Li-Jun, a senior licensed sex worker and the vice-president of

the Taipei Licensed Prostitutes Self-help Organization:

Many people laugh at us. They say we have no dignity. But I want to say that
women at our age who work as licensed prostitutes are either widowed or divorced,
have parents to take care of, or have two or three children to rear. The children are
usually still in primary school or high school. Please put yourselves in our shoes: are
women at our age with such a responsibility not under hardship? Please show
understanding for us. As a friend told me, If you can barely survive, how can you
possibly care about saving face? So you have no choice. You just go for it.
(COSWAS, 2000b:105, emphasis added).

Wei-wei, an [independent] call-girl:

[wJe simply did what ordinary lovers do to each other... I charged NT$ 5,000 per
hour, but clients were only allowed to do it once in an hour. Usually [we] let them
come in ten minutes. Afier they finished it, we would just leave.

Western views of Chinese sex workers are heavily reliant on orientalist,

racist depictions, and western feminists who claim to help only deny
them the opportunity to speak for themselves.
Doezema 01 (FEMINIST REVIEW NO 67, SPRING 2001; Jo Doezema, Phd., is a sex worker
and board member of the Network of Sex Work Projects (NSWP). She has published widely on
trafficking and feminism. She is a consultant to a number of sex work projects, and works as a
researcher at the Institute of Development Studies, University of Sussex, UK.) *we do not
endorse language in this card that excludes queer or male voices
How is power exercised in Barrys writing about third world prostitutes? Liddle and Rais (1998) recent article on
orientalism in feminist discourse is a useful place to begin exploring this question. Liddle and Rai identify three ways
in which discursive [authorial] power takes on the character of orientalism [and] . . . power of an orientalist character
is exercised (1998: 512). Two of these will be discussed below. First, Liddle and Rai argue that orientalist
power is exercised discursively when the author denies the subject the opportunity for self-
representation (1998: 512). A second discursive operation of orientalist power occurs when
patriarchal oppression or womens resistance to it is represented in such a way that western
cultures, and western feminism, come out as more advanced on the scale of civilization (1998:
512).10 In Barrys work, the subject of the prostitute is constructed partially through the lens of
orientalism: in Liddle and Rais words, she denies the subject the opportunity for self-
representation (1998: 512). First world sex workers are both pitied and blamed for adopting
a politics of sex worker rights.11 While pitied for having to actively incorporate de- humanization
into [their] identity (1995: 70), rst world sex worker activists are at the same time held
responsible for womens oppression: to embrace prostitution sex as ones self-chosen identity
is to be actively engaged in promoting womens oppression in behalf of oneself (1995: 71).Third
world sex workers, however, are not even credited with knowing what sex worker rights are all
about. Referring to third world sex workers, Barry writes: Sex work language has been
adopted out of despair, not because these women promote prostitution but because it seems
impossible to conceive of any other way to treat prostitute women with dignity and respect than
through normalizing their exploitation (1995: 296). As with Victorian feminists and their
campaign to rescue Indian women, third world sex workers are seen as so enslaved that their
only hope is rescue by others. The helplessness of Indian prostitutes was central to Victorian
feminists arguments, and the slavery trope served to demonstrate the need for intervention by
western feminists: Ideologies of slavery, whether pro- or anti-, were premised on the notion that
the slave, even when capable of resistance, was most often helpless in the face of either natural
incapacity or culturally sanctioned constraint (Burton, 1998: 341). The helplessness of the
Indian prostitute served as an effective foil to the saving capabilities of British feminists (Burton,
1994). The same holds true now: In true colonial fashion, Barrys mission is to rescue those
whom she considers to be incapable of self-determination (Kempadoo, 1998: 11). Third world
sex workers organizations reject this racist portrayal of themselves as deluded and despairing
(see Kempadoo and Doezema, 1998). Neither is sex work language, as Barry implies, a western concept
picked up by ignorant third world sex workers who are incapable of understanding its ramications. While the term
sex work was coined by Carol Leigh, a western sex worker (Leigh, 1998), its rapid and wide-spread adoption by sex
workers the world over reects not stupidity, but rather a shared political vision. As Kempadoo (1998) documents,
sex workers in the third world have a centuries-old history of organizing to demand an end to discriminatory laws and
practices. Building on this history, sex worker rights organizations are today ourishing all over the third world: Sex
workers struggles are thus neither a creation of a western prostitutes rights movement or the privilege of the past
three decades (Kempadoo, 1998: 21). Third world sex workers have seen through the patronizing
attitude of those like Barry who would save them for their own good. It is worth quoting at
length from the Sex Workers Manifesto (1997), produced at the First National Conference of
Sex Workers in Calcutta (attended by over 3,000 sex workers): Like many other occupations,
sex work is also an occupation . . . we system- atically nd ourselves to be targets of moralizing
impulses of dominant social groups, through missions of cleansing and sanitising, both
materially and sym- bolically. If and when we gure in political or developmental agendas, we
are enmeshed in discursive practices and practical projects which aim to rescue, rehabilitate,
improve, discipline, control or police us. Charity organizations are prone to rescue us and put us
in safe homes, developmental organizations are likely to rehabilitate us through meagre
income generation activities, and the police seem bent upon to regularly raid our quarters in the
name of controlling immoral trafcking. Even when we are inscribed less negatively or even
sym- pathetically within dominant discourses we are not exempt from stigmatisation or social
exclusion. As powerless, abused victims with no resources, we are seen as objects of pity.
(Durban Mahila Samanwaya Committee (DMSC), 1997: 23) I now turn to the second of Liddle
and Rais contentions about the workings of orientalist power in feminist discourse: that
orientalist power is invoked discursively when male oppression and female resistance are
characterized in such a way as to reinforce a hierarchy of civilization. Barrys work, and the
campaign rhetoric of CATW, clearly locate trafficking within backward, traditional societies
(Kempadoo, 1998). As in Victorian feminists Indian campaign, traditional and religious
practices are seen as the root of the problem of trafcking: Trafficking focuses particularly on
indigenous and aboriginal women who are from remote tribal communities where traditional
family and religious practices either devalue girl children or reduce girls to sex service, which
enables and encourages parents to sell their daughters (Barry, 1995: 178). Referring to a
remark by a Pakistani womens rights leader that Bengali girls trafcked into Pakistan do not
know what country they are from, Barry comes close to calling these women sub-human:
Illiteracy and rural village patriarchal feudalism abnegate human identity for many of these
women (1995: 171). Concerning Thai women, she remarks: In Thailand, religious ideology and
patriarchal feudalism reduce the value of womens lives to that of sexual and economic property,
which in turn validate prostitution (1995: 182). Her analysis is based on that of Troung (1990),
whose work, though of immense value, is not free from a sense that non-modern cultures live in
a different, backward, or eternal time (Lyons, 1999: 3). This attitude that third world women,
and prostitutes in particular are victims of their (backward, barbaric) cultures is pervasive in
the rhetoric of CATW and in those western feminist organizations that have joined CATWs
lobby efforts around the Vienna Protocol against trafcking. According to Planned Parenthood
President Gloria Feldt: In the US, we tend to see the issue of trafcking and forced prostitution
through the lens of our afuent democratic society. In many cultures, women and girls have no
power and very limited rights so that their vulnerability to sex traf- cking is high. (quoted in
Soriano, 2000: 3) The co-director of CATW stated recently: In the global South and East,
victims of the sex trade are often young women and girls who are desper- ately poor in cultures
where females are expected to sacrice themselves for the well being of their families and
communities (Leidhold, 1999: 4). In CATW-inspired feminist discourses, the third world
sex worker is presented as backward, innocent and above all helpless in need of
rescue (Doezema, 1998, 2000; Murray, 1998). Through her, the superiority of the saving
western body is marked and maintained.

