Policing Perversity: Tracing the Contingent Illegality of Dominatrixes in New York City

• In Event: Surveillance Sex: Carcerality and Representation in Sex Worker Archives

Abstract

What can we learn about the policing of sex work from those who are only sometimes surveilled? This paper asks how the inconsistent policing of professional dominatrixes in New York City can help us understand the contingent perversities of sex-work policing as well as the fantasies that animate them. Through an analysis of New York City police crackdowns and sex industry regulations from the 1990s through the 2008 financial crisis, I argue that policing priorities are vivified by libidinal fantasies of the city in which they take place. In doing so, I focus on dominatrixes given their ambiguous legal and social status as well as their ‘useful delinquency’ (Foucault 1995). The legality of professional domination is opaque, and dominatrixes are liminal figures who can be variably figured as respectable professionals or perverse transgressors. Their history as shifting targets of policing offers a unique insight into the relationship between surveillance, perversity, and fantasy.

During Mayor Rudy Giuliani’s administration, aggressive policing targeted street-based sex work, strip clubs, and peepshows, while commercial BDSM dungeons – discrete, professionalized, and devoid of potentially unruly crowds of customers – were expanding at unprecedented rates. Where in the 1980’s, domination was often performed alongside or through full-service sex work, by the late 1990’s many dominatrixes came to understand themselves as separate and more licit than full-service sex workers and advertised even legally tenuous activities like anal penetration without major concern. This changed abruptly in 2008 when NYPD raids targeted at least a dozen dungeons, arresting dominatrixes under prostitution charges. Many dominatrixes link these raids to both the contemporaneous prostitution scandal of then-Governor Elliot Spitzer as well as the financial crisis. In this moment, dominatrixes became scapegoats for Wall Street’s hedonistic excess, depravity, and culture of risk, and were targeted accordingly. Not only did these raids reveal dominatrixes’ insulation from the police to be contingent, but also the NYPD made clear in their response to a FOIL request about these raids that their records do not distinguish between different forms of prostitution.

By tracing these shifts, I argue that policing against sex workers is entailed in fantasies of perversion and inquire into the threats these fantasies seek to manage. Anti-sex work policing disproportionately targets, Black, trans, immigrant, poor, and street-based sex workers, but it is also bound up in historically specific libidinal investments. As Melissa Gira Grant writes, “It’s not just a carceral eye; it’s a sexual eye” (2014:11). Dungeons could be at one moment compatible with fantasies of New York as a sanitized epicenter of business and at the next emblematic of New York as a breeding ground for unfettered financial recklessness. This history demonstrates that while some sex workers may move in and out of the focus of law enforcement, surveillance and policing apparatuses remain intact, ready to be reanimated. Moreover, it demonstrates that sex work policing is itself a site of fantasy – one that continually refigures it objects in response to the most salient perversities of different historical moments.

Author

• Kassandra Sparks, Sarah Lawrence College