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

1. Introduction

The Western cultural imaginary that the market and intimacy are and ought to remain bounded spheres of human activity – the ‘separate spheres and hostile worlds’ view (Zelizer 2005, p. 22) – affects the value of the activities that more visibly transgress it: sex and care work. Their construction as acts and attachments that should not be for sale generates and reproduces an ‘economy of affect’ (Richard and Rudnyckyj. 2009)¹ which makes certain bodies more likely to perform these activities. In contemporary Western European countries it is indeed largely migrant women who occupy the positions of the carer (see for example Barone and Mocetti 2011, Triandafyllidou and Marchetti 2013) and the sex worker (see for example Mai 2013, p. 108, TAMPEP International Foundation 2015)² i.e. the market equivalents of the binary roles of the wife-and-mother or of the prostitute that the heteronormative order reserves to women (Grosz 1990, p. 129). The transgression of the (fictitious) boundaries safeguarding the sphere of intimacy from the commodification of its constitutive acts and attachments (hereinafter the market/intimacy binary) appears to be the condition of possibility of their migratory projects. However, in contexts increasingly characterised by restrictive mobility regimes (Vuolajärvi 2018) and repressive prostitution policies within and across national borders (Benoit et al. 2019) the intersection of work, intimacy and migration gives rise to different hierarchies of visibility and policy concern for the precarious, exploitative and hazardous conditions under which women perform their labour.

Following Constable’s invitation to cast ‘the pairing of commodification and intimacy’ as the main topic of analysis (Constable 2009, p. 58), and drawing from my ethnographic fieldwork in Italy, in this article I discuss the relationship between work and intimacy in the lives of migrant women for whom the commodification of intimate acts and attachments by and large encapsulates their opportunities to sustain themselves and their transnational intimacies. To this purpose I use Berlant’s concept of ‘cruel optimism’, which she defines as ‘a relation of attachment to compromised conditions of possibility’ whereby a subject projects its continuity ‘into an enabling object that is also disabling’ (Berlant 2006, p. 21). For Berlant, ‘the conditions of ordinary life in the contemporary world […] are conditions of the attrition or the wearing out of the subject’ (ibid., 23). Hence, in this article I argue that the intricate entanglement – rather than the separation – of sex, care, love and work in migrant women’s lives constitutes what makes their under-valued, exploitative and risky jobs meaningful and valuable to them, as they pursue their cruelly optimistic attachments to a better life for themselves and their family members. The dire conditions under which women perform sex and care work attest to the workings of intersecting structures of inequality, as inflected (mainly) by gender, class, race and sexuality, and primarily the gendered and racialised (Brah 1993) economy of affect engendered by the market/intimacy binary, restrictive mobility regimes and discriminatory prostitution laws. In showing migrant women’s predicaments I aim to contribute to contemporary feminist scholars’ and sex workers rights activists’ debates in academia and policy making spaces on the nature and regulation of prostitution, arguing for rescaling its relationship to harm from an ontological to a phenomenological level.

This article is based on my larger ethnographic research project on the relationship between sex, pleasure and the market in processes of women’s subjectification in contemporary Western countries. In 2012–13 I conducted 14 months of fieldwork in Italy, moving across a continuum of spaces of leisure and work wherein Italian and migrant women consumed and/or commodified their sexual desirability – pole dance schools, discos, strip clubs, and streets where the sale of sex is negotiated. I conducted 41 open-ended interviews with women working as pole dance entrepreneurs and/or teachers, burlesquers, ragazze immagine (image girls),³ acrobatic strippers, lap dancers and indoor sex workers, and two with former street sex workers who are now activists working in harm-reduction programmes. Simultaneously, I collaborated for a year with two non-governmental organisations providing sexual and reproductive health information to street sex workers, and I regularly volunteered in the night-time outreach activities (hereinafter: mobile unit) organised by one of them.⁴