The way western feminists perceive Chinese sex workers operates under a
system of orientalist thought that perpetuates Euro-American hegemony
and colonialism in the non-Western world
Chis 15 (Ioana Cerasella Chis: University of Birmingham. MA Social & Political Theory. United
by Strength or Oppression? A Critique of the Western model of feminism) *we do not endorse
language in this card that excludes queer or male voices
Solidarity with the Global South women is declared by the WMW feminists under the grand
narrative of global sisterhood (Morgan 1984), a Western-centric approach which finds its basis
on abstract, disembodied universalism and the colonisation of particularities under a hegemonic
Western model of particularism (Grosfoguel 2012:95). Historically, international sisterhood
started as a liberal, WMW feminist movement claiming unity with all women as women due to
perceived common oppression and victimisation (hooks 2000:43;45), depicting women as one-
dimensional: always-already constructed in relation (of subordination) to men. The WMW
feminists implicitly assume a particular construction of womanhood and gender relations, and
the essentialised role of victims, whilst they reify and colonise the Global South (Narayan
1998:86) by defining the third world women prior to their entry into social relations (Mohanty
1986:352). One of the problems which stems from upholding the idea of sameness on the
basis of gender within a white supremacist, classist and neo-colonial matrix of power is that
experiences, socio-epistemological location and context are eradicated under a discourse of
WMW benevolence. The political dimension of the decision taken by women in the Global
Souths to side with the men in their lives against colonialism, WMW feminism and Western
patriarchy, is negated by the WMW feminism. Instead, this political siding is interpreted within
the colonial-development framework as evidence for furthering Western intervention and
orchestration of divisions between women and men in the Global South, leading to a treatment
of Global South women as objects, not subjects of policy (Bruno 2006:7). In the context in which
the WMW feminists benefit from the oppression of the Global South, the sisterhood claimed
by the former has hegemonic effects. Hence, there is no immediate reason for non-Western
people to forge alliances with WMW feminists when these feminists benefit from Western
domination. Although women of the Global North and South may share commonalities of
oppression (Rai 2011:34), the former have historically accessed specific privileges. During
colonialism, women were differently positioned in relation to gender, capital, colonialism,
sexuality and race: black women and women of colour on the colonies were colonised,
whereas white women were housewifised (Mies 1998:101). In the West, both the bourgeois and
proletarian women[2] performed the role of the housewife as an agent of consumption, with the
upper class women also being engaged in the demand for luxury goods and in maintaining the
class system (Mies 1998:104-6). The creation of the domesticated housewife meant the
withdrawal of white women from the newly constructed public sphere her and her family
came to be the Little White Mans [] colony (Mies 1998:110). Concomitantly, for every Aunt
Jemima who was maligned as a nonwoman, there was a Miss Ann imprisoned by the
definition of her femininity (Johnson-Odim 1991:318-9). The meaning of the feminine and the
masculine was distributed in opposition to what and who is not: the femininity available to the
white woman was denied to the black woman, whilst the masculinity of the white man was
denied to the enslaved black man (Harding 1991:179); and, of course, femininity and
masculinity were constructed in a Western-specific binary opposition. In terms of sexualised,
racialised and gendered norms, the enslaved women were characterised as sexually
aggressive, perverse and strong to do any sort of labor, whilst European women were
considered fragile and sexually passive (Lugones 2007:203). Considering the aforementioned
interconnections, the priority of a Global South feminist is not only gender but also imperialism,
neo-colonialism, racism and classism all affecting Global South women and the wider
population (Harding 1991:193; Johnson-Odim 1991:316-20). A gender-only focus of the master-
narrative of feminism does not take into account the multitude of experiences, histories and
knowledges: In fact, black, white, and other third world women have very different
histories with respect to the particular inheritance of post-fifteenth-century Euro-
American hegemony: the inheritance of slavery, enforced migration, plantation and
indentured labor, colonialism, imperial conquest, and genocide (Mohanty 1991:10). Within
the ideology of white supremacy, whiteness[3] leaves white feminists racialised identity
unexamined, leading to a distorted view of both themselves and those different from them
(Harding 1991:209; hooks 1984:55). Through othering, the WMW feminist is involved in
self-presentation and self-constitution as always-already superior, entitled, liberated,
emancipated, empowered, modern, educated and free (Mohanty 1986:337; Moore-Gilbert
2005:455). White supremacy is not only non-white peoples problem, but it is a white and
feminist issue due to its embedding in social reproduction, shaping identities, interactions,
experiences and social systems (Russo 1991:299-300). There is a distinction between women
as a discursively constructed group and women as material subjects of their own history
(Mohanty 1986:337-8). The WMW feminism assumes a universal ideal-type of Third World
woman defined in negative terms in relation to the referent. Within colonial-development studies
and industry, the signifier third world woman stands in for a monolithic, uni-dimensional,
essentialised and fixed category, stripped off agency, history and subjectivity; in other words, the
socially constructed identity of Global South women by the WMW feminism subsumes their
agency. This top-down fixation of women in ahistoricity and passivity creates the Third World
Difference which implies not only that all women are universally oppressed, but that third-world
women are even more so (Mohanty 1986:335). Within colonial-development, the WMW
approaches make use of a modern imaginary to enact a classificationist machinery to transform
differences into values (Mignolo 2012:13). With the inscription of values and classifications
upon women, their body becomes a site of struggle, a third colony additional to colonised
states and subjected nature (Aguinaga et. al. 2013:49) against which coloniality and patriarchy
enforce systematic violence. United strategically through strength, as feminists, for social
transformation: decolonisation, difference and solidarity. how can feminists collectively
understand multiple differences and asymmetries of power, use the insights from differences,
hear the anger, not the silences, and keep conviction? (Harcourt 2009:201) Although differences
have been misnamed for the ideal of homogeneity (Lorde 1984:119-20), the radical alterity and autonomous
assertion of difference by people in the Global South can replace the WMW enclosures and erasures because
womens positions, although different, are intertwined and interdependent (Glenn, cited by Russo 1991:303).
Difference can be used positively for transformative purposes to enact borderless solidarity outside of the hegemonic
parameters of the WMW feminism and to recognise the plurality of universalisms without sliding into relativism-
which are connected, politically autonomous and particularly situated. To avoid erasing the particular within the
universal or dichotomising the two, I follow Mohanty in arguing that the particular is often universally significant
(2003:501). The common differences shared between feminists cross-borders, and the commonalities of the
particularity of difference are tools for building bridges of solidarity and alliance based on interdependence and the
mutual recognition of agency and autonomy[4] inherent in all bodies (Russo 1991:305; Mohanty 2003:502-4). This
approach overcomes the Western myth of solipsism which depicts individuals as isolated, self-generated, self-
centred, above and beyond history and location (Grosfoguel 2012:88-9), revealing that patriarchy has no gender
(hooks 2014), just as whiteness has no colour (Mills 1997:127). Following from this, I argue that feminism does not
have gender either it is a political commitment to which people differently situated on the gender spectrum adhere.
Spivak argues that feminists of the Global North cannot encounter the Global
South without carrying a lot of baggage, and for this reason the former
ought to acknowledge their complicity and position in the geopolitical,
global context (Kapoor 2004:628; 641). Solidarity can be shown through positive
acknowledgement of difference and by strategically using positivist essentialism in a
scrupulously visible political interest (Spivak 1988:205). One cannot be purely anti- or non-essentialist,
as the subject is always centered (Spivak 1990:109); strategic essentialism, then, requires being conscious of the
(im)possibility of escaping essentialism, and using ones location for social transformation. It is to be noted that some
feminists who critique the homogenisation and abstract universalisation of the WMW womens experience, are
involved in essentialising and relativising culture instead (Narayan 1998:87-88), thus not committing themselves to
challenging injustice and to acknowledging the involvement of the West within other cultures. For instance,
gendered divisions in the Global South were consolidated/exacerbated through colonisation and
the import of institutions where female-male complementarity was not conceived of in equal
terms: the colonizers addressed their demands and their technical innovations to men, thus
favouring mens access to cash, the economic dependency of women and, as a result, the
emergence of the patriarchal nuclear family (Etienne and Leacock 1980b:19). Within
mainstream colonial-development studies, solipsism and the dichotomy created between value-
free objectivity and judgemental relativism are prevalent (Harding 1991:139); instead, writing
needs to take on the perspective of groups and ideas which have been subalternised and
left out of conventional knowledge. Standpoint epistemology is a method which shows
the positive and objective nature of the outsiders within (Harding 1991:150), being in
part [] a struggle against the illiteracy of the elite (Hirsh and Olson 2005:194). It allows
the Other to gaze back shamelessly at the self who had reserved for himself the right to gaze
anonymously at whomsoever he chooses (Harding 1991:150). In other words, the
standpoint analysis begins from the perspective of marginalised subjects (Mohanty
2003:511), decentring both Western epistemology as the referent, and the researchers
role as the framer of decolonising knowledge (Langdon 2013:394). It acknowledges
embodied realities and the historically-situated and partial dimension of knowledge, which leads
to strong objectivity and reflexivity (the neutral objectivism and judgemental relativism have
weak objectivity) (Harding 1991:142). As the costs of colonial-development are carried out by
Third World women (Harding 1991:206), their experiences give them epistemological
advantage. Decoloniality and the praxis of decolonisation are feminist issues and alternatives to
development which allow for self-actualisation and creation of new imaginaries, outside of the
confines of the current colonial-developmentalist, hegemonic gender-based policies and
assemblages of laws, ideas and institutions. Decoloniality has at its core the idea of pluri-
versalisms, and in actuality one cannot discuss decoloniality in a singular form, as its praxis is
socially and historically situated, and informed by the local, daily struggles of people who are
positively different (Grosfoguel 2012). Decolonisation involves the concrete unsettling of settler
domination and their use of land, water, air, animals, and the repatriation of Indigenous land
(Tuck and Yang 2012:18-22), as well as dismantling the colonial fields of knowledge and
being (lived experience), so as to stop the reproduction of the whitestream pattern of
uncritical thinking, and to make space for inter-epistemic conversations (Aguinaga et. al.
2013:57; Grosfoguel 2012:101). In analysing the Canadian Constitutions impact upon Indigenous people in Canada,
Ladner argues that decolonisation as a gendered project must be grounded in indigenous understandings of gender,
challenging masculinist ideas of sovereignty and nationalism. Conversely, when decolonising gender, the focus
should not be only on women, but also on the construction of masculinity (2009:72) to reimagine gender roles,
loyalties and relations.

