Deviant cosmopolitanism: Transgressive globalization and traveling citizenship

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Content DEVIANT COSMOPOLITANISM: TRANSGRESSIVE GLOBALIZATION AND
TRAVELING CITIZENSHIP
by
Charles Tsung Tang Lee
A Dissertation Presented to the
FACULTY OF THE GRADUATE SCHOOL
UNIVERSITY OF SOUTHERN CALIFORNIA
In Partial Fulfillment of the
Requirements for the Degree
DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY
(POLITICAL SCIENCE)
May 2006
Copyright 2006 Charles Tsung Tang Lee
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UMI Number: 3233792
Copyright 2006 by
Lee, Charles Tsung Tang
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Dedication
For Celia
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Acknowledgements
Since the day I passed my Qualifying Exam and moved on to candidacy, I
have dreamt about the day that I would complete my dissertation so I could write my
acknowledgements. It has been three years since then, with twists and turns on the
journey that I have not expected. It has been a long wait, so I cherish this
opportunity to thank all those who have guided and accompanied me on my
intellectual dwelling and traveling throughout these years.
My foremost thanks go to my dissertation committee. I was fortunate to have
met Marita Sturken and Alison Dundes Renteln at USC and wrote my dissertation
under their guidance. Marita taught me about cultural studies and opened up a whole
new intellectual horizon for me. I learn from her the importance of doing original
work while maintaining one’s political sensibility and responsibility. She provided
unfailing encouragement and unflinching criticisms on numerous drafts of this
manuscript—both when I most needed them. Alison has given me pivotal advice
and support on my writing, teaching, and professional development throughout my
graduate school career. She read drafts of the dissertation with scrupulous comments
and care, and provided poignant insights for revision. I thank her for teaching me
about human rights and for asking me important questions on citizenship that will
remain with me as the project further evolves. Nora Hamilton offered sustaining
support from beginning to end. She provided careful reading of the dissertation draft
after draft, and is a remarkable treasure of wisdom and insights. I have enjoyed and
learned from all the conversations with her on immigrant workers, and I thank her
iii
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for urging me to consider the heterogeneity of these traveling groups and what they
may do to push liberalism to provide for their citizenship rights. Many, many thanks
to Sarah Banet-Weiser, who joined the committee at a later stage of this project and
immediately provided acute insights on my methodology, theoretical arguments, and
writing on drafts of this dissertation that have helped me immensely to hone this
project into the final version. I am thankful for all of her fine-tuned advice and
encouragement.
Other scholars who are not on the committee have also made an impact on
my rethinking of the project at different stages. I thank Dana Polan for making my
arguments more nuanced and reminding me o f the role o f history in his critical
comments on the introduction, chapter 1 and chapter 2 when they were still in early
forms. Barbara Cruikshank is the first political theorist outside my ‘SC circle to
provide consistent encouragement and support on this project. I have benefited from
conversations with her especially on the introduction, chapter 1 and chapter 2. The
co-panelists and audience who provided comments and raised questions on early
drafts of the introduction and chapter 1 at previous meetings of the American
Political Science Association, Western Political Science Association, and Midwest
Political Science Association all helped me reshape this project from different
angles. I presented a paper on transsexuality at UCLA’s “Thinking Gender”
conference and the National Association for Ethnic Studies conference years ago
when I was still unsure what to write for my dissertation. Chapter 3 on
transsexuality has taken on a very different form since then, and I thank the
iv
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audience’s challenging questions and insightful comments that made me convinced
that I ought to pursue this subject further in the dissertation.
Several individuals have given me important mentoring in my graduate
career. Judith Grant was a crucial advisor until she left USC. It was her exceptional
teaching that made me decide to shift gears from comparative politics to political
theory. I thank Judith for providing me with the training in political theory without
which this project is not possible. I am thankful to Mark Kann for the opportunity to
do a reading with him on contemporary democratic theory that helps me gain a more
solid grounding in the field. Thanks also to Raymond Rocco, whose course on
difference and pluralism at UCLA and whose own work on transnational citizenship
have made an impact on the way I approach theoretical problems. Stan Rosen,
Sunhyuk Kim, and Ann Crigler provided consistent support and mentoring when I
first came to USC to do Chinese politics and political communication. My work has
taken on a very different direction since then. I thank each o f them, however, for
making me a better scholar in my early days of graduate school.
Friends in the Department o f Political Science at USC have helped make the
stress of academic work easier to bear. Jinee Lokaneeta and Sangay Mishra are
treasured friends who are difficult to find. For the last six years, I have enjoyed and
cherished their company on and off campus. Jinee is a peer mentor in many ways,
and I thank her for our ongoing conversations on this project and for her comments
on chapter 2 in particular. I thank Sangay for all the stimulating intellectual and
political discussions, and for his finely prepared curry whenever I go to their place
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hungry! For all o f our get-togethers, exchange o f ideas, and therapeutic sessions in
the dissertation support group, Club 794,1 thank Linda Veazey, Maya Sabatello, Art
Auerbach, Fred Gordon, Archana Agarwal, Yooil (Joseph) Bae, Jinee and Sangay.
My parents, Ronny Lee and Vera Lee, made the sacrifice to move our family
from Taiwan to the U.S. fifteen years ago when I felt I could no longer sanely dwell
in my native country’s school system during my teenage years. They never
imagined that I would go on to earn a Ph.D. and write this project, but they have
worked hard to make the cross-ocean travel possible and make our home on this land
a place where I can securely dwell. My sister, Melody Lee, allows me to be the first
person to taste her delicious dishes and always offers excellent advice. I thank all of
them for their steady support and unending love.
For the last ten years, Celia Ho has been a loving (and subversive) presence
in my life that I could never part. She pushes me harder than anyone to pursue what
I want to do, while always finds a way to deviate from my proposed trajectory of
what I want her to do. Her “traveling” spirit and “dwelling” sensibility manifested in
our everyday life somehow inform my thinking on this project through and through.
I thank her for being the way she is, and for sharing my laughs, my tears, and my
rant as my closest companion in my dwelling and traveling in various dimensions.
This dissertation is dedicated to her as we take on a new life journey together at the
conclusion o f my graduate career.
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Contents
Dedication ii
Acknowledgements iii
Abstract viii
Introduction 1
Crouching Travelers, Hidden Citizens: Traveling Citizenship and Deviant
Cosmopolitanism
Chapter 1 51
Tactical Citizenship: Domestic Nannies, Sweatshop Seamstresses, and
Undocumented Citizen Participation in the Third Space
Chapter 2 123
O f Tainted Bodies and Cosmopolitanism: Global Sex Workers,
Sexual Traveling, and Tainting Citizenship
Chapter 3 207
Cosmopolitanism Within: Transsexuality, Gender Dwelling/Traveling,
and Morphing Citizenship
Chapter 4 291
Bare Death: Lethal Travelers and Deathly Citizenship
Conclusion 358
Deviant Democracy
Bibliography 364
Vll
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Abstract
This dissertation examines four groups of “illegitimate" traveling figures vis-
a-vis modem state surveillance in the context of globalization: undocumented
domestic and sweatshop workers, global sex workers, transsexuals, and suicide-
bombing terrorists. While these subjects have historically been written outside the
framework of “citizens” as signs of cheap labor, fallen women, gender deviants, and
despicable fanatics, I place these societal outsiders in traveling narratives to look at
them as cosmopolitan traveling agents who can actually help us rethink about visions
of citizenship and cosmopolitanism.
Proceeding through an interdisciplinary methodology that involves textual
analysis and theoretical interpretation o f literatures that traverse the fields o f political
theory, cultural studies, ethnography, globalization studies, postcolonial theory,
feminist theory, queer/transgender studies, and terrorism studies, I read these
subjects’ illegitimate acts of travel as signaling an insistent desire in search of
alternative sites of dwelling when situated in conditions where neither secure
“dwelling” nor legitimate “traveling” is possible. By pointing to the ways in which
the conventional notion of citizenship contains an inherent “dwelling trajectory” that
confers formal rights and entitlements upon subjects but also reproduces a fixed
social order of citizenship in several dimensions—national, gender, political,
economic, and moral-legal— I argue that each group of the traveling agents
transgresses one particular dimension o f citizenship in the most salient way in
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marking alternative dwelling spots for themselves as legible denizens and (non
existent) “citizens.”
I call these transgressive citizenship imaginaries, “traveling citizenship,”
including: tactical citizenship (undocumented domestic/sweatshop workers), which
re-scripts the “political” dimension o f citizenship; tainting citizenship (global sex
workers), which subverts the “economic” dimension; morphing citizenship
(transsexuals), which crosses over the “gender” dimension; and deathly citizenship
(terrorists), which digresses from the ultimate, “moral-legal” dimension. Traveling
citizenship functions as an internal abject presence inside democracy from which
democracy cannot part, while slowly and tactically expanding and reshaping our
interactive cosmopolitan horizons in the public sphere. The challenge for democracy
is to empower these traveling figures with rights that would provide them with a
sense of secure “dwelling,” thus also transforming the way they do “travel.”
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Introduction
Crouching Travelers, Hidden Citizens: Traveling Citizenship and Deviant
Cosmopolitanism
To live in the twenty-first century is to live in a moment of flux, travel, and
movement. In this day and age of “globalization,'” refugees, border-crossers, and
foreign workers travel all around in search of a more humane living standard in an
unprecedented fashion. According to Marcelo M. Suarez-Orozco,
At the dawn of the Millennium there are an estimated 175 million transnational
immigrants and refugees. One in 20 Londoners today is an asylum seeker, Leicester
in England will soon be the first city in Europe where “whites" will be a minority;
Rotterdam is 45 percent immigrant. Frankfurt is roughly a third immigrant;
Amsterdam will be 50 percent immigrant within a generation. China alone has over
150 million immigrants. The US, mythical land of immigrants, now has the largest
number of new arrivals in history—over 34 million people—more than the entire
Canadian population and more than three times the Swedish population. In NYC
today half of all children live in immigrant and refugee headed households
originating in 199 different countries. In Los Angeles, the largest city in a state that
now has over 11 million Latin American origin folk, 70 percent of all children in
schools come from Latino homes, the vast majority of them immigrants or the
children of immigrants. Nation-wide immigrant children are the fastest growing
sector of the US child population.1
Accompanied with these full-fledged migratory movements, however, is the fear of
the undocumented travelers. Globalization signifies a contentious moment over the
politics o f travel. In the U.S., for example, ever since the terrorist attack on
September 11, 2001, national airports intensify security control; southern borders
next to Mexico are armed with ever stringent surveillance on undocumented
migrants; and the movement and flow of human thought is closely monitored via the
USA Patriot Act. Terrorism provides those who are already discontented with the
“flooding” o f immigrants a further motivation to crack down on the “illegals.”
Fighting back for their right to be here, more than 500,000 people gathered in
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downtown Los Angeles on March 25, 2006, former and present undocumented
immigrants among them, marching down the streets protesting against the pending
federal legislations that would make illegal immigration a felony and build a security
wall along the U .S /s southern border.
If “traveling into” the state has caused concerns and triggered monitoring and
punishment, however, “traveling out” of the state has always been considered an
essential feature of state politics. Most o f the state’s major political agenda cannot
be accomplished without the act of traveling out: diplomacy requires the traveling of
statesmen; war requires the traveling of soldiers; and promotion of global economy
and national prosperity requires the traveling (expansions, relocations) of
transnational corporations. Traveling is thus a political necessity, something to be
deployed, maneuvered, and regulated depending on domestic needs and global
conditions in the eyes o f political leadership.
The conflicting tensions associated with travel were apparent already in the
ancient Greece. Caren Kaplan points out that the ancient Greek city-state regularly
sponsored a body o f sacred envoys, known as theors, to go out to perform religious
rite or duty. According to Kaplan, “the state-sponsored theor is also referred to as a
‘spectator,’ as ‘one who travels in order to see things.’”3 While this “traveling out”
was a regular state function, Plato in his The Republic exuded a concern with the evil
and strange influences “coming in” from the outside to corrupt the minds of the
citizens and subvert the established order, proclaiming that “the overseers of the city
must cleave to this, not letting it be corrupted unawares, but guarding it against all
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comers."4 This tension about traveling “in” and “out” demonstrates that traveling
has long been an intertwining factor in the problematic of politics and power o f any
given state. The only difference between now and then lies in the immense speed,
degree, and qualitative changes brought about by the current process of globalization
that sets it apart from previous modes of transnational contact, and which also
intensifies the fear of unregulated and illegitimate travel.
The surveillance measures imposed on the moving bodies are indeed nothing
new. As David Lyon points out, “The practice of locating, tracking, and controlling
bodies is as old as history, although it was routinized and intensified by the
disciplines of modernity.”5 The very inscription of subjects into modem
“citizenship” also initiates the process of the state’s systematic surveillance o f its
population. The civil, political and social rights granted to citizens in the age of
modernity imply that “people had to be registered, and their personal details filed,
which of course paradoxically facilitated their increased surveillance. Freedom from
one set of constraints— those o f feudal societies— gave opportunities for new forms
of surveillance of control.” Lyon points out, “By the last quarter o f the twentieth
century, extensive systems of mass surveillance had been established throughout all
liberal capitalist societies, each o f which depended on the documentary identification
of individuals, ... [such as] birth certificates, driver’s licenses, social security cards,
passports, bank books, and credit cards.”6 Ensuring a proper conduct of traveling
“in” and “out” o f its national borders can be seen as part of the liberal state’s modem
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coding o f surveillance, inspection, regulation, monitoring, registering, classifying,
licensing and rectification of human bodies.
Michel Foucault has identified the modem state’s governing of the
population, specifically “its taking charge of life, more than the threat of death," as a
form of bio-power that advances beyond the convention usage of sovereign power.7
Instead of operating through the sanction of killing, the essential art o f modem state
governance is to oversee the welfare o f the population (wealth, longevity, health, etc.)
through mechanisms of calculation, monitoring, regulation and utilization. Foucault
observes, “population comes to appear above all else as the ultimate end of
o
government.” Bio-power taps into the bodies and souls of every citizen-subject to
ensure the reproduction of the social body in a “proper” way.9 Migration or traveling
that has the potential in affecting the moral equilibrium o f the social body fits right
into the agenda o f state governance o f the population.
Yet, despite the state’s all-encompassing panopticon, it has simply been
unable to catch every single “problematic” traveling element. It appears that even as
the liberal state boosts its efforts in cracking down on “illegitimate” moving subjects,
potentially “disruptive” travelers have not been deterred, if not growing even more
rapidly and spreading out, finding a multiplicity of channels to go around the
security apparatuses in order to reach their desired destinations and accomplish their
desired objectives. Jane Caplan and John Torpey argue in the introduction to
Documenting Individual Identity, “the controlling eye o f the state ... has been
enabling as well as subordinating, and has created rights as well as police powers.”1 0
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The liberal surveillance in winnowing out the potentially dangerous segment is not
always successful, and each passing subject poses potential counterclaim of
resistance. Caplan and Torpey write,
Human agency remains a decisive factor in the genealogy of identification practices,
which tend automatically and immediately to generate strategies by individuals (and
sometimes even by organized groups) to undermine their effectiveness. The very
multiplicity of these documents ... open spaces in which administors are driven to
imperfect strategies of coordination and improvisation, while citizens can imagine
and adopt new identities and relationships. In short, states and their subjects/citizens
routinely play cat-and-mouse with individual identification requirements, ... even
i f ... so far the cat has held the better cards.1 1
Illegal immigration, trafficking of narcotics, and terrorism are but a few ostentatious
examples in globalization of the mice outsmarting the claws of the big cat.
Contemporary discussions of globalization have often centered on
dichotomous inquiries on whether globalization pushes toward a modernizing,
pluralizing, and democratizing world (the “end o f history” thesis) or leads to a
widening global inequality and antidemocratic tide (the “end of democracy”
treatise).1 2 Much less attention has been tended to the deviance and transgression
brought about by the multi-series of “cat-and-mouse” struggles over the
(re)distribution o f rights, powers, and citizenships that would define globalization as
a more open-ended, contested, and negotiated terrain. If, according to Foucault, the
panoptical gaze o f the modem state works to bring subjects in line through
disciplinary mechanisms in reproducing a docile and governable population,1 3 how
do theorists make of the cultural and political meanings o f acts of travel that go
around and subvert the disciplinary gazing o f modem state apparatuses, thereby
interrupting the “rational” logics o f liberal governance and global integration?
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Indeed, how should we look at the subjects who put to “illegitimate” acts of travel in
battling the modem state surveillance system in the cat-and-mouse struggles in the
context of globalization? While sharing many left progressive analyses that point to
the debilitating and antidemocratic symptoms of globalization, I choose to sidestep
the “either/or” description and prescription of globalization by focusing on resistance
and contestations by several groups o f “illegitimate” travelers under the panoptical
surveillance system. As I will argue, these contestations do not so much resemble
‘V/wb-globalization” or “counter-empire” as tactical interventions that bear the
possibility of building alternative cosmopolitan visions and futures along the abject
edges of globalization.
In this project, I examine four groups of what I term “traveling agents” vis-a-
vis modem state surveillance: undocumented immigrants working as domestic
nannies and sweatshop seamstresses, global sex workers, transsexuals, and terrorists.
Rather than looking at these figures who are historically written outside the
framework o f “citizenship” as signs o f illegal labor, fallen women, gender
“deviants,” or despicable fanatics, I argue that they are global traveling agents who
can actually help us rethink visions o f citizenship and cosmopolitanism. By reading
their acts o f travel metaphorically as a means of finding alternative sites o f dwelling
and expanding their resources of livelihood and spaces of operation, I argue that
these traveling agents induce a series o f transgressive citizenship imaginaries that are
critical in building alternative cosmopolitan visions and futures. I call these
imaginaries, traveling citizenship. By saying “imaginaries” I do not mean that they
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are fictional, but normative visions derived from actual, alternative practices of
contesting for citizenship rights that are still “non-existent” because they transgress
the inherent national, gender/sexual, and moral-legal boundaries of citizenship. At
the same time, I do not assume that these subjects deliberately or knowingly create
all these imaginaries; rather, 1 offer a particular way o f interpreting these traveling
agents as participants in these citizenship imaginaries in order to enable the
recognition o f their transgressive acts as acts o f “citizenship.”
As I will show, these transgressive configurations of citizenship: 1) point to
the failure of conventional nation-state citizenship in fulfilling the needs (of dwelling
and traveling) for many subordinate subjects, and 2) turn citizenship from (what has
become) a mundane object and national artifact into new cosmopolitan possibilities.
To be sure, traveling citizenship does not name a radical, transformative response to
the hegemonic system. But in the cracks and holes around modem state surveillance,
traveling agents can be seen as generating moments o f political participation as
“non-existent citizens.” Within limited terrain, we may read their transgressive acts
as re-scripting and extending the possibilities of citizenship and cosmopolitanisms
for alternative democratic imaginations.
In the following, section I will first contextualize my understanding of
“travel.” Theorists o f travel such as James Clifford and Caren Kaplan have
previously recaptured “travel” from association with colonial privilege by theorizing
its imbrications in the history o f the migratory movement o f the less mobile and
marginalized subjects. Yet, it is unclear how “travel” as a term is significantly
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different from “migration.” By working through Foucault's notion of “revolts
against the gaze” and Michel de Certeau’s concept of “tactics,” I will situate my use
of travel in the context of the global nation-state surveillance apparatuses. I argue
that travel further manifests a “tactical” agency that makes do with, evades, and
trespasses the surveillance system and its accompanied moral-legal order. More so
than “migration,” travel speaks of a human contingency that is not content with
being reined and put in place, an agency that seeks to keep moving away from
taming grasp and disciplinary constraints. Without arguing that the rebellious tactics
I
involved in traveling are liberatory or transformative, I nonetheless point to the ways
in which each “crouching” traveler passing through the state surveillance system is a
potential “hidden” citizen imbued with critical cultural and political meanings.
Section II places citizenship in dwelling/traveling terms, and identifies an
inherent “dwelling trajectory” embedded in citizenship, which confers formal rights
and entitlements upon subjects but also binds them in place (in national, gender,
political, economic, and moral-legal terms). The dwelling trajectory of citizenship
functions in a repetitive, mundane cycle in producing a standardized national subject,
male or female, who works and consumes, saves and invests, and pays taxes in the
productive cycle o f capitalism as a law-abiding citizen-worker, and who periodically
participates along with others in an orderly manner in the business of governing
through the bureaucratic representative matrix, within a national territory. As I will
note, however, the current neo-liberal globalization forces that contribute to a
widening global inequality and operate by a hyper-individualist “self-care” ethos
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have shattered many subordinate subjects' sense of secure dwelling. When official
citizenship fails to fulfill the needs of secure dwelling and livelihood for these
subordinate citizen-subjects who now desire escape in search of alternative sites of
dwelling, the state’s insistent “dwelling” mode becomes suffocating. Here,
“traveling agents” takes on double meanings, not simply as subjects who travel, but
specifically those who refuse to be reined in and put in place, who transgress and
reconfigure the dwelling trajectory of citizenship as it were a mundane object and
outmoded artifact. Traveling citizenship, then, describes a series o f alternative
citizenship imaginaries derived from the unruly practices of undocumented subjects
(non-citizens or second-class citizens) who transgress the numerous boundaries of
the dwelling trajectory of citizenship in seeking a way out of their current state of
subjection and taking rights and powers as (non-existent) “citizens.”
Section III provides a further linkage between traveling citizenship and
cosmopolitanism. James Clifford in his seminal work, “Traveling Cultures,” moves
successfully beyond both (elitist) corporate cosmopolitanism and (Western)
philosophical cosmopolitanism by examining actual migratory experiences and
cultural exchanges in history, thereby providing the crucial link between “travel” and
“cosmopolitanism.” Establishing the notion of what he calls the actually existing,
discrepant cosmopolitanisms, Clifford tends to the differentiated and discrepant
experiences of ethno subjects traveling along the hegemonic circuit of globalization
rooted in historical and geographical contexts. As I will argue, however, given his
rather overarching framework and his emphasis on inter ethnic-cultural-national
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exchange, Clifford’s discrepant cosmopolitanisms lacks a further specificity in
looking at how subordinate subjects transgress the moral-legal order of the
“cosmopolitan” horizon. As a point of departure, I invoke the term deviant
cosmopolitanism to describe the interactive horizons of citizenship with subjects put
to abject and uncanny ways of living and acting as “cosmopolitan” citizens by
crossing not just national boundaries, but also the “proper” bounds of gender,
sexuality, politics, economics, morality and legality. As I will argue, looking at
these alternative citizenship stories can better help us think about cosmopolitanism in
more inclusive and innovative ways. Finally, upon addressing the interdisciplinary
methodology o f the project and selection of populations in section IV, I will provide
a layout of the chapter plan in section V.
I. Crouching Travelers, Hidden Citizens: Traveling Bodies and Revolts
against the Gaze
Recent scholarships on “travel,” in an anti-colonial and postcolonial vein,
have rightly recaptured the term from its historical association with colonial privilege
to apply it to subordinate migrant and exiled subjects. Despite this progressive look
at “travel,” however, it is also unclear how “travel” as a term is substantively
different from “migration.” By working through Foucault’s notion of “revolts
against the gaze” and Michel de Certeau’s concept of “tactics,” I will situate travel in
the context of the global nation-state surveillance apparatuses and argue that the term
further manifests a “tactical” agency that makes do with, evades, and trespasses the
state surveillance system and its accompanied moral-legal order.
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“Travel” as a concept is historically linked to privilege and leisure, an activity
available only to the modem metropolitan subjects who were predominantly
European, bourgeois, and male. To say that someone is always “going places”
underlies the privilege o f mobility that is only available for the few and inaccessible
to others. In colonial times, traveling is associated with imperialist domination.
Mary Louise Pratt has written about how European travel books and exploration
writings about non-European regions from the eighteenth to the twentieth centuries
helped produce “‘the rest o f the world’ for European readership” that legitimated the
economic and political expansion of the empire.1 4 Traveling invokes imagery of
vessels and steamships carrying colonial explorers to the barren and exotic lands of
the “mysterious” races o f the Orient.
In the modem, “postcolonial” era, the connotations of privilege and power
associated with travel are further subsumed in the incarnation o f the tourist. Louis
Turner and John Ash argue, “Tourism is an invasion outwards from the highly
developed metropolitan centers into the ‘uncivilized’ peripheries.”1 5 The traveling
elite is, for the most part, defined by age, income and social status: “The younger
generation tends to travel somewhat more than its elders; people in managerial and
professional jobs tend to be internationally mobile; so do people whose jobs give
them long paid holidays. The key factor, however, is obviously income.”1 6 Turner
and Ash argue that “the tourist belt which surrounds the great industrialized zones of
the world” forms a global “Pleasure Periphery” that sells “primitivity” for the mass
consumption o f metropolitan tourists. They write,
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The tourist comes from a highly developed urban culture, and therefore seeks its
opposites ... in search of the exotic and the simple.... The tourist travels from his
metropolitan home to the world of antiquity, the picturesque, pre-industrial cultures
and to the unspoilt animal kingdoms of African game reserves.1 7
In a subsequent study, Priscilla Boniface and Peter Fowler also echo:
Tourism feeds on the colonial impulse. Part of the appeal, the frisson, of traveling to
strange islands is the opportunity that it may afford to patronize the poor native
unfortunates who may know no better way of life than that of their homeland.
Tourism, in many ways, is a sort of neo-colonialism.1 8
Travel for the most part is attached to the privileged and the middle-class in the
Northern industrial zones.
But upon further reflection, the global forces that are currently operating have
pushed even the most marginalized in the Third World to move and relocate in
search for a minimal living standard. Can’t we understand the subordinates’
movement as a form of “travel”? Frances Bartkowski writes,
Travel is movement, movement through territorialized spaces, movement by those
who choose to move and those who are moved by forces not under their control.
Travel then could suggest crossing cultural boundaries, trespassing, visiting, capture.
It could open up the possibility of removing the term from its class-bound
associations with exploitation and pleasure-seeking, and remind us that those
exploited are often forced into movement as an integral part of their exploitation.'9
bell hooks cautions against such an undertaking of linking “travel” to the under
classed and under-privileged, arguing that, “Travel is not a word that can be easily
evoked to talk about the Middle Passage, the Trail of Tears, the landing of Chinese
immigrants, the forced relocation of Japanese-Americans, or the plight of the
homeless.” Caren Kaplan explains hooks’ repulsion to the idea of travel: “‘travel,’
as it is used in Euro-American criticism, cannot escape the historical legacies of
capitalist development and accumulation, of imperialist expansion, and of inequities
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of numerous kinds.”2 1 But it is worth considering whether it is not the case that these
marginalized subjects do not travel, but rather that the dominant ideological
discourse has preempted an understanding of their “traveling” as travel, or serious
travel.
As Kaplan notes, “Etymologically, travel is linked to travail, or ‘labor, toil,
suffering, trouble.’ Thus, in addition to the more commonplace meaning of taking a
journey, travel evokes hard labor (including childbirth) and difficulty.”2 2 James
Clifford also points out that the question of who can achieve the status of “travelers”
has been historically determined by race and class: “in the dominant discourses of
travel, a nonwhite person cannot figure as a heroic explorer, aesthetic interpreter, or
scientific authority.” For example, the Victorian bourgeois travelers were usually
accompanied by “a host of servants, helpers, companions, guides, and bearers [who]
have been excluded from the role of proper travelers because of their race and class,
and because theirs seemed to be a dependent status in relation to the supposed
independence of the individualist, bourgeois voyager.”2’ A similar analogy applies
to women who figure “largely as companions or as ‘exceptions’” in the midst of the
“predominance of male experiences in the institutions and discourses of ‘travel.’”2 4
If the predominant narrative of “travel” often hides stories of pain, suffering
and violence of the unknown marginalized subjects, then a more historical approach
calls for re-inscriptions of those forgotten experiences and excluded voices into the
narrative of travel, rather than discarding the concept as a whole. Clifford thus
situates his understanding of “travel” in the context of a broadly defined, materially
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rooted, critically reflected, and actually existing movement and migration in history.
To Clifford, “travel” is not equivalent to a romanticized postmodern nomadology.
He remarks, “I am recommending not that we make the margin a new center (‘we’
are all travelers) but that specific dynamics of dwelling/traveling be understood
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comparatively.” Thus, “the project of comparing and translating different traveling
cultures need not be class- or ethnocentric,” but it “would have to grapple with the
evident fact that travelers move about under strong cultural, political, and economic
compulsions and that certain travelers are materially privileged, others oppressed.”2 6
He writes,
Such cultures of displacement and transplantation are inseparable from specific,
often violent, histories of economic, political, and cultural interaction.... I’m not
saying there are no locales or homes, that everyone is—or should be—traveling, or
cosmopolitan, or deterritorialized. This is not nomadology. Rather, what is at stake
is a comparative cultural studies approach to specific histories, tactics, everyday
practices of dwelling and traveling: traveling-in-dwelling, dwelling-in-traveling.2 7
Kaplan echoes, calling our attention to “the ‘material suffering’ behind the
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celebration of mobile citizenship.” She argues that an understanding of travel
situated in the contemporary power relations of globalization requires a negotiation
of the tension between “fixed locations and mobile circulations.”2 9
Theorists of travel like Clifford and Kaplan critically recapture the term
“travel” from its historical association with colonial privilege to align it with stories
of pain and violence for the subordinate subjects. But in this sense, it also becomes
increasingly unclear how “travel” as a term is substantively different from
“migration”? Why “travel”? What does “travel” do or offer us that has not or
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cannot be done by terms such as “migration”? By working through Foucault and
Michel de Certeau, here I will situate travel in the context of the global nation-state
surveillance apparatuses and argue that the term further postulates a “tactical”
agency that evades, subverts and trespasses the surveillance system and its
accompanied moral-legal order.
In Discipline and Punish, Foucault has discussed how disciplinary methods
employed in modern-day institutions achieve domination “through the meticulous
control of the operations of the body, which assured the constant subjection of its
forces and imposed upon them a relation o f docility-utility.” Under the inspecting
gaze of the panoptical surveillance, the human body o f modem man is a product of
the disciplined and normalized “docile body” that serves the capitalist mechanism by
increasing labor utility while at the same time diminishing political dissent and
opposition.3 1 But panoptical power never functions in one direction only. As
Foucault further notes, panoptical surveillance by its architectural design and
symbolic representation of modern-day monitoring techniques suggests a system that
is self-interiorizing: both the overseer and the watched are caught up in the
imbrications of power. He indicates, “One doesn’t have here a power which is
wholly in the hands of one person who can exercise it alone and totally over the
others. It’s a machine in which everyone is caught, those who exercise power just as
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much as those over whom it is exercised.” In other words, “In the Panopticon each
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person, depending on his place, is watched by all or certain o f the others.” In this
sense, one may argue that if the travelers caught in the circuit o f globalization are the
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objects under the inspecting gaze of the nation-states, the overseeing apparatuses of
state surveillance have also in the process become the objects of certain
“illegitimate” travelers' gazing—the very targets of their trespassing. Seeking out
cracks and holes around the surveillance apparatuses, some traveling agents manage
to slip through the net. Foucault identifies such moments as “revolts against the
,,34
gaze.
Acts of travel by the “illegitimate” traveling agents may further be read as
taking on the mode of tactics. Michel de Certeau has distinguished between strategy
and tactics', strategy refers to the discipline of the dominant political-social-economic
rationality, an institutional entity of will and power; tactics refers to the art of the
weak that finds cracks and holes in the surveillance o f powers and subverts it. To
de Certeau, for subordinate subjects who lack the means and resources to put up a
direct challenge to the power of the dominant social order, they resort to tactical
practices o f “making do” in going around the surveillance apparatuses. He argues,
“Power is bound by its very visibility. In contrast, trickery is possible for the weak,
and often it is his only possibility, as a ‘last resort.’” Tactics takes advantage o f
opportunities and makes uses o f particular circumstances and occasions, operating
“in isolated actions, blow by blow.” de Certeau writes, “It must vigilantly make use
of the cracks that particular conjunctions open in the surveillance o f the proprietary
powers. It poaches in them. It creates surprises in them. It can be where it is least
expected. It is a guileful ruse.”3 6
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From Foucault and de Certeau, one may thus speak of the “traveling bodies,”
which do not exist independent o f and outside the historical matrix of docile bodies,
but which signal a flux of tactical motions that negotiate, circumvent, go around, and
subvert the panoptical gaze of the nation-state system and its legal-moral order.
Traveling bodies implicate “something in the social body, and in each person, which
evades or wrestles with others’ attempt to act on our own ways of acting.”3 7
Traveling signifies a human contingency that is not content with being reined, settled
and put in place, an agency that keeps moving away at critical junctures from taming
grasp and disciplinary constraints. More so than “migration,” travel signals a willful
determination and insistent transgression in search for betterment. In this sense,
traveling as a term aptly captures the ways in which subordinate human agents refuse
to be reined in by the current globalization forces that uproot them while seeking to
domesticate and tame them as docile bodies.
It needs to be noted that traveling, as subversive “revolts against the gaze,”
speaks of little pockets o f resistance that are neither liberatory nor transformative.
As I will argue, however, in the limited spaces opened up by tactics, traveling agents
induce a series o f transgressive citizenship imaginaries that will be critical in
reformulating the current horizons o f cosmopolitanism. The contingent limitations
and possibilities presented by the traveling agents may be put in the narrative that I
call— borrowing from the title o f the film, Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon—
•7 O
“crouching travelers, hidden citizens.” Particularly, the traveling agents, facing the
omnipresent inspecting gaze o f the state surveillance system, must crouch or lay low.
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But behind the crouching posture is actually an un-reined tiger (traveler) that is
determined to pass through the surveillance to attain what it desires. For a long time,
the liberal states have known nothing but to catch and rein the tigers (travelers) or
turn them into an expendable instrument of capitalism (as in “guest workers”
program). A new democratic cosmopolitan imagination, however, will hinge on
whether the liberal polity and citizenry can recognize each of the “crouching” (tiger)
traveling agents as a potential, “hidden” (dragon) citizen. The critical task of this
project is precisely to bring that unseen citizenship into visibility and recognition in
facilitating this renewed democratic imagining.
II. Traveling Citizenship: the Dwelling Trajectory of Citizenship and
Transgressive Citizenship Imaginaries
Clifford in his “Traveling Cultures” calls on anthropologists and theorists to
examine everyday cultural practices in the dialectical mode of “traveling-in-dwelling,
dwelling-in-traveling” in order to de-essentialize culture while maintain the rooted
ness of traveling.3 9 Borrowing from while extending beyond Clifford, here I will
also place “citizenship” in dwelling/traveling terms, though in a different way. I
argue that the relative invisibility of citizenship practices by the “illegitimate”
traveling agents can be attributed to an inherent “dwelling trajectory” embedded in
citizenship. As Lyon notes earlier, modem citizenship grants human subjects an
official status o f belonging but also functions as a system o f state surveillance. In
this section, I will thus identify a “dwelling trajectory” o f citizenship that confers
formal rights and entitlements upon subjects but also binds them in place and keeps
them in check. This dwelling trajectory can be dissected into four dimensions:
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membership status (nationality and gender), politics, economics, and moral-legality.
When formal citizenship fails to fulfill the needs of secure dwelling and livelihood
for many subordinate citizens, however, its insistent “dwelling” mode becomes
suffocating— and traveling out of that dwelling trajectory in its various dimensions
becomes a necessity. I use traveling citizenship to denote a series o f alternative
citizenship imaginaries derived from the unruly practices of undocumented subjects
(non-citizens or second-class citizens) who transgress the numerous boundaries of
the dwelling trajectory of citizenship to take rights and powers as (non-existent)
“citizens.”
Martin Heisler notes that modem citizenship dates from the end o f World
War II, and “by the mid-1970s virtually everyone virtually everywhere had become
citizens of a state.” The spread o f legal, nominal citizenship came from both internal
political change within countries and, “especially in the non-westem world, from
cross-border diffusion.”4 0 Formally, citizenship by definition denotes nationality and
a set of rights and duties for the inhabitants in a political community on a given
territory. But modem state surveillance system does not render “citizenship” an
ideologically neutral entity; rather, citizenship is filled with certain cultural
orientations so that citizens are made easier to govern, monitor, and regulate.
Barbara Cruikshank thus argues that democratic citizenship is not just a sign of
empowerment but also a measure o f our subjection 4 1 Toby Miller specifically
points to the modem political technology o f citizenship that works “to produce loyal
citizens who leam to govern themselves in the interests o f the cultural-capitalist
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polity."4 2 Building on this line of argument, I further argue that while specific
arrangements of citizenship vary across states, one may speak o f a general, ideal
citizen trajectory emanated from liberalism—what I call the “dwelling trajectory” of
citizenship— that attempts to reproduce domesticated subjects who will be settled
and kept in place, thus stifles the agency of travel and deviant transgression.
The dwelling trajectory can be dissected into four dimensions: membership
status, politics, economics, and moral legality. In the dimension o f membership
status, citizenship denotes 1) singular nationality at birth (ius sanguinis or ins soli)4 3
or through naturalization, and 2) binary gender identity, as either male (M) or female
(F). For the status of nationality, while official membership in more than one nation
state is allowed in certain regions,4 4 it has yet to form into a legitimized and
integrated global norm. Stephen Castles thus writes, “Political citizenship is
universalistic and inclusive, while national belonging is culturally specific and
exclusive. Everybody in the country is meant to belong, while the rest of the world
is excluded: foreigners cannot belong.”4 5 Nationality carries a further racial
connotation: under the nation-state system, racial/ethnic difference often functions as
a marker of being outside a particular “nationality” and outside citizenship.4 6
Citizenship by definition orients toward “dwelling,” nationalism, and ethnic
sameness, rather than “traveling,” cosmopolitanism, and racial difference. But
citizenship not only dwells in national terms, it also dwells in gender terms. In other
words, a citizen since his/her birth is put in a particular gendered place— either “M”
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or “F,” dwelling into respective masculine and feminine order—projected on the
path of heterosexual relationship and conjugal arrangement.
In the field of politics, citizenship denotes periodic but limited participation
in a political community on a given territory within predetermined bureaucratic
parameters: voting through the representative matrix, serving on a jury, or
deliberating in a town hall meting etc. The “proper” way o f political participation
figures citizens as public, civil, and rational deliberators. In the terrain o f economics,
the ideal citizen-worker is an honest and law-abiding subject who follows the day-
by-day scripts o f working and consuming, saving and investing, and paying taxes in
contributing to the productive cycle of capitalism. Finally, in the arena o f moral
legality, citizenship nurtures, in a general sense, civil, law-abiding and orderly
subjects in pursuit of “life, liberty, and happiness.”
In all, the dwelling trajectory o f citizenship prescribes a fixed social and
moral order o f citizenship in accordance with liberal governance. It perpetuates a
repetitive and mundane circuit o f a standardized national subject, M or F, who works
and consumes, saves and invests, and pays taxes in the productive cycle o f capitalism
as a honest and law-abiding citizen-worker, and who periodically participates along
with others in an orderly manner in the business o f governing/deliberating through
the bureaucratic representative matrix, within a national territory. To fully attain the
rights, benefits, empowerment and protection conferred by citizenship, people need
to participate within the parameters set by its dwelling trajectory that binds them in
place—whether in national place (one nation-state only), gender/sexual place (one
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gender: M or F), political place (representative/deliberative bureaucracy), economic
place (law-abiding worker in capitalism), or moral-legal place (civil and orderly). In
a Foucauldian sense, citizenship functions as bio-power, facilitating modem state
governance in ensuring the normative and mundane reproduction o f social life in a
“dwelling” mode, in a “proper” way.47
This is not to say that people have no needs of dwelling: many of us, in fact,
do aspire to a sense of national and gender belonging, a voice and power to affect
public affairs through a workable system, a sense of achievement or making
contribution to the progress and welfare of society through production and
innovation, and a desire to associate with neighbors and strangers in a civil and
friendly manner. But two critical problems associated with the dwelling trajectory of
citizenship need to be noted. First, it excludes those who do not fit in the
predetermined membership status (one nation and binary gender) of the dwelling
trajectory: stateless peoples such as the Palestinians, undocumented migrant workers,
and sexual minorities such as the transgendered all lack official “dwelling” status.
Second, the dwelling trajectory of citizenship has in actuality never guaranteed
secure living and dwelling for many citizen-subjects under capitalism, especially the
marginalized and the bottom class. The condition is exacerbated by the current neo
liberal trend o f globalization that restructures the economies in widening global
inequality and operates by a hyper-individualist “self-care” ethos where state recedes
from the role of welfare provision in forcing citizens to confront the severe
insecurities o f the global market. In a sense, the current globalization forces shatter
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subordinate subjects' sense of secure dwelling and force them to travel (often
through underground channels) in search of alternative sites of dwelling. In this
regard, an insistent “dwelling” trajectory of citizenship becomes dogmatic and
suffocating when it neither provides for (secure) dwelling nor permits (legitimate)
traveling for marginalized subjects. This second point needs further elaboration.
As Mike Davis points out, the current widening global inequality can be
attributed to neo-liberal policies known as Structural Adjustment Programs (SAPs)
prescribed by the IMF and the World Bank (the “Washington Consensus”) to Third
World countries that force the latter to open up markets and privatize industries in
exchange for loans and development packages. What results, as Davis notes, is
human-engineered depression that collapses the Third World region’s local
industries with drastic cutbacks on public services, a “planet o f slums” in the South
with a fast emergence o f informal employment and a surplus of unskilled labor, with
people forced to join a massive migration outward from rural to urban areas and
overseas in search o f viable economic opportunities amidst crowded competition for
low-wage jobs without labor law protections. Neo-liberal globalization intensifies
global inequality and the lagging-behind o f the South in relation to the North rather
than growth and development.4 8
In addition to global inequality, neo-liberalism also generates a new logic of
state governance in globalization, what both Wendy Brown and Aihwa Ong have
identified as the hyper-individualist “self-care” ethos. By “construct[ing] and
interpellating] individuals as entrepreneurial actors in every sphere of life,” Brown
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writes, neo-liberalism “figures individuals as rational, calculating creatures whose
moral autonomy is measured by their capacity for ‘self care’— the ability to provide
for their own needs and service their own ambitions” regardless of questions of
structural constraints on his/her actions (e.g. lack of education, childcare, and welfare
benefits).4 9 Ong sees this as a sign of fundamental change under the neo-liberal
subject formation, “as governing shifts its target from the social and collective
management of the population (biopolitics) to a focus on individual self-governing
(ethico-politics).” She writes, “This shift toward a neoliberal technology of
governing holds that the security o f citizens, their well-being and quality of life, are
increasingly dependent on their own capacities as free individuals to confront
globalized insecurities by making calculations and investments in their lives.” Based
on this neo-liberal standard o f “self-management and self-enterprise,” “those who
cannot scale the skills ladder or measure up to the norms o f self-governing are
increasingly marginalized as deviant or even risky subjects who threaten the newly
normalized regime.” Ong argues that in this new global arrangement, individual
subjects ”are induced to respond fluidly and opportunistically to dynamic market
conditions regardless of national borders.”5 0 She terms these practices “flexible
citizenship,” with “flexibility, migration, and relocations ... becom ing] practices to
strive for rather than stability.”5 1
What we have here is less a global village than what Castles identifies as
“hierarchical citizenship in a world of unequal nation-states,” with a grossly
imbalanced distribution of rights and freedoms o f each state’s peoples across the
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globe,5 2 and with subjects leaving their dwelling spot without legal documentation,
scrambling for material resources, rights, and voices that are entitled to citizens o f
another place. When nation-state citizenship proves ineffective and inadequate in
providing for the dwelling needs of subjects, its insistent “dwelling” mode that binds
subjects in place becomes suffocating under the current status quo. To live, subjects
have to disregard, or, metaphorically, travel out o f the dwelling trajectory of
citizenship that has placed them in a predicament where neither (secure) dwelling
nor (legitimate) traveling is feasible.5 3 The term “traveling agents” thus not only
refers to subjects who conduct acts of travel, but further describes those subjects who
may be seen as transgressors of the dwelling trajectory of citizenship under the
panoptical state surveillance system. Traveling citizenship, then, denotes a series of
alternative citizenship imaginaries derived from the unruly practices of
undocumented subjects (non-citizens or second-class citizens) who transgress and
reconfigure the dwelling trajectory of citizenship in seeking a way out of their
current state of subjection by taking rights and powers as (non-existent) “citizens.”
Under these imaginaries, the traveling agents can be seen as challenging the fixed
social and legal order of the dwelling trajectory of citizenship in order to create
multiple dwelling spots for themselves in living and acting as citizens. As I will
show, it is in these transgressive forms o f traveling and expanded spaces of dwelling
that we may re-envision and broaden the horizons of cosmopolitanism from the
abject edges o f globalization.
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Rather than looking at undocumented domestic and sweatshop workers,
global sex workers, transsexuals, and terrorists as misnomers or antitheses of
“citizens,” I argue that they should be reconceived as subjects who, borrowing from
French philosopher Jacques Ranciere, stage “a nonexistent right” by making
themselves count.5 4 Taking insights from Bonnie Honig’s Democracy and the
Foreigner, what we have here are subjects who “are not [legitimate] nationals of the
regime but insist, nonetheless, on exercising national citizen rights while they are
here.” Honig writes,
We have here a story of illegitimate demands made by people with no standing to
make them, a story of people so far outside the circle of who ‘counts’ that they
cannot make claims within the existing frames of claim making. They make room
for themselves by staging nonexistent rights, and by way of such stagings,
sometimes, new rights, powers, and visions come into being.5 5
While some may be deliberately transgressive and others are not, these traveling
subjects may be seen as agents who stage a series of transgressive citizenship
imaginaries, each of which exceeds certain limits and boundaries of the ideal
dwelling trajectory of citizenship. In the case o f undocumented domestic and
sweatshop workers, tactical citizenship; in the case of global sex workers, tainting
citizenship; in the case of transsexuals, morphing citizenship; and in the case of
terrorists, deathly citizenship. In this way, these deviant traveling agents thus forge
themselves into the framework of citizenship.
In particular, while these traveling agents all deviate from the different
dimensions of the dwelling trajectory of citizenship in one way or another, each
citizenship imaginary transgresses one particular dimension o f the dwelling
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trajectory in the most salient way. Tactical citizenship (undocumented
domestic/sweatshop workers) re-scripts the “political” dimension; tainting
citizenship (global sex workers) subverts the “economic” dimension; morphing
citizenship (transsexuals) crosses over the “gender” dimension; and deathly
citizenship (terrorists) digresses from the ultimate “moral-legal” dimension. In
addition, as imaginaries induced by national-boundary crossers, tactical citizenship,
tainting citizenship, and deathly citizenship all go beyond the “national” dimension
of the dwelling trajectory.
While these transgressive citizenship imaginaries do not name a radical or
transformative response to the hegemonic system, traveling agents can nonetheless
be seen as generating moments o f political participation as “non-existent citizens” in
the cracks and holes around the global panoptical surveillance. This is, in fact,
politics. As Ranciere puts it, “Political activity is whatever shifts a body from the
place assigned to it or changes a place’s destination. It makes visible what had no
business being seen, and makes heard a discourse where once there was only place
for noise; it makes understood as discourse what was once only heard as noise.”5 6
The conception o f traveling citizenship, therefore, is meant to translate what was
once heard only as noise o f the “illegals,” “fallen whores,” “gendered deviants” and
“horrendous monsters” into a visible and legible discourse of citizenship.
III. Deviant Cosmopolitanism
Traveling citizenship, in fact, turns citizenship from a nationalist object and
mundane ritual into new cosmopolitan possibilities. Clifford in his “Traveling
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Cultures” provides the foundational link between “travel” and “cosmopolitanism” by
establishing the notion of what he calls the actually existing, discrepant
cosmopolitanisms, which tends to the differentiated and discrepant experiences of
ethno subjects moving along the hegemonic circuit of globalization rooted in
historical and geographical contexts.5 7 In this vein, Clifford goes beyond both the
(elitist) corporate cosmopolitanism and the (Western) philosophical ideal of
cosmopolitanism to examine actual migratory experiences and cultural exchanges in
history. As I will argue, however, given his rather overarching framework and his
emphasis on inter ethnic-cultural-national exchange, Clifford’s discrepant
cosmopolitanisms lacks a further specificity in looking at how subordinate subjects
transgress the moral-legal order of the “cosmopolitan” horizon. As a point of
departure, I use deviant cosmopolitanism to describe the interactive horizons of
citizenship with subjects put to abject and uncanny ways of living and acting as
“cosmopolitan” citizens by crossing not just national boundaries, but also the
“proper” bounds of gender, sexuality, politics, economics, morality and legality.
Looking at these alternative citizenship stories can better help us think about
cosmopolitanism in more inclusive and innovative ways.
In linking his notion o f travel to cosmopolitanism, Clifford makes it clear
that, if “travel” is to be detached from its privileged location to also tell stories of
migrant subjects who are forced to travel, move and relocate under forces beyond
their control, so should “cosmopolitanism” be brought down from its association
with corporate mobility and philosophical idealization to also address the laboring
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experiences and cultural exchanges o f the masses who are often forced into the orbit
of cosmopolitanism. As Amanda Anderson points out, cosmopolitanism “manifests
c o
a tension between elitism and egalitarianism.” On one hand, cosmopolitanism is
imbricated in relations of privileged mobility, “international communication and
travel” that are accessible only to the bourgeois elites. Bruce Robbins indicates, “the
word cosmopolitan immediately evokes the image of a privileged person: someone
who can claim to be a ‘citizen of the world’ by virtue of independent means,
expensive tastes, and a globe-trotting lifestyle.”5 9 On the other, Anderson furthers,
cosmopolitanism is “inspired by the deep-seated belief in the humanity of all” with
universal rights and equality.6 0 This seemingly “universal” vantage point of
egalitarianism, however, carries a “particularistic” bent of the Western philosophical
tradition of Enlightenment with lineage to the Cynics, the Stoics, and Kant.6 1
Whether as a sign o f privileged mobility or a belief in humanity, both corporate and
philosophical cosmopolitanism imply the power of choice. In contrast, actually
existing cosmopolitanisms, as Scott Malcomson argues, often involve subordinate
subjects with limited options. Malcomson observes,
The decision to enter into a larger religion than one’ own is perhaps the freest of
these choices, though physical and material compulsions are often part of the mix.
The decision to enter a political realm larger than the local may sometimes be taken
at leisure, but is more often made under force of circumstances. More narrowly
market-driven choices usually derive from a desire not to be poor, or simply not to
die. Entertainment choices are based on a range of options frequently beyond the
control of the individual consumer. Such compulsions may explain in part why the
mass of real cosmopolitanisms rarely enters into scholarly discussions of
cosmopolitanism: to argue that the choice of cosmopolitanism is in some sense self-
betraying and made under duress takes away much of its ethical attractiveness.6 2
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In Clifford’s discrepant cosmopolitanisms, the subjects who have something to
“contribute” to the making o f cosmopolitanism are not simply corporate elites,
middle-class urbanites, or political philosophers, but also those from less privileged
and mobile positions who are often forced into the mix o f cosmopolitanism beyond
their control.
By grounding travel not in its inherent privilege but in its “historical
taintedness,” that is, “its associations with gendered, racial bodies, class privilege,
specific means of conveyance, beaten paths, agents, frontiers, documents, and the
like,”6'1 Clifford’s paradigm of discrepant cosmopolitanisms displays sensitivity to
class distinctions and power inequity among nations, inclusion of diverse and
actually lived experiences of cultural interactions, and disavowal of the Western
imperative functioning as the universal cosmopolitan motif. Robbins aptly captures
this discrepant character of cosmopolitanisms:
Like nations, cosmopolitanisms are now plural and particular. Like nations, they are
both European and non-European, and they are weak and underdeveloped as well as
strong and privileged. And again like the nation, cosmopolitanism is there—not
merely an abstract ideal, like loving one’s neighbor as oneself, but habits of thought
and feeling that have already shaped and been shaped by particular collectivities,
that are socially and geographically situated, hence both limited and empowered.6 4
To Robbins, Clifford carves out a new terrain of engaging plural material
experiences o f global traveling that translates into actually existing
cosmopolitanisms. This intellectual vision does not describe traveling as a universal
and homogenous predicament o f late modem capitalism where “everyone has
become traveler.”6 5 Rather, context, location, and history are critical in examining
the diverse experiences of travel.
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While Clifford’s discrepant cosmopolitanisms effectively moves beyond
corporate and philosophical cosmopolitanism, I nonetheless want to point to two
limitations with the paradigm that will shift my discussion on cosmopolitanism in a
different direction. First, Clifford’s theoretical umbrella, while powerful, is too big
and overarching to capture the subtle texture o f the dissonant dynamics o f the
informal and underground cosmopolitan experiences generated by the “illegitimate”
travelers crawling under the watchful gaze o f the modem state surveillance regime.
As I noted earlier, it remains unclear how Clifford’s notion of travel functions
differently from migration. Similarly, discrepant cosmopolitanisms in its intellectual
practice can be limited to discussions o f different “migratory experiences” between
and among classes, nations, cultures and genders. In contrast, by linking travel to
practices o f “tactics” and “revolts against the gaze” under the dwelling trajectory of
citizenship, I argue that the meanings derived from the traveling agents extend even
beyond Clifford’s original framework.
Second, the idea o f discrepant cosmopolitanisms shares an affinity with some
of the other discussions on cosmopolitanism in being structured around the ethnic-
cultural-national trope.6 6 There is no problem with this as an intellectual topic. In
fact, cosmopolitanism is by definition spoken through racial/ethnic differences and
any discussion of cosmopolitanism that doe not ground itself in the ethnic-cultural-
national context betrays a dangerous degeneration into, as Malcomson puts it, “a
Eurocentric, ‘rationalist,’ secular-democratic jihad.”6 7 The problem is that the
discussion o f cosmopolitanism simply stays at this level, as if all sources of
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inspirations for cosmopolitanism are just about inter ethnic-cultural-national
exchange, occasionally with some addendum of class and gender. For my purpose,
discrepant cosmopolitanism lacks a further specificity on how we may read the
subordinate traveling subjects as subverting or transgressing the moral-legal order o f
the “cosmopolitan” horizon.
Here, I argue that the imaginaries of traveling citizenship— in the forms of
tactical citizenship, tainting citizenship, morphing citizenship, and deathly
citizenship— generate an alternative dynamic o f what might be called deviant
cosmopolitanism, which describes the interactive horizons of citizenship with
subjects put to abject and uncanny ways of living and acting as cosmopolitan
“citizens” by crossing not just national boundaries, but also the “proper” bounds of
gender, sexuality, politics, economics, morality and legality. We might see deviant
cosmopolitanism as engaging in what Rey Chow calls “tactical interventions”—not
“in term o f the creation of new ‘fields,”’ but as tactics on the borders, on the “para-
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sites that never take over a field in its entirety but erode it slowly and tactically.”
Deviant cosmopolitanism does not resemble strategic postures of “anti-
globalization” or “counter-empire,” but it serves as tactical interventions that attempt
to build alternative cosmopolitan visions and futures along the abject edges of
globalization.
