Her reference to Bourdieu was fascinating to me for several
reasons:
The enriching of "habitus" as a notion by looking at
the ambivalences, tensions, pain that underlie the embodied
dispositions of each of us. How we react most automatically does
not tell us about the complexity behind our dispositions, and
so about the potential for acting differently, the lability of
our dispositions to change ... matters of importance not just
for personal-social analysis, but for the project of critical
and transformative education.
The project of "socioanalysis" in relation to the uses of
social-cultural understanding in the lives of individuals.
(I assume here an agnate to "psychoanalysis" for Bourdieu.)
The perennial sense of frustration when we find explanations
of social phenomena (which are also individual phenomena!)
that are useful for macro-system understanding, but not
necessarily for micro-level action.
It's no news perhaps that research in socio-cultural analysis
needs to make more direct contact with the lives of individuals,
to understand how larger patterns arise in and affect the
biographies of particular persons and small-scale communities.
I think many of us are focussing research on this scale and
trying to understand the social construction of subjects,
subjectivities, and patterns of action in small communities.
On Angel's specific theme, the sex industry and our valuations
of it from different social and cultural positions, my reading
of some of the literature on this topic seems to suggest that
there are indeed two rather different kinds of life patterns
for those who work in this "industry" (it's at least a kind of
commodification, whatever its status as production). One is
the sex-worker as victim, mostly unwillingly forced by
circumstances, poverty, traumas of personal life, lack of
support from an ungenerous community, into a relatively painfully
experienced form of survival labor. This pattern fits very well
with the 19th century critique of a harsh capitalism that creates
conditions for the exploitation of labor.
But there is another pattern as well: of the relatively more highly
paid sex-worker, or perhaps we should say sex-professional, who
has chosen this work as a sideline, or as a career, over other
options, for the reasons middle-class people generally do: pay,
working conditions, life goals, temperament, lifestyle choices,
etc. Housewives and university students looking for extra money
(not survival), people with other career options, and perhaps
longer term goals, turning to a means of converting surplus
body capital (beauty, sex-appeal, physical strength, athlecticism)
into financial capital to be invested in later career moves (and
social capital sometimes equally useful).
This second pattern is much more the late 20th century view of
the capitalist labor market as an arena of (unequal) opportunities
for social mobility (provided you start with some capital valued
by those with more capital).
The first pattern embodies the model of social constraint, the
second that of social choice. The first seems to apply more to
those with less of the capitals, less opportunity; the second to
those with more. Working class prostitution, the street vs. middle-
class prostitution, the escort agency.
The opposition of constraint to choice, of course, is too simple
in any adequate theory of social structuration, but still lies
at the core of the dilemma Angel quotes Bourdieu as experiencing.
There certainly must also be differences of an ideological kind
between how the poor and the more comfortable view the sex-industry
as constraint vs opportunity, and as morally offensive vs. morally
neutral. One could argue, for example, that the prohibition on
prostitution mainly serves to close off an avenue of exchange of
bodily capital for financial and social capital, so keeping the
circulation of capital within the middle-class, and keeping the
need for financial capital greater (and so wages lower) for the
poor. The legalization of the sex-industry would seem to be a
basically progressive move, shifting the focus to what is more
clearly immoral: forced prostitution, dangerous working conditions,
low pay, lack of legal protections, etc.
Since this is a controversial topic, I should perhaps say that
I am thinking here of literature on both male and female sex-workers,
though the gender inequities are quantitatively great (qualitative
conditions and patterns seem similar however), and it remains to
be seen whether women will hire male sex-workers in proportional
numbers when they have the means, and the cultural license, to do
so. I should also say that I consider the normative association of
sex with love relationships, family, etc. in my own dominant culture
to be a mostly romantic ideal that has significant negative impact
(as unrealistic) in the lives of many people, and fairly obvious
social control functions in the larger social picture. (Some cultures,
after all, have similar associations for meeting the basic human
need for food.)
None of this is to deny that economic pressures, both negative
(survival in poverty) and positive (socially created desires for
material goods), drive many people into a sex-industry in which
they are economically exploited; or that this is disproportionately
the case for women, who still have fewer economic alternatives;
or that the market for sex-work is driven predominantly by male
desires. But it is to suggest that a single model of this market and
of the lives of people who work in it is insufficient, and that
it is a rich site in which to think about the dialectic of social
constraint and social choice, habitus and inner contradictions,
and the viewpoint and responsibility of the socially positioned
and culturally biased analyst.
JAY.
JAY LEMKE.
City University of New York.
BITNET: JLLBC who-is-at CUNYVM
INTERNET: JLLBC who-is-at CUNYVM.CUNY.EDU