“Work? What work?”: the discourse of survivors of the prostituting system

Abstract

Nowadays, prostitution is one of the most polemic and divided issues among the feminist movement. In general terms, the argument is if whether we are dealing with a kind of work (the «sex work» position) or of a type of gender-based violence (abolicionist position). In Buenos Aires, this problem started becoming significant in the mid-90s, when prostituted people had to face persecution and imprisonment because of then current Police edicts. In 1995, a group of women and transvestites created the Argentine Association of Women Prostitutes, ammar [for it’s acronym in Spanish] within the Argentine Trade Union Center, cta [for it’s acronym in Spanish] and reported police abuses, while fighting for the derogation of the edicts that criminalised them. However, in 2002, disagreements aroused within AMMAR, regarding unionisation and the notion of «sex work». Those who did not consider prostitution a job but the violation of human rights of prostituted people, created AMMAR Capital, later known as the Argentine Women’s Association for Human Rights, AMDH [for it’s acronym in Spanish]. In recent years, the voices of abolitionist women, transvenstites and trans people who were prostituted have emerged; some of whom abandoned AMMAR and others whose journies vary. They call themselves survivors of the prostituting system, and through their lives testimonies (written or spoken) and a feminist critic of prostitution, they seek to raise awareness within their audicence and convince them. In this work, I intend to analyse the oral testimony of two survivors: Delia Escudilla and Florencia Guimaraes, making use of the audiovisual records of an activity that took place in the Health Sciences School at the Mar del Plata National University (UNMP) in 2017, in which both of them took part. Some thoughts by M. Batjin and V. N. Volóshinov about language in use and otherness will guide my analysis. I will particularly explore the notion of prostitution that they build in their enuntiation, as well as the relation they establish with other speeches about prostitution, as they reinforce or dispute them.