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membership in campaigns. The transition in these countries will be painful, long, and drawn out. The trade unions still bear the taint of the old regimes. And serious state regulation of working conditions went out with the euphoria of the new market economies. In sum, Mogensen has helped our understanding of the significance of globalization of markets for the health and safety of workers. And he has raised many important questions for us to pursue. This macro-perspective is a wonderful antidote to the substance by substance hyper-epidemiological approach to occupational health. But I wish some portion of the book had dealt with China, India, and Southeast Asia, where much of the hazardous industry has gone and where workers’ health is under siege in a battle that dwarfs other regions. Charles Levenstein is a Professor Emeritus of Work Environment at the University of Massachusetts-Lowell. His research focuses on the politics and economics of occupational disease and injury; international dimensions of workers’ health; integrated approaches to health protection and health promotion; work environment justice; history and ethics of occupational health; and sustainable development. Address correspondence: Dr. Charles Levenstein, Department of Work Environment – Kitson Hall, Room 200 (UML North), 1 University Avenue, Lowell, MA 01854, USA. Telephone: (+011) 978-934-3250. Fax: (+011) 978-452-5711. E-mail:
[email protected].
Bernstein, Elizabeth. Temporarily Yours: Intimacy, Authenticity, and the Commerce of Sex. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2007. 291 pp. $22.00 (paperback).
Why study sex work—because to study the way prostitution is understood, tolerated, or punished is to study the way a culture defines social justice. Public policies toward such forms of labor are intimately interconnected with the means with which the society aims to promote and or neglect questions about equality (Hobson 1990). For many years now, discussion about sex work has been characterized by a schism between sex negative conservatives and sex positive liberal feminist camps. For many feminists, prostitution is best seen an expression of patriarchal exploitation and oppression (MacKinnon 1987); on the other hand, sex positive feminists see prostitution as a subversive expression of freedom and economic empowerment, a worker’s issue (Alexander 1987; Goldman 1917). While the former group sees sexuality as a core component of gender inequity, the latter sees it in terms of liberatory possibility as well as a means of making a living, of work (Bromberg 1999; Jenness 1990; Jolin 1994). The former describe sex for money transactions using the word “prostitution” connoting “whore stigma,” sexual shame, and unworthiness, while advocates
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such as Bernstein (1999) frame the practice as “sex work” suggesting both radical sexual identity and the normalization of the profession in terms of “service provision” and “care giving” and a burgeoning, “global service economy,” (p. 187). The two positions have been rehashed repeatedly as if they were mutually expressive terms. Yet as public space is appropriated at exponential rates, their influence on the current public polices cannot be underemphasized. While virtual spaces for sexually related materials have only expanded with the rise and social acceptance of a billion dollar internet market for commodified sexual content, physical spaces where communities of difference converge, street walkers work, and public sexual cultures thrive have been squeezed (Bernstein 2001; Ferrell 2001; Lee 2002; Worth 2002). Herein prostitution is used a device to sanitize the public commons. “[T]he common focus of state intervention has been on eliminating visible manifestations of poverty and deviance (both racial and national) from urban spaces, rather than the exchange of sex for money per se,” Elizabeth Bernstein claims in her new work Temporarily Yours: Intimacy, Authenticity, and the Commerce of Sex (p. 164). Elizabeth Bernstein is a Berkeley-trained sociologist who teaches sociology and women’s studies at Barnard. She spent much of the 1990s as a participant observer conducting an ethnography on sex work in the streets of San Francisco’s Tenderloin neighborhood. The result is Temporarily Yours. Writing about the ways that urban space is increasingly viewed a private commodity, a part and parcel of a growth machine utilized to cultivate a better business climate for economic expansion, Bernstein locates her study within the shifting terrain of a post-welfare neo-liberal city. Herein prostitutes and their patrons were targeted as symbols of urban decay, to be swept from the streets. “Prostitutes are among the disorderly—they are among the ‘disreputable or obstreperous or unpredictable people; panhandlers, drunks, addicts, rowdy teenagers . . . loiterers, the mentally disturbed,’ ” she quotes James Q. Wilson and George Kelling writing about their theory of crime prevention ‘Broken Windows’ policing. Thus, public signs of sexual commerce were viewed as an eyesore. And politicians from San Francisco to New York won election after election fighting, condemning, and targeting sex work as a symbol of all that is wrong with urban life. While few could identify secondary harmful effects of their presence, these manifestations were targeted and largely wiped away from public view. Simultaneously, a global marketplace for sexual commerce only increased, as online pornography and escort services became a billion dollar market. And understandings of sexual commerce shifted with the trends in a global market place. For Bernstein, the differing contexts of sexual interaction and commerce—inside or outside, between man and boy, for procreation or romance, or even between males and females—have differing social meanings that result in vastly divergent social and theoretical understandings and policies. Differing definitions determine the responses sexual labor. “[N]ormative discussions of sexual labor should begin with an understanding of the socially and historically specific meanings that affix to commercial sexual transactions, and to intimacy and sexuality more generally,” the author explains (p. 187).