Orientalism creates a mindset that justifies colonialism,

hypersexualization, and otherization
Bakli 14 (Sara, Free-lance writer and blogger, Published by Jenn Incorporation,
Published April 17 2014, What is Orientalism, and how is it also racism?,
http://reappropriate.co/2014/04/what-is-orientalism-and-how-is-it-also-racism/) RR Jr
While Orientalism led to a Western fascination with Asia as an exotic land equal parts
captivatingly romantic and terrifyingly barbaric perhaps the most important aspect of Orientalism is how it
defined Asian men and women against the Western norms of gender identity. Compared to stalwart European men and

chaste European women, Asian men and women were recast in the European
imagination as specific counter-points to these expected gender norms: Asian
women became hypersexualized, unsatiable, creatures in one Medieval text described as standing
thirteen feet tall and having ox-tails emerging from their genitals, whereas described by Marco Polo as either dainty courtesans or voracious prostitutes

Asian men are portrayed as slight, stooping, meek and unassertive barbarians
whereas

who attack in faceless hordes to make up for their easy defeat in single combat by European men. Furthermore, in
Orientalism, the land of the Orient is, itself, feminized, which invites subsequent
conquest in overtly sexual language by the virile West . Polo discusses the many Asian wives that
Western traders take, literally wresting the Asian woman from the Asian man. Columbus endeavour to discover Asia by sea was cast as taking

the Orient is not merely the Other of the West, but an

possession of these lands. Thus, in Orientalism,

Other that stands as a prize or trophy, to be dominated or conquered by the West.

Importantly, when the West is the standard against which the Orient is defined, the Orient

cannot, by definition, be a point of empath y. As defined in its distance from norm, Asia instead
becomes a thing to be possessed, and populated with a people who are not quite
normal and therefore not quite human. In short, when the Orient becomes a land of
the Other, the people of the Orient become the Other , too; Orientalism becomes
dehumanization. This, not surprisingly, paved the way for multiple Western efforts to
colonize economically, culturally, and militaristically Asia. I neednt go into the many examples of the Wests incursions
into the East, all of which share at their core the perception that the West has a moral and
cultural imperative to subdue through whatever means necessary the bizarre traditions and
abnormal people of the Eastern Other based entirely upon the Orients deviancy.

Thus we advocate a politics of feeling and a participatory approach to the

discourse on Chinese sex workers. In doing so, Riya and I acknowledge
our privileged positions and attempt to start a movement in the right
direction.

