“But She Was a Whore, Right?” — Controlling Sex Work and Sex Workers in Mexico’s Border Zones
“The news truck has loaned its services to denounce the alleged rape of a local prostitute by eight policemen. Police crime here does not surprise me. “Son of a bitch,” I say, “eight of them raped her.” Auner and El Chele look down. “Qué Paloma,” they mutter, and expression meaning something like “What a shame!” and go on absently staring at the magazines of a nearby kiosk. Pitbull looks pensive. He doesn’t say anything at first, then he spits out, “But she was a whore, right?”
- Martínez, The Beast, 13
Accusing culture of vulgarity denies us the ability to recognize the structural inequalities that rob us.
In this passage Martinez is travelling with three migrants near Mexico’s southern border when he learns of the rape of a local prostitute. As Martinez’ lack of surprise indicates, the rape is not an unusual event in rural, Southern Mexico. But what is Mexico? Amongst other things, it is a neoliberal country. A definition is needed before assumptions can color my meaning. Anthropologist David Harvey describes neoliberalism as “a theory of political economic practices that proposes human-well-being can best be advanced by liberating individual freedoms and skills within an institutional framework characterized by strong private property rights, free markets, and free trade.”
And yet, in Mexico, these policies of freedom do not seem to have created free people.
In this anecdote, the woman’s body is commodified, victimized, and ultimately denied. Her body has been consumed by market forces, abused by law enforcement, and stigmatized by the social environment. The comment, “But she was a whore, right?”, ponders whether her engagement in sex work relinquishes her right to have rights, with regard to sex or otherwise. Law enforcement and the market reinforce and act upon this doubt by constraining her agency.
The regulation of sex work and sex workers in Mexico’s border zones produces structural violence. I do not believe that this is an inherent product of commercial sex or the accidental result of gender subjectivities. Violence is deeply informed and regulated by the state — violence is the very tool through which the state makes and preserves law. Sociologist Charles Tilly would add that states therefore need to assert a monopoly on violence in order to control their constituents and attain sovereignty. In this way all violence can be understood as a reflection of state power dynamics.
Though neoliberal reform indicates a decentralization of the Mexican state, structural violence within the realm of sex work is reflective of intensifying state control over the sex lives (and therefore social lives) of Mexico’s poor and working classes. This control over sex work and sex workers is layered and varied. Sex work is determined by biopower and laws that are informed by social and commercial landscapes. Legal regulation can discipline bodies, but illegality can often serve as a superior form of control over those same bodies. The market, the law, law enforcement, and the public all have a role in controlling sex work. Ultimately, the burden of controlling sex work is carried by the sex workers themselves, who must sacrifice their agency to provide greater power to the state. There are political, legal and bodily consequences to controlling these sex workers, which I will explore as diverse forms of structural violence.
My research for this article focuses on Mexico’s border zones, specifically, a selection of cities in Mexico’s northern and southern borders where sex work is legal and regulated by the municipality. This includes references to Tijuana, Juarez, Nuevo Laredo, Matamoros, and Tuxla Gutiérrez. I chose to examine border cities because of their role as urban ports of trade. Their functional roles emphasize international relations, and invite a variety of races of classes to live in the same space in an attempt to capitalize on these trade relations. Mexican border cities are an intense expression of neoliberalism, and the power structures created by neoliberalism. Therefore, these commercial cities provide the ideal environment to study sex workers and the circumstances they face.
Since male sex workers are unregulated and forced to practice in a less visible fashion, a majority of publications on sex work in Mexico’s border cities study exclusively female sex workers As a result, I too will be forced to adopt a heteronormative lens in my writing and analysis. I hope that the reader will forgive me, and that the conclusions from my article can be used to analyse a variety of cases as they relate to sex work in neoliberal and developing states.
Defining Sex Work
“Instead of a single body, we view sex and its expressions as part of a ‘multiple body’ that involves ‘the social and the physical’ and ‘the body politic’ encompassed by individual desires and social, political and ritual constraints.”