This article brings together the experiences of migrant women occupying different positions in the sphere of commodified intimacy in Italy. The interview with Kate – a young Ukrainian woman working as image girl while in higher education – discloses the predicament of her mother, who travelled to Italy as an undocumented migrant and achieved family reunification with her daughter only after several years of informal employment as a care worker.⁵ The field notes from my activities with the mobile unit relay fragments of the conversations between ‘us’ in the van – frequently women, Italian, and in a self-ascribed ‘helping’ role – and the female sex workers whom we reached out to.⁶ Power flows across and structures all social situations (Foucault 1977), and inevitably shapes the circulation of words, emotions, expectations and silences in the interaction between the researcher and the subjects of her research. I am therefore aware that my position as a white female researcher with Italian (i.e. EU) citizenship influenced my fieldwork, and that the power imbalances were particularly intense in the interaction with the women I encountered while on the mobile unit. This awareness is reflected in my analytic approach to these exchanges as narratives: their value, therefore, does not pertain to the realm of un/truth but to the performative. What they foreground is women’s negotiation of their predicaments in the context of the profound disparities shaping the space between us.

The article is structured as follows. First, I trace the workings of intersecting gendered, class-based and racialised hierarchies of power in the economy of affect engendered by the market/intimacy binary. Next I highlight the place and meaning of this trope in feminist and sex workers rights activists’ debates on prostitution. Subsequently, I show how female migrants in Italy navigate care and sex work in contexts characterised by restrictive mobility regimes and discriminatory prostitution laws. In conclusion, I argue that addressing migrant women’s predicaments demands an engagement with the material and affective structures of inequality which unevenly distribute wealth and opportunities within and across borders.

2. A gendered and racialised economy of affect

The Western cultural imaginary of the market and the intimacy as bounded and hostile spheres gained strength in Western countries in the nineteenth century in the context of the dramatic social transformations brought about by rising industrial capitalism (Zelizer 2005, p. 24). Against the cold, impersonal instrumentality of the market where men sold their labour, the home was imagined as a space of respite and nurture (Wilson 2012, p. 41) – a shelter from commodification (O’Connell Davidson 2014, p. 518), wherein relationships were based on reciprocity rather than self-interest. Intimacy, hence, signified both a space and the affects producing and involving its subjects through acts, emotions, attachments and orientations. As Marxist feminist economists have amply shown (see for example Folbre 1994, Elson 1998), however, the imaginary ‘of the home as a site of leisure and recreation – a “haven in a heartless world”’ (Ehrenreich 2004, p. 86) was a peculiarly male fantasy reliant upon the invisibilisation of the everyday work that women invested in the production of homey-ness. The scaffolding of intimacy, hence, rested on the suppression of the economic value of the activities that produced it, enabled by the affective makeover re-signifying women’s work into a gift – an expression of their ‘natural’ caring disposition. Class-based and racialised hierarchies of power arising at the intersection between the ideology of respectability and Western colonialism further contributed to making domestic and care work respectable occupations for working class women, prostitutes (see for example Agustín 2007, Skeggs 1997), and native women subjected by European colonial powers (see for example McClintock 1995).

Within this Western cultural imaginary the home was also discursively constructed as the shell of respectable sexuality, which was heterosexual, reproductive in purpose, and gratuitous. Prostitution was intrinsically at odds with this imaginary, as the sale of sex transgressed symbolically and materially its placement within the sphere of intimacy. The ensuing social disapproval for this activity, however, was unequally distributed among the parts involved in this exchange. Sexual double standards constructing men’s sexuality as ‘naturally’ voracious by and large tolerated their recourse to women prostitutes (Lyons and Lyons 2011, p. 70) – whereas men’s purchasing sex from other men was invisibilised given that homosexuality was considered ‘unnatural’. For women, on the other hand, their use of sexuality signalled their positioning along a racialised temporality ranging from primitive promiscuity to the apex of modernity signified by Victorian women’s domesticated sexual desire (ibid.). Female prostitutes’ ‘promiscuous’ sexuality supposedly signaled their stunted development (Lombroso and Ferrero 1903) and evolutionary proximity closer to the women inhabiting the lands colonized by Europe than to the respectable middle class women living in the European metropolis (Gilman 1985, McClintock 1995). Prostitution laws crystallized normative (albeit changing) definitions of where sex ought to be enacted, contextually producing women selling it to men as either objects or subjects, victims or renegades, workers or outlaws. Whether prohibited or regulated, however, the exchange of sex for money remained affectively enwrapped in social disapproval, and the blame, shame and stigma disproportionately attached to women prostitutes.

