Hostname: page-component-586b7cd67f-2plfb Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-11-25T22:42:08.433Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

Boundaries of Legitimacy: Sex, Violence, Citizenship, and Community in a Local Sexual Economy

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  27 December 2018

Lisa E. Sanchez
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Abstract

Studies of prostitution have overlooked the role of law in constituting the identities and sexual practices of women in the sex trade and defining the boundary between legitimate and illegitimate violence in the sexual economy. Drawing on field work with sex trade participants in a northwestern United States city, this paper explores how the cultural logic of modern liberal law shapes women's identities and interpretations of their actions. In positioning women in the sex trade as “sexual outlaws” to be managed and subjected to the full scope of legal authority, the law simultaneously limits women's citizenship and withdraws its protection. Moreover, in restricting women's capacity to invoke fundamental legal rights, the law effectively sanctions “private” or extralegal forms of discipline and creates a space for violence. Given the paradoxical position these women hold as sexual outlaws on the one hand and frequent victims of physical and sexual assault on the other, I explore how they negotiate consent and resist violence.

Type
Articles
Information
Law & Social Inquiry , Volume 22 , Issue 3 , Summer 1997 , pp. 543 - 580
Copyright
Copyright © American Bar Foundation, 1997 

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

Argyle, Michael. 1988. Bodily Communication. New York: Routledge.Google Scholar
Bakhtin, Mikhail. 1981. The Dialogic Imagination. Translated by Caryl Emerson and Michael Holquist. Austin: University of Texas Press.Google Scholar
Becker, Gary. 1968. Crime and Punishment: An Economic Approach. Journal of Political Economy 76: 169–217.Google Scholar
Benhabib, Seyla. 1992. Situating the Self: Gender, Community, and Postmodernism in Contemporary Ethics. New York: Routledge.Google Scholar
Biolsi, Thomas. 1995. The Birth of the Reservation: Making the Modern Individual. American Ethnologist 22 (1): 28–53.Google Scholar
Boden, Deirdre, and Molotch, Harvey L. 1994. The Compulsion of Proximity. In No-wHere: Space, Time, and Modernity, edited by Friedland, Roger and Boden, Dierdre. Berkeley: University of California Press.Google Scholar
Bourdieu, Pierre. 1977. Outline of a Theory of Practice. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.Google Scholar
Bumiller, Kristen. 1990. Fallen Angels: The Representation of Violence against Women in Legal Culture. International Journal of the Sociology of Law 32: 125–42.Google Scholar
Butler, Judith. 1990. Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity. New York: Routledge.Google Scholar
Chambliss, William. 1975. The Law of Vagrancy. In The Criminal Law in Action, edited by Chambliss, William. New York: John Wiley and Sons.Google Scholar
Collier, Jane F., Maurer, Bill, and Suarez-Navaz, Liliana. 1995. Sanctioned Identities: Legal Constructions of Modern Personhood. Identities 2 (1–2): 1–27.Google Scholar
Coombe, Rosemary J. 1989. Room for Manoeuver: Toward a Theory of Practice in Critical Legal Studies. Law and Social Inquiry 14: 69–121.Google Scholar
Cornell, Drucilla, and Thurschwell, Adam. 1987. Feminism, Negativity, Intersubjectiv-ity. In Feminism as Critique: On the Politics of Gender, edited by Benhabib, Selya and Cornell, Drucilla. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.Google Scholar
Coutin, Susan. 1995. Ethnographies of Violence: Law, Dissidence, and the State. Law and Society Review 29: 517–39.Google Scholar
Cover, Robert. 1986. Violence and the Word. Yale Law journal 95: 1601–29.Google Scholar