IV. Methodology: Interdisciplinary Synthesis in the Dwelling/Traveling
Mode
This project is primarily a theoretical and interpretive venture, involving
textual analysis of literatures that traverse the fields o f political theory, cultural
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studies, ethnography, globalization studies, postcolonial theory, feminist theory,
queer/transgender studies, and terrorism studies. Such enterprise might be
understood as an interdisciplinary synthesis, one that integrates a variety o f scholarly
literatures and subject matters in constructing a theoretical narrative and argument.
The deployment o f this interdisciplinary synthesis is driven by the research question:
that is, how should we look at these subjects who put to “illegitimate” acts of travel
in battling the modem state surveillance system in a cat-and-mouse struggle in the
context o f globalization? In this interdisciplinary experience, none of the groups of
traveling agents, theoretical tools, or ethnographic research emerges as the central
divine altar, but must uncomfortably jostle with one another while “collaboratively”
working together towards the common goal of resolving the research question.
I select these various traveling figures not only because I see each population
putting to acts of “travel” in different ways, but also because I find each traveling
group containing specific bearings on ideas of “citizenship” and “cosmopolitanism.”
Each presents a unique case o f traveling citizenship and deviant cosmopolitanism.
While there are other subjects beyond these four groups who might be conceived of
as “traveling agents,” the project requires a boundary o f cases in order to put forth a
specific argument. In the present study, I have attempted to expand the scope of
traveling agents while imposing a limit in order to present my thesis in a
comprehensive and intelligible way. As stated earlier, each group o f traveling
figures transgresses one particular dimension of the dwelling trajectory o f citizenship
in the most salient way: in the case of undocumented domestic and sweatshop
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workers, politics', in the case o f global sex workers, economics', in the case of
transsexuals, gender, and in the case o f terrorists, moral-legality. In additional,
undocumented workers, sex workers, and terrorists all cross over the dwelling
trajectory of nationality. These transgressive citizenship imaginaries present a
challenge to and stretch the limits of our imagination o f citizenship and
cosmopolitanism in a gradually intensifying manner. Again, while I do not see
traveling citizenship generating a radically transformative cosmopolitan public
sphere, I think that we may nonetheless consider alternative ways of formulating
more progressive and democratic ideas on citizenship and cosmopolitanism from
each of these momentary deviations o f the dwelling trajectory of citizenship.
It is necessary, however, to underline a fraught relationship between the
“traveling agents” under study and my own position as a theorist and writer. This
uneasy relationship is salient given my own position as a relatively privileged
outsider to the communities that I discuss and given the fact that while I make use of
ethnographic literatures in the study, I have not conducted ethnographic research
myself. This doubling distance needs to be acknowledged. The theorist’s
interpretation and reconstruction o f the “other” always needs to be mediated and
problematized.
But to understand myself as outside these marginal communities is not to
detach myself from the sea o f travelers and border-crossers or situate myself outside
the narratives o f dwelling and traveling. When I was at age fourteen, my family flew
across the Pacific Ocean from Taiwan to relocate in the U.S. when I felt I could no
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longer sanely dwell in my native country’s authoritarian school system at that time.
The traveling that was made possible allowed me to escape from a state o f hopeless
suffocation to find an alternative place of dwelling on another land. But the story
does not end here. Like many other immigrants’ experience, this new state of
dwelling in the America was not a completely embodied one. Coming to America
with limited knowledge in English and situated in a predominantly white and
conservative community in Orange County, California, going to high school as a
racial other without the ability to converse effectively with one’s teachers and fellow
classmates presented questions of belonging on a day-to-day basis in those teenage
years.
This disembodied dwelling, however, found a channel of expression when I
made the travel to Berkeley for my college education. It was at Berkeley that I first
had my political awakening, learning about terms such as “justice,” “equality,” and
“identity” in a way that was never like before, in a place that was away from home.
My subsequent pursuit of graduate studies at USC brings me back home to southern
California, but my interest in progressive political and cultural theory that has been
gradually developed over the years is in itself now a transgressive traveling from the
dwelling trajectory o f the hometown folks who surround me (i.e., neighbors, friends,
relatives, and the growing middle-class Chinese immigrant community). Throughout
the years, I have had my own struggles and tensions with the needs o f dwelling and
the desires for traveling. I thus come to this theoretical and political project with a
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personal touch— and a personal bias that continues to make me think about the
importance of dwelling/traveling in every subject’s living history.
Hence, I think that recognizing the doubling distance between the subjects
under study and the theorist/writer should not negate the latter’s capacity in seeking
to, not so much understand the communities and events the way “they are” (in an
ahistorical, static sense) as offer a way to interpret the communities and events in a
particular, historically rooted way. By synthesizing and integrating both theoretical
literatures and ethnographic interviews on these subjects in my own reading and
reconstruction, I attempt to weave a particular narrative about how these subjects’
intertwining narratives of dwelling/traveling can contribute to our understanding
about citizenship and cosmopolitanism in more inclusive and innovative ways. My
aim o f this project is neither to generalize my conceptual frameworks to all traveling
agents nor to persuade with an enlightened account of “Truth,” but simply to point
the readers to a different way of thinking and feeling about these various traveling
agents—in order for all of us, as democratic actors, to do what I see as the important
work of citizenship in building alternative cosmopolitan visions and futures.
To a certain extent, this interdisciplinary project itself may also be
understood in “dwelling/traveling” terms. Specifically, if disciplinarity may be seen
as projecting a dwelling posture in intellectual comfort zones, interdisciplinarity
conducts an unruly act o f traveling through academic disciplinary gazing, moving
from one discipline and intellectual terrain to another. For disciplinarians to charge
that interdisciplinary practitioners lack substantive engagement (or, for that matter,
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“knowledge,” “skills,” or “understanding”) with any particular one discipline,
however, is to neglect that the intellectual desire for traveling is always mediated by
the need o f dwelling. In other words, interdisciplinary works are buttressed by
periodic dwellings on and within particular disciplinary territories, featured with
moments o f agonizing brooding and pleasurable surprises—before they travel on to
the next disciplinary dwelling spot or create their own (interdisciplinary) home, if not
returning to the same disciplinary site, again and again.
While the aim o f interdisciplinarity is always guided by one’s research
question, it is also because o f the space carved out by interdisciplinarity that
broadens the scope of a scholar’s research questions, intellectual horizons, and
imagined political possibilities. Hence, in the case of the present study, it is
precisely through an interdisciplinary synthesis that questions about citizenship,
cosmopolitanism, and political possibilities o f these underground traveling agents
may be asked, illuminated and imagined. What interdiciplinarity does for the
academic community is not so much absolving the integrity o f academic
“disciplines” (as if it is possible) as creating its own preferred space for intellectual
and political dwelling and traveling. Each discipline and intellectual terrain presents
a memory, struggle, and possible coalescence in relation to the interdisciplinary
research, as the practitioner travels-in-dwelling, dwells-in-traveling. It is in this
recurring theme o f “traveling-in-dwelling, dwelling-in-traveling” that we might
consider interdisciplinary research as “cosmopolitan.”
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V. Chapter Plan
The chapter layout of the dissertation is based on the study o f the four groups
of traveling agents: undocumented domestic and sweatshop workers, global sex
workers, transsexuals, and terrorists. Starting with chapter 1 ,1 look at how
undocumented immigrants working as domestic nannies/housecleaners and garment
factory seamstresses depart from the “political” dimension of the dwelling trajectory
o f citizenship by instrumentalizing and reusing the script o f citizenship in political
theory and creating new meanings to it in their daily working routine, leading to an
imaginary of tactical citizenship. I revise and extend Dick Hebdige’s conception of
subculture to theorize this subcultural conception of tactical citizenship. Then,
deriving from the dwelling trajectory o f citizenship, I identify four “proper ways of
participating as citizens” in the conventional theoretical construction of citizenship
which, in my view, make it difficult to imagine alternative means and forms of
citizen participation: 1) the in-or-out dichotomy of citizenship; 2) civility and law-
abidingness; 3) politics as the supreme activity o f citizenship (and its simultaneously
“public” and “collective” character); and 4) system-subject correspondence.
Borrowing from a wide range of writers—postcolonial theorist Homi Bhabha,
poststructuralist Michel de Certeau, political anthropologist James Scott, and
historian Robin Kelley—I delineate an alternative citizenship imaginary where each
of these four features o f citizenship may be seen as correspondingly translated and
re-narrated by undocumented subjects into four “other ways of participating as
citizens”: 1) the “neither/nor”-a n d -“both/and also” of the third space of mimicry; 2)
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calculated conformity; 3) hidden transcripts, and 4) the Greek notion of metis (tricks
and cunning intelligence) or what Levi-Strauss calls bricolage. These “other ways
of participating as citizens” constitute what I mean by tactical citizenship. Next,
turning to ethnographic literatures on domestic work and garment sweatshops, I
compare and analyze the ways in which immigrant workers in different working
conditions negotiate and resist at their workplace to gain rights and benefits may be
precisely seen as deploying these other ways o f citizenly participation. Finally, I
examine how traveling citizenship in the mode of tactics via undocumented
immigrant workers turns citizenship from a mundane object into new
“cosmopolitan” possibilities.
In chapter 2 on global sex workers, I look at the seemingly degraded sex
industry as a critical site where global sex workers demand and assert their rights as
legitimate citizen-workers. As an occupation inherently rooted in “travel” (e.g., the
needed “mobility” in search o f clientele and in order to dodge state authority), global
sex workers can be seen as a group o f unofficial traveling figures who carry a
precarious status o f citizenship, but who also forge themselves into “citizenship”
through their demand of a citizen’s right to work. Breaking the time-honored link
between profit and morality, global sex workers transgress the “economic”
dimension o f the dwelling trajectory o f citizenship by reconfiguring the conventional
notion of “honest and law-abiding citizen-workers.” Tainting citizenship describes
the ways in which global sex workers mimic liberal citizenship in its reducing
citizenship to the bottom line or moneymaking activity, but with a deviance: through
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the illicit use of their erotic body parts and sexual bodily organs in the public sphere
o f work.
By engaging with the arguments in certain strands of radical feminist and
Marxist theories that consider the commodification of women’s body for male erotic
pleasure as signs of gender domination and alienation, I argue that this line of
reasoning adopts a theoretical posture of “judging prostitution” that emanates from
an internalized “high,” privileged, (white) maternal body that denies the agency of
the prostitute’s “low,” violated and degraded body. Upon establishing the prostitute
body and the sexualized racial body as constitutive of the “low” body in modem
civilization, I argue that, rather than judging, repelling, or containing the “low” body,
we need to, following Mikhail Bakhtin, engage the “bodily lower stratum,” a process
of degradation of the body but also its rebirth.
However, by focusing exclusively on an idealistic, collective counter-cultural
space of the carnival, Bakhtin fails to consider that the “low” body o f modernity
cannot be detached as an “outside” from the material economy, escaping its
determinations o f power of different sorts, namely, capitalism, masculine ideology,
and racialized power relations. Contra Bakhtin, the “low” body in modernity cannot
be rid of private and individual considerations, but must instead insinuate itself into
the official discourse to gain the “private” rights of ordinary citizens that have long
been denied to the lowly subjects. In understanding sex workers’ body not simply as
“low” but also “tainted,” I argue that by inscribing their tainted bodies into the public
sphere of work as legible bodies with rights, global sex workers’ rights discourse
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taints citizenship from the bodily lower stratum. Through a comparison and contrast
of sex workers’ rights discourse in the First and Third World as discrepant
transnational articulations o f a citizen’s right to work like all other laboring bodies, I
look at how global sex workers help us expand our conception of citizenship beyond
the dwelling trajectory as “tainted” citizens. Finally, I will examine how our
cosmopolitan horizons can be reformed through promoting contact with the tainted
bodies and incorporating them in our daily associative arrangement.
Upon examining two groups o f national-boundary crossers who transgress
the “political” (undocumented domestic/sweatshop workers) and “economic” (global
sex workers) dimensions of the dwelling trajectory o f citizenship, I will turn my
attention to “gender” in chapter 3. By shared understanding, every citizen knows
that, ever since birth, s/he is put in a particular gendered place— either male or
female, man or woman—dwelling into the respective masculine and feminine role
and projected on the path of heterosexual relationship and conjugal arrangement. I
argue that placing the body narratives o f transsexuality in “dwelling/traveling” terms
can help us rethink citizenship beyond this binary gendered trajectory of citizenship.
In my reading, transsexuality generates a politics of “gender travel” that is
best delineated by queering traveling theorist James Clifford’s diasporic narrative,
“traveling in dwelling, dwelling in traveling.” Particularly, sex change involves a
somatic traveling that must negotiate conflicting and jostling tensions of gender
dwelling and traveling. Transsexuality simultaneously embodies a painful need for
gender embodiment where one looks for a gendered “home,” a location of dwelling
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and categorical placement, as well as a desire for traveling where one shifts identity
in-between the gender binary by disobeying and rearranging the heteronormative
rules of gender. Transsexual identity thus signifies an aspiration for citizenship in
the sexual third time-space, whereby citizenship claims of dwelling and traveling
need to be negotiated and balanced: on one hand, the need for belonging to a
gendered “home” and the strategic quest for equal rights based on juridical gender
categories (dwelling-in-traveling); on the other, the freedom to travel, to the self-
expression and self-negotiation o f gender identity that challenges the
heteronormative roots o f citizenship categories (traveling-in-dwelling). I identify
this expansion of binary citizenship categories in the gender dimension, morphing
citizenship, which consists o f a dialectical mode of “morphing in” and “morphing
out.” While “dwelling in traveling” involves transsexuals morphing into the binary
citizenship category of M or F, “traveling in dwelling” involves transsexuals
morphing out o f the conventional trajectory of M or F to embody other gendered
possibilities on the sexual third time-space borderlands.
Morphing citizenship simultaneously: 1) subverts the gender script of
citizenship by forcing its binary categories “M” and “F” to be inclusive o f subjects
bom with the “opposite” biological body, thereby stretching and expanding the
original meanings of the categories of man and woman (morphing in); and 2)
challenges the fundamental binary system o f citizenship, stipulating that a citizen has
a right to travel to gender/sexual destinations other than those labeled as “M” or “F”
(morphing out). This transgressive citizenship imaginary produces a psychosomatic
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“cosmopolitanism within” that maps alternative gender arrangements and sexual
practices as citizens in the sexual third time-space. From the vantage point of
transsexuality’s “cosmopolitanism within,” I further reflect on the “cosmopolitanism
without” o f the globalization o f queer visibility. In my view, tending to transsexuals
as “undocumented” gender travelers with a precarious citizenship status points us to
what is at stake in the current global circuit of queer traveling, a corporate
“cosmopolitanism without” which, while illuminating the visibility of First World
queer tourists, displaces the citizenship narratives of dwelling and traveling that are
critical to the Third World queers and undocumented diasporic queers.
In chapter 4 ,1 look at suicide-bombing terrorists as traveling agents who
transgress the dwelling trajectory of citizenship in the ultimate dimension of “moral-
legality” that configures citizens as civil, law-abiding subjects in pursuit o f life,
liberty, and happiness. As subjects who live in a constant state of insecure dwelling,
and either forbidden traveling away (as in the case of Palestinians) or see their
current travel in the West as a meaningless displacement and exile (as in the case of
al-Qaeda members), suicide bombers turn their unfulfilled aspirations and
suffocating predicament into a deadening rage against targets that they perceive have
ruined their secure dwelling and embodiment. Rather than seeing terrorism as the
negation o f citizenship, I argue that suicide bombing embodies claims to both
“dwelling” and “traveling” that underlies thwarted desires to be included as part of
the world and as (non-existent) “citizens.”
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To elaborate this thesis, I look at how previous arguments based on claims o f
culture, nihilism, and political history have generated three different narratives about
the terrorists: brainwashed fanatics, nihilists, and avengers. Going beyond these
narratives, I argue that tending to the terrorists’ needs and desires for dwelling and
traveling will enable us to weave an alternative narrative that figures suicide
bombers as “citizens.” While noting the religious influence in Islamic suicide
bombing, I point to a process of “secularization of martyrdom” in the Middle Eastern
context that appeals to material needs and worldly wants beyond religion. This
secularization o f martyrdom opens up our inquiry into the terrorists’ claims of
“citizenship” in terms of dwelling and traveling—what I call deathly citizenship, that
attempts to realize a reborn chance for “life, liberty, and happiness” in and through
death, in a “sublime” state of eternal dwelling in the afterlife. I examine this
alternative imaginary of citizenship specifically in the cases o f Palestinian suicide
bombers and 9/11 hijackers affiliated with al-Qaeda.
I further point out that, facing terrorists’ “bare death,” that is, self-infliction
o f physical pain and active pursuit of their own death, state sovereignty—whether in
the ordinary form of the monopoly of the legitimate use of physical force or in an
exceptional state of what Giorgio Agamben calls “bare life”—is not only challenged
but also loses its point. Moreover, advocates o f an expansive state sovereignty in a
“war on terror” neglect that, as suicide bombers feed off death, military actions will
only further the life of terrorism. The relationship between liberal state sovereignty
and suicide-bombing terrorism, rather than being oppositional, is mutually
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reinforcing and directly proportional. The only possibility to stop the life of
terrorism is to give prospective suicide bombers a reason to live as citizens in the
earthly world.
Finally, in the conclusion, I argue that, as traveling agents change the
contours of citizenship, they also change the cosmopolitan horizons o f democracy.
Long isolated and excluded from the proper terrain of “what it means to be citizens,”
these traveling figures, having come from afar by crossing over the numerous
boundaries of citizenship—whether national, gender, political, economic, or moral-
legal—now inscribe themselves into the public sphere as legitimate dwellers with
rights, voices, and claims. In a sense, democracy is becoming deviant, as the
“citizens” who make up the republic are no longer the same. In the reconfigured
cosmopolitan sphere that I call, deviant cosmopolitanism, these various travelers
come here, and in their abject and uncanny ways, living, acting, and participating
along with the city dwellers as (non-existent) “citizens.” Deviant cosmopolitanism
coexists with liberal democracy, functioning as an internal abject presence inside
democracy from which democracy cannot part. The ultimate challenge for
democracy, then, is to empower these traveling figures with rights that would
provide them with a sense o f secure “dwelling,” thus also changing the way they do
“travel.”
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NOTES
1 Marcelo M. Suarez-Orozco, “Globalization and Learning,” First International Conference on
Globalization and Learning, http://www.ficgl.com/abstracts/suarez m.html (accessed March 29,
2006).
2 Teresa Watanabe and Hector Becerra, “500,000 Cram Streets to Protest Immigration Bills,” Los
Angeles Times, March 26, 2006, A l, A20.
3 Caren Kaplan, “Transporting the Subject: Technologies o f Mobility and Location in an Era or
Globalization,” PMLA 177 (2002): 33.
4 Plato, The Republic o f Plato, 2n d ed., trans. Allan Bloom (New York: Basic Books, 1991), 101.
5 David Lyon, “Under M y Skin: From Identification Papers to Body Surveillance,” in Documenting
Individual Identity: The Developm ent o f State P ractices in the M odem World, eds. Jane Caplan and
John Torpey (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2001), 304-305.
6 Ibid, 294.
7 Michel Foucault, The H istory o f Sexuality, Volume I: an Introduction, trans. Robert Hurley (New
York: Vintage Books, 1990), 143.
8 Michel Foucault, “Govemmentality,” in Power: Essential Works o f Foucault, 1954-1984, Volume
III, ed. James D. Faubion and trans. Robert Hurley and Others (New York: The N ew Press, 2000),
216.
9 Michel Foucault, “Truth and Power,” in Power/Knowledge: Selected Interviews and Other Writings,
1972-1977, ed. Colin Gordon and trans. Colin Gordon, Leo Marshall, John Mepham, and Kate Soper
(New York: Pantheon Books, 1980), 124-125.
1 0 Jane Caplan and John Torpey, “Introduction,” in Caplan and Torpey, Documenting Individual
Identity, 5.
" Ibid, 7.
1 2 For a sampling o f the former position, minding their internal differences, see, e.g., Francis
Fukuyama, The End o f H istory and the Last Man (New York: Free Press, 1992); Anthony Giddens,
Runaway World: H ow Globalization Is Reshaping Our Lives (New York: Routledge, 2000); Thomas
L. Friedman, The World Is Flat: a B rief H istory o f the Twenty-First Century (New York: Farrar,
Straus and Giroux, 2005). For a sampling o f the latter position, minding their internal differences,
see, e.g., Mike Davis, “Planet o f Slums: Urban Involution and the Informal Proletariat,” New Left
Review 26 (March/April 2004): 5-34; Thomas Frank, One M arket Under God: Extreme Capitalism,
Market Populism, and the End o f Economic D em ocracy (New York: Anchor Books, 2001); Wendy
Brown, “Neo-liberalism and the End o f Liberal Democracy,” Theory & Event 1, no. 1 (2003),
http://muse.ihu.edu/ioumals/theory and event/v007/7.lbrown.html.
1 3 See Michel Foucault, D iscipline and Punish: the Birth o f the Prison, trans. Alan Sheridan (New
York: Vintage Books, 1995).
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1 4 Mary Louise Pratt, Im perial Eyes: Travel Writing and Transculturation (London and N ew York:
Routledge, 1992), 5.
1 5 Louis Turner and John Ash, The Golden Hordes: International Tourism and the Pleasure Periphery
(New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1976), 129.
1 6 Ibid., 13
1 7 Ibid., 129-130.
1 8 Priscilla Boniface and Peter J. Fowler, H eritage and Tourism in ‘ th eglobal village’ (London and
New York: Routledge, 1993), 19.
1 9 Frances Bartkowski, Travelers, Immigrants, Inmates: Essays in Estrangement (Minneapolis and
London: University o f Minnesota Press, 1995), xxiii (emphasis mine).
2 0 bell hooks, “Representations o f Whiteness,” in Black Looks: Race and Representation (Boston:
South End Press, 1992), 173.
2 1 Caren Kaplan, Questions o f Travel: Postmodern D iscourses o f Displacem ent (Durham: Duke
University Press, 1996), 131.
2 2 Kaplan, “Transporting the Subject,” 33.
2 3 James Clifford, “Traveling Cultures,” in Routes: Travel and Translation in the Late Twentieth
Century (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1997), 33. The essay was originally published as
“Traveling Cultures,” in Cultural Studies, eds. Lawrence Grossberg, Cary Nelson, and Paula A.
Treichler (New York: Routledge, 1992), 96-116.
2 4 Clifford, “Traveling Cultures,” 31-32. For further sources on the gender marking o f travel, see
Kaplan, Questions o f Travel, and Pratt, Im perial Eyes.
2 5 Clifford, “Traveling Cultures,” 24.
2 6 Ibid., 35.
2 7 Ibid., 36.
2 8 D. N. Rodowick, “Introduction: Mobile Citizens, Media States,” PMLA 177 (2002): 20.
2 9 Kaplan, “Transporting the Subject,” 35.
3 0 Foucault, D iscipline and Punish, 137.
3 1 Ibid., 138.
3 2 Michel Foucault, “The Eye o f Power,” in Gordon, Power/Knowledge, 156.
3 3 Ibid., 158.
3 4 Ibid., 162.
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1 5 Michel de Certeau, The P ractice o f E veryday Life, trans. Steven Rendall (Berkeley and Los
Angeles: University o f California Press, 1984), 34-39.
36 Ibid., 37.
3 7 Gordon, “Introduction,” in Faubion, Pow er, xx.
3 8 Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon was directed by Ang Lee and adopted from a Chinese martial arts
warrior novel. As a globalized cultural commodity, many aspects o f the film in its production, casting
and contents are worth examining in film/critical studies. Here I simply want to acknowledge a strong
“traveling/dwelling” element in the film that gives an impetus to some fiirther thinking o f the project
at a certain stage. This, however, is for another conversation.
3 9 Clifford, “Traveling Cultures,” 36.
40 Martin O. Heisler, “Introduction— Changing Citizenship Theory and Practice: Comparative
Perspectives in a Democratic Framework,” PS: Political Science and P olitics xxxviii, no. 4 (2005):
668 .
4 1 Barbara Cruikshank, The Will to Empower: D em ocratic Citizens and Other Subjects (Ithaca, N Y :
Cornell University Press, 1999).
4 2 Toby Miller, The W ell-Tempered Self: Citizenship, Culture, and the Postmodern Subject
(Baltimore, MD: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1993), ix.
4 3 Jus sanguinis means by bloodline; ius soli means by birthplace.
4 4 See Rainer Baubock, “Towards a Political Theory o f Migrant Transnationalism,” International
Migration Review 37, no. 3 (2003): 700-723; and Rainer Baubock, “Expansive Citizenship— Voting
beyond Territory and Membership,” PS: P olitical Science and Politics xxxviii, no. 4 (2005): 683-687.
4 5 Stephen Castles, “Hierarchical Citizenship in a World o f Unequal Nation-States,” PS: Political
Science and Politics xxxviii, no. 4 (2005): 689.
46 See Paul Gilroy, There A in't No Black in the Union Jack: the Cultural Politics o f Race and Nation
(Chicago: University o f Chicago Press, 1991).
4 7 This is not to denigrate the historical struggle for the three dimensions o f citizenship traced by T. H.
Marshall— namely civil, political and social rights— but to indicate the ways in which conventional
structure o f citizenship, despite its sacred origin, has for the most part “settled” to sustain the political,
economic, and cultural status quo o f the (neo-)liberal, capitalist way o f life in the contemporary era,
and has become exceedingly inadequate in giving the marginalized and subordinate class the needed
access and power to dramatically change their lot. A s a result, the marginalized are induced to take
citizenship into their own hands. For Marshall’s evolutionary account o f the three dimensions o f
citizenship rights, see T. H. Marshall, Citizenship and Social Class and Other Essays (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 1950). For a critical appraisal o f the Marshallian legacy o f citizenship,
see Bryan S. Turner, “Contemporary Problems in the Theory o f Citizenship,” in Citizenship and
Social Theory, ed. Bryan S. Turner (Newbury Park, CA: Sage, 1993), 1-18.
4 8 M ike Davis, “Planet o f Slums: Urban Involution and the Informal Proletariat,” New Left Review 26
(March/April 2004): 5-34.
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4 9 Wendy Brown, “Neo-liberalism and the End o f Liberal Democracy.’’
5 0 Aihwa Ong, “(Re)Articulations o f Citizenship,” PS: Political Science and Politics xxxviii, no. 4
(2005): 698.
5 1 Aihwa Ong, Flexible Citizenship: The Cultural Logics o f Transnational ity (Durham, NC: Duke
University Press, 1999), 19.
5 2 Castles, “Hierarchical Citizenship,” 690.
5 3 As many scholars have noted, those in a higher socioeconomic position are much more likely to
enjoy the flexibility o f legitimate traveling through immigration process than those on the bottom.
Stephen Castles writes,
[I]t may be argued that the real decision on citizenship is made when immigration
applications are rejected or accepted, rather than later on when settlers apply for
naturalization. Selectivity o f immigrants according to economic, social and humanitarian
criteria may be based on ... political and cultural biases.
Stephen Castles, Ethnicity and Globalization: from M igrant Worker to Transnational Citizen
(Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage, 2000), 193. Aihwa Ong similarly argues,
[Njation-states seeking wealth-bearing and entrepreneurial immigrants do not hesitate to
adjust immigration laws to favor elite migrant subjects, especially professionals and
investors. In advanced capitalist sites, the articulation o f market-based criteria and
citizenship norms encourages elite actors to exploit the possibility o f capital accumulation
through the astute deployment o f multiple passports.
Ong, “(Re)Articulations o f Citizenship,” 698.
5 4 Jacques Ranciere, Dis-agreem ent: Politics and Philosophy, trans. Julie Rose (Minneapolis:
University o f Minnesota Press, 1999), 25.
5 5 Bonnie Honig, D em ocracy and the Foreigner (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2001), 101.
5 6 Ranciere, D is-agreem ent, 30.
5 7 Clifford, “Traveling Cultures,” 36. See also entire chap.
5 8 Amanda Anderson, “Cosmopolitanism, Universalism, and the Divided Legacies o f Modernity,” in
Cosmopolitics: Thinking and Feeling beyond the Nation, eds. Pheng Cheah and Bruce Robbins
(Minneapolis: University o f Minnesota Press, 1998), 268.
5 9 Bruce Robbins, “Comparative Cosmopolitanisms,” in Cheah and Robbins, Cosmopolitics, 248.
60 Anderson, “Cosmopolitanism,” 268.
6 1 The most oft-sited contemporary exemplar o f this is Martha C. Nussbaum, “Patriotism and
Cosmopolitanism,” in F or Love o f Country: D ebating the Limits o f Patriotism , ed. Joshua Cohen
(Boston: Beacon Press, 1996), 3-17.
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6 2 Scott L. Malcomson, “The Varieties o f Cosmopolitan Experience,” in Cheah and Robbins,
Cosmopolitics, 240.
6 3 Clifford, “Traveling Cultures,” 39.
6 4 Bruce Robbins, “Introduction Part I: Actually Existing Cosmopolitanism,” in Cheah and Robbins,
Cosmopolitics, 2.
6 5 Cases o f this romanticized idealization o f postmodern, euphoric travel can be found in Ulrich Beck
and Zygmunt Bauman. Beck points out that in an increasingly globalized and postmodern world,
what he calls the era o f the second, reflexive modernity, when the concepts o f borders and affiliations
around the entity o f nation-states are increasingly undermined and re-structured, ambivalence,
indetermination, and strangeness have spread out universally and become each individual’s living
reality. Bauman also argues that, in an age o f global hypermobility where people constantly travel
from one place to another, we are effectively moving from the condition o f “modem pilgrims” to that
o f “post-modem nomads.” See Ulrich Beck, D em ocracy without Enemies, trans. Mark Ritter
(Cambridge, UK: Polity Press, 1998); and Zygmunt Bauman, M odernity and Am bivalence (Ithaca:
Cornell University Press, 1991).
6 6 This is shown in David Hollinger’s Postethnic America: Beyond Multiculturalism (New York:
Basic Books, 1995), as well as the edited volumes o f Cohen’s F or love o f Country? D ebating the
Limits o f Patriotism , and Cheah and Robbins’ Cosmopolitics: Thinking and Feeling beyond the
Nation.
6 7 Malcomson, “The Varieties o f Cosmopolitan Experience,” 221.
6 8 Rey Chow, Writing Diaspora: Tactics o f Intervention in Contemporary Cultural Studies
(Blommington: Indiana University Press, 1993), 16.
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Chapter 1
Tactical Citizenship: Domestic Nannies, Sweatshop Seamstresses, and
Undocumented Citizenship Participation in the Third Space
The sociologist Saskia Sassen has written of the global cities as the
concentrated command points and central strategic sites for global capitalist market
production. In the midst of the popular phantasmic aspiration for global cities,
Sassen points to the grim development of economic polarization where the
increasing number o f high-income white-collar jobs breeds a great number o f low-
paying dead-end jobs. Not only does the high-income sector (both residential and
commercial) have a huge demand for low-wage service labor (e.g. cleaning, serving,
ornamenting), the manufacturing sector is also going through a downgrading process
“in which the share of unionized shops declines and wages deteriorate while
sweatshops and industrial homework proliferate.”1 It is in these low-wage service
and manufacturing sectors with loose labor-protection enforcements in the hyper
capital cities that we encounter the most prominent presence o f immigrant workers.
Writing in Los Angles, the sociologist Pierrette Hondagneu-Sotelo asks us to
imagine “a day without a Mexican”:
When you arrive at many a Southern California hotel or restaurant, you are likely to
be first greeted by a Latino car valet. The janitors, cooks, busboys, painters, carpet
cleaners, and landscape workers who keep the office buildings, restaurants, and
malls running are also likely to be Mexican or Central American immigrants, as are
many of those who work behind the scenes in dry cleaners, convalescent homes,
hospitals, resorts, and apartment complexes.... Along the boulevards, at car washes
promising “100% hand wash” for prices as low as $4.99, teams of Latino workers
furiously scrub, wipe, and polish automobiles. Supermarket shelves boast bags of
“prewashed” mesclun or baby greens (sometimes labeled “Euro salad”), thanks to
the efforts of the Latino immigrants who wash and package the greens.2
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Taking out the Latino immigrant workers will shut down an overwhelming
proportion of the capitalist operation of Los Angeles and, increasingly, many other
entrepreneurial cities that rely on the laboring bodies of immigrant manual laborers.
Those who proudly wear the label o f “citizens” and who conspicuously
benefit from the low-expense arrangement in their everyday life, however, are often
incensed at the “invasion” by the “illegal aliens,” their “stealing” o f “our” jobs, tax
dollars and social benefits, and their diluting of “our” cultural heritage. Given the
dwelling trajectory o f citizenship that stipulates a citizen to be an official national
subject by birth or through the formal channel of immigration/naturalization,
undocumented Third World migrant workers have historically been dissociated from
“citizenship.” These undocumented subjects are caught in a condition where neither
(secure) dwelling nor (legitimate) traveling is possible. On one hand, neo-liberal
policies such as the Structural Adjustment Programs (SAPs) pursued by the U.S.-
based financial institutions (World Bank and IMF) through blatant privatization and
massive cutting o f social subsidies have collapsed their local economies and
shattered their sense of secure dwelling, forcing a huge wave o f migration outward in
search of better job opportunities and a more humane living standard. On the other,
the system o f nation-state citizenship (dwelling trajectory) severely delimits their
chances of migration through official channels, forcing them to go underground and
travel without legitimate documents— whether by overstaying their visas, crossing
borders in the desert on foot, or traveling along with smugglers.3
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But such plight does not simply translate into passive victimization of a
mystical “Third World.” Rather, in the context o f egregious exploitation and
colonization, an engaging and resistant agency o f the subordinate class also surges
forth strongly, courageously, and creatively. Hence, while global cities are the
conspicuous sites of flexible capitalist operation that takes advantage of “cheap” and
expendable immigrant labor, they are also sites of what social theorist Michel de
Certeau calls “secondary production”— a hidden and intricate process bred by the
weak in their daily negotiations and struggles against the rich, strong and powerful.4
In the context o f globalization, this hidden resistance is often performed by the
laboring immigrant workers in both the service sector (e.g., domestics, janitors, hotel
maids) and the manufacturing sector (e.g., garment factory), many o f whom are
undocumented and without the official state endowment to act out citizenship, taking
rights and participating politically. Since they are denied the official access to
citizenship, I will in this chapter look at how these forbidden travelers nonetheless
insinuate themselves into “citizenship.”
I look at these undocumented workers as neither aggressive “illegals” nor
passive “victims,” but as “traveling agents” who challenge and transgress the
dwelling trajectory o f citizenship in its “political” dimension that keeps subjects in
place by delimiting citizen participation within national borders and within
predetermined bureaucratic parameters o f representative/deliberative democracy. I
argue that their unruly resistance and contestation at workplace induce a
transgressive imaginary of traveling citizenship— particularly, a formation o f tactical
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citizenship—that takes us beyond the political dwelling trajectory in rethinking the
notions of citizenship and cosmopolitanism.
The political theorist Bonnie Honig in Democracy and the Foreigner asks
that we think of “taking,” the taking of liberties and non-existent rights, “as the very
thing that immigrants have to give us.”5 In examining the working rituals and
resistance of undocumented immigrants working as domestic nannies and garment
sweatshop seamstresses, I extend this argument further in arguing that immigrant
workers not only take non-existent rights as citizens, they also help us reformulate an
alternative “cultural” processing o f citizenship that both uses and challenges the
conventional scripts of “citizens” in political theory. By “cultural” I do not mean
traditional cultures or multicultural citizenship but in terms of “subcultural” or
“subaltern.” Specifically, borrowing from Dick Hebdige’s work on subculture, I
read “citizenship” as a mundane object, a liberal-cultural artifact, and argue that an
alternative subcultural style o f citizenship comes to emerge in undocumented
immigrants’ daily struggle at work. Using Michel de Certeau’s notion o f “tactics,” I
call these alternative uses of citizenship scripts by undocumented workers, tactical
citizenship. As I will also note, tactical citizenship is not a “voluntary” act freed
from structural constraints; to the contrary, it needs to be situated as a reactive
response by the subordinate class lacking viable options to redress their precarious
livelihood in the context of the global political economy.
While some of the immigrant workers that I examine are undocumented,
others are not—with legal working permits, permanent residency, or even
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citizenship. However, I purposefully read the immigrant workers in their
undocumented-ness that takes on double meanings. First, while the undocumented
status makes many immigrants more vulnerable to exploitation, blacklisting, and
deportation, it also signifies their subtle and subversive agency in negotiating with
the neo-liberal economy by traveling through the state surveillance system, obstacles
and dangers in order to attain what they desire. It is precisely their traveling without
legal documents and taking rights without citizen status that provides a starting point
for the investigation of “tactical” citizenship. Second, as their undocumented status
subjects them to exclusion from public political participation as citizens, their
political register is largely hidden from view and remains undocumented. I thus see
it critical to document their “citizen” participation as political agents who calculate,
evaluate, take risks, and further the claims of rights, equality, and justice.
I divide the chapter into four sections. First, I explicate how Dick Hebdige’s
conception o f subculture may be revised and extended to theorize a subcultural style
of tactical citizenship. Second, deriving from the dwelling trajectory of citizenship, I
identify four “proper ways o f participating as citizens” in the conventional
theoretical construction o f citizenship which, in my view, make it difficult to
imagine alternative means and forms o f citizen participation: 1) the in-or-out
dichotomy o f citizenship; 2) civility and law-abidingness; 3) politics as the supreme
activity of citizenship (and its simultaneously “public” and “collective” character);
and 4) system-subject correspondence. Assembling and borrowing from a wide
range of writers— postcolonial theorist Homi Bhabha, poststructuralist Michel de
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Certeau, political anthropologist James Scott, and labor historian Robin Kelley— I
delineate an alternative citizenship imaginary where each of these four features of
citizenship may be seen as correspondingly translated and re-narrated by
undocumented subjects into four “other ways of participating as citizens”: 1) the
“neither/nor”-an d -“both/and also” of the third space o f mimicry; 2) calculated
conformity; 3) hidden transcripts, and 4) the Greek notion of metis (tricks and
cunning intelligence) or what Levi-Strauss calls bricolage. These “other ways of
participating as citizens” constitute what I mean by tactical citizenship. Third,
turning to ethnographic literatures on domestic work and garment sweatshops, I
compare and analyze the ways in which immigrant workers in different working
conditions negotiate and resist at their workplace to gain rights and benefits may be
precisely seen as deploying these other ways of participating as citizens. Finally, I
will conclude by examining how traveling citizenship in the mode of tactics via
undocumented immigrant workers turns citizenship from a mundane object into new
“cosmopolitan” possibilities.
I. Reuse and Refashion: the Subcultural Style of Tactical Citizenship6
In Subculture: the Meaning o f Style, Dick Hebdige examines how post-war
white British working-class youths emulate, reuse, copy and paste the dresses, music,
and dance styles o f their neighboring West Indies immigrants, a generation o f young
Black Britons who fashioned reggae and Rastafarianism to signify their alienation
and “otherness” from the “straight” and white world as well as to resurrect their
black identity and African heritage. From the hipsters, beats and teddy boys, to the
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mods, skinheads, glam rockers and punks, the white working-class youths drew
identity and inspiration from the black Rastafarians in reusing sartorial elements and
mundane objects from different epochs and other subcultural groups in forming an
eclectic clothing style in “cut up” form, combining diverse and incompatible musical
traditions and dance styles in refashioning their own subcultural styles that
symbolized their difference from, and class revolt against, the bourgeois public
order. As Hebdige notes, there are always “subversive implications” in styles, “in
the expressive forms and rituals of these subordinate groups,” which carry “the status
and meaning of revolt.”7 The process o f subculture “begins with a crime against the
natural order ... But it ends in the construction o f a style, in a gesture of defiance or
contempt, in a smile or a sneer. It signifies a Refusal.”
Undocumented immigrant workers are not directly equivalent to subcultural
youths. My effort here, however, is to treat “citizenship”— as it is constructed in the
conventional script of Western democratic theory—as a mundane object, a liberal-
cultural artifact in itself. Through a reading of the acts by undocumented immigrants
working as domestic nannies and garment sweatshop seamstresses in their daily
working rituals, I argue that these undocumented workers may be seen as
“subculturalists” who appropriate, rearrange and reuse the conventional scripts of
democratic citizenship to gain citizenship rights that they otherwise would be
incapable of obtaining because o f their non-citizen status and subordinate position.
In the process, they help formulate an alternative conception o f citizen participation,
representing “objections and contradictions”9 to the conventional script of citizenship
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that excludes them from meaningful political participation. By appropriating the
codes of citizenship and refashioning them in their own ways, undocumented
immigrant workers express “a form of resistance to the order which guarantees their
continued subordination.”1 0
As Hebdige points out, for the youth subculturalists, style is an “intentional
communication” that directs public attention to its deviance from normality,
“giv[ing] itself to be read.”11 As “semiotic guerilla warfare” on an outward level of
appearance, the youth stylistic resistance “is declared on a world of surfaces.”1 2 One
key difference in the acts of undocumented immigrant workers that I examine herein
is that such “sign” politics is not carried out outwardly and aesthetically on the
surface through dress, dance and music to deliberately call attention upon their
“deviance;” rather, as we shall see, much o f their resistance is lodged off the public
view, behind the scenes, as “hidden transcripts.” Undocumented workers’ “sign”
politics is inhered within their daily working rituals and always speaks directly to
their immediate material situations. Unlike youth subcultures, their “sign” politics is
a means to an end (rights, wages, benefits) not an end in itself as an aesthetic
performance. It is through their daily life struggle at work that an alternative style
and meaning of citizenship comes to emerge.
Like youth subcultures, however, undocumented immigrant workers’ acts
may be understood as “subcultural” in Hebdige’s notion of style as bricolage.
Originating from Levi-Strauss’s study, bricolage refers to the means by which
primitive men use and improvise the elements in their surroundings in response to
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their environment. To Hebdige, subcultures are “cultures of conspicuous
consumption,” involving the consumption, uses and reuses of various cultural
products and artifacts, and through consumption, a subculture “reveals its ‘secret’
identity and communicates its forbidden meanings.” Borrowing from Hebdige, it is
in the notion o f using and appropriating cultural artifacts (i.e., script of citizenship)
rather than following the convention of what a “citizen” is or ought to be that we
may come to theorize undocumented immigrant workers’ acts as formation of a
subcultural style of citizenship. Through bricolage, this subcultural style of
citizenship interrupts the “normalization” o f citizenship in conventional discourse,
signifying “gestures, movements towards a speech which offends the ‘silent
majority’, which challenges the principle o f unity and cohesion, which contradicts
the myth of consensus.”1 4 Borrowing from Michel de Certeau’s notion of “tactics,” I
call these alternative uses o f citizenship scripts by undocumented workers, tactical
citizenship. As I will argue, contemporary citizenship theorists often impose their
own scripts o f “proper ways of participating as citizens” in a strategic manner that
echoes the discipline o f the dominant political-social-economic order, neglecting that
the weak and the subordinate always have their own ideas, i.e. making do with or
reusing the scripts in their own ways through everyday tactics}5
In saying this, I do not mean that subordinate undocumented subjects
consciously know that in resisting against the authority at work, they are doing the
work of re-scripting traditional notions o f citizenship. As Hebdige notes, it is
unlikely that members o f subcultures would recognize themselves as reflected in the
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theorists’ "sympathetic” readings and construction. He writes, “The war may be
conducted at a level beneath the consciousness of the individual members of a
spectacular subculture.”1 6 Or, as de Certeau puts it, they “write without being able to
read it.”1 7 Tactical citizenship is merely my own way o f reading/interpreting the
subjectivity of these undocumented subjects. But while the undocumented
immigrant workers whom I will go on to examine may not understand themselves as
“tactical citizens,” there is no doubt that they are aware of the necessity of their
spontaneous struggle and calculated resistance in gaining and safeguarding their
immediate rights, economic welfare and physical well-being. My theoretical
construction thus aims to do the intellectual work in further translating these
workers’ dissident acts into a legible discourse of “citizenship” so to render them not
as illegal disruptors but as legitimate “citizens.”
It also needs to be noted that tactical citizenship is not a “voluntary” act freed
from structural constraints; rather, it needs to be situated as a reactive response by
the subordinate class lacking viable options to redress their precarious livelihood in
the context o f the global political economy. As Hebdidge points out, one should
avoid the temptation to locate subcultures as the repository of “Truth” or the
embodiment o f a revolutionary telos.ls Rather, as it involves manipulation of social
hierarchy rather than its restructuring, subcultures “actually sometimes serve to
reinforce rather than erode existing social structures.”1 9 Hebdige argues,
“subcultures are not privileged forms; they do not stand outside the reflexive
circuitry of production and reproduction which ... [forms] the social totality.”
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Subculturalists “in part contest and in part agree with” the dominant culture's
construction o f social relations.2 0 In the midst of the global hegemonic arrangement,
tactical citizenship is never enough, and still relies on more potent and sustainable
social protest that can empower and transform undocumented immigrant workers
into rightful citizens. But as Hebdige further notes, what is critical is “to
acknowledge the right o f the subordinate class ... to ‘make something of what is
made of (them)’— to embellish, decorate, parody and wherever possible to recognize
and rise above a subordinate position which was never o f their choosing.”2 1 Tactical
citizenship therefore denotes the limited means by which traveling agents such as
undocumented domestic and sweatshop workers attempt to rise above their
subordinate situation by insinuating themselves into citizenship, taking rights and
powers as (non-existent) “citizens.”
II. Tactical Citizenship: the Proper Ways of Participating as Citizens vs.
the Other Ways of Participating as Citizens
In his oft-cited essay, “Identity, Authenticity, Survival,” Kwame Anthony
Appiah argues that Charles Taylor’s proposed recognition o f multicultural group
identity forces subjects to act according to the proper scripts o f being “black” and
“gay.”2 2 To put it in dwelling/traveling terms, what concerns Appiah is the way in
which identity politics forces a subject to “dwell” into a pre-defined destination of
identity when he/she may desire other “traveling” routes of identity expressions. It
comes less to mind that scripts of proper ways o f being citizens also abound in
citizenship theory that attempts to fix subjects in a “proper” social order. If these
citizenship scripts designed by political theorists may be understood as strategic in
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nurturing citizen-subjects in a “dwelling” mode of political participation, tactical
citizenship speaks o f acts that rearrange and reuse these scripts in order to open up
other “traveling” routes for subjects to act out citizenship and obtain citizenship
rights.
Here, I will specifically identify four “proper ways o f participating as
citizens” as scripted in democratic theory that, in my view, silence other remote
murmurs of citizen participation. I examine how each feature can be subverted and
retooled to allow for “other ways o f participating as citizens” to emerge into
visibility. As democratic theorists generally make a distinction between the liberal
notion and the civic republican lineage of citizenship, and there also exist various
approaches and positions within these two dominant traditions of citizenship, these
four “proper ways of participating as citizens” are not meant as definitional criteria
that capture the comprehensive spectrum of the diverse positions on citizenship.
Rather, I choose to focus on these four major identifiable features that, in my view,
stifle bricolage—the reuse and refashioning of citizenship scripts in constructing
alternative conceptions of citizen-subjects.
Two major approaches to citizenship in Western political thought are often
distinguished: civic republicanism and liberalism. The former, taking its heritage
from Greek democracy and thinkers like Aristotle and Rousseau, is more communal-
, civic- and participatory-oriented, and it places emphasis on the substantive good of
the democratic community.2 3 The latter, taking its heritage from classical liberals
such as Hobbes and Locke, is driven by concerns with individual liberty, rights, self-
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interest, property, and procedural forms o f democracy.2 4 For Jurgen Habermas, the
former emphasizes government as a cooperative enterprise based on the mutual
dependence of free and equal citizens, considers politics as dialogical reflections on
substantial ethical life, and devotes to consensus, solidarity and the common good;
the latter sees government as an apparatus of public administration, considers politics
as a pursuit of private interests in a society o f market networks, and grounds rights in
a “higher law o f reason” than a dialogical general will.2 5 Other commentators have
called the former “thick” citizenship (citizenship-as-desirable-activity) and the latter
Oft
“thin” citizenship (citizenship-as-legal-status).
Identifying the two major approaches in constructing citizenship is not to
neglect that not all political theorists who write on citizenship fit nicely under either
of these two categories. For example, while modern-day communitarianism2 7 is
often associated with civic republicanism because of its emphasis on common good,
civic virtue, and patriotic sentiment, civic republican philosophers consider
communitarianism not only as a different camp o f thought, but even threatening the
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true ideal o f republican citizenship. Then there is also Habermas’s vision of a
discourse-based deliberative citizenship that takes elements from both the liberal and
the republican model.2 9 Finally, Iris Marion Young writes against the idea of
universal citizenship in either the liberal and republican script and proposes instead
an activist model of differentiated citizenship that attends to societal oppression and
group differences.3 0 All this is to qualify that my following discussion does not
intend to exhaust the diverse and complex features of the various positions on
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citizenship staked out by political theorists. Neither do 1 assume that all democratic
theorists subscribe to all of the “proper ways of participating as citizens” that I
identify. These four features do, however, in one way or another, capture the aura, a
“shared understanding” of the way citizenship is scripted in the canon of political
theory.3 1
In my view, theorists who inscribe the “proper ways of participating as
citizens” and oversee citizen participation according to their designed strategic
schemas behave like, to use de Certeau’s terms, “voyeur-god,” turning citizens into
“cadavers” who memorize their scripts line-by-line, follow the trajectory rules in
their “Concept-city,” who live but without life.3 2 In contrast, the corresponding
“other ways of participating as citizens” point towards a different way of conceiving
citizenship— focusing not on the imposition of principles from “above” but on the
artistic, hybrid and instrumental improvisation and retooling o f the scripted
narratives from “below.” I call these everyday practices, uses and improvisations of
citizen participation scripts, tactical citizenship.
The kinds of activities that characterize tactical citizenship do not fit the trope
of citizens in the conventional script where one participates in a civil-institutional
sense, such as in voting, serving on a jury, campaigning, legislating, rulemaking,
negotiating, or deliberating in a town-hall meeting. Undocumented immigrant
workers are denied access to these official forums of citizen participation. Rather,
their modes o f activity include both overt acts of protesting and striking as well as
hidden dissident acts o f rule-breaking, transgression, and manipulating spaces of
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power relations in the everyday. For the undocumented workers who are made to
travel for livelihood, tactical citizenship is one critical (even if limited) way in which
they politically participate to get themselves in a position to demand rights and take
benefits entitled only to official state citizens. Due to their undocumented status,
their “citizen” participation tends to be camouflaging in character, “less a pitched
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battle than a low-grade, hit-and-run, guerilla action.” Immigrant workers thus put
to contestation the founding script of citizens. And as Judith Butler rightly notes,
“That such foundations exist only to be put into question is ... the permanent risk of
the process of democratization.”3 4 Below, I will provide a summary/appraisal of
each feature o f citizenship while illustrating how each one may be retooled to
imagine other ways o f being citizens.
The In-or-Out Dichotomy o f Citizenship vs. the “ Neither/nor” -and— “Both/and
also” o f the Third Space o f Mimicry
The first feature basically means that conventional citizenship is defined by a
dichotomous, binary logic of either/or, in or out, citizen or illegal, member or
stranger. As Judith Shklar points out, “In any modem state and especially in an
immigrant society, citizenship must always refer primarily to nationality.”3 5
Whether liberals or civic republicans, citizenship is only for those who are already
“in” as members: only citizens of a particular state get to partake in citizen
participation in that state.
The in-or-out boundary o f citizenship is traditionally determined by bloodline
(ius sanguinis) and birthplace (ius soli). Democratic theorists from Peter Schuck and
Rogers Smith to Michael Walzer have charged against this “ascriptive” notion of
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citizenship based on immutable characteristics and propose instead a “consensual”
conception of citizenship in which political membership is determined by mutual
consent— granted by the person seeking citizenship as well as by the existing
citizenry.3 6 This seemingly democratic consensual notion o f citizenship, however,
fortifies rather than loosens the binary distinction between citizens and outsiders.
Schuck and Smith’s vision o f the harmonious “consent,” as Honig indicates, is
persistently haunted by the “willful lawbreaker” of the illegal alien who “never
consents to American laws, and ‘we’ never consent to his presence on ‘our’
territory.”3 7
Walzer, while arguing that migrant workers who are admitted through
democratic consent by the republic must be naturalized as members and given
citizenship, nonetheless presents the imagery of the political community as a sacred
“family” (rather than a neighborhood or a club) to re-demarcate the boundary
between “members” and “strangers.” For Walzer, there is “no stranger in this
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family!” But the family always carries the shadow of strangers. As Phil Cole
argues, the “existence of a liberal polity made up of free and equal citizens rests
upon the existence of outsiders who are refused a share o f... [its] goods.”4 0 The
more we put emphasis on national membership, the more likely that we label, make
distinction of, and ostracize the strangers as distant and unrelated others.
I propose that rather than seeing citizenship through this binary construction,
we instead see undocumented immigrants through a third space lens of
“neither/nor” and-“both/and also.”4 1 In other words, the undocumented subject is
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neither “in” nor “out,” neither official legal citizen nor “unaffiliated” alien, but both
a member and a stranger, both a citizen and an outsider (and also with a difference),
thereby blurring the in-or-out boundary of citizen participation. The idea o f a
bordered third space of cultural identification has previously been articulated by
Chicana lesbian feminist Gloria Anzaldua in what she calls the mestizo
consciousness: a mixed-race, mixed-culture, hybrid, and alien being. The mestizo is
not completely white, Indian, or Chicana, but steps in all three, as a plural
personality: “nothing is thrust out, the good the bad and the ugly, nothing rejected,
nothing abandoned.”4 2 A mestizo “continually walk[s] out of one culture and into
another, because [he/she is] in all cultures at the same time.”4 3 Hence, neither
completely like “this” nor completely like “that,” but simultaneously both this and
that (though also with a difference). The third space may be employed to re-imagine
the construction of citizenship from the binary construct o f “members (us) vs.
strangers (them)” to a shifting in-between space where the undocumented may be
simultaneously conceived o f as citizens as well as outsiders.
I argue that this third space of citizenship takes on what Homi Bhabha calls
the camouflaging moment o f mimicry— “almost the same, but not quite”44: they
seem to be like us citizens, but not quite; they are “illegal aliens,” but not quite like
it, either. Mimicry is a way of translating, a way of imitating, “but in a mischievous,
displacing sense— imitating an original in such a way that the priority of the original
is not reinforced but by the very fact that it can be simulated, copied, transferred,
transformed, made into a simulacrum and so on.”4 5 The binary construction of
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citizenship as a dichotomous in-or-out—the original copy of citizenship— never
really has a closure, but is consistently simulated: someone who is “out” pretends to
be “in;” someone who strikes you as “in” is actually “out.” The third space of
mimicry blurs, camouflages, and destabilizes the in-or-out boundary of citizenship,
thus opening up the possibilities o f undocumented workers’ “citizen” participation.