The workings of this gendered and racialised economy of affect are still clearly discernible in contemporary Western European countries. The persistently low exchange value of care work (see for example: Hayes 2017, O’Connor 2018) arguably bears the traces of the affective makeover turning nurture and compassion into ‘natural’ i.e. effortless female dispositions. Concomitantly, despite the neoliberal urge to commodify everything, including one’s ‘erotic capital’ (Hakim 2011), the stigma on sex workers (see for example Benoit et al. 2019, Platt et al. 2018) remains particularly ‘sticky’ (Ahmed 2004, p. 120). This economy of affect, as I show in the next section, informs feminists and sex workers rights activists’ debate on the nature, roots and scale of the harm in prostitution, and their views on whether and how states should legislate over this activity. Following Benoit et al. (2019), I distinguish the two main positions in this debate based on what they identify as the root of the ‘prostitution problem’ i.e. gender or social inequality.

3. A moral and political economy of harm

Radical feminists and (neo)abolitionists herald the view that prostitution is mainly a problem of unequal gender relations of power between men and women, which rests upon and is reproduced through men’s sexual exploitation of women (see for example Pateman 1988, Miriam 2005, Jeffreys 2009, MacKinnon 2011, Coy 2012). Consistent with the Western imaginary that intimacy and the market are two hostile spheres that ought to remain separate, they consider that sex should be only an expression of mutual desire (MacKinnon 2011, p. 281). Its circulation as a commodity is functional to ‘patriarchal capitalism’ (Pateman 1988, p. 189), and accordingly envisaged as a univocally gendered exchange between men who buy or procure it and women who are sold in it. Blame, shame and stigma are also similarly gendered, as the sex-buyer (or ‘Swedish’) model they herald re-signifies male demand for commodified sex as shameful and criminal.⁷ Contextually, women are lifted of both the stigma and the responsibility for their involvement in prostitution: the semantic shift signalled by the use of the term prostituted (rather than prostitutes or sex workers), in fact, conveys the notion that women have been turned into (sexual) objects and that as such, they are unable to consent to the use of their bodies (MacKinnon 2011, p. 274). The relationship between prostitution and harm is framed as ontological: the activity is in itself a form of violence against women (Farley 2004, p. 1089).⁸ The scale of harm is exacerbated by the assumption that because women have a special relationship to their body and sexuality (Pateman 1988, p. 207; p. 216) their alienation in prostitution shatters women’s selves. ‘Dissociation’ – the splitting of bodies and selves – is conceived of as both a means that women adopt to survive prostitution and the outcome of the sexual violence that is intrinsic to it (Farley 2004, pps. 1106–8, MacKinnon 2011, pps. 286–87). Women’s capacity to enjoy sex with a partner of choice is also compromised (Farley 2004, p. 1106).

A broad and composite constellation of feminist scholars and sex workers rights’ activists contests the prioritization of gender over other intersecting axis of social inequality, and consider prostitution as a form of precarious labour that can be performed under very different conditions which are shaped by multiple laws (e.g. prostitution, migration, labour), neoliberal policies and social norms (see for example Nussbaum 1998, Kotiswaran 2011, O’Connell Davidson 2014, TAMPEP International Foundation 2015, Vuolajärvi 2018). In opposition to the normative injunction that sex should never be commodified, they uphold the two-fold assumption that sex has no intrinsic meaning or place: persons performing kinaesthetically indistinguishable sex acts might experience them differently,⁹ and the boundary between the market and intimacy is reimagined as pliable and subject to sex workers’ ability to craft it in time (e.g. setting a work routine), space (e.g. reserving a room to work only), and on the body (e.g. excluding use of specific body parts) (see for example Chapkis 1997, Day 2007). Rather than ontological, the relationship between prostitution and harm is hence conceptualised as phenomenological, and borne of the risky, exploitative, and precarious conditions under which many adult women – but also men and LGBT people (see for example Smith and Laing 2012, Minichiello et al. 2012) – perform it. Blame, shame and stigma are hence dislodged from the nature of the labour performed (i.e. sex acts), opening the policy space to tackle the structures affecting the unequal conditions of its exchange.¹⁰