Crenshaw, Kimberlé. 1989. Demarginalizing the Intersection of Race and Sex: A Black Feminist Critique of Antidiscrimination Doctrine, Feminist Theory, and Antiracist Politics. University of Chicago Legal Forum 139–67.Google Scholar
Crenshaw, Kimberlé. 1994. Mapping the Margins: Intersectionality, Identity Politics, and Violence Against Women of Color. In Fineman and Mykitiuk 1994.Google Scholar
Danielson, Dan, and Engle, Karen, eds. 1995. After Identity: A Reader in Law and Culture. New York: Routledge.Google Scholar
Davidson, Donald. 1980. Essays on Actions and Events. Oxford: Oxford University Press.Google Scholar
Davis, Nanette J., ed. 1993. Prostitution: An International Handbook on Trends, Problems, and Policies. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press.Google Scholar
De Certeau, Michel. 1984. The Practice of Everyday Life. Berkeley: University of California Press.Google Scholar
Delacoste, Frederique, and Alexander, Priscilla, eds. 1987. Sex Work: Writings by Women in the Sex Industry. Pittsburgh: Cleis Press.Google Scholar
Derrida, Jacques. 1992. Force of Law: the “Mystical Foundation of Authority.” In Decon-struction and the Possibility of Justice, edited by Cornell, Drucilla, Rosenfeld, Michel, and Carlson, David Gray. New York: Routledge.Google Scholar
Evans-Pritchard, E. E. 1940. The Nuer: A Description of the Modes of Livelihood and Political Institutions of a Miotic People. New York: Oxford University Press.Google Scholar
Fineman, Martha Albertson, and Mykitiuk, Roxanne, eds. 1994. The Public Nature of Private Violence. New York: Routledge.Google Scholar
Foucault, Michel. 1979. Discipline and Punish: The Birth of a Prison. Translated by Alan Sheridan. New York: Vintage.Google Scholar
Foucault, Michel. 1980. The History of Sexuality. Vol. 1: An Introduction. New York: Vintage Books.Google Scholar
Foucault, Michel. 1983. The Subject and Power. In Michel Foucault: Beyond Structuralism and Her-meneutics, edited by Dreyfus, Hubert and Rabinow, Paul. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.Google Scholar
Foucault, Michel. 1991. On Governmentality. In The Foucault Effect, edited by Burchell, Graham, Gordon, Colin and Miller, Peter. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.Google Scholar
Frankenberg, Ruth. 1993. White Women, Race Matters: The Social Construction of Whiteness. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.Google Scholar
Fraser, Nancy. 1989. Unruly Practices: Power, Discourse, and Gender in Contemporary Social Theory. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.Google Scholar
Frohmann, Lisa. 1997. Convictability and Discordant Locales: Reproducing Race, Class, and Gender Ideologies in Prosecutorial Decision making. Law and Society Review 31: 531–55.Google Scholar
Frohmann, Lisa, and Mertz, Elizabeth. 1995. Legal Reform and Social Construction: Violence, Gender, and the Law. Law and Social Inquiry 19: 829–51.Google Scholar
Garfinkel, Harold. 1967. Studies in Ethnomethodology. Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice Hall.Google Scholar
Geertz, Clifford. 1983. Local Knowledge: Further Essays in Interpretive Anthropology. New York: Basic Books.Google Scholar
Giddens, Anthony. 1979. Central Problems in Social Theory: Action, Structure, and Contradictions in Social Analysis. Berkeley: University of California Press.Google Scholar
Goffman, Erving. 1967. Interaction Ritual: Essays on Face-to-Face Behaviour. New York: Doubleday Anchor.Google Scholar
Goffman, Erving. 1969. Strategic Interaction. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press.Google Scholar
Goldberg, David Theo. 1993. Racist Culture: Philosophy and the Politics of Meaning. Oxford, England: Blackwell Publishers.Google Scholar
Goodrich, Peter. 1987. Legal Discourse: Studies in Linguistics, Rhetoric, and Legal Analysis. Hampshire, England: MacMillan Press.Google Scholar
Greenhouse, Carol. 1986. Praying for Justice. Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press.Google Scholar
