"Eclipsing Exploitation: Transnational Feminism, Sex Work, and
Ethical Resistance"

Jennifer M. Cotter

In its most effective moments, Western Feminism related the questions
of gender and sexuality to matters of labor, capital and their
relation ("exploitation"). Gender and sexuality were never treated as
simply personal, interpersonal relations or floating cultural signs.
They were understood as social relations and as such the effects of
englobing historical conditions of production.  Contemporary feminism
has all but abandoned the question of mode of production--especially
the relation of labor-capital and its impact on gender and
sexuality--and has put in place of revolutionary praxis (as a means
for ending economic inequality and restoring social justice), an
"ethical resistance"--a hyper-sentimentalization of inter-personal
relations.

To be more specific: as global class contradictions have deepened,
the most advanced form of bourgeois feminism has displaced issues of
need in the international division of labor, solidarity in politics,
and matters of universality in epistemology--questions of class--and
advanced a local ("nationalist") agenda.  Consequently, feminists
such as Kaplan and Grewal, Spivak, and Kempadoo and Doezema
articulate a de-localized "transnational" feminism of "ethical
resistance" to capitalism.  Yet, this is the same poststructualist
ethics of "resistance" that transnational feminists formally reject
as quietistic: it is an "ethics" that rejects revolution and
emancipation from exploitation as a material condition for meeting
needs and normalizes class by eclipsing the place of the subject in
the social relations of production with his/her location in the
social relations of reproduction, exchange, and consumption--or
"shopping" (A. McRobbie).

Consequently, transnational feminism sentimentalizes the needs of
workers by representing the meeting of "needs" as an ethical and
interpersonal issue of reproduction and not a material and collective
issue of production.  For instance, transnational feminism celebrates
global sex work as a "new" mode of "resistance" to the bourgeois
family and nation-state ("power")--a new mode of "emotional labor"
for meeting the sexual and emotional needs of workers--by abstracting
sex work from its material basis in wage-labor (economics).  But this
abstraction of "sex work" and "emotional labor" from wage-labor does
not actually resist capitalism; rather, it marks an increased
subordination of gender and sexuality to production for profit.  It
therefore restricts the "meeting" of "needs" of workers to the narrow
needs dictated by capitalist development: the need for exploitable
labor-power and the need for consumer subjects.

After a sustained critique of transnational feminism, my essay argues
for red internationalism in feminism, which advances the necessity of
transforming production relations in order to end exploitation
worldwide.  For red feminism, freedom from oppression and
exploitation is not possible without putting the material conditions
in place for it and material conditions cannot be accounted for
without knowledge of class.  Class (understood as one's relationship
to the means of production) is the most crucial concept for
understanding social transformation of material conditions, including
change for women, because only class can explain whether society is
organized so that the products of labor belong to all members of
society or whether they are appropriated by the few who privately own
the means of production.

Such knowledge of class is necessary for feminism because humans
cannot be emancipated from exploitation and oppression in a society
in which some can continue to privately appropriate the surplus-labor
of others.  Only by producing revolutionary knowledge of class can
feminism serve as a guide to praxis that avoids substituting
moralizing and sentimentalizing for historical and materialist
analysis of conditions of exploitation and offers guideline for
freedom of humans from necessity. Red Feminism places women once
again at the vanguard of the fight for human emancipation and the
construction of a society in which gender, sexuality and other
differences are not deployed to justify economic inequality. Red
Feminism fights, that is, for a society which puts pursuit of
bourgeois human rights behind itself and is founded on the principle
"from each according to" their "ability, to each according to" their
"needs".