A politics of feeling privileges emotions, feelings and meanings in accessing lived experiences
or lived cultures and explores experiences, meanings, practices through the tension or
mediation between feeling and reason involved in critical interpretive ethnography. Maggie
ONeill
A Politics of Feeling challenges the widely held, racist views of Western
feminists by opening the discourse to Chinese sex workers and therefore
creating an inclusive and emotion-centered space for all sex workers to
represent themselves.
ONeill 00 (Maggie ONeill, PhD., is a professor at Durham University. She has been actively
involved in sex worker and womens rights since 1990 and is a member of the National Network
of Sex Work Projects) *we do not endorse language in this card that excludes queer or male
voices
There is a great need to examine prostitution from a critical feminist woman-centred position (a
version/development of standpoint(s) feminism) that acknowledges the lived experiences of
women working as prostitutes within the context of sexual and social inequalities. Such
an approach should aim to give sex workers a voice by working with them through participatory
action research. This describes the approach taken in this text. The reflexive interrelationship between feminist
theory, womens lived experiences and policy-oriented practice articulated through feminist participatory action
research is central. Prostitution and violence, prostitution and the state, feminism, prostitution and the political
economy and the social organization of prostitution (at a national as well as a European level), the management of
female sexuality, sexual trafficking and tourism are all key themes and concerns. Identifying spaces of
resistance can become the means through which women-centred change can be developed on
a collective scale at local, national and international levels. The emphasis is upon exploring the
issues with women working as prostitutes, developing collective responses and, in so doing,
both challenging the ideology of individualism and responding to the criticisms of women
working as prostitutes towards feminism(s), begun by the work of Alexander, Nagle and
Chapkis.Feminist analyses of prostitution inevitably challenge the ways in which sexual and
social inequalities serve to reproduce ideology, patriarchy and the structuration of gender
relations. The central ideological problem for feminism is that the exchange of money for sex is
taken to be the exchange of equivalents. This is a socially created illusion and is central to the
commodification of womens bodies as use objects and our subsequent oppression in society.
Both first- and second-wave feminists have fought battles based on this very use value of
women and womens bodies. However, feminist thought must acknowledge that for some women prostitution
gives a good enough standard of income, relative autonomy and can be fitted in around child care. Prostitution has
always been a means for women to acquire an income economic need is the bottom line. Furthermore, as Nagles
work (1997) shows very clearly, many women are choosing work in the sex industry as dancers, peep-show workers,
lap-dancers, as a response to economic need and limited options. Focusing upon the moral rights and
wrongs of prostitution in the UK the enforcement of a justice model based upon Victorian
ideology and Wolfenden (which criminalizes and stigmatizes the whore but not her client)
hides the gender issues implicated in the question: why do men use prostitutes? It is this issue
which needs to be given more attention (gender relations and masculinities) while at the same
time working with prostitutes rights organizations, women working in prostitution and the wider
sex industry to address sexual and social inequalities. As the work of Chapkis (1997) shows,
feminism(s) and feminists must face up to the contradictions inherent in working with and for women working
in the sex industry, and call for the return of civil liberties and the rights of human dignity to people
working as prostitutes. There is also a need for direct action from all those agencies working
with prostitutes, particularly at the level of the criminal justice system, to explore their policies,
codes of practice and funding mechanisms in order to develop more woman-centred responses.
Feminists necessarily challenge the discrimination and oppression of women. Creating a space
for women involved in prostitution to be heard, and, in turn, for feminist research to inform
theory and practice around womens involvement in the sex industry, is at the very heart of
this approach and can serve to resist, challenge and change sexual and social inequalities via
feminist praxis on an individual and a collective level.
This solves orientalist views rely on the dominance of Western
representations of the Orient, rather than their own representations of
themselves. A politics of feeling wherein these sex workers can represent
themselves inherently destroys the power of the west to project its
orientalist representations of them.
Said 78 (Edward Said, Frmr prof, English and Comp Lit, Columbia. PhD, Harvard)
Yet what German Orientalism had in common with AngloFrench and later American Orientalism
was a kind of intellectual authority over the Orient within Western culture. This authority must in
large part be the subject of any description of Orientalism, and it is so in this study. Even the
name Orientalism suggests a serious, perhaps ponderous style of expertise; when I apply it to
modern American social scientists (since they do not call themselves Orientalists, my use of the
word is anomalous), it is to draw attention to the way Middle East experts can still draw on the
vestiges of Orientalism's intellectual position in nineteenth-century Europe. There is nothing
mysterious or natural about authority. It is formed, irradiated, disseminated; it is instrumental, it is persuasive; it has
status, it establishes canons of taste and value; it is virtually indistinguishable from certain ideas it dignifies as true
and from traditions, perceptions, and judgments it forms, transmits, reproduces. Above all, authority can, indeed
must, be analyzed. All these attributes of authority apply to Orientalism, and much of what I do in this study is to
describe both the historical authority in and the personal authorities of Orientalism. -My principal methodological
devices for studying authority here are what can be called strategic location, which is a way of describing the author's
position in a text with regard to the Oriental material he writes about, and strategic formation, which is a way of
analyzing the relationship between texts and the way in which groups of texts, types of texts, even textual genres,
acquire mass, density, and referential power among themselves and thereafter in the culture at large. I use the notion
of strategy simply to identify the problem every writer on the Orient has faced: how to get hold of it, how to approach
it, how not to be defeated or overwhelmed by its sublimity, its scope, its awful dimensions. Everyone who writes about
the Orient must locate himself vis-a-vis the Orient; translated into his text, this location includes the kind of narrative
voice he adopts. the type of structure he builds, the kinds of images, themes, motifs that circulate in his text-all of
which add up to deliberate ways of addressing the reader, containing the Orient, and finally, representing it or
speaking in its behalf. None of this takes place in the abstract, however. Every writer on the Orient (and this is true
even of Homer) assumes some Oriental precedent, some previous knowledge of the Orient, to which he refers and
on which he relies. Additionally, each work on the Orient affiliates itself with other works, with audiences, with
institutions, with the Orient itself. The ensemble of relationships between works, audiences, and some particular
aspects of the Orient therefore constitutes an analyzable formation-for example, that of philological studies, of
anthologies of extracts from Oriental literature, of travel books, of Oriental fantasies-whose presence in time, in
discourse, in institutions (schools, libraries, foreign services) gives it strength and authority. It is clear, I hope, that my
concern with authority does not entail analysis of what lies hidden in the Orientalist text, but analysis rather of the
text's surface, its exteriority to what it describes. I do not think that this idea can be overemphasized. Orientalism