– Donnan & Magowan, The Anthropology of Sex, 49
First we must attempt to understand sex; itself an expression of biopower. There is no blueprint for how bodies should or can engage in sexual acts, and yet sex is often defined by societal institutions and popular social forces. Historian Jeffery Weeks explains that, because sex is a deeply intimate and private aspect of social life, it “has been one of the prime sites where domination and subordination are defined and expressed.” The Anthropology of Sex, by Hastings Donnan and Fiona Magowan, argues that in Europe the Cartesian Principle produced a sensual hierarchy. Because men were believed to be aroused by sight and hearing (the use of their mind), and women by touch, smell and taste (the use of their bodies), it was concluded that men’s sensibilities were superior. This idea produced a normative benchmark for heterosexual sex in the West. While the Cartesian Principle has been forgotten, the quest to rationalize sex has not. In his History of Sexuality, Michel Foucault explains that the rise of industrialisation was accompanied by the creation of a scientia sexualis, “the modern production of a single truth of sex”. This truth is meant to reflect the power structures of society. It was in the interest of the industrialized state to make sex “economically useful”. As such, an emphasis on vaginal sex, monogamy, and domestic wives available for reproduction and child rearing was created, upheld by bans on divorce, abortions, prostitution, etc. As Judith Butler notes, even genders as they are understood in their mutual engagement are “a neutral surface on which culture acts.”
Because sex is a cultural act informed by sexual subjectivities, it is similarly difficult to define sex work. Donnan and Magowan agree that since the rise of neoliberalism, sex work is predominantly characterized as “monetized sexual exchanges”. They believe that the commercialization of sex may be empowering for both consumers and performers. In entering a new sexual space, purchasing sex “allows normative boundaries to be explored and transgressed.” By simulating pleasure for economic reward, the sex workers can explore their own sexuality through performance. Karl Marx did not believe sex workers could experience such satisfaction because “the provider is never free of the circumstances of exploitation that defines the activity.” Although the nature of sex work depends on the social environment, government regulation of sex work almost universally “assumes a natural dichotomy between sex outside of marriage and proper moral conduct confined to marital relationships.”Attempts to regulate sex work are attempts to regulate, perhaps even define, sex as morally and socially opposed to sex work.
To surmise, sex work is an expression of bio-power because it is informed by normative conceptions of sex. Because regulation of sex work is informed by the scientia sexualis of the state, it allows for a more explicit telling of the power relations at play in these normative conceptions of sex, especially relating to gender roles. The regulation of sex work therefore explains what the state understands as immoral sex, at the same time that it reveals the actual condition of sex. So in understanding sex work, we can explore the forms of bio-power at play in the sex lives of those who engage sex work as well as those who do not.
Creating the Commercial Landscape in Mexico’s Border Zones
Dependency theorists argue that neoliberalism can only survive by creating asymmetrical power relations, where the development of one is sourced by the underdevelopment of another. These asymmetries are what characterize the commercial landscape in Mexico’s border zones. We must understand this landscape to conceive the fundamental constraints applied to the sex industry in neoliberal Mexico.
As we know, The United States has had an outsized role in shaping the Mexican economy. Since the 1960s’, Mexico’s border zones occupied themselves with developing a manufacturing industry to supply Americans with cheap goods. Mexican factories, called maquiladoras, employed poor people in surrounding areas at minimal cost. Unfortunately, the wider modernization project being carried out in Mexico came at the cost of extreme debt, and in 1982 the state was forced to declare bankruptcy. At that point, Mexico was pressured by the IMF and the United States to adopt structural reforms. Deregulating the Mexican economy in favor of neoliberalism had the effect of exacerbating the maquiladora-effect – if I may call it as such. The signing of trade agreements such as NAFTA brutally outcompeted Mexican industries. The ongoing flood of cheap (and subsidized) American agricultural products destroyed the agricultural sector, reversing half a century worth of agrarian reform. Real wages dropped, and Mexico’s rural population found itself largely unemployed. Economic migration ensued, bringing people to the only places where there were new jobs: the border zones. Here maquiladoras were popping up rapidly to cater to the demands of free trade. Never before could the U.S. so efficiently extract labor resources from Mexico.
