Page 96 - Chinese Woman Living and Working

FEMINIST PROSTITUTION DEBATES 83
that resemble the fierce conflict within the United Nations between the feminist pro-sex
work and anti-prostitution lobbies.
The aim of this chapter is, accordingly, threefold. First, I will outline the broad
parameters of international prostitution debates by detailing the divergent arguments and
strategies advanced by the feminist anti-prostitution and pro-sex work lobbies. Second, I
will highlight some of the diverse ways in which the ‘selling and buying of sex’ has been
identified as an object of governmental concern in present-day China. I use the phrase
‘selling and buying of sex’ here because the Chinese term for prostitution, maiyin
piaochang, refers simultaneously to the practices of selling sex (maiyin) and frequenting
prostitutes (piaochang), and therefore highlights the relational nature of the prostitution
transaction. Finally, I will demonstrate that the problems associated with the PRC’s
prostitution controls are not amenable to resolution via the imposition of some
‘idealised’, transnational feminist response, especially one that fails to acknowledge the
liberal underpinnings of the concept of ‘sex work’.

Feminist prostitution debates and international law
Although questions concerning the appropriate moral and legal status of prostitution have
vexed the feminist movement since its inception, feminist prostitution debates are now
polarised around two diametrically opposed perspectives. At one extreme of the debate
there is the feminist anti-prostitution lobby, which relies heavily on radical feminist
theorisations of sexuality. Radical feminists oppose the institution of prostitution on the
grounds that it arises from a particular system of political oppression—male supremacy—
and denies women their full status as human beings by reducing them to the level of
objects (Barry 1995; Jeffreys, S. 1997). In keeping with their ongoing critique of the
system of hetero-patriarchy, they also locate prostitution on a continuum with the forms
of sexual abuse and inequality that women frequently experience within the traditional
family system, and insist that prostitution will continue to exist so long as existing
gendered structures of power and desire remain intact.
At the other extreme of the debate there is the pro-sex work lobby, which comprises
an assorted group of feminist scholars and prostitute activists who are unified primarily by
their opposition to radical feminist theorisations of sexuality. In this respect, Gayle
Rubin’s ‘Thinking Sex: Notes for a Radical Theory of the Politics of Sexuality’ has proved
seminal, being consistently cited as a key theoretical contribution to the ‘sex debates’
which have redefined the terrain of contemporary feminisms since the mid-1980s (Rubin
1984; 1993: 3–31). Briefly, Rubin maintains that progressive sexual liberationists should
acknowledge that consensual sexual acts, whether cross-generational, sadomasochistic or
commercial, are not vices to be prohibited and thereby kept marginal and distorted.
Achieving the desired feminist goal of sexual liberation demands a ‘pro-sex’ approach, one
that allows people to engage in what are ultimately consensual, if unconventional, sexual
practices, whilst continuing to oppose systemic, structural inequalities (Rubin 1984; 1993:
3–31). In doing so, the work of scholars such as Rubin has enabled prostitute rights’
activists to promote a celebratory conception of the prostitute subject as being both a sex
worker and a transgressive, sexual-political identity, and simultaneously to reject