is premised upon exteriority, that is, on the fact that the Orientalist, poet or scholar,
makes the Orient speak, describes the Orient, renders its mysteries plain for and to the
West. He is never concerned with the Orient except as the first cause of what he says. What he
says and writes, by virtue of the fact that it is said or written, is meant to indicate that the
Orientalist is outside the Orient, both as an existential and as a moral fact. The principal product
of this exteriority is of course representation: as early as Aeschylus's play The Persians the
Orient is transformed from a very far distant and often threatening Otherness into figures that
are relatively familiar (in Aeschylus's case, grieving Asiatic women). The dramatic immediacy of
representation in The Persians obscures the fact that the audience is watching a highly artificial
enactment of what a non-Oriental has made into a symbol for the whole Orient. My analysis of
the Orientalist text therefore places emphasis on the evidence, which is by no means invisible,
for such representations as representations, not as "natural" depictions of the Orient. This
evidence is found just as prominently in the so-called truthful text (histories, philological
analyses, political treatises) as in the avowedly artistic (i.e., openly imaginative) text. The things
to look at are style, figures of speech, setting, narrative devices, historical and social
circumstances, not the correctness of the representation nor its fidelity to some great original.
The exteriority of the representation is always governed by some version of the truism
that if the Orient could represent itself, it would; since it cannot, the representation does
the job, for the West, and faute de mieux, for the poor Orient. "Sie konnen sich nicht vertreten,
sie mussen vertreten werden," as Marx wrote in The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte.
Another reason for insisting upon exteriority is that I believe it needs to be made clear about
cultural discourse and exchange within a culture that what is commonly circulated by it is not
"truth" but representations. It hardly needs to be demonstrated again that language itself is a
highly organized and encoded system, which employs many devices to express, indicate,
exchange messages and information, represent, and so forth. In any instance of at least written
language, there is no such thing as a delivered presence, but a re-presence, or a
representation. The value, efficacy, strength, apparent veracity of a written statement about the
Orient therefore relies very little, and cannot instrumentally depend, on the Orient as such. On the
contrary, the written statement is a presence to the reader by virtue of its having excluded, displaced, made
supererogatory any such rear thing as "the Orient." Thus all of Orientalism stands forth and away from the Orient:
that Orientalism makes sense at all depends more on the West than on the Orient, and this
sense is directly indebted to various Western techniques of representation that make the Orient
visible, clear, "there" in discourse about it. And these representations rely upon institutions,
traditions, conventions, agreed-upon codes of understanding for their effects, not upon a distant
and amorphous Orient. The difference between representations or the Orient before the last third of the
eighteenth century and those after it (that is, those belonging to what I call modern Orientalism) is that the range of
representation expanded enormously in the later period. It is true that after William Jones and Anquetil-Duperron, and
after Napoleon's Egyptian expedition, Europe came to know the Orient more scientifically, to live in it with greater
authority and discipline than ever before, But what mattered to Europe was the expanded scope and the much
greater refinement given its techniques for receiving the Orient, When around the turn of the eighteenth century the
Orient definitively revealed the age of its languages- thus outdating Hebrew's divine pedigree-it was a group of
Europeans who made the discovery, passed it on to other scholars, and preserved the discovery in the new science
of Indo-European philology. A new powerful science for viewing the linguistic Orient was born, and with it, as Foucault
has shown in The Order of Things, a whole web of related scientific interests. Similarly William Beckford, Byron,
Goethe, and Hugo restructured the Orient by their art and made its colors, lights, and people visible through their
images, rhythms, and motifs. At most, the "real" Orient provoked a writer to his vision; it very rarely guided it,
Orientalism responded more to the culture that produced it than to its putative object, which was also produced by the
West. Thus the history of Orientalism has both an internal consistency and a highly articulated
set of relationships to the dominant culture surrounding it. My analyses consequently try to show
the field's shape and internal organization, its pioneers, patriarchal authorities, canonical texts,
doxological ideas, exemplary figures, its followers, elaborators, and new authorities; I try also to
explain how Oriental ism borrowed and was frequently informed by "strong" ideas, doctrines,
and trends ruling the culture. Thus there was (and is) a linguistic Orient, a Freudian Orient, a
Spenglerian Orient, a Darwinian Orient, a racist Orient-and so on. Yet never has been such a
thing as a pure, or unconditional, Orient; similarly, never has there been a nonmaterial form of
Orientalism, much less something so innocent as an "idea" of the Orient. In this underlying conviction
and in its ensuing methodological consequences do I differ from scholars who study the history of ideas. For the
emphases and the executive form, above all the material effectiveness, of statements made by Orientalist discourse
are possible in ways that any hermetic history of ideas tends completely to scant. Without those emphases and that
material effectiveness Orientalism would be just another idea, whereas it is and was much more than that. Therefore I
set out to examine not only scholarly works but also works of literature, political tracts, journalistic texts, travel books,
religious and philological studies. In other words, my hybrid perspective is broadly historical and "anthropological,"
given that I believe all texts to be worldly and circumstantial in (of course) ways that vary from genre to genre, and
from historical period to historical period.
Embracing a politics of feeling allows us to acknowledge the complexity of
the situation faced by Chinese sex workers and distance ourselves from
false representations of them and their struggles.
ONeill 00 (Maggie ONeill, PhD., is a professor at Durham University. She has been actively
involved in sex worker and womens rights since 1990 and is a member of the National Network
of Sex Work Projects) *we do not endorse language in this card that excludes queer or male
voices
In trying to understand the politics of everyday life we need to acknowledge structures that
constrain and enable as part of the interrelationship between social processes and psychic
processes. We also need to be aware of the messiness and untidiness of human relations
(Rojek 1995: 106). One way of exploring and understanding the messiness and untidiness of
human relations is to listen to womens accounts of their particular biographies. In this study the
voices of women involved in prostitution are central in order to develop fuller
understanding of their lived experiences within prostitution as a patriarchal institution
and within patriarchal capitalism more generally for all women. As I have said, women
working as prostitutes, particularly on street, are a muted group. The dominant image of a
prostitute is a seedy, immoral, lazy, drug/alcohol abuser, a lower-class women, in fish-nets,
cheap erotic clothing and garish lipstick. Many documentaries on prostitution have reinforced
this view, as does the medias portrayal of the prostitute. The Hollywood film Pretty Woman , on the
other hand, was the stuff fantasies are made of: glossy and smooth (not much reality save for the attempted rape
scene), the beautiful working-class/underclass tart with the heart of gold goes from good-girl, to bad and back again
to good, thus maintaining social order and hegemonic heterosexuality, and lives happily ever after with rich business
man Richard Gere.