By maquiladora-effect, I do not just refer to the spread of maquiladoras, but also to the incredible inequity that they represent. In her ethnography of Tijuana, anthropologist Yasmina Katsulis explains that maquiladoras employ a vast majority of the working-poor. In an effort to reduce costs, these factories emerge outside city limits. The price of accommodation in the city center has been driven up by the rising middle class that works in the United States, so employees are often forced to live right next to the maquiladoras. Maquiadoras can employ as many as 10,000 workers, so worker accommodations are actually densely populated “colonias populares”, or slums. Colonias populares are the product of rapid urbanization, economic migration, and a lack of local infrastructure. In other words, the product of neoliberalism. Here, poverty is compounded. Maquiladora wages average fifty-two cents an hour, hours are abusively long, and employment is unreliable. Colonias populares suffer from high rates of crime and few emergency services to prevent them. This is not a welcoming environment for women, who are the targets of work-place harassment, as well as high rates of rape and murder on their way to and from work walking through the slums at night.
In her ethnography of the southern border state of Chiapas, Patty Kelley offers a similar account. Following structural reform, the state capital Tuxla Gutiérrez became flooded with indigenous populations and Guatemalan immigrants. Unregulated urban expansion was met a rise in maquiladoras and poor working conditions. Kelley and Katsulis arrive at the same conclusion: for most women, becoming a sex worker was a rational, economic decision. A vast majority of their subjects used to work at maquiladoras, where they felt vulnerable and under-paid. Because a maquiladora wage is not enough to survive, women who are abandoned by a male partner cannot be economically independent. Sex work provides an alternative for many single, uneducated, and working women. Sex work is dubiously more exploitative and pays anywhere between three to fifty times the average maquiladora wage.
Vulnerability allows economic forces to regulate sex workers. When unemployment rises, this is consistently reflected by a rise in the number of sex workers. When Mexico experiences a recession, the price of sex services drop accordingly.
Economic restructuring in Mexico has not only produced sex workers, but also the sex industry. Along the northern border, this relationship is most obvious. When prohibition began in the United States in the 1920s, Mexican border cities accommodated by specializing in the vice industry. Much like maquiladoras, the Mexican industry offered what American producers could not: cheap sex, drugs, and alcohol. Because prostitution remains largely illegal in America this relationship has continued, and on weekends Mexican border brothels are met by high demand from American tourists. Social scientists often attribute Mexico’s large sex industry to entrenched gender subjectivities, with a focus on the notions of “machismo” and “marianismo.” It is suggested that, culturally, men are expected to exert power and aggression, while women are understood to be inferior and domestic in nature.
Although Mexico is a patriarchal society, I argue that market forces play a larger role than culture in objectifying and commodifying women. Allow me to offer the example of sex tourism in the northern border zone. Sex workers pander to tourists by marketing themselves as subservient “good girls”, traditional “Mexicana” women, and fun-loving Latinas. Sex bars in Tijuana famously used to offer sex shows where women in traditional dress would have sex with a donkey. None of these behaviors are reflective of culture, they simply capitalize on cultural stereotypes for a foreign audience. Similarly, street-walkers do not wear short dresses just because they are culturally objectified, but also because they are financially rewarded for doing so. That being said, sex work is still informed by gender subjectivities. In a separate ethnography on male consumers, Katsulis puts forth an interesting idea: neoliberalism has put masculinity in a crisis that uses sex work as a temporarily solution. Economic restructuring has dislocated the traditional male role in a way that significantly undermines male power. The modern Mexican man faces job uncertainty and the modern Mexican woman has gained greater independence through her need to work. Because men feel threatened, they have produced a nostalgia for a form of masculinity inspired by the past (or their imagination). As a coping mechanism, purchasing sex enables Mexican and non-Mexican men to subjugate and control a woman in ways informed by this nostalgia.
While these claims could be contested, the importance of Mexico’s changing commercial landscape in promoting sex work cannot be. One fatal flaw of neoliberalism is that it restricts state and municipal resources and limits the redistribution of wealth. In both Tijuana and Tuxla Gutiérrez, the sex industry is the largest contributor of the municipal tax base. Businesses selling sex are tolerated in part because the municipalities that host them need those tax revenues to provide basic services to their citizens. As a whole, economic restructuring in Mexico’s border zones has produced the supply and demand for a commercial sex industry, and a state structure that is supportive of the industry in return for tax revenue.
