Sex Work & Agency

     The one aspect I could not stop thinking about while reading Denise Brennan’s What’s Love Got to Do With It?  was that of agency. Brennan mentions that sex work in Sosua is almost the opposite of what we think of as prostitution in the United States. There is no pimp controlling these women, and they have complete say over which bars they go to, when they go to them, and who they sleep with. Another aspect that differentiates Dominican sex work with US prostitution is the performativity of love; in this context, Dominican sex work is more comparable to escorting in the United States. Both escorts and sex workers go out to dinner with their clients, spend weekends with them in ritzy hotels, and get paid for sex.  However, the situations of the sex workers are completely opposite: high paid-v-low paid, typically/usually white-v-nonwhite, well-off-v-poor, nonmother-mother. Considering this stark binary, where’s the agency?

            Brennan is careful to assert that she is not framing the Dominican and Haitian sex workers as victims, and I do not aim to do that either. But still, it was so difficult for me to separate the agency of their sex work (public) and the agency of their home lives (private). After all, their private lives (heads of households, single moms, kin keepers, lack of networks) inform the reality of their public lives. Additionally, many of the women that Brennan interviewed went to Sosua for sex work in the hopes of marrying someone with whom they could leave the Dominican Republic (213). Pratt writes, “…there are often fewer economic opportunities for women in their countries of origin, and women may be loath to give up gains in gender equity experienced through migration” (161). Is completely relocating in hopes of marrying a man through the avenue of being paid to have sex with him agency? This double-layered heteronormative practice is made even more degrading by the fact that the women engage in performing love with their clients. Now, this could be framed as a more positive facet of the Dominican sex work industry, but I argue that it is not because it is still a heteronormative practice that is to be imagined/pretended for the pleasure of men. This waste of time and energy, according to Brennan’s fieldwork, was a better chance at migration and freedom than waiting in line at the Immigration Office (107).

Brennan does point out that most of the sex workers view the men as equally exploitable, and this is an important factor to recognize. However, I do not see the exploitation of the sex workers and the exploitation of the clients as on equal footing because it is something the women have to learn. It is not inherent in their societal structure, like patriarchy and misogyny is: “Since most have never worked in the sex trade before, they must learn, on the job, how to choose the best working environment and how to protect themselves” (155). Thus, Dominican sex workers must bend to the wills, desires, and expectations of European men who are “going transnational” (Pratt 162). In this sense, these men could be compared to the American soldiers who ended up marrying and having children with Haitian women during the occupation, for they were said to have been “going native.” It could be argued which of these situations has a more negative connotation, but the core issue is that women are being exploited for sex; although they may choose this situation and exhibit agency and strength, they are still being commodified in a number of ways, most notably physically and racially. I would also argue that that are being commodified in the manner of gender roles; Brennan mentions that some men expressed their desire to purchase sex and love in the DR as a yearning for more traditional gender roles (33). Furthermore, the women’s availability and commitment is being commodified in a manner that renders it worthless; the men often leave (Kincaid’s “luxury of leaving”), never to return or contact their “girlfriends” again.

The conclusion of this book left me to ponder (as I seem to frequently on these issues) the pros and cons of sex-positive and sex-negative feminism. With regard to sex-positive feminism, these women are exerting agency and control over their situations and surroundings through their sex work choices. Furthermore, they do not rely on a man for income, and their own method of income is seen as valid. On the other hand, sex-negative feminism would say that the practice of using sex and/or adhering to norms of highly sexual, heteronormative misogyny is more hurtful than helpful. So, which one is correct?