Anne McClintock has noted that in his construction of the mimicry, Bhabha
has a tendency in sliding historical agency into a fetishized abstraction o f formal
ambivalence that takes on a transhistorical ubiquity.4 6 In Bhabha’s hands, textual
mimicry often functions as the celebratory resistant mode of a generalized (and
privileged) “postcolonial,” disregarding its insufficiency and passivity in redressing
the urgent needs o f the subordinate classes within the postcolonial 4 7 The point,
McClintock argues, is not to dispense with the notion but “to historically complicate
it,”4 8 to localize and contextualize mimicry. From McClintock, we need to pinpoint
the moments and locations where “citizen” participation in the mode of mimicry can
function as useful intervention, and where it reaches its limitations vis-a-vis the
hegemonic order.
Civility, Law-Abidingness, or the “Virtue Checkbox” vs. Calculated Conformity
George Armstrong Kelly points out that in the discussion of citizenship, a
distinction is made between “civil” and “civic.” Kelly writes, “In our common terms
of today, the civil is more oriented toward private individualism and the civic toward
public solidarity.”49 Whereas civic implies a more affirmative and even patriotic
tone, “as when we refer to ‘civic virtue’ or ‘civic duty,”’ civil is more passive and
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less political, as when we refer to “civil rights” or “civil life,” and with “the
additional meanings o f ‘civilian,’ ‘polite,’ ‘orderly,’ and ‘legally entitled to obtain
private justice.’”5 0 Here, I will focus on “civility” and its accompanied meanings of
law-abidingness, virtue and conformity to public order as the second “proper way of
being citizens;” the “civic” feature will be addressed next as the third.
While civic virtue tends to have a more civic republican and communitarian
bent, civility is a widely shared value among liberals, communitarians and civic
republicans. Despite their disagreements, there is an underlying “common moral
vocabulary.”5 1 Stephen Macedo argues, “Citizens often profess an allegiance to the
basic tenets of liberal political morality, tenets that importantly define the ‘American
ethos.’”5 2 This “common moral vocabulary” or “American ethos” often takes on the
form of what I call “virtue checkbox.” Walzer, for example, in What It Means to be
an American trumpets the values (the checkboxes) of loyalty (to the republic);
service (such as the citizen-soldier or minuteman who risk their lives in defending
their country); civility (social virtues, orderliness, politeness, law-abidance);
tolerance; and participation in political life (voting, attending meetings, joining
organizations).5 3
Liberal theorists such as William Galston and Macedo also come up with
their reformist ideal o f “liberal virtues” to fend off communitarian and civic
republican charges that liberalism’s commitment to neutrality, acquisition o f rights
and pursuit o f private interests undermines community and lacks a substantive
conception o f the human good. The virtue checkbox for Galston, a one-time deputy
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assistant to the former President Bill Clinton, is expansive, covering different spheres
o f liberal life: general virtues (courage, law-abidingness, loyalty); virtues o f liberal
society (independence, fidelity, tolerance); virtues o f liberal economy (divided into
virtues for entrepreneur, employee, and market economy in general); and virtues o f
liberal politics (divided into virtues o f citizenship, leadership, and general political
principles).5 4 Macedo also articulates three sets of liberal virtues: judicial virtues
(e.g. impartiality); legislative virtues (e.g. engaging in dialogue, compromise and
accommodation); and executive virtues (e.g. to resolve, act, and persevere).5 5
While such virtue lists represent normative ideals and are in no way inscribed
in law as pre-requisites o f citizenship (and certainly not every citizen is likely to
check off all o f the above boxes), one needs to look into the ways in which
citizenship and cultivation of civility/law-abidingness are persistently intertwined in
the everyday life o f liberal democracy: from parenting, school system, legal system,
bourgeois institutional dealings, professional interaction, media barrages, to
Presidential speech that addresses the nation.5 6 The U.S. immigration law
specifically prohibits the entrance o f convicted criminals, communists, and, prior to
the 1990 Federal Immigration Act that lifts the bar, homosexuals, that would set
them on any possible path towards citizenship. Each o f these above subjects, in one
way or another, represents a potential disruptive counterfigure to a liberal regime’s
virtue checkbox on civility, law-abidingness, social virtues and public order.
Honig has provided an incisive critique o f virtue and law-abidingness in her
dissection of the works by political philosophers John Rawls (liberal) and Michael
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Sandel (communitarian). Honig characterizes Rawls and Sandel (along with Kant)
as “virtue theorists o f politics” (as opposed to her favored virtu theorists such as
Arendt and Nietzsche) who “converge in their assumption that success lies in the
elimination from a regime of dissonance, resistance, conflict, or struggle.”5 7 As
Honig points out, democratic theorists often consider that citizens governed under
their designed democratic institutions will be so well-ordered that they would play
their part as the law-abiding, rational beings supporting the stability of the regime.
The recalcitrant others who are not law-abiding or who disrupt the system o f justice
are then seen as “oddly irrational, even immoral, ... a now spectral other, the ‘bad
character.’”5 8 Those who do not conform to the rules of justice, rationality, and
civility (criminals, irresponsible rogues and idiosyncratic misfits) are treated as
extrasystemic and considered “a symptom o f sheer perversity, orneriness, a tic of
some kind, a defective character.”5 9 Honig argues, a democratic theory that attempts
to prescribe a closure to deviance and conflicts by way o f constructing a system of
orderly and virtuous subjects is ill-served without attending to— or noticing but with
a sheer will to manage and administer—“dilemmas” and “difference,” or, “the
eventful eruptions o f a turbulence that is always already there, ... the periodic
crystallizations o f incoherences and conflicts in social orders and their subjects.”6 0
To Honig, these “eventful disruptions o f a turbulence” by unruly subjects are the
periodic remainders that disrupt the virtue politics of civility and public order.
Honig concludes that, and I agree, the ultimate move is not to embrace virtu and
displace virtue, but to go beyond the virtu e-virtu divide— to see them not as two
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distinct and self-sufficient positions but two coexisting and conflicting impulses of
democratic political life that we should learn to negotiate and live with.6 1
Adding to Honig, however, in-between virtue and virtu, there is yet another
possibility in the third space o f mimicry—one that lurks under the appearance of
loyalty, civility, law-abidingness, and restrains from the dissonant moment of
eruption—what political anthropologist James Scott calls “calculated conformity.”6 2
To many undocumented immigrant workers, the fear of repression, blacklisting,
deportation, and “the day-to-day imperative of earning a living” often negate “any
realistic possibility, for the time being, of directly and collectively redressing their
situation, ... [so they] have little choice but to adjust, as best they can, to the
circumstance they confront daily.” The demonstration of civility, law-abidingness,
submissiveness, and performing their tasks to the optimal can be useful masks of
camouflaging—protecting themselves from “unwanted” attention or in exchange of
material rewards by acting as civil and law-abiding subjects. Rather than doing
away with the script of civility, undocumented workers may translate it into their
own use: as a tool of survival, a necessity o f living, and a weapon of the weak. Here,
Rawls’s notion o f “veil of ignorance”6 4 is turned into a literal and practical usage—
living behind a veil o f ignorance (or, better yet, obedience)— to act like cooperative,
ignorant and harmless.
As Scott points out, calculated conformity “does not rule out certain forms of
resistance, although it surely sets limits that only the foolhardy would transgress.”
At the same time, neither does it “imply normative consent to those realities,” as it
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needs to be interpreted in a context that requires a pragmatic consideration.6 5
Calculated conformity is widely shared in the culture of the weak. Well-known
black author Zora Neale Hurston once wrote:
[T]he Negro, in spite of his open-faced laughter, his seeming acquiescence, is
particularly evasive. You see we are a polite people and we do not say to our
questioner, “Get out of here!” We smile and tell him or her something that satisfies
the white person because, knowing so little about us, he doesn’t know what he is
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missing.
Or, as Gloria Wade-Gayles puts it: “In the dark, we vented our rage. But in the
bright of day and out in the open, we were often well-behaved and cooperative.”6 7
For undocumented immigrant workers, calculated conformity is specifically
deployed to safeguard one’s rights (e.g., minimum wages, safer working conditions)
vis-a-vis the authority at work. In tactical citizenship, the ideal script of civility is
simulated into a mimicry: almost the same, but not quite.
Politics as the Supreme Activity o f Citizenship (and Its Simultaneously “Public”
and “Collective” Character) vs. Hidden Transcripts
To political theorists affiliated with the civic republican branch of thought
and the deliberative model o f democracy, civility is insufficient in energizing
“democratic citizenship.” To them, civic participation denotes the supreme activity
and ultimate end o f citizenship, and such activity takes on a simultaneously “public”
and “collective” character.
Thinkers in the civic republican tradition inspired by Aristotle and Rousseau
take citizenship to mean much more than an endowment o f legal status or behaving
civilly and orderly; it further implies a “robust civic involvement and citizenly
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commitment.” Citizenship is not merely an instrumental means o f procuring,
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preserving, and advancing each individual’s civil interests as prescribed in Lockean
liberalism, but is rather a way of living in a political community where each one
intimately associates with one another and enjoys affective ties by resolving conflicts
together, in a re-building of fraternity and solidarity.6 9 As Sheldon Wolin argues,
what makes the “political” distinct is its public quality, concerning with the common
and general interests shared by all members o f the community.7 0 Benjamin Barber
similarly criticizes the way liberalism reduces politics to a mere private matter of
pursuing life, liberty, and happiness, limiting it to the function o f zookeeping by
treating humans as animals fulfilling their own individual needs. He identifies the
ultimate political problem as action, the Arendtian notion of the Vita Activa, not
Truth or Justice in the abstract. What we need is political actors and citizens, not
speculative philosophers. Politics, Barber asserts, is “not as a way o f life but as a
way o f living.”7 1 J. G. A. Pocock echoes,
[Pjolitics (alias the activity of ruling and being ruled) is a good in itself.... What
matters is the freedom to take part in public decisions, not the content of the
decisions taken. This nonoperational or noninstrumental definition of politics has
remained part of our definition of freedom ever since and explains the role of
citizenship in it. Citizenship is not just a means to being free; it is the way of being
free itself... [I]t entailed an escape from the oikos, the material infrastmcture in
which one was forever managing the instruments of action, into the polis, the ideal
superstructure in which one took actions which were not means to ends but ends in
themselves.7 2
To civic republicans, citizenship signals universal freedom by the act of participating
in political activity in unison, away from the entanglement o f the particularistic
pursuits o f material necessity.
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To revive the participatory mode o f citizenship in the modem age, Barber
thus urges that we come to a compromise between liberal representative democracy
(which has destroyed the original meanings o f participation and citizenship) and the
Greek-style direct democracy where people governed themselves in all public affairs
all o f the time (which is no longer possible). This ideal is what Barber calls, “strong
democracy,” in which everyone would govern “in at least some public matters at
least some of the time,” but enough to “keep alive the meaning and function of
citizenship in all o f us all of the time.”7 3 To Barber, strong democracy rekindles the
spirit o f two key components o f citizenship: participation and community.7 4 It
revives a populist conception o f democracy, helping to reproduce a nation of
political actors and citizens in the modem age.
In contrast to the civic republicans, theorists who espouse the deliberative
model of democracy believe that the proper goal of collective participation is not
communal unison, but public rationality and democratic legitimation. Thus, while
Habermas prefers the civic republican model to the liberal model because o f its
emphasis on self-determination and public communication in a common praxis, he
objects to the communitarian reading o f the republican model that assimilates
politics “to a hermeneutical process of self-explication o f a shared form o f life or
collective identity.”7 5 Rather, Habermas borrows elements from both the liberal and
the republican paradigms to arrive at a new model of deliberative democracy. With
its emphasis on public reason and rational argumentation, the ideal imagery of the
citizen in the deliberative model is a rational deliberator who reflects, reasons,
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converses, compromises, and bargains, civilly, in a public sphere. Unlike civic
republicanism, the public sphere in deliberative democracy is less a union of
communal solidarity than a competitive bullring that “allow[s] the better arguments
to come into play.”7 6 The objective is less about community than to achieve justice
through a collective process o f reason and argumentation “in the equal interests of
all.”7 7 As Seyla Benhabib argues, the legitimation of democratic societies can only
be established through “the free and unconstrained public deliberation ... [on]
matters o f common concern.... among individuals considered as moral and political
equals.”7 8
Despite the differences between civic republicans and deliberative democrats,
their common emphasis on political participation and active citizenly engagement
advances beyond the passive paradigm o f the Lockean laissez faire liberalism. But
this third “proper way o f being citizens” is not without its problems. To begin with,
it is doubtful whether it is both possible and desirable to displace the private and the
materia] in their devotion to a narrowly defined “political.” Nancy Fraser, for
example, points out that in Habermas’s framework of deliberative public sphere,
public discourse is “restricted to deliberation about the common good, and that the
appearance o f ‘private interests’ and ‘private issues’ is always undesirable.”7 9 As
Fraser argues, not only should the matters o f what constitute “private” or “common”
concerns be left to the participants to decide in the discursive process itself rather
than determined a priori, moreover, given our social arrangements that often “operate
to the systemic profit of some groups o f people and to the systemic detriment of
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others, there are prima facie reasons for thinking that the postulation of a common
good shared by exploiters and exploited may well be a mystification.” For the
systematically disadvantaged groups, workers’ concerns (“economic privacy”) and
women’s concerns (“domestic privacy”) are not private, but public and political
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issues.
To supplement Fraser’s critique, it would also be problematic to read the
interest contestation by subordinate classes as simply private pursuits of necessity;
rather, they persistently politicize necessity. As James Scott argues, “‘Bread-and-
butter issues are the essence of lower-class politics and resistance. Consumption ...
is both the goal and the result o f resistance and counterresistence.”8 1 Subordinate
subjects do not follow the conventional script of citizenship o f either taking the high
route of the political towards the realm of freedom or going down the abyss of
necessity. Rather, they fuse self-interest and political resistance, politicizing private
pursuits in order to achieve a sense of human dignity and public justice.
Moreover, while both civic republicans and deliberative democrats
emphasize the public and collective character o f political action, subordinate classes
often participate through a flexible variety of guerilla-like tactical actions in their
politicization o f necessity. There is no singular channel of politics. On certain
occasions, collective participation in union strikes or ethnic-based workers’ center
protests is utilized; at other times, dissident acts o f sabotage may be deployed.
Referring to these dissident acts, Scott writes, “If they are open, they are rarely
collective, and, if they are collective, they are rarely open.”8 2 Hence, the scripts of
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publicity and collectivity are enacted, but often one without another. In fact, the
problem with participatory or discursive models o f democracy is not only that, as Iris
Young argues, they are exclusionary of marginal social groups because of their non-
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mainstream speech acts, but more importantly, they neglect how the transparent
public sphere is composed o f many “power-laden situations ... [where] the exercise
of power nearly always drives a portion of the full script underground.” Hence,
what is captured out in the open, or what is declared openly in deliberation in the
Habermasian “ideal speech situation,” can only be a “partial script” that is unable to
detect what is murmured by the weak “backstage”8 5 — for fear o f reprisal by the
dominant and the powerful who dictate their life chances. While certain
undocumented immigrant workers do on occasions courageously take on the risk of
deportation by protesting publicly against the exploitation by their employers,
oftentimes a “safer” route is to act out citizenship by demanding and taking citizen
rights offstage— in what Scott calls the evasive, dissident, and counter-cultural
hidden transcripts that only emerge outside the purview of authority and the perusal
of public transparency.8 6
System-Subject Correspondence vs. Metis and Bricolage
The last feature of citizenship, system-subject correspondence, is not an
internal principle o f the script of citizenship like the previous three; rather, it
describes the way the script is written (or the way the philosophers do theory), which
also sums up the common problem with the previous three features. That is, once
citizenship theorists put to design their ideal notions or systems o f citizenship, they
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expect the citizens to act properly according to their scripts: whether the liberal script
o f hardworking and law-abiding necessity pursuers, the communitarian script of
intersubjective self, the civic republican script of political animals, or the deliberative
script of rational deliberators. A desire for system-subject correspondence is
imposed. This is, as Honig puts it, the desire of theory to “fit the self without
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excess.” In this imagining, “citizens governed by relatively just institutions will
oo
acquire a ‘corresponding sense of justice,’” or a corresponding way of living in a
community, so on and so forth. Those who deviate from the desired system are seen
as anomaly yet to be fully nurtured by the citizenship script. As Honig points out,
however, every identity, every politics, and every system engenders disruptions to its
scripts that the system cannot contain. This is the remainder of politics that no
theory can escape, and a theorist can do better only by “recognizing] the
impossibility o f such an escape and engaging] that impossibility politically,
O Q
institutionally, and discursively.”
Rather than following the designed citizenship scripts dutifully, we may look
at how other ways of participating citizens involve what de Certeau calls the tactical
agencies o f the subordinate groups by doing something with, reassembling, reusing
and refashioning the strategic scripts handed down from above to fit their own
particular situations. Mary Louise Pratt thus identifies the process of
“transculturation,” wherein the subjugated and marginalized “select and invent from
materials transmitted to them by a dominant or metropolitan culture.” Even though
the subordinates do not control the writing of the scripts emanating from the
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dominant culture, “they do determine to varying extents what they absorb into their
own, and what they use it for.”9 0 In this way, we may look at the construction of
proper citizens in citizenship theory as persistently “translated,” “revised,”
“recoded,” and “reused” by the undocumented workers in their everyday life and
resistance in the Western metropolis. As Smadar Lavie and Ted Swedenburg argue,
[Subordinates have frequently managed to divert the cultural elements they were
forced to adopt and have rearranged them for their own sly purposes within a new
ensemble ... Hybrids often subversively appropriate and creolize master codes,
decentering, destabilizing, and camivalizing dominant forms through “strategic
inflections” and “re-accentuations.”9 1
Carlos Forment echoes and pushes this point further. Writing on the
“peripheral peoples” from former colonies, Forment argues that while these agents
are infused with liberal precepts after entering liberal regimes, they have learned to
“rel[y] on these stories to retool their own narratives, eventually using them to
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question the liberal stories they had been inculcated with.” He writes,
Purist liberals successfully stripped peripheral groups of their anti-and non-modem
outlook; however, they failed to remake them in their own image and likeness.
Instead of adhering to the dichotomous alternatives on the list, adopting each time a
liberal story and discarding its opposite, peripheral groups came together and
improvised their own list. They gathered bits and pieces from each story, those with
liberal and nonliberal plots alike; fused them with their newly composed hybrid
narrative, an amalgam of postcolonial, ethnonationalist, and religious accounts that,
to begin with, were not featured in the original list; and combined all three—liberal,
nonliberal, and hybrid—into a lumpy, dense narrative, accommodating each plot in
light of the rest. Peripheral groups relied on their own historical experiences and
prudential judgments to rework the language of liberalism in ways neither they nor
their tutors had foreseen. Like master bricoleurs, peripheral groups tinkered with
those elements that liberalism had left behind as refuse, cobbling them together with
unexpected results.9 3
To Forment, the hybrids “who memorized the script and played their assigned roles”
in a system-subject correspondence actually became the liberal tutors’ worst
students, while “those who resisted normalization became its finest, spinning stories
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that reconciled political liberty with social equality, and both of these with cultural
differences.”9 4
This hybridizing of scripts and retooling o f narratives echo both what de
Certeau and Scott refer to as the Greek concept of metis?5 To de Certeau, metis are
“‘ways of operating’: victories o f the ‘weak’ over the ‘strong’ , clever tricks,
knowing how to get away with things, ‘hunter’s cunning,’ maneuvers, polymorphic
simulations, joyful discoveries, poetic as well as warlike.”9 6 Scott further points out,
while metis is often translated into English as “cunning intelligence,” it really
captures a wider “array of practical skills and acquired intelligence in responding to a
constantly changing natural and human environment.”9 7 This reservoir of know
how, knack, or practical knowledge, carries qualities that are plastic, vernacular,
implicit and experiential. Strapped in conditions where the “either/or” element of
national citizenship, civility and law-abidingness, and public participation and
deliberation prove to be difficult media and forums to take rights, request higher
wages, demand safer working conditions, and seek better welfare of their children,
metis sometimes becomes a critical way for many undocumented immigrant workers
to negotiate with the global capitalist economy in the liberal regime. Contra de
Certeau, it is doubtful that undocumented workers will gamer any substantive
“victories” over the strong through their cunning intelligence or practical knack; it is
reasonable to assume that, however, metis is nonetheless one way for them to make
do, to gain however little room they can in expanding their livelihood.
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Metis provides a linkage to what Hebdige, via Levi-Strauss, refers to as
bricolage in subcultures: the consumption, appropriation and refashioning of cultural
artifacts. As cultural theorist Dana Polan argues, “Culture can be empowering not
Q O
only in its use value, but also its reuse.” In reading the “proper ways of
participating as citizens” in the script of citizenship as liberal-cultural artifacts that
often make it difficult to imagine alternative means and forms of citizen
participation, I thus read the “other ways of participating as citizens” described thus
far as taking on a mode of subcultural, tactical citizenship.
III. Undocumented Citizen Participation in Domestic Work and Garment
Sweatshops
In this section, I look at how domestic and sweatshop workers who are
traditionally excluded from the framework o f citizenship may be imagined as
“citizens.” I will do this through a reading of the subtle reuses of the citizenship
scripts by undocumented immigrant workers in their daily working rituals at the sites
of two low-wage labor sectors: domestic work and apparel factories. Both working
sectors are racialized and gendered as a great majority of workers are immigrant
women whose undocumented status is not uncommon. The gendering of Third
World migration is contributed in large part by global inequality, post-Fordism, and
the neo-liberal policies o f the gigantic U.S.-based financial institutions such as the
World Bank and the International Monetary Fund (IMF). Grace Chang points out in
Disposable Domestics that since the 1980s, the World Bank and the IMF have
sought to prescribe the Structural Adjustment Programs (SAPs) to poor and indebted
Third World countries as the precondition for loans. These programs include
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“cutting government expenditures on social programs, slashing wages, liberalizing
imports, opening markets to foreign investment, expanding exports, devaluing local
currency, and privatizing state enterprises.” Women in these developing countries
are hit the hardest by such policies that cut wages, food subsidies, public health care
programs and education opportunities. Many, in order to sustain their families, have
to leave their children behind and migrate in search o f w ork." It creates a condition
where “indebted nations must surrender their citizens, especially women, as migrant
laborers to First World nations in the desperate effort to keep up with debt payments
and to sustain their remaining citizens through these overseas workers’
remittances.”1 0 0 No longer the “lone male” migration of seasonal workers, these
female migrant workers tend to be the leading force behind the permanent settlement
of undocumented immigrants in the U.S.1 0 1 While in the past immigrant men were
seen as job stealers, the current xenophobia shifts to immigrant women as “brood
mares and welfare cheats.”1 0 2
However the repugnance to immigrant women’s reproduction, their
productive capacity at low labor cost is nonetheless actively sought. As Chang
argues, not only are these immigrant women denied the rights and benefits of citizen
workers, since they come at a productive age, they are used as a pool of low-wage
labor without the Western industrial liberal regime having to invest in their education
and training. Although some may obtain wages paid “off the books,” others still
have to pay income taxes and social security without any prospect o f benefiting from
the safety net.1 0 3 In fact, despite legal regulation, two-career, middle-class families
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often prefer undocumented domestic workers to do their housecleaning, childcare
and laundry work precisely for saving purposes.1 0 4
As the British economist Joan Robinson is often quoted as saying, “The one
thing worse for a worker than being exploited in capitalism is not being
exploited.”1 0 5 In a global capitalist system that leads to a “race to the bottom,”
exploitation binds undocumented immigrants to a doorstep o f opportunities of
earning a meager income than no income at all. Their domesticated non-citizen
status and its associated low wage constitute a critical part of what drives up the
demand of their labor. In the following discussion, thus, I argue that imaginaries of
tactical citizenship by undocumented immigrant workers should be seen as operating
inside the structural constraints o f the global political economy, rather than located in
an exhilarating, voluntarist outside.
It needs to be noted that much of the ethnographic scholarship has not
unveiled the everyday immigrant worker tactics at the workplace. These forms of
resistance are rarely documented in historical records not only because o f their
hidden and “anonymous” nature, but also because most o f the literatures on the
subject tend to paint a singular picture of the subordinate class— i.e., victimized, law-
abiding, heroic— where petty sabotage constitutes a dissonant deviation from the
struggling immigrant working-class script.1 0 6 Moreover, while subversive acts may
be documented at certain workplaces, the nature o f the working condition o f other
types of work tends to make such acts more difficult to realize. Hence, instead of
generalizing tactical citizenship to all strata of immigrant work, I will conduct a
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contextualized comparison between domestic work and garment factory to highlight
tactical resistance where it happens, and to identify and underline its moments of
limitation and un-realization in these workers’ quest for citizenship rights. This is
also in keeping with McClintock’s earlier call to localize and contextualize Bhabha’s
mimicry rather than rendering it a generalized and transhistorical resistance.
Domestic “Citizens” as the Remainders o f Home
In the tradition of Western political thought, “domestic subjects” such as
women, slaves and racial subjects were excluded from public citizen participation.
While feminist and critical race political theorists rightly critique this inherent
exclusion in the canon of political theory,1 0 7 it often goes unexamined the ways in
which these domestic subjects tactically intercept and sabotage the power o f the
white male Masters in their everyday life. To extend and rework the meaning of the
feminist maxim, “the personal is political,” I argue that the personal and domestic
sphere o f home can be one critical, even if limited, site o f “citizen” political
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participation for the undocumented domestics.
Here, using Rhacel Salazar Parrenas’s ethnographic study o f Filipina
domestic workers in Rome and Los Angeles, I will provide a reading to show how
the domestic cleaners/maids/nannies— the “apolitical” private subordinates who are
bound by necessity and cannot act as citizens as suggested in the political theory
canon— enact “citizenship” not in the public but right in the “private sphere” of
home, as they appropriate and reuse citizen narratives in their daily routines of
domestic work. While I see the need for domestic workers to engage in more
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organized collective resistance through unions, legal institutions and community
advocacy groups, the isolated existence of domestic work has made unionization
particularly difficult.1 0 9 In this regard, it is critical to look into the ways in which
immigrant domestics turn the private household into a political site in demand of
citizenship rights. Following Honig"s essay, “Difference, Dilemmas, and the Politics
of Home,” I see these domestic “citizens” as the remaindering difference that
troubles the identity of home from within. As Honig argues, home is not “a place
free of power, conflict, and struggle, ... unriven by difference and untouched by the
power brought to bear upon it by the identities that strive to ground themselves in its
place.”1 1 0 Rather, home is often the overlooked site o f citizen contestation for the
working domestics.
Different types o f domestic workers and their different social locations need
to be first distinguished. Hondagneu-Sotelo identifies live-in nanny/housekeepers,
live-out nanny/housekeepers, and (part-time) housecleaners.1 1 1 Similarly, Parrenas
distinguishes between part-time work, elderly care, and live-in housekeeping.1 1 2 As
both point out, part-time housecleaners are generally paid better, have greater control
o f their working schedule and are in a better position to negotiate with employers. In
contrast, live-in nanny/housekeepers have long and unpredictable working schedule
and very little space of privacy; they are “live in” because the “live out” expense is
not a viable option. Most of the Filipina domestic workers in Parrenas’s study are
live-in workers, whose dependent status and closer day-to-day contact with their
employers put them in a position that is more likely to propel acts that may be
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understood as tactical citizenship. My following discussion is thus primarily limited
to the Filipina live-in domestic workers addressed by Parrenas, and cannot be
generalized to all strata of domestic nannies in every location. At the same time, I
write with the hope that more discussion on instances of tactical citizenship can be
generated around other locations o f domestic work.
In her study, Parrenas points out how domestic workers with undocumented
status are in a vulnerable position to be misled and exploited by the employer. For
these subjects, since one primary goal is legalization o f their status through employer
sponsorship, the lengthy process it takes to obtain a green card (as long as six
years)1 1 3 makes them extra-dependent on their employers and subjects them to
unreasonable demands o f their wage-suppliers. For example, domestics are subject
to an emotional work o f deference. Parrenas indicates that domestic work is
governed by the script o f “deference and matemalism”:
Domestic workers must act with deference—they cannot talk to but must be spoken
to by employers, they must engage in “ingratiating behavior,” and they must
perform tasks in a lively manner. An employer’s control penetrates into the bodily
movements of domestic workers in myriad ways, including patterns of speech,
gestures, spatial movements, and the “attitude and manner with which the individual
performs tasks.” Concomitantly, employers validate their higher social status
through matemalism, acting “protective” and “nurturing” to the “childlike” domestic
worker."4
The script o f deference “demands the emotional labor o f smiling. Domestic workers
have to disregard their true feelings, be it boredom, anger, or exhaustion, and carry
attitudes reflecting the idealized, pleasant environment o f the home.”1 1 5
This script o f benevolent matemalism can further take on a “communitarian”
texture when the employers attempt to be on closer terms with the domestic as “one
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o f the family.” This often happens in live-in nanny work when the welfare of the
children, whom the domestic will be caring for, is at stake. The employers want to
treat the domestic as “one of the family” so that the nanny will care for the
employers' children as her own kids. This familial intimacy also makes it
(emotionally) difficult for the domestic to ask for raises or to quit. The phantasmic
imagery of the “family” runs consistently throughout communitarians’ writings:
from Walzer’s “There is no stranger in this family!” (only members) to SandeTs
conception of the intersubjective self where one “affirmfs] an obligation to a family
or community.”1 1 6 Sandel’s notion that the higher virtues of benevolence, generosity
and belonging within institutions such as family dispense with the need for justice
finds an echo in domestic employers who get angry over their maids’ and nannies’
demand for higher wages: how can she be asking for bonuses and raises and
holidays, things o f monetary compensation for doing intimate care for our family, for
“labors of love,” when we treat her as one o f the family?1 1 7
While both the scripts o f “deference and matemalism” and “like one of the
family” seem to be ideological constructs that reinforce the domination o f employers
over domestic workers, what often goes unexamined are the ways in which domestic
workers turn these scripts into their own advantage. Recalling the third space of
mimicry: here the domestic workers may be seen as neither official citizens nor
unaffiliated aliens, but both members and strangers, both citizens and outsiders, both
“in” and “out.” Particularly, while undocumented domestic workers are denied a
share of the state’s goods due to their political status as “strangers” and “outsiders,”
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the act o f inserting oneself into the personal sphere of the employers’ home gets
them in a position to be treated like a “child” (even if condescendingly) or “family
member” (even if instrumentally), giving them some leverage to negotiate limited
rights and rewards in return within the domestic sphere o f home. For example, in the
absence o f explicit labor regulation, following the script of “like one of the family”
allows the undocumented domestics to negotiate their working conditions (or
through a tacit understanding) to be treated like, well, a “family member”: not being
ordered around constantly; given the option o f not to wear a uniform; allowed to
have visitors and partners to spend the night; given the time to rest and ease their
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pace; offered snacks and invited to sit down and chat. Domestic workers, of
course, are neither actual members of the family nor official members of the state, so
these rights and benefits accrued to them are not natural privileges o f family
members but rather “non-existent” labor rights. Operating in this “neither/nor”-a n d -
“both/and also” of the third space produces a mimicry o f citizenship, as the domestic
worker transgresses the binary in-or-out logic o f nation-state citizenship by partaking
in rights and benefits as a citizen-worker.
Following the instruction o f “deference and matemalism” and “like one of
the family” may also be interpreted as an instrumental act of calculated conformity in
protecting the domestic workers from “unwanted” attention or in exchange of
material benefits by acting like civil and law-abiding workers. This is a tool of
survival and a weapon o f the weak. Hence, rather than engaging their employers in a
confrontational protest, the day-to-day imperative o f earning a living tends to orient
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the domestics to adjust to their role as what Galston prescribes as the virtuous
citizen-workers in the liberal economy: to be punctual, reliable, and civil (and be
obedient in your language and gesture to the employers); to carry a work ethic “to do
one’s job thoroughly and well” (remember: keep smiling!); to put aside personal
self-indulgence and engage in ascetic self-denial as much as possible (forget about
your personal problems and suppress your immediate emotions); to “subordinate
immediate gratification to longer-run interest” (always remember your wage, your
green card, and your family back home); and to be able to adapt to a new working
environment (look at persistent deference and smiling as a new challenge for your
work).1 1 9
Doing so has enabled the domestic workers to reap fruits from the employer’s
gift-giving, especially when they have established relationships as “one of the
family.” These need not necessarily be material gifts, but things like the employers’
advance payment and loans (with no or low interest) to take care o f a family
emergency, rent an apartment, start their own business or even purchase their own
house. The employers may also help with sponsoring the workers’ legalization or
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permit to stay. Within the familial arrangement, domestic workers have been able
to create more breathing space and safeguard some “non-existent” labor rights and
benefits as a citizen worker: a slower working pace, a friendlier working
environment, and better material sustenance. Contra Sandel, the virtues of
benevolence, generosity and belonging in a family do not dispense with the need for
justice; rather, domestic workers constantly use the script of “like one of the family”
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to improve their working conditions and gain control of their labor—which is,
justice.
But as Parrenas further points out, domestic workers “simultaneously follow
and question the script of deference and matemalism.... and in the process subvert
the script within the routine o f domestic work.”1 2 1 Calculated conformity is not just
about strict compliance with the scripts of deference and familial civility to make the
boss happy; sometimes, momentary deviation from and disruption to the script might
be necessary to safeguard the workers’ rights and integrity. Hence, while domestic
workers are expected to behave deferent, civil, law-abiding, and put on a smiling
face, they have also learned to work these normalized scripts to manipulate the
emotions of the employers. As Parrenas indicates, the domestics’ daily working
rituals often involve emotional appeals to the employers, through “chicanery,
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cajolery, and negotiation.” Once in a while, a temporary detour away from the
script o f smiling and deference is consciously deployed. For example, displaying a
frown on the face may signal the employers that something is wrong and that they
need to do something about it in order to return to their normalized scripts o f familial
deference and maternal relations. Hence, through “crying, showing anger, projecting
a somber mood, becoming very quiet and unresponsive to employers, or by simply
talking back,” domestic workers have on occasions gained gifts, better meals, longer
breaks, an afternoon off to shopping, a higher wage, or the employers’ apology for
having said something offensive. Such tactical display o f emotions, however, may
be used only occasionally, “since it loses its punch when utilized frequently.”1 2 3
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Reluctant compliance with or deviation from the script need to be exercised precisely
to the point that stops short o f a direct insult or overt defiance, less it jeopardizes the
worker's own employment.1 2 4 What is clear here is that domestic workers calculate
and manipulate varying degrees o f conformity to safeguard their benefits, rights, and
even dignity.
Domestic workers’ everyday concerns can thus be said to center on material
necessity. But they are not simply the apolitical Lockean private necessity pursuers;
rather, they persistently politicize necessity. It is precisely their deeply felt personal
indignity over the lack of access to sufficient material sustenance that compels the
domestics to politicize necessity by making demands of more humane treatment on
their employers: better food, higher wage, more breaks, and a more dignified
working environment. Barred from the official forum o f citizen participation, such
politicization of necessity by undocumented domestic workers does not involve
exercising rational deliberation collectively and publicly as in the proper citizenship
scripts, but through “hidden transcripts.”
In fact, we may consider the aforementioned tactical displays of emotions as
a kind of “hidden transcripts,” involving an internalized dialogue rather than an
external, transparent and public one, aiming to “elicit feelings o f guilt” to destabilize
ensuing power relations in a status quo and gain limited rewards in return.1 2 5
Parrenas argues, “power inequalities between domestic workers and employers often
prevent them from being able to” speak openly and rationally to employers.1 2 6
Inside the domestic sphere o f home, due to their non-citizen status, linguistic
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barriers, and dependence on the job, domestic workers need to subtly handle their
demands o f redistribution (of food and wage), inclusion (as a family member), and
respect (as a worker and human being). Hence, when mistreated, a domestic may
keep it to herself rather than openly confronting the employers. But when she gets
quiet, the employers know that they may have offended her and that they may need
to do something about it— even if they do not, the domestic’s showing of emotions at
least allows her to express displeasure without, for the time being, risking an open
confrontation with her employers.1 2 7
However, hidden transcripts are not simply isolated and sporadic individual
acts. As indicated by Scott: these acts, if open, are rarely collective; if collective, are
rarely open.1 2 8 Parrenas points out that outside the purview o f their employers,
domestic workers often share their stories, difficulties, experiences, and strategies at
sites like churches, community centers, and buses. These “hidden” congregations
allow domestic workers to collectively “gamer the information and resources that
they need to lessen their dependence on employers and secure the option of
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quitting.” If tactical displays o f emotions are open but individual acts, these
“hidden” congregations are closed but collective acts. Scott argues that hidden
transcripts “are often reinforced by a venerable popular culture o f resistance ... to the
extent that the whole community is involved.” This culture o f resistance may be
spoken of as a “social movement,” albeit one “with no formal organization, no
formal leaders, no manifestoes, no dues, no name, and no banner.”1 3 0 They form
what labor historian Robin Kelley calls “networks o f solidarity.”1 3 1 These hidden
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congregations help fortify domestic workers’ resolve in demanding rights and
benefits in the domestic sphere o f home as “citizens.”
Domestic workers’ actions thus symbolize metis and bricolage, ways of
operating that do not follow prescribed rules and formulas, but require multiple ways
of hybridizing citizen scripts and retooling citizen narratives in order to make do and
work their way around in different contexts and situations in the domestic household.
Yet, such tactical ways of operating to gain the rights of minimum wages and better
working conditions are, contra de Certeau, far from “victories” over the strong.
While Foucault is right that power does not only flow from one way to another, such
tactics for the most part “work with” and maintain the larger structure of inequality,
leaving undocumented domestic workers still largely vulnerable and
disenfranchised.1 3 2 Moreover, sometimes an open confrontation between the
domestic and the employer eventually heats up. As one informant told Parrenas:
“My employers always shouted at me. But in a book, I had read ‘When in Rome, do
what the Romans do.’ So, I did what the Romans did, I screamed back at them.”1 3 3
Such defiant act, however, can potentially put the domestics in the jeopardy of
ending her employment without an immediate re-supply o f income.
The relatively isolated existence o f domestic workers and the fact that they
do not share a common employer have made unionization difficult and legal action
against employer costly and risky. Recognizing these dilemmas, the non-union
community advocacy groups such as Mujeres Unidas y Activas (MUA) in San
Francisco and the Domestic Workers Association (DWA) o f CHIRLA (Coalition for
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Humane Immigrant Rights o f Los Angeles) have been especially instrumental in
organizing Latina domestic workers by “draw[ing] on the strength o f women’s
connections around gender as well as around worker occupation identity.” For
example, through a more moderate approach, the DWA provides periodic cultural
events and consciousness-raising self-help seminars on “negotiating hours, wages,
and conditions in a contract with employers and sexual harassment on the job.”1 3 4
These collective experiences can empower domestic workers to further enable their
acting out domestic citizenship as the “remainders” of home; at the same time, they
point to the void o f a still much needed unionization that will translate these
workers’ energy and inventive tactics into a collective social movement towards their
full enfranchisement.
“The Potluck Is PoliticalSw eatshop Citizenship
Tactical citizenship insinuates not only into the personal space of home, but
also into the impersonal industrial structure.1 3 5 Recent academic attention to the
industrial complex has turned to the reemergence of garment sweatshops since the
1970s, where predominantly female immigrants working long hours before their
sewing machines below minimum wage or without payment for working overtime,
and in unsanitary and unsafe working conditions that violate health and safety
regulations. The return of the sweatshop is not simply a result o f unethical practices
by individual contractors, retailers or manufacturers. Rather, the heightened
intensity of neo-liberalization of the global economy has forced apparel producers
and retailers to follow the post-Fordist, “just-in-time,” “lean and mean” style of
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flexible production in order to stay competitive and gamer a larger margin of profits.
Nancy Green identifies three elements of flexibility from the vantage point of
capital: the avoidance o f “fixed costs, a fixed labor force, and fixed rales.” In her
words, “Flexibility permits the adjustment of supply to demand by cutting the risk of
long-term investment, adjusting the labor force to production needs, and limiting
rigidities due to union and legal restrictions that regulate wages, benefits, social
welfare payments, and working conditions.”1 3 6 Operating in the neo-liberal free-
market “postmodemity” facilitated by the Caribbean Basin Initiative, the NAFTA,
the WTO, and the SAPs, garment contractors and manufacturers are forced to adopt
and have acquired the means of transnational “fluidity,” able to “cut and ran,”
moving garment production units from one place to another across national borders,
thus circumventing unionization, labor regulation, and worker contestation.1 3 7 In this
restructuring o f garment production, hiring undocumented immigrant workers in the
First World or moving production offshore in non-unionized areas in the Third
World with even lower wages and an even more tightly controlled workforce have
been the primary way for apparel capital to engage in flexible production.
Facing these flexible tactics o f capital, garment factory workers have put up
resistance that may be conceived o f as tactical citizenship. However, it is sometimes
difficult to discover everyday immigrant worker tactics in the factory from
sweatshop literatures. Two primary reasons can be cited: 1) the political lens of the
scholars affects what gets to be written; and 2) the distinct structure of the sweatshop
working condition. First, the predominant academic discourse on sweatshops tends
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to follow the union script that, while necessary in countering neo-liberal policies that
are shaping globalization, nonetheless projects workers in a static victim-hood
requiring the presence o f unions that directs their political trajectory of
empowerment. In such script, often unchallenged is the internal hierarchy of the
union marked by white male leadership whose top-down command of operation and
paternalistic posture often bypasses consultation with the female immigrant worker
base, stifling their critical agency and undermining their self-initiated resistant
efforts.
For example, in Making Sweatshops, Ellen Israel Rosen puts forth the binary
categories o f “winners” and “losers” in the global apparel trade: whereas executives,
shareholders and managers of the retail and apparel transnationals emerge to be
clearly the winners and benefactors, women working in the garment industry who
suffer from wage loss, job displacement and health hazards are the losers on a race to
the bottom.1 3 8 While it is true that garment workers are unlikely to match against the
clout of transnational capital, constructing immigrant workers as “losers” seemingly
places them in a homogeneous mass o f victim-hood without voice and agency.
Without understanding the workers as critical agents who are conforming to
while negotiating and resisting the demands o f the neo-liberal economy, Rosen’s
binary “winner-loser” paradigm can slide into what Ethel Brooks identifies as the
dichotomized imagery of “savior-victim,” with First World anti-sweatshop activists
viewing themselves as “saviors” and immigrant/Third World garment workers as
1 ^ 0
“victims.” Brooks points out, “As models for the antisweatshop movement, ...
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women garment workers have not been granted the status of protestors.” Rather, the
staging o f their speaking testimonies of suffering and abuse “[has] become part o f a
circulation o f signs and symbols, o f virtual factories and perpetual victimhood,”
“deployed for the use o f protestors in North America and Europe.”1 4 0 Eileen Boris
echoes, “In the new transnationalism, the U.S. consumer/protester retains superiority,
while the ‘third-world woman,’ reduced to a pathetic body, remains victim.”1 4 1
When sweatshop workers do speak and act, any deviation from the
“authentic” socialist or union script is further stifled by the scholars as immature or
misinformed practices that need to be set on a correct trajectory of the political. For
example, Edna Bonacich and Richard Applebaum’s oft-cited Behind the Label, while
is in itself an exhaustive and progressive study of apparel workers in Los Angeles,
nonetheless considers “weapons o f the weak” as passive resistance and ethically
questionable practices. Ironically, the way they narrate immigrant worker tactics—
“lying” in order to receive MediCal, WIC, or food stamps; “misrepresenting” the
number of hours worked or pieces sewn; helping to transport family members
“illegally” into this country; consenting to sexual relations with the owner in order to
“enjoy” relaxed working conditions; working for cash and not filing the “proper” tax
documents with the IRS etc.1 4 2 — unwittingly plays into the mainstream imagery of
“illegal immigrants” that comes with racist and sexist connotations. The traditional
union lens o f the scholars affects what gets documented (and what gets discounted)
in publications as progressive resistance.
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Maria Angelina Soldatenko has specifically spoken of the exclusionary
practices of the International Lady’s Garment Workers Union (ILGWU) in Los
Angeles that keep immigrant women outside of union leadership and decision
making process “even though the majority of garment workers are Latinas.”1 4 3
Immigrant workers who “demonstrated too much independent thinking” or
questioned the union programs often “found themselves blacklisted and made
unwelcome.”1 4 4 In one instance, when the independent immigrant garment workers’
group, La Mujer Obrera (LMO), was launching a strike against four garment
manufacturers and inviting the ILGWU for technical support, the ILGWU “tried to
negotiate with employers without consulting with LMO [as if they were incapable of
fighting for their own rights],” thus undermining the workers’ efforts and losing all
of their support.1 4 5 Based on the past experience, it seems critical for the newly
formed garment workers’ union, UNITE, to monitor its own racial (white) and
gender (male) politicking.1 4 6 The union’s stifling o f dissension and self-initiated
resistance o f garment workers has so far resembled the conventional citizenship
script, mirroring what Honig identifies as an attempt to pretend and prescribe a
closure to the remaindering differences o f a politics that are impossible to escape, but
must be engaged “politically, institutionally, and discursively.”1 4 7
In addition to the adoption of union script by scholars, the distinctive
structure o f the sweatshop working condition may also contribute to the stifling of
tactical resistance by the workers. In her study, Soldatenko points out that a working
culture of resistance has been difficult to develop and materialize in garment
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factories (compared to, say, Mexican cannery workers), particularly because garment
workers are “completely absorbed in their sewing machines ... [and the] noise level
does not allow for conversation and exchange at work.” Moreover, it is a highly
competitive working environment with workers “constantly forced to compete for
the good ‘bundles’” distributed by the supervisor. Unproductive workers are quickly
replaced by a supply of new workers. The working structure is divisive o f workers,
and because o f the high turnover rate, “women do not stay long enough at the shop to
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establish networks.” Hence, compared to live-in domestic work, it appears even
less likely to find ostentatious instances of tactical resistance by garment workers.
Still, despite these obstacles, whenever and wherever possible, sweatshop
workers do resist inside the factories fighting for their citizenship rights in a way that
resembles Scott’s depiction of Southeast Asian peasant resistance that is “less a
pitched battle than a low-grade, hit-and-run, guerilla action.”1 4 9 Inside the
sweatshops, despite their exclusion as strangers and outsiders, undocumented
immigrant garment seamstresses act out “citizenship” tactically in demanding
benefits, wages, and sanitary working conditions that are entitled to other citizen-
workers. As figures o f mimicry in the third space: they are neither “citizens” nor
“outsiders,” but both. Immanuel Ness writes,
Everyday, thousands of workers in New York’s garment industry resist unfair
wages, oppressive conditions, and harassment. Their efforts take many forms—
from slowing the pace of work to finding shortcuts to get through the day, from
disparaging the boss to organizing into membership organizations. In the New York
garment industry, immigrant workers with no backing at all engage in sit-down
strikes. Resistance never stops.1 5 0
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Like domestic work, however, such non-unionized resistance inside
sweatshops needs to be handled with care, nuance and subtlety, interjecting overt
resistance with scripts of “calculated conformity.” One Latina garment worker in
Soldatenko’s study states: “ Hay que exigir unpoco no hay que bajar la vista.... We
must demand a little—we do not need to keep our eyes downcast. One sees
instances of both conformism and resistance everyday at the shop.”1 5 1 In fact, due to
their undocumented status, when the union tries to organize the shops, the owners
could “threaten to inform immigration officials [with consequences o f the workers’
deportation], or they move to a different location and leave the workers out of work
again.”1 5 2 Any alarming or drastic demands on the factory owners or contractors
may meet with the severe fate o f the workers. As a result, garment workers need to
largely conform to the working scripts at factories, while attempting to “practice
protesting and contestation” over more concrete and piecemeal demands, such as
“bargaining for a better price on a particular operation, asking for breaks, or
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demanding better work conditions.” On occasions, they may “obtain higher
wages, health care, masks and gloves, and subsidies for food, transportation, and
education.”1 5 4
Barred from the official forum of citizenship, sweatshop workers take a
detour in interjecting calculated conformity with piecemeal demands at their
workplace in gaining limited rights and benefits as citizen-workers. In one instance,
Oakland’s Chinese garment seamstresses, with the help o f their teenage daughters
and the community organization, Asian Immigrant Women Advocates (AIWA),
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overcame the fear of riling their employers by securing the use of ergonomic chairs
and wooden footrests to ease their shoulder ache, back pain, and leg soreness.1 5 5
While such piecemeal demand does not look like a transformative and radical act of
citizenship, it is nonetheless a critical way for immigrant workers to insinuate
themselves into the status of dignified citizen-workers— with the right to better
working condition and with the very right (of citizenship) to demand rights.
Sweatshop workers also practice “hidden transcripts” away from the purview
o f factory supervisors, garment contractors and manufacturers. These include, as in
Ness’s earlier description: slowing the pace of work, finding shortcuts to get through
the day, or disparaging the bosses behind their back and then organizing into
membership organizations. These phenomena are not unusual, and in fact resonate
with tactical resistance by subordinate classes in other working locations. In his
study of South Asian peasantry, Scott has spoken of acts o f “foot dragging,
dissimulation, desertion, false compliance, pilfering, feigned ignorance, slander,
arson, sabotage.”1 5 6 In his examination of black working class in the urban South,
Kelley further adds theft, absenteeism, cursing, graffiti, slowdowns, leaving work
early, quitting, “pan-toting” (household domestics bringing home leftovers), and
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singing in unison in the factory.
But one phenomenon of “hidden transcripts” in the case of sweatshops that is
particularly worth noting is what Karen Sacks in a separate study on female hospital
I
workers has referred to as, “the potluck is political.” As Soldatenko notes,
immigrant women “bring a gendered and ethnic politics to their activism.”1 5 9 She
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cites the example of the work done at the Justice Center with Chicana and Latina
leaders offering free legal advice and support for workers.1 6 0 Like domestic work,
“hidden” networks of solidarity were established among garment workers. Weekly
meetings and events are conducted in Spanish to create “an atmosphere o f
camaraderie.” Classes were offered in English as a second language, and workers
“met regularly ... to exchange stories and job-hunting techniques and to discuss
labor laws and rights.” The Center also helped workers calculate and document their
hours, ensuring that they were earning the minimum wage and keeping files on hand
should they resort to legal action.1 6 1 Moreover, referring to Sacks’ notion o f “the
potluck is political,” Soldatenko observes, “Women organized birthday parties, held
potlucks at their homes, or got together to sell household products to each other. In
these settings, Latinas also discussed issues o f work and organizing.”1 6 2 In utilizing
these “private” spaces of social gathering away from the inspecting gaze o f the work
supervisors to help immigrant garment workers enact citizenship, Chicana and Latina
organizers created alternative ways to reach out and politicize these workers,
strategizing on-site tactics and ways o f organizing to improve their wages and
working conditions.
The third-space mode o f mimicry, calculated conformity (with piecemeal
demands), and hidden transcripts are all instances of resistance in immigrant
sweatshop workers’ everyday experience in negotiating for rights, minimum wage,
and healthier working environment entitled to citizens. These forms of resistance
often arise out o f the workers’ know-how knack (i.e., metis) through trial-and-error.
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Miriam Ching Yoon Louie’s Sweatshop Warriors further captures the element of
bricolage in tactical citizenship when she holds up the political vision of “fusion.”1 6 3
Louie examines the rising “post-union” formation of ethnic-based community labor
organizations that place workers at the center,1 6 4 including Asian Immigrant Women
Advocates (AIWA), Chinese Staff and Workers Association (CSWA), Fuerza Unida,
Korean Immigrant Workers Advocates (KIWA), and La Mujer Obrera. These
workers’ centers develop a distinct culture of resistance, where immigrant garment
workers “are learning and transforming the English language like the African
Americans who have bestowed upon this country the gift o f Black English, a vibrant
example of fusion. The women are enriching this polyglot rainbow nation’s
language, food, style, labor, culture, and identity.”1 6 5 While Louie recognizes the
on-going tensions that often result from the fusion of different generations, classes
and cultures within the immigrant workers’ movement, she also asserts, “Fusion has
produced some bumpin’ music, screamin’ food, knockout fashions, and kick-butt
movements that can invigorate one and all.”1 6 6 Louie mentions the sharing o f ethnic
foods among workers and the utilizing o f body motions and hand gestures to
communicate to one another when they do not speak each other’s language.1 6 7 Here,
like subcultural bricoleurs who appropriate and reuse cultural artifacts, garment
seamstresses utilize, rearrange and retool foods, music, dances, and languages to do
the political work o f coalition. In every small way, sweatshop workers are what
Louie calls “guerilla warriors,”1 6 8 mixing all the available resources on hands in
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boosting their collective morale and solidarity, as well as hybridizing and retooling
different narratives, tactics, and strategies in their citizenship rights claiming.
As Soldatenko notes, many workers feel that these spontaneous acts of
resistance play a critical role “in their political learning process.” In fact, “it is at
work that working conditions, wages, and abuses first become contested” before the
involvement of unions. The workers “did not always win, but ... [mjobilizaitons
imprinted a memory of struggle and hope that affirmed these ... [subjects] as
politically active.”1 6 9 Like domestic work, tactical citizenship in sweatshops still
needs to be accompanied by organized unionization in their long-term struggle
against global capital. To this day, neither the garment workers’ tactical citizenship
nor unionization has substantively limited the flexible tactics of garment contractors
and manufacturers to “cut and run” by shutting down factories or moving production
offshore in circumventing unionization, labor regulation, and workers contestation.
In this regard, Armbruster-SandovaTs proposal for cross-border union organizing,
including “region-wide organizing” (e.g., in Central America) and “production-chain
organizing” (e.g., Gap) may be a useful way to limit the channels of escape for
garment capital.1 7 0
But regardless o f which form the organized resistance will take on, the lesson
of history shows that anti-sweatshop activism should not predicate on a universal
script of citizenship that speaks on behalf of workers while erasing their voice and
agency in the process, in Boris’s words, turning “subjects o f solidarity into objects of
reform, creating a movement o f allies but not of equals.”1 7 1 Sweatshop workers are
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not wetbacks or losers. They are victims of history, but also guerilla warriors and
tactical citizens whose immediate resistance against their exploitation and neo-liberal
globalization often jostles “between hope and despair.”1 7 2
IV. Tactics and Cosmopolitanism
Tactical citizen participation in the third space of mimicry does not exist as a
voluntary or nomadic “outside,” but always inside the global political economy and
inside exploitation. Tactical citizenship is a restrained and reactive than a
transformative response to a subordinate status conditioned by the repressive forces
of neo-liberalism and global capitalism. Scott comments soberly that it is unlikely
that the subordinate class can significantly improve their lot through daily
transgressions; rather, many of them are likely to “lose out, as have millions ...
before them.”1 7 3 Or, as Parrenas indicates, the average migrant worker “does not
come to realize her world through the understanding of larger systems such as
patriarchy and global capitalism.”1 7 4 They are more concerned with their immediate
situations, and their “immediate struggles” can recuperate and sustain even as they
resist the power structure.1 7 5 Hence the limits of Bhabha’s mimicry: the momentary
subversive imitation and transgression o f the original copy—citizenship scripts—
does not translate into a sustainable transformation of the status of the subordinates.
Tactical citizenship, then, is insufficient in safeguarding the full enfranchisement of
undocumented immigrant workers; it still requires larger and more systemic and
organized social protest movements and policies to mediate the polarization o f global
economy and the cycle o f exploitation and poverty.
