Editorial

The last 30 years have been characterised by an ‘emotional’ and an ‘affective’ turn in the social sciences and the humanities. There is an ongoing (re-)discovery of the value of feeling, emotion, and of affect, for scientific explanation. While classical sociology was concerned with emotions and feelings – Max Weber, Georg Simmel, Emile Durkheim, Norbert Elias – the issue was ignored from the second half of the twentieth century onwards, as feelings, emotions and affects were seen as too complex to study. Several initiatives changed that not least of all brain research and the neurosciences (e.g. Damasio 2006 [1994]) which nourished and launched an affect and emotion boom, in turn, influencing the social sciences and humanities to also focus on the role of emotion, feeling and affect for people’s lives, for societies and for politics and policies. Drawing deep from the well of both classical and modern philosophical traditions, Martha Nussbaum (2001) in her opus made the case for a renewed incorporation of the emotions in ethical reasoning in which, inter alia, she spoke of the critical and sometimes problematic role that emotion plays in our personal lives which itself both shapes and is shaped by public choice and our view of what constitutes a ‘good and reasonable life’ (p 299). The contribution of feminist thought to the renewed interest in the body and in emotions is clear across the disciplines, in social theory, sociology, geography, international relations and politics. In an overview of the previous decade, Frank declared in 1990 that bodies are ‘in’, in both academic and popular culture (Frank 1990), an insider status heavily influenced by feminist thought or by what he calls more correctly ‘feminisms’. This renewed interest in feeling, emotion, and affect has placed the body on the horizon of social scientific reflection and thus questions of how people’s bodies are governed. Or to put it differently: How people are controlled and disciplined via their bodies (Foucault 1978).

This issue of the Journal of Political Power picks up this thread of interdisciplinary enquiry to focus on governmentality and sex work with a particular reference to affect and to the emotions. Prostitution has always been an emotional issue in western bourgeois societies for many diverse though interrelated reasons. It is deeply involved in bourgeois settings of love, family, sexuality and gender relations. As Zelizar (2005) has shown, the bourgeois tradition, albeit breached in a complex gendered power play, has been that commerce and intimacy should not meet. And where they do, the former necessarily entails a corruptive impact on the latter. But of course the gender power play ensured that the power to corrupt was primarily contained within the female body whose taboo-breaking role in commercial sex was read, for instance, in second-wave feminism as either a positive breach of patriarchal hypocrisy or another example of women’s degradation by the patriarchy. Because of some of these attitudes and beliefs, the governance of prostitution has always been characterized by heated and emotionalised public debates. Wagenaar and Altink (2012) argue that public policy on this topic is singularly subject to irrationality, a rebuttal of evidence, and to abrupt changes. Moreover, governance in this area has been also characterised by shame and shaming those involved in prostitution. Debates in the Swedish parliament that preceded the adoption of the Sex Purchase Ban there in 1999 considered the standardisation of publicly identifiable, specifically coloured envelopes with which the state would communicate with suspected offenders, in order that their possible or actual breach of the law would bring heightened visibility and thus increase the moral pressure against clients. In one public debate participated in by one of us (Ward) the objection raised that families of clients, including children, being prosecuted for purchasing sex would be also drawn into a web of shame, was dismissed by proponents of such a law on the basis that they too ought to know what the adult men in their families were up to. Though progress has been variable and takes different shapes in different times and places, sex-workers’ movements, however, have recently been able to transform shame into pride, i.e. to create an ‘affective atmosphere’ (Anderson 2009) which aims at legitimising prostitution as work or at least at reducing the stigma and all of its loaded emotional baggage including its perverse justification of violence against those most ‘loathed’ or stigmatised.

This special issue focuses on the role of emotion, feeling and affect in different fields of prostitution politics or in the politics of sex work. The articles use different concepts, either emotion, feeling or affect, and some use the concepts synonymously. The editors of this special issue think that it is worth being aware of the different scientific traditions of the concepts, but that the concepts overlap and that their meanings cannot be exactly distinguished. The emotional turn in sociology and history for instance focused on legitimising a view that emotions are not opposed to cognition and rationality but are always part of human perception and of evaluation, and thus that body and mind cannot be separated. Nevertheless, the concept of emotion has been historically tainted with the binary opposition. The affective turn aimed at bringing the body back into the study of human activity, collective behaviour and politics. Relying on Baruch Spinoza’s notion of affect, Gilles Deleuze (1988) and Brian Massumi promoted the concept of affect in opposition to the emotion concept: Massumi (2002, p. 27) claims that emotion and affect ‘follow different logics and pertain to different orders’. While emotions are seen as the conscious aspect of feeling, affect are perceived as pre-conscious and immediate bodily reactions. Affect is a state of being affected by reality and other people and of affecting other people, it is a force, a biological energy and potential, it is of ‘irreducibly bodily and autonomic nature’, thus pure ‘intensity’ (ibid.: 28).

Researchers like Sara Ahmed (2004) or Clare Hemmings (2005) decline this distinction by arguing that it runs the danger of bringing in divisions between body and mind. They suggest to use the concepts interchangeably. The editors and authors of this special issue follow this suggestion. The authors use different concepts of emotion, feeling and affect however, legitimizing why and how they introduce the concepts chosen.