And - The Debate space is key to analyze questions of

oppression
Reid-Brinkley, 08 (Dr. Shanara R. Reid-Brinkley, professor at the University of Georgia focusing on
racial studies, argument and performance, and black feminist theory, she is also the director of debate, The Harsh
Realities of" acting Black": How African-American Policy Debaters Negotiate Representation Through Racial
Performance and Style, https://getd.libs.uga.edu/pdfs/reid-brinkley_shanara_r_200805_phd.pdf

The attempts at educational reform are not limited to institutional actors such as
the local, state, and federal governments. Non-profit organizations dedicated to alleviating the black/white achievement gap have also
proliferated. One such organization, the Urban Debate League, claims that Urban Debate Leagues have proven to increase literacy scores by 25%, to improve grade-point averages by 8
to 10%, to achieve high school graduation rates of nearly 100%, and to produce college matriculation rates of 71 to 91%. The UDL program is housed in over fourteen American cities
and targets inner city youths of color to increase their access to debate training. Such training of students defined as at risk is designed to offset the negative statistics associated with
black educational achievement. The program has been fairly successful and has received wide scale media attention. The success of the program has also generated renewed interest
amongst college debate programs in increasing direct efforts at recruitment of racial and ethnic minorities. The UDL program creates a substantial pool of racial minorities with debate

The debate community serves as a

training coming out of high school, that college debate directors may tap to diversify their own teams.