Regulating Sex Work: A Panopticon
“Laws related to prostitution are an integral part of the social landscape. These laws, and the policies and practices surrounding them, result from the social negotiation of what constitutes moral or criminal action as it relates to sex.”
– Katsulis, Sex Work and the City, 62
The American border with Mexico has famously become a constitution free zone; a zone of exception where certain laws do not apply. With regards to sex work, a reverse phenomenon seems to be at play on the Mexican side of the border. Sex work is legal and regulated almost exclusively in Mexico’s border zones. As the previous chapter explains, this is primarily for economic reasons. Border cities are those most able and in need of capitalizing on the taxation of the sex industry. Their dominant role in trade also means that border cities have been subject to the most extreme forms of economic and social change. As Katsulis and Kelley argue, this has made them uniquely disposed to questioning and restructuring state approaches to moral issues such as prostitution.
Sex work only became systematically regulated in the late 1980s, exactly at the time of neoliberal reform. During this period, both Tijuana and Tuxla Gutiérrez became fraught with concerns of moral decline. Long-term residents were concerned with the growing interaction between class, races, nationalities, and other visible signs of change, such as alcoholism and the rise of “public women” (prostitutes), that were symptomatic of urban expansion. In 1989 the Governor of Chiapas, Gonzalez Garrido, responded to concerns by spearheading a project to create the Zona Galactica: a sort of state operated brothel. The zone was established outside the city to limit the contact of sex work with private property, schools, churches… essentially all of civil society. In Tuxla Gutiérrez, sex can only be legally bought and sold within the Zona Galactica, where over a dozen bars and massage parlors operate. The intentions of this project are multiple. On the one hand, Governer Garrido, in the name of neoliberalism, wanted to bring sex work into state control by making it a formal and regulated modern market. There was hope that formalizing the market could restrict the space in which it existed. On the other hand, the state wanted to make sex workers “legible”. In a state run brothel zone, both workers and consumers can be surveilled and regulated according to preference. Garrido also knew that workers and consumers were mostly likely to source from the urban poor: the same population that was tending towards rebellion in response to neoliberal reform. Sex work regulation was thus a form of targeted population control. Along norther border cities, the sex industry was older because of the relationship with American tourists, but in the late 1980s cities like Tijuana and Matamaros officially began to implement “Zonas de Tolerancia”. These red light districts are often in the city center near tourist attractions, but still strictly confined to certain streets. While each sex market is different, the laws that regulate them in Mexico are often quite the same.
What has been the implications of state regulated sex work in Mexico? Remember that Donnan and Magowan argue that sex work can allow performers to explore their sexuality and perhaps even enable their sexual liberation. I argue that this empowerment effect is largely mitigated in Mexico’s regulated sex industries. Regulation is so thorough, invasive, and often humiliating, that zones of tolerance function as a panopticon for the women who work in them. Because sex workers are surveilled and their behavior is prescribed by legal regulation, they can only experience sex in a very narrowly defined fashion.
Donnan and Magowan argue that sexual exploration can occur because sex workers often need to live a double life, allowing them to embody other characters in their work life. Mexican sex workers are not allowed the safety of a double life, because regulation grants them no anonymity. Most sex workers need to have a registration card and a health inspection card. The registration card makes them known as a prostitute to the state. In Tuxla Gutiérrez, a state operates bus with the words “Zona Galactica” painted across the front transports sex workers from the city center to their workplace, making them especially visible. When the same state that publicly describes sex work as “morally corrupting” regulates and validates sex work, sex workers are prone to internalizing the rhetoric that surrounds their visibility. In the ethnographies I read from Mexico’s border zones, I frequently found that prostitutes hesitated to defend their rights because “we are prostitutes, who will trust us?”, or endure harassment because “we cannot expect anyone to like us or treat us with respect.” Mexican sex workers cannot emerge from their work place environment into a socially conformed role where they can avoid judgement. Their visibility means they carry state stigmatization of sex work with them everywhere, and have little opportunity to see the stigma as wrong.