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Yet, to the extent that Western political theory places citizenship on a
determinative trajectory of in-or-out, virtue box-checking, transparent public
deliberation, and systemic obedience to its strategic scripts, not only does it
contribute to the negative stereotyping of the “illegal,” it can blindfold itself to the
ways in which many undocumented immigrant workers participate in contesting
citizenship daily, whether in the domestic sphere of home or in the industrial factory.
To be sure, it is unlikely that undocumented immigrant workers see their “sign”
politics in reusing citizenship scripts or understand themselves as tactical citizens in
a “subcultural” fashion. But my preceding discussion shows that whether as
domestic nannies or sweatshop seamstresses, undocumented immigrant workers are
conscious of the need to engage in spontaneous resistance through calculated
conformity and hidden transcripts, as well as making use of the reservoir o f knack
and available resources (metis and bricolage) from time to time in order to obtain and
safeguard minimal rights, wages, and benefits entitled to ordinary citizens in the
liberal polity—in spite o f their status as strangers and outsiders. The space opened
up by these dissident acts of resistance and negotiation allows room for our
imagining of these immigrant workers as “citizens” in demand of rights not officially
belonged to them— and their acts as a tactical manifestation o f citizenship.
Undocumented domestic and sweatshop workers are, then, neither aggressive
“illegals” nor passive “victims,” but traveling agents who can help us rethink the
notion of citizenship beyond the dwelling trajectory. Traveling citizenship in the
mode of tactics via undocumented immigrant workers turns citizenship from a
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mundane national artifact into new cosmopolitan possibilities, as they now come to
work, live, and “participate politically” with us as our fellow citizens. Traveling
agents such as undocumented immigrant workers slowly and tactically erode the
national, political, and moral-legal boundaries by shedding their status as
foreigners/strangers and inserting themselves into the crowd of citizens— as a
mimicry.
Taking on this “cosmopolitan” act o f being a mimicry o f “citizens o f the
world” carries a underworld register that deviates from Martha Nussbaum’s neo-
Kantian cosmopolitanism, which, by presenting citizens o f the world as educated
knowers and rational problem-solvers,1 7 6 bypasses the subaltern bodies that must
struggle against and negotiate with the underground dynamics of global capitalism.
After all, whose bodies get to be secure in visibly and rationally deliberating as
citizens o f the world, and whose bodies must migrate in the dark and toil in abject
labor in building the infrastructure o f corporate cosmopolitanism? While some
undocumented sweatshop workers have taken on chances o f acting as “citizens o f the
world” through public protests and strikes against global garment manufacturers and
retailers (e.g., Jessica McClintock and DKNY) in the liberal metropolis, they do so
only at a tempered visibility as they must put on masks to cover their faces to deflect
the risk of deportation,1 7 7 and at the risk o f losing their meager but vital source of
income. Without the preconditions o f liberal education, articulate rationality, and
public deliberation, undocumented immigrant workers are already participating as
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“citizens of the world’" in other ways, quietly and offstage, through the third space of
mimicry, calculated conformity, hidden transcripts, metis and bricolage.
Julia Kristeva is known for her Freudian analysis that it is only by
recognizing the abject strangeness in ourselves that we may let go of our own fear
and detestation of the other.1 7 8 I do not know whether tactics translates into “abject
strangeness,” but sometimes, it may indeed be by recognizing our own uses of tactics
in battling the everyday saturated corporate culture that we may come to a
“cosmopolitan” recognition o f our shared sensibility and subjectivity with the
strangers. In a New York Times article, for example, Ian Urbina discusses the
everyday tactics ordinary citizens deploy in negotiating with the daily corporate
annoyances, including ordering a “medium” at Starbucks when the coffee company
calls the size “grande” so to let them know that their word games are not fooling the
customers, or collecting and returning magazine inserts of subscription cards but
leaving them blank so that “the advertiser is forced to pay the business reply postage
without gaining a new subscription.”1 7 9
Ordinary citizens thus engage in weapons of the weak everyday in countering
the corporate order. There is, of course, still some distance to travel from citizen-
consumers’ uses of tactics from a relatively secure position to undocumented
immigrant workers’ tactical resistance to gain citizenship rights that are denied to
them. But looking at the undocumented subjects’ quest for rights, humane treatment,
and justice entitled to citizens inside the global capitalist system precisely helps us
reformulate and expand the meaning o f these little subversive acts into acts of
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citizenship— whether they happen in the restaurant, hotel, hospital, factory, or the
domestic sphere of home. Again, tactics needs not be wholeheartedly celebrated.
After all, states and transnational corporations can also deploy their own
manipulation tactics. But when working-class undocumented workers enact
everyday tactical resistance at their workplace, it also marks the critical moment
when—slipping through the cracks and holes of state surveillance and corporate
discipline—the lines of possibilities of citizen participation and contestation are
extended, and re-scripted.
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NOTES
1 Saskia Sassen, The G lobal City: New York, London, Tokyo (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University
Press, 1991), 9.
2 Pierrette Hondagneu-Sotelo, D om estica: Immigrant Workers Cleaning and Caring in the Shadows o f
Affluence (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University o f California Press, 2001), ix, 3.
3 For disc, on different channels o f entry— both documented and undocumented— for migrant
workers, see Alejandro Portes and Ruben G. Rumbaut, Immigrant America: A Portrait, 2n d ed.
(Berkeley and Los Angeles: University o f California Press, 1996), 14-16. According to Vernon
Briggs and Stephen Moore, the number o f undocumented immigrants in the U.S. has risen steeply
throughout recent decades. In the Immigration and Naturalization Service (INS) estimate, only
88,823 “illegal aliens” were apprehended in the U.S. in 1961, compared to 420,126 in 1971, 975,780
in 1981, and 1,197,875 in 1991. Vernon M. Briggs, Jr. and Stephen Moore, Still an Open D oor? :
U.S. Immigration Policy and the American Economy (Washington, D.C.: The American University
Press, 1994), 25.
4 Michel de Certeau, The P ractice o f E veryday Life, trans. Steven Rendall (Berkeley and Los Angeles:
University o f California Press, 1984), xiii.
5 Bonnie Honig, D em ocracy and the Foreigner (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2001), 99.
6 I want to acknowledge Dana Polan’s essay on Habermas and on the reuse and refashion o f cultural
production that gives me ideas in developing the notion o f a subcultural style o f citizenship. See
Dana Polan, “The Public’s Fear; or, Media As Monster in Habermas, Negt, and Kluge,” in The
Phantom Public Sphere, ed. Bruce Robbins (Minneapolis: University o f Minnesota Press, 1993), 33-
40.
7 Dick Hebdige, Subculture: the M eaning o f Style (New York: Routledge, 1979), 2.
8 Ibid., 3.
9 Ibid., 17.
1 0 Ibid., 18.
" Ibid., 101.
1 2 Ibid., 105.
1 3 Ibid., 103.
1 4 Ibid., 18.
1 5 For the distinction between strategy and tactics, see de Certeau, The P ractice o f E veryday Life, 34-
39.
1 6 Hebdige, Subculture, 139, 105.
1 7 de Certeau, The P ractice o f E veryday Life, 93.
I l l
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1 8 Hebdige, Subculture, 138.
1 9 Ibid., n.5, 167. For example, the skinheads are “aggressively proletarian, puritanical and
chauvinist” (55).
2 0 Hebdige, Subculture, 85-86.
2 1 Ibid., 139.
2 2 Kwame Anthony Appiah, “Identity, Authenticity, Survival: Multicultural Societies and Social
Reproduction,” in M ulticulturalism: Examining the Politics o f Recognition, ed. Amy Gutmann
(Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1994), 162-163.
2 3 Those whose writings can be characterized as modern-day civic republican include Hannah Arendt,
Sheldon Wolin, Benjamin Barber, Maurizio Viroli, Quentin Skinner, J. G .A. Pocock, and Ronald
Beiner.
2 4 Modern-day liberal thinkers include John Rawls, Ronald Dworkin, Charles Larmore, and Robert
Nozick (who is more o f a libertarian).
2 5 Jurgen Habermas, “Three Normative M odels o f Democracy,” in Dem ocracy and Difference:
Contesting the Boundaries o f the Political, ed. Seyla Benhabib (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University
Press, 1996), 21-23.
2 6 See, e.g., W ill Kymlicka and Wayne Norman, “Return o f the Citizen: A Survey o f Recent Work on
Citizenship Theory,” in Theorizing Citizenship, ed. Ronald Beiner (Albany: State University o f N ew
York Press, 1995), 283-285. Michael Ignatieff says that in the republican tradition, citizenship is a
“noble myth;” in the liberal tradition, it is a “fanciful lie.” Michael Ignatieff, “The Myth o f
Citizenship,” in Beiner, Theorizing Citizenship, 53. Richard Flathman calls the former “high”
citizenship (enthusiastic, celebratory, evangelical) and revises the latter into his own vision o f
“chastened” citizenship (subdued, tempered). Richard Flathman, “Citizenship and Authority: A
Chastened V iew o f Citizenship,” in Beiner, Theorizing Citizenship, 105-113.
2 7 Writers who are generally associated with communitarianism include Michael Sandel, Charles
Taylor, Alasdair MacIntyre, and Michael Walzer.
2 8 See, e.g., Ronald Beiner, “Introduction: Why Citizenship Constitutes a Theoretical Problem in the
Last Decade o f the Twentieth Century,” in Beiner, Theorizing Citizenship, 12-16; and Maurizio
Viroli, From Politics to Reason o f State: the Acquisition and Transformation o f the Language o f
Politics, 1250-1600 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1992), 288-289.
29 Habermas, “Three Normative Models o f Democracy,” 23-30.
3 0 Iris Marion Young, “Polity and Group Difference: A Critique o f the Ideal o f Universal
Citizenship,” in Beiner, Theorizing Citizenship, 175-207.
3 1 Speaking o f the “W estemer-ness” o f the canon, J. G. A. Pocock puts it this way:
The ‘citizen’— the Greekpolites or Latin civis— is defined as a member o f the Athenian polls
or Roman res publica, a form o f human association allegedly unique to these ancient
Mediterranean peoples and by them transmitted to ‘Europe’ and ‘the W est.’ This claim to
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uniqueness can be criticized and relegated to the status o f myth; even when this happens,
however, the myth has a way o f remaining unique as a determinant o f ‘Western’ identity—
no other civilization has a myth like this.
J. G. A. Pocock, “The Ideal o f Citizenship Since Classical Times,” in Beiner, Theorizing Citizenship,
29-30.
3 2 de Certeau, The Practice o f Everyday Life, 93.
3 3 James C. Scott, Weapons o f the Weak: E veryday Forms ofPeasant Resistance (New Haven, CT:
Yale University Press, 1985), 241.
34 Judith Butler, “Contingent Foundations: Feminism and the Question o f ‘Postmodernism,’” in
Feminists Theorize the Political, eds. Judith Butler and Joan W. Scott (New York: Routledge, 1992),
16.
3 5 Judith N. Shklar, American Citizenship: the Quest fo r Inclusion (Cambridge: Harvard University
Press, 1991), 4.
3 6 Peter H. Schuck and Rogers M. Smith, Citizenship Without Consent: Illegal Aliens in the American
P olity (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1985); Michael Walzer, Spheres o f Justice: A Defense
o f Pluralism and Equality (New York: Basic Books, 1983).
3 7 Honig, Democracy and the Foreigner, 96. As Honig further argues,
[I]t is not all clear that the state does not consent to the presence on its territory o f large
numbers o f illegal immigrants. Illegal immigration is not only combated by the state; it is
also simultaneously enabled, covertly courted, often managed, and certainly tolerated by it.
Established citizens profit from the subsidies that cheap migrant labor provides to their child
care costs and food prices (97).
3 8 Walzer, Spheres o f Justice, 35-42. As Jacqueline Stevens points out, despite his rhetoric against
ascriptive notion o f citizenship, here Walzer ultimately reverts back to birthright and kinship in
arguing that a political community is like a family whose “members are morally connected to people
they have not chosen.” See Jacqueline Stevens, Reproducing the State (Princeton, NJ: Princeton
University Press, 1999), 5-6.
3 9 Walzer did not say this, though his arguments can be interpreted as such. But whether there is
really no “stranger” in the liberal family is open to doubt. After all, some o f the family’s racialized
(as Ronald Takaki suggests) or sexually deviant members (as Shane Phelan argues) can still be
excluded or perceive themselves as strangers. See Ronald Takaki, Strangers from a Different Shore:
A H istory o f Asian Americans (Boston: Little, Brown and Company, 1989); and Shane Phelan, Sexual
Strangers: Gays, Lesbians, and Dilemmas o f Citizenship (Philadelphia: Temple University Press,
2001).
4 0 Phil Cole, quoted in David Morley, Home Territories: Media, M obility and Identity (New York:
Routledge, 2000), 209.
4 1 The “third space” is articulated in postcolonial thought. On the “neither/nor”-and-“both”
articulation o f cultural identity, I am much influenced by Gloria Anzaldua’s Borderlands/La
Frontera: The New M estizo (San Francisco: Aunt Lute Books, 1987). See also Edward W. Soja’s
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analysis o f the cultural and political logics o f the “both/and also'" in Thirdspace: Journeys to Los
Angeles and Other Real-and-Jmagined Places (Cambridge, MA: Blackwell Publishers, 1996).
42 Anzaldua, Borderlands/La Frontera, 79.
4 3 Ibid., 77.
4 4 Homi Bhabha, The Location o f Culture (New York: Routledge, 1994), 6.
4 5 Homi Bhabha, “The Third Space: Interview with Homi Bhabha,’’ in Identity: Community, Culture,
Difference, ed. Jonathan Rutherford (London: Lawrence & Wishart, 1990), 210.
4 6 Anne McClintock, Imperial Leather: Race, Gender and Sexuality in the Colonial Contest (New
York: Routledge, 1995), 62-65.
47 For a sampling o f these critiques on Bhabha’s tendency in eliding hybridity into a postmodern
romanticism, see SmadarLavie and Ted Swedenburg, “Introduction: Displacement, Diaspora, and
Geographies o f Identity,” in Displacement, Diaspora, and Geographies o f Identity, ed. SmadarLavie
and Ted Swedenburg (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1996), 8; Aijaz Ahmad, In Theory:
Classes, Nations, Literatures (London: Verso, 1992), 68-69; Kuan-Hsing Chen, “Introduction: The
Decolonization Question,” in Trajectories: Inter-Asia Cultural Studies, eds. Kuan-Hsing Chen, Hsiu-
Ling Kuo, Hans Hang, and Hsu Ming-Chu (New York: Routledge, 1998), 22-23; David Morley,
“EurAm, Modernity, Reason and Alterity: Or, Postmodernism, the Highest Stage o f Cultural
Imperialism?” in Stuart Hall: Critical Dialogues in Cultural Studies, eds. David Morley and Kuan-
Hsing Chen (London and N ew York: Routledge, 1996), 346; David Morley, Home Territories:
Media, Mobility- and Identity (New York: Routledge, 2000), 233-234. Another noted figure who has
also been criticized along these lines is Zygmunt Bauman, whose romanticized musing o f
“ambivalence” and “indeterminacy” (like hybridity and mimicry) takes on an even stronger tone. See
Zygmunt Bauman, M odernity and Am bivalence (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1991).
4 8 McClintock, Im perial Leather, 65.
4 9 George Armstrong Kelly, “Who N eeds a Theory o f Citizenship,” in Beiner, Theorizing Citizenship,
89.
5 0 Ibid., 88.
5 1 The term com es from Robert Bellah, quoted in Stephen Macedo, Liberal Virtues: Citizenship,
Virtue, and Community in Liberal Constitutionalism (New York: Oxford University Press, 1990), 6.
5 2 Macedo, Liberal Virtues, 5.
5 3 Michael Walzer, What It M eans to be an American: Essays on the American Experience (New
York: Marsilio, 1996), 81-101.
5 4 William A. Galston, Liberal Purposes: Goods, Virtues, and D iversity in the Liberal State (New
York: Cambridge University Press, 1991), 213-237. It should com e to no surprise that Galston’s
embrace o f “liberal virtues” is evoked by a conservative lens looking through social ills:
[ 0 ] f rising rates o f crime, drug abuse, and family breakdown; o f the near collapse o f
effective public education; o f greed and shortsightedness run amok in public and private
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affairs; o f a steady decline in political awareness and an equally steady rise in political
cynicism; and o f what I can only regard as the relentless tribalization and barbarization o f
American life (6).
5 5 Macedo, Liberal Virtues, 275-276.
5 6 On this point, Louis Althusser’s notion o f “ideological state apparatuses” is useful. See Louis
Althusser, “Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses (Notes Towards an Investigation),” in Lenin
and Philosophy, and Other Essays, trans. Ben Brewster (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1971),
127-186.
5 7 Bonnie Honig, P olitical Theory and the Displacem ent o f Politics (Ithaca: Cornell University Press,
1993), 2.
5 8 Ibid., 138. This is especially the symptom o f Rawls.
5 9 Honig, Political Theory and the Displacement o f Politics, 142. A s Honig further points out, while
Rawls treats indolent laborers as not being responsible for their own misfortunes and that citizens
should share the distribution o f talents and abilities as “common assets” (so to offset natural
contingencies that are “arbitrary from a moral point o f view”), criminals possessed o f bad character
are not offered this charitable attitude. Rawlsian citizens do not share criminals’ “moral failings as a
common liability”: their nature is their misfortune (139-141).
6 0 Bonnie Honig, “Difference, Dilemmas, and the Politics o f Home,” in Benhabib, D em ocracy and
Difference, 259.
6 1 See Honig, “Renegotiating Positions: Beyond the Virtue-Virtz'/ Opposition,” in P olitical Theory and
the Displacement o f Politics, 200-211
6 2 See Scott, “Beyond the War o f Words: Cautious Resistance and Calculated Conformity,” in
Weapons o f the Weak, 241-303.
6 3 Ibid., 246.
6 4 John Rawls, A Theory o f Justice, rev. ed. (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1999), 11 passim.
Rawls proposes the model o f the original position wherein the parties who are to deliberate and decide
on the regulating principles o f justice o f a democracy stand behind a “veil o f ignorance,” a condition
under which they are denied the knowledge o f their place in society (including the “places” that
concern political and social theorists alike: class, gender, ethnicity, “race,” sexuality), their natural
abilities, their conceptions o f the good or particular plans in life, as well as the economic/political
circumstances o f their society— all these according to Rawls to ensure a condition o f equality prior to
their collective decision-making.
6 5 Rawls, A Theory o f Justice, 247. It needs to be noted that subordinate subjects can surely display
genuine friendly gestures and civil manners (especially to their peers): it is when they confront a
superior authority figure who is in a dominant position to dictate their livelihood that it takes on a
heightened pragmatic significance.
6 6 Zora Neale Hurston, M ules and Men (New York: Harper & Row, 1990), 2.
6 7 Gloria Wade-Gayles, Pushed Back to Strength: A Black Woman’ s Journey Plome (Boston: Beacon
Press, 1993), 4. See also Robin D.G. Kelley, “‘W e Are Not What W e Seem ’: the Politics and
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Pleasures o f Community,” in Race Rebels: Culture, Politics, and the Black Working Class (New
York: The Free Press, 1994), 35-53.
6 8 Beiner, “Introduction,” 19.
6 9 Sheldon Wolin, Politics and Vision: Tradition and Innovation in Western Political Thought
(Boston: Little, Brown and Company, 1960).
70 Ibid., 2-3 passim. In a more recent essay, “Fugitive Democracy,” Wolin expresses a sentiment
shared by many other communitarians and civic republicans when he distinguishes between the
political and (postmodern cultural) politics, and laments the now rare moment o f the former and the
exuberance o f the latter: “Politics is continuous, ceaseless, and endless. In contrast, the political is
episodic, rare.” To Wolin, democracy is a project aligned with the political, the possibilities o f
“ordinary citizens ... becoming political beings through the self-discovery o f common concerns and
o f modes o f action for realizing them.” But the political is hastened into decline in the late-modern
age by the dominance o f the corporate sector, the globalization o f economic life, a constitutional
regime o f administration and regularization that guards the state against populist political action, and
finally, the “postmodern cultural politics” that espouses difference and divisions, undercutting a
democratic action in unison in the interests o f the common. See Wolin, “Fugitive Democracy,” in
Benhabib, D em ocracy and Difference, 31-45. As William Connolly argues, however,
[T]he weight o f the common itself often poses barriers to the political extension o f
democracy. It is invoked to marginalize or liquidate challenges to the order.... To the extent
Wolin acknowledges a constitutive tension between the politics o f established commonality
and the politics o f becoming, by which the common is changed or pluralized, we are his
allies. To the extent he tends to divest him self o f this tension by pretending that we only
address the politics o f difference and becoming, we are his critics.
William E. Connolly, “Politics and Vision,” in D em ocracy and Vision: Sheldon Wolin and the
Vicissitudes o f the Political, eds. Aryeh Botwinick and William E. Connolly (Princeton, NJ: Princeton
University Press, 2001), 16.
7 1 Benjamin R. Barber, Strong Dem ocracy: Participatory Politics fo r a New Age (Berkeley and Los
Angeles: University o f California Press, 1984), 118.
7 2 Pocock, “The Ideal o f Citizenship Since Classical Times,” 32.
7 3 Barber, Strong Dem ocracy, xiv-xv.
7 4 Ibid., 155.
7 5 Habermas, “Three Normative M odels o f Democracy,” 23-24.
7 6 Ibid., 24. Some, however, argue that deliberation is not incompatible with (a revised version of)
solidarity. See, e.g., Jodi Dean’s vision o f “reflective solidarity” in Solidarity o f Strangers: Feminism
after Identity P olitics (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University o f California Press, 1996).
7 7 Habermas, “Three Normative M odels o f Democracy,” 25.
7 8 Seyla Benhabib, “Toward a Deliberative Model o f Democratic Legitimacy,” in Benhabib,
Dem ocracy and Difference, 68.
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7 9 Nancy Fraser, “Rethinking the Public Sphere: A Contribution to the Critique o f Actually Existing
Democracy,” in Robbins, The Phantom Public Sphere, 9.
8 0 Ibid., 19-22.
8 1 Scott, Weapons o f the Weak, 296.
8 2 Ibid., 242.
8 3 Iris Marion Young, “Communication and the Other: Beyond Democracy,” in Benhabib, D em ocracy
and Difference, 122-125. Young argues for the need to incoiporate speech acts such as “greeting,
rhetoric, and storytelling” in addition to critical argumentation to more meaningfully include
subordinate groups in deliberative democracy (128-133).
8 4 Scott, Weapons o f the Weak, 286.
8 5 Ibid., 284-289.
8 6 See James C. Scott, Domination and the Arts o f Resistance: Hidden Transcripts (New Haven, CT:
Yale University Press, 1990). See also Scott, Weapons o f the Weak, 284-289.
87 Honig, P olitical Theory and the Displacem ent o f Politics, 4.
8 8 Ibid., 137. Here Honig is referring specifically to Rawls, though the implication certainly extends
to other script-minded political theorists as well.
8 9 Honig, Political Theory and the D isplacem ent o f Politics, 148.
9 0 Mary Louise Pratt, Imperial Eyes: Travel Writing and Transculturation (New York: Routledge,
1992), 6. As Pratt writes, “While the imperial metropolis tends to understand itself as determining the
periphery ... , it habitually blinds itself to the ways in which the periphery determines the metropolis”
(6).
9 1 Lavie and Swedenburg, “Introduction,” 9.
9 2 Carlos Forment, “Peripheral Peoples and Narrative Identities: Arendtian Reflections on Late
Modernity,” in Benhabib, D em ocracy and Difference, 316.
9 3 Ibid., 322.
9 4 Ibid.
9 5 The term originates in Greek mythology, referring to the first bride o f Zeus. For a brief account o f
its origin, see James C. Scott, Seeing Like a State: H ow Certain Schemes to Improve the Human
Condition H ave F ailed (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1998), 424, n.8. As Scott points out,
Odysseus was an exemplary Greek figure often praised for using metis to outwit opponents and
enemies (313). It is important to note that the idea was widely practiced and shared across various
cultures and philosophical thoughts. According to Scott, “Taoism emphasizes precisely this kind o f
knowledge and skill” (424, n.12); so do the Native Americans (311-312). Michel de Certeau also
mentioned the Greek Sophists, the Chinese author Sun Tzu’s The A rt o f War, and the Arabic
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anthology, The Book o f Tricks as belonging to this tradition. See de Certeau, The Practice o f
Everyday Life, xx.
9 6 de Certeau, The P ractice o f Everyday Life, xix.
97 Scott, Seeing Like a State, 313.
9 8 Polan, “The Public’s Fear,” 39.
9 9 Grace Chang, D isposable Domestics: Immigrant Women Workers in the G lobal Economy
(Cambridge, MA: South End Press, 2000), 123-124.
1 0 0 Ibid., 4.
1 0 1 Ibid., 5. See also Pierrette Hondagneu-Sotelo, Gendered Transitions: Mexican Experiences o f
Immigration (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University o f California Press, 1994).
1 0 2 Chang, D isposable Dom estics, 4, 7.
1 0 3 Ibid., 10-11.
1 0 4 Chang indicates, “According to a survey o f 18 New York agencies, ‘illegal’ workers earned as
little as $175 a week and ‘legal’ workers as much as $600 a week” (ibid., 55).
1 0 5 See also Kaushik Basu, “The V iew from the Tropics,” in Can We Put an End to Sweatshops, eds.
Joshua Cohen and Joel Rogers (Boston: Beacon Press, 2001), 62.
1 0 6 Both Scott and Kelley make similar points in their respective studies; they also further note the
historians’ and scholars’ fear o f the possible reinforcement o f negative stereotypes o f the subordinate
class by the documentation o f such transgressive acts. Both, however, oppose such way o f thinking.
See Scott, Weapons o f the Weak, 36-37; and Kelley, Race Rebels, 21-22.
1 0 7 See, e.g., Susan Moller Okin, Women in Western Political Thought (Princeton, NJ: Princeton
University Press, 1979); Carole Pateman, The Sexual Contract (Stanford: Stanford University Press,
1988); and Charles Wade M ills, The R acial Contract (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1997).
1 0 8 The original meaning o f “the personal is political” is that women’s problems are not merely
personal complaints, but significant political issues. See Judith Grant, Fundamental Feminism:
Contesting the Core Concepts o f Feminist Theory (New York: Routledge, 1993), 33-39. Even for
feminists who support the slogan, however, they tend to conceptualize the proper feminist citizen acts
in terms o f overt public participation in the “outdoor,” not inside one’s home.
1 0 9 Despite the difficulty o f unionization, the current works done by non-union community advocacy
groups such as M ujeres Unidas y Activas (MUA) in San Francisco and the Domestic Workers
Association (DW A) o f CHIRLA (Coalition for Humane Immigrant Rights o f Los Angeles) have been
vitally important. I will have more discussion on this at the end o f this section. See Chang,
D isposable D om estics, 200-204; and Hondagneu-Sotelo, D om estica, 219-243.
1,0 Honig, “Difference, Dilemmas, and the Politics o f Home,” 258.
1 1 1 Hondagneu-Sotelo, D om estica, 30-47.
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1 1 2 Rhacel Salazar Parrenas, Servants o f Globalization: Women, Migration, and D om estic Work
(Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2001), 153-163.
1 1 3 See ibid., 167.
1 1 4 Parrenas, Servants o f Globalization, 170.
1 1 5 Ibid., 171.
1 1 6 Michael Sandel, Liberalism and the Limits o f Justice (New York: Cambridge University Press,
1982), 62-63.
1 1 7 See ibid., 30-34; and Hondagneu-Sotelo, Domestica, 120. In saying this I do not mean that
communitarians would react in this way; however, I do mean this as a problem in communitarian
discourse and politics.
1 1 8 Parrenas, Servants o f Globalization, 181.
1 1 9 See Galston, Liberal Purposes, 223-224.
1 2 0 Parrenas, Servants o f Globalization, 187-188.
1 2 1 Ibid., 189 (emphasis mine).
1 2 2 Ibid., 188.
1 2 3 Ibid., 190-191.
1 2 4 Scott, Weapons o f the Weak, 26.
1 2 5 Parrenas, Servants o f Globalization, 193.
1 2 6 Ibid., 192.
1 2 7 Ibid., 193.
1 2 8 Scott, Weapons o f the Weak, 242.
1 2 9 Ibid., 194.
1 3 0 Scott, Weapons o f the Weak, 35.
1 3 1 Kelley, Race Rebels, 28. Here K elley refers specifically to the sister networks formed by black
female tobacco workers. However, such solidarity networks are also formed in many arenas o f
female immigrant labor.
1 3 2 Parrenas, Servants o f Globalization, 195.
1 3 3 Ibid., 192.
1 3 4 Chang, D isposable Domestics, 202.
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1 3 5 For the purpose o f this paper, the ensuing discussion o f sweatshop will omit the case o f industrial
homework, which indeed problematizes the binary division between the personal sphere o f home and
the impersonal industrial sector.
1 3 6 Nancy L. Green, “Fashion, Flexible Specialization, and the Sweatshop: A Historical Problem,” in
Sweatshop USA: The American Sweatshop in H istorical and Global Perspective, eds. Daniel E.
Bender and Richard A. Greenwald (New York: Routledge, 2003), 39. Green further identifies “three
S”s” that define the sewing industry: skill (relatively low skill needs), “seasonality” (high seasonal
fluctuations), and subcontracting (ibid., 40).
1 3 7 See Ralph Armbruster-Sandoval, G lobalization and Cross-Border Labor Solidarity in the
Americas: The Anti-Sweatshop M ovement and the Struggle fo r Social Justice (New Y ork: Routledge,
2005), 8-9; Ellen Israel Rosen, Making Sweatshops: the Globalization o f the U.S. A pparel Industry
(Berkeley and Los Angeles: University o f California Press, 2002); and Edna Bonacich and Richard P.
Applebaum, Behind the Label: Inequality in the Los Angeles Apparel Industry (Berkeley and Los
Angeles: University o f California Press, 2000).
1 3 8 Rosen, Making Sweatshops, 220-235. Rosen argues that consumers lose in the deal as well rather
than benefiting from low-price clothing. As my focus is on the workers, I will omit the discussion o f
consumers here.
1 3 9 Ethel Brooks, “The Ideal Sweatshop?: Gender and Transnational Protest,” in Bender and
Greenwald, Sweatshop USA, 281.
1 4 0 Ibid., 282.
1 4 1 Eileen Boris, “Consumers o f the World Unite!: Campaigns Against Sweating, Past and Present,” in
Bender and Greenwald, 220.
1 4 2 See Bonacich and Applebaum, Behind the Label, 195.
1 4 3 Maria Angelina Soldatenko, “Organizing Latina Garment Workers in Los Angeles,” Aztlan: A
Journal o f Chicano Studies 20, nos. 1&2 (1991): 80.
1 4 4 Maria Angelina Soldatenko, “ILGWU Labor Organizers: Chicana and Latina Leadership in the
Los Angeles Garment Industry,” Frontiers: A Journal o f Women Studies 23, no. 1 (2002): 49.
1 4 5 Ibid., 60-61.
1 4 6 The ILGWU merged with the Amalgamated Clothing and Textile Workers’ Union (ACTW U) into
the Union o f N eedle Trades, Industrial, and Textile Employees (UNITE) in 1995 due to declining
membership. As Soldatenko points out, in many workers’ experience, the track record o f both the
ILGWU and ACTW U often fuels perception that they “have tried to work with employers rather than
with workers” (“ILGWU Labor Organizers,” 61).
1 4 7 Honig, P olitical Theory and the Displacem ent o f Politics, 148.
1 4 8 Soldatenko, “Organizing Latina Garment Workers in Los Angeles,” 77.
1 4 9 Scott, Weapons o f the Weak, 241.
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1 5 0 Immanuel Ness, “Globalization and Worker Organization in N ew York City’s Garment Industry,”
in Bender and Greenwald, Sweatshop USA, 180.
1 5 1 Quoted in Soldatenko, “ILGWU Labor Organizers,” 58.
1 5 2 Soldatenko, “Organizing Latina Garment Workers in Los Angeles,” 85.
1 5 3 Soldatenko, “ILGWU Labor Organizers,” 58.
1 5 4 Armbruster-Sandoval, Globalization and Cross-Border Solidarity in the Americas, 21.
1 5 5 Lee Romney, “Chairs Sit W ell With Laborers,” Los Angeles Times, May 26, 2004, A l, A24.
1 5 6 Scott, Weapons o f the Weak, xvi.
1 5 7 Kelley, Race Rebels, 17-34.
1 5 8 Karen Brodkins Sacks, Caring by the Hour: Women, Work, and Organizing at Duke M edical
Center (Urbana: University o f Illinois Press, 1988), 125.
1 5 9 Soldatenko, “ILGWU Labor Organizers,” 54.
1 6 0 Ibid., 47-48. The Justice Center was created by the ILGWU in 1990 to reach out to nonunion
immigrant workers, and was dismantled in 1999 (47). Soldatenko notes that the Chicana and Latina
leaders appointed to lead the Center held no real power within union hierarchy under the supervision
o f white males, but had been effective and instrumental in relating to the workers, gaining their trust
and organizing them (48-49). Absurdly for the ILGWU, these Latina organizers had been dismissed
from their posts by the union leadership for reasons ranging from being single mother and having a
duty to raise children and cleaning up the house first (58) to “manipulat[ing] the membership at the
Justice Center because they could communicate in Spanish” (61). Despite all the adversity, these
immigrant women organizers had made significant contributions to the workers’ struggle in their
everyday life.
1 6 1 Soldatenko, “ILGWU Labor Organizers,” 48.
1 6 2 Ibid., 56.
1 6 3 Miriam Ching Yoon Louie, Sweatshop Warriors: Immigrant Women Workers Take on the G lobal
Factory (Cambridge, MA: South End Press, 2001), 191.
1 6 4 See Miriam Ching Yoon Louie, “Immigrant Asian Women in Bay Area Garment Sweatshops:
‘After Sewing, Laundry, Cleaning and Cooking, I Have N o Breath Left to Sing,”’ Amerasia Journal
18, no. 1 (1992): 2.
1 6 5 Louie, Sweatshop Warriors, 191.
1 6 6 Ibid., 192-193.
1 6 7 Ibid., 50. This, however, underscores the relevance o f Iris Young’s proposal for the inclusion o f
other ways o f communication besides “rational deliberation.” See Young, “Communication and the
Other,” 128-133.
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1 6 8 Louie, Sweatshop Warriors, 215.
1 6 9 Soldatenko, “ILGWU Labor Organizers,’" 59.
1 7 0 Armbruster-Sandoval, Globalization and Cross-Border Solidarity in the Americas, 151-152.
1 7 1 Boris, “Consumers o f the World Unite!,” 220.
1 7 2 The phrase comes from Armbruster-Sandoval, Globalization and Cross-Border Solidarity in the
Americas, 153-154.
1 7 3 Scott, Weapons o f the Weak, 27.
1 7 4 Parrenas, Servants o f Globalization, 33.
1 7 5 Ibid., 253.
1 7 6 Nussbaum lists the virtues that a cosmopolitan education can achieve: 1) through cosmopolitan
education, we learn more about ourselves; 2) we make headway solving problems that require
international cooperation; 3) we recognize moral obligations to the rest o f the world that are real and
that otherwise would go unrecognized; and 4) we make a consistent and coherent argument based on
distinctions we are prepared to defend. Martha C. Nussbaum, “Patriotism and Cosmopolitanism,” in
F or Love o f Country: D ebating the Limits o f Patriotism , ed. Joshua Cohen (Boston: Beacon Press,
1996), 11-15.
1 7 7 See photos in Miriam Ching Yoon Louie, Sweatshop Warriors: Immigrant Women Workers Take
on the G lobal Factory (Cambridge, MA: South End Press, 2001), 47, 58.
1 7 8 Julia Kristeva, Strangers to Ourselves, trans. Leon Roudiez (New York: Columbia University
Press, 1991).
1 7 9 Ian Urbina, “N o N eed to Stew: A Few Tips To Cope With Life’s Annoyances,” The N ew York
Times, March 15, 2005, A l, A24. Thanks to Nora Hamilton for the reference.
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Chapter 2
Of Tainted Bodies and Cosmopolitanism: Global Sex Workers, Sexual
Traveling, and Tainting Citizenship
The 2000 film Bread and Roses tells the story of undocumented immigrant
Maya traveling with smugglers from Mexico to reunite with her sister living in Los
Angeles, Rosa. During the course of her stay working as a janitor at a big downtown
building alongside Rosa, Maya became involved in the Justice for Janitors campaign
against their non-unionized cleaning company that had cut wages and withheld
health insurance, sick pay, and holidays over the years. Desperately needing the
money that would get her ailing husband to be seen by a doctor, Rosa betrayed her
fellow workers by giving the manager Perez information about the organizing o f the
campaign that resulted in the firing o f several workers. Furious over her sister’s
action, Maya confronted Rosa, culminating in the most powerful scene o f the film,
where the following dialogue ensues:
Maya: You’re a fucking traitor, Rosa. You’re a fucking traitor, sis.
Rosa: You do, don’t you? You think that? Even when I was supporting
everybody? Sending money to you and mama? ... Did you guys ever
wonder ... how did Rosa manage to send the money? How old was I when 1
got to Tijuana? I was a little girl. A little girl, right? And you didn’t even
wonder about how I did it. What for? Rosa kept your mouths pretty full.
You know how I did it? Turning tricks. I was a hooker. What do you think
about that?
Maya (suddenly in agony): I didn’t know.
Rosa: I was turning tricks, honey. So that you guys didn’t starve. For five fucking
years in Tijuana. Every single night. Just about every single night. “Suck
their dicks, Rosa. Fuck, Rosa. Fuck. Fuck.” ... “Come on, because your
family is starving.” Huh? “Suck their dicks.” Right? “Come on, come
on!” O la le, o la le. Sounds awful, huh? Disgusting? What do you think?
Nobody asked me, huh? My dad leaves, and who gets screwed? Who gets
screwed? Rosa. Let Rosa start fucking everybody.
Maya (covering face with her hands in disbelief): I didn’t know, Rosa.
Rosa: Let her suck everybody’s fucking dicks ... Blacks, whites, sleazeballs,
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slimebags. Let her suck everybody, right? ... My husband gets sick, and I
have to fuck. Whose turn is it? Rosa's. Let Rosa pick up all the pieces,
right? (Crying) She has to be doing everything all the time, as if Rosa were
an idiot, fucking everybody, right? So you had something to eat! I hate the
whole fucking world! I hate it! I’ve put up with it all my fucking life! I’ve
been keeping it here, in my own gut. How do you like that, Maya? ... Do
you know how I got you your job? Didn't you want a job here? “Come on,
sis, get me a job, because I can do everything.” You know what I did? Yes,
honey, I had to fuck Perez.
Maya: Don’t joke about that!
Rosa: ... I fucked him for you! I fucked him for you! Because I’m tired. Tired!
All my life. My husband gets sick, I go fuck. My dad leaves, I go fuck. ...
You want a job? I go fuck. All the time!
Maya: Goddamn it, I didn’t know!
Rosa: No? Everybody looked the other way ... Now do you feel bad? Do you
feel bad? (Crying) I have a husband! I have two kids! And what? And I’m
a fucking whore, right? That’s what I am! Because I didn’t think I’d keep
on doing it here, right! How do you like that, Maya? My own daughter, my
baby asks me where her dad is. What am I going to tell her, Maya? I didn’t
even remember his face. I didn’t know who the fuck is her father. “You
were bom in a brothel, honey.” You’re right, Maya. I am a fucking traitor.
A traitor who is lying to herself, to my own family, to my baby girl ...
Maya’s shock, pain and disbelief upon learning of her sister’s prostitution
provides a conflicting contrast in the film: the daring but naive Maya on the
progressive path of social movement and justice, and the equally bold but
experienced and succumbed Rosa who has “learned” in a hard way how power in
this society functions and how as a subordinate subject one has to extract the very
last bit of her body and soul to keep on surviving, including “selling one’s body” and
selling others out. The film applauds Maya’s bravery, faith, sense of justice and her
associated labor movement, while cutting into a silent “understanding” (through
Maya’s felt speechlessness) towards Rosa’s painful revelation o f having prostituted
herself as an immigrant to support her family. Rosa has sold her co-janitors out, yes,
but the film provides a forum for her subjectivity to come forth— so that even if the
audience does not approve o f betrayal or applaud selling bodily service in exchange
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for money and favors, one can at least achieve an understanding o f how the difficulty
of living as a poor working-class immigrant woman facing the force of global capital
may propel her to engage in “such” activities in order to make do.
But it is also at this critical juncture one wonders whether the divergent paths
taken by Maya and Rosa in the film provide too comfortable an outlet of the
conflicting emotions o f the audience by placing Rosa in the dark category of whore,
victim, betrayal, manipulation, sadness and pain, while remaindering her as an other,
an anomaly to the progressivism o f immigrant labor movement represented by
Maya? Indeed, may we not imagine a new subjectivity who fuses the binary
construct of Maya and Rosa into one: a female immigrant who, given a dismal range
of working options (among which are working as a domestic maid, apparel
seamstress, farm worker, janitor, or at the MacDonald’s), consciously chooses
prostitution as her temporary occupation which offers her a relatively higher pay and
flexible schedule, and following Maya’s social activism, is politically involved in
pushing for the decriminalization of prostitution as a conscious rights-seeking sex
worker?
In fact, across the globe, this prototype o f conscious rights-seeking sex
workers who negotiate with male domination and desire is beginning to take shape
(even if still distributed unevenly), as more and more historically subordinate and
stigmatized brothel workers, street prostitutes, escorts, call-girls, strippers,
pornography actresses, exotic dancers, phone sex operators, peep show workers,
window prostitutes, massage parlor masseurs, S/M dominatrixes, and sex educators
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are coming out to assert the legitimation o f sex work by proclaiming: “Outlaw
Poverty, Not Prostitutes,” and “It’s a Business Doing Pleasure With You.”1
Saying this is not to claim that there is a universal profile o f sex worker that
can adequately represent the diverse range o f experiences of every man and woman,
white and black, Latino and Asian, gay and lesbian, transgendered and transsexual,
straight and S/M practitioner, native and migrant, educated and non-educated,
middle-class and working-class subject working in the sex trade in the industrialized
North and the underdeveloped South. For example, migrant sex workers o f Third
World origin are usually unable to attain the higher degree of economic
independence and sexual agency enjoyed by native, educated, and white First World
sex workers. Bandana Pattanaik argues in Transnational Prostitution that the vast
trajectories of prostitution make it difficult “to arrive at neat theories.” In fact,
“Powerful stories often confuse us because they are not homogenous.”2 What is
important to note here is that even this disparity among sex workers has not resulted
in the less privileged declaring their absolute victim status and the futility o f the
project of sex workers’ rights; to the contrary, they demand more attention, more
rights and more protections to fulfill their needs as rightful human beings. Thus,
while a great number of global sex workers do not join the trade because they want
to explore sex with strangers, the very notion of “sex workers’ rights” signifies that
no woman should feel shame or fear in turning to sex for money.
In this chapter, I look at how the hidden exploitation o f women’s body and
suppressed sexual expressions in the day-to-day bourgeois society are revealed
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openly in the underground world of sex work. In this seemingly pathological space,
however, the conceptualized subordinate victims, global sex workers, are demanding
and asserting their rights as (non-existent) “citizens” in protecting themselves as
legitimate workers. As an occupation inherently rooted in “travel” (e.g. the needed
“mobility” in search of clientele and in order to dodge state authority), global sex
workers can be seen as a group of unofficial traveling agents who carry a precarious
status of citizenship, but who also seek to insinuate themselves into “citizenship”
through their demand o f a citizen’s very right to work. While in the previous chapter
I address how undocumented domestic and sweatshop workers transgress the
“political” dimension of the dwelling trajectory by re-scripting the proper ways of
citizen participation through the imaginary of tactical citizenship, here I argue that
global sex workers further transgress the “economic” dimension o f the dwelling
trajectory by reconfiguring the conventional notion of “honest and law-abiding
citizen-workers” in their breaking “the link between profit and social approbation.”3
As historian Philippa Levine argues, prostitution has always been seen as “work’s
mirror image, profit without honor.”4 Here, I invoke the narrative of tainting
citizenship to describe the ways in which global sex workers mimic liberal
citizenship in its reducing citizenship to the bottom line or moneymaking activity,
though with a deviance: through the use o f their private body parts and sexual organs
in the public sphere o f work. In the process, they expand the conception o f laboring
citizen-workers beyond the conventional script of the dwelling trajectory.
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As such theoretical take on sex work treads on fraught terrains in feminist
discourse,5 it needs to be clarified that the following discussion does not adopt a
celebratory position in seeing sex work as voluntarily empowering or subversive, but
only to delineate, within limited terrain and given existing structures, what global sex
workers can do in helping us rethink the notion o f citizenship and even expand the
horizon o f cosmopolitanism. In this way, I see the current sexual politics of sex
work, borrowing from Stuart Hall’s “encoding/decoding” framework, occupying a
“negotiated” rather than “hegemonic” or “emancipatory” position in social power
relations.6 This “negotiated” position approaches sex work, in Wendy Chapkis’
words, “as a terrain of struggle, not a fixed field o f gender and power positions.”7
Previously, certain strands o f radical feminist discourse take on a
“hegemonic” position by seeing commodified sex as purely a manifestation of
gender domination and male violence against women’s body. Such discourse,
however, not only lacks a critical negotiation with gender’s complex interworkings
with race, class, sexuality, and geopolitical disparity in the neo-liberal global
economy, its accompanied drive towards anti-trafficking, anti-prostitution, and anti-
pornography legislations has unproductively led to the perception among sex
workers of powerful feminists beating on the weak and the marginalized in
complicity with the male agents of liberal states (e.g., vice police) in taking away
their means of livelihood and driving them into underground. At the same time, an
“emancipatory” reading o f sex work as sex radicalism can slide into an imbalanced
celebration o f the power, subversion and pleasure sex workers derive from running
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the sex acts to the neglect of power differentials among sex workers (class, race,
education, global locations, and hierarchy within sex work) in confronting the forces
o f global capital, client power, masculine ideology, brothel management, state
authority and neo-colonial relations. My following discussion, therefore, will
negotiate the dueling poles o f domination and agency by contextualizing and
theorizing sex workers’ resistance and contestation within the complex interlocking
systems of power that dictate their life chances.
I divide up the chapter into five sections. First, I shift the term o f discourse
in transnational prostitution from “sexual trafficking” to “sexual traveling” in order
to configure global sex workers not as trafficked victims but as traveling agents who
“illicitly” pass through state surveillance and consciously turn their bodies into erotic
instruments in negotiating and making do with the forces of global capital, masculine
ideology, and racism. Second, I engage with the arguments in certain strands of
radical feminist and Marxist theoretical discourse that consider the commodification
of women’s body for male erotic/sexual pleasure as signs of gender domination and
alienation. I argue that this line o f reasoning adopts a theoretical posture of “judging
prostitution” that emanates from an internalized “high,” privileged, (white) maternal
body that denies the agency o f the prostitute’s “low,” violated and degraded body.
As we shall see, this repelling o f the “low” misses the engagement with what
Mikhail Bakhtin calls the “bodily lower stratum,” a process o f degradation of the
body but also its rebirth.
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Third, I further argue that we may consider the prostitute body and the
sexualized racial body sharing an affinity in constituting what might be called the
“low” body in modem civilization: a body in excess, polluted, outside the official
discourse and deviating from the bourgeois standard of cleanliness and moderation.
Rather than judging, repelling, or containing the “low” body, Bakhtin has sought to
re-imagine the radical potential o f the “low.” As I will argue, however, by focusing
exclusively on an idealistic, collective counter-cultural space of the carnival, Bakhtin
fails to consider that the “low” body of modernity cannot be detached as an “outside”
from the material economy, escaping its determinations o f power o f different sorts,
namely, capitalism, masculine ideology, and racialized power relations. Contra
Bakhtin, the “low” body in modernity cannot be rid of private and individual
considerations, but must instead insinuate itself into the official discourse to gain the
“private” rights o f ordinary citizens that have long been denied to the lowly subjects.
Here, it is apt to understand global sex workers’ body not simply as “low” but also
“tainted.”
Fourth, I argue that by inscribing their tainted bodies into the public sphere of
work as legible bodies with rights, global sex workers’ rights discourse further taints
citizenship from the bodily lower stratum. This transgressive citizenship imaginary,
tainting citizenship, mimics liberal citizenship in its reducing citizenship to the
bottom line or moneymaking activity, but through the illicit use of their erotic body
parts and sexual bodily organs in the public sphere of work. In comparing and
examining sex workers’ rights discourse in both the First and Third World as
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discrepant transnational articulations of a citizen's right to work like all other
laboring bodies, I look at how global sex workers help us reformulate citizenship by
expanding the room for different kinds of citizen-workers beyond the dwelling
trajectory. Finally, I will conclude by examining how our cosmopolitan horizons can
be reformed through promoting contact with the tainted bodies and actively
incorporating them in our daily associative arrangement.
I. Can Global Sex Workers Travel? From Sexual Trafficking to
Sexual Traveling
Postcolonial theorist Gayatri Spivak is well known for asking, “can the
subaltern speak?” in the predominant discourse of poststructuralist theory and
postcolonial subaltern studies.8 A similar question, “can the prostitutes speak?”
seems also applicable to the predominant discourse of feminist theory. As Shannon
Bell argues, in feminist discourse, the prostitute thus far has functioned as “the other
of the other: the other within the categorical other, ‘woman.’”9 Anne McClintock
echoes, arguing that in feminism, the prostitute serves as a “ventriloquist’s dummy”
through which relatively empowered, white, middle-class professional women
“project their feelings o f sexual frustration, political impotence, and rage,” and
“voice their interests ... at the expense of the sex workers’ real needs.”1 0 Extending
this line of arguments to recapture the erased subjectivity o f sex workers, it seems to
me that in the context o f globalization, given the predominant paradigm o f “sexual
trafficking” in describing prostitution, the question for us to ask would be: can
global sex workers travel?
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Specifically, in this section I will attempt to reconfigure global sex workers
not as trafficked victims but as traveling agents who negotiate and make do with the
forces of global capital, masculine ideology, and neo-colonial power relations. In
articulating this position, I am not denying the continued existence of and need to
combat trafficking conditions where women and children are coerced, threatened or
cheated into prostitution. I am arguing that, however, to portray all migrant
prostitutes as trafficking victims is to pursue an over-simplified and sensationalistic
project as it neglects a large number of migrant women who are informed and know
what they are getting into (some might even have done sex work in their homeland)
when they locate sex work as their best working option in order to support
themselves as well as their children and family. There is thus an urgent need to shift
the term o f discourse from “sexual trafficking” to “sexual traveling” in theorizing
and politicizing global sex work.
It needs to be first noted that my understanding o f “sexual traveling” here in
part agrees with and in part contests James Clifford’s framework of “travel.”
Previously, Clifford employs the term “discrepant cosmopolitanisms” to theorize the
class distinctions, power inequity among nations, and diverse and actually lived
experiences o f ethno subjects moving along the hegemonic circuit of globalization.1 1
Given the fact that a majority of sex workers in many cities around the world are
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migrants, the diverse migratory trajectories of global sex workers indeed mirror
Clifford’s notion of “discrepant cosmopolitanisms.” As Susanne Thorbek observes,
The differences in the circumstances of migrant prostitutes are vast. Some may have
been cheated or forced into the trade; others have chosen it voluntarily, knowing
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what the work entails; and some have had experience of prostitution both at home
and abroad before travelling to Europe. There are differences in ‘legal status’: some
have citizenship, others not. Some are married to a fake husband who is often well
paid for his hire. Others are illegal migrants. The type of employment and the
existence of women’s networks are important elements in the amount of autonomy
an individual woman has. Income levels and the degree to which women are
exploited vary so much that some women barely survive while others earn double
the minimum wage.1 3
Understanding migrant sex workers as “traveling” in Clifford’s term usefully moves
beyond the linear trajectory of trafficked victims and renders global sex work a
historical and discrepant character. Here, “traveling” rightly situates the bodies of
sex workers, in Anders Lisborg’s words, in a shifting “continuum from voluntary
prostitution to direct trafficking in women and forced migration.”1 4
But while global sex work mirrors discrepant cosmopolitanisms, there is
nonetheless a conspicuous absence o f engagement with the traveling bodies o f sex
workers in Clifford’s own work— especially salient given his attention to gender.1 5
Thorbek indicates that in diasporic studies, “migrant women who work as prostitutes
are seldom if ever included.”1 6 I see this, however, not simply as an issue of why
certain subjects are not included in Clifford’s framework, but rather that the very
way he constructs “travel,” in its overarching “discrepant” mode, becomes
equivalent to a “migratory” paradigm that attends to inequality and power
differentials among traveling subjects but is inadequate in doing the work of
delineating the additional, inherent transgression associated with prostitutes’ “sexual
traveling.” The absence of sex workers in Clifford’s “traveling” frame simply
amplifies this limitation. Hence, taking Clifford’s historical, discrepant traveling as
a point of departure, I argue in the following that sexual traveling may be further
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understood as a transgression of global panoptical surveillance and its accompanied
moral-legal order in search o f a better livelihood, when neither (secure) dwelling nor
(legitimate) traveling is granted as an option. It speaks to the untamed desire for
betterment and an agency that refuses to be reined in, settled and put in place by
states’ disciplinary constraints.
Traveling, in fact, has always been an inherent part of the underworld o f sex
work, signifying both necessity and transgression as one moves constantly in order to
locate a personal market of clientele, look for working places with trustable
management and colleagues, and evade state surveillance in the forms of police
arrest and harassment. As Gloria Locket, black sex worker and director o f California
Prostitutes’ Education Project, puts it, “If you’re a career prostitute, especially if you
work the streets, you have to move around to make money and to stay out o f jail.”1 7
The first U.S. sex workers’ rights organization, COYOTE (Call O ff Your Old Tired
Ethics) was, in fact, named by founder Margo St. James to “symbolize the animal
which is forced by persecuting ranchers to migrate and which, despite a promiscuous
reputation, mates for life.”1 8 This “illicit” mobility transgresses state surveillance
and exceeds civilized constraints. As Levine argues,
Prostitute women crystallized the many dangers of mobility and its challenges to a
fixed legal and social order. They often moved residence rather than conform to
regulation. They exercised a choice over their living quarters and arrangements,
moving when they deemed it necessary and living outside the confines imposed by
respectable domesticity. Women working outside the brothel system were a danger
because their mobility allowed them to locate exactly where they might find clients.
Moreover, faced with examination, hospitalization, or incarceration, easy mobility
meant that women could seek business elsewhere with little effort, their physical
freedom undermining the system of regulation.1 9
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State regulations of prostitution that restrict prostitutes and brothels to Red Light
district areas through zoning laws are meant to provide male desire with "a safely
debased outlet”2 0 while delimiting and containing prostitutes’ mobility less their
traveling spreads “diseases” and “moral vices” that disrupt social order and threaten
the sanctified monogamous marriage institution. Migration overseas for prostitutes
is made illegal in almost every nation-state. Countering state regulations and
containment of their movement, mobility and migration, sex workers at the First
World Whores’ Congress thus emphasize their right to travel (within and between
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countries) and freedom of association as one essential human right.
