La Pobreza

Body politics: international sex tourism

This article explores some puzzles in international politics, in particular about what it might mean to write 'the body', taking account of embodied materiality and sexual difference. I pursue this puzzle through a focus on sex tourism, which means asking questions about relations between sex and power, men and women, first and third worlds, and sexual relations across state, national, racialised and culturalised boundaries.

Prelude

My earlier work as a feminist in International Relations (IR) pursued the question 'Where are women in international politics?',(n1) interrogating different constructions of masculinity and femininity in international politics, and using early feminist IR understandings of gender relations as power relations.(n2) This meant teasing out connections between the category woman and actual women; between women and feminism; between different feminisms or feminists. It meant attending to gender constructed relationally, implicating women and men; and attending to differences among women, too. It led, also, to a reversal--to ask what 'the international' does to women's lives, and to gender relations; and to interrogate the international politics of feminism--something that 'Third World' and minority feminists demand of white, settler state feminists like myself.(n3)

I was reading, teaching, writing as a materialist feminist, and a gender feminist.(n4) I took on board early second wave feminist distinctions between (biological) sex and (social/cultural) gender, to deny that biology is women's destiny, to make room for a feminist political project. Seeing gender, along with race and ethnicity, as socially constructed, I tended to assume bodies were simply there: natural, neutral, surfaces on which the social/symbolic was written. What had been constructed could, with difficulty and struggle, be changed.

In recent writing for Worlding Women,(n5) I was surprised to detect the eruption of bodies--sexed bodies--into my text. One reader took the presence of these bodies in my manuscript as emphasising the physicality of people's, particularly women's, experiences of the international. Bodies figured, she suggested, as 'the site in which the international and the personal most painfully converge… it is only through a resistance to hegemonic ways of mapping, controlling and silencing that we can unearth the real bodies that the nation-state and traditional IR have buried'.(n6)

Bodies emerged inscribed with differences that matter; bodies were gendered, racialised, culturalised, classed--and sexualised. Sex--as desire, danger, eroticised bodies, transgressions, violations--came through my writing too, including women's experiences in identity conflicts, as boundary markers or community possessions, as women warriors, as commodified cheap labour on the global assembly line, as labour migrants, 'foreign' domestic workers, and international sex workers.

Made curious,(n7) I began to address the growing literature referred to as the philosophy of the body, associated in Australia especially with Moira Gatens, who asserted early on that mapping onto the body is affected by what kinds of bodies meanings are mapped onto,(n8) and Elizabeth Grosz, writing on the sexed body, and female embodiment.(n9) So too I took up Gillian Young's question: 'how can we address the issue of the body in investigating social and global power and the interconnections between them?'(n10)

Missing the body, and the 'Third World'

IR has largely 'forgotten' women and gender relations. The citizen, soldier, leader, worker was presumed to be male--if persons were visible at all. Feminist political theory and feminist IR deconstructed dichotomies and hierarchised oppositions encapsulated in mind-body, culture-nature, public-private, so often translated as masculine-feminine, and politics-sex, too.(n11) The public/political was revealed as male, with women relegated away from it and from the discipline, into the private, domestic, family. This smoothed the move from male to universal, a move that normalised masculinity and erased women. On closer examination, though, 'men' turned out to be certain kinds of men, whose experiences, interests and fears became the stuff of theorising. This saw an alignment of public space and power with dominant group men, and with particular constructions of masculinity. Other/othered men--working class, minority, racialised--might for certain purposes be aligned with women, associated with physicality, dangerous sexuality, emotions, more of nature and less of reason, for example.

If public space and citizenship entitlements are dominant male places, these are disrupted by 'other' men, and by women of all kinds, who might be seen as out of place, and whose rights claims could endanger them.(n12) These body politics were not available for critique in disciplines practised as dis-embodied, in the absence of bodies, both of the writers and their subjects. Political Science and IR grew largely safe from the mess, pain, pleasure and desire of actual bodies--though at times in language which suggested pleasure and danger were just a word away.(n13)

There are contradictions and complications here. While largely disembodied, or in the process of 'missing' the body, the discipline colluded with the displacement of both body and sex onto women.(n14) Enlightenment's man is abstract, individual, centred on the mind, autonomous. Woman, on the other hand, is sexed, and there for (heterosexual) men's sex and service. Men are subjects, women dependents, a 'body-for-others'.(n15)

However, men's bodies are both there and denied in much social science writing. In other constructions, men's bodies are active, women's the object of desire or repulsion. Men's bodies are often aligned with technology, use--body as instrument or weapon; while the female body aligns with nature, receptivity, the maternal or sexual.

Two rather different positions--men's bodies absent, with bodies displaced onto women, who are in turn displaced from public space and disciplinary concern; or men's bodies associated with doing, action, and women's bodies there for men's gaze or use. How then to grapple with representations of 'the' body as male? 'Whenever the body is abstractly thought of, it so often assumes masculine characteristics--despite the fact that the body is aligned metaphorically with the feminine.' This is another effect of the ubiquitous public/private divide. 'When the body is located in the public domain… then both materially and practically it is assumed to be male'.(n16)

Another contradiction.

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