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Increasingly, the practice is linked with issues including the regulation of public space, policing, political economy, and global capital (Bland 1992; Chambliss 1964; Gilfoyle 1992; Wagner 1997). “[T]he San Francisco Bay Area, which, by the late 1990’s was one of the hearts of the ‘new economy’ and thus emblematic of its attendant economy of desire,” Bernstein explains in the introduction of the study (p. 16). Throughout these years in San Francisco, the social mores regarding sexual work shifted from stigma toward social acceptance, at least for many. Few would bat an eye if a young graduate stated he or she worked as a stripper, go-go boy, or attendant at a sex club. Yet, public polices rarely mirrored such progressive thinking. While the stigma around sex work receded from public view, it was never far beneath the surface. Instead, public policies reflected many of these shifts from progressive to regressive thinking. While policy makers hailed neoliberal economic models that supported open markets, they condemned those catering to the most basic of desires, those attending to the ever expanding supply demand curve (Shepard 2007). Bernstein seeks to make sense of a service-based economy attending to market supplications, while shifting stigma from producers, workers, to consumers of services, those who purchase products and services related to sexual commerce. Some nights, Bernstein works as a decoy on the strolls of the Tenderloin; others she rides with the police as they target consumers, sending them to John school. The study also contributes to a larger conversation about the meanings of sexual commerce for a new cohort of urban actors taking place in a distinct urban milieu. San Francisco, with its Matrix programs and John Schools, is both an exceptional space and an incubator for new forms of social policies, possibilities and controls—all taking place within the streets and computer networks of a global city. “Although the Bay-Area is neither a typical, nor a ‘representative’ US location, I maintain with other commentators that the fact that postindustrial cultural transformations occurred in a manner that was ‘more condensed, rapid, and exaggerated’ here than elsewhere,” the author explains (p. 16). Thus, more than anything, understandings of prostitution have to do with the location in which services are purchased, paid for, and rendered. Bernstein situates and builds the study of sexual commerce within long-standing debates about the relationship between money, culture, and self. “The nature of money resembles the nature of prostitution,” the author quotes Georg Simmel’s 1907 essay on the topic. “The indifference with which it lends itself to any use, the infidelity with which it leaves everyone, its lack of ties to anyone, its complete objectification that excludes any attachment and makes it suitable as a pure means,” the author quotes Simmel, suggesting a close analogy between capital and sexuality (p. 7). The study of sexual labor is thus a study of political economy. By extension, it involves the streets, cars, phone cables, and cultural mores San Francisco’s distinct neighborhoods as they grapple with the flows of social, cultural, and transnational capital rapidly transforming a distinct urban space and those who live, work, play, and survive in it. The fieldwork for Temporarily Yours took place during a series of points in San Francisco’s Tenderloin neighborhood in the mid-1990s, a space which at that
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point had managed to elude the trend to toward gentrification taking place in so many of San Francisco’s other spaces with hip social and cultural capital. It was not always easy to call the Tenderloin a trendy space. Years before speed became an East Coast public health issue, the drug fueled the thriving underground economy of the neighborhood, located just north of Market Street. HIV-AIDS, street drugs, the homeless queer youth who dropped into the neighborhood from points unknown only to vanish before the city had known they were there characterized much of this tragicomic milieu. I worked and conducted research (Shepard 1997) in the neighborhood from 1993–1995, during the same period in which the research took place. Bernstein could not have chosen a richer space in which to locate the ongoing debates about the shifting meanings of a purchase, demand, and commerce of sex. It is not an understatement to suggest that