One of the most important concerns of studies of emotion and affect is their ability to relate between people but also to divide and discriminate against them, and thus to create power relations. Research therefore claims that emotion and affect need to be perceived as important means of power and of governing (Heaney 2011, Pykett et al. 2018). Some scientists use a more instrumental approach and analyse how governments deliberately develop affective and emotional policy measures to activate citizens or to exclude those depicted as ‘Others’ (from full citizenship). Other scientists in a Foucauldian tradition see affect and emotion as dimensions of ‘bio-politics’ (Rose 1999, Foucault 2008) and of a ‘neo-liberal affective governmentality’ (Sauer and Penz 2017), i.e. a way of guiding and controlling people by a mixture of disciplinary, controlling, soft instruments and self-technologies of governance. The articles in this special issue follow these different social science traditions of conceptualizing emotion and affect as elements of governance and power and analyse different aspects of the governance of sex work. Hence, this special issue is driven by the insight that governing prostitution has historically always been highly emotional and affective – although policy-makers, state officials and the police claimed that their activities are based on ‘rational’ means and ends.

Most of the articles in this special issue are contextualised in the EU COST Action IS1209 – ‘Comparing European Prostitution Policies: Understanding Scales and Cultures of Governance’ which ran from 2013 to 2017. The network brought together an interdisciplinary team of researchers and experts in the field, at different stages of their career, from across the EU all involved in research and/or activism on commercial sex. One theme that emerged from our discussions about different or rather similar (or converging) cultures of prostitution governance was the importance of emotion and affect in these regulating processes. This motivated us to dive deeper into different scales, dimensions, layers of prostitution policy-making and into their entanglement with emotions and affects. The articles in this special issue cover different actors of governing such as national governments (Ward, Zambini), political partiers (Crowhurst), the police (Fey, Pates and Leser), abolitionist movements (Sauer), and the interplay between social service and health-care providers (Dewey, Hankel and Brown) and the different dimensions of governance and self-governance. Whether the context is migrant sex-workers in Italy, street-involved sex workers in an urban setting in the US or women working indoors in German cities, we find effects of affect and emotions, namely the construction of sex-workers as ‘Others, as ‘affect aliens’ in Sara Ahmed’s (2010, p. 42) term. Affect aliens are those who are excluded from the ‘happy community’ but also those who resist the affective exclusionary norms.

In the US case study Susan Dewey, Jennifer Hankel and Kyria Brown, drawing from a bigger and well-established research relationship between the authors and support services for involved sex workers in Denver, suggest three nodes on a circuit of affect. The first is the street, made up of both geographic and psycho-social phenomena that exert a formative and often intergenerational impact on street-involved women. The second, selfhood, connects an understanding of trauma as inhibitory to cognitive development with the governmentality of mental health diagnoses by specialists. And the third, embodied abjection, links the physical states and practices connected with addiction, homelessness, incarceration, and other forms of social suffering, with these women’s abjection. In Eilís Ward’s case study from Ireland the origin of that construction of otherness is traced back to a deeper psychic discomfort with the presence of ‘errant’ female sexuality in the state that, at a different time, led to policies of incarceration and punishment in the now disgraced Mother and Baby Homes but which now finds a more contemporary and socially acceptable discourse in radical feminism. Birgit Sauer’s interrogation of the websites of abolitionist groups in Germany and Austria shows how their approach runs the risk of establishing a disciplinary regime of governing people, of restrictive, heterosexist norm of sexuality, and of gender inequality. Abolitionist strategies in both thus produce an affective governmentality that excludes those deemed outside of the affective community, i.e. those who do not limit their sexuality to the private realm of monogamous relationships. Elena Zambelli’s ethnographic work in Italy amongst migrant women reveals the manner in which they prevail in and navigate jobs that transgress the normative separation between care and sex work, resulting in their positioning as ‘intimate Others’ or ‘risky tenants’. In her case, also from Italy, Isabel Crowhurst argues that the Northern League party has changed its emotional and affective repertoire to justify its recent prostitution policy proposal. Having largely dispensed with the punitive and fearful rhetoric against migrant prostitution of previous campaigns, the party now seeks the regulation and taxation of prostitution and citizens are encouraged to think and feel differently about sex workers: as profitable human capital. But the measures proposed are far from neutral (a matter of taxation alignment) rather, they reinforce a well-established, emotively appealing and normative dichotomy between potentially dangerous individuals in need of surveillance and the wholesome families that make up the nation and are in need of economic assistance.

From her field work with Geneva vice squads, Mira Fey concludes that these specialist units are not, in fact equipped to carry out their main task, to protect sex workers from violence and exploitation, because of their reliance on affect alone to create trust in repeated interactions, rather than fair and equal treatment and transparent decision-making processes. From Germany, Rebecca Pates and Julia Leser utilise a state ethnographic methodology to reveal the three functions borne by affects in the governing of trafficking prevention projects, in affective displays used by police officers to regulate and govern the clients they encounter in their everyday practices, in the role of affective displays in boundary-making and in the epistemological function of affects in assessing the behaviour and the features of potential victims of trafficking. Drawing on Sauer and Penz (2017) they conclude with a demystification of the state as an apparatus of rational decision-making through the evidence they offer that affects bear very particular and quite subtle functionalities within the realm of state practices.

Overall, the articles in this special issue show the importance of emotions and affects in governing prostitution and sex-work. The affect perspective highlights the political necessity to critically assess prostitution policies in order to show how fear, disgust but also desires influence governing prostitution and how these sentiments create power, exclusion and discrimination.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.