These competing views on the relationship between sex, work and harm also inform different ways to understand women’s use of intimacy as an economic resource in migration, and to see and respond to the hazards they face in a context of increasingly restrictive border regimes. Several scholars contend that radical feminists and abolitionists’ subsuming of prostitution under the sex trafficking paradigm has been feeding into anti-migration policies and agendas (see for example Agustín 2007, Bernstein 2010, Andrijasevic 2010, Vance 2011). Furthermore, the isolation of sex trafficking from a broader labour exploitation framework (Wijers 2015) and the highest visibility that the former attracts in public policy and discourse compared to the latter, overshadow concerns for the difficult conditions under which many migrant women, for example, perform care work (see for example Anderson 2000, O’Connell Davidson and Anderson 2007, Garofalo Geymonat et al. 2017). Conversely, scholars and activists heralding the social inequality perspective foreground precarity as a framework to conceptualise sex workers and other workers (Benoit et al. 2019) as subjects ordinarily at risk of being worn out (Berlant 2006, p. 23) by predatory neoliberal economies and exclusionary mobility regimes.

With the intention to contribute to the visibility of these shared constraints and hazards, I will now turn to my ethnographic fieldwork and show how migrant women arriving in Italy from Eastern European countries that either do not belong to or only recently joined the EU similarly found themselves in the position of having to anchor the feasibility of their migratory projects to their availability to commodify intimate acts and attachments.

4. Facing a gendered and racialised livelihood binary

When I met Kate she was completing higher education (BA) and worked regularly as an image girl in discos and trade fairs.¹¹ Although her mother reportedly disliked her job – possibly fearing exposure to undue male sexual contact or proposition – for Kate, it constituted a cost-effective and flexible means to cover part of the living expenses with her mother and earn a degree of financial autonomy. She also enjoyed the fun and glamour of a job that produced and confirmed the value of her heterosexual desirability, but suffered from the gendered stigma of the ‘easy girl’ stuck onto it, prompting Kate to utter that she would drop it as soon as she found ‘something better’:

I am handing out my CV, I am continuing to search also in firms, if I find a decent job I stop. Slowly slowly I will begin to stop … I will do some nights … I don’t know. But I don’t want this in the future – also because, how do you make [explain] it [in front of your family]? ‘[Bye love!] Mummy goes to perform burlesque!’

At the time of the interview Kate had just started collaborating with a female dance group that was preparing a Burlesque show to sell in night entertainment venues abroad. Although she anticipated being well paid for it, she also remarked finding her (partial) display of nudity acceptable only as long as she performed away from prying eyes – a condition suggesting that she feared disapproval and stigma. Against this background, the ‘decency’ of the job that Kate hints at above, appears to encapsulate measures of both economic (wage fairness) and social value (dignity). Yet, in a country with dramatically high rates of youth unemployment,¹² the hesitation with which she looked at the future suggests that she perceived this combination as a rare occurrence.

Ukrainian, Kate moved to Italy when she was fifteen to reunite with her mother who had migrated alone years before. ‘How brave,’ I said to Kate pensively, imagining my mother in her place. ‘Eh, yes, [my mother was] brave,’ she said admiringly, ‘because she came here and [she knew] nothing, nothing: a different culture, language, she did not know where to go, what to do!’ A General Practitioner (GP) with her own medical practice in Ukraine, Kate’s mother could not transfer her educational and professional qualification to Italy.¹³ Here, formal work opportunities for economic migrants were established yearly by decree which, typically, reflected a demand for low-skilled and cheap labour.¹⁴ Lacking an employment contract prior to entering Italian jurisdiction, migration law de facto turned Kate’s mother into an undocumented economic migrant, vulnerable to the double bind of exploitation and deportation (O’Connell Davidson and Anderson 2007, Anderson 2012). ‘Did she not have any friend?’ I asked Kate, thinking of the informal, transnational support networks which migrants weave to support one another (Hochschild 2004, p. 19).

There was a girl who should have helped her; but in the end, she did not find her. If I told you, really … she went through many things. She even slept in [with] twenty [people] in a room, on the floor. She ate at Caritas.¹⁵ In the beginning it was hard. Then perhaps there are those who choose the easier way and go to prostitute themselves. My mother would never do these things, she has never done them, but little by little she has built a life.

