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Abstract
By elucidating the average everydayness of prostitution, this essay shows—contrary to contemporary conceptions of sex work as either horror or utopia—that whoring is boring. Boredom is a stubborn aspect of modern Western existence. Yet in its philosophical portrayals, it is only described based on masculine parameters, and modeled on male figures such as the flaneur. As his feminine equivalent, the flaneuse shows that boredom is a pervasive yet under-explored feature of feminine life. Like the flaneur, the flaneuse turns to writing to process her impressions of the boring public sphere, but unlike him, the flaneuse is a literal streetwalker. On her strolls in the polis, her gaze never merely grazes the metropolitan landscape and its inhabitants, but solicits. As a queer femme or lesbian, she responds to the male gaze (only) when she is looking for work. Boredom is intrinsically linked to life under capitalism, but boredom may also be conceived as an important attitude for combatting its demands for ever-increasing productivity. Epitomized by the flaneur, the flaneuse, the scribe, and the whore, the meditations that make up this essay formulate a passive resistance against the capitalist logic of work. Through the political medium and passive modality of writing, they draw on the bored and impotent aspects of subjectivity in order to rethink political resistance through passive existence.
Disclosure statement
The author reports no conflicts of interest. The author alone is responsible for the content and writing of the paper.
Notes
1 Walter Benjamin, Siegfried Kracauer, Martin Heidegger, Søren Kierkegaard…
2 As Clementine von Radics explains in the foreword to A Whore’s Manifesto, femininity is a uniting modality for many sex workers: “To me, being a former sex worker often feels like being in a sorority built on grit and hard-earned taste for fast money. Difficult, but undeniably fast. We, this sorority I imagine, are a heterogenous riot of voices, less a community of women and more a network of cis women, trans women, and non-binary queers who perform a stylized version of womanhood for the gratification of clients—mostly cis, straight men of means. There are of course cis and trans men in the industry too, and non-binary people who performed a stylized boyhood. But throughout the world, 80% of prostitutes are women between the ages of 18 and 34, catering to men.” Clementine Von Radics, foreword to A Whore’s Manifesto: An Anthology of Writing and Artwork by Sex Workers, edited by Kay Kassirer (Portland, OR: Thorntree Press, 2019), iix.
3 I wish to thank the two anonymous reviewers who gifted an earlier draft of this essay with their generous and thought-provoking comments. Amongst other things, their readings helped elucidate this question about the status of the subject guiding these Meditations.
4 From Clementine von Radics foreword to A Whore’s Manifesto (Von Radics, Citation2019, p. ix).
5 Sex work also, of course, happens in the home and can blend with the repetitive tasks of household labour, which is beautifully portrayed in Chantal Akerman’s Citation1975 film Jeanne Dielman, 23, quai du commerce, 1080 Bruxelles.
6 The terms whoredom, sex work, and prostitution are used interchangeably. In my view, they all describe the same job, but might for strategic or poetic reasons serve different purposes in different contexts.
7 Despentes (Citation2006, p. 59). See also this whole chapter “Coucher avec l’ennemi.” Despentes (Citation2009, p. 49).
8 “As the social werewolf, the flaneur is seen and not seen; is both conspicuous and anonymous; mixes with the crowd and yet keeps apart from it; is the perceptive observer of modern social and political life and yet is its most complicit bourgeois supporter and participant; is permanently drunk with the excitement of the city life and yet is utterly bored with it; is replete in his writings with the premonition of coming disasters and yet is incapable of averting any of them.” Nikulin (Citation2018, p. 152).
9 Dahl (Citation2014), “La Flaneuse.” “Nu glider jag liksom omkring och betraktar kända byggnader, vackra människor med hårda, väldoftande skal. Jag ser på kvinnorna. Det är en tyst värld där alla kvinnor stirrar framför sig eller ner i gatan. Hårt kontrollerade dressyrhästar som endast kan koncentrera sina rörelser genom att bära skygglappar.” My translation.
10 Dahl (Citation2014) “La Flaneuse.”
11 Dahl (2014), “La Flaneuse.” “flanerandet är enkom möjligt genom att inta den manliga positionen, att gå ur blickfånget och upplösas i en riktad blick och förvänta sig, men också strunta i, om den är besvarad.” My translation.
12 Dahl (Citation2014). “La Flaneuse.” “Den prostituerade må ha möjlighet att observera, men hon kan inte förbli oinvolverad, hennes uppenbarelse omöjliggör distans, hon är en förlängning av världens förtingligande. (…). Att vara streetwalker är att alltid vara en vara…” My translation.
13 Described in Meditation One. Tea (Citation2004, pp. 33–43).
14 Doyle (Citation2006, p. xxviii). In this way, Doyle echoes Agamben’s discussion of the mundanity of the scribe, and his critique of the “heroic pathos of negation.”
15 For example the display of brothels in art, in works of Degas and Manet. Doyle (Citation2006, p. 50).
16 Al-Saji writes: “what I make of my hesitation, or what hesitating makes of me, is a singular unfurling of time.” Al-Saji (Citation2018, p. 337).
17 Here Doyle is citing Anne McClintock who in turn is using this term by Mark Seltzer. Doyle (Citation2006, p. 49).
18 Irigaray recognizes that what she terms hommo-sexuality is constitutive of a symbolic order wherein homosexuality is prohibited; in the same culture, by the same logic. Irigaray (Citation1977, p. 190). Irigaray (Citation1985, pp. 193–194). But what then of feminine homosexuals? How can one desire another woman without being subjected to a hommo-sexual logic? Sigmund Freud diagnoses the homosexual woman as suffering from an excess of virility, thus offering the perfect example of how this logic operates: everything is but a mirror of same, man.
19 This is the expression that Maurice Merleau-Ponty uses to address Blanchot’s language in “La mort du dernier écrivain” from Le livre à venir. Merleau-Ponty (Citation2010, p. 151, Citation2015, p. 260).
20 “Life in this society being, at best, an utter bore and no aspect of society being at all relevant to women, there remains to civic-minded, responsible, thrill-seeking females only to overthrow the government, eliminate the money system, institute complete automation and destroy the male sex.” (Solanas, Citation2015, p. 50).
21 Lynne Huffer discusses Despentes’ Baisse-moi and Karen Bach’s death in Are The Lips A Grave? Unlike Despentes herself, the movie’s other heroine Rafaëlla Anderson, and its co-director Coralie Trinh Thi, Karen Bach was the only one of the four that had not yet published a book. Huffer writes: “Perhaps writing wasn’t really her thing, as Despentes admits in her blog: ‘She’s the only girl I know, really, whose big dream was to be a housewife. The first time she told me that, I wanted to put it aside, but in getting to know her better, I understood that this existed, as a life dream. That was her thing. Sometimes we don’t do what we want’” (Huffer, Citation2013, pp. 170–171).
Or, as the main character of Justice Hustlers Marisol puts it in her speech and introduction of singer Delia Borbón, at a fundraiser event toward the free women’s health clinic that Marisol is running: “Everybody deserves health care. No matter what it is they choose to do with their bodies. Delia Borbón knows how hard it is out there. That’s why she’s here tonight. Because she remembers the tightrope young brown women have to walk. And she remembers all the women who don’t ever write the book, attend the gala event, or even live to tell the tale” (León, Citation2016, p. 68).