The health inspection cards are an especially apt example of Foucault’s understanding of “discipline”. Discipline, as it is exerted through biopower, is meant to make bodies economically utile and politically obedient. If visibility helps promote obedience, then health inspections attempt to regulate the utility of sex worker’s bodies. In the Tijuana ethnography Sex Work and the City, Katsulis explains that sex workers must go to a state-run health clinic to have their health card stamped each month. Sex workers must pay $65 USD for initial registration and $40 USD for each health inspection. The irony is that the inspections are horribly ineffective because they only look for visible signs of infection. Not only do early-stage infections go untreated, visibly infected women are forced not to work for a much longer period of time than if they had been properly diagnosed. Because sex workers cannot make sex economically useful in the traditional sense of making children, Katsulis argues that these health inspections reflect how their bodies are made useful to the state. First, they are useful in that they limit the spread of disease, and second, they are useful in that they pay taxes. Indeed, the reactive rather than preemptive function of the health clinic suggests the state is more interested in containing infection than in promoting the health of workers. The health clinic, which hire eighteen people, is also fully funded by the mandatory worker fees.
In regulating these women, the state also makes evident what it understands as proper sex and proper gender roles. First and foremost, all regulation of sex work applies exclusively to the women. While the non-regulation of male consumers implies that they are engaging in normal behavior, the regulation of women implies that they are behaving in a way that is inacceptable. Thorough legal constraints that apply to sex workers are a form of punishment and discipline, which all the while do not prevent male consumption. Although any state official is able to request and revise the registration card and health information of a sex worker, sex workers can only prosecute rape at a state rather than municipal barrier. Because legal structure is top-down, women can easily be surveilled but face enormous legal barriers if they wish to execute their rights. Sex workers believe “rape is hard to prove” and “the state wants to punish us”, so rape is rarely prosecuted. Regulation not only subordinates’ women for failure to comply to traditional gender roles; it ascribes what is normal sexual practice. In both Tijuana and Tuxla Gutiérrez, sex workers must use condoms or they will lose their registration card if they become infected. Anal sex is implicitly discouraged, because it also puts women at higher risk of infection. To institutionalize these practices, regulation ensures that women bear the burden of infection. Sex workers are paid significantly more to not use condoms or to have anal sex, but instead of limiting the men demanding these services, sex workers must relinquish potential profit and conform or risk their entire livelihood. To my surprise, sex workers can even be fined and banned for having sex while pregnant. Sex cannot harm a fetus; instead this law is entirely informed by moral conceptions of proper sex.
The legal, and subsequently financial, barriers to entry into legal sex work mean that the regulated sex market is highly classed and racialized. Women must have a degree of starting capital to purchase and maintain a registration card. Legal brothels can only hire registered sex workers — a process which allows them to express their preference for lighter skinned and Caucasian looking women. Illegal immigrants in Mexico need not apply for a registration card. That legal sex workers are a relatively hegemonic population, reveals a state sanctioned understanding of what is an acceptable or desirable sexual object.
While legal regulation exerts disciplinary power, the physical structure of Zones of Tolerance tend to work as a more literal panopticon. In Mexico’s border zones, brothels typically take the form of a bar or parlor. Sex workers usually live in this buildings, in the same rooms where they work. Not only is it impossible to separate their lives from this space, brothels typically hire an older women called a “madrota” to organize the workers. The aim of the madrota is to maximize profit, and she will influence working hours and working habits of the workers accordingly. Brothels are also subject to regular health inspection raids, and Zonas de Tolerancia must accept high levels of police surveillance. La Zona Galactica is an extreme example: surrounded by an eight-foot fence, guards, and two surveillance towers, everyone within the space feels coerced not to behave in a way that invites unwelcome attention. The state argues these measures are to prevent illegal activity on behalf of consumers, but law enforcement officials, be they police or inspectors, are also surveilling sex workers’ compliance to the law and have the right to fine or imprison them if they don’t. Police and madrotas are also known to walk into rooms when sex is being exchanged.