Kate’s depiction of prostitution as the ‘easier’ of two ways could be interpreted as a descriptive statement on undocumented female migrants’ likelihood of accessing sex vs. care work, or as a normative judgement reflecting the stereotypical association of prostitution with idleness. More forcefully, however, her words foreground the constrained choice that her mother was faced with, suggesting that for migrant women navigating the lower echelons of the labour market – where work is irregular, informal and/or unprotected – the commodification of acts and attachments culturally codified as intimate by and large encapsulates the pathways they can follow to sustain their own and their family members’ livelihood and aspirations. In the face of this gendered and racialized sex/care work binary, Kate’s mother opted for the latter. ‘Fifteen years ago there was the Italian boom’, Kate recounted in response to me asking what had prompted her mother to move,

in Ukraine everyone came here, especially women, to do cleaning, baby-sitting, etc. In Milan [my mother] got on very well, because she ended up with a family which was wealthy enough to want her to cook for them every day. Seriously, to work as a domestic worker:¹⁶ to cook, clean, stay with the kids.

‘And she got on well’, she said one more time – her emphasis on her mother’s state conveying her genuine surprise, as if something awkwardly unfamiliar in the setting she described would have more likely suggested otherwise. Kate’s words convey her estrangement in front of the resignification of the home into a work space, as the everyday acts of care which she had seen her mother performing for her family members had become the object of a contract. Her mother now occupied the position of an ‘intimate Other’:¹⁷ a stranger in kin terms, whose presence ambivalently demystified and reproduced the Western cultural imaginary of the home as a space of rest unspoiled by work. The homey-ness she contributed to produce was experientially accessible only to those who could outsource (Hochschild 2012) the daily work that went into producing this affect, and which circulated along lines of class and race.¹⁸ In most European countries, in fact, it is migrant women who predominantly undertake the ‘cleaning-in-private-homes work and domiciliary care for elderly people’ (Triandafyllidou and Marchetti 2013, p. 340). In Italy, two thirds of economically active foreign women work in domestic and personal services, with the highest concentration in the so-called ‘not qualified’ sector (Ricciardi 2018).¹⁹ Recent research has also shown that, away from public scrutiny, working conditions in this sector are particularly bad (Alemani et al. p. 2016). The average working conditions of the badante (home-based care worker) are poor and in a significant number of cases exploitative.²⁰ For many, economic exploitation is compounded by physical and emotional wearing-out,²¹ to the extent that in Eastern European countries there is now a term specifically coined to indicate the negative physical and psychological effects exhibited by people who worked in Italy as caregivers: the ‘Italy syndrome’ (Mihala and Vinci 2019).

Intersecting migration and labour laws exacerbate the cruelty of women’s pursuit of their own and their family members’ aspirations through (care) work. Women’s endurance in their under-valued and frequently exploitative jobs is in fact tied to the fear that dismissal would trigger the fall into irregularity – risking with it both deportation and failure to fulfill the cluster of promises (Berlant 2006, p. 20) projected onto their migration.²² The low numbers of care work visas issued yearly contribute to widespread informality, obstructing workers’ enjoyment of labour rights. Hence, for example, although Kate’s mother’s informal employment allowed her to earn an income and contribute sustaining her family in Ukraine, it also kept her away from her daughter, preventing her access to family reunification. ‘But my mum loves the family too,’ said Kate resolutely – as if reclaiming her mother’s humanity in the latter’s impossible separation of work from the intimate relations which it nourishes and sustains, ‘and she could not wait to make me come here, and so [here I am]. Now my mum is fine’, she said conclusively, her presence in front of me crowning her mother’s efforts to restart their lives elsewhere, in a country of her choice. Many years after arriving to Italy, Kate’s mother continues to earn a living by commodifying care, albeit now from a different position – as a professional nurse.