microcosm of the broader educational space within which racial ideologies are
operating. It is a space in which academic achievement is performed according to
the intelligibility of ones race, gender, class, and sexuality. As policy debate is
intellectually rigorous and has historically been closed to those marked by social
difference, it offers a unique opportunity to engage the impact of desegregation and
diversification of American education. How are black students integrated into a competitive educational community from which they have
traditionally been excluded? How are they represented in public and media discourse about their participation, and how do they rhetorically respond to such representations? If

racial ideology is perpetuated within discourse through the stereotype, then

mapping the intelligibility of the stereotype within public discourse and the attempts
to resist such intelligibility is a critical tool in the battle to end racial domination.
Education allows for the critical consciousness necessary to pursue social justice and
fight against oppression
Housee, Senior Lecturer in Sociology at the University of Wolverhampton, 2012
(Shirin, Whats the point? Anti-racism and students voices against Islamophobia, Race
Ethnicity and Education, Vol. 15, No. 1, January 2012, 101120, accessed 7/3/2015 JCP PB)
This article argues for making anti-racist thinking possible in class. The student voice, that critiques mainstream
thinking as found in the media and elsewhere, is a starting point for this political work. I argue that
teaching and learning in our classroom should encourage the critical consciousness necessary
for pursuing social justice. Whilst I acknowledge the limits of doing anti-racist campaign in university spaces, I argue that
this is a good starting point. And who knows, these educational exchanges may become (as with my own
story) the awakening for bigger political projects against injustices in our society. In conclusion I endorse
social justice advocates, such as Cunningham (cited in Johnson-Bailey 2002, 43) who suggest that educators re-direct
classroom practices and the curriculum, because: if we are not working for equity in our
teaching and learning environments, then...educators are inadvertently maintaining the status
quo. In conclusion I argue that a classroom where critical race exchanges and dialogues take place is
a classroom where students and teachers can be transformed. Transformative social justice
education calls on people to develop social, political and personal awareness of the damages of
racism and other oppressions. I end by suggesting that in the current times of Islamophobic racism, when racist attacks
are a daily occurrence, in August and September 2010 alone, nearly 30 people have been racially abused and physically attacked
(Institute of Race Relations 2010). The point of studying racism, therefore, is to rise to the anti-racist
challenge, and for me, a place to start this campaign is within Higher Education Institutions, optimistic as it might sound, I
believe, as asserted by Sheridan (cited in Van Driel 2004) that: Education can enlighten students and promote
positive attitudes.... Education settings can be the first arena in which battles can be fought
against Islamophobia. It is to education that our attention should be directed . (162)

Discourse defines peoples understanding of society and shape

society to fit the discourse inclusive discourse has real
potential for change.
Cassiman, 2008. Shawn A. Cassiman, Sociology Professor at University of Dayton, Resisting
the Neo-liberal Poverty Discourse: On Constructing Deadbeat Dads and Welfare Queens, 2008)

The perversity thesis outlined by Hirschtnan (1991) suggests, welfare recipients are not to blame, but are in fact the victims of a welfare
system designed to encourage the very sorts of behaviors associated with welfare mothers. In other words, there are perverse incentives
in the welfare system that, by design, encourages welfare receipt over wage work. Somers and Block (2005) examine the history of the
1834 New English Poor Law and the 1996 Welfare Reform Act or PRWORA drawing attention to the ... parallel ideational
transformations from poverty to perversity (268). They note that Murray (1984) resurrected the perversity thesis in his drive for welfare
reform. Murray argued, as had Malthus before him, that poverty was not the real problem affecting people in poverty, but the perverse
incentives built into a generous welfare state. The generosity of benefits was leading welfare recipients to spurn low wage labor in
favor of generous welfare benefits. A constructions truth is not a prerequisite to discursive domination . During
the welfare reform debates, opponents of welfare reform (Blank 1997) pointed out that in
real dollars, welfare benefits had
been steadily falling between the years of 1970 and 1990 and that rather than generous in comparison to other
welfare states, the benefit levels were quite inadequate (Gottschalk and Smeeding 1997). The discursive
construction of the welfare queen and its contributions to the welfare reform discourse also ignores, intentionally or not,
the inevitable and iterative nature of dependency (Fineman 2004), reifying selfsufficiency while
stigmatizing dependency (Fraser and Gordon 1994). The welfare queen is a myth, as is globalization, and yet this
mythical creation dominates the public imagination and the policy discourse (Cassiman 2005, 2006; Hancock
 2004; Lubiano 1992; Mink 1998; Resse 2005; Sidel 2006). Cruikshank (1997) argues that rather than the usual directional order of
discourse leads to policy, that the reverse is true. To rationalize policy, we need a discourse to explain it.
Either way, truthfulness is of little consequence.