Kelley argues that these disciplinary practices, combined with the free market pressures applied to the sex industry, has the effect of individualizing and isolating women. This makes them less prone to collective action, revolt, and to publicly challenging gender roles, but it also heightens the sense of economic competition between them. Legal sex workers often report one another, and they are most likely to experience violence at the hands of other sex workers. Privacy is non-existent, and the disciplinary power of the state is so optimized, it is internalized and democratically practiced even amongst the community of sex workers. As Foucault aptly concludes, “visibility is a trap.”
The Illegible Women: Illegality as the Supreme Form of Control
“Raids express a new enthusiasm for state intervention into the lives of the poor on medical and sanitary grounds.”
– Kelley, Lydia’s Open Door, 63
In Mexico’s border zones, the formal sector often overlaps with the informal sector within the same spatial environment. While is it difficult to provide accurate numbers, it is estimated that in Tijuana, Juarez, and Tuxla Gutiérrez there are more illegal (unregistered) sex workers as there are legal and registered sex workers. These illegal sex workers represent the most vulnerable segment of the population. They work illegally because they are underage, illegal immigrants on their way north, or most commonly, they cannot afford to be a registered worker. They serve a similar group of consumers and work similar hours, except that they earn less for their services. As is often the case, their illegal status enables a degree of state control over their bodies superior to that which legal control can provide. The criminalized status of these workers subjects them to greater occupational risk, but also perpetuates class hierarchies. As Katsulis explains, “The inequalities found within the sex work hierarchy of sex workers reflect and reinforce those found in the city more generally. Access to safe work venues is limited by social and legal status, which have effects on one another.” This effect can be explained from two perspectives.
The first perspective comes from observing the municipality. In her study of Tuxla Gutiérrez, Kelley followed municipal health inspectors and police on their weekly raids of the clubbing district to identify and arrest unregistered sex workers. Kelley explains that the municipality sanctions these raids as a way to combat a health threat. Because these unregistered workers are not “legible”, there is no way guarantee they are practicing safe sex practices or that they are “limpia”. Instead these women are characterized as “contaminantes”, “suciedad”, and “porqueria”. “Dirt is the by-product of a system of ordering and classification of matter, in so far as order involves rejecting those inappropriate elements”[7] Because the perceived dirtiness of these women is a challenge to perceived order, the identification of the problem has enabled a militarized response. Armed police hush dozens of women into the back of police cars and taken to the police station to be “processed”. Processing involves paying a fine and forced registration. The status of the woman in question is confirmed by a criminal record and the public declaration of her engagement in sex work. The stigmatization of poverty and sex work blend at once to produce intense humiliation. Kelley describes a room full of women crying, trying to hide their faces from the cameras of the journalists who have been invited to observe the raid. Many women cannot afford the fine, which, ironically, promoted further engagement in vulnerable, and illegal work to pay up.
The second perspective comes from the sex workers themselves. In Tijuana, Katsulis spent two years following the sex workers themselves. While conducting interviews she was able to collect a wealth of data, and found that 25% of unregistered sex workers had experienced police violence. “Relationships with police tend to be hostile, and illegal workers are subjected to fines and jail time as well as police harassment, extortion, violence, and rape.” When approached by police, illegal sex workers were either fined, or forced to offer a bribe or sexual favour. Resistance is often met with rape. I believe there are two implications to this trend. The first, as Katsulis observes, is that police violence normalizes violence against sex workers. As Walter Benjamin would frame it, it makes the mistreatment of these workers “law”, if at least on a street level. Customers know of the vulnerability of unregistered sex workers, which is why they can often rape, abuse, or rob these women knowing that they will not be punished. When these women have already experienced corruption first-hand by the police, what incentive do they have to report abuse? In fact, Katsulis reports that most unregistered workers are afraid that if they report a crime, they will be the ones sent to prison. The socio-economic vulnerabilities that led these women to sex work are now amplified by their illegal status. Their illegality is determined by the way poverty has influenced the use of their body. In this way poverty is again treated as a problem rather than offered a solution.