Yet, in an effort to combat the growing scale of transnational prostitution,
national enforcement and international law agencies often resort to an abolitionist
rhetoric that reduces prostitution to trafficking and criminal networks without
consideration o f the deadening forces of neo-liberal capitalism in pushing women in
different parts of the world into sex industry and migrant prostitution.2 2 As Marjan
Wijers notes, “Trafficking is not limited to prostitution, ... and not all prostitution
involves trafficking.” Current discourse on trafficking, however, often
sensationalizes the victimized female bodies and oversimplifies the forces behind
migrant prostitution.2 4 In the trafficking discourse, the agency of sex workers is
figured to be non-existing and bears no positive rights claims.2 5 While international
legal documents and rights organizations have generally distinguished between
“forced” and “voluntary” prostitution,2 6 Jo Doezema argues that they are more
interested in condemning forced prostitution and saving its innocent victims than
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affirming and promoting prostitutes’ rights.2 7 As she notes, the dichotomy between
forced and voluntary prostitution perpetuates the false division between the forced
innocent victims (madonnas) and the guilty voluntary transgressors (whores) who
deserve to suffer: in short, no “normal” person would choose prostitution unless
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forced by someone or by poverty.
What is unsaid in the trafficking and forced prostitution discourse, with the
intention to save “fallen” women, is an unconscious assumption that women should
or would always prefer to be in a “dwelling” state: tamed, domesticated, well-
protected. Levine writes,
The prostitute was female but not feminine, a separation that justified her forfeiture
of a slew of rights otherwise accorded women by virtue of their sex. The
prostitute’s open performance of her female sexuality ran counter to contemporary
notions of femininity as less sexual, domestically contained and fulfilled, and
subservient to male desire. The prostitute terrifyingly represented the idea of
woman in her natural state, untamed and unchained from modesty and propriety.
Prostitution disrupted dominant visions of female purity and submission. Powerful
as this reading of womanhood was, there was a fear that women might break out and
prove something other than docile.2 9
Hidden behind the official rhetoric of battling criminal networks, the discourse of
trafficking reveals not simply a fear o f crimes but more subtly, a fear of women’s
mobility, in Levine’s words: “Mobility as excessive freedom and a social threat led
to its association with criminality.” The act of anti-trafficking accompanied with a
reluctance to actively and positively recognizes sex workers’ rights suggests a hidden
assumption that conforms to the binary imagery o f women as “wild/tamed,
wandering/sedentary.”3 0 Anyone who consciously chooses prostitution is considered
deviating from the dwelling trajectory o f femininity in being overabundant and out
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of place.3 1 This “traveling” (troubling) subject, as a voluntary transgressor, deserves
no rights until put back onto the dwelling trajectory of the correct womanhood.
Saying this is not to simply play the “liberatory transgression” card against
civilized constraints. Rather, what is particularly problematic in the trafficking
paradigm and the “forced/voluntary” prostitution dichotomy is their failure to
recognize the ways in which subordinate women across the globe are caught in a
condition where neither (secure) dwelling nor (legitimate) traveling is possible in the
current neo-liberal global climate. In fact, as neo-liberalism deteriorates these
women’s state o f insecure dwelling in their home countries, the trafficking paradigm
and the “forced/voluntary” prostitution dichotomy suppress the recognition of their
sexualized migration for livelihood as legitimate traveling with a set of positive
rights, leaving them in a double bind.
Mike Davis has traced the global phenomenon o f the increase o f poor
migrants moving from rural to urban areas to the Structural Adjustment Programs
(SAPs) mandated by the IMF and the World Bank in the 1980s, as these gigantic
West-based international monetary organizations used the exchange of loans and
development packages to force the Third World economies to open their markets,
remove import controls, privatize the industries, downside the public sector, and
eliminate governmental subsidies for agricultural producers so to push them into the
“sink or swim” global commodity markets. The result, Davis argues, has collapsed
the local industries with drastic cutbacks on public services, furthering rather than
reducing global inequality between the North and the South, intensifying the
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lagging-behind of the Third World in terms of growth and development, deepening
urban poverty along with an increasing appearance of shanty towns, and
contributing to the fast emergence of informal employment and a surplus of
unskilled labor as the rural migrants move to the already crowded urban areas
competing for jobs amidst a cross-the-board lowering of wages and absence of labor
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law protections.
Women in particular are hit the hardest by these neo-liberal policies that cut
education and health care. Many eventually migrate overseas in search of better
economic opportunities, including sex work, in the process of what some scholars
have called, “feminization of international migration.”3 3 In this new gendered
migration processing, Kamala Kempadoo notes, “it is no longer simply a question of
movement between the industrialized North and developing South, but a complex
picture that includes border crossings within and between developing nations that is
heavily dependent upon female labor.”3 4 Many women traveling for sex work are
conscious about the types of work they would be engaged in. While trafficking is
no doubt a part of this new global arrangement, many migrant women adopt sex
•3 r
work as one option among “multiple sources of livelihood.” Their entry into
prostitution may be understood as an “informed decision” in the context of neo
liberal globalization.3 6
Placed in a predicament whether one can neither securely dwell nor
legitimately travel, participating in the sex trade in negotiating with the neo-
liberalizing global forces reflects more of “responsibility, intelligence and courage”
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than of “immorality and misfortune.'’3 7 As Satoko Watenabe puts it, global sex
workers
can also be understood as multinational workers who, by moving across the artificial
barriers of nation-state borders, are, at least to some extent, breaking down the
international wage hierarchy and recomposing the structure and distribution of
power within the working class against capital’s control.... They differentiated
between the sex they had for money from sex for their own emotional and physical
satisfaction. They may not have thought of themselves as rebels against male power
and social control, but, at the same time, they did not view themselves as sexual
slaves, either ... [TJhey sell sexual access to their bodies but not themselves.3 8
Rather, Kempadoo asserts, “it was the working conditions, laws and social stigmas
•5 Q
around prostitution that formed the greatest obstacles.” As Linda Meaker points
out, “abuse o f human rights is more likely to occur as a result of the work being
illegal and informal, than through deceptive coercion and lack of consent.”4 0 Pricilla
Alexander also observes that anti-trafficking laws that restrict migration and prohibit
prostitution create conditions o f underground and unregulated debt bondage that
actually help trafficking to flourish.4 1
Like other historical migrant subjects, for sex workers, traveling is an “age-
old survival strategy ... [that] implies courage and initiative to try to change one’s
own or the family’s situation.”4 2 Those who believe that prostitution is completely
male-driven as the client “can do anything he wants”4 3 thus neglect the agency of
global sex workers in “making do,” in Olive Senior’s words, as “poor women ...
make do with what they have or better still, ‘make something from nothing’ in order
to maintain their families. Neither strictly ‘forced’ nor completely ‘voluntary,’
‘making do’ involves ‘cutting and carving’ or ‘cutting and contriving,’ i.e., being
resourceful in using whatever is available to maximize its utility to oneself and
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family.”4 4 As Kempadoo argues, sex work does not determine these migrant
women’s identity, but is “just one way that women ‘make do,’ in their efforts to feed,
house, clothe and educate their families.”4 5
In her pioneering study on sex tourism, Cynthia Enloe notes that female
migration as erotic entertainers and as brides to foreign men is an extension of sex
tourism, as “men in Scandinavia, West Germany, Australia, Britain, the United
States and Japan now want to have access to Third World women not just in Third
World tourism centers; they want to enjoy their services at home.”46 But while First
World men dictate world travel, Third World sex workers are subaltern laborers with
equally demanding agency. Pataya Ruenkaew’s study o f Thai sex workers in
Germany, for example, contradicts the conventional image of Southeast Asian
women selling sexual labor as poverty-stricken victims. She argues that poverty
does not necessarily cause the migration to Germany as most of the Thai immigrant
women belong to middle class (in Thailand’s context) whose earnings are enough to
cover their daily expenses; rather, they migrate abroad for sex work in order to build
a long-term economic future.4 7 Denise Brennan’s study on Caribbean sex tourism in
Sosua, Dominican Republic also notes that while European sex tourists might see
Dominican sex workers as sexual commodities for erotic pleasure, Dominican sex
workers see these men as “potential dupes, walking visas, means by which the
women might leave the island, and poverty, behind.”4 8 They “feign love” in
establishing long-term transnational relationship with European sex tourists, and
invest on the possibility o f economic success, romance, visas, and even eventual
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settlement in Europe.4 9 Brennan asserts that women in Sosua choose sex work not
simply as a “survival strategy” (that only solves short-term economic problems) but
also as a “strategy o f advancement” (that will change their lives in the long-term).5 0
These women, Brennan argues, “try to take advantage of the global linkages that
exploit them.”5 1
In all, even though women across the globe may not dramatically improve
their lived conditions through sex trade, we may nonetheless interpret global sex
work as sexual traveling beyond the sexual trafficking paradigm, and look at sex
workers as “traveling agents” who illicitly pass through state surveillance and
consciously turn their bodies into erotic instruments in negotiating with the
repressive dynamics of global capitalism, masculine ideology, and racism. More
important, understanding sex workers as sexual traveling agents opens up the space
for our inquiry into the ways in which they may help us rethink the concept of
citizenship, in particular the proper way of being a citizen-worker, beyond the
dwelling trajectory.
II. Judging Prostitution, Judging Bodies
To configure global sex workers not as subordinate victims but as traveling
agents is also to assume that they are workers who are in control o f the erotic parts
and sexual organs o f their bodies. In certain strands o f radical feminist and Marxist
theoretical discourse, however, the commodification o f women’s body for male
erotic/sexual pleasure is considered degradation o f and violence against women.
Here, by engaging these arguments, I identify a theoretical posture of “judging
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prostitution” adopted by these feminist and Marxist writers which, in my view,
emanates from an internalized “high,” privileged, (white) maternal body that denies
the agency o f the prostitute’s “low,” violated and degraded body. As I will further
argue in the next section, this repelling o f the “low” critically misses the engagement
with what Mikhail Bakhtin calls the “bodily lower stratum,” a process of degradation
of the body but also its rebirth.
Almost a century ago, Georg Simmel drafted an essay in 1907 on
“Prostitution” that combines the central themes o f the two major oppositions against
prostitution: male domination (feminist) and alienation (Marxist). Simmel’s writing
is to be distinguished from the conservative moralists who consider prostitutes to be
immoral plagues of society; rather, he sympathizes with prostitutes as powerless,
alienated victims in a male-dominated market economy. To Simmel, prostitution
negates the Kantian principle that man should never be treated as means but only as
ends by reducing two individuals “to the status of mere means.”5 2 He wrote, “the
nadir of human dignity is reached when what is most intimate and personal for a
woman ... is offered for such thoroughly impersonal, externally objective
remuneration.” The market exchange in prostitution works only to the prostitute’s
indignity and humiliation because in the sensual act, “the man contributes only a
minimal part o f himself, but the woman her entire self.” The men never interact with
her “as real and whole persons,” and she “must feel a terrible loneliness and
dissatisfaction,” resulting in her, according to Simmel, turning to pimps and
lesbianism.5 4 To Simmel, prostitution takes away what is the most intimate and
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sensuous from a woman (but not that o f men), reducing her to a non-person who is
alienated from all men by instrumentalizing her as the object of men’s sexual outlet.
Moreover, Simmel argued: “the key feature o f prostitution is not polyandry, but
polygyny.” That is, the advantage o f the buyer (client) over the seller (prostitute) in
the sexual exchange economy means that prostitution is not defined by a woman’s
availability to many men but in a man’s sexual access to many women. Polygyny
“diminishes uniqueness of a woman; she has lost the value of rarity.”5 5 Prostitution
thus reinforces men’s domination and women’s degradation.
Here, Simmel’s totalizing delineation of the violence and alienation done to
women in prostitution needs to be critically appraised. To begin with, his take on
Kant mentions neither Kant’ inconsistency in applying the treating-humans-as-ends
principle to prostitution but not to marriage (where wives may become the husband’s
property),5 6 nor Kant’s belief that instrumentalization/objectification is intrinsic to
sexual desire itself.5 7 Simmel’s argument that the prostitute is reduced to mere
means and that she is alienated from her work and men, though true to some extent,
is not unique to prostitution, but a prevalent phenomenon of capitalist society where
workers are used as instrumental means and who have to alienate certain parts of
their “true” selves in their day-to-day working relations. The “alienation” argument
reduces the prostitute to a mere object who possesses no autonomous and conscious
subjectivity in using parts o f their laboring body—like all working men and
women—in charge o f a fee for living.
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SimmePs notion that the man gives little while the woman gives the whole of
herself in prostitution is also unwarranted. Most sex workers learn to draw a clear
boundary between sex and work, detaching sex from desire, seeing what they are
CO
doing as mere work or a professional service. As one sex worker said, “It’s sex to
him, it’s work to me.”5 9 In fact, contra Simmel, oftentimes it can be the male clients
who are the lonely and depressed subjects who lack self-confidence and intimate
relationship such that they come to sex workers not just for the sex but also for the
talking, conversation, and revealing o f personal secrets.6 0 Finally, while the male
client may enjoy the power in his sexual access to many women, to say that a
prostitute then loses her “uniqueness” or “value of rarity” is again to conflate sex
work as an occupation with the sex worker’s emotional/spiritual/sexual fulfillment in
her own personal relationship(s).
Simmel’s overall argument is premised on the presumption of the prostitute’s
violated body, its being used frequently and replaced easily as commodity and
instrument for men’s sexual domination and fulfillment—its deviation and “fall”
from the time-honored pure maternal body (and its corresponding conscious
subjectivity) valued and respected by men. While Simmel’s gender and class
analysis is less developed than that o f current radical feminists and Marxists, his
premise about the prostitute’s violated body foreshadows the problems revealed in
the writings o f contemporary theorists.
For example, Carole Pateman argues in The Sexual Contract that what’s
wrong with prostitution is that as women’s bodies are put up for sale as commodities
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in the capitalist market, “the law of male sex-right is publicly affirmed, and men gain
public acknowledgement as women’s sexual masters.”6 1 But while Pateman’s
critique of the male sex-right inherent in any sexual contract includes the marriage
contract, as Shannon Bell observes, she nonetheless privileges conjugal
heterosexuality over commercial sexuality by arguing that the male sex-right to the
“sexual use o f his wife’s body is only one possible form [of marriage]. The conjugal
relation is not necessarily one o f domination and subjection, and in this it differs
from prostitution.”6 2 Bell thus asks, “If access to women’s bodies is the defining
feature of male sex right, how is it transformed into something else in marriage? If
contemporary marriage can after all be founded on principles which do not
subordinate women, what is it about prostitution that prevents this from occurring?”
To Bell, what is wrong with prostitution for Pateman is not merely its public
manifestation o f male sex right, but her “visceral disagreement with commercial sex”
that derives from, and in turn reconstructs, the unconscious division of the female
body into the wife (the not-yet violated Madonna) and the prostitute (the fallen
whore). Neither subject “is in control of her body, though one has more potential for
ownership, due to the love, commitment, and mutual responsibility, which Pateman
assumes is inherently present in the marriage contract and absent in the prostitution
contract.”6 3 While Pateman argues that to say that “there is something wrong with
prostitution does not imply any adverse judgement on the women who engage in the
work,”6 4 the very moment Pateman privileges a certain kind o f “un-violated”
maternal body and when sex workers consciously assert their right to use their body
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in a commercial way, Pateman is unable to resolve the paradox except to attribute it
(even if sympathetically) to sex workers’ problematic (if not false) consciousness in
not seeing their body as being dominated and violated.
The same symptom also shows in the work of Catherine MacKinnon and
Andrea Dworkin, if not in a more extreme manner. To MacKinnon, “Women are in
pornography to be violated and taken, men to violate and take them, either on screen
or by camera or pen, on behalf of the viewer.”6 5 She writes,
Each specifically victimized and vulnerable group of women, each tabooed target
group—Black women, Asian women, Latin women, Jewish women, pregnant
women, disabled women, retarded women, poor women, old women, fat women,
women in women’s jobs, prostitutes, little girls—distinguishes pornographic genres
and subthemes, classified according to diverse customers’ favorite degradation.
Women are made into and coupled with anything considered lower than human:
animals, objects, children, and (yes) other women.6 6
Dworkin’s writing is also full o f graphic imagery of the violated bodies of women:
“Prostitution ... is the use o f a woman’s body for sex by a man, he pays money, he
does what he wants.... Prostitution is not an idea. It is the mouth, the vagina, the
rectum, penetrated by a penis, sometimes hands, sometimes objects, by one man and
then another and then another and then another and then another.”6 7 Prostitution is
defined by “what is done to women who are in prostitution.” The client “is everyone
... [who is] on top of a woman with money on the table next to them.”6 8 To
Dworkin, the only cure to this problem is to “taking power away from men.”6 9
Stating that women need to be making their own laws (as she and MacKinnon have
done through their anti-pornography legislation), Dworkin argues that any
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compromise and accommodation with male fantasy and domination is like
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“performing fellatio on the current legal system.”
In her critique of MacKinnon's work (and by extension, that of Dworkin),
Wendy Brown borrows from Jean Baudrillard’s and Hannah Arendt’s dissection of
Marx as presenting a hyperbolic generalization of human history in the mode of
production such that Marx’s writings both mirror and reify capitalist production in
arguing that: similarly for MacKinnon, her “thesis that sexuality is fully constitutive
of gender, and that heterosexuality is gender’s male dominant form, also ‘generalizes
the [pornographic heterosexual sexual] mode of rationality over the entire expanse of
7 1
human history, as the generic mode o f [gender] becoming.’” In other words, by
presenting a hyperbolic (graphic) expression of gender domination, pornography
becomes something “MacKinnon’s theory ‘mirrors’ rather than historically or
analytically decodes.”7 2 In this mirroring of her subject of critique, Brown writes,
MacKinnon’s analysis acquires much of its potency from the cultural resonance it
strikes, the libidinal excitation it incites, the pornographic guilt it taps and reworks—
all under the sign of radical critique ... MacKinnon’s theory of gender transpires
within a pornographic genre, suspending us in a complex pornographic experience
in which MacKinnon is both purveyor and object of desire and her analysis is
proffered as substitute for the sex she abuses us for wanting.7 3
Brown’s critique is both original and incisive, and yet, what is particularly
intriguing here is that, by stipulating that MacKinnon’s work mirrors what she (and
other feminists) hates, i.e., pornography, it also shows where Brown stands with,
rather than apart from, MacKinnon. In other words, while Brown disagrees with
MacKinnon’s universalizing and transhistorical view on gender relations,7 4 by saying
that MacKinnon unwittingly performs and reifies pornographic expression o f gender
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domination, Brown actually shares with MacKinnon’s subject view on the object o f
pornography: that it is just that, a world o f gender domination. In Brown’s own
words, “[MacKinnon’s] social theory of gender mirror[s] rather than deconstructs]
the subjects of heterosexual male pornography—both the male consumer and the
female model— subjects that, we may speculate, function largely (and futilely) to
75
shore up or stabilize a sexual/gender dominance itself...” To put it in another
way, to say that MacKinnon’s theory mirrors pornography, Brown must, at the same
time, accept the reverse premise: that pornography mirrors MacKinnon’s theoretical
world of gender domination (or, in fact, that is exactly what MacKinnon’s theory
seeks to capture). In this sense, despite their differences on the view of gender
relations, both Brown and MacKinnon stand on the same ground on pornography’s
portrayal of gender relations.
Specifically what sorts o f gender relations might this view on pornography
entail? Though hers is not a study on pornography but a study on Hollywood films,
feminist film theorist Laura Mulvey’s analysis might be helpful in this regard.
According to Mulvey, filmic portrayal of erotic desire is a reflection and
recapitulation o f the dominant patriarchal ideology in society. Distinguishing
between the active/male as the subject looker and the passive/female as the object of
look, Mulvey argues that the cinematic gaze at a woman’s body is a way of
satisfying the male viewers’ voyeuristic pleasure and sexual desire: a bunch of
obsessive “Peeping Toms... whose only sexual satisfaction can come from watching,
in an active controlling sense, an objectified other.”7 6 This cinematic gaze
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accentuates male power by reinforcing the unbalanced subject/object positions: “As
the spectator identifies with the main male protagonist, he projects his look on to that
o f his like, his screen surrogate, so that the power of the male protagonist as he
controls events coincides with the active power of the erotic look, both giving a
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satisfying sense of omnipotence.” Given her argument that MacKinnon’s thesis on
gender domination mirrors pornography (and vice versa), one supposes that Brown,
along with MacKinnon, both subscribe to Mulvey’s argument on cinematic portrayal
of erotic pleasure.
But here it also begs the question as to whether pornography really mirrors
MacKinnon’s thesis on gender domination, and conversely, whether MacKinnon’s
theory accurately mirrors pornography. Indeed, if Brown faults MacKinnon for
construing a universalizing and transhistorical gender relation, “as subject and
object, person and thing, dominant and subordinate: or, as ... ‘fucker and fuckee,’”
why is it not just as universalizing and transhistorical to read pornography as such?7 8
If Brown has so forcefully critiqued MacKinnon for de-historicizing gender, in her
words, “by divesting it o f any greater specifiability through class, age, sexuality,
race, or culture; by exhaustively identifying it with respectively dominant and
subordinate social positions, and by making gender fully a function o f such
positions, giving it no plasticity, complex and diverse interiors, variability, or domain
of invention,”7 9 why does it become different when it comes to pornography—and
by extension, sex work? In fact, why is pornography (or sex work) also given “no
plasticity, complex and diverse interiors, variability, or domain o f invention”?
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The problem here is that MacKinnon’s theory, after all, does not exhaustively
mirror pornography (or sex work)— not because her work is not pornographic (as
Brown rightly argues that it is), but because pornography (or sex work) also
manifests something more plastic, complex, diverse and variable other than gender
domination: something else that is not reflected in MacKinnon’s theoretical mirror.
Film theorist Laura Kipnis thus argues in Bound and Gagged that pornography,
despite its certain emptiness and lack of interior,8 0 does the kind of work in
“offending all the bodily and sexual proprieties intrinsic to upholding class
distinctions: good manners, privacy, the absence of vulgarity, the suppression of
bodily instincts into polite behavior.”8 1 Pornography creates an alternative social
space that, “[l]ike your boorish cousin, ... locate[s] each and every one o f society’s
taboos, prohibitions, and proprieties and systematically transgress[es] them, one by
one.”8 2 Further, “It confronts us with bodies that repulse us— like fat [or aging and
sagging] ones—or defies us with genders we find noxious. It induces us to look at
o->
what’s conventionally banished from view.” While not without unacceptable
contents of “violence, misogyny, and racism,” the pornographic genre nonetheless
guards “the freedom to fantasize different futures, and different possibilities for
individual, bodily, and collective fulfillment, [which] is a crucial political space.”8 4
To Kipnis, pornography offers (however limited) a space for alternative counter-
cultural imagining suppressed by official bourgeois culture.
Looking into the real world of sex work, the specific sex acts and contexts of
sex work have in fact provided room for sex workers to negotiate and even subvert
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male domination. Consider, for example, Carol Queen's observation: “many clients
experience the reality o f the masculine role in another way: male sexuality is often
unduly performance oriented, even mechanized. The man often has to make all the
moves. With a whore, he can lie back and receive, ... whether it takes the form o f a
blow job, a greased finger up the ass, or a full-on S/M scene.”8 5 While the client is
given pleasure, the experienced and skilled sex worker is the subject running the sex
acts on top and— within the constraint o f the male-dominated exchange economy—
dictating his orgasm. Laurie Shrage thus writes, while for Dworkin, “women’s
bodies are penetrated, entered, invaded, and colonized by men ... , it is equally
natural to imagine that, in acts o f heterosexual intercourse, men’s bodies are
enveloped, enclosed, swallowed, squeezed, and consumed by women’s bodies.”8 6
The female sexual organ is not a passive hole, Bell argues, as it has a range of
options from “taking the penis or penis object in, expelling it, or prohibiting entry.”8 7
Tawnya Dudash also holds that while nude dancers do not escape the shame
and guilt about one’s “imperfect” body shape, some resist that culture by refusing to
be ashamed o f their nakedness and consider being naked with an “non-ideal” body
shape an empowering (than degrading) experience in flaunting the conventions of
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slim body. Marlene Spanger similarly maintains that selling racial stereotypes of
being “exotic,” “mulatto babe,” or “chocolate brown” can be a useful strategy for an
Afro-Caribbean sex worker to “emphasize her sexuality ... [while] hid[ing] her real
identity behind the stereotype ... [Stereotypes can be used as a kind of strategy in
the way she earns her money ... From that perspective, the women can be seen as
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acting individuals, with agency, and not only as victims of the system.”8 9 This may
in fact be seen as a twisted form of “strategic essentialism” for sex workers to use
racial stereotype as a protective cover of her identity and to accumulate financial
capital as a citizen-worker. One prostitute further writes about her experience of
getting homophobic clients into compromising positions in threesome sessions by
saying, “T want to suck both of your dicks at the same time” (a seeming degradation
from a feminist vantage point), “so that they would bump their dick heads together”
(turning homophobia into homosexual contact).9 0 Finally, as McClintock describes
the commercial S/M where, by staging plays o f the male client in subdued and
humiliated positions (in chains and on his knees) dominated by the female sex
worker who acts as the punisher whipping and tormenting the men, detaches
manhood from mastery, femininity from passivity, and eroticism from the rule of
procreation.9 1 By staging punishment not for the civic prevention of crime but for
erotic pleasure, McClintock argues, S/M mocks and denies the state’s “penal
monopoly and ... exposfes] the right-to-punish not as Reason’s immutable decree,
but as the irregular product of social hierarchy.”9 2
All o f this is not to say that pornography and sex work are free from the
determination of masculine ideology; rather, it simply points to moments, flashes,
and episodes not captured in MacKinnon’s mirror. Pace Brown, MacKinnon’s and
Dworkin’s theory fail to “mirror pornography” in these very moments, flashes, and
episodes that underline spaces where pornography actresses, prostitutes, and other
sex workers consciously gain control o f their laboring bodies— an agency
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vehemently denied by MacKinnon and Dworkin as manifestation o f false
consciousness of the “low” as an undistinguishable mass of violated and degraded
sexual bodies and organs.
While incorporating the theme o f gender domination addressed by Pateman,
MacKinnon and Dworkin, Ryan Bishop and Lillian Robinson’s study on sex tourism
in Thailand further amplifies Simmel’s argument on alienation in prostitution.
Situating sex tourism in the context o f global capitalism, Bishop and Robinson
describe how a Third World country, in an attempt to boost its local economy and
induce the outpouring o f foreign currency, marketizes its female citizens’ racialized
sexuality in appealing to the Western foreign (or farang) male tourists. Informed by
the Marxian theory of alienation, they argue,
The commercial sex encounter that occurs under the purview of international sex
tourism is a completely alienating experience, in both material and psychological
senses of the term. For the sex-worker, the work itself is alienated labour in the
material sense, in that its value is appropriated, and also in the emotional sense, in
that it is separated from and causing separation from authentic feelings, giving rise
to isolation and revulsion.9 3
To Robinson and Bishop, sex tourism bespeaks a hollow human existence, an
“international sexual alienation ... as part of the global system o f exchange,
domination, and exploitation that functions on the economic level.”9 4
Bishop and Robinson are troubled by “the necessity of ‘faking’ or o f making
the representation resemble the ‘real thing’— an experience that places the sex
worker in a position to commodify her own as well as her client’s pleasure as part of
the economics of transaction.”9 5 By constructing a binary between a “fake” (and
thus tainted and alienated) commercial sex and a “real” (true, pure, innocent) loving
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sex, Bishop and Robinson commit to the dichotomy between the fallen body of the
whore and the privileged body of the wife or Madonna. But while Bishop and
Robinson see faking in sex as alienating, some sex workers interpret it differently,
seeing faking as a necessary skill in the trade to get by the customers. As S/M
professional dominant Liz Highleyman points out, “It’s a skill to make a client think
he’s getting what he wants when he’s really n o t.. .”9 6
Like Dworkin and MacKinnon, Bishop and Robinson’s writing is full of
graphic imagery o f the violated and degraded bodies of Thai prostitutes, and thus, in
Brown’s sense, represents a mirror of pornography. In examining sex tourists’
traveling tales and reports from the World Sex Guide on the Internet,9 7 and in
recounting how an American tourist showed them how to “have a good time” in
QO
Bangkok, Bishop and Robinson focus on white males’ Orientalist perceptions of
the racialized sexual others by reproducing, pomographically, detailed accounts o f
what these tourists wrote and thought about the Thai prostitutes in different ways of
sexual objectification and commodification. Such writing technique—the use of
victimized imagery of Third World subjects—has the danger of sliding into what
Arthur Kleinman and Joan Kleinman call the “globalization of suffering,” where
“experience is being used as a commodity, and through this cultural representation of
suffering, experience is being remade, thinned out, and distorted.”9 9 In Kleinman
and Kleinman’s words, “The image of the [victimized] subaltern conjures up an
almost neocolonial ideology o f failure, inadequacy, passivity, fatalism, and
inevitability. Something must be done, and it must be done soon, but from outside
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the local setting. The authorization of action ... begins with an evocation of
indigenous absence, an erasure o f local voices and acts.”1 0 0 Indeed, Bishop and
Robinson’s work manifests almost no agency of the local Thai sex workers, whether
their perceptions of thq farang men, their use of ihe farangs' Orientalist perceptions
o f them in order to advance their own personal economic goals, or their organizing
into Thai sex workers’ rights movement. By focusing one-sidedly on First World
male tourists’ sexual gaze of Thai prostitutes, Bishop and Robinson participate in a
judging gaze o f thee women that, like MacKinnon and Dworkin, turn them into an
undistinguishable mass of “low” bodies and organs, hopelessly apart from the
standard, “high,” (white) maternal body.
From Simmel, Pateman, MacKinnon, Dworkin, to Bishop and Robinson,
each theorist resorts to an implicit framework of “judging prostitution” that involves
a unidirectional positioning o f subject (theorist) -> object (prostitution/pornography).
The subject judges what is wrong with the object, and why as an informed subject
one must oppose it. Their analysis o f male domination and female alienation hides
an internalized discomfort with the degraded and alienated bodies o f sex workers
that signify to them a lack of oppositional agency and political consciousness—
objects who cannot judge for themselves. By focusing exclusively on the way power
oppresses, they “run the risk o f victimizing women by representing them as the
passive objects o f monolithic systems o f oppression.”1 0 1 More important, an un
commodified and un-violated maternal body functions as the implicitly privileged
standard in their judging gaze of the prostitute body.1 0 2 Below, in turning to the
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“low” body in modem civilization— constituted by both the prostitute body and the
sexualized racial body—I further contend that the assumption of the “high” maternal
body and the repelling o f the “low” in these feminist and Marxist writings on
prostitution misses the engagement with what Mikhail Bakhtin calls the “bodily
lower stratum,” a process of degradation of the body but its rebirth.
III. From the “Low” Body to the “Tainted” Body: Prostitute Body,
Racialized Body, and Bakhtin’s Re-imagining of the “Low”
In this section, I hold that we may consider the prostitute body and the
sexualized racial body sharing an affinity in constituting what might be called the
“low” body in modem civilization: a body in excess, polluted, outside the official
discourse and deviating from the bourgeois standard o f cleanliness and moderation.
Rather than judging, repelling, or containing the “low” body, Mikhail Bakhtin has
sought to re-imagine the radical potential of the “low.” As I will argue, however, by
focusing exclusively on an idealistic, collective counter-cultural space o f the
carnival, Bakhtin fails to consider that the “low” body of modernity cannot be
detached as an “outside” from the material economy, escaping its determinations of
power of different sorts (capitalism, masculine ideology, and racialized power
relations). Contra Bakhtin, the rebirth o f the “low” body in modernity does not
operate by standing apart from, or ridding itself of, private and individual
considerations, but instead functions by insinuating itself into the official discourse
to gain the “private” rights o f ordinary citizens that have long been denied to the
lowly subjects. In this way, I maintain that we may understand global sex workers’
body not simply as “low” but also “tainted.”
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Bell in her Reading, Writing, and Rewriting the Prostitute Body examines
how alternative meanings o f the prostitute body—as exhibited in premodem pagan
prostitute philosophers (hetairae) and postmodern (North American) prostitute
performance artists— destabilize and deconstruct the modernist and feminist
construction of the prostitute as an “other.” As Bell points out, while feminist
theorists and philosophers have critically evoked the image o f woman as a maternal
reproductive body in the canon texts of Western philosophy, they “have silenced and
othered another female body written in those texts—the libidinal female body.”1 0 3
Feminist theorists such as Pateman and MacKinnon reconstruct the binary between
the “reproductive” (wives and mothers) and the “sexual and libidinal” (prostitute),
privileging the former as the essential female difference to male hegemony, while
suppressing the latter to the status of the “other” within the category “woman.”
To recover the prostitutes as subjective speakers o f prostitute feminist
discourse, Bell first traces the meanings of the ancient prostitute body as sexual,
sacred, and healing through sophist hetairae, Diotima and Aspasia, who occupy
central roles in informing the texts of Socrates, Plato, and Pericles, destabilizing
Western philosophical foundation from within. She then examines the erotic and
political performance by six North American sex worker artists— Candida Royalle,
Annie Sprinkle, Veronica Vera, Gwendolyn, Janet Feindel, and Scarlot Harlot—to
demonstrate how they use postmodern performance art to challenge the modem and
feminist preconceptions of the prostitute body by both dissolving and unifying the
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dichotomies of “whore and madonna,” “feminist and slut,” “good girl and bad girl,”
“sacred and profane,” and “abuse and empowerment.”
But while Bell innovatively dissolves the dichotomous hierarchy between the
maternal and the libidinal, she has not resolved the internal hierarchy among the
prostitutes. For example, the two ancient Greek sacred prostitute philosophers Bell
examines, Diotima and Aspasia, as hetairae, were high-status prostitutes (courtesan
philosophers), as opposed to “the auletrides (flute players, dancers, and acrobats),
and the [even lower] dicteriades (common prostitutes: brothel inmates and
streetwalkers).”1 0 4 The six postmodern prostitute performance artists she looks at are
middle-class white women operating in the West (U.S. and Canada). In fact, several
of them are well-known, celebrity pom stars in the industry who have accumulated
enough socioeconomic and cultural capital in speaking to a public audience. This is
not to deny the critical and powerful essence in their erotic/political performance; it
is to point out that, however, Bell’s “prostitute” body is not problematized by its own
othering at several critical layers: race (black, Latino, Asian within North America),
class (working-class street prostitutes), and location (less developed countries in the
Third World), where less privileged sex workers may be struggling with a
complexity o f issues more urgent than “postmodern” spirituality and pleasure. It
further begs the question whether the seeking of empowerment through the abused
white prostitute body can be a complete one without engagement with other
prostitute bodies scarred by class and racial markings.
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Bell’s statement that “The contemporary postmodern is a unique historical
moment in which prostitutes ... have assumed their own subject position and begun
to produce their own political identity”1 0 5 in fact neglects that the location of her
“postmodern” is primarily white and North American, and yet she uses it to describe
and prescribe a universal and homogeneous global predicament. Again, this is not to
deny the potential of postmodern critique. Inderpal Grewal and Caren Kaplan argue
that “critiques o f modernity are necessary to feminism in any location,” as engaging
the structure and dynamics of postmodemity is not simply a choice of intellectual
commitment but a necessity precisely because it is affecting all subordinate subjects
around the world, even if with unequal and uneven effects in different circumstances
and locations.1 0 6 Yet, to Grewal and Kaplan, the way postmodern theory has so far
been practiced in the West shows little evidence o f being cross-cultural and
comparative,1 0 7 failing to attend to geographical, cultural, racial and historical
differences. They write,
Is it racism that leaves the issue of race out of most considerations of postmodern
theory? Is it modem colonial discourse or a new neocolonial variant that leaves the
locations of the non-West out of the pages of most Western publications on
“postmodern theory?”.... [Rjecent theorizing on postmodemity and postmodernism
indicate the danger of a supposedly antibourgeois, subversive attack on master
narratives becoming its own unifying discourse, its own master narrative with its
own exclusive, elitist rhetorics ...1 0 8
Taking “postmodern” seriously means moving beyond the centrality of the West as
the determinant o f the postmodern to what Kaplan calls the politics o f multiple
global locations, thus “critiquing the limits of modernity without overvalorizing the
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possibilities o f postmodemity.”1 0 9 There is not one universal postmodern prostitute
body, but historical prostitute bodies in multiple geographic locations.
Kempadoo in her “Introduction” to the collective volume, Global Sex
Workers, thus challenges Western feminists’ writings on prostitution, whether in
Kathleen Barry’s construction o f the ignorant Third World trafficked victims or in
Bell’s postmodern celebration o f the sacred prostitute body.1 1 0 Kempadoo argues,
feminist theory needs “to engage with racialized sexual subjectivities in tandem with
the historical weight o f imperialism, colonialism and racist constructions of power
...”" 1 While Bell traces the historical origin of the (Western, white) prostitute body
to ancient Greece, Kempadoo in her study on Caribbean prostitution traces the
historical political agency o f prostitutes to anti-slavery resistance against European
colonization since the sixteenth century. As Kempadoo points out, sexual alliances
were used by slave women to achieve emancipation and freedom from oppression.
They exploited the colonial masters’ exotic fantasies and sexual demands in
exchange for money “to purchase their own or their children’s freedom, or ... in
exchange for manumission.” Furthermore, some ‘“exchanged sexual favors [with
soldiers] for bullets and gunpowder’ ... [that] were intended to support slave revolts,
to break the crushing bonds o f slavery for both women and men.”1 1 2 In the colonial
context, thus, “Caribbean prostitution [is] not only ... a form o f masculine
oppression and exploitation or ... a survival strategy in time o f economic hardship
but also ... a strategy o f resistance to racialized relations o f power and
1 1 3
dominance.” Bell neglects that the privileged white maternal body (madonna) in
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mainstream feminist theory is not only sustained by its sexual/libidinal opposite
(whore), but also by the sexualized racial body in a global and colonial context.
Prostitution is not simply about postmodern erotic performance; it is historically
intertwined with racial, class, and anti-colonial resistance.
In fact, the heterosexual monogamous white maternal body serves as the
modem normative standard by which its deviations—whether the prostitute body or
the sexualized racial body—become processing of degradations. Sander Gilman
notes the historical affinity between the prostitute body and the sexualized racial
body in constituting signs o f “pathology,” the antithesis of reason, order and control
that embody the civilized modernity. “Pathology,” “sexuality,” and “race” form into
an intricate intertwinement when the anatomy (i.e. shape o f genitalia, skin color,
physiognomy) o f a racial body is presented not simply as “sexually different” but
“pathological”: the racial Other (the Hottentot) is seen as diseased, overly sexual,
and abnormal.11 4 The physiognomy of the prostitute body in the nineteenth century
medical model similarly reveals signs belonging “to the lower end o f the scale of
beauty, the end dominated by the Hottentot.”1 1 5 Both the prostitute body and the
sexualized racial body are thus constructed as primitive, hypersexual, animal-like,
and sources o f pollution.11 6 By the late nineteenth century, the prostitute and the
black have merged into one in common perception: “The primitive is the black, and
the qualities o f blackness, or at least o f the black female, are those of the
1 1 7
prostitute.” The uncleanness and disease form “the final link between ... the black
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1 1 8
and the prostitute.” In this context, “interracial marriages [signifying the “decline
of population”] were seen as exactly parallel to prostitution in their barrenness.”11 9
McClintock similarly observes a simultaneous racialization of the metropolis
and feminization of the colonies by the second half of the nineteenth century. While
in the metropolis, prostitutes were figured as the atavistic and regressive racial
deviants or the “metropolitan analogue o f African promiscuity,”1 2 0 in the colonies,
blacks were figured as gender deviants and hypersexual animals with a “‘feminine’
lack of history, reason and proper domestic arrangements.”1 2 1 The prostitutes and
the blacks occupied the status o f social degenerates, and their bodies signified
contagion that “justified a politics o f exclusion and gave social sanction to the
middle class fixation with boundary sanitation, in particular the sanitation of sexual
boundaries.”1 2 2
If the Western metropolis was kept as harboring a containable (and even
productive) sexuality, Levine argues, “the idea o f the libertine east allowed
prostitution to be defined as regional, with the colonies depicted as a giant
brothel.”1 2 3 As Levine indicates, the colonial administering and management of
local prostitution in the British colonies through policing venereal disease was used
as a “safe” and “necessary” outlet for colonial men in brief sexual encounters with
local women in order to deter “the potential intimacy o f longer-term associations”
that carried the threat o f reproductive racial mixing and disloyalty to the colonial
empire. Moreover, given the prostitute’s “fulfilled ... role as the most degraded of
women, a polluted and despised witch removed from decency,” prostitution in the
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colonies “could also serve to yoke ‘lesser’ populations to ideas of sexual disorder,
offering a veritable commentary on the savagery and barbarism of colonized
peoples.” Prostitution served to justify racial stereotypes. Levine writes, “Sexual
laxity became synonymous with racial primitivism, an archetype of degeneracy
measuring a people’s distance from the civilized world.”1 2 4
While the colonial fascination with the exotic and promiscuous racial body
works hand-in-hand with the booming economy of sex tourism, the simultaneous
association o f the racial body with immoral, monstrous and unclean qualities is
further reflected in the racialized hierarchy within the global sex work industry itself.
Certain types o f prostitute bodies carry a higher privilege than others. Kempadoo
observes, “the brown or black woman is regarded as a desirable, tantalizing, erotic
subject, suitable for temporary or non-marital sexual intercourse—the ideal ‘outside’
woman— and rarefy seen as a candidate for a long-term commitment, an equal
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partner, or as a future mother.” In fact,
White sex workers invariable work in safer, higher paid, and more comfortable
environments; brown women—Mulatas, Asians, Latinas—form a middle class; and
Black women are still conspicuously overrepresented in the poorest and most
dangerous sectors of the trade, particularly street work. Whiteness continues to
represent the hegemonic ideal of physical and sexual attractiveness and desirability,
and white sexual labor is most valued within the global sex industry.1 2 6
Kempadoo asserts, “color and ‘race’ define a woman’s sexual capital.”1 2 7 In the
Western metropolises, native white sex workers are more likely to establish a degree
of “equality” with their clients by filling in the role of “confidential partner with
communication skills,” while foreign, Third World women are primarily defined by
their bodies and erotic services.1 2 8 In the Caribbean, light-skinned mulatto (mixed
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African-European) women are more valued and privileged than women of Afro-
Caribbean descent, leading Kempadoo to call this phenomenon, imitating Fanon,
“Black Bodies, White Faces,” that synthesizes the racialized fantasy o f “the
promiscuous and physically desirable Black female body and ‘delicate’ facial
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features and silky hair of the White Euro-American woman.”
In all, the prostitute body and the sexualized racial body share an affinity in
being erotic and monstrous, desired and repelled. They project a primitive,
pathologized disorder in need of control. The processing of degradation signifies not
just the split between the maternal and the libidinal, but also between the white and
the black/brown/yellow. We may consider the prostitute body and the sexualized
racial body constituting the “low” body in modem civilization: a body in excess,
polluted, outside the official discourse and deviating from the bourgeois standard of
cleanliness and moderation. Rather than judging, repelling, or containing the
degraded body, Russian philosopher Mikhail Bakhtin has sought to re-imagine the
radical potential o f the “low” in his Rabelais and His World.
To Bakhtin, the moment of a body’s degradation is also the moment for its
renewal and rebirth. Here, the body is not o f the biological individual, but of a
cosmic, collective whole that keeps on growing and being renewed. He speaks o f a
“grotesque realism” or “material bodily principle” embodied in the carnivals of the
Middle Ages that counters the official discourse by portraying “images of the human
body with its food, drink, defecation, and sexual life ... in an extremely exaggerated
form.”1 3 0 He argues, “The essential principle o f grotesque realism is degradation, ...
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131
the lowering o f all that is high, spiritual, ideal, abstract.” This unofficial, folksy
and popular realm of grotesque realism, shown through people’s feasting and
laughter, sexual/reproductive process, “the slinging of excrement and drenching in
urine,” and the candid showing of the material bodily lower stratum (the zone o f the
genital organs), articulates an alternative counterculture that means to debase and
degrade the body in anticipation of a utopian renewal: it destroys in order to
regenerate. This is Bakhtin:
Degradation here means coming down to earth, the contact with earth as an element
that swallows up and gives birth at the same time. To degrade is to bury, to sow,
and to kill simultaneously, in order to bring forth something more and better. To
degrade also means to concern oneself with the lower stratum of the body, the life of
the belly and the reproductive organs; it therefore relates to acts of defecation and
copulation, conception, pregnancy, and birth. Degradation digs a bodily grave for a
new birth; it has not only a destructive, negative aspect, but also a regenerating one.
To degrade an object does not imply merely hurling it into the void of nonexistence,
into absolute destruction, but to hurl it down to the reproductive lower stratum, the
zone in which conception and a new birth take place. Grotesque realism knows no
other lower level; it is the fruitful earth and the womb. It is always conceiving.1 3 2
Neither prostitution nor race is a conspicuous subject in Bakhtin’s work, but his re-
imagining o f the “low” is useful for reconsidering the degraded bodies of the
prostitutes and the racialized Third World women as the very site o f a radical
renewal.
To Bakhtin, however, the re-imagining o f the “low” takes on a collective
body, an indivisible whole and a single procreating birth. He laments the gradual
decline of this collective spirit with mixing of the private and the individual in the
Renaissance and then becomes even worse in Romanticism.1 3 3 Arguing that the re-
imagining o f the “low” must be free of private considerations, he considers this
intrusion of bourgeois individual “egotistic lust and possession ... a blunt and
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deathly obstacle to ideal aspirations.”1 3 4 But it is precisely here that I stand apart
from Bakhtin. In fact, not only is it nearly impossible to recreate Rabelais’
camivalesque world of the Middle Ages in the present day, by focusing exclusively
on the unofficial, countercultural space of the carnival, Bakhtin fails to consider that
the “low” body of modernity can never be detached as an “outside” from the material
economy, escaping its determinations of power of different sorts—namely,
capitalism, masculine ideology, and racialized power relations. Contra Bakhtin, I
argue, the rebirth of the “low” body in modernity does not operate by standing apart
from, or ridding itself of, private and individual considerations, but instead functions
by insinuating itself into the official discourse to gain the “private” rights of ordinary
citizens that have long been denied to the lowly subjects.
In this way, sex workers’ body may be conceptualized as not simply “low,”
but also “tainted” with bottom-line motives and monetary considerations. This does
not change the fact that they still operate from the “low” body position. It simply
stipulates that their vantage point would not be Bakhtin’s singular moment of radical
collective rebirth; rather, it is to inscribe their low bodies into the sanitized official
sphere as legible bodies with rights— and with the very right to make money like
everyone else, like all other laboring bodies. The “low” body is thus not merely an
object of gaze and judgment. As global sex workers “taint” their own low bodies,
they also demand the “tainting” o f citizenship.
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IV. Sex Workers’ Rights Discourse and “Tainting” Citizenship
Sex workers do not sell their bodies—they still have them when the
commercial transaction is over. Rather, they sell their time and skills, and
perhaps rent the temporary use of parts o f their bodies, as do most other
workers.
Liz Highleyman, aka Mistress Veronica Frost, S/M professional
dominant1 3 5
How is [having the pussy get me things] different from my brain getting me
things? And how different is that from, you know, I’ve got a headache from
studying so hard but I get my As or whatever. How is it different?
Blake Aarens, Afro-Caribbean-American sex worker, formerly a
street sex worker and currently a pomographer1 3 6
Not me, darling, it is the man that is the sex slave ... after all I am the one
who gets the money.
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Anonymous migrant sex worker in Queensland, Australia
I’ve experienced many clients as much more pleasant and respectful than a
lot o f people in my past who wanted to have sex for free. Portraying all johns
as abusive is like overlooking the difference between a bank customer and a
bank robber because both stand at the same teller’s window and make a
withdrawal.
Carol Queen, sex worker and educator with a doctorate in
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sexology
When sex workers are characterized as immoral persons engaged in illegal
and unacceptable behavior or as victims acting against their will and
controlled by others, they become invisible as workers to which rights apply.
Where prostitution is illegal, it goes underground, causing those working in
the sector to become vulnerable to abuse for which they cannot seek
protection from the police or other representatives of the state. Even where
sex work is not technically illegal, the social stigma frequently placed on sex
workers tends to have a similar invisibilizing effect.
Cynthia Mellon, “A Human Rights Perspective on the Sex Trade
in the Caribbean and Beyond”1 3 9
When prostitutes unite, powerful men tremble.
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Quoted in Nina Hartley, “Bodhisattvas Among Us:
Compassionate Sex Workers”1 4 0
Recalling that the economic dimension o f the dwelling trajectory of
citizenship configures citizens as honest and law-abiding workers. As Levine points
out, the prostitute has always been defined as work’s opposite: a vagrant, a
nonworker. The “traveling” involved in prostitution is associated with vagrancy and
crimes, and prostitution is seen “as an alternative to ‘honest’ work for the loose and
lazy woman.” By breaking “completely the link between profit and social
approbation, ... [wjomen ‘became the site in which questions o f economics
intersected with questions of morality.” Levine writes, “Greed, not honesty, was the
motive, negating women’s palpable exertions, putting them outside the hallowed
work ethic.”1 4 1 Prostitution represents the quintessential “profit without honor.”
Levine notes, however, the fixity o f defining prostitution “as that which was not
work, as that pursued by the lazy, the greedy, the intemperate, the loafer,” is also a
sign o f classifying prostitution “as equivalent to, ... [though] always less than,
work.” As subjects who have always been defined as the opposite of, or that which
is less than, workers, global sex workers’ central demand of the legitimation o f their
work as work thus transgresses the dwelling trajectory o f citizen-workers.1 4 2
Particularly, I argue that, by inscribing their “dishonored,” tainted bodies into
the public sphere o f work as legible bodies with rights, global sex workers’ rights
discourse taints citizenship from the bodily lower stratum. This transgressive
citizenship imaginary, tainting citizenship, mimics liberal citizenship in its reducing
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citizenship to the bottom line or moneymaking activity, but through the illicit use of
their erotic body parts and sexual bodily organs in the public sphere o f work. In
defying “western sensibilities of private and public by mixing business with
pleasure,”1 4 3 global sex workers help us reformulate citizenship by expanding the
room for different kinds of citizen-workers in democracy beyond the dwelling
trajectory. Below, I compare and examine sex workers’ rights discourse in both the
First and Third World as discrepant transnational articulations o f sex worker ethics
and rights claims. The process of turning from bodily degradation to rights-claiming
activities signals a process o f re-conceiving and rebirth. Pace Bakhtin, global sex
workers’ tainting citizenship, the demand o f the bourgeois right to work like all other
laboring bodies, symbolizes “the grave and the generating womb, the receding past
and the advancing future, the becoming.”1 4 4
Since global sex workers speak from very different locations, it is critical to
avoid homogenizing their discrepant voices and demands. Wendy Chapkis points
out that different social locations of sex workers affect their varying degrees of
autonomy, control of their work, negotiating room with management and clients, and
their overall experiences and views on sex work. For example, control by third-party
(brothel owner, escort agency manager, pimp) limits a sex worker’s ability to select
clients and forms o f services.1 4 5 Class position also dictates the range of choice for
sex workers: migrant prostitutes are the most vulnerable to clients’ demands for
dangerous services (e.g. sex without condoms) because of their need of daily
survival and the pressure to send money home; on the other hand, young, single,
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educated and white call girls can carefully screen clients, have more leeway in
negotiating the types o f services performed, and possessing a certain degree of
respect.1 4 6 Prostitution forms an internal hierarchy: street work at the bottom, then
window prostitution, then clubs/brothels, and at the top o f the pyramid, escorts/call
girls.1 4 7 Race, age, and physical appearance all factor into this internal hierarchy.1 4 8
As Chapkis argues, while the objective of most sex workers is “You get in, make the
money, and get out,” such goal is not easily realizable for sex workers in marginal
socioeconomic positions.1 4 9 The most outspoken voices in sex workers’ rights
movements also often belong to the most economically and politically secure:
documented, legal, working indoors.1 5 0
With these social differences in mind, in the following I will compare and
contrast the rights claims between First World native sex workers on the one hand,
and Third World sex workers and migrant sex workers on the other. My aim is to
highlight both of their similarities and differences in order to approximate (however
imperfect it is) an intimation o f global sex workers’ subaltern ethics and rights
discourse. As it will become clear, despite their different social locations, sex
workers throughout the globe do share similar considerations, and in their different
ways, articulate similar rights claims. For First World sex workers, while economic
gains remain the priority, many of them also go to great lengths in emphasizing
sexual freedom and liberation, and draw analogy o f their marginal status to sexual
minorities such as gays and lesbians. This narrative, however, is destabilized within
by sex workers o f color in the First World. Speaking from less privileged locations,
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Third World sex workers tend to focus on economic primacy and the need to make
do in the global economy rather than on sexual liberation, and consider their
marginal status part of a continental predicament. What unites these seemingly
discrepant perspectives, in my view, is the common desire to break out o f what
Pheterson calls the “whore stigma” and its related state policies, leading towards
Doezema’s conception of a woman’s right to have sex (as an occupation) outside
marriage, love, and even desire.
Many First World white sex workers argue that part o f their reason entering
the industry is for sexual exploration. For example, Nina Hartley lists the positives
of her entering pornography as “enhanced self-image, sexual variety, exhibitionism,
fantasy fulfillment, and economic gain.”1 5 1 Sex-worker-tumed-academic Eva
Pendleton echoes: “I entered the sex industry for many reasons, not the least of
which was sexual self-exploration.”1 5 2 The sense of sexual transgression propels
theorists like Gayle Rubin to draw the analogy of the status of prostitutes to other
sexual minorities such as gays and lesbians, arguing that while sex work is an
occupation and homosexuality is an erotic preference, both are “criminal sexual
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population stigmatized on the basis of sexual activity.” Rubin identifies sex work
and homosexuality as the “outer limits” (bad, abnormal, unnatural, damned
sexuality: homosexual, unmarried, promiscuous, non-procreative, commercial, alone
or in groups, casual etc.) of the “charmed circle” (good, normal, natural, blessed
sexuality: heterosexual, married, monogamous, procreative, non-commercial, in
pairs, in a relationship etc.).1 5 4
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In fact, First World white sex workers tend to emphasize that sex work
should be something one likes to do in addition to meet the bottom line. Gay sex
worker Scott O’Hara writes, “If you’re doing it just for the money, you’re in the
wrong field. In my ideal world, ... sex work as a full-time profession would not be
an option for most people, simply because there would be so many part-timers doing
‘freelance.’”1 5 5 Carol Queen adds that for a sex worker to experience her profession
in a positive way, she needs special qualifications in addition to “wanting to make a
lot o f money.”1 5 6 Laurie Shrage thus proposes requiring prostitutes to be “licensed”
as a kind of erotic artist or sex therapist for which prostitutes would need to complete
courses required for sex work.1 5 7 This, to Shrage, upgrades and professionalizes
prostitution while strengthening prostitute’s autonomy, independence, and
humanity.1 5 8 Hence, “By taking prostitution off the streets and out of the hands of
‘unskilled labor,’ it presumably could be repositioned as a middle-class, professional
activity, and thereby achieve social respectability.”1 5 9 While such proposition may
be ideal, several questions deserve considering: 1) what about poor women o f color,
street workers, or Third World women who may not be able to afford this
professional training? 2) it is likely to divide sex work into a dichotomy of the
licensed elite professionals vs. the un-licensed, “illegal” street women who work in
underground;1 6 0 3) some women approach sex work not as a permanent profession,
but a temporary means to an end, such as using it to pay for tuition. The required
licensing process adds unnecessary obstacles for prospective sex workers.