5. Navigating the sex/care binary

The constrained horizon of livelihood possibilities available to women who migrate to Italy in search of work emerged starkly in the brief conversations I had with street sex workers during the nights I was out with the mobile unit. Working as a badante, by and large, emerged as the closest alternative to street sex work they had. Their capacity to move within this narrow gendered and racialised sex/care binary was further affected by stereotypes constructing migrant women as ‘promiscuous’ and hence as undesirable intimate Others. ‘I could work as a badante, I am old’, said Maria, a Romanian street sex worker in her fifties, pensively, as she linked her diminished work revenues to the increased number of women selling sex around the area where she was regularly stationed. ‘But she is young, she can’t’ she continued, hinting at the colleague on a concrete block nearby who was smoking and staring at the cars moving behind the van I sat in.²³ The average profile of care workers in Italy is indeed that of a ‘mature’ woman,²⁴ and it was a brief exchange I had with Nunzia, a Nicaraguan woman in her early twenties also selling sex on the street, that prompted my realisation that gender and race inflected the meaning of ‘maturity’. ‘They told me “you are too young”: they are afraid that I do certain things’, she said, explaining why she could not get a care work job.²⁵ In a country where ‘whore stigma’ (Pheterson 1993) is heavily racialised (Zambelli 2018), age thus appears to function as a signifier of women’s dis/respectability, moulding migrant women’s employability as home-based care workers accordingly.

Nevertheless, Nunzia did not seem to reckon care work as a better alternative to (street) sex work. ‘I tell you sincerely: I don’t like working as badante’, she said, annoyed, as her tale of a security incident she had with a customer had prompted me to ask whether she would consider leaving the street. She continued:

To be locked inside all day long, every day … I’m not a person who can be locked, you know? To be on duty 24 hours, also on Sunday … and the pay is too little: nine hundred Euros a month! Ok they give you food but … it’s too bad to be locked, and they take advantage of you.²⁶

Minute in appearance, carefully dressed and made up, Nunzia was standing alone under a streetlight on an arterial road leading to the industrial area in the city outskirts. Within sex markets (mainly) stratified along axis of gender, race, class and sexuality, the street constitutes the riskiest work environment (Deering et al. 2014, p. e48), and as she pronounced these words, I could see behind her back the darkness of the agricultural fields where she ordinarily led her customers’ vehicles – a depth which I perceived as scary from the comfort of the van I was in. Within the direly constrained binary of livelihood opportunities that she navigated, and despite the dangers of visibly selling sex in a country where the forcefulness of the stigma on women’s use of sexuality as an economic resource (Zambelli et al. 2018) is exacerbated by growing racism (Lunaria 2019), Nunzia still appeared to prefer this job to its more ‘respectable’ but still emotionally and economically exploited counterpart: the home-based care worker.

In the gendered and racialised economy of affect constructing women’s care work as a gift and ‘natural’ disposition, Nunzia’s economic considerations arguably signified and reproduced her Otherness. No other woman I met on the street explicitly voiced a similar opinion.²⁷ Sacrifice to nourish their transnational intimate sphere was the lens through which most explained their recourse to selling sex for a living (Andrijasevic 2010, pps. 113–14). When I met Gina, for example, she had just come to Italy on a tourist visa.²⁸ After my presentation of the services of the mobile unit she disclosed fear of contracting a sexual infection and asked whom to approach for a health check. Perhaps it was the sudden intimacy of this conversation between strangers, or the field of power between us, that prompted her to say that she frequently cried at night repeating to herself that she was a prostitute.²⁹ ‘I would try to work as badante because I don’t like it here’, she said, but explained that she was doing it for her kids, whom her mother cared for back in Albania, where she came from.

6. Everyday harm

Women’s efforts to support themselves in migration and sustain their transnational intimate sphere through sex work appeared to be an immanent source of psychological and physical wearing out. ‘Work is not going well. Actually, it’s not going.’³⁰ I met Stefania, a Romanian woman in her early twenties, the first night I was out with the mobile unit, as our van stopped at the pavement where she was regularly stationed, in an industrial area in the city outskirts. My colleagues knew her since long before, and she had made a name for her sparkling personality, and welcoming attitude. That night, though, she was visibly troubled. ‘Every day I have more and more expenses’, she continued pensively, ‘I consume myself a lot when I have so many things to pay, and I can’t sleep at night.’ Her husband, also Romanian, worked only intermittently,³¹ as the construction sector which absorbs much of migrant men’s work was in stagnation (Ingenio 2013). In Romania, high inflation rates had eroded her family members salaries and pensions’ purchasing power, and as a result, their livelihood overwhelmingly relied on the earnings she made as a street sex worker. ‘Today my brother sent me a text that made me cry’, she continued, ‘He said they haven’t eaten in the last two days.’³²

