Rethinking #MeToo with Sex Workers' Critiques

• In Event: The Logic and Meaning of Gender

Abstract

Discourses on the #MeToo movement have ranged from highlighting the universal prevalence of sexual harassment and misconduct which all women encounter on a daily basis, to rethinking the movement’s domination by white women’s narratives and its sidelining of marginalized voices and precarious subjects. A major critical intervention has been brought forth by sex workers who have since then found themselves overlooked and excluded from the movement, which they attribute primarily to the movement’s underlying gender-coded binary assumptions about consent viz-a-vis coercion, legal precarity and workplace harassment which have also characterized several mainstream feminist approaches to sex work and sexual labor broadly. In this paper, I discuss contending issues raised by sex workers’ critiques of the #MeToo movement, to elucidate the scope of the movement is severely limited when it comes to addressing precarious experiences associated with sexual labor. This is due to its underlying binary-coded assumptions about consent and coercion as discrete realities , which is further reflected and complicated through similar dualistic notions underlying legal and moral rules and norms which govern sexual commerce. I take commercial sex work in India as my site of theorizing and draw upon a number of critical feminist works and some preliminary findings from my doctoral dissertation, to assert it is precisely this false binary between consent and coercion and its relation to agency that is at the heart of #MeToo’s exclusionary process, which necessitates us to understand how people constantly negotiate the boundaries of consent and agency within oppressive systems. Hence, there is a need for us to move beyond the ‘liberal understanding’ of coercion as the absence of verbal consent’ to coercion as systemic abuse of power yielding negative consequences (Tambe 2018) which in turn has wide-ranging implications about access to legal redressal, moral excusability and culpability of sexual violence and rethinking collective modalities of resistance and accountability.

Author

• Sudeshna Chatterjee, University of Massachusetts Boston