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Other “sacred prostitutes” further proffer sex work as a spiritual therapy for
lost men seeking understanding and acceptance.1 6 1 While this is a creative
interpretation of sex work, such commanding power by elite, educated, middle-class,
and even celebrity sex workers over clients is, again, not something accessible by
many other sex workers who go into prostitution for “non-spiritual” reasons. When
sex becomes sacred and spiritual, it becomes detached from the toiling o f labor.
Spiritual salvation becomes imaginable without having to deal with the political
economy of work. Moreover, as Chapkis argues, “just as the ‘sex therapy’ model
requires that commercial sex be ‘medicalized’ in order to be destigmatized, ‘sacred
prostitution’ requires that it be ‘sanctified’ to be found acceptable.”1 6 2 Both
licensing and sacred prostitution justify deviance only by upgrading, cleaning,
normalizing, and sanctifying the “low” body into middle-class respectability.
In fact, like Bell’s conception of the prostitute body that is un-problematized
by racial and class markings, similar problems emerge within this “libidinal”
narrative. Sex workers of color in the First World, whose voices remain marginal in
the predominant North American sex work literature, destabilize this narrative. Sex
workers of color need to deal with trying to fit into an industry dominated by the
idolized imagery of “blonde with big boobs,” racist attitudes from customers and
management, white customers who have sex with them but would not interact with
them as peers, their higher likelihood in being arrested and jailed, and their lower
wage compared to their white counterparts.1 6 3 Neither do they misplace the primacy
of economics, as former street prostitute and current co-director o f COYOTE Gloria
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Lockett argues, “I don’t know any Black women that say, ‘I’m doing this because o f
the power and energy and I’m doing this because I like to have sex with all these
people.’ Where I know lots of white women have said ... , ‘I’m in it for the sex. I’m
in it for the power.’”1 6 4 It is critical to note that even this— doing sex work to meet
the bottom line more so than for sexual liberation—has not made Lockett feel
degraded, as she agrees with her white counterparts, “all of it wasn’t down ... ,
[s]ome of it was lots of fun.”1 6 5 It does raise questions, however, on whether
licensing and sacred prostitution constitute viable options for non-white prostitutes
whose bodies carry economic weight and racial markings that may not easily
“normalize” and “sanctify.”
This predicament of non-white sex workers in the First World is shared by
Third World and migrant sex workers. To be sure, like their white and non-white
counterparts in the First World, migrant sex workers do derive a sense o f sexual
empowerment from sex work. In Meaker’s words, “The expression o f sexuality can
be empowering for women from cultures where sexual expression is often
suppressed. Some women have described the process o f becoming a sex-worker as
liberating, explaining that it provides them with power, independence and self-
confidence.”1 6 6 While some view sex work as immoral but engage in it as the only
way to earn a large sum of money, others consider sex work giving them the
“freedom from marriage and men.”1 6 7 This sense o f sexual freedom is vividly
illustrated in cases where female migrant sex workers, like their First World
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counterparts, become “tricks” themselves by purchasing sex from male sex workers
for their own erotic pleasure.1 6 8
However, the primacy of economics is so central to Third World sex workers
that it is not possible to enter the trade simply for reasons of sexual exploration or
perceiving their body as sacred or therapeutic. In the Third World context,
Kempadoo argues, “Migration to a wealthier part of the world in order to generate
income for the family’s survival takes on greater significance in the overall picture of
declining income-generating opportunities for women at home.”1 6 9 As the
traditionally breadwinners of the household, Third World working-class migrant sex
workers continue their ties with the family back home while working abroad, and
periodically sending back remittances. Rearing children and sustaining a flow of
household income play a large role in migrant prostitution.1 7 0 Bishop and Robinson
are thus right to argue that, unlike the North American sex goddesses, “the Thai
prostitute [symptomatic of many other Third World and migrant sex workers] ... can
never speak about her life without placing its economic reality at the center.”1 7 1
What unites these discrepant perspectives, however, is the global sex
workers’ rights discourse that challenges the universal “whore stigma.” As
Pheterson argues, such stigma is not exclusively associated with prostitution.1 7 2 But
prostitutes represent the epitome o f the whore stigma in the ultimate “degradation”
of their bodies. State policies, whether of prohibition, abolition, regulation or
toleration,1 7 3 all reflect faith in whore dishonor by silencing sex workers’ voices on
prostitution, aiming to either extinguish their presence altogether or contain their
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movement under the state’s watchful eye, whether through state licensing,
compulsory registration, police regulation, mandatory AIDS/STD testing, or zoning
ordinances. Prohibitions and regulations deny sex workers the right to safe working
environment and push them into a criminal underground. Sex workers are unable to
report client, management, and police abuse without jeopardizing their own income,
safety and freedom. In a prohibitionist system where a sex worker’s earnings are
illegal, any recipient o f those earnings, including the worker’s children, lover, or
family relatives, is defined as pimp. Compulsory STD/AIDS testing stigmatizes
prostitutes as “disease spreaders” without considering that male clients who refuse to
use condoms (and who are not required to do the testing) may be the actual culprits
in hurting the health of sex workers. Even in places like the Netherlands or Las
Vegas that legalize or tolerate prostitution, zoning policies protect the interests of the
residents/tourists more so than sex workers, while allowing the state, county
government, and brothel management to rip profits from prostitutes’ erotic labor. As
sex workers are categorized as “independent contractors,” they do not possess the
right to “unemployment insurance, sick leave, retirement benefits, vacation pay, and
collective contract negotiations” like other workers.1 7 4 In this way, as Levine
indicates earlier, sex work is seen as equivalent to, but also less than, “real” work.
Regardless o f the global location where a sex worker works and lives, and
despite the power differentials among sex workers in different social locations, there
is a common imperative to break out of the universal whore stigma and reform its
related state policies that persecute, monitor, regulate, and exploit sex workers’
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“low” bodies without recognizing them as legitimate workers. The whore stigma
runs so deep that Samantha, co-director o f COYOTE, points out that rather than
focusing on building a political movement, the organization has been shifting the
objective to the fundamental by gathering group of prostitutes each month talking to
each other, just so that they can finally assert that, “I’m a sex worker.”1 7 5 As
Doezema argues,
I think it’s ridiculous that people think if you have sex for any reason other than to
satisfy your own desire you will be destroyed. Didn’t it used to be that sex without
“love” would deeply damage a woman? And before love, it was ... sex outside of
marriage ... And now it’s sex outside of desire that’ll destroy us. Look, we’ve
already survived sex outside of marriage and sex without love so it’s likely we can
survive sex outside of desire, too.1 7 6
Doezema’s conception of a woman’s right to have sex outside marriage, love, and
desire—and to sell it—underlies global sex workers’ common demands for the
legitimation o f their work and the recognition of them as rightful citizen-workers.
Against the state policies o f prohibition, abolition, regulation, and toleration,
the sex workers’ rights movement is calling for decriminalization without
legalization.1 7 7 Many sex workers argue that decriminalization, by removing the
criminal penalties for sex trade, is sufficient in protecting them as workers.
Legalization often results in disciplinary state regulation that advances the interests
of state, clients, residents, and brothel management while surveying, containing, and
domesticating the deviant bodies o f the prostitutes through licensing, registration,
compulsory medical screening, and zoning policies.1 7 8 In short, legalization has not
translated into full legitimation of “sex work;” rather, it merely tolerates the abject
presence of prostitutes by regulating and exploiting, without de-stigmatizing,
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prostitutes’ bodies. “Pseudo-criminalization” laws that aim to help prostitutes out of
“the life” by punishing pimping, procuring, and punters but not the prostitutes are
also unhelpful as they drive sex workers out of brothels and onto the streets, forcing
them to work individually than collectively, exposing them to violence, perverse
acts, customers who refuse to use condoms, and having them work for less money.1 7 9
Decriminalization does not mean that no state regulation is needed at all to combat
trafficking, slave-like working conditions or violent customers. As Jo Bindman
points out, “existing human rights and slavery conventions are ... sufficient to take
the slavery out of the sex industry.” She argues, the most urgent task is to first
“identify prostitution as work, as an occupation susceptible like the others to
exploitative practices. Then sex workers can be included and protected under the
existing instruments which aim to protect all workers from exploitation, and women
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from discrimination.”
While none o f the existing international human rights documents explicitly
j o 1
legitimizes prostitution as work, sex workers’ rights advocates have pointed to the
possibility in certain documents that may be interpreted as recognizing sex workers’
rights as human rights. For example, the International Covenant on Civil and
Political Rights (ICCPR) protects all people against discrimination as well as the
right to life, liberty and personal security, which is surely relevant to sex workers
who suffer from societal whore stigma in general and sexual violence and police
abuse in particular.1 8 2 The International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural
Rights (ICESCR) attends to development issues in the Third World, requiring states
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to provide free and mandatory education at the primary level, thus lessening the
burden on migrant women who enter sex work to cover children’s education costs.1 8 3
Where prostitution is legitimized as work, the minimum labor standards covered in
the International Labor Organization (ILO) apply: “freedom of association, the right
to organize, abolition of forced labor, equality of opportunity and treatment, and
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other standards regulating work conditions” such as social insurance, sick leave,
retirement benefits, vacation pay, and workplace safety and hygiene. While the main
thrust of the Convention on the Elimination of All Forms o f Discrimination Against
Women (CEDAW) aims to suppress trafficking, it, along with the Universal
Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR), “contain articles on the inalienable right of
all human beings to work and to freely choose their job or profession.
Discrimination against sex workers is clearly in violation o f this right.”1 8 5
In addition to relying on existing international law documents, sex workers
themselves have also convened two World Whores’ Congresses to specifically draft
their own international documents of sex workers’ rights. The “World Charter for
Prostitute Rights” adopted by the First World Whores’ Congress in Amsterdam in
1985 and the “Statement on Prostitution and Human Rights” adopted by the Second
World Whores’ Congress in Brussels in 1986 call for the fundamental civil liberties
and labor rights— the right against violence, rape and racism; the freedom to travel,
immigration and marriage; the right to pay taxes and receive unemployment/health
insurance and housing benefits; the right to life, liberty, and security of persons; the
freedom of peaceful assembly and associations; the freedom to choose place of work
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and residence against systematic zoning o f prostitution; the prohibition o f torture and
inhuman or degrading treatment and punishment; and the right to education and job
training programs for those wishing to leave the industry.1 8 6
The “Statement on Prostitution and Health” adopted at the Second World
Whores’ Congress further opposes compulsory AIDS/STD testing of prostitutes
while advocating free, anonymous and voluntary testing for all people, not just
prostitutes.1 8 7 Chapkis argues, “current responses to the AIDS epidemic have
focused on the presumed role of the prostitute as infectious agent ... (like
homosexuals) [who] are always already ‘sick.’” In the social imagining, “disease
and death are the natural, the expected, and the sanctioned punishment” for those
1 8 8
who deviate from proper womanhood (whores) and manhood (homosexuals). As
Pricilla Alexander reports, however, there is no inherent connection between AIDS
and prostitution: the small minority o f prostitutes who carry AIDS antibodies are IV-
1 O Q
users or in regular sexual relationships with IV-users or bisexual men. Sex worker
Jasmin argues, “Health checks are good, but testing does not stop AIDS, only safe-
sex stops AIDS.”1 9 0 It is not controlling the number o f sexual partners but the use o f
condoms that remains the most effective (even if imperfect) means in preventing
AIDS and other venereal diseases. As workers who rely on their bodies to make a
living, prostitutes generally know how to take care of their health by requiring clients
to use condoms. It is male clients who often act irresponsibly, and undocumented
migrant workers, drug prostitutes, and older women are in vulnerable positions to
comply with their demand for unsafe sex.1 9 1 This fact, however, only intensifies the
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need for more funding of peer education and outreach programs on practicing safe
sex.
As many Third World sex workers contest, however, their perspectives and
voices have not been adequately reflected and represented in these “international”
whores’ rights instruments. Kempadoo critically notes that, “the international
character o f the movement has been more wishful thinking than political reality.”1 9 2
Pheterson in A Vindication o f the Rights o f Whores, the main document recording the
development and proceedings o f the two World Whores’ Congresses, concedes that
“[o]nly a few Asian countries were represented, and then not by prostitutes
themselves; Africa and South America were as yet totally unrepresented ...”1 9 3 As
is, the voices in the prostitutes’ rights movement have been dominated by those
working in the West. Kempadoo writes,
[M]uch of what was laid out in the Charter and discussed at the congresses was
defined by (white) western sex workers and advocates.... And despite Pheterson’s
awareness of the problem and her insistence that the movement needed to truly
‘internationalize,’ many writings in the 1990s have continued to reproduce a skewed
representation of the prostitutes rights movement and to ignore sex workers’ rights
groups in developing countries.1 9 4
Though off the chart o f the West-centered international prostitutes’ rights movement,
many sex workers’ rights groups have in fact been formed in regions such as South
and Central America, Asia, and South Africa. Some o f these resistance movements
claim historical heritage of sex workers’ resistance in their homelands that predate
the beginning o f the Western sex workers’ rights movement with the founding o f
COYOTE in 1973 (and the two subsequent Whores Congresses in the mid-1980s).1 9 5
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Local grassroots sex workers' rights organizations in the Third World
articulate similar desire for decriminalization and the need o f rights as legitimate
citizen-workers in ways that correspond to their particular cultural contexts and
social locations. For example, the Association of Autonomous Women Workers in
Ecuador employs strikes and lockdowns in order to press on issues of police abuse,
exploitation by brothel and club management, and their health and working
conditions. The group draws political inspiration from “the Latin spirit o f dance and
music as well as ... the spirit of the women and ... their particular life histories and
... struggles.”1 9 6 The Japanese organization SWEETLY (Sex Workers! Encourage,
Empower, Trust and Love Yourselves!), with a diverse membership from sex
workers, dancers, nude models, lesbian counselor, acupuncturist, lesbian activists
and AIDS activists, works on issues ranging from HIV/AIDS de-stigmatization,
sexual harassment/exploitation/slavery, sexual rights, to exploring and recognizing
social differences between workers in sex industries in Japan, other Asian countries
and Western countries.1 9 7 South Africa’s SWEAT (The Sex Worker Education and
Advocacy Taskforce) focuses on legal and civil discrimination against sex workers
and advocates democracy for sex work through legal reforms in accordance with the
World Charter for Prostitutes Rights.1 9 8 It publishes a monthly newsletter that
facilitates communication among sex workers, including an “Ugly Mugs” list that
blacklists dangerous and violent clients. It further provides “[t]raining of
mainstream medical healthcare workers, police, legal professionals and medical
healthcare personnel” on awareness of the needs of sex workers from a sex workers’
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rights perspective.1 9 9 Combating both the whore stigma and economic deprivation,
La Union Unica o f Mexico presses the need of labor laws that would provide sex
workers with “social security, low-income housing, medical assistance, and tax
rights like other workers” in addition to health projects.2 0 0 In their own ways, Third
World sex workers thus articulate a citizen’s right to initiate, use and sell sex outside
of marriage, love, and desire, just like their Western counterparts.
By inserting their tainted bodies into the official sphere o f work and in
demanding rights that would protect them as legitimate citizen-workers like all other
laboring bodies, global sex workers can be seen as tainting citizenship from the
bodily lower stratum, expanding the space for different kinds of citizen-workers on a
global scale. If neo-liberalism heightens the intensity o f configuring every citizen as
laboring and moneymaking subject, it is now haunted by the prospect of the tainted
bodies re-scripting the docile trajectory o f citizen-workers. Global sex workers form
part o f the populations that McClintock calls “abject peoples”—the marginal
underclass elements whom modem society simultaneously exploits and seeks to
expunge. McClintock notes, however, these expelled subjects can never be fully
obliterated, as “the abject returns to haunt modernity as its constitutive, inner
repudiation: the rejected from which one does not part.”2 0 1 Through their rights
discourse, global sex workers claim the right to stay on with the masculine and
imperial order from the abject edges of modernity. Rather than claiming their own
separate, countercultural space detached from the bourgeois sphere, they force the
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civilized and sanitized citizenship system to officially recognize and organically
include their tainted bodies with legible citizenship rights.
V. Of Tainted Bodies and Cosmopolitanism
I started talking to them about how I was having political discomfort about
this [getting profits for writing pom]. And one of the woman ... turned to me
and said, “You know something, Blake? The only thing wrong with tainted
money is ’ tain’ t enough o f it.”
Blake Aarens, Afro-Caribbean-American sex worker, formerly a
street sex worker and currently a pomographer2 0 2
In political theory, the conception of the public sphere is often articulated
through the Habermasian strand of public deliberation that constructs the coming-
together o f the people as a bourgeois forum o f “rational” deliberation and “political”
participation.2 0 3 Theorists such as Iris Young and Nancy Fraser have sought to
reform this implicitly middle-class, white, masculine and consensus-oriented model
of public sphere by mounting cultural pluralism and subaltern differences into the
paradigm.2 0 4 While siding with Young and Fraser, however, I remain in doubt that
the abject populations such as global sex workers living on society’s marginal edges
and in a largely criminalized and stigmatized atmosphere can be fairly included as
cosmopolitan interlocutors in a deliberative bullring. In fact, the Habermasian public
sphere, with its emphasis on the “mind,” “civility,” and “rationality” (not directly
challenged by Young and Fraser), reflects a bourgeois timidity in actively engaging
with and taking in the grotesque, low, and tainted bodies— a sanitary official
sensibility that dictates the terms o f its political participation. There is “political
participation,” but no destabilizing cultural politics that offends and transcends.
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While deliberative theorists speak o f “public transparency” in idolized language, in
large measure it remains a public theater of fa9ade, a space where the participants
hide their “animality,” suppress their “abnormal” urges, thoughts, and excesses, and
try to act as a “normal,” healthy, and functional person during the moment o f public
visibility. It aims towards truth and justice and inclusion, but it ends up with a truth
and justice and inclusion of the normality. It aims towards transparency and
publicity, but it ends up with a massive suppression o f deviant desires and urges.
Deliberation no doubt has its necessary functions in democracy, but the kind of
cosmopolitan “coming together” operates on a bounded territory.
In contrast, in the seemingly degraded sex work industry, global sex workers
often confront the most secretive, intimate, and unspoken parts o f the public
deliberators as naked clients. Whether in brothels, hotels, clubs, clients’ houses,
public restrooms, or cars on street comers and in the alleys, sex work elicits and
exposes what is unsaid and undone in the public. The hidden exploitation of
women’s sexualized and racialized bodies in the day-to-day bourgeois society are
revealed openly in the underground world o f sex work. Yet, it is also in this
misogynous, racialized, and exploited “public” sphere where the fa9ade o f daily
bourgeois lives is momentarily penetrated and where engagement with the “low,” or
contact with the “tainted” is temporarily generated.
This is not to say that we allow all the misogyny and exploitation to go on for
the sake o f generating contact with these supposedly low or tainted subjects. To the
contrary, here I am venturing: what if the best way to combat gender domination,
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sexual exploitation, colonial imagery of racialized women, and global inequality that
affects women’s living options in different geographic locations is not to suppress
these problems through anti-trafficking laws, anti-pornography ordinances, or anti
prostitution legislations— all of which only drive the issues underground rather than
actually eliminating them—but to legitimize sex work, empower sex workers as
rightful citizen-workers, and allow them, in their own ways, to bring these problems
from the underground into the open? What if the very first step to engage and tackle
these problems is precisely not to deny sex workers agency, repel their “low” bodies,
but to make a democratic effort to welcome and incorporate their “taintedness” into
our body politic so to allow us to think about citizenship in more inclusive ways, and
to expand our cosmopolitan horizons in associating with different kinds of laboring
bodies, different kinds of citizen-workers? Again, returning to Bakhtin, in order to
bring about an alternative and something new, we need to first destroy in order to
recreate.
Samuel Delany in his Time Square Red, Time Square Blue speaks of the
democratic potential of generating “contact” with the abject bodies living on the
edges of urban city. Writing about the cosmopolitan space in the gay and straight
pom theaters in the Time Square neighborhood o f New York City that allow open
masturbation and oral sex in the audience, Delany points out that what unfold in the
pom houses are not only mutual consensual sex and occasional hustling, but also
conversations that last hours, “especially with men less well-off, the out-of-work, or
7 0 S
the homeless with nowhere else to go.” Delany observes,
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The population was incredibly heterogeneous—white, black, Hispanic, Asian,
Indian, Native American, and a variety of Pacific Islanders. In the Forty-second
Street area’s sex theaters specifically, ... I’ve met playwrights, carpenters, opera
singers, telephone repair men, stockbrokers, guys on welfare, guys with trust funds,
guys on crutches, on walkers, in wheelchairs, teachers, warehouse workers, male
nurses, fancy chefs, guys who worked at Dunkin Donuts, guys who gave out flyers
on street comers, guys who drove garbage trucks, and guys who washed windows on
the Empire State Building. As a gentile, I note that this is the only place in a
lifetime’s New York residency I’ve had any extended conversation with some of the
city’s Hasidim.2 0 6
Yet, a renovation project conceived in the late sixties, reinforced by the AIDS
epidemic and the moralist revival for family values in the eighties, led to a gradual
but fierce demolition of these gay sexual outlets, along with other adult stores and
small shops in the Time Square neighborhood, replaced with construction of
towering corporate office buildings.
Distinguishing between “contact” and “networking,” Delany argues that
while both are necessary ingredients in urban relationships, a healthy, diverse and
erotic culture of a democratic metropolis needs be sustained by promoting daily
interclass contact and intermingling in a public space. While contact is interclass,
welcomes and engages difference, and involves people from different communities,
networking is intraclass, orienting towards professionalized, indoor, and competitive
relationships. Contact is centrifugal, crossing sanitary boundaries; networking is
207
centripetal, fearing contagious and diluting differences. Contact occurs on “the
looser streets of the neighborhood;” networking happens within the institutionalized
space of “hotel or conference center spaces.”2 0 8 To Delany, gay pom theaters allow
for a space o f contact and interclass communication, but New York City’s
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redevelopment project erodes that space by orienting citizenly relations towards the
standard norm of bourgeois networking.
Contact, in Delany’s conception, makes our relationships with one another in
the city richer, more fulfilling, and through layers of subtle understanding, makes the
denizens less susceptible to the hate politics of waving the moral banner o f “family
values” in cleansing and driving out the abject elements that deviate from and
threaten the beneficiary o f the white, middle-class, heterosexual family arrangement.
Building a bridge to Bakhtin, if networking repels and contains the “low” body,
contact embraces and welcomes it as part of our daily surroundings. Contact brings
the once degraded bodies into the living mode of the body collective, breaking down
racial, class, gender, and sexual boundaries so that an alternative cosmopolitan
sphere may come into being. In Delany's words, a healthy democratic metropolis
requires that “we speak to strangers, live next to them, and learn how to relate to
them on many levels, including the sexual.”2 0 9
Delany’s thesis usefully points to a different way o f imagining social
relations and generating understandings among strangers apart from the Habermasian
deliberative public sphere. Like Bakhtin, for Delany it is not the civil body politic
but the crass intermingling o f (and with) the wretched and degraded bodies that spark
a “free and familiar contact... [across] the barriers o f caste, property, profession,
and age.”2 1 0 But here the same problem that we found in Bakhtin also applies to
Delany. As I have pointed out, Bakhtin’s notion that the carnival must be universal
and collective without intrusion o f private interests and individualist considerations
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exudes an idealistic detachedness (an “outside”) from monetary exchange and the
effects of material economy. While Delany does not go to that extreme, much o f the
gay sex going on under the tavern of the gay movie house that frames his analysis
does not—as most segments of female global sex work do— involve gross power
inequity. As Delany himself describes it, it is sex with mutual desire, and largely
21 1
free of monetary exchange. In this way, like Bakhtin, Delany’s imagining of the
democratic potential of erotic cosmopolitanism is made easier through a certain
degree of detachment from the effects of material economy.
Yet, despite noting the limitations such “contact” may bring us, 1 nonetheless
agree with Delany’s underlining point that we need more, not less, of these abject
spaces. We need to legitimize, not criminalize, these alternative spaces o f citizenly
association and understanding across racial, gender, sexual, class, and professional
boundaries. Without over-generalizing his argument, the kind of layered
understanding through interracial/intersexual/interclass contact described by Delany
indeed exists in some segments of sex work in certain locations. Tawnya Dudash,
for example, provides a profile of fifteen nude peepshow dancers at the Lusty Lady
theater in San Francisco:
Their ages ranged from nineteen to thirty-one, with an average age of twenty-three.
Ten self-identified as white, Caucasian, or European-American; two as Black or
African-American; one as Latina; one as half Black and half White; and one as
Black-Arab and Irish Catholic. Concerning sexual orientation, three women self
identified as heterosexual; five as “primarily” or “mostly” heterosexual; four as
bisexual; two as “bi/queer”; and one woman as exclusively homosexual. These
women had grown up in all regions of the United States, and most had come to
California within the past several years. Four women described their socioeconomic
backgrounds as upper-middle class, six as middle class, three as lower-middle class,
one as working poor, and one as poor. All fifteen women had completed high
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school, seven either had some college education or were currently in college, one
was attending a trade school, and six had undergraduate degrees.2 1 2
While this makeup o f erotic dancers has a relatively high socioeconomic and
educational standing compared to street or migrant prostitutes, it nonetheless reflects
a microcosm of the diverse range of global sex workers engaged in the sex industry.
On the other side of the equation, for the male clients of sex work, while those who
hire call girls are mostly white, married, upper-middle-class professional men aged
thirty-five and older (ranging from lawyers, insurance executives, physicians, well-
to-do retirees, business owners, stockbrokers etc.),2 1 3 those who visit brothels reflect
a wider range of customers with different socioeconomic standings and racial
backgrounds. At the peep show, as Carol Queen points out, one may see even more
class and racial diversity, “from just barely old enough guys with skateboards to
shuffling great-grandpas from nearby Chinatown.”2 1 4 Both the workers and the
clients come from all walks o f life.
Dudash points out, while many clients hang on to misogynist ideas about
women, sex workers sometimes do detect men “who are attempting to discover and
explore positive aspects of sexual variance” and even share their different sexuality
2 1 5
with the workers. One nude dancer at the Lusty Lady states,
It simply didn’t dawn on me until I started working there that there would be a
greater variety of men as customer than I’d ever interacted with in my life.... It just
feels so much healthier to me to be interacting with people of a variety of races and
ages and classes and ... physical abilities, it’s just much more real and much more
what the real world is.2 1 6
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Or, as Vicki Funari, also a peepshow dancer, writes, “I have made it my personal
goal at this job that no man leave my sight without knowing how to find the clitoris
and some things to do with it [with their wife or girlfriend] once he’s found it.”2 1 7
To Funari, for the clients to indulge in, explore, and discover a woman’s sexuality
through contact propels men to see women not as pure and passive objects, but to
respect them as subjects with their own agency. This is Delany’s point when he
argues that only by inflicting violence on the traditional concept of “women” through
erotic representation may we “prevent actual violence against women’s bodies and
2 1 8
minds in the political, material world.”
Within limited terrain, spaces of contact generated by sex work may inflect
cosmopolitanism towards a more inclusive interactive horizon given existing power
structures. Steps should be taken not to expunge the presence of tainted bodies from
our public sphere, but to innovatively incorporate them in our daily associative
cosmopolitan arrangement. As Funari argues, anti-pornography legislation does not
help, for eliminating erotic or pornographic performance “would still leave us
encountering each other on the street, at work, in bed, within the same
socioeconomic system.” In fact, mainstream pornography “has more power to
deaden our imaginations and our passions than it has to hurt us physically.” What is
needed, she argues, is to produce alternative pornography in our own cosmopolitan
visions, “to surround our daughters and sons with images we want them to see and,
more importantly, with a reality we want them to live.”2 1 9 Cheryl Overs, the
Coordinator o f Network of Sex Work Projects (NWSP), similarly argues for the need
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to incorporate brothels into the physical design of urban planning.2 2 0 Writing on
Caribbean sex tourism, both Beverley Mullings and Cynthia Mellon advocate for
developing “community tourism” that breaks up multinational corporations’
monopoly of tourism profits (which orients toward middle-class networking), and
decriminalizes and incorporates sex work as an essential component of a community-
2 2 1
based tourism (that orients toward interracial and interclass contact).
These proposals can do better in allowing for the room and space for global
sex workers to live and act as citizen-workers. In an attempt to re-narrate the space
of brothels, Brian Pera writes about his experience as a gay man serving as a
cleaning boy at a whorehouse who comes to see this physical space that he grew up
in— often portrayed as a place of exploitation, alienation and violence— as a possible
222
home, family, and community for the sex workers. It would be difficult to
consider all the physical spaces of sex work around the globe as “home,” but there is
definitely room for us to try harder in helping make sex work for global women a
safer “dwelling” place, and their “traveling” away from home, from the time-
honored “high” maternal body, and from the official and sanitized trajectory of
citizen-workers easier, healthier, and possible.
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NOTES
1 These are sex workers’ rights slogans. See Gail Pheterson, “ Not Repeating History,” in A
Vindication o f the Rights o f Whores, ed. Gail Pheterson (Seattle: Seal Press, 1989), 24.
2 Bandana Pattanaik, “Where Do W e Go From Here?” in Transnational Prostitution: Changing
Global Patterns, eds. Susanne Thorbek and Bandana Pattanaik (New York: Zed Books, 2002), 221.
3 Philippa Levine, Prostitution, Race, and Politics: Policing Venereal D isease in the British Empire
(New York: Routledge, 2003), 184.
4 Ibid., 191.
5 As Wendy Chapkis observes, “prostitution, pornography, and other forms o f commercial sex still
function as land mines within feminism.” Wendy Chapkis, Live Sex Acts: Women Performing Erotic
Labor (New York: Routledge, 1997), 5.
6 Stuart Hall, “Encoding/decoding,” in Culture, Media, Language: Working Papers in Cultural
Studies, 1972-1979, eds. Stuart Hall, Dorothy Hobson, Andrew Lowe and Paul W illis (New York:
Routledge, 1980), 128-138. This position is adopted by the neo-Gramscian, post-marxist Birmingham
School o f cultural studies, first articulated by Stuart Hall. Hall distinguishes between three different
ways o f reading a cultural text such as film, music or other media representations: the hegemonic,
emancipatory, or negotiated position. The hegemonic position means that the viewer decodes the
message in the way it was encoded, uncritically accepting whatever meanings have been constructed
by the text. The emancipatory position means that one forms completely oppositional readings
against the dominant definition o f events. The negotiated position, which happens most often, is
when one acknowledges the hegemonic code and is constructed by it, but nonetheless makes
alternative, negotiated reading to one’s own specific circumstances.
7 Chapkis, Live Sex Acts, 26.
8 Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, “Can the Subaltern Speak?” in Marxism and the Interpretation o f
Culture, eds. Cary Nelson and Lawrence Grossberg (Urbana: University o f Illinois Press, 1988), 271 -
313.
9 Shannon Bell, Reading, Writing, and Rewriting the Prostitute Body (Bloomington and Indianapolis:
Indiana University Press, 1994), 2.
1 0 Anne McClintock, “Sex Workers and Sex Work: Introduction,” Social Text, no. 37 (Winter, 1993):
9.
1 1 James Clifford, “Traveling Cultures,” in Routes: Travel and Translation in the Late Twentieth
Century (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1997), 36.
1 2 Gail Pheterson, “Migration and Prostitution,” in Pheterson, A Vindication o f the Rights o f Whores,
201.
1 3 Susanne Thorbek, “Prostitution in a Global Context: Changing Patterns,” in Thorbek and Pattanaik,
Transnational Prostitution, 1.
1 4 Lisborg, “Bodies Across Borders,” 101.
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1 5 Clifford notes that his framework o f travel is concerned with a “historical taintedness,” in particular
“its associations with gendered, racial bodies, class privilege, specific means o f conveyance, beaten
paths, agents, frontiers, documents, and the like.” See Clifford, “Traveling Cultues,” 39. This
disengagement with the traveling o f sex workers is also seen in Caren Kaplan, Questions o f Travel:
Postmodern D iscourses o f Displacem ent (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1996).
1 6 Susanne Thorbek, “Prostitution in a Global Context: Changing Patterns,” in Thorbek and Pattanaik,
Transnational Prostitution, 4.
1 7 Quoted in Chapkis, Live Sex Acts, 209.
1 8 Pheterson, “Not Repeating History,” 4 (emphasis mine). As indicated by Pheterson, since the
founding o f COYOTE in San Francisco in 1973, similar sex workers’ rights organizations sprang
forth throughout the U.S.: “N ew York’s PONY, Massachusett’s PUMA, Hawaii’s DOLPHIN,
Detroit’s CUPIDS, Michigan’s PEP, Florida’s COYOTE, Kansas City’ KITTY, Los Angeles’ CAT,
N ew Orleans’ PASSION, Sacramento’s COYOTE, San D iego’s OCELOT, Seattle’s ASP and others”
(5).
1 9 Levine, Prostitution, Race, and Politics, 186-187.
2 0 Martha C. Nussbaum, ‘“Whether from Reason or Prejudice’: Taking Money for Bodily Services,”
in Sex and Social Justice (New York: Oxford University Press, 1999), 286.
2 1 ICPR, “World Charter for Prostitutes’ Rights,” in Pheterson, A Vindication o f the Rights o f Whores,
40.
2 2 On international law, the 1949 Convention for the Suppression o f Traffic in Persons and o f the
Exploitation o f the Prostitution o f Others adopted by the UN proceeds with an abolitionist stance in
stating that prostitution violates human rights and human dignity. Article 6 o f the feminist document,
the Convention on The Elimination o f All Forms o f Discrimination Against Women (CEDAW)
adopted in 1979 similarly calls on states “to suppress all forms traffic in women and the exploitation
o f prostitution o f women.” Ambiguity exists with CEDAW, however. As Jo Doezema points out,
Morocco attempted to introduce an amendment to Article 6 by calling for “the suppression o f
prostitution” in addition to “the suppression o f exploitation o f prostitution” but was refused by
Netherlands and Italy. The rejection o f the amendment implied that “Article 6 does not consider all
prostitution inherently coercive.” Moreover, General Recommendation 19 o f CEDAW (1992), while
reaffirming the objective o f Article 6, recognizes that poverty and unemployment do force women
into prostitution and adds that prostitutes are especially vulnerable to violence because o f their
marginal position and must be protected against violence. To Doezema, this demonstrates a shift in
seeing the prostitute “as a subject whose rights can be violated.” The well-known international anti
trafficking organization, the Coalition Against Trafficking in Women (CATW) founded by radical
feminist Kathleen Barry, similarly adopts a neo-abolitionist stance in defining “prostitution as a form
o f sexual exploitation just like rape, genital mutilation, incest and battering.” See Jo Doezema,
“Forced to Choose: Beyond the Voluntary v. Forced Prostitution Dichotomy,” in G lobal Sex Workers:
Rights, Resistance, and Redefinition, eds. Kamala Kempadoo and Jo Doezema (New York:
Routledge, 1998), 37-40.
2 3 Marjan Wijers, “Women, Labor, and Migration: The Position o f Trafficked Women and Strategies
for Support,” in Kempadoo and Doezem a, G lobal Sex Workers, 69.
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2 4 For example, Chitrapom Vanaspong points out, First World media coverage o f Thai prostitution
often portrays the sex workers as “passive, beautiful, innocent, and poor.” A newsworthy story
follows the following guideline: “the worse the situation is the better, the younger the child is the
better, and the more irresponsible the government is the better.” Episodic rather than thematic
reporting on prostitution distorts, over-simplifies, and de-contextualizes human lives with “the same
journalistic sleight-of-hand highlighting human misery.” See Chitrapom Vanaspong, “A Portrait o f
the Lady: the Portrayal o f Thailand and Its Prostitutes in the International Media,” in Thorbek and
Pattanaik, Transnational Prostitution, 139-155.
2 5 Similar trend exists in the international discourse on sex tourism, where the moralized and
victimizing rhetoric o f Third World child prostitution dominates the agenda to the neglect o f working
conditions, safe sex practices, police harassment and other rights claims o f adult sex workers. See
Kamala Kempadoo and Ranya Ghuma, “For the Children: Trends in International Policies and Law
on Sex Tourism,” in Sun, Sex, and Gold: Tourism and Sex Work in the Caribbean (Boulder, CO:
Rowmand and Littlefield, 1999), 291-308.
2 6 The Declaration on the Elimination o f Violence Against Women (1993) is the first document to
make an implicit distinction between trafficking in women/forced prostitution and non-forced
prostitution, and focuses its efforts only on the former as violence against women. W hile the
Declaration becom es the general standard on the ensuing international agreements on prostitution,
Doezema notes, the UN is internally fragmented on this issue and has not committed to a uniform
prostitution policy. Thus, UN organizations such as UNESCO and the Working Group on
Contemporary Forms o f Slavery continue to see all prostitution (regardless o f forced or voluntary) as
violation o f human rights. In contrast to the CATW, the Global Alliance Against Trafficking in
Women (GAATW ) objects to trafficking and forced prostitution but respects the right to self-
determination in voluntary adult prostitution. Doezema, “Forced to Choose,” 37, 40-41.
27 Doezema, “Forced to Choose,” 41.
2 8 Ibid., 42-44.
2 9 Levine, Prostitution, Race, and Politics, 183.
3 0 Ibid., 187.
3 1 Ibid., 198.
3 2 Mike Davis, “Planet o f Slums: Urban Involution and the Informal Proletariat,” New Left Review 26
(March/April 2004): 17-21.
3 3 Anders Lisborg, “Bodies Across Borders: Prostitution-related Migration from Thailand to
Denmark,” Thorbek and Pattanaik, Transnational Prostitution, 102.
3 4 Kempadoo, “Migrations and Tourism,” in Kempadoo and Doezem a, Global Sex Workers, 99.
3 5 Kamala Kempadoo, “Continuities and Change: Five Centuries o f Prostitution in the Caribbean,” in
Kempadoo, Sun, Sex, and Gold, 19.
3 6 Pattanaik, “Where Do W e Go From Here?” 223. Some disagree with this position; cf. Saskia
Sassen, “Global Cities and Survival Circuits,” in G lobal Woman: Nannies, M aids, and Sex Workers in
the New Economy, eds. Barbara Ehrenreich and Arlie Russell Hochschild (New York: Metropolitan
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Books, 2002), 267-273. While Sassen correctly links trafficking to global poverty, she focuses
exclusively on the “structural” side o f trafficking to the neglect o f agency, so that migrant prostitutes
in Sassen’s construction are seen as predominantly victims than agents who negotiate the forces o f
neo-liberal global production.
3 7 International Committee for Prostitutes’ Rights (ICPR), “Statement on Prostitution and Feminism,”
in Pheterson, A Vindication o f the Rights o f Whores, 193.
3 8 Satoko Watenabe, “From Thailand to Japan: Migrant Sex Workers as Autonomous Subjects,” in
Kempadoo and Doezem a, G lobal Sex Workers, 122.
3 9 Kamala Kempadoo, “Migrations and Tourism: Introduction,” in Kempadoo and Doezema, Global
Sex Workers, 101.
40 Linda Meaker, “A Social Response to Transnational Prostitution in Queensland, Australia,” in
Thorbek and Pattanaik, Transnational Prostitution, 61.
4 1 Priscilla Alexander, “Feminism, Sex Workers, and Human Rights,” in Whores and Other Feminists,
ed. Jill Nagle (New York: Routledge, 1997), 91.
4 2 Wijers, “Women, Labor, and Migration,” 70.
4 3 Andrea Dworkin, Life and Death: Unapologetic Writings on the Continuing War Against Women
(New York: The Free Press, 1997), 145.
4 4 Olive Senior, Working M iracles: W omen’ s Lives in the English-Speaking Caribbean (Bloomington:
Indiana University Press, 1991), 130-131. See also Beverley Mullings, “Globalization, Tourism, and
the International Sex Trade,” in Kempadoo, Sun, Sex, and Gold, 68-69.
4 5 Kempadoo, “Continuities and Change,” 17.
4 6 Cynthia Enloe, Bananas, Beaches and Bases: Making Feminist Sense o f International Politics
(Berkeley and Los Angeles: University o f California Press, 1989), 39-40.
4 7 Pataya Ruenkaew, “The Transnational Prostitution o f Thai Women to Germany: A Variety o f
Transnational Labour Migration,” in Thorbek and Pattanaik, Transnational Prostitution, 75.
4 8 Denise Brennan, “Selling Sex for Visas: Sex Tourism as a Stepping-stone to International
Migration,” in Ehrenreich and Hochschild, G lobal Woman, 156.
4 9 Ibid., 159.
5 0 Denise Brennan, “Women at Work: Sex Tourism in Sosua, the Dominican Republic,” Critical
M atrix 11, no. 2 (1999): 17. Brennan notes that these romantic dreams often come with few happy
endings since transnational relationships are often short-lived. Often they turn out to be
disillusionment and a myth o f opportunity for the sex workers. For example, in her telling o f three
sex workers’ stories, both Elena and Louisa ended up worse o ff than before they entered into
relationships with foreign tourists. Among the three, Carmen was the only one who achieved
moderate success— not through foreign relationships but through her long-term strategy to save
money, diversity her pool o f clients, and secretly building her own house. This demonstrates the
difficulty for many Third World women in accomplishing dramatic economic advancement and
196
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transforming their lives through sex work. It does, however, figure sex workers as calculating agents
who actively pursue sex trade rather than passive trafficked victims.
5 1 Brennan, “Women at Work,” 18.
5 2 Georg Simmel, “Prostitution” (1907), in On Individuality and Social Forms: Selected Writings, ed.
Donald N. Levine (Chicago: The University o f Chicago Press, 1971), 122.
5 3 Ibid.
5 4 Ibid., 124.
5 5 Ibid., 125.
5 6 See disc, in Carole Pateman, The Sexual Contract (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1988), 204.
5 7 See disc, in Nussbaum, “Objectification,” in Sex and Social Justice, 224-225.
5 8 Chapkis, Live Sex Acts, 75-80.
5 9 Quoted in Pheterson, “The Whore Stigma,” Social Text, no. 37 (Winter, 1993): 54.
60 Japanese sex worker Momocca M om occo points out,
Many customers need mental liberation just as much as they need physical liberation through
an ejaculation. With a sex worker, they talk about things which nobody in the family or
workplace will listen to. Or they can talk about personal things because they are more able
to relax with a sex worker than in the front o f their colleagues or their wives.
See Momocca M omocco, “Japanese Sex Workers: Encourage, Empower, Trust and Love
Yourselves!” in Kempadoo and Doezem a, G lobal Sex Workers, 180. For other examples o f men
paying sex workers for personal talking, see also Eileen Geoghegan “A Slice o f ‘The Life’,” in Tricks
and Treats: Sex Workers Write About Their Clients, ed. Matt Bernstein Sycamore (New York:
Harrington Park Press, 2000), 61-67; Laurie Sirois, “Orange Phone,” in Sycamore, Tricks and Treats,
167-170.
6 1 Pateman, The Sexual Contract, 208.
6 2 Carole Pateman, “Defending Prostitution: Charges against Ericsson,” in Feminism and Political
Theory, ed. Cass R. Sunstein (Chicago: University o f Chicago Press, 1990), 203.
6 3 Bell, Reading, Writing, and Rewriting the Prostitute B ody, 79-80.
64 Pateman, The Sexual Contract, 193.
6 5 Catherine A. MacKinnon, Toward a Feminist Theory o f the State (Cambridge, MA: Harvard
University Press, 1989), 139.
6 6 Ibid., 138.
6 7 Dworkin, Life and Death, 140.
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6 8 Ibid., 147.
6 9 Ibid., 149.
70 Ibid., 150.
7 1 Wendy Brown, “The Mirror o f Pornography,” in States o f Injury: Pow er and Freedom in Late
M odernity (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1995), 85.
7 2 Ibid., 87.
7 3 Ibid., 91.
7 4 Ibid., 84.
7 5 Ibid., 87.
7 6 Laura Mulvey, “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema,” Screen 16, no. 3 (Autumn 1975): 9.
7 7 Ibid., 12.
7 8 Brown, “The Mirror o f Pornography,” 88. The use o f the term, “fuckor and fuckee,” in describing
MacKinnon’s theory o f gender relations comes originally from Drucilla Cornell, Beyond
Accommodation: Ethical Feminism, Deconstruction, and the Law (New York: Routledge, 1991), 119.
7 9 Brown, “The Mirror o f Pornography,” 84.
8 0 Laura Kipnis, Bound and Gagged: Pornography and the Politics o f Fantasy in Am erica (New
York: Grove Press, 1996), xii.
8 1 Ibid., 174.
8 2 Ibid., 164.
8 3 Ibid., 165.
8 4 Ibid., 202-203.
8 5 Carol Queen, “Toward a Taxonomy o f Tricks: A Whore Considers the Age-Old Question, ‘What
Do Clients Want?’” in Sycamore, Tricks and Treats, 111-112.
8 6 Laurie Shrage, Moi'al Dilemmas o f Feminism: Prostitution, Adultery, and Abortion (New York:
Routledge, 1994), 136.
8 7 Bell, Reading, Writing, and Rewriting the Prostitute Body, 86.
8 8 Tawnya Dudash, “Peepshow Feminism,” in Nagle, Whores and Other Feminists, 110.
8 9 Marlene Spanger, “Black Prostitutes in Denmark,” in Thorbek and Pattanaik, Transnational
Prostitution, 130, 132.
198
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90 Coffee, “Thirty Years,” in Sycamore, Tricks and Treats, 123.
9 1 Anne McClintock, “Maid to Order: Commercial Fetishism and Gender Power,” Social Text, no. 37
(Winter, 1993): 106.
9 2 Ibid., 108.
9 3 Ryan Bishop and Lillian S. Robinson, “Travellers’ Tails: Sex Diaries o f tourists Returning from
Thailand,” in Thorbek and Pattanaik, Transnational Prostitution, 19.
9 4 Ryan Bishop and Lillian S. Robinson, Night Market: Sexual Cultures and the Thai Economic
M iracle (New York: Routledge, 1998), 248.
9 5 Ibid., 234.
9 6 Liz Highleyman, “Professional Dominance: Power, Money, and Identity,” in Nagle, Whores and
Other Feminists, 148.
9 7 See Bishop and Robinson, “Travellers’ Tails;” Bishop and Robinson, Night Market, 141-144, 166,
232-235.
9 8 Bishop and Robinson, Night Market, 153-155.
9 9 Arthur Kleinman and Joan Kleinman, “The Appeal o f Experience; The Dismay o f Images: Cultural
Appropriations o f Suffering in Our Times,” D aedalus 125, no. 1 (1996): 2.
1 0 0 Ibid., 7.
1 0 1 Kathy Davis and Sue Fisher, “Power and the Female Subject,” in Negotiating at the M argins: The
Gendered Discourses o f Pow er and Resistance, eds. Sue Fisher and Kathy Davis (New Brunswick,
NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1993), 6.
1 0 2 While liberal feminists associated with analytical philosophy such as Alison Jaggar, Martha
Nussbaum and Laurie Shrage have spoken in defense o f prostitution, they still tend to render
prostitutes as non-speaking objects o f liberal discourse. Their justification o f prostitution based on the
moral principles o f the liberal contract, autonomy, liberty and equality, while avoiding the “false
consciousness” trap and the sensationalized imagery o f the degraded and violated female body,
nonetheless domesticates the meanings o f prostitution within a contained liberal framework. They
articulate a public, democratic space for prostitution/pornography only by fitting them in their comfort
zone o f liberal values. See, e.g., Martha Nussbaum’s distinction between good, ethical pornography
that respects consent and equality and negative pornography that demeans and dehumanizes women.
Nussbaum, “Objectification,” 213-239. The problem with such distinction is that Nussbaum’s
personal taste in distinguishing between what constitutes ethical and pleasurable pornography and
what constitutes a misogynist one is affected not only by her own liberal values, but may also reflect
her socioeconomic and intellectual standing, that is, her own social hierarchy as a consumer o f a
“certain type” o f pornography rather than “other kinds.” For an analysis that links taste distinction
and class/ideology, see Pierre Bourdieu, Distinction: A Social Critique o f the Judgement o f Taste,
trans. Richard N ice (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1984).
1 0 3 Bell, Reading, Writing, and Rewriting the Prostitute Body, 22.
199
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1 0 4 Ibid., 24.
1 0 5 Ibid., 2.
1 0 6 Inderpal Grewal and Caren Kaplan, “Introduction: Transnational Feminist Practices and Questions
o f Postmodemity,” in Scattered Hegemonies: Postmodernity and Transnational Feminist Practices,
eds. Inderpal Grewal and Caren Kaplan (Minneapolis: University o f Minnesota Press, 1994), 21.
1 0 7 Ibid., 22.
1 0 8 Ibid., 5-6.
1 0 9 Caren Kaplan, “The Politics o f Location as Transnational Feminist Practice,” in Grewal and
Kaplan, Scattered Hegemonies, 150.
1,0 Kamala Kempadoo, “Introduction: Global Sex Workers’ Rights,” in Kempadoo and Doezema,
G lobal Sex Workers, 11-13. Kathleen Barry is a U.S.-based feminist sociologist known for her work
on anti-trafficking movement and founder o f the Coalition Against Trafficking in Women (CATW).
She adopts a similar position as that o f MacKinnon and Dworkin in arguing that all prostitution is
inherently abusive. See Kathleen Barry, Female Sexual Slavery (New York: N ew York University
Press, 1984).
1 1 1 Kempadoo, “Introduction,” 13.
1 1 2 Kempadoo, “Continuities and Change,” 8.
1 1 3 Ibid., 9.
1 1 4 Sander Gilman, Difference and Pathologyv Stereotypes o f Sexuality, Race, and M adness (Ithaca:
Cornell University Press, 1985), 25. For discussion o f the Hottentot representing the essential black,
see ibid., 83. For an analysis o f the cultural representations and media imagery o f the racial “other,”
see Stuart Hall, “The Spectacle o f the 'Other,’” in Representation: Cultural Representations and
Signifying Practices, ed. Stuart Hall (Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage, 1997), 225-279.
1 1 5 Gilman, Difference and Pathology, 95.
1,6 Ibid., 8 3 ,9 4 , 101.
1 1 7 Ibid., 99.
1,8 Ibid., 105.
1 1 9 Ibid., 107.
1 2 0 Anne McClintock, Im perial Leather: Race, Gender and Sexuality in the Colonial Contest (New
York: Routledge, 1995), 43, 56.
1 2 1 Ibid., 44.
1 2 2 Ibid., 47.
200
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P1 Levine, Prostitution, Race, and Politics, 180.
1 2 4 Ibid., 179.
1 2 5 Kempadoo, “Introduction,” 10.
1 2 6 Ibid., 11.
1 2 7 Kamala Kempadoo, “The Migrant Tightrope: Experiences from the Caribbean,” in Kempadoo and
Doezema, G lobal Sex Workers, 131.
1 2 8 Spanger, “Black Prostitutes in Denmark,” 132.
1 2 9 Kempadoo, “The Migrant Tightrope,” 131.
1 3 0 Mikhail Bakhtin, Rabelais and His World, trans. Helene Iswolsky (Cambridge, MA: The MIT
Press, 1968), 18.
1 3 1 Ibid., 19-20.
1 3 2 Ibid., 21.
1 3 3 Ibid., 23-37.
1 3 4 Ibid., 23.
1 3 5 Highleyman, “Professional Dominance,” 147.
1 3 6 Blake Aarens, Hima B., Gina Gold, Jade Irie, Madeleine Lawson, and Gloria Lockett, “Showing
Up Fully: Women o f Color Discuss Sex Work,” moderated by Jill Nagle, in Nagle, Whores and Other
Feminists, 204.
1 3 7 Quoted in Meaker, “A Social Response to Transnational Prostitution in Queensland, Australia,”
63.
1 3 8 Queen, “Toward a Taxonomy o f Tricks,” 106.
1 3 9 Cynthia Mellon, “A Human Rights Perspective on the Sex Trade in the Caribbean and Beyond,” in
Kempadoo, Sun, Sex, and Gold: Tourism and Sex Work in the Caribbean, ed. Kamala Kempadoo
(Boulder: Rowman and Littlefield, 1999), 311.
1 4 0 Quoted in Nina Hartley, “Bodhisattvas Among Us: Compassionate Sex Workers,” in Sycamore,
Tricks and Treats, 73.
1 4 1 See Levine, Prostitution, Race, and Politics, 184-185.
1 4 2 Ibid., 191.
1 4 3 Ibid., 7.
1 4 4 Bakhtin, Rabelais and His World, 195.
201
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1 4 3 Chapkis, Live Sex Acts, 98.
1 4 6 Ibid., 99-100.
1 4 7 Ibid., 103.
1 4 8 Ibid., 105.
149 Ibid., 101.
1 5 0 Ibid., 186.
1 5 1 Nina Hartley, “In the Flesh: A Pom Star’s Journey,” in Nagle, Whores and O ther Feminists, 58.
1 5 2 Eva Pendleton, “Love for Sale: Queering Heterosexuality,” in Nagle, Whores and Other Feminists,
80.
1 5 3 Gayle Rubin, “Thinking Sex: Notes for a Radical Theory o f the Politics o f Sexuality,” in Pleasure
and Danger: Exploring Female Sexuality, ed. Carole S. Vance (Boston: Routledge, 1984), 286.
1 5 4 Ibid., 281.
1 5 5 Scott O ’Hara, “In Love with M y work,” in Sycamore, Tricks and Treats, 118.
1 3 6 Carol Queen, “Sex Radical Politics, Sex-Positive Feminist Thought, and Whore Stigma,” in Nagle,
Whores and O ther Feminists, 134.
1 3 7 Shrage, M oral Dilemmas o f Feminism, 86.
1 5 8 Ibid., 158-161.
1 3 9 Chapkis, Live Sex Acts, 193-194.
1 6 0 Ibid., 159.
1 5 1 See, e.g., Nina Hartley, “Bodhisattvas Among Us;” Cosi Fabian, “The Holy Whore: A Woman’s
Gateway to Power,” in Nagle, Whores and Other Feminists, 44-54; and Bell, “Prostitute
Performances: Sacred Carnival Theorists o f the Female Body,” in Reading, Writing, and Rewriting
the Prostitute Body, 137-184.
1 6 2 Chapkis, Live Sex Acts, 195.