the economy of sex pulsed through these streets with an electric sense of contrasts between possibility and desolation, high octane desire and bleak disappointment, pleasure and violence, eros and anxiety, connection and separation, contact and isolation, health and illness, and joy and annihilation. Like much of urban life, the answers to questions about the meanings of sexual commerce cannot be separated from the space in which they take place. It is complicated. While there is a lure, gaze, and intrigue to questions sex for money transactions, it is also work and therefore subject to shifting contours of a global marketplace, in which the imperatives of transnational commerce often precede human need. Bernstein’s contribution to remind us much of the debate about sex work has taken place as cities around the world have used its presence as a justification to, “criminalize economically and racially marginalized people who occupy public streets” (p. 187). Cities changed during the 1990s. Using one of the most emblematic signs of urban space, Bernstein’s study richly describes how. Benjamin Shepard is Assistant Professor of Human Services at City Tech/ City University of New York. He is the author/editor of five books, White Nights and Ascending Shadows: An Oral History of the San Francisco AIDS Epidemic (Cassell 1997), and From ACT UP to the WTO: Urban Protest and Community Building in the Era of Globalization (Verso 2002). The latter work was a non-fiction finalist for the Lambda Literary Awards in 2002. In addition, Queer Political Performance and Protest and Play, Creativity, and the New Community Organizing are both under contract with Routledge. In addition his work, Community Projects as Social Activism: From Direct Action to Direct Services (Sage), is due at next year. Address correspondence: Dr. Benjamin Shepard, Department of Human Services (N-401), New York City College of Technology, The City University of New York, 300 Jay Street, Brooklyn, NY 11201-1909, USA. Telephone: (+011) 718260-5135. Fax: (+011) 718-254-8530. E-mail:
[email protected]. References Alexander, P. 1987. Prostitution: A difficult issue for feminists. In Sex Work: Writings by Women in the Sex Industry, ed. F. Delicoste and P. Alexander, 184–230. Pittsburgh, PA: Cleiss Press.
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Bernstein, E., 1999. What’s wrong with prostitution? Whats right with sex work? Comparing markets in female sexual labor. Hastings Women’s Law Journal 10:91–119. Symposium Issue: Economic Justice for Sex Workers. ———. 2001. The meaning of the purchase: Desire, demand, and the commerce of sex. Ethnography 2:389– 420. Bland, L. 1992. “Purifying” the public world: Feminist vigilantes in late Victorian England. Women’s History Review 1 (3):397–412. Bromberg, S. 1999. Feminist issues in prostitution. In Prostitution: On Whores, Hustlers, and Johns, ed. J. Elias, V. L. Bullough, and V. Elias, 294–321. New York: Prometheus Books. Chambliss, W. J. 1964. A sociological analysis of the law of vagrancy. Social Problems 12:67–77. Ferrell, J. 2001. Tearing Down the Streets: Adventures in Urban Anarchy. New York: Palgrave/St. Martin’s Press. Gilfoyle, T. J. 1992. City of Eros: New York City, Prostitution, and the Commercialization of Sex, 1790–1920. New York: WW Norton. Goldman, E. 1917. The traffic of women. In Anarchism and Other Essays, ed. E. Goldman, 177–194. New York: Dover Publications. Hobson, B. 1990. Uneasy Virtue: The Politics of Prostitution and the American Reform Tradition. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. Jenness, V. 1990. From sex as sin to sex as work: Coyote and the reorganization of prostitution as a social problem. Social Problems 37:403–17. Jolin, A. 1994. On the backs of working prostitutes: Feminist theory and prostitution policy. Crime and Delinquency 40:69–83. Lee, D. 2002. Street fight. New York Times, (March 31): C1. MacKinnon, C. A. 1987. Feminism Unmodified: Discourses on Life and Law. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Shepard, B. 1997. White Nights and Ascending Shadows: An Oral History of the San Francisco AIDS Epidemic. London: Cassell. ———. 2007. Moral panic in the welfare state. Journal of Sociology and Social Welfare XXXIV 1:155–72. Wagner, D. 1997. The universalization of social problems. Critical Sociology 23:3–23. Worth, R. 2002. Tolerance in village wears thin drug dealing and prostitution are becoming a hazard in a normally quiet west village area. New York Times January 19.
