Feminismo de las Putas: Sex Workers and Punitive Feminism in Catalunya, Spain

Abstract

Sex workers in Spain are routinely criminalized, most recently as a result of the current administration’s campaigns to outlaw sex work using feminist justifications. Mainstream feminism supports the idea that sex workers are passive victims of prostitution, gender violence, and body exploitation who require protection and defense (Bernstein 2007; 2010). Such accounts of what could be referred to as “punitive feminism” are frequently shared in official and public discourses without taking into account the perspectives and lived experiences of sex workers. When sex workers advocate for themselves, they are portrayed as “pimps” or individuals who have the so-called privilege of choosing to engage in sex work, which keeps them out of the mainstream feminist circles. Drawing on five months of ethnographic fieldwork between July and December 2022 in Catalunya, Spain, this thesis explores everyday forms of resistance among sex workers and their allies. Going beyond the agency/victim dichotomy, I understand resistance as a tool that sex workers use to continue to work and support themselves financially. Through participant observation, interviews, online observation, and visual ethnography, I examine sex workers’ individual and collective acts of solidarity, community building, creation of alternative spaces, and rule-bending due to their systematic vulnerability (Scott 1985; Bourgois 2002). In opposition to the discourses and practices of punitive feminism, I argue that sex workers seek to reconstruct their own feminist space in order to negotiate against measures that marginalize and criminalize them as working-class sex workers and immigrants. Their actions are a counter-response to the punishment and re-moralization they face for their alleged transgression of norms (Juliano 2004; 2009). Sex workers, united by the Feminismo de las Putas [feminism of whores], oppose the “class-cleaning” (Juliano 2009), “criminalization of poverty” (Wacquant 2008), and “sexual moralization” (Smith and Mac, 2018) of the state and feminism.