1 6 3 See Aarens et al., “Showing Up Fully,” 197, 206-207; Siobhan Brooks, “Dancing Toward
Freedom,” in Nagle, Whores and O ther Feminists, 253; and testimony by Gloria Lockett in Chapkis,
Live Sex Acts, 207-209.
1 6 4 Aarens et al., “Showing Up Fully,” 209.
1 6 5 Ibid., 205.
1 6 6 Meaker, “A Social Response to Transnational Prostitution in Queensland, Australia,” 63.
202
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1 6 7 Watenabe, “From Thailand to Japan,” 120.
1 6 8 First World sex worker Coffee describes her case:
A lot o f prostitutes are tricks themselves: they need to pay someone to do what they want,
exactly the way they want it, to get them off. Today, if I see someone I really want, I’m a
trick. I’ll pay them, but if I can’t get what I want, I don’t bother them anymore. Just like a
trick.
Coffee, “Thirty Years,” 123. Watenabe documents similar scenario in the case o f female migrant
Thai sex workers in Japan where they would pay their male counterparts from Thailand for sexual
service. Watenabe, “From Thailand to Japan,” 120.
1 6 9 Kempadoo, “The Migrant Tightrope,” 129.
1 7 0 Tbid., 132.
1 7 1 Bishop and Robinson, Night Market, 240.
1 7 2 It also stamps on women who engage in sex with strangers or with many partners, take sexual
initiative and control sexual encounters, ask for money in exchange for sex, use one’s energy and
abilities to satisfy male lust and sexual fantasies, dress provocatively and/or are out at night alone, get
raped, have an abortion, talk too much, run away from home, have a child without marrying, have an
affair when married, get beaten up by husbands, identify as a lesbian or black. See Pheterson, “The
Whore Stigma,” 46; and Pheterson, “Not Repeating History,” 23.
1 7 8 For disc, on these different state policies towards prostitution, see Pheterson, “Not Repeating
History,” 8-10; Wijers, “Women, Labor, and Migration,” 72-74; and Chapkis, Live Sex Acts, 131-179.
1 7 4 Chapkis, Live Sex Acts, 138, 162-164.
1 7 5 See Samantha’s testimony in ibid., 206.
1 7 6 See Doezema’s testimony in ibid., 121.
1 7 7 See ICPR, “World Charter for Prostitutes’ Rights,” 40; Bell, Reading, Writing, and Rewriting the
Prostitute Body, 116-117. Others disagree, arguing that legalization is necessary. See, e.g., Shrage,
M oral Dilemmas o f Feminism, 82-87, 158-161. My own position sides with decriminalization
without legalization. See my rationale in text.
1 7 8 Chapkis, Live Sex Acts, 155.
1 7 9 “Pseudo-criminalization” laws are proposed by feminist authors such as Kathleen Barry. See
Barry, Female Sexual Slavery, 277-278. See also disc, in Bell, Reading, Writing, and Rewriting the
Prostitute Body, 113-114. For a good illustration o f the deteriorating consequences for sex workers
that punish “the consumption o f prostitution” but not the prostitutes, see Arthur Gould, “Sweden’s
Law on Prostitution: Feminism, Drugs and the Foreign Threat,” in Thorbek and Pattanaik,
Transnational Prostitution, 201-215.
1 8 0 Jo Bindman, “An International Perspective on Slavery in the Sex Industry,” in Kempadoo, G lobal
Sex Workers, 66-67. The “World Charter for Prostitutes’ Rights” similarly advocates regulating third
203
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parties (brothel owner, escort agency manager, pimp) according to standard business codes, with
additional special clauses to criminalize abuse o f sex workers as a form o f labor protection. See
ICPR, “World Charter for Prostitutes’ Rights,” 40.
1 8 1 The United Nations Educational, Scientific, and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) and the
Working Group on Contemporary Forms o f Slavery in fact attempt to extinguish any discussion o f
sex workers’ rights by adopting the position that all forms o f prostitution constitute human rights
violation. See Amalia Lucia Cabezas, “Tourism, Sex Work, and Women’s Rights in the Dominican
Republic,” in Globalization and Human Rights, ed. Alison Brysk (Berkeley and Los Angeles:
University o f California Press, 2002), 44-58.
1 8 2 Mellon, “A Human Rights Perspective on the Sex Trade in the Caribbean and Beyond,” 314.
1 8 3 Ibid., 313.
1 8 4 Kempadoo and Ghuma, “For the Children,” 294.
1 8 5 Mellon, “A Human Rights Perspective on the Sex Trade in the Caribbean and Beyond,” 313-314.
1S 6 j c p r “World Charter for Prostitutes’ Rights,” 4 0 -4 2 ; ICPR, “Statement on Prostitution and
Human Rights,” in Pheterson, A Vindication o f the Rights o f Whores, 1 0 3 -1 0 8 .
1 8 7 ICPR, “Statement on Prostitution and Health,” in Pheterson, A Vindication o f the Rights o f Whores,
142.
1 8 8 Chapkis, Live Sex Acts, 166.
1 8 9 ICPR, “Health: ‘Our First Concern,’” in Pheterson, A Vindication o f the Rights o f Whores, 123.
1 9 0 Jasmin, “Prostitution is Work,” Social Text, no. 37 (Winter, 1993): 35.
1 0 1 Chapkis, Live Sax Acts, 168.
1 9 2 Kempadoo, “Introduction,” 20.
1 9 3 Pheterson, “Not Repeating History,” 25-26.
1 9 4 Kempadoo, “Introduction,” 20. Kempadoo gives the example o f the internal struggle at the 1997
international conference on prostitution that was challenged by Third World sex workers for the ill
treatment they received at the conference. Their contestations included the absence o f travel funds
and translation services that would enable their actual participation, the North American agenda that
dominated the conference, the ignorance o f the existence and importance o f sex workers organizations
outside the U.S. and Europe, the relegation o f Third World sex worker sessions to difficult time-slots
or were even canceled when they conflicted with “more important” sessions. In Kempadoo’s words,
“The conference thus ended in a strong anti-imperialist, anti-racist demonstration with the uproar
forcing western sex workers to recognize and deal with these dimensions o f power and inequality”
(23).
1 9 5 Kempadoo, “Introduction,” 20-21. Kempadoo notes that discrepancies also exist within the Third
World sex workers’ rights movement as “Central and South American, and increasingly, Asian sex
workers’ organizations are becoming a major voice in the international movement. In the former
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Soviet Union, Eastern Europe, Africa, and in the majority o f Asian countries, however, independent
organizing by sex workers is not yet visible” (22-23).
1 9 6 Angelita Abad, Marena Briones, Tatiana Cordero, Rosa Manzo and Marta Marchan, “The
Association o f Autonomous Women Workers, Ecuador: ‘22n d June,’” in Kempadoo, G lobal Sex
Workers, 174.
1 9 7 Momocco, “Japanese Sex Workers,” 181.
1 9 8 Shane A. Petzer and Gordon M. Issacs, “SW EAT: The Development and Implementation o f a Sex
Worker Advocacy and Intervention Program in Post-Apartheid South Africa,” in Kempadoo, G lobal
Sex Workers, 193, 195.
'" ib id ., 195.
200 Claudia Colimoro, “A World o f People: Sex Workers in M exico,’’interview by Amalia Lucia
Cabezas, in Kempadoo, G lobal Sex Workers, 197.
2 0 1 McClintock, Im perial Leather, 72.
202 Aarens et al., “Showing Up Fully,” 202.
2 0 3 Jurgen Habermas, The Structural Transformation o f the Public Sphere, trans. Thomas Burger
(Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 1989).
20 4 Iris Marion Young, “Communication and the Other: Beyond Deliberative Democracy,” in
D em ocracy and Difference: Contesting the Boundaries o f the Political, ed. Seyla Benhabib
(Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1996), 120-135; Nancy Fraser, “Rethinking the Public
Sphere: A Contribution to the Critique o f Actually Existing Democracy,” in The Phantom Public
Sphere, ed. Bruce Robbins (Minneapolis: University o f Minnesota Press, 1993), 1-32.
2 0 5 Samuel R. Delany, Times Square Red, Times Square Blue (New York: N ew York University Press,
1999), 15.
206 Ibid., 15-16.
207 Ibid., 123-142.
2 0 8 Ibid., 142.
209 Ibid., 193.
210 Bakhtin, Rabelais and His World, 10.
2 1 1 Delany, Times Square Red, Times Square Blue, 146-150.
212 Tawnya Dudash, “Peepshow Feminism,” in Nagle, Whores and Other Feminists, 99.
2 1 3 Queen, “Toward a Taxonomy o f Tricks,” 107.
214 Ibid.
205
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215 Dudash, “Peepshow Feminism,” 114.
216 Quoted in ibid., 115.
2 1 7 Vicki Funari, “Naked, Naughty, Nasty: Peep Show Reflections,” in Nagle, Whores and Other
Feminists, 30.
2 1 8 Delany, Times Square Red, Times Square Blue, 32.
219 Funari, “Naked, Naughty, Nasty,” 30. For an example o f alternative practice o f pornography, see
Shannon Bell, “Post-pom\post-anti-pom: Queer socialist pornography,” in N ew Socialisms: Futures
beyond Globalization, eds. Robert Albritton, Shannon Bell, John R. Bell, and Richard Westra (New
York: Routledge, 2004), 139-156.
220 Cheryl Overs, interview by Jo Doezema, “International Activism: Jo Doezem a interviews NWSP
Coordinator, Cherl Overs,” in Kempadoo, G lobal Sex Workers, 206-207.
2 2 1 Mullings, “Globalization, Tourism, and the International Sex Trade,” 77-79; Mellon, “A Human
Rights Perspective on the Sex Trade in the Caribbean and Beyond,” 319-321.
2 2 2 Brian Pera, “The House I Grew Up In,” in Sycamore, Tricks and Treats, 79-89.
206
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Chapter 3
Cosmopolitanism Within: Transsexuality, Gender Dwelling/Traveling, and
Morphing Citizenship
The last two chapters have identified two groups of national boundary-
crossers—undocumented domestic and sweatshop workers and global sex workers—
who transgress the “politicaf ’ and “economic” dimensions of the dwelling trajectory
of citizenship, respectively. Here, I turn my attention to “gender,” for citizenship not
only dwells in national, economic, and political terms, it also dwells in gender terms.
By shared understanding, every citizen knows that, ever since birth, s/he is put in a
particular gendered place— either male or female, man or woman— dwelling into the
respective masculine and feminine order and projected on the path o f heterosexual
relationship and conjugal arrangement. Global sex workers, as we have seen, no
doubt depart from the expected feminine gender trajectory of Madonna by tainting
the time-honored maternal body. But as I will argue here, the subjects who can most
fruitfully help us rethink about citizenship beyond the dwelling trajectory in the
gender dimension are the transsexuals. This chapter is thus a telling o f story of
traveling citizenship in transsexuality, which, through jostling modes of gender
dwelling and traveling, induces an alternative citizenship imaginary that I call,
morphing citizenship.
What will unfold in the following is an attempt to construct a “traveling
theory” o f transsexuality in order to theorize a gender stranger’s “right to travel”
(and dwell) in the realm o f gender and sexuality. For a long time, diasporic travel
and sexual minorities have been kept at a distance in academic theorizing. Diasporic
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studies have rarely discussed the traveling of gays, lesbians, and other queer
subjectivities; conversely, queer theory in its North American trajectory has rarely
incorporated ethnic travelers. It was only in the late 1990s and early 2000s that there
began to emerge the first generation of scholarly inquiry into sexual minorities and
diasporas, a series of studies that situate queer sexuality1 in the context of
globalization, or, more specifically, in what Arjun Appadurai identifies as the
“ethnoscapes.”2 Martin F. Manalansan IV terms these emerging literatures “new
queer studies,” works that build on the first generation of queer theory developed by
figures such as Judith Butler, Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, Teresa de Lauretis, Michael
Warner, and Biddy Martin. From Jose Esteban Munoz’s Disidentifications: Queers
o f Color and the Performance o f Politics, Jose Quiroga’s Tropics ofDesire:
Interventions from Queer Latino America, Juana Maria Rodriguez’s Queer
Latinidad: Identity Practices, Discursive Spaces, Manalansan’s Global Divas:
Filipino Gay Men in the Diaspora, to collective volumes in David Eng and Alice
Horn’s Q & A: Queer in Asian America, Cindy Patton and Benigno Sanchez-
Eppler’s Queer Diasporas, and Amaldo Cruz-Malave and Martin F. Manalansan
IV’s Queer Globalizations: Citizenship and the Afterlife o f Colonialism,4 the “new
queer studies” genre seeks to formulate the cultural subjectivity and political
practices o f queers o f color and o f Third World origin by drawing from queer theory,
ethnic studies, postcolonial theory, critical race theory, and Third World Feminism.
To Manalansan, this field of scholarship troubles the universal (white) gay/lesbian
subject by examining “the ways in which gay/lesbian cultures in specific localities
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inflect and influence the growth o f alternative sex and gender identities and
practices.”5
“New queer studies” by no means suggests a uniform orientation in terms of
methodology, approach, or politics.6 Neither does this range o f works implicate an
“additive model” o f queemess by simply mixing it with other elements of social
difference: race, ethnicity, class, or geographical locations.7 These works do,
however, share a commonality in illustrating that, in David Eng and Alice Horn’s
words, the “very epistemological conception of what it is to be queer cannot be
understood without a serious consideration o f how social differences such as race
constitute our cognitive perceptions of a queer world, how sexual and racial
difference come into existence only in [a constitutive and dynamic] relation to one
another.”8 This emerging field o f literatures thus produces an important social
inquiry in its effort to, as Jasbir Puar puts it, “queering the diaspora, diasporicizing
the queer.”9 As Puar notes, on one hand, the term “queer” has historically presumed
a fixed trajectory o f formal inclusion within the nation-state, one in which the queer
subject is presumably a citizen (even if a precarious one) within the state. This
trajectory assumes a “white episteme of queemess” that is complicated by diasporic
queers who may have no citizenship status in the liberal state. On the other hand,
diasporic studies often “hinge upon masculinist constructions o f home and travel
[that] are, for the most part, inattentive to gender and silent on sexuality.”1 0 Hence,
there is a need “to understand immigration as a queer issue” and to look at gender
and sexuality as inflected by diasporic travel.1 1
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This chapter follows Puar’s call for “queering the diaspora, diasporicizing the
queer,” though from a different vantage point. Instead of addressing the “queering of
citizenship” by diasporic subjects directly, I take a different route in looking at
transsexuality as inhering in itself a story of “diasporic” traveling that has
implications for alternative imaginings of citizenship and cosmopolitanism in the
gender dimension. In fact, as subjects who never feel belonged to their bom sex,
transsexuals are placed in a similar predicament as other groups o f undocumented
traveling agents for whom secure “dwelling” (in their bom sex) is denied and
legitimate “traveling” (to the opposite pole or other gender destinations) is not fully
granted as an option under the current citizenship system. Caught in the suffocating
bind of citizenship’s gender surveillance, transsexuals have to transgress and move
beyond the dwelling trajectory in the gender dimension in order to travel to their
desired gender dwelling spots. As I will further argue, tending to the
dwelling/traveling narratives of transsexuality ultimately aligns us with “new queer
studies” in pointing us to what is at stake in the current circuit of queer globalization
and queer cosmopolitanism.
Placing transsexuality in traveling terms is not to equate transsexuals to
immigrants in a reductive sense, as though they are “gender immigrants” who move
from one country to another (i.e. from the culture of men to the culture of women, or
vice versa) and achieve their American Dream. As Shane Phelan has noted, the
relation between immigrants and transsexuals is not equivalent to direct
appropriation. As the immigrant is marked as a racial/ethnic category and the
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transsexual a gender/sexual one, appropriating immigrant experiences for transsexual
12
purpose as “gender immigrant” skirts around edges of problematic cooptation. It
also begs the question whether there is one universal “immigrant” experience that
can be equivalently appropriated as one singular “transsexual” narrative.
But to resist uncritical appropriation is not to take immigration and
transsexuality as two divergent paths o f social inquiry, as if one is strictly about
race/ethnicity, and the other is solely about gender/sexuality. In fact, in November
2004, a transsexual Filipino couple in Los Angeles filed what may be the landmark
case against the U.S. government over the green card status o f married
1 ^
transsexuals, indicating that immigration is a transgender issue as much as
transgender is an immigration issue. What is necessary, then, is to draw out the
connections between the traveling of transsexuals and immigrants while
acknowledging the differences in their historical contexts and social locations. This
is in keeping with Phelan’s call for “antihegemonic appropriation,” one that
transforms social differences and recognizes “commonality without sameness” in
staking minority subjects’ collaborative claims to citizenship.1 4
Within this frame of “antihegemonic appropriation,” it might indeed be
helpful to delineate the similar predicament facing immigrants and transsexuals at
certain intersecting points before we go on to construct a traveling theory of
transsexuals’ quest for citizenship. This is most vividly shown in the respective
“assimilation rituals” that both immigrants and transsexuals have to go through in
order to attain official citizen status. For example, for an U.S. immigrant, once a
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green card is obtained, s/he needs to live in the country for a certain period of time
(the so-called “substantial presence” test of thirty months in five years or more)
before being admitted to the citizenship exam/interview. During the citizenship
interview, the immigrants are asked to demonstrate not only a basic familiarity with
U.S. history and government, but also their loyalty, allegiance and patriotism to their
newly adopted homeland by responding (a resounding “yes!” without hesitation) to
questions like: “Are you willing to fight for the United States if it is invaded by an
enemy?” The day o f the citizenship swearing-in ceremony is similarly filled with
“passing” rituals of saluting the flag and singing the Star-Spangled Banner. Without
denigrating the meaning and value of attaining U.S. citizenship for many immigrant
subjects in need o f a sense o f belonging, a basic provision of rights, and a feeling of
being at home, there is nonetheless a way in which the power structure o f U.S.
citizenship interview and ceremony, in that very context, tends to put the prospective
citizens in a position where no ambiguity is taken for an answer—no room for
deliberation or disagreement (the touted values o f democratic education)— one is
made to “pass” as an object of nationalist interpellation.1 5
Similarly, for a transsexual, in order to obtain the hormonal treatment and sex
reassignment surgery (SRS), the subject needs to provide the psychotherapist with
the symptomatic narrative o f “Gender Identity Disorder” as prescribed in the
Diagnostic and Statistical Manual o f Mental Disorders (DSM-IV) such as feeling
“trapped in the wrong body” and wanting to be the opposite sex from early
childhood, thus declaring one’s absolute “loyalty” and “allegiance” to the culture of
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the opposite gender, in order to convince the medical authority to prescribe
treatment. The transsexual is then required to go through the “life test” stage by
living as the opposite gender for one to two years (similar to the immigrant
“substantial presence” test) before admission to surgery. As Jay Prosser argues,
while the diagnostic ritual with the psychotherapist provides an expressive forum for
the transsexuals to articulate their feelings and needs to an “understanding” medical
professional, the “diagnosis acts as a narrative filter, enabling some transsexuals to
live out their story and thwarting others [that deviate from the preconceived gender-
binary storyline].”1 6 In that interview setting, there is thus a way in which the
transsexual is made to “pass” as “authentically” feminine or masculine in order to
obtain hormone supply and authorization of surgery.
Immigrants and transsexuals also experience similar ordeals at another level,
particularly facing discriminatory policy in the post-9/11 context of heightened
governmental surveillance. As of now, the Department of Motor Vehicles (DMV) in
several states are now comparing records with the Social Security Administration
(SSA) and sending letters threatening license suspension to those whose social
security number shows discrepancy in these two sets of records— specifically
targeting undocumented immigrant workers. Concurrently, many transsexuals have
also received similar “no match” letters as their files reveal a discrepancy in their
gender status. While the DMV allows a transsexual to change sex designation
without having to go through genital surgery, the SSA requires such proof, thus
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leaving many transgendered persons in a bind for they are unable to afford, are
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medically ineligible for, or simply do not desire genital surgery.
Having drawn this contextualized connection between immigrants and
transsexuals, I will in the following proceed to delineate how transsexuals’ sex
change between the binary “man” and “woman” (or between other gendered
subjectivities) can be further understood as “gender travel” in what the sexual third
time-space, involving aspirations for both dwelling and traveling—in a mode that is
characterized by, borrowing from while queering Clifford’s diasporic phrase,
“traveling in dwelling, dwelling in traveling.” As the figure of transsexuality has
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been both undertheorized and overdetermined in queer discourse, I argue that this
shifting, dialectical mode of dwelling/traveling can better help us understand the
jostling and contradicting (rather than uniform) subjectivities, desires, and needs o f
transsexual subjects, whether MTFs (transwomen) or FTMs (transmen).1 9
Transsexuals might be looked at as traveling agents who refuse to be tamed by
citizenship’s gender binary that fixes one’s gender trajectory on his/her bom sex.
They are not simply trapped “in the wrong body,” but trapped in a condition where
neither secure “dwelling” (in their bom sex) nor legitimate “traveling” (to the
opposite gender or alternative dwelling spots) is possible. As such, they insist on a
willful, transgressive traveling in search of their own desired gendered dwelling
sites. “Gender travel” thus parallels the traveling of undocumented subjects in some
way, taking on a texture of revolting against the surveillance o f the sex/gender
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system that distributes citizenship rights according to predetermined gender
boundaries and territories.
I will divide up my discussion in six sections. In section I, I identify the
ways in which transsexuality has led a tumultuous history in feminist and queer
theory: while some condemn its essentialization and reification of gender binary,
others celebrate its postmodern deconstruction of the body. Resisting the ambiguity
o f the transsexual body, some transgender theorists attempt to read it as residing in a
“third space” beyond gender binary that is neither male nor female. As I will argue,
however, this reading o f third space seems a transhistorical move that
problematically locates one’s gendered/sexed body outside the sex/gender system.
In revising this notion, I propose that the sexual third time-space be informed by the
concept of border, a historical in-between-ness wherein the transsexual body may be
imagined as a traveling inside the sex/gender system between the binary poles of
man and woman.
In section II, I indicate that such narrative of “gender travel” can best be
delineated by queering traveling theorist James Clifford’s diasporic narrative,
“traveling in dwelling, dwelling in traveling.” In particular, I argue that sex change
in transsexuality involves a somatic traveling that must negotiate conflicting and
jostling tensions of gender dwelling and traveling. Transsexuality simultaneously
involves a painful need for gender embodiment where one looks for a gendered
“home,” a location of dwelling and categorical placement, as well as a desire for
traveling where one shifts identity in-between the gender binary by disobeying and
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rearranging the heteronormative rules of gender. This jostling traveling narrative
induces an interjecting citizenship imaginary wherein citizenship claims o f dwelling
and traveling need to be negotiated and balanced: on one hand, the need for
belonging to a gendered “home” and the strategic quest for equal rights based on
juridical gender categories, what I call “dwelling in traveling;” on the other, the
freedom to travel, to the self-expression and self-negotiation of gender identity,
challenging the heteronormative roots of citizenship categories, what I call “traveling
in dwelling.” I characterize this expansion o f binary citizenship categories in the
gender dimension, morphing citizenship, which consists o f a dialectical mode of
“morphing in” and “morphing out.” While “dwelling in traveling” involves
transsexuals morphing into the binary citizenship category of M or F, “traveling in
dwelling” involves transsexuals morphing out of the conventional trajectory of M or
F to embody other gendered possibilities on the sexual third time-space borderlands.
These intertwining modes o f dwelling and traveling produce a psychosomatic state
of “cosmopolitanism within” that embodies the diverse transsexual subjectivities and
trajectories, as these gender travelers cross prescribed gender/sexual boundaries and
territories in re-narrating the gender trajectory of citizenship. Section III and IV will
address transsexuality’s manifestations o f “dwelling in traveling” (morphing in) and
“traveling in dwelling” (morphing out), respectively.
In section V, I examine the contestations over morphing citizenship in the
legal arena. As I will point out, limited degree of “dwelling in traveling” (morphing
in) has been recognized in the European Court of Human Rights to accommodate
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transsexuals who desire to be M or F. While the law is still far behind in affirming,
“traveling in dwelling,” some transsexual subjects have been able to find cracks and
holes in state surveillance to conduct “morphing out” within limited terrain. The
discrepancy between how transsexual subjects live out their genders/sexualities and
the limits imposed by the law shows a disconnection between legal discourse and the
reality of gendered/sexual diversity. It also figures transsexuals as “undocumented”
gender travelers whose needs and desires for dwelling and traveling are in a
precarious state without substantive citizenship protection.
Finally, in section VI, I use the vantage point o f transsexuality’s
“cosmopolitanism within” to further reflect on the “cosmopolitanism without” o f the
globalization of queer visibility. Particularly, I argue, tending to transsexuals as
undocumented gender travelers whose needs and desires for secure dwelling and
legitimate traveling are denied can further point us to what is at stake in the current
global circuit o f queer traveling, a corporate “cosmopolitanism without” which,
while illuminating the visibility o f First World queer tourists, displaces the
citizenship claims of dwelling and traveling that are critical to working-class, Third
World, and diasporic queers of color.
I. Gender Travel in the Sexual Third Time-Space
Transsexuality has had a tumultuous history in the feminist and queer
theorization o f gender. Jay Prosser notes that while, for some, transsexualilty
signifies the problem o f essentialist literalization in reifying both the sexed body
(parts) and the stereotypical gender norms, others celebrate transsexuality as
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demonstrating postmodern deconstruction of the body and fluidity of gender.2 0 In
this superimposed binary between literalization and deliteralization, reinscriptive
hegemony and subversive transgression, the trope of the transsexual is put into play
as an “overdetermined” figure— as if the diverse transsexual trajectories, experiences
and subjectivities can all be told in one singular story, one snapshot demo, o f either
the perpetuity of patriarchy or the coming of the post-human age. In fact, the very
complexity of the transsexual body in its simultaneous essentializing and
deconstructing possibilities has led queer theorists to cast the transsexual subject as
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an unsatisfactory character to trouble gender. This trope of ambiguity around
transsexuality becomes what several transgender theorists feel most compelled to
resist and move beyond. They put forth a conception of “third space” that situates
transsexuality as neither male nor female, thus outside gender binary. As I will
argue, however, this reading o f third space seems an ahistorical and transhistorical
move that problematically locates one’s gendered/sexual body outside the sex/gender
system. In revising this notion, I propose instead that the sexual third time-space be
informed by the concept of border that situates transsexuality as “gender travel”
inside the sex/gender system.2 2
Feminists like Janice Raymond, Catherine Millot and Sheila Jeffreys have all
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denounced transsexuals for reifying patriarchal notions of gender. In particular,
Raymond in The Transsexual Empire argues that MTFs are patriarchal men who
desire to possess women’s body: “Transsexuals are not women. They are deviant
males.”2 4 To Raymond, transsexuals “are men who, rather than transcending, i.e.,
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dismantling and going beyond gender-roles, seek to combine aspects o f traditional
femininity with aspects of traditional masculinity.”2 5 Raymond perceives
transsexuals as gay men who appear to be women on the outlook in order to attract
other males: “What is described as transgression of boundaries actually turns out to
be conformity to sex-roles once more, with many men flocking to hormones and
surgery to attract other men as artifactual, ultra-feminine women.”2 6 The male
transsexual, Raymond writes, “having castrated himself, turns his whole body and
behavior into a phallus” that, by possessing women’s body in a misogynist sense,
commits a “total rape o f our feminist identities, minds, and convictions.”2 7 If the
MTF transsexuals colonize women’s bodies, Jeffreys adds, the FTMs are faulted for
7 o
abandoning womanhood by joining the side of the patriarchal enemy. Ironically,
this condemnation of transsexuality for reestablishing the patriarchal gender
mythology simultaneously reveals these feminist separatists’ own investment in the
reification o f sex/gender binary—male is male, female is female, no in-betweens or
borderlands— the nationalist imagery of territorial-bounded identity (Us vs. Them,
West vs. East, White vs. Black) is unwittingly replayed in the war o f gender over the
transsexual body. Hermaphrodites or intersexuals bom with both sexes’ body parts
or ambiguous genitalia are then displaced as homeless exiles under this separatist
imagery.
Building upon Raymond in a more nuanced interpretation, Dwight
Billings/Thomas Urban and Bemice Hausman focus on the medical technology that
“invents” transsexuality. To Billings and Urban, transsexuals are subjects
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interpellated by the capitalist and consumerist factory of the medical establishment
that commodifies gender, selling “an alluring world of artificial vaginas and penises”
for sexual fulfillment.2 9 In their words, “Sex-change surgery privatizes and
depoliticises individual experiences of gender-role distress.”3 0 Hausman similarly
notes that transsexuality as a term did not exist prior to the existence of sex-change
operation. From its inception, transsexuality is constructed by and within a
patriarchal discourse o f regulation and surveillance in the medical technological
establishment. By demanding sex change to “produce themselves as the simulacra of
sexual difference through the presentation o f gender as both origin and goal of sex
identity,” Hausman asserts, “transsexuals are the dupes of gender” devoid of critical
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agency and living in self-deception.
While Billings/Urban and Hausman are right to note that the medical-surgical
construction of transsexuality, as evolving from a community of male authority, is
dominated by patriarchal discourse and reified by commodification, they fail to
account for historical subjects who feel differently gendered and want to act out
alternative gender presentations long before the technological advancement of sex
change.3 2 The explanation o f medical construction can at best be counted as a
sufficient condition that carries “trans-sexing” to fruition but never a necessary
condition that narrates why certain subjects want to go through the pain and travail—
not only physically but also socially, economically and politically—o f hormonal
therapy and surgical reconstruction of their sexed body. Importantly, Prosser notes,
there is a way in which this discourse o f medical construction “fail[s] to examine
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how transsexuals are constructing subjects: participants and actors who have shaped
medical practices as much as they have been shaped by them.” Specifically, before
the medical discourse of transsexuality is made possible, psychiatrists and therapists
have to first listen to these subjects’ internal feelings and experiences before turning
their narratives into the psycho-medical construct of “gender identity disorder.” We
can criticize why transsexuality is fixated into a discourse of “mental illness” and
simultaneously fixated into a rigid ontological sexual difference and gender
dimorphism (M->F or F->M), but even the ideological construction of transsexuality
does not simply take its “raw materials” from a vacuum: the somatic transgendered
feelings, with important qualifications, are real.3 4
On the opposite end o f the spectrum, rather than looking at transsexuality as
reifying gender norms, postmodern theorists tend to read it as a plastic performance
that demonstrates the fluidity o f switching sex and gender in the postmodern
technoculture. Arthur and Marilouise Kroker, for example, argue that transsexuality
pinpoints to a post-male, post-female and post-human age, wherein the cybernetic-
like shifting o f identities dissolves the once hegemonic sex/gender system.3 5 Such
euphoric reading— a theory without lived subjects—misses the material reality and
lived experiences o f transsexuals whose somatic transformation from the initial
feeling o f gender dislocation to the “passing” ritual o f psychotherapeutic interview
and to the penultimate bodily reconstruction takes more than a blinking second of
cosmetic donning or cybernetic morphing. Reading a monolithic pleasure into a
once suffering transsexual body removes the intricate dynamics o f pain, politics and
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power along the transsexing journey that is never outside the hegemonic sex/gender
system.
But precisely because of transsexuality’s literalizing tendency, even the
poststructuralist-inflected queer theorists do not uncritically celebrate transsexuals’
performative body as do the Krokers; to the contrary, transsexuality is often
considered the troubling figure in queer theory that is unable to fully trouble gender.
Hence, as Butler predicates her performative thesis on the notion that there is no
“being” behind the deed or “no gender identity behind the expressions of
gender”3 6 — i.e. gender is not dictated by nature or internal disposition but already
socially constructed and performatively constituted—transsexuality’s complex body
narrative is simultaneously read as demonstrating this performative thesis and a limit
in pushing for queer performance. This point needs elaboration.
While it is widely known that Butler in Gender Trouble points to the
performance o f drag queens in questioning the stableness of gender identity and
'i n
exposing the tenuous foundation o f gender “reality,” in the 1999 preface to the new
edition of Gender Trouble, she uses transsexuality in an attempt to further her claim:
Indeed, if we shift the example from drag to transsexuality, then it is no longer
possible to derive a judgment about stable anatomy from the clothes that cover and
articulate the body. That body may be preoperative, transitional, or postoperative;
even “seeing” the body may not answer the question: for what are the categories
through which one sees? .... When such categories come into question, the reality of
gender is also put into crisis: it becomes unclear how to distinguish the real from the
unreal. And this is the occasion in which we come to understand that what we take
to be “real,” what we invoke as the naturalized knowledge of gender is, in fact, a
changeable and revisable reality.3 8
It is critical to note that Butler is not suggesting that performing gender is radically
free-willing (as she was often misread as doing). While Butler writes against the
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naturalizing tendency in gender, she does not take gender to be merely “a set o f free-
floating attributes.’7 3 9 Still, her argument contains an impulse to render any reality
claim untenable. In that very impulse, as Susan Bordo points out, Butler cannot
explain why the dualist gender binary norms are re-constituted even in drag
performance. For example, drag star Chili Pepper “felt drag queens could help teach
women how to be ‘real women.7 7 7 4 0 Subversive drag performance can re-establish
the reification o f gender binary. In the case of transsexuals, Butler is similarly
unable to account for the fact that some transsexuals feel like the “opposite7 7 gender
since early age. In this way, Butler can only displace narratives of transsexuals’
somatic dislocation and strong desire for sexed embodiment that bears no direct
relation to gender subversion.4 1
Transsexuality’s “realness” indeed troubles Butler.4 2 Even before writing her
preface to the 1999 edition o f Gender Trouble, Butler already examines the
ambiguity (and limits) o f the transsexual body in the 1993 Bodies That Matter. As
Prosser critically notes, from GT to BTM, Butler moves from “using the
transgendered subject [drag queen] to ‘trouble7 the naturalization of heterosexuality
and sex to using the transsexual subject ... to mark the limits o f the trouble the
subject in transition can effect.”4 3 Specifically, in her reading o f the murder o f the
Latina MTF Venus Xtravaganza during the course of the filming of Paris Is Burning,
Butler reads Venus’s potential subversion in her possession o f a penis despite her
desire to be and “pass” as a complete woman.4 4 This transgression— that her
transsexual trajectory is incomplete— is what Butler takes to be the cause o f Venus’s
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death (presumably by a client who discovered her “real” identity in a hotel room as
she turned to sex work to earn money for her surgery). However, Butler is
ambivalent about the fact that Venus's subversive transgression is motivated by a
desire to fit into the “normative framework of heterosexuality”: to be a whole
woman, to enter marriage as a suburban housewife with financial security.4 5 Venus
demonstrates for Butler the limits of parodic repetition through transsexuality:
performing the denaturalization of sex/gender can still work to sustain
heteronormative arrangement. Prosser writes, “Venus’s fantasy ... of becoming
‘real’ ... and her corporeal progress in realizing this fantasy mark her out from the
drag ball performers [in the film] who ‘do’ realness and who ‘resist
transsexuality.’”4 6 Ironically, for Butler, it is in Venus’s death, when her “realness”
is revealed as “fake,” that “Venus holds out ... the promise o f queer subversion.”
Prosser argues that, had Venus completed the transsexual trajectory in acquiring a
vagina, she “would cancel out this potential and succumb to the embrace of
hegemonic naturalization.” Butler thus unwittingly “locates transgressive value in
that which makes the subject’s real life most unsafe.”4 7
Resisting the “passing” tendency o f transsexuals to be either “man” or
“woman” that results in its ambiguous role in gender theorizing, several transgender
theorists seek to recover the transsexual body as queer body in putting forth a notion
o f the “third space” beyond gender binary. Marjorie Garber, in Vested Interests,
points out how transvestite cross-dressing “offers a challenge to easy notions of
AO
binarity, putting into question the categories o f ‘female’ and ‘male.’” In moving
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across the boundary o f gender, transvestites destabilize and subvert the comfortable
binary, creating a space o f the “third," which “reconfigures the relationships between
the original pair, and puts in question identities previously conceived as stable,
unchallengeable, grounded, and ‘know n/"4 9
Extending Garber’s argument to transsexuality, transsexual writer Kate
Bomstein locates herself as neither man nor woman, in a space of the third outside
gender binary that “constantly shifts and changes.” She writes, “The concept o f the
‘third’ is the concept o f the outlaw, who subscribes to a dynamic of change, outside
any given dichotomy.”5 0 Writing transsexuality beyond its ambiguous status,
Bomstein argues that transsexuality is not simply o f “gender ambiguity” (a refusal to
fall within a prescribed gender code); rather, it manifests “gender fluidity,” that is,
“the refusal to remain one gender or another, ... the ability to freely and knowingly
become one or many o f a limitless number o f genders, for any length of time, at any
rate of change. Gender fluidity recognizes no borders or rules o f gender.”5 1
Sandy Stone in her foundational essay, “The ‘Empire” Strikes Back: A
Posttranssexual Manifesto,” similarly calls on transsexuals to forego passing as a
natural member o f the binary gender: “Passing means the denial of mixture.”5 2 To
reclaim transsexuals’ intertexual subjectivities, bodies and histories, Stone, without
directly using the term “third space,” nonetheless echoes Bomstein on positioning
transsexuality in a third space of possibility that is neither man nor woman and
outside gender. She writes,
I am suggesting that in the transsexual’s erased history we can find a story disruptive
to the accepted discourses of gender ... [T]he transsexual currently occupies a
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position which is nowhere, which is outside the binary oppositions of gendered
discourse. For a transsexual, as a transsexual, to generate a true, effective and
representational counterdiscourse is to speak from outside the boundaries of gender,
beyond the constructed oppositional modes which have been predefined as the only
positions from which discourse is possible.5 3
However, by constructing the third space as independent o f detached from, or
outside the binary, as an elevated position which is nowhere, transgender theorists
overstate the “choice” and “voluntariness” we have in “inventing” our identities.
This “postmodern” narrative not only forces diverse transsexual subjectivities into
one singular trajectory (no passing, only fluidity!), it further neglects that a
counterdiscourse can never simply be willed “outside” or “beyond” heteronormative
constraint. Bodies, as much as they are unable to be contained within normative
gender categories, are lived in history. There is no outside, no escape from power
(the original dictum followed, at least in theory, even by Foucault and Butler)— one
must continue to negotiate and jostle with, even while destabilizes and reconfigures,
the dominant relations of gender.5 4
In the hands of certain Third World postcolonial theorizing, the “third space”
is never staged as an outside, where identity floats limitless beyond without meaning
and consequence; rather, it is always situated in history, with never-ending
contention, negotiation and strategic appropriation with given identity categories in
order to make do, survive and stake claims to citizenship. As subjects who have
been historically “outside” the access o f power, who have suffered and died under
the First World regime of power, rights, even if it comes with essentialist
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interpellation, is something that subaltern diasporas cannot afford not to have.
“Outside” is not a location that subaltern diasporas are in a position to claim.
Smadar Lavie and Ted Swedenburg, for example, conceptualize the “third
time-space” not as an outside, but as a “borderzone between identity-as-essence and
identity-as-conjuncture.” As a borderzone, the third time-space is always inside
history and hegemonic relations of power. In the third time-space borderzone,
identity is “heterogeneous, mobile, and discontinuous;” yet, “it remains anchored in
the politics of history/location.”5 5 Lavie and Swedenburg write,
[T]he border is a process of deterritorialization that occurs both to and between the
delimited political realities of the First World and the Third World. Yet borders,
like diasporas, are not just places of imaginative interminglings and happy
hybridities for us to celebrate. They are equally minefields, mobile territories of
constant clashes with the Eurocenter’s imposition of cultural fixity. Borders are
zones of loss, alienation, pain, death—spaces where ‘formations of violence are
continuously in the making.’ Living in the border is frequently to experience the
feeling o f being trapped in an impossible in-between .. ,5 6
Border is illustrated by the hyphen of a binary, signifying both postmodern
fragmentation and essentialist nostalgia, displacement and rooted-ness. It constitutes
a form of alienation but also o f solidarity, of separation but also of connection. As
Lavie and Swedenburg speak o f the border as the jostling location between two
binary poles, we can understand transsexuality as not so much “trapped in the wrong
body” as trapped in an impossible in-between o f the gender binary (M and F).
Yet, Lavie and Swedenburg’s dualistic conception o f border seems to neglect
subjects who may have multiple affiliations with more than two places, cultures and
locations (that is, more than one hyphen). As Judith Flalberstam argues, the notion
of the “third space” has the danger of “clos[ing] down the possibility that there may
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be a fourth, fifth, sixth, or one hundredth space beyond the binary.” She argues,
situating the transsexual as a border in-between “merely balances the binary system
and, furthermore, tends to homogenize many different gender variations under the
banner o f ‘other.’”5 7
With important qualifications, while I understand the third time-space in the
realm of sex and gender as an in-between space between and among M and F, this
in-between space does not designate a fixed “third sex” or “third gender” that invests
in and maintains the “authentic” binary o f maleness and femaleness. Neither does it
designate a continuum between M and F as if there are ordinal degrees of
masculinity or femininity in relation to what a “real man” or “real woman” is.5 8
Rather, I use the third time-space, the in-between border to denote an abject location
on the edges of the dominant.binary o f M and F: multiple subjectivities who
remotely resemble straight-heterosexual men and women (the original copy) and are
really “mimicry” o f the dominant definition o f gender. It does not matter whether
there may be a hundredth or thousandth of gender options beyond the “third,” the
third time-space is useful as an open-ended concept in delineating multiple historical
border zones and interstitial spaces where deviant gender denizens and travelers
reside, dwell, and pass through. Some transsexuals may try to become man or
woman, some neither-man-nor-woman, others neither-straight-nor-gay, and still
others neither-more-of-this-nor-more-of-that. There are multiple borders and
multiple hyphens, and it is critical to historicize and contextualize different
transsexual subjectivities and trajectories. But by definition “transsexual” and
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‘'transgender'' transgresses the acceptable bourgeois definition of man and woman,
and at both the conceptual and political level, live in the third time-space border
zones vis-a-vis the sex/gender binary, as gender deviants and sexual minorities.
Chicana lesbian feminist Gloria Anzaldua, in her Borderlands/La Frontera,
writes about the mestizo consciousness of a mixed-race, mixed-culture, hybrid, and
alien being as a “consciousness of the Borderlands.” Beyond dualism, the mestizo
faces the extremity of cultural collision: “Cradled in one culture, sandwiched
between two cultures, straddling all three cultures and their value systems, la mestizo
undergoes a struggle o f flesh, a struggle o f borders, an inner war.”5 9 Anzaldua's
location as a mestiza (Chicana, White, and Indian), a multilingual woman o f color, a
working-class feminist, a diasporic queer, and also transgendered,6 0 could have
written herself in the hundredth-dimension of third-space-beyond that is “nowhere”
and “outside” any normative categories, but she has not located herself as such.
Instead, she situates herself in and through history, embracing the pain of her un
belonging while seeking to transform it, finding solace in her alien-ness, and creating
an imaginary and resistant homeland on the borderlands— in the third time-space
border zone.
Instead o f locating transsexuality as a position from outside, I will ground it
as a traveling inside—even while it destabilizes and troubles— the sex/gender system.
Instead of placing transsexuality against the yardstick o f queer performance, I
venture that we instead tend to its jostling narratives of essentialization and
deconstruction, location and deterritorialization, dwelling and traveling, in its cross-
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gender and cross-sexual identifications. As it will be shown, the transgressive
citizenship imaginary derived from transsexuality precisely lies in its staking claims
to both the needs of gender dwelling and the desires of gender traveling. The
ensuing narrative of transsexuality is thus one of “gender travel” in the sexual third
time-space between the dominant gender copy of M and F.
II. Cosmopolitanism Within: Dwelling, Traveling, and Morphing
Citizenship
The fact that as of this day many transsexuals still lack the guarantee to
“travel” without duress as rightful citizens indicates that the body narrative of
transsexuality is approximating a quasi-“undocumented” traveling in travail—a
precarious border subject position without substantive citizenship protection.
However, through jostling modes of dwelling and traveling, transsexuals’ “gender
travel” in the sexual third time-space also helps us rethink about citizenship away
from the dwelling trajectory in its gender dimension. In his “Traveling Cultures,”
James Clifford warns against a celebratory postmodern nomadology of
deterritorialization by calling for a historical approach to “travel,” tending to the
specific histories and practices of “traveling-in-dwelling, dwelling-in-traveling.”6 1
Clifford’s ethnic/racial traveling history, however, contains no reference to sexual
minorities. Puar in “Transnational Sexualities” points to the masculinist imagery of
dwelling and traveling in Clifford’s traveling framework. She writes,
Clifford rests his diasporic terrain on two masculinist concepts of home (fixed,
stable, inclusive, ‘back there’) and travel (physical, direct, safe, and legal). His
diaspora privileges a masculine, mobile, middle- or upper-class subject ... [who] has
the resources to maintain substantial links—including financial investments—to a
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homeland, and as a postcolonial elite or cultural nationalist, (he) may have other
reasons to invest in the ‘motherland.’6 2
Noting the mutual disengagement between diasporic studies and queer theory, Puar
advocates for the need to “queering the diaspora, diasporicizing the queer.”6 3
Here I argue, however, by situating transsexuality within Clifford’s
dialectical parameter of “traveling in dwelling, dwelling in traveling,” it can have the
very uncanny effect o f unsettling and queering Clifford’s male nationalist diasporic
narrative (thus queering the diaspora). At the same time, it helps generate
“diasporic” thinking on the transsexual subjectivity that is figured by unfulfilled
needs o f dwelling and traveling trapped in conditions where neither secure dwelling
nor legitimate traveling is feasible (thus diasporicizing the queer). Transsexuals can
indeed be looked at as traveling agents who refuse to be tamed by citizenship’s
gender binary that fixes one’s gender trajectory on his/her bom sex. As
undocumented gender travelers, transsexuals insist on a willful, transgressive
traveling, fending off the surveillance o f the sex/gender system in search of their
own desired gendered dwelling spots, while they must also negotiate with it in order
to obtain limited citizenship rights predicated on predetermined gender boundaries
and territories.
Transsexuality’s simultaneous modes o f dwelling/traveling in the sexual third
time-space induces an interjecting citizenship imaginary whereby citizenship claims
of gender dwelling and traveling need to be negotiated and balanced: on one hand,
the need for belonging to a gendered “home” and the strategic quest for equal rights
based on juridical gender categories, what I term “dwelling in traveling;” on the
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other, the freedom to travel, to the self-expression and self-negotiation o f gender
identity, challenging the heteronormative roots of citizenship categories, what I dub
“traveling in dwelling.” I characterize this expansion of binary citizenship categories
in the gender dimension, morphing citizenship, which consists of a dialectical mode
of “morphing in” and “morphing out.” Specifically, if “dwelling in traveling” may
be seen as involving transsexuals “morphing into” the binary citizenship category of
M or F, “traveling in dwelling” can be looked at as involving transsexuals “morphing
out o f ’ the conventional trajectory o f M or F to explore and create other gendered
possibilities in the sexual third time-space.
“Dwelling in traveling” (morphing in) challenges the gender script of
citizenship by forcing the binary categories “M” and “F” to be inclusive o f subjects
bom with the “opposite” biological body, thereby stretching and expanding the
original meanings o f the categories o f man and woman. “Traveling in dwelling”
(morphing out) challenges the fundamental binary system o f citizenship, stipulating
that a citizen has a right to travel to gender/sexual destinations other than those
labeled as “M” or “F” in the sexual third time-space. Morphing citizenship shifts a
transsexual subject’s citizenship category from M to F or from F to M, as well as
from M or F to something else, to other destinations, thus reconfiguring and
multiplying the gender categories o f citizens.
“Dwelling in traveling” (morphing in) signifies an insistent will of “I am”: I
am a man, even though my bom sexed body parts do not conform to the official
territory of male; or, recognize me as a woman, even though everyone says my body
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indicates otherwise; or, I was bom a female, and I need to be embodied and
recognized as a man even though I feel like neither man nor woman. “Traveling in
dwelling” (morphing out) signifies a determined will of “1 want”: I want other
options, other identities, other rules, other gendered relations and sexual practices
besides those accorded official man or woman. “Dwelling in traveling” aspires to
recognition o f transsexuals as a male or female citizen like all other men and women;
“traveling in dwelling” covets recognition of transsexuals and other transgender
subjects as citizens even though they identify with neither man nor woman. I argue
that these jostling needs, desires, and narratives of “dwelling/traveling” and
“morphing-in/morphing-out” embodied in the diverse transsexual subjectivities and
trajectories bespeak a psychosomatic mode of “cosmopolitanism within,” as these
undocumented gender travelers cross officially prescribed gender/sexual boundaries
and territories in re-narrating the binary gender script of citizenship in the sexual
third-time space border zone.
III. Dwelling in Traveling (Morphing In)
Writing the life, the trope evidences, inscribes it as a journey: a trajectory in
which episodes lead toward a destination. The life written visibly and
inevitably takes on this same progressive, connective, and destined pattern of
the journey: departure, transition, and the home o f reassignment.
Jay Prosser, Second Skins6 4
Beginning with “dwelling in traveling,” in this section I will examine
transsexuality’s jostling tensions o f pain and embodiment, remembering and
forgetting, and the desire for belonging and “home” on their somatic journey. The
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conventional idea of transsexuality follows the trajectory of “man becoming woman”
or “woman becoming man,” but the very fact that one has to change sex to occupy
the opposite location means that the subject is already different from the dominant
definition o f man or woman. By invoking the concept of “dwelling,” I attempt to
designate transsexuals’ desire to be and for home. What they take to be “home”
varies from one to another: for some it means to blend into M or F without a trace,
for others it means redefining M or F, and still for others it means to be in a
transitioning state (as neither M nor F but both) while still dwelling as M or F. No
matter where they take to be their home, and no matter whether they successfully
make a home in their body, “dwelling in traveling” is invoked to delineate the
somatic feeling of sexed disembodiment and gender dislocation that one feels needed
to be reconstituted in order to feel “home” in his/her body again.
This desire to settle into a home goes against the grain of queer and
transgender theory that resists dwelling into categorical definition and upholds
fluidity as critical virtue. Viviane Namaste points out that as it focuses
disproportionately on literary and cultural texts, “queer theory as it is currently
practiced ... exhibits a remarkable insensitivity to the substantive issues of
transgendered people’s everyday lives.”6 5 She argues that transsexual bodies are
more than about gender identity, performance, or “the interesting remark that we
expose how gender works;” rather, “our lives and our bodies are constituted in the
mundane and uneventful,”6 6 in the dissonance o f being displaced and not at home.
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By staging the erasure o f transgender subjectivity, Namaste faults queer theory for its
“tragic misreadings.”6 7
Prosser also argues that there is something corporeal in transsexuals’
narrative of somatic disembodiment that queer theory’s emphasis on the
performative fails to capture. As “queer theory’s approbation has been directed
toward the subject who crosses the lines of gender [e.g. transvestite, drag queen, or
butch woman], not those of sex [e.g. transsexual],” he writes, it neglects to account
for the bodiliness o f gender transition that “does not shift the subject away from the
embodiment o f sexual difference but more fully into it.”6 8 Prosser argues that
hormonal treatment and sex-change operation are procedures of shedding a “second
skin” (the extra skin, the “wrong” body) for transsexuals towards a rebirth: to
become what they have been inside all along.6 9 In his words, transsexual narratives
embody a sense “from fragmentation to integration; from alienation to reconciliation;
from loss to restoration.”7 0 Prosser speaks of “gendered realness,” that transsexual
and transgendered lives and bodies do not so much reveal “the fictionality of gender
categories” as their continued meanings for subjects. He asks: “why hand over
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gendered realness when it holds so much sway?” Echoing this position, Jason
Cromwell similarly argues that while performative theory is right to point out how
people “‘do gender’ in the presence o f others,” it does not delineate why people still
manifest a particular gender when they are alone. Contra Butler who argues that
there is no “being” (gender identity) behind the deed (expression of gender),
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Cromwell asserts that for transsexuals, “gender and gendered identity are, and feel,
basic to beingness.”7 2
Feminist author Adrienne Rich once wrote, “When I write ‘the body,’ I see
nothing in particular. To write ‘my body’ plunges me into lived experience,
particularity: I see scars, disfigurements, discolorations, damages, losses, as well as
what pleases me ...” As transsexuals who write about “my body” rather than the
abstracted “the body,” Namaste, Prosser and Cromwell capture the immediate
bodiliness of gender dislocation, and the desire to right it in order to feel at home in
their body. Like other subjects, there is no universal bodily experience for all
transsexuals. Still, in many transsexual experiences, to shed one’s skin and to travel
outside a given sexed body is not initiated by a desire to deconstruct gender, but to
remake one’s body in order to dwell on a habitable gendered spot. The reason to
travel is to dwell: dwelling in traveling.
As they dwell into opposite gender categories, transsexuals re-scripts the
gender rule of citizenship through “morphing in,” stipulating that a male citizen does
not have to be bom with a male body, and a female citizen does not have to be bom
with a female body. In fact, for many o f them, even the ultimate traveling
destination or dwelling point is not necessarily the stereotypical, heteronormative
definition o f M or F. As Cromwell, a FTM himself, recounts, “All my young life I
knew I was a boy.” His absence o f a penis never convinces him otherwise.7 4 He
argues, “most female-bodied transpeople have always had the self-concept of being
male and/or man, although the degree differs.” Indeed, for reasons ranging from
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financial constraint, health, medical eligibility, low success rate of phalloplasty, self-
identification, and politics, many FTMs “choose to live ... as men with vaginas,”
thereby challenging the patriarchal myth that one has to have a penis in order to be a
man.7 5 One informant in Cromwell’s ethnographic study puts it this way: “If I didn’t
have the label transexual I’d probably think o f myself as a man with a female body.
I belong to neither sex, yet I’m both: I have a beard and a deep voice, I’ve had a
mastectomy but I still have a vagina. I don’t have a problem with that, neither does
my wife, but society does.”7 6 In addition to sex body parts, there is also no singular
gender trajectory for FTMs: while some adhere to conventionally masculine roles,
others are flexible and may incorporate their former feminine traits into their new
roles.7 7 The desire to be, to attain (partial) sexed embodiment, and to dwell on a
gender identity is there, but the dwelling spot is not a simple replica of the
heterosexual straight man with a penis. Cromwell writes, “we are not like other men.
Many transpeople acknowledge that their histories, identities, bodies, and sexualities
7 0
are different from nontransgendered men and women.” For those FTMs who
desire the recognition as male citizens with vagina, they force the category “M” to be
inclusive o f subjects not only bom with, but continue to possess, the “opposite”
biological body, thus stretching and expanding the original meanings of the
citizenship categories o f man and woman. They claim the right to morph into man,
dwelling on the “M” territory, despite the absence o f the bodily “prerequisites.”