There is, however, another implication to police violence. Police, as law enforcement, are an extension of the state. When the state characterizes unregistered sex work as dirty, a moral hazard, and a pollutant, at the same that police rape unregistered sex workers, is to deny the very existence of those sex workers. The consequences go beyond the state contradicting itself. Remember that the incentive of the state to make sex workers regulated was to make those women “legible” so they could be controlled. When these women are raped by the same state that calls them immoral, they are made “illegible”. The conduct of the police suggests these women are so worthless their rape does not even count, because as the regulators of immorality, the police cannot possibly engage in immorality themselves. Like in the first anecdote in this paper, the police make the judgement that these women are not worthy of rights. As is often the case in Latin America, the Bolivarian ideal is betrayed by everyday violence. Although these women cannot be legally regulated, as illegible women, they are subject to the harsher forces of a life without rights or protection.
Tourism & The Art of Exploiting Law and Lawlessness
“He projects upon her what he desires and fears, what he loves about her and what he hates. And if it is so difficult to say anything specific about her, that is because man seeks the whole of himself in her and because she is all. She is all, that is, on the plane of the inessential; she is all the Other. And, as the other, she is other than herself, other than what is expected of her. Being all, she is never quite this which she should be; she is everlasting deception, the very deception of that existence which is never successfully attained nor fully reconciled with the totality of existents.”
– Beauvoir, The Second Sex, 198
Tourism greatly complicates the law and lawlessness that surrounds sex work in Mexico’s border zones. As Steve Bender explains in Run for The Border, there is a historical legacy of American men capitalizing on (economically produced) social inequity to buy sex across the border. Most tourists buy sex legally, but some also come to Mexico to exploit the legal system and purchase under-aged sex workers or to engage in violent, abusive fantasies. Illegal sex workers are most vulnerable to these forms of exploitation[8]. It is very unlikely that these foreign men are ever to be prosecuted. As we know, illegal sex workers are unwilling to report abuse, but police are also unwilling to pursue a case that involves consulting international jurisdictions. In Tijuana, Juarez, Nuevo Laredo, and Matamoros, an American could theoretically commit a crime and return to the United States in less than half an hour. This makes pursuing and identifying the subject a nightmare in most cases. Especially within the informal sex industry, Americans and other foreigners can operate with de facto impunity.
As I hinted in the chapter on the commercial landscape, tourism also accentuates the problem of gender subjectivities in sex work. As Katsulis explains it “Sex tourism, as a practice of conspicuous consumption, enables the cultivation, and experience, of a particular form of masculine subjectivity that relies upon (and exploits) historical differences in power and privilege.” At the same time, “Gendered performances by Mexicana sex workers are seen as natural characteristic based on cultural difference rather than a product of female economic dependence”, which cause them to market themselves as such. Although sex work challenges the traditional gender roles in Mexico, the demand for gendered performance forces women to “permit men a greater sense of masculine entitlement and prestige than they would otherwise have access to”. As Simone de Beauvoir would describe it, sex tourists project sex workers as “the Other”. They are limited to the sphere of “immanence”, where American sex tourists can project onto them their gendered desires. The sense of masculinity they seek can only be created by the feminization of the other. “Woman is necessary is so far as she remains an Idea into which man projects his own transcendence; but she is inauspicious as an objective reality.” Because gendered and cultural expectations inform every aspect of her sexual performance, Beauvoir would likely argue that it is impossible for a female sex worker to experience transcendence herself. Biopower invites sex workers to see themselves as the gendered and cultural Other too, and this belief is confirmed by the explicit difference in power between them and American tourists. I don’t like to think a sex worker could never achieve transcendence, but consistent contact with American tourists can imaginably distort one’s own understanding of the self.
Structural Violence and The Punishment of Bodies
“Structural violence as defined by Anglin takes such forms as the expropriation of vital economic and non-material resources and the operation of systems of social stratification or categorization that subvert peoples chances of survival, and can be understood as the imposition of categories of difference that legitimate hierarchy and inequality, and deny them the opportunity for emotional and physical well-being.”