Greenhouse, Carol, Yngvesson, Barbara, and Engel, David. 1994. Law and Community in Three American Towns. Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press.Google Scholar
Gramsci, Antonio. 1971. Selections from the Prison Notebooks. London: Lawrence & Wishart.Google Scholar
Habermas, Jiirgen. 1984. The Theory of Communicative Action. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press.Google Scholar
Harris, Cheryl. 1993. Whiteness as Property. Harvard Law Review 106: 1707–91.Google Scholar
Hartog, Hendrik. 1993. Abigail Bailey's Coverture: Law in a Married Woman's Con-sciousness. In Law in Everyday Life, edited by Sarat, Austin and Kearns, Thomas. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press.Google Scholar
Heimer, Carol A., and Staffen, Lisa R. 1995. Interdependence and Reintegrative Social Control: Labeling and Reforming “Inappropriate” Parents in Neonatal Intensive Care Units”. American Sociological Review 60: 635–54.Google Scholar
Henry, Stuart, and Milovanovic, Dragan. 1996. Constitutive Criminology: Beyond Postmodernism. London: Sage Publications.Google Scholar
Herbert, Steve. 1996. Policing Space: Territoriality and the Los Angeles Police Department. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.Google Scholar
Herrnstein, Richard, and Prelec, Drazen. 1992. A Theory of Addiction. In Loewenstein and Elster 1992.Google Scholar
Hobbes, Thomas. [1668] 1994. Leviathan., edited by Curley, Edwin. Cambridge, England: Hackett.Google Scholar
Hooks, Bell. 1981. Ain't 1 a Woman: Black Women and Feminism. Boston: South End Press.Google Scholar
Hunt, Alan. 1993. Explorations in Law and Society: Toward a Constitutive Theory of Lawi New York: Routledge.Google Scholar
Kandel, Minouche. 1992. Whores in Court: Judicial Processing of Prostitutes in the Boston Municipal Court in 1990. Yak journal of Law and Feminism 4: 329–52.Google Scholar
Kelman, Mark. 1979. Choice and Utility. Wisconsin Law Review 1979: 769–97.Google Scholar
Lazarus-Black, Mindie, and F. Hirsch, Susan, eds. 1994. Contested States: Law, Hegemony, and Resistance. New York: Routledge.Google Scholar
Locke, John. [1690] 1980. Second Treatise of Government., edited by Macpherson, C. B. Indianapolis: Hackett.Google Scholar
Loewenstein, George, and Elster, Jon, eds. 1992. Choice over Time. Russell Sage Foundation.Google Scholar
Macpherson, C. B. 1962. The Political Theory of Possessive Individualism: Hobbes to Locke. Oxford: Oxford University Press.Google Scholar
Maher, Lisa, and Curtis, R. 1991. Women on the Edge of Crime: Crack Cocaine and the Changing Contexts of Street-level Sex Work in New York City. Crime, Law, and Social Change 18: 221–58.Google Scholar
Mahoney, Martha R. 1994. Victimization or Oppression? Women's Lives, Violence, and Agency. In Fineman and Mykitiuk 1994.Google Scholar
Mahoney, Maureen A., and Yngvesson, Barbara. 1992. The Construction of Subjectivity and the Paradox of Resistance: Integrating Feminist Anthropology and Psychology. Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society 18 (1): 44–73.Google Scholar
Maine, Sir Henry. [1861] 1977. Ancient Law. New York: Dutton. Reprinted from the 1917 edition. London: J. M. Dent.Google Scholar
Merry, Sally Engle. 1986. Everyday Understandings of the Law in Working-Class America. American Ethnologist 13: 253–70.Google Scholar
Merry, Sally Engle. 1990. Getting Justice and Getting Even: Legal Consciousness among Working-Class Americans. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.Google Scholar
Merry, Sally Engle. 1995a. Gender Violence and Legally Engendered Selves. Identities 2 (1–2): 49–73.Google Scholar
Merry, Sally Engle. 1995b. Narrating Domestic Violence: Producing the “Truth” of Violence in Nineteenth- and Twentieth-Century Hawaiian Courts. Law and Social Inquiry 19: 967–93.Google Scholar
