Excesses and double standards: migrant prostitutes, sovereignty and exceptions in contemporary Italy

Abstract

In this paper, the author proposes an analysis of the apparently contradictory attitudes towards transactional sexual exchanges, as they have emerged in public debate and informed legislation and policies in Italy over the past few years. The ambiguity towards commercial sex is linked to a specific dynamic of power, which denies sexual labour the status of work and makes it the object of repressive and criminalising policies, whilst at the same time habitually demanding sexual services in exchange for money, gifts or favours. The article shows how criminalisation functions as a prominent form for the control of subjects, related to the workings of sovereignty. In particular, the author considers the ways in which the criminalisation of prostitution and of undocumented migration, which compound in the figure of the migrant prostitute, represents a means for the exertion of sovereignty and relates to the centrality of desire, transgression and their disciplining in the contemporary context. However, closer examination of the subjective experiences of those who are supposedly excluded and criminalised, such as undocumented migrant sex workers in detention centres, reveals the incompleteness of disciplinary mechanisms.

Keywords:

• culture and media
• political thought
• politics
• society
• subjectivity

Notes

Notes

1. http://www.liviaturco.it/?p=321 (accessed 1 August 2011).

2. Cf. http://video.repubblica.it/dossier/ruby-tormentoni-inchieste/bunga-bunga-fede-racconta-la-barzelletta-di-berlusconi/55522/54644 (accessed 10 March 2012).

3. Law No. 75 (‘Merlin Law’) on the ‘Abolition of the regulation on prostitution and fight against exploitative prostitution’.

4. Cf. De Gregorio's letter in leftist newspaper L’Unità, published on 27 January 2011: ‘I am sure, I know for a fact that the majority of Italian women are not queuing up for the bunga bunga. I am certain that consciously exercised prostitution is the choice, if one can indeed speak of a choice under such conditions, of a small minority. It is thus the others, all the other women that I address. It is time to answer out loud: where are you, girls? Mothers, grandmothers, daughters, granddaughters, where are you’.

5. Given the problems concerning the commensurability of different sets of data collected according to disparate, inadequate and often unaccounted for methods (cf. Agustín 2007, 36–38), on the one hand, and those of quantifying a phenomenon whose contours are fuzzy (partly because sex work is not formally considered a profession and is criminalised in subtle ways) on the other, figures are to be taken cautiously. The very exercise of counting partakes of a specific form of power that manages sexual (and more generally (re)productive) labour through a variety of techniques, including state and non-state actors’ interventions. These depend on processes of resource allocation that in turn revolve around the politics of (ac)counting (Lindquist 2010). Nonetheless, quantitative estimates can give a sense of scale: most studies conducted in recent years calculate the number of non-Italian prostitutes to be around 20,000, the majority of whom are working outdoors (Camera dei Deputati 1999; Carchedi 2000; Transcrime 2002; Gruppo Abele 2008; Caritas 2010; UNICRI 2010).

6. See http://youtube.maroc.bz/video/GS4473BDNRRM/RUBY-intervista-completa-a-Kalispera-12 (accessed 1 August 2011).

7. For further elaborations on this psychoanalytical reading of contemporary Italian politics and society, see the debate in il manifesto (Bianchi 2010; De Rita 2010; De Rita and Recalcati 2011; Dominijanni 2010a, 2010b; Recalcati 2010b).

8. Cf. http://noinonsiamocomplici.noblogs.org/.

9. See http://fortresseurope.blogspot.com/2011/02/cie-milano-assolto-lispettore-accusato.html, http://noinonsiamocomplici.noblogs.org/files/2011/03/glossier_per_web_aggiornato.pdf