– Katsulis, Sex Work and the City, 72
The combination of laws and lawlessness in Mexico’s border zones subject sex workers to structural violence. On a granular level, I am referring to the fact that unregistered sex workers face added occupational risk. These women are more likely to: face police abuse, be depressed, have been homeless, exchange sex for basic necessities, and to engage in substance abuse. Meanwhile, the hyper-individualization of regulated sex workers makes them most likely to experience violence from one another. Differences aside, most studies find that sex workers, registered and unregistered, are equally likely to face workplace violence (incidence is 36% in Tijuana, and 61% in Juarez). This violence most typically takes form as violent victimization. Customers exploit the structural vulnerability of sex workers to attack them, and/or rape them. Mexican sex workers are the infamous of victims of “Feminicide”; the popular gang practice of murdering sex workers that has killed over a thousand women in Juarez. Over 60% of sex workers have experienced a customer refusing to use a condom, or removing it during sex; a violent act that puts them at threat of infection. Vulnerability and gendered performance also entices sadist customers, who abuse workers as an outlet for their desires. As a whole, less than 6% of sex workers report abuse by police or tourists.
Structural violence represents a failure of the state to honour the rights of these women.
Sovereign Men and Sovereign States: The Centralized Control of Sexed Bodies
“Neoliberalism is less about withdrawal of the state from public life than about the shifting of arenas of state interest and intervention.”
– Kelley, Lydia’s Open Door, 19
There is no such thing as inevitable violence. Katsulis believes that within the context of Mexico’s border zones, the purchase of sex gives men “extraordinary powers of sovereignty.” If we are to trust the vast body of social theory on sovereignty, then part of that sovereignty must come from the ability to exercise violence on those women, because to be a sovereign is to have a monopoly on the means of violence. Using the same logic, if state regulation constrains the agency of sex workers and exposes them to structural violence, then that violence must tell us something about the powers of the state. I argue that the structural violence produced by state regulation of sex work is indicative of of intensifying state control over the sex lives (and therefore social lives) of Mexico’s poor and working classes.
This centralized control can be explicitly observed. State regulation of sex work clearly communicates that women are to blame for their engagement in sex work, and that their occupation is immoral. At the same time, by sanctioning a formal sex industry that process only female sex workers, the state expresses that women are the inevitable object of sexual desire. It appears that the state itself wants to maintain a masculine hegemony over the lives of women. It enables the self-employment of women in sex work, but only at great cost to their health and safety — as if to say punishment is deserved for those who defy classic sexual subjectivities. The treatment of registered and unregistered workers alike confirms the state belief that the poor and working classes are worthy of suspicion. The individualized surveillance of formal sex workers and the humiliation of informal sex workers actively works to discourage collective action on behalf of sex workers. Because these women are visible and consistently subject to these disciplinary forces of law, it is difficult for them to imagine or experience sexuality in a way that is divorced from social inequity.
The fact that the regulation of sex workers falls only on female sex workers, also functions to validate the sexual desires and promiscuity of men. The thorough regulation of sex work along the northern border recognizes that sex is a profitable export, and that women can be commodified if it brings compensatory revenue for the state. The understanding that men have rights to women, and that poor women can rightfully be commodified is explicitly expressed in the regulation of sex work, but it indirectly affects others too. In poor communities, the victimization of women by the state indirectly validates the victims of women on an everyday basis. When the police make poor unregistered sex workers “illegible”, then any one or any institution can expect to abuse those vulnerable women without retribution. If the state actively stigmatizes sex workers, then it functions to stigmatize the sex lives of poor and working class women as a whole as well. During health raids, police will often arrest women who are not actually sex workers based on their outward appearance. This tendency invites others to make judgements based on appearance as well. The regulation of a narrow aspect of private life, is actually reflective of state-held conceptions of sex, and the biopower at play in the sex and social lives of the poor and working classes in Mexico’s border zones.
While neoliberalism has decentralized the state, it has also forced many to make their private lives more public through commercial exchange. In Mexico’s border zones, the state has amplified this visibility to centralize its control over sex life in a way that ultimately confirms and perpetuates the class, race and gender hierarchies that neoliberalism itself has helped to create.