Mohanty, Chandra T., Russo, Ann, and Torres, Lourdes, eds. 1991. Third World Women and the Politics of Feminism. Bloomington: Indiana University Press.Google Scholar
Musheno, Michael. 1995. Legal Consciousness on the Margins of Society: Struggles against Stigmatization in the AIDS Crisis. Identities 2 (1–2): 101–22.Google Scholar
Okin, Susan Moller. 1989. Justice, Gender, and the Family. New York: Basic Books.Google Scholar
Pateman, Carole. 1988. The Sexucd Contract. Stanford, Cal.: Stanford University Press.Google Scholar
Perry, Richard. 1995. The Logic of the Modern Nation-State and the Legal Construction of Native American Tribal Identity. Indiana Law Review 28: 547–74.Google Scholar
Posner, Richard. 1992. Sex and Reason. Cambridge: Harvard University Press.Google Scholar
Radin, Margaret Jane. 1996. Contested Commodities. Cambridge: Harvard University Press.Google Scholar
Rawls, John. 1971. A Theory of justice. Cambridge: Harvard University Press.Google Scholar
Rhode, Deborah. 1989. Justice and Gender: Sex Discrimination and the Law. Cambridge: Harvard University Press.Google Scholar
Sanchez, Lisa E. 1997a. Sex/Law and the Paradox of Agency in the Everyday Practices of Women in the “Evergreen” Sex Trade. Forthcoming in Constitutive Criminology at Work: Agency and Resistance in the Constitution of Crime and Punishment, edited by Milovanovic, Dragan and Henry, Stuart. New York: SUNY Press.Google Scholar
Sanchez, Lisa E. 1997b. Spatial Practices and Bodily Manuevers: Negotiating at the Margins of a. Local Sexual Economy. Forthcoming in PoLAR: Political and Legal Anthropology Review 21 (2).Google Scholar
Sarat, Austin, and Kearns, Thomas. 1991. A Journey Through Forgetting: Toward a Jurisprudence of Violence. In The Fate of Law, edited by Sarat, Austin and Kearns, Thomas. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press.Google Scholar
Sarat, Austin, and Kearns., Thomas, eds. 1993. Law's Violence. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press.Google Scholar
Schneider, Elizabeth M. 1994. The Violence of Privacy. In Fineman and Mykitiuk 1994.Google Scholar
Schor, Naomi. 1987. Reading in Detail: Aesthetics and the Feminine. New York: Metheun.Google Scholar
Scott, James C. 1985. Weapons of the Weak: Everyday Forms of Peasant Resistance. New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press.Google Scholar
Simon, Jonathan. 1988. The Ideological Effects of Actuarial Practices. Law and Society Review 22: 771–800.Google Scholar
Stinchcombe, Arthur. 1994. Prostitution, Kinship, and Illegitimate Work. Contemporary Sociology 23 (6): 855–59.Google Scholar
Spivak, Gayatri Chakravorty. 1988. Can the Subaltern Speak? In Marxism and the Inter-pretation of Culture, edited by Nelson, Cary and Grossberg, Lawrence. Urbana: University of Illinois Press.Google Scholar
Taub, Nadine, and Schneider, Elizabeth M. 1982. Perspectives on Women's Subordination and the Role of Law. In The Politics of Law: A Progressive Critique, edited by Kairys, David. New York, Pantheon Books.Google Scholar
Thomas, Kendall. 1995. Beyond the Privacy Principle. In Danielson and Engle 1995.Google Scholar
Tushnet, Mark. 1981. The American Law of Slavery: 1810–1860, Considerations of Humanity and Interest. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press.Google Scholar
Unger, Roberto. 1975. Knowledge and Politics. Cambridge: Harvard University Press.Google Scholar
West, Robin. 1987. The Difference in Women's Hedonic Lives: A Phenomenological Critique of Feminist Legal Theory. Wisconsin Women's Law Journal 1987: 3–81.Google Scholar
West, Robin. 1993. Narrative, Authority, and Law. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press.Google Scholar
Williams, Patricia. 1991. The Alchemy of Race and Rights. Cambridge: Harvard University Press.Google Scholar
Wilson, James Q., and Herrnstein, Richard. 1985. Crime and Human Nature: The Definitive Study of the Causes of Crime. New York: Simon and Schuster.Google Scholar