By ELENA ZAMBELLI
ELENA ZAMBELLI is an ethnographer with interdisciplinary expertise on gender and sexuality, race, migration, and intersecting inequalities. She currently works at Lancaster University as Senior Research Associate.
In this exclusive article Dr Zambelli discusses her new book, Sexscapes of Pleasure.
WEAVING WOMEN’S EXPERIENCES TO NURTURE TRANSVERSAL SOLIDARITIES
25 November was the International Day for the Elimination of Violence Against Women. Since 1991, its celebration is accompanied by the Global 16 Days of Activism against Gender-Based Violence against women campaign (25 November – 10 December, see below for a link), during which individuals and groups around the world get together to raise awareness and foster local and transnational dialogues, connections, strategies and solidarities among women’s rights activists. Although statistics notoriously underestimate the real extent of gender-based and other forms of intimate and sexual violence, the recent WHO report estimates that 1 in 3 women will experience physical or sexual violence across their lifetime [see below for WHO link] constitute a compelling reminder of the importance of these and similar initiatives mobilising support to ending it.
Gender-based violence against women manifests itself differently in time and place. In my book, which is set in Italy – the country where I am from – I explore one particular aspect of it, which pivots on male control of women’s sexuality and the impact this has on women’s gendered subjectivities. More specifically, I discuss how Italian and migrant women negotiate the tension between sexuality and status in a patriarchal and heteronormative context, where their use of the first jeopardizes the latter. At the core of my book lies the concept of the ‘whore stigma’, which Gail Pheterson (Pheterson 1996) coined from within an explicitly sex-positive framework. The concept describes and captures the many ways in which women’s use of sexuality outside of patriarchal chastity norms – whether it be for their own pleasure and/or for work – may be the cause of social disapproval, ostracism, denial of rights as well as physical and sexual violence. Women’s ascription into the ‘whore’ category implies their dehumanization and intensifies their vulnerability to any form of gender-based violence. It is, hence, important to study why, when and how this pernicious device operates – including by bringing to the fore, as this book does, women’s participation in the reproduction of hierarchies of female respectability and dishonour among them.
The concept of the whore stigma is intimately tied with but does not equate to ‘sex work stigma’. Although, globally, most people selling sex are women (Smith and Mac 2018), men and LGBTQI+ people also sell sex and may thus experience sex work stigma. On the other hand, a woman does not need to sell sex to experience the whore stigma. The occupational dimension of the whore stigma, that is, does not fully account for its broader functioning as a gendered device of social control and subjection – a device that, as I argue, partakes in the production of the very ‘woman’ subject.
In the book, I pursue the enquiry of the women’s negotiation of the whore stigma by moving across a continuum of spaces of sexualised leisure and sex work: recreational pole dance schools, strip clubs and street sex work areas. I bring into mutual conversation the narratives of Italian and migrant women inhabiting these ‘sexscapes of pleasure’, as they negotiate their use of sexuality for pleasure and/or for work. I also show the centrality of race and class in what, drawing from de Certeau (de Certeau 1984), I call the women’s ‘respectability tactics’, through which many sought to disavow the stigma and pass it onto the ‘other women’.
But what is the purpose of showing these processes of disavowal, displacement and othering? What social imagination underpins this enquiry? Why does it matter, and for whom?
By bringing the woman subject back front and centre in the analysis of the whore stigma and by showing the commonalities in the women’s experiences of subjection to it across the non-/sex working women divide, as well as their negotiations of it, I foreground the ‘matrix of domination’ (Collins 2000) under which women negotiate selves. This approach follows in the wake of recent sociological scholarship on stigma that weaves the individual level of experience with a structural analysis of power and inequality (Link and Phelan 2014; Tyler and Slater 2018). In so doing, it is my hope that this book may contribute to nurturing understandings and solidarities that traverse, rather than reproduce, the division between women who are in or out of sex work.
As I conclude this brief piece, I am reminded of what, in a different context, Nira Yuval-Davis called ‘transversal politics’ (Yuval-Davis 1997). The concept drew from the work of a group of feminist activists in Bologna (Italy) who in the 1980s (and beyond) engaged in practices of peace in conflict zones, such as Israel-Palestine, notably by contributing to dialogues among women inhabiting opposing fronts. Transversal politics, Yuval-Davis explained, is ‘based on knowledge acquired by dialogue carried out by people who are differentially positioned’ (Yuval-Davis 1997, 92). Whilst, strictly speaking, a monograph is by definition an author’s monologue rather than a dialogue, I hope that the nuanced, transversal and intersectional analysis of women’s negotiation of the tension between sexuality and status I offer in this book will be of interest to feminists of any sex and gender seeking to retrieve the control of our sexuality, and ourselves.
SEXSCAPES OF PLEASURE: Women, Sexuality and the Whore Stigma in Italy, by Elena Zambelli
Hardback and ebook
November 2022
Links
References
Certeau, Michel de. 1984. The Practice of Everyday Life. University of California Press.
Collins, Patricia Hill. 2000. Black Feminist Thought: Knowledge, Consciousness, and the Politics of Empowerment. Rev. 10th anniversary ed. New York: Routledge.
Link, Bruce G., and Jo Phelan. 2014. “Stigma Power.” Social Science & Medicine (1982) 103 (February): 24–32. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.socscimed.2013.07.035.
Pheterson, Gail. 1996. The Prostitution Prism. Amsterdam: Amsterdam Univ. Press.
Smith, Molly, and Juno Mac. 2018. Revolting Prostitutes: The Fight for Sex Workers’ Rights. London; New York: Verso.
Tyler, Imogen, and Tom Slater. 2018. “Rethinking the Sociology of Stigma.” The Sociological Review 66 (4): 721–43. https://doi.org/10.1177/0038026118777425.
Yuval-Davis, Nira. 1997. Gender and Nation. London; Thousand Oaks, California; New Delhi: SAGE Publications.
For the latest news on our books and journals please sign up for our email newsletters.