Social change cannot be effected in the world unless there is a

vocabulary to construct subjects- ethical decision-making
requires attuning our ways of knowing to prevent the
normalization of the self that makes us complicit in the
ongoing violence and inequality perpetuated by racism only
our affs interruption can challenge the hidden violence of
dominant knowledges
Scott 9 prof of philosophy @ Vanderbilt
(Charles, Journal of Medicine and Philosophy, 34: 350367, Foucault, Genealogy,
Ethics)
In Foucaults analysis of the May 1968 uprising in France, he said that even though
things were coming apart there did not exist any vocabulary capable of
expressing that process (Foucault, 2000, 271). We could say on Foucaults terms that there did
not exist a way of knowing (a subject of knowledge) and the language and
concepts suited for the complex event of Frances transformation. A momentous
event happened without adequate tools for its recognition, analysis, and appropriation.
Consequently, in the following dispersion of quarreling groups and political factions, the 1968 crisis did
not at first become an effective discursive event that opened up a full range
of apparent problems and transformations for formal knowledge. That would require a
knowing subject that was turned away from the strongest discursive options, such as those of the current
Humanists, Marxists, Maoists, French colonialists, and French cultural supremacists. So much was falling
apart in France at the time that a subject of knowledge was needed that formed in the
interconnecting French crises, a subject informed by marginal experiences in comparison to the
experiences recognized by the dominant discourses, marginalized experiences like
those of Algerian soldiers, French prisoners, people oppressed by French colonialism,
people hammered down by Stalins communism or the Proletarian Cultural Revolution in China, and people in
highly energized, non-French cultures: a subject that developed with the voices and
experiences that were on the margins of the older and authoritative French way of life. In spite
of the stammering and stumbling in its aftermath, however, May, 1968 opened an opportunity for
a new vocabulary, a new discourse, and a new ethos for recognizing and knowing. Its event
made possible a transitional and transformative knowing subject whose relative
freedom and lack of establishment constituted a major, constructive epistemic difference from
the accepted discourses. Much more could be said on this issue, but my present, limited points are that in
the context of Foucaults thought, transformation of the knowing subject constitutes an
ethical event; and ethics on an individual level takes place as people work
on themselves to be able to change themselves enough to know differently and to
transform what is evident about others (Foucault, 2000, 2412).14 These two kinds of transformation take place in
genealogical knowing as Foucault conceives and practices it. Two different senses for ethics are at work here.
One sense refers to ways of life that are constituted by discourses, institutions, and
practicesby all manner of power formations that are not authored by singular individuals and that are
ingrained in peoples lives inclusive of their judgment, knowledge, and codes of behavior. A society, of course,
can have a variety of overlapping or competing ways of life, a variety of ethical
environments, and changes in these environments would compose ethical changes in this broad sense of
ethical. The knowledge that genealogy generates comprises a different discourse from many established ones
and puts in question many aspects of Western society, especially around the topics of madness, sex, crime,
challenges
normalcy, social/political suppression of people, and mechanisms of regulation and control. It
significant parts of our social environment, encourages deliberation and critique,
and intends to make a differential impact on contemporary ways of life. In addition
to his writing, Foucault was active in many causes designed to change political and
social formations and to have a broad social impact. He played a leading role, for example, in support of
Vietnamese boat people who were fleeing from persecution and being ignored by Western governments. He was
active in prison reform movements. He spoke out against what he found to be unacceptable injustices in Poland and
equally unacceptable silence in their regard in the West, against a Realpolitik that ignores suppression of people
passionate support of
and their liberties in countries other than ones own. He showed in multiple ways that
institutional transformation and of suppressed and suffering people can be carried
out without Humanism or other forms of universalizing or totalizing discourse. A
second sense of ethics for Foucault means a work on the self by the self.15 He
understood, for example, his writing (and his interviews) as processes of self-formation: I
havent written a single book that was not inspired, at least in part, by a direct personal experience, an experience
that he wants to understand better by finding a different vocabulary , changed combinations of
concepts, and the mutations they bring by connecting with aspects of experience that are barely emerging at the
borders of his awareness (Foucault, 2000, 244). His books, he says, compose experiences inclusive of his
own metamorphosis as he writes them and comes to a transformed connection with their topics.
He would also like for his books to provide readers with something akin to his
experience, to bring us to our limits of sense where transformations can occur (Foucault, 2000, 244). The sense
of ethics in this case is focused by individual experiences and the care they exercise in
connecting with them. In care for themselves, they work at maintaining or altering
their behavior and attitudes to appropriate themselves to their experiences.16 Foucault says that
his books are like invitations and public gestures to join in the books process, a process that he finds
transformative of aspects of contemporary life and potentially, should individuals join in,
transformative of the way they understand and connect with themselves (Foucault,
2000, 2456). Care for self has a very long lineage that Foucault spent his last years investigating.
Indeed, understanding himself without metaphysical help or universalized solutions was one aspect of his caring
self-relation.He carried out a project, deeply rooted in a Western tradition that makes caring for
oneself inseparable from the ways one knows oneself, the world, and others. In his
own process, he finds repeated instances of change in his self-world relation as he
experiences the impact of what he is coming to know at the borders of his
knowledge and identity. When these boundary-experiences (he calls them limit-experiences) occur, he
says, the clarity of some aspects of his identity dies in the impact of what he is coming to find. His affections
and behavior often change. As an author he attempts to write into his books these very processes for the
readers possible engagement. If I find through one of his books, for example, a way of knowing that
makes clear some of the dangers inherent in a well-established body of
knowledge or a mainstream institution, I have an opportunity for assessing those
dangers and choosing how I will connect with them and my experience of them. I might find
that what I know and the way I know are violated by what Foucaults work shows. I might find his
approach and the knowledge that it offers highly questionable or irrelevant for my life. I might experience
new questions, a need for change, an unexpected dissatisfaction with
what I have been accepting as true and good. If Foucaults works carry out their intention
and if I read them carefully, I am engaged in an experience that he found transformative and
that will make room for choices and problems that I can experience and that might bring me to an
edge where what I know meets a limit and the possibility for an altered discourse and
subjectivity. Coming in this way to an edge, a limit of the way I know and who I am in such
knowing brings together the epistemic and personal aspects of ethical experience.
The very act of caring for myself in this instance interrupts the subliminal processes of
normalization and sets in motion another kind of dynamics as I come to the limits of
my authorized experience and the emergence of a different kind of experience. I
am caring for myself, impacting my own affections, values, and way of knowing. The
dynamics of what Foucault calls biopower (the powerful complex of social forces that regulate human
behavior by means of, for example, health care delivery, education, and moral legislation in both broad and
corpuscular ways) are interrupted by a different dynamics that builds individual
autonomy. Self-caring instead of the anonymous dynamics of normalization begins to form my
selfs relation to itself. How will I appropriate the experience of limits and their transgression by emerging
voices, realities, and intensities? Who shall I be in their impact? How will I present myself to myself and
my environment should I affirm what is happening in the margins of my established identity?

Cites from narratives:

Li jun 98 - Peng,
Yenwen (2005). Of course they claim they were coerced: On Voluntary
Prostitution, Contingent Consent, and the Modified Whore Stigma. Journal of International
Women's Studies, 7(2), 17-35.)

Wei wei - Chen 3 (Selling Body / Selling Pleasure: Women Negotiating Poverty,
Work, and Sexuality Mei-Hua Chen PhD University of York The Centre for Women's
Studies 2003)