dance or show venue, or their annexes, or any other venue open to or used by the public, and who habitually tolerates the presence of one or more persons who undertake prostitution within that venue.’

36. Repression of street sex work in Italy mainly occurs indirectly. For example, several mayors have been issuing decrees establishing fines for violations of ‘public decorum’ (Favet 2010, p. 14; see also Garofalo Geymonat 2014, p. 91).

37. Since the 1990s street sex work in Italy is overwhelmingly performed by migrant women hailing from countries of the former Eastern Bloc and Nigeria (see for example Tatafiore 2012, Serughetti 2013, Garofalo Geymonat 2014). This transformation is partly rooted in the shift indoors of Italian street sex workers, as they sought to stem the race to the price bottom ignited by the increased numbers of women selling sex on the street (Tatafiore 2012, 140, Corso 1991, pps. 227–28).

38. For both undocumented and regular (including EU) migrants, owning a flat in Italy would seem to signal a degree of economic security unlikely associated with the sale of sex for a living.

39. Field notes, 18 September 2012.

40. They reported paying twenty-five Euros a day for a shared double room (i.e. approx. 750 Euros a month) or forty Euros for a single (i.e. approx. 1200 Euros per month). In both cases, the price did not include breakfast nor use of kitchen facilities, which suggests that the women likely incurred high food expenses (e.g. daily purchase of groceries).

Additional information

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Elena Zambelli

Elena Zambelli is a postdoctoral researcher at the Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam, where she works on a ERC-funded project exploring the intersection of race, intimacy and the law. In her PhD (SOAS) she discussed how sexuality, pleasure and work interrogate each other and differently impinge on women’s subjectification and agency according to class and ‘race’. Her research interests include the anthropology of gender and sexuality, critical race theory and migration studies.