In Stefania’s words, the market and intimacy are intensely interconnected spheres, which she cannot afford to imagine as separate. Anguish, love and exploitation blend in her account of the everyday material and emotional responsibilities she endures as the main economic provider for herself, her husband, and her family in Romania. Several scholars have highlighted the ambivalent needs, demands and desires which inform the relationship between female sex workers and their families. Prompted to the job by economic deprivation, women’s revenues support a large web of dependents (Brennan 2004, p. 123) but are also a gateway to higher levels of consumption (Casas 2010, p. 53). Livelihood concerns, hence, intersect with status and social mobility aspirations, strengthening the women’s reliance on sex work.

Although MPs who, over 60 years ago wrote and/or endorsed the Italian prostitution law,³³ arguably did not intend to establish a hierarchy of power between national and migrant sex workers, its current interplay with migration laws and racism negatively affects the latter’s position in and revenues from sex work. The so-called ‘Merlin Law’ (Law 75/1958) abolished the country’s long-lasting system of state-regulated prostitution (see for example Gibson 1999) and turned into a mixed one. Under Merlin law the sale and consumption of commercial sex between two consenting adults has been decriminalised, but any third party benefiting directly or indirectly from a sex worker’s revenues can be charged with aiding and abetting prostitution.³⁴ Accordingly, the nature of ownership of the physical place where sex is sold and consumed is key in determining the status of the activity. In fact, a landlord who leases space to a sex worker can be indicted; owners of public venues she attends (e.g. bars, clubs, dance halls, etc.) risk the same.³⁵ There residually remain only two places where a person’s sale of (her/his) sex acts is not as such criminalised: outdoor, on public soil,³⁶ and in one’s own residential property (e.g. flat) – a case which the law does not explicitly consider and hence prohibit neither.

Migrant women prevail in the first locality – and indeed during my nights on the mobile unit I have never met an Italian woman selling sex on the street³⁷ – but they unlikely find themselves in the latter position.³⁸ Their structural condition as tenants is affected by gendered and racialised stereotypes constructing ‘foreign’ women as promiscuous (Zambelli 2018), which feed landlords’ assumptions that especially young ones could be sex workers.³⁹ Women are thus perceived as ‘risky tenants’, positioned between a rock and a hard place: fearing indictment, in fact, some (prejudiced) landlords might refuse them a priori, whereas others might accept but overcharge them to offset the hazard they would be taking on themselves. Essentially, therefore, women’s ‘foreign’ nationality amounts to an additional gendered and racialised cost on their labour.

In the context of indoor sex work, the ‘risky tenants’ label fuels migrant women’s higher dependence on third parties compared to national sex workers (Favet 2010, p. 42) – for whom nationality does not inflect their interaction with landlords on the accommodation market – contextually increasing the danger of their exposure to different forms of exploitation and abuse. For migrant women selling sex on the street, their perception as ‘risky tenants’ contributes to push them to the margins of the city. While, on the mobile unit, many street sex workers indeed relayed living in peripheral and yet expensive motels.⁴⁰ The remoteness of these lodgings possibly reflects a conscious choice prompted by lower degrees of police surveillance in the areas outside of the city – a factor that is all the more important for undocumented migrants. Yet, it also likely mirrors the difficulty of finding an affordable place to rent in town. The peripheral location of their accommodation, its distance from their working spot, and possibly also a wish to avoid the judging gaze of public transports’ passengers, in fact, all contribute to women’s reliance on private transportation (taxis). A significant part of migrant women’s earnings through sex work, therefore, is ordinarily transferred to the Italian hospitality and transportation market, overall encroaching on their savings and remittance-sending capacity. Vuolajärvi (2018, pps., p. 9–10) made similar observations on the housing discrimination experienced by migrant sex workers in Finland, which exacerbates their economic strain and stress.

Plausibly, therefore, women like Stefania have to work more in order to live up to their own and their families’ needs and aspirations. Taming the self-consumption that she voices, I contend, demands tackling the ‘matrix of domination’ (Hill Collins 2000) that intensifies the cruelty of the conditions under which she pursues a better life for herself and her family members. It thus requires dismantling the gendered and racialised economy of affect producing migrant women’s concentration in care and sex work, and the exclusionary migration policies and discriminatory prostitution laws which constrain women’s livelihood options and negatively affect their negotiation power and (sex or care) work revenues.

7. Conclusions

In this article I have discussed how the economy of affect engendered by the Western cultural imaginary that the market and intimacy are separate and hostile spheres of human activity has shaped the engagement of migrant women in Italy in the undervalued, exploitative and hazardous jobs which most visibly transgress this trope i.e. sex and care work.

First, I have foregrounded the place and meaning of this trope within feminist scholars and sex workers rights activists’ debate on the nature, roots and scale of the harm in prostitution. Radical feminists and abolitionists’ position, that prostitution is intrinsically harmful for women, is rooted in and reproduces the normative placement of sex within the intimacy sphere – although it shifts the blame, shame and stigma for the spatial transgression intrinsic to prostitution from prostituted women to men. Conversely, feminist scholars and sex workers rights’ activists heralding the social inequality perspective approach the relationship between prostitution and harm phenomenologically, as a result of risky, exploitative, precarious conditions resulting from intersecting structures of discrimination. These competing views are reflected in different ways to see and respond to the hazards that women face in Western contexts where the feasibility of their migratory projects is, by and large, anchored to their sale of acts and attachments culturally codified as intimate. I then suggested that radical feminist and abolitionists’ isolation of sex trafficking from a broader labour exploitation framework feeds into a hierarchy of policy concerns that contribute to overshadowing the harmful and exploitative conditions that migrant women face in other labour markets, such as care.

Subsequently, drawing from my ethnographic fieldwork, I have shown the constraints and hazards faced by women migrating to Italy from Eastern European countries that either do not belong to or only recently joined the EU.

Migrant women navigated a highly constrained horizon of livelihood possibilities at the intersection of restrictive mobility regimes, gendered and racialised labour markets and discriminatory laws. Their readiness to turn intimate acts and attachments into commodities appeared to be the condition of possibility of their migratory projects. Sex work and care work, hence, emerged as the distinctive economic activities of a class of women formed out of the affective and material conditions shaping their migration. For them, holding on to the normative separation of the market and intimacy was a phenomenological impossibility. Sex, care, love and work seamlessly weaved through one another, as the paid performance of sex and care acts and attachments provided women with the means to sustain themselves and their transnational intimacies. In their narratives, the market and intimacy appear neither as separate nor hostile spheres, as their thick interdependence is what made women’s work valuable and meaningful to them.

Gender, race and class interplayed in shaping the conditions under which migrant women performed and exchanged their labour. In the domain of care work, I have argued that the production and circulation of homey-ness are racialised, as reliant on the employment of ‘intimate Others’ vulnerable to the double bind of exploitation and deportation. Racist stereotypes constructing ‘foreign’ women’s sexuality as promiscuous contributed to constrain migrant women’s employability as care workers along a generational axis, contributing to ‘mature’ women’s prevalence in this sector. They also negatively affected the ways in which especially young(er) women navigated the accommodation market, engendering their perception as ‘risky tenants’ – a label which increased their labour-related costs as well as the risk of third party abuse and exploitation.

The burden of the emotional and economic responsibilities which migrant women sustained constituted, in Berlant’s terms, a source of attrition exacerbating the cruelty of their optimistic attachments to a better life for themselves and their family members, across the ‘here’ (i.e. Italy) and ‘there’ (i.e. the country of origin). For many, the precarious, exploitative and hazardous conditions under which they performed their labour were the source of psychological and physical wearing out, which they endured in fear that dismissal and/or deportation would shatter the dreams and aspirations projected onto their migration. Addressing women’s predicaments, I have conclusively argued, demands tackling the material and affective structures of inequality that mark the borders of Europe from within and from without: predatory neoliberal economies, restrictive mobility regimes, discriminatory prostitution laws, and the market/intimacy binary – a trope which contributes to obfuscate and perpetuate the dire conditions that many migrant women experience as they are structurally positioned as vulnerable workers transgressing this normative, albeit imaginary boundary.

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.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

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.

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).