This elastic reconstruction o f home, “man,” by FTMs is also addressed by
Henry Rubin. Rubin points out that many FTMs indeed simply want to live as
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“ordinary men.”7 9 In Rubin’s study, FTM informants express the feeling that their
bodies have betrayed and failed to express “the internalized, core sense o f self that
they have carried with them since childhood”8 0 As they felt “an extraordinary sense
of discomfort with their bodies,” “[t]hey longed to restore the link between their
8 1
bodies and their core identities in order to be recognizable again.” Yet, rather than
fading into common men, most o f them resist “dominant, white masculinity.” Their
sexuality varies: ranging from heterosexual men, queer-identified heterosexual men,
o o
gay men, bisexual, engaging in gay sex with other FTM, or asexual. Noting that
many FTMs do not live according to hegemonic masculine codes, Rubin indicates
that their somatic transformation does not necessarily lend them in masculine
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heterosexuality; rather, they are constructing different ways o f being men. This is
not to say that FTMs never exhibit stereotypically masculine behavior; rather, such
manifestation often varies depending on social contexts. Rubin notes,
If their status as men is challenged, they will choose to appear as stereotypically
male as possible and behave like the most ‘manly’ of men. Their behavior may be
hostile, oppressive, and even violent in ways that deny recognition to women and
other men. Conversely, if they are recognizable as men, they will feel comfortable
enough to deviate from the dominant types of manly presentation and behavior.8 4
Hence, while transsexuals may indeed pass as ultramasculine or ultrafeminine, Rubin
provides a more contextualized interpretation than that of Raymond and Hausman
who simply argue that transsexuals are dupes o f gender. How a transsexual presents
himself/herself has much to do with his/her sense of security in a given social
context. What is important to underline here is the way in which FTMs, again, help
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us rethink the gender requirements of citizenship as for biological male and female in
heterosexual relationships only.
Some transsexuals do not start their journey with a strong feeling o f being the
“opposite" gender. This, however, does not take away the desire for dwelling. Ed, a
FTM informant in Rubin’s study, comments: “I don’t feel like a woman although I
don’t know exactly what a woman would feel like or what a man would feel like.
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But I don’ t identify with my female parts.” Even without knowing what a man or a
woman feels like, Ed’s disidentification with his bom sexed body results in a sense
o f disembodiment that he feels needed to be reconstituted as a man in order to feel
“right” or feel “home.” In fact, although transgender theorist Bomstein argues that
there is no rule to gender, even she has not stopped dwelling. Writing on her own
MTF transitioning, Bomstein says, “I’ve no idea what ‘a woman’ feels like. I never
did feel like a girl or a woman; rather, it was my unshakable conviction that I was
not a boy or a man. It was the absence of a feeling, rather than its presence, that
convinced me to change my gender.”8 6 While Bomstein may take her “absence of
feeling” to mean the undermining of gender meanings, such reading is possible only
if she blocks out her sense of somatic dislocation that desires for re-embodiment. Pat
Califia thus suggests, despite her claim to be living without gender, Bomstein’s own
photo image throughout her book “is not readable as anything other than the image
of a beautiful, feminine woman.” Califia argues, “Bomstein ... has gone to a lot of
trouble, pain, and expense to acquire a body that reads as a woman’s body.... Why
go through years o f taking hormones, expensive and painful surgery, and a difficult
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transition period if the end result is to dispense with any clear gender
identification?”8 7 This is not to say that Bomstein’s gender identity is that o f a
“natural woman” or that her identification is not fluid; it does mean that, however,
Bomstein’s identity is not traveling limitless beyond, but always locatable in some
dwelling spot.
But to interject “dwelling” with “in traveling” is also to resist the temptation
to settle into a rosy imagery o f home, as if categorical homeliness is all that matters.
This is not the assimilationist American Dream, as if transsexuals are gender
immigrants moving from the “wrong country (body)” to the “right country (body).”
Transsexuals, after all, are still traveling in the abject sexual third time-space: their
“home” or dwelling spot is built on the borderlands. It is for this reason that
Prosser’s homely narrative of memory/forgetting needs to be problematized.
Prosser writes in his essay, “No Place Like Home,”
Transsexual subjects themselves have traditionally figured their transition as a final
going home, a trajectory that is only worth its risks, complications, and intense pain
(somatic and psychic) because it will allow one to finally arrive at where one should
have always been: the destination, the telos of this narrative (being able to live in
one’s ‘true identity’) is all.... The period of transition [valorized in queer theory] ...,
the actual crossing, is simply a means to an end rather an end in itself...8 8
In Second Skins, he furthers, “Journeys, like narratives, have points of departure and
destination, beginnings and ends; writing allows the transsexual to make
8 9
connections, to trace ‘how I got here.’” By placing transsexuality on a trajectory o f
“going home,” arriving at the “fe/os,” reaching a “destination” and an “end,” and
finally getting “here,” Prosser valorizes the narrative o f home and displaces the
narrative o f in-between borders. Halberstam remarks, “the journey home for the
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transsexual may come at the expense o f a recognition that others are permanently
dislocated.”9 0 The dichotomous construction between “departure” and “destination,”
“beginning” and “end,” “here” and “there,” I suspect, leads Prosser to a similarly
problematic dichotomous construction between “memory” and “forgetting.”
Particularly, Prosser weaves in the narrative o f somatic memory/forgetting to
delineate the fleshly experience of sex (dis)embodiment in transsexuals. He argues,
“What makes the transsexual able and willing to submit to ... the splitting, cutting,
removal, and reshaping of organs, tissues, and skin ... is the drive to get the body
back to what should have been.” Prosser distinguishes between agnosia and the
phantom limb. He argues, before their transitioning, transsexuals are in a state of
agnosia, a “forgetting in the body image of somatically attached, functioning
parts.”9 1 That is, their disidentification with their bom sexed body parts—which are
really not part o f them, which should not have been there—makes them incapable o f
generating any feeling for their own body as if their limbs have been lost. As one
FTM informant in Rubin’s study states: “You end up basically just seeing yourself
from the neck up. You don’t even want to look at the rest o f your body.” Rubin
notes, “FTMs become disembodied selves who refuse to recognize their breasts.”9 2
In reconstructive surgery, phantom limb is put in place to treat agnosia,
“represent[ing] the remembering in the body image of parts actually lost from the
material body.” Sex reassignment surgery functions for transsexuals as a phantom
limb, but different from the case o f amputee, it does not reconstitute “the body ...
that actually existed in the past, ... but one that should have existed.” Prosser
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argues, in their act of “remembering,” the transsexual's embodied becoming is not
“the return to home per se ... but to the romanticized ideal of home.”9 3
While Prosser’s narrative o f memory/forgetting usefully delineates
transsexuals’ need and desire o f dwelling into a “home,” he nonetheless neglects a
different dynamic o f memory/forgetting that unsettles such homely imagery.
Specifically, wouldn’t the transsexuals’ prior unspeakable body parts always be in
and part of their “memory”? Or, to put it differently, can transsexuals do away with
their pre-existed body with a willful “forgetting”? Cromwell writes, “However
much they may pass, transpeople, whether they identify as trans or not, are always
aware of their transness—an awareness situated in their bodies.... Transpeople,
especially those who take hormones and have had surgeries, are aware that their
bodies are or have been transsexed or reconstructed.”9 4 The scars on the body, the
once somatic feeling o f gender dislocation, the taunting by gender defenders, the
trips to the psychotherapist’s office, the “passing” rituals, the hormonal
transformation, the surgical reconstruction, the fear of being “read,” the loss of
lovers and jobs, the bathroom dilemma, the filing o f change o f gender status and
name in institutional documents, and the pressure to pass and fear for personal
safety, all function as the vicissitudes of remembrance of one’s “trans-sex ed” and
“trans-gendered” bodies on the precarious borderlands.
To be sure, Prosser is not calling on one to fade into gender binary, as he
makes it clear that transsexual autobiographical writing is precisely meant to make
the “trans” journey visible and public.9 5 Prosser’s ultimate home is not that o f a
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“man” or a “woman,” but a “transgendered home” which, in order to be built, “we
have to leave the home [M or F] we reach in passing.”9 6 Still, the way Prosser
valorizes “home” and bodily restoration, and the way he constructs memory and
forgetting as a dichotomous and complimentary processing rather than a jostling and
dialectical one, is symptomatic of his resistance to the “uninhabitable ... borderlands
in between.”9 7
Karin Aguilar-San Juan, in “Going Home: Enacting Justice in Queer Asian
America,” writes about the ambivalence of “going home when ... there is really no
QO
place I call ‘home.’” To Aguilar-San Juan, as a queer Asian American, gesturing
toward the ethnic home is both “necessary” (for a sense of completion) and
“impossible” (because family requires heteronormativity).9 9 At the same time, the
queer or transgender home may well be “a place from which Asian Americans are
always already negated, made invisible, excluded.”1 0 0 The desire of dwelling for
many subordinate subjects does not come with a guarantee that there will always be
a welcoming home, but a persistent sense o f living on the borders. Indeed, while
Prosser illustrates how transsexual subjects suffer from agnosia which can only be
treated through surgical reconstruction in order for them to feel at home again with
their body, the color o f one’s skin is not something that can be easily washed away in
order for one to be at “home” inside the North American or European state territory.
It sticks with you and it stays with you: there is no shedding o f the second skins.
Halberstam’s euphoric reading o f cosmetic “race change” (including “the surgical
contortions o f Michael Jackson”) in undermining the fixity of race and class is an
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overstatement.1 0 1 In the case o f Prosser, the non-discussion of skin color o f the
subaltern subjects— and their permanent dislocation on the border in a “wrong
body”—becomes a glaring absence in his otherwise powerful narrative of
transsexuals’ skin shedding.
This is not simply to say that Prosser fails to consider race or transgender
immigrants o f color, it is to say that by conceptualizing the transsexual journey as
bipolar points (beginning and end, departure and destination), Prosser displaces and
marginalizes the bordered experiences and subjectivities of both transsexuals and
other subordinate bodies dwelling on the borders. In Prosser’s hands, the holistic
narrative of dwelling-in-traveling in the sexual third time-space is reduced to a mere
dwelling. However, as Prosser himself recognizes, in order to create a transgender
community, one cannot stop at categorical dwelling, but must leave “the home we
reach in passing,” thus, traveling (even) in dwelling.
IV. Traveling in Dwelling (Morphing Out)
What would it be like to live in a society where you could take a vacation
from gender?
Pat Califia, Sex Changes 1 0 2
In Sexing the Body, biologist and feminist writer Anne Fausto-Sterling argues that a
“body’s sex is simply too complex” to be contained within the gender category of
man and woman.1 0 3 Examining intersexuals or people bom with both sexes’ body
parts or ambiguous genitalia, she asks: “If a child is bom with two X chromosomes,
oviducts, ovaries, and a uterus on the inside, but a penis and scrotum on the outside,
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... is the child a boy or a girl?”1 0 4 Between the male and female as “the extreme
ends of a biological spectrum,” Fausto-Sterling recognizes “many other bodies ...
that evidently mix together anatomical components conventionally attributed to both
males and females.” In fact, she writes, “If nature really offers us more than two
sexes, then it follows that our current notions of masculinity and femininity are
cultural conceits.”1 0 5 Taking this further, “our beliefs about gender affect what kinds
of knowledge scientists produce about sex in the first place.”1 0 6
While “dwelling in traveling” accentuates transsexuals’ need for home and
reconciliation with their gender dislocation in their effort to attain sex reassignment
surgery and to relocate and reside into a gendered dwelling spot, it simultaneously
signals that, contra Prosser, there is no “telos” or universal destination for every
transsexing and transgendering journey. Transsexuality, in the gender travel
narrative, does not stop at dwelling into categories; it also “morphs out” the
conventional trajectory by challenging, mixing, reassembling and redefining existing
gender categories, and in the process creates new habitable spots in the sexual third
time-space: thereby traveling even in dwelling. Following Fausto-Sterling, an
intersexed or transsexed body proliferates multiple dwelling sites and ways of
“redoing” gender on the borderlands between M and F. Here, “traveling in
dwelling” (morphing out) can be used to describe the ways in which transsexuality
challenges the fundamental binary system o f citizenship, stipulating a citizen’s right
to travel to gender/sexual destinations other than those labeled as “M” or “F” in the
sexual third time-space.
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While some transsexuals may despair over their incapacity to ever become
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“real” men (no penis) or “real” women (incapable of pregnancy), others seek to
redefine those very terms by rearranging and redoing genders. As discussed earlier,
for example, some FTMs live as men with vaginas, thus challenge the phallocentric
equation of manhood with penis that predicates the gender requirement o f
citizenship. In fact, some FTM informants in Rubin’s study went through pregnancy
while insisting they were a man, not a woman. One of them, Matthew, considered
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his attachment to his new baby in “the way a father would.” While more analysis
is needed before we label it as a “paternal pregnancy,” it does show that FTMs,
despite dwelling into the category of “man,” do not stop traveling on by redefining
the masculine gender role with and through a female body.
As we have also seen, neither do transsexuals follow the heteronormative
gender roles by blending into straight heterosexuality: they may self-identify as gay,
lesbian, bisexual, queer, or engaging in sex with other transsexuals. They may see
themselves as both sexes and neither, and incorporate their prior sexed body parts or
gender traits into their new roles. Hence, while in psychiatrist Robert Stoller’s
“diagnostic criteria,” FTMs are attracted only to the conventionally feminine,
heterosexual women desiring pregnancy and motherhood,1 0 9 this is not necessarily
the location that FTMs adopt as their habitable spot. Bomstein, for example, a MTF
with a female lover, considers herself a “transsexual lesbian.” As her lover goes
through her own sex change in becoming a man, Bomstein’s subjectivity changes yet
once again in a relationship with a FTM.1 1 0 One FTM informant in Cromwell’s
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study, Justin M, also disassociates with heterosexual masculinity and identifies as a
“feminine gay man.”11 1 While many may think that FTMs, having chosen the path
of becoming a man, would have no use of their vagina and strongly desire for a
penis, it is not always the case. As Cromwell points out, many “derive pleasure from
genitalia, including vaginal penetration.” He cites two informants:
Rich: I am one of those who ‘enjoy my cunt’ but still see myself as male. I do not
identify as a lesbian or a dyke. I am a sexual being and will be sexual with the
organs I have.
Mark Craig: I’ll use the equipment I’ve got. To me, that’s a sign of strength, of my
manhood.1 1 2
Hence, while gender traveling in transsexuality may have the essentializing tendency
to pull subjects toward M or F, the dominant conception o f gender binary is
incapable of containing transsexual travelers within its territorial border. Many
transsexuals travel on (even) in dwelling, creating new gender/sexual categories on
the borderlands. The notion of gender binarity in the dwelling trajectory o f
citizenship lags far behind actual living human practices: transsexuals’ variety of
sexual acts change the trajectory of their gender roles; conversely, their new gender
roles make them open to more variety o f sexual acts.
Mitch G, an informant in Cromwell’s study, states, “Attraction is on many
levels with genitals being only one o f those.” FTMs may have relationship not just
with heterosexual women, but also with lesbians, men who identify as straight, gay
or bisexual, or other transpeople.1 1 3 As Cromwell indicates, specialized terms are
now created for “nontranspeople who are attracted to and have sexual relations with
transpeople: trannytrollop, t-bird, transhag, transfaghag, and trannyhawk.”1 1 4 When
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transpeople have sexual relationships with other transpeople, they may “utilize every
body part, ... exploring all the possibilities that we can with each other.”11 5 Nataf in
Cromwell’s study describes his sexuality in this way:
With a heterosexual man I can be their best nightmare fantasy in the shape of a boy
hustler. With a heterosexual woman I can be a pretty hetero male; or if I perceive
her as a fag hag, I can be a faggot with bi tendencies. With a lesbian top femme I
can be a high heel worshipping boy bottom or a third sex butch, a lesbian man. With
a gay man I can be a cock worshipping catamite or a fisting top. With gender
ambiguous bi men and women and sexually ambiguous transgendered people maybe
I can just be myself.1 1 6
Dwelling does not stop the desire to travel, to further explore, experiment and create
different possibilities of doing gender— traveling in dwelling. In this way,
transsexuality helps expand the gender categories of citizenship by stipulating a
citizen’s right to form gendered relations and sexual practices besides those accorded
official man or woman, thus morphing the original M or F to something else.
Such diverse sexuality in transsexual subjectivity, however, does not signify
the end of gender. On the bodily matters of sex and gender, one does not always
have the resources, the ability, the will, or, for want of a better word, the “calling,” to
travel to any place he/she wants. It is traveling within the limits of circumstances.
Fausto-Sterling argues that, “gender variation [does not] mean the concept o f gender
would disappear entirely.”1 1 7 In the sexual third time-space, given gender binaries
are not rendered meaningless; rather, gender deviants and sexual diasporas make do
within the limits of their sexed bodies in redefining, rearranging, and translating
existing gender categories into new meanings, new identities, new ways o f being,
acting and loving. This is not simply “undoing” gender, pace Butler,1 1 8 but a redoing
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and recoding, in C. Jacob Hale’s words, wherein “the dominant cultural gender
categorizations are not ignored but reorganized.”1 1 9 It is an act o f bricolage. Hence,
while in the above epigraph Califia rightly underlines the sense of gender travel by
asking, “What would it be like to live in a society where you could take a vacation
from gender?” I suspect that traveling in the case of transsexuality will take on the
form of “a [tourist’s] vacation from gender.” Rather than doing away with gender,
Cromwell writes, “Transseexualities are grounded within a paradigm that uses
transsituated language to express multiple ways of being identified, of being
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embodied, and o f being sexual.”
As Hale points out, “fluidity of gender performativity and identification is
clearly not necessary to disrupt unitariness o f sex/gender.”1 2 1 It is necessary to
theorize gender multiplicity “in terms of multiple, context-specific, and purpose-
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specific gendered statuses ...” Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick echoes, “If these
identities are not fixed and immutable, then, neither are they random or endlessly
proliferative.” Neither essentialist nor free play, traveling in dwelling is better
characterized as gestures o f “daring surmise and cognitive rupture, followed by
moments o f experiential reflection, forward projection, trial and error, and reality
testing of such surmise.” Each temporary dwelling may be understood as
identification with “the growing edge of a self.” Contra Prosser, dwelling is not
necessarily settling into a permanent home, but in Sedgwick’s words, a “new site of
provisional meaning-consolidation ... [where] many new paths and itineraries
evidently become visible— ... their existence could never have been guessed from
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the place from which one began.” Each dwelling may instigate yet a new travel;
each traveling is limited by the need of body to dwell. Sedgwick argues, one may
never return to the previous dwelling spot, but “proceeds to the next fork in another
path, proceeds with a full respect for the integrity and gravity as well as for the
contingency o f one’s journey.” Because of the absence of telos of transsexual
trajectory, subjects who travel do not all end up in one place, but spread around
different sites along the gender borderlands. At the same time, gender travelers do
not go outside of gender, but are always brought back to locatable dwelling spots.
Hence, while “morphing out” underlines the self-expression of gender identity and
challenges the heteronormative roots o f citizenship categories, it does not proliferate
gender/sexual identities limitlessly beyond, but is always mediated by the historical
sex/gender structure and the needs o f dwelling.
V. Morphing Citizenship in Legal Contestation
Now, as then, physical genitals form a poor basis for deciding the rights and
privileges of citizenship.
Anne Fausto-Sterling, Sexing the Body1 2 4
In reformulating gender/sexual arrangements, transsexuals’ morphing
citizenship expands our conception o f citizens other than the conventional dualistic
M and F. But how has transsexuals’ narrative o f gender dwelling/traveling been
translated into law as citizenship right? As it should become clear at this point, to
read transsexuality in the dialectical narrative of gender dwelling/traveling means
that there is no single universal trope o f transsexuality: for some, there is a need for
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home and a sense o f belonging; for others, there is a desire to travel, to go beyond
the fixating categorical reification; still for others, both impulses jostle for attention,
coexist painfully and complexly in the transsexed and transgendered body.
Transsexuals’ citizenship claims thus need to be negotiated and balanced: on one
hand, the need o f belonging at home and the strategic quest for equal rights based on
juridical categories (morphing in); on the other, the freedom to travel, to the self-
expression and self-negotiation of gender identity beyond the heteronormative roots
o f citizenship categories (morphing out). The dialectical modes of “dwelling in
traveling” and “traveling in dwelling” situate transsexuals not as outside gender, but
within gender while redoing gender, thus transgressing the required binary gender
status in the dwelling trajectory of citizenship.
In current transsexual and transgender politics, however, activists often adopt
positions that reflect one singular mode— dwelling or traveling—to the exclusion of
the other. On one hand, most indicative in the statement, “why hand over gendered
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realness when it holds so much sway,” Prosser advocates for a “politics of home,”
supporting the continued incorporation o f transsexuality into medicalization (and
subject to its pathologization as “mental disorder”) in order to stake claims to gender
belonging and subsequent treatment and operation.1 2 6 Such claims include, he
writes,
[Ejnlisting the binary of sexed assignment to argue for total health insurance
coverage for sex reassignment; using the state’s own insistence on sexed belonging
to argue for the right to it of those subjects currently denied it—the right of those
who change sex to also change their birth certificates so that they may legally live,
work, marry, and die in their reassigned sex.1 2 7
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Against Stone’s notion o f “posttranssexuality,” Prosser asserts, “in ceding our claims
to sexed location, we relinquish what we do not yet have: the recognition of our
sexed realness; acceptance as men and women; fundamentally, the right to gender
homes.”1 2 8 Proceeding from a desire to expand the categories “man” and “woman”
to incorporate transsexual subjects, Prosser’s position embodies the mode of
“morphing in.” While I support his staking transsexual claims to citizenship based
on the desire to fitting transsexuals into gender binary (and thus changing the
original meanings of M and F), I worry that his rhetoric overplays the desire for
home into the hands of heteronormativity, neglecting the very border-ness that has
underlined the transsexual body all along.
On the other hand, some question whether binary categories are too “unreal”
to be useful and whether juridical citizenship should not be disengaged altogether.
For example, Riki Anne Wilchins, cofounder of Transexual Menace, an activist
group that engages in in-your-face picketing-style political activism (similar to that
of Queer Nation), argues that transgender politics should seek to detach bodies from
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any fixed and predetermined meaning. Following Butler’s notion that gender “is
not a being, but a doing,” a performing, Wilchins claims that essentializing
transpeople into men or women “... generally works to our disadvantage ... [and]
places us in the position of pursuing a ‘realness’ defined on other people’s
bodies.”1 3 1 Lisa Bower similarly argues that laws, in constructing fixed group
categories, are insufficient in understanding the fluid, unstable, and shifting nature of
sexual identity, or nonidentity. Bower advocates that queer subjects shift their forum
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o f contention from “official recognition” by legal institutions towards a “politics of
direct address” (such as that o f Queer Nation, Queer Nights Out, Queer Shopping
Network), an everyday politics of cultural improvisations that affirm the public
visibility o f alternative sexual practices and gender identities in different social
spheres.1 3 2 Halberstam best captures the sentiment of this disengagement with
juridical citizenship in identifying a queer rebellion “not in opposition to the law but
through indifference to the law,” an assertion o f power in a gesture of refusal: “Well,
I don’t care.”1 3 3 These positions underline a desire to travel away from gender
binary embedded within the juridical system. But while “I don’t care” is often an apt
and politically necessary gesture towards the authority of gender defenders and the
many inhumane and suppressive aspects o f the law, it loses its relevancy in relation
to many sexual minorities, gender travelers and diasporic deviants who do care, who
cannot afford not to care, and who are still in need o f the very juridical categories
(however dull or problematic) to forge themselves into citizenship and make rights
claims. It loses its political potentiality when it situates “queer” subjects as outside
the gender system rather than, always inside.
If Prosser posits a politics of dwelling based on essentialist juridical
categories, Wilchins, Bower, and Halberstam aspire for a politics o f traveling beyond
reified gender categories. Both positions contain insights and limitations. It is my
view that transsexual/transgender politics needs to negotiate these jostling tensions
of dwelling and traveling. On one hand, legalist strategy o f recognition needs to
politicize citizenship based on given official categories but also create new
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definitions of subjectivity to highlight a citizen’s right to the free expression o f
gender/sexual identity. On the other, while juridical categories tend to sustain the
system of gender binary, queer theorists need to take into account the material
urgency of transsexual subjects who do have stakes in their legal protection— in
dealing with issues from job discrimination, rape, birth certificates, marriage license,
custody battle, to lethal violence— aside from the potential elasticity o f their identity.
Resorting to one strategy at the expense of another is to put transsexual/transgender
subjects in an impossible dilemma. Paisley Currah writes,
Transsexual, transgender, and gender-variant people are thus besieged on both
sides—by queer theorists’ readings of transgender subjectivity, which poses
transgender people and their rights claims as interesting only insofar as their very
subjectivity works to deconstruct categories, rather than as identity-bearing subjects
who might wish to enjoy freedom from state-sponsored violence and discrimination,
and, simultaneously, by advocates for lesbian and gay rights who perceive such
gender-crossing practices and identities as too radically other, too inauthentic, or too
marginal to hegemonic U.S. gender norms to be included in the politics of official
recognition that seeks legislative and judicial remedies for identity-based
discrimination.1 3 4
Contesting citizenship in the sexual third-time space cannot be bounded by one
singular trajectory, as either “dwelling” or “traveling,” but must negotiate both:
dwelling-in-traveling, traveling-in-dwelling. Like other traveling agents,
transsexuals and transgender subjects have both the needs o f dwelling and the desires
o f traveling. Morphing citizenship needs to embody both the modes of “morphing
in” and “morphing out.”
In the following, by examining the contestation over morphing citizenship in
the legal arena, I argue that limited degree o f “dwelling in traveling” (morphing in)
has been recognized in the European Court o f Human Rights to accommodate
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transsexuals who desire to be M or F. While the law is still far behind in affirming,
“traveling in dwelling,” some transsexual subjects have found cracks and holes in
state surveillance to conduct “morphing out” within limited terrain.
“Morphing In ” in the European Court o f Human Rights
Limited recognition o f “morphing in” can best be found in the evolution of
transsexual rights struggle in the European Court of Human Rights (ECHR) that
revolves centrally around Article 8 “right to private life” (per the government’s
refusal to allow change of gender status on birth certificates that often put
transsexuals in humiliating situations when such proof is required at different social
and institutional functions) and Article 12 “right to marry” (per the official definition
of marriage as a union between biological man and woman that prevents
heterosexual transsexuals to form a legal matrimony like other man and woman).
Starting with Van Oosterwijck v. Belgium in 1980, transsexual subjects who brought
their cases to the Court repeatedly suffered losses until two decisive cases in 2002, 1
v. the United Kingdom and Christine Goodwin v. the United Kingdom, which, after a
long line o f precedents where the Court sided with the governments in trumping
transsexual rights, finally scored victory for transsexuals’ right to private life (Article
8) and right to marry (Article 12). However un-liberating the fluidity of gender
identity is restricted to a right to privacy and a right to marry, the result should be
considered no small undertaking in light of the history o f transsexual rights
contestation in the ECHR, and in the room that it allows for transsexuals to morph
into citizenship.
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The case o f Van Oosterwijck v. Belgium (1980) involved Danielle Van
Oosterwijck, a Belgium native, who was bom a female but had psychologically
identified as a male since age five. He suffered from depression and attempted
numerous suicides throughout his early life, and decided at age 22 to go through
hormonal and surgical treatment to change his physical sex. Facing humiliating
situations whenever he must present proof of birth or identity, and barred from
getting married and claiming social benefits, Van Oosterwijck asked the Belgium
government to change his civil status (both his forename and sex) on his birth
certificate. The government refused, arguing that 1) there was nothing to indicate
that Van Oosterwijck had always belonged “fundamentally” to the male sex; and 2)
the Registrar of Births had made no mistake in recognizing his outward appearance
at his birth. Van Oosterwijck then brought suit to the European Court of Human
Rights on the grounds that the government o f Belgium violated three articles in the
ECHR: 1) Article 3 “prohibition o f torture;” 2) Article 8 “right to respect for private
and family Life;” and 3) Article 12 “right to marry.” As the first transsexual case to
reach the ECHR, Van Oosterwijck vs. Belgium (1980) was thrown out of the Court,
which argued that the applicant had not exhausted domestic remedies and therefore it
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lacked jurisdiction over the case. As Eric Heinze points out, however, the Court
“might in fact have welcomed this opportunity to avoid adjudicating such thorny and
unfamiliar issues.”1 3 6
In Rees v. the United Kingdom (1986), the Court did reach a decision. Mark
Rees was bom female sex as Brenda Margaret Rees, but since early age she
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exhibited masculine behavior. At age 28 he started receiving hormonal treatment
and at age 32 he obtained surgical construction to change his sex, which the British
national health service bore the cost. Rees was able to change his name to a male
name with the prefix “Mr.” on all of his official documents (driver’s license,
passport, insurance cards etc.) except his birth certificate, which was needed as a
proof document at various social occasions including employment, insurance, and
college. Rees thus argued that he faced humiliating situations whenever presentation
of proof of birth or identity was required. The British government claimed that in
England and Wales, the birth certificate is a document revealing not current identity,
but “historical facts,” based exclusively on biological criteria: chromosomal,
gonadal, and genital sex. Therefore, the fact that Rees later in life felt that his
“psychological” sex was at odds with his physical-biological characteristics did not
indicate a factual error of the initial entry. Rees also argued that as the British law
defined marriage as a voluntary union between a man and a woman, he was
prevented from getting married to a biological woman. While the showing of birth
certificates was not needed at the wedding ceremony in Britain, anyone who
knowingly and willfully made a false oath or signed a false declaration in order to
obtain a marriage certificate violated the Perjury Act.
Like Van Oosterwijck, Rees thus brought suit to the ECHR, claiming that his
rights were violated under 1) Article 3 “prohibition o f torture;” 2) Article 8 “right to
respect for private and family life;” and 3) Article 12, “right to marry.” The alleged
complaint under Article 3 was declared inadmissible, and the Court refused to grant
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any relief under either Article 8 or 12.1 3 7 With respect to Article 8, the Court
decided that the “respect” for private life needed to strike a fair balance between the
general interests of the community and the individual. In the Court’s opinion, the
British government had tried its best to meet Rees’s request to the full extent
possible under its current system (i.e. changes in other official documents and
assistance in obtaining surgical treatment). The British government had no more
positive obligation to change its birth registry system— which was used for recording
“historical facts”—just for Rees.
However, in its interpretation o f Article 12, the Court revealed its true
intention. Particularly, it contended that the Article itself was about the protection of
traditional heterosexual marriage between a man and a woman—persons o f opposite
biological sex. Thus, in the end, in the Court’s eye, Rees was really a female, not a
male, despite his sex change. That is, even though the Court claimed earlier that
what the British government did with birth certificate was simply to record
“historical facts” rather than documenting “current identity,” in the eyes o f the
majority judges on the Court, the “biological sex at birth” was still the true, real, and
authentic essence of Rees’s current sexual identity. If the Court truly agreed that
Rees’ current sexual identity was a man despite his entry at birth as a female, it then
called into question as why Rees, now as a man, may not be allowed to marry a
woman. Here, the Court arbitrarily decided that Rees’s historical fact as a biological
female meant that he was a woman, as o f then, as o f now.
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In Cossey v. the United Kingdom (1990), Ms. Cossey again brought the
British government to the ECHR under Articles 8 and 12. Cossey was bom a male,
but by age 13 she realized that she was unlike other boys and identified
psychologically with the female sex. She began to dress as a woman and eventually
went through sex change when she was an adult. Cossey later married a man but
divorced in the same year. She sought financial relief, but the court in Britain
pronounced the marriage void because she was not a “female” according to the birth
certificate. Like Rees, Cossey was unable to change her status on the birth certificate
because it was used to record “historical facts” under the British system, thus
preventing her from attaining right to privacy at certain social and institutional
functions. Cossey asked the Court to depart from the precedent in the Rees decision.
The Court, however, refused to grant relief on both Articles on similar grounds as
Rees.i3S From Van Oosterwijck, Rees, to Cossey, the ECHR thus failed to recognize
transsexuals’ need o f dwelling into categorical placement as M or F.
Yet, in Cossey, Judge Martens delivered an unusually long dissenting opinion
that deserves attention for it presents the possibility of “morphing in.” Martens
agreed with the Court that the Rees case indeed did not differ much from Cossey.
However, Martens claimed, the Rees decision was decided wrongly and should have
been overturned, and that Cossey should be granted relief on both Articles 8 and 12.
Particularly, Martens argued that the well-being o f transsexuals needed to be met in
two conditions: 1) obtaining hormonal and surgical treatment so that their physical
sex/body can be brought into harmony with their psychological sex; and 2) their new
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sexual identity must be recognized not only socially but legally. Martens stated, “for
a transsexual the ‘rebirth’ he seeks to achieve with the assistance of medical science
is only successfully completed when his newly acquired sexual identity is fully and
in all respects recognized by law.” The British government, he argued, had done the
first part but not the second. Martens continued,
The endeavours of transsexuals to obtain legal recognition of what they feel as their
attaining the sex to which they have always belonged have, however, often met with
a marked aversion on the part of the authorities. It seems that the transsexual’s
attempts to ‘change sex’ infringe a deeply rooted taboo. At any rate, the first
reactions of authorities as well as of courts have been almost instinctively hostile
and negative.
The “aversion” and “infringement of a deeply rooted taboo” that Martens alluded to
signifies the potentiality of transsexuality in “morphing in,” destabilizing the binary
gender categories embedded in citizenship by forcing M and F to incorporate
subjects bom with “opposite” or different sexual organs.
Taking on the right to privacy in Article 8, Martens pointed out that the
British birth registry system did constitute “a continuing interference” with
transsexual’s private life. He wrote:
Sexual identity is not only a fundamental aspect of everyone’s personality but,
through the ubiquity of the sexual dichotomy, also an important societal fact. For
post-operative transsexuals sexual identity has, understandably, a very special and
sensitive importance because they acquired theirs deliberately, at a high cost in
mental and bodily suffering. To be condemned to live, as far as that identity is
concerned, in opposition to and thus ‘outlawed’ by their country’s legal system must
therefore cause permanent and acute personal distress to post-operative transsexuals
in the United Kingdom. That is to say nothing of the lifelong dread to which the
BSD-system condemns them, by obliging them, every time that their sex is legally
relevant, to make the painful choice between either hiding what legally is ‘the
truth’—with all the legal consequences of such untruthfulness, such as making
themselves liable to a criminal charge, dismissal or a demand for nullification of the
legal act in question—or revealing that legal ‘truth’ and facing at least the possibility
of very humiliating or even hostile reactions.
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Having refused the transsexuals’ request for full legal recognition, the Court thus
“sadly failed its vocation of being the last-resort protector of oppressed individuals.’'
With respect to the right to marry in Article 12, Martens argued that if the
Court already construed marriage as between persons of the opposite biological
sex—that is, only those who can together procreate are allowed to marry—then of
course the British government did not violate the Article. But the factors that
determined one’s sexual condition— chromosomal, gonadal, genital, and
psychological— all were capable of changing except the chromosomal. But why
should chromosomal be decisive? Martens asked:
Why should an individual who—although having since birth the chromosomes of a
male—at the moment he wants to marry no longer has testes or a penis but, on the
contrary, shows all the (outward) genital and psychological factors of a female (and
who is socially accepted as such), nevertheless, for the purpose of determining
whether that individual should be allowed to marry a man, be deemed to be still a
man himself?
Judge Martens’ opinion shows a deeper understanding of transsexuals’ sex change
than other judges on the Court. By advocating for a full legal recognition of
transsexuals’ needs and desires o f dwelling into man or woman like every other
citizen, Martens opens up a space in legal discourse to allow for morphing
citizenship. The Court did just that, though not until more than a decade later, in
officially recognizing transsexuals’ right to private life and right to marry in I v. the
United Kingdom (2002) and Christine Goodwin v. the United Kingdom (2002).1 3 9
Considering the span o f more than twenty years of struggle to attain the right
to privacy and right to (heterosexual) marriage for transsexuals in the international
human rights arena, the contestation is no small undertaking in allowing for a (even
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if limited) space for transsexuals to morph into citizenship’s binary gender
categories. This is certainly not intended to give the impression that privacy or
marriage is what transsexual “dwelling” is all about (other issues of safe dwelling
include protection from employment discrimination, rape and violence etc.), but it
helps indicate the ways in which legal recognition of transsexuals’ dwelling in
traveling does occur in certain circumstances in providing limited rights entitlements
and protection. More important, it also shows that to take rights as citizens,
transsexuals do need to sometimes settle into categories, even if just momentarily,
for the purpose of “official recognition.”
But one problem also emerges in Judge Martens’s opinion, when he followed
the other judges’ interpretation o f Article 12 as marriage between persons of
opposite sex. He wrote, “It is true that Article 12, by speaking of ‘men and women’,
clearly indicates that marriage is the union of two persons o f opposite sex.” The
only difference between Martens and other judges is that he believed this
“heterosexual” marriage should not be restricted to “biological” sex only. In reading
transsexuality as falling into the divergent paths o f M or F, however, Judge Martens,
like Prosser, reduces transsexuality to a mere “dwelling” rather than a more holistic
and dialectical narrative o f “dwelling in traveling” and “traveling in dwelling.” In
fact, as the transsexual contestation in the ECHR revolves centrally around the right
to privacy and right to marry, while glimpses o f “morphing in” can be found in the
Court’s legal discourse, the very heteronormative language of the law has thus far
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blocked out the possibility o f contesting over “morphing out” that will present an
even more destabilizing challenge to the gender binary of citizenship.
“ Morphing Out” in the Cracks and Holes o f Legal Surveillance and Beyond
While official recognition of “traveling in dwelling” has yet to exist,
sometimes cracks and holes in legal surveillance may be found that can enable
transsexuals to conduct limited “morphing out” in departing from the heterosexual
conjugal trajectory. Currah points out in the U.S., the “horrendous” same-sex
marriages have emerged in transsexual relationships because of the incapacity of
state law to fully regulate and discipline sexual relationships generated by complex
gender identifications. For example, Lori Buckwalter, a MTF in a “lesbian”
relationship to another woman, is allowed to marry her female lover in Oregon.
Buckwalter, at the moment o f her wedding, had just been taking hormones for a year
and not yet gone through sex reassignment surgery to officially change her sex. Ffer
official status as a “man” allowed her to marry her female lover in the disciplinary
eyes of the state as a heterosexual marriage even though the couple was same-
gendered. Yet, Buckwalter considers her matrimonial union as that of a
“homosexual” couple. Once she formally changed her gender identity, Buckwalter
was officially recognized as a woman, “resulting in a legal same-sex marriage.”1 4 0
Currah notes that in the U.S., regulations on the genital characteristics of to-be
married couples for transsexuality differ from state to state, ending up with “same-
sex” marriages in some cases and “heterosexual” ones in others.1 4 1
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Transsexual same-sex marriage may be seen as “traveling in dwelling,” in the
sense that these subjects, while changing sex to the “opposite” pole in order to dwell
into categorical placement as either M or F, do not stay on with heterosexual
relationship in the dwelling trajectory of citizenship, but instead travel on to arrive at
the site of homosexual conjugal arrangement. Due to state authority’s (mis)reading,
they are able to attain citizenship rights entitled to other married couples by turning
state surveillance on its head. It needs to be noted that, however, this “morphing
out” is strictly limited, as it is predicated upon (heterosexual) “matrimonial
dwelling” in the state’s eyes, determined by the chances of the couples’ genital
characteristics matching up with each individual state’s legal requirement.1 4 2 As
such, transsexuals’ dwelling destinations in their gender travel are largely
constrained by state heteronormativity, and their “traveling in dwelling” remains
unfulfilled and unprotected by law. This is the predicament o f border denizens in the
sexual third time-space.
“Morphing out” requires a more potent citizenship claim to resist the binary
gender categories—the categories inscribed in the sex/gender system— as the only
place citizens can occupy in their gender traveling. Currah argues that a legal
strategy that gains rights but leaves the dominant category and gender norms intact is
“a narrow victory.” She asserts, “it is vital that we get to the root o f the problem and
challenge the very premises of the classification system itself.”1 4 3 To accomplish
this goal, transgender activist Leslie Feinberg proposes the following:
Sex categories should be removed from all basic identification papers—from
driver’s licenses to passports—and since the right of each person to define their own
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sex is so basic, it should be eliminated from birth certificates as well. And
affirmative action—first won to redress some of the historic discrimination based on
race and sex—needs to be defended and expanded to include more victims of sex
and gender oppression.1 4 4
While 1 concur with Feinberg that sex classification on certain personal and public
documents is exceedingly unnecessary, I nonetheless wonder if an even more
political (and publicly educational) act is not to take out the categories, but to add
and multiply more gender categories on those very documents— an assertion o f a
citizen’s right in the gender/sexual dimension to “travel in dwelling” and “dwell in
traveling”—for those who would like to do so in the public space. Taking out the
categories may defeat the very purpose for an individual to actually define his/her
own sex and gender. Inscribing a category besides M or F is also to write oneself
into the sex/gender system as a rights-bearing citizen rather than outside. In fact,
maintaining and reinforcing affirmative action policies and extending them to
transsexual and transgender subjects hinge upon the preservation of these very
minority categories rather than their removal. The point here is that, to claim rights
as citizens, one cannot argue for “nonidentity” which others cannot recognize, but
must stake claims to different and multiple ways o f gender expression and identity
that, however complex, can be made locatable, understandable, translatable and
recognizable as other juridical categories besides M and F.
Critiquing the medicalization o f transsexualism that often depicts it as a
gender identity disorder and essentializes its trajectory as moving strictly from M to
F or vice versa, Hale argues that “justification for access to medically regulated
technologies [needs to be shifted] from category placement to personal desire.”1 4 5
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This signifies a move from dwelling to traveling. But Hale’s proposal neglects that
for some transsexuals, their “personal desire” is precisely to fit into “categorical
placement.” As Califia further points out, in the current climate, removing the
pathological diagnosis from the DSM-IV will take away the “officially-recognized
rationale” for transsexuals to exercise sex reassignment surgery.1 4 6 Contestations
over gender dwelling (morphing in) or gender traveling (morphing out) should not be
pursued at the expense of one another. An exclusive strategy will always leave the
“dwelling/traveling” needs of certain gender/sexual diasporas unfulfilled. A brighter
future of a holistic gender dwelling and traveling in the medical arena will hinge
upon what James Nelson identifies as the shifting from the current “disciplining”
model of the Benjamin Standards (HBIGDA) that privileges medical-professional
authority and pathologizes transsexuality to an “empowerment” model o f the Health
Law Standards (ICTLEP) that sees transsexual patients as consumer of services who
hold the predominant say in determining and reconstructing their gender identity
through hormonal injection and surgical operation.1 4 7 This, again, does not take the
transsexual subject to anyplace and everywhere s/he wants in a third space outside
gender, but rather enables the subject’s traveling to other locatable, (even if
temporary) dwelling locations other than M or F.
In the most recent development, the mainstream sexual civil rights
organization, Human Rights Campaign, after years of displacing transgender issues
from its white, middle-class, and respectable “gay and lesbian” agenda, has finally
announced in 2004 that it will support only a “transgender-inclusive” Employment
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Non-Discrimination Act (ENDA) that will include “gender expression and identity”
in addition to “sexual orientation” in its scope of protection.1 4 8 From the experience
o f the ECHR cases, I suspect that this right to “gender expression and identity” is
likely to provide more possibilities for gender dwelling (morphing in) than gender
traveling (morphing out). That, of course, remains to be seen. As we have known
now, however, a rights protection that provides the need of one without another can
only be a half-victory.
Thus far, the discrepancy between how transsexual subjects live out their
genders/sexualities in their everyday life and the limits imposed by the law shows a
disconnection between legal discourse and the reality o f gendered/sexual diversity.
It also figures transsexuals as gender outlaws, or, more correctly, as “undocumented”
gender travelers whose needs and desires for dwelling and traveling are in a
precarious state without substantive citizenship protection.
VI. Cosmopolitanism Without: Global Queer Visibility and
Undocumented Queer Traveling
Here, I would like to use the vantage point of transsexuality's
“cosmopolitanism within” to further reflect on the “cosmopolitanism without” o f the
globalization of queer visibility. Particularly, I argue, tending to transsexuals as
undocumented gender travelers whose needs and desires for secure dwelling and
legitimate traveling are denied can further point us to what is at stake in the current
global circuit o f queer traveling, a corporate “cosmopolitanism without” which,
while illuminating the visibility of First World queer tourists, marginalizes the needs
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of dwelling and traveling that are critical to working-class queers, Third World
queers, and undocumented queers of color.
Dereka Rushbrook points out that in the current globalization climate, the
presence o f gays/lesbians in entrepreneurial city is now functioning as a luring global
tourist market, not only for its “exotic” appeal, but also for the marker of “tolerance
and diversity that enhance the city’s perceived quality of life.” The “gay index,” or
“the concentration o f unmarried same-sex partners living in metropolitan areas,”
Rushbrook notes, is now used as ’’the best predictor of the presence o f high-tech
businesses in U.S. cities.”1 4 9 In fact, as queer visibility is now gradually absorbed
into the globalization ambit as a commercial selling point, one needs to consider to
what extent has the gay/lesbian strategy of “coming out” or the queer tactics of kiss-
ins translate “visibility” into substantive citizenship. More important, to what extent
has the more affluent and mobile (and marketable) white queer visibility in the First
World since the post-Stonewall era taken priority over the issues and concerns of the
precarious citizenship o f other queers: queers of color, working-class queers,
immigrant queers, and queers residing in the Third World? In all, how have those
who are financially capable in joining a visible “coming-out” global queer tourism
marginalized the intertwining narratives of dwelling and traveling for these other
queers?
Within the U.S. national context, several scholars have contested the
usefulness o f employing queer visibility in gaining citizenship protection. Phelan
argues in Sexual Strangers that citizenship is not just about “a list o f legal
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protections and inclusions,” it is also about “political and cultural visibility.”1 5 0
Unfortunately, the “mainstream” strategy o f asserting individual visibility o f middle-
class and professional gays/lesbians who come out has worked to sustain an
assimilationist normality and marketable respectability.1 5 1 Cathy Cohen argues, as
the elite members of a marginal group gain limited access to mainstream
acceptability, the power dynamics shifts from “categorical exclusion” to “integrative
marginalization,” as a self-policing and domesticating mechanism pushes the elites
to marginalize the more troublesome subjects within their own group.1 3 2
Opposing the mainstream gay/lesbian visibility that attempts to tone down
difference and deviance in order to be granted “official recognition,” more radical
queer groups seek to politicize their “queer” visibility in a different way—through
cultural improvisations by generating discomfort in the comfort zones of
heterosexual America. This is what Bower calls the politics o f direct address. The
Queer Nation Manifesto thus reads, “Being queer is not about a right to privacy; it is
about the freedom to be public, to just be who we are.”1 5 3 The mall invasion projects
of the Queer Shopping Network convey a similar message: “W e’re here, we’re
queer, you ’ re going shopping.”1 5 4 Rejecting liberal tolerance, queer politics o f direct
address demands affirmation and respect by asserting and inserting their “deviant”
identities in the public space to “familiariz[e] mainstream America with ‘otherness’
in all its varieties ...”1 5 5
However, as Phelan observes, these visibility campaigns, whether of
gay/lesbian politics or radical queer politics, lead us to ask just whose bodies among
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these diverse groups get to be visible and whether all kinds of visibility are good.
She writes, “Visibility as a goal is also potentially bound to consumption and
advanced capitalism at least as much as to political membership.... Visibility is no
guarantee o f either citizenship or equality.”1 5 6 Cohen points out, queer politics of
visibility that attempts to do away with official recognition often takes the form o f a
“single-oppression paradigm” around sexuality, ignoring “the multiple and
1 57
intersecting systems of power” that function through the interactions between and
among heteronormativity, racism, patriarchy, and class exploitation.1 5 8 Cohen
argues, queer politics, in its current rendition that emphasizes fluid traveling, “is
coded with class, gender, and race privilege.”1 5 9 The visibility campaign such as
“mall invasions” in Queer Shopping Network that focuses on the visible free
expression o f gender/sexual identity neglects that queers can be alienated and
excluded not just for “the normative sexual codes associated with the mall,” but for
being poor or working-class queer in their lack o f consuming power, and/or for being
queer of color in their being constructed “as a threatening subject every time you
enter this economic institution.”1 6 0
These problems with queer visibility in the U.S. context are reproduced in the
context o f global queer travel. Situating queer visibility in a global perspective,
Manalansan has specifically critiqued the ways in which the First World event o f the
1969 Stonewall Rebellion in New York is now taken to be the “origin” of an
international gay and lesbian movement, as if an “universal” gay/lesbian culture and
politics has since then been spread outward from a metropolitan center.
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Unquestioned in this internationalization rhetoric is the assumption of an Eurocentric
“coming out’" imperative that imposes a normative “gay” subject by which non-
West em queer subjects and practices are judged, whereby the lack of public visibility
of “gays and lesbians” in the Third World periphery is perceived as “‘premodem’ or
unliberated.”1 6 1
This Eurocentric perception needs to be problematized in two respects. First,
as Manalansan argues in his examples o f Filipino gay men in New York, the demand
for visible “coming out” does not quite fit into the self-understanding and cultural
practices of the bakla (an intricate Filipino gay identity that encompasses
effeminacy, transvestism, hermaphrodism and homosexuality) for whom identity is
not just something to be divulged or proclaimed verbally, but something “worn” that
relies on a subtler level of intuition and feeling in interaction.1 6 2 Even when they do
“come out” in parades, as indicated in Manalansan’s discussion o f the Filipino
celebration o f “The Santacruzan” in New York, their cross-dressing is different from
the white comedic/parodic gay drag intended to reveal the constructedness o f gender.
Rather, by enacting while recoding religious figures and rituals and by insisting on
“femme realness” than camp, the public performance of Filipino gay men and
lesbians “was one way o f confronting the vicissitudes o f diasporic living,” a way of
negotiating their difference, alienation, nostalgia and belonging in both the gay and
Filipino community on their adopted “homeland.”1 6 3 The Western “coming out”
narrative is thus interrogated and negotiated in different local communities and
cultural contexts.
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Second, a uniform trajectory of public visibility contradicts many queer
immigrants’ circumstances. As Ignatius Bau points out, “many queer immigrants are
undocumented in the United States precisely because they are queer.” Prior to the
1990 Federal Immigration Act that repealed the exclusion o f queers, homosexual
migrants (along with convicted criminals and communists) were denied entrance to
the U.S.1 6 4 Being visible as gay “was a cause for the denial of entry visas, permanent
residency, or citizenship.”1 6 5 Manalansan notes, “Tales of harassment and exclusion
o f gay and lesbian immigrants and travelers in embassies, airports, and border
crossings abound.”1 6 6 As one informant told Manalansan, “When you are an illegal
alien, you have other things to hide [in the closet] apart from being gay.”1 6 7 Bau
argues, proclaiming gay identity in public carries risks for queer immigrants to
“being outed as undocumented immigrants.” He notes, “The risk o f deportation is
real; the consequences for family members, employers, and others are also very
real.”1 6 8 For undocumented queer immigrants who are forced to take low-wage jobs
such as janitors and domestics, Manalansan argues, to be able to make an economic
livelihood is “more important than coming out.”1 6 9
Saying this is not to assert an absolute “public vs. private” distinction where
undocumented queer immigrants are forever relegated to the private and should
forsake any public forum in advocating for rights and protection.1 7 0 Rather, it is to
call attention to the power inequity in different “queer” situations that demands a
more complex analysis of traveling narratives. Manalansan argues, “what has been
touted as the ‘gay nineties’.... [is also] an era o f the ‘immigrant backlash.’”1 7 1 As
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the New York City Lesbian and Gay Pride Month celebrations in June 1996
proclaimed a global queer visibility with the theme, “Pride without Borders,”1 7 2 its
idealization of a visibly universal gay/lesbian identity neglects the ways in which, for
many undocumented migrant queers, their movement must be less pronounced, less
visible, less deterritorialized and less rhizomic, but “mov[ing] in more determined
and located ways,”1 7 3 in more tightly scripted circuits, through and along the edges
of borders (not without), making do and laying low. “Pride” is put on hold until the
gaining o f citizenship. Caren Kaplan argues, the gesture of deterritorialization
(without borders) “is always reterritorialization, an increase of territory, an
imperialization.”1 7 4 The notion that a universal “gay” subject whose visibility,
mobility and influence can undermine national, cultural and local borders,
Manalansan observes, is a parallel to the “popular ‘McDonald’s’ notion o f the global
as a homogenizing process that emanates from above.”1 7 5 Global queer visibility
displaces the abject narratives of insecure dwelling and illegitimate traveling of
undocumented queers who must travel in travail.
The impulse to deterritorialize through a normative queer subject in fact
speaks to the ways in which the “cosmopolitan” queer tourism displays visibility
only by integrating itself into the circuit o f global capitalism. In the 2002 special
issue “Queer Tourism: Geographies o f Globalization” in the journal GLQ, Jasbir
Puar leads off the introduction by indicating that tourism “is one o f the most
important aspects of the globalization o f sexuality and sexual identities,” not just
because of the growing sex tourist industry but also because of the growth o f same-
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sex tourism. She notes that, “Gay and lesbian tourists account for at least 10 percent
o f the U.S. travel industry, and that percentage is growing.”1 7 6 In her own essay,
Puar argues that while several tourist studies celebrate the construction of
homosexual identity in holiday traveling and show how gay and lesbian tourists
disrupt the heterosexual public space (many in the “homophobic” Third World
periphery that allows for fantasy o f exotic transgression), they fail to problematize
this mobility of sexual expression enabled by high education and income level (of
mostly white gay males). By asserting “traveling openly as gay” or “coming out in
travel,”1 7 7 this First World global queer visibility expresses a particular sexual
expression and lifestyle— cosmopolitan queemess (DINKs: dual income, no kids)—
which the tourist industry finds potentially profitable and seeks to recruit in its
marketing campaign.1 7 8 In fact, Puar points out, what is particularly worth noting is
the shift from corporate interests (airlines, hotels, tourist industry) “in courting gay
and lesbian consumers to national interests [tourist boards] in doing so .. .”1 7 9
Following the steps o f corporate globalization, state promotion of queer tourism
marks cosmopolitan cities as resort spots for middle-class and professional queers.
In a vein that underscores Cohen’s notion o f “integrative marginalization,” gay
neighborhoods in the cosmopolitan cities are going through their own self-policing
gentrification and commercial restructuring as they are incorporated and
appropriated by the state in the global tourist gambit,1 8 0 sold for their “gay
friendliness,” “queer lite,” and “cosmopolitan coolness.”
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Gabriel Giorgi further illustrates this in the case of Madrid. He indicates that,
by promoting Chueca as a tourist gay quarter, Madrid is now seen as one o f the
global gay capitals (along with New York, London, and Paris) on the path towards
freedom, modernity and democracy. Giorgi argues, however, Madrid’s visible
gayness needs to be problematized in three layers: 1) the lack o f a visible gay
presence outside Chueca in the rest of Madrid, thus an official tolerance o f gay
tourism only in a few selective prosperous spots in order to accrue profit and capital;
2) the “gendered” difference in the relative lesbian invisibility in an “all-inclusive”
global mobility; and 3) the “invisible” presence of illegal immigrants from Latin
America and Africa as workers, the very “economic and social counterfigure to the
tourist.”1 8 1 As Giorgi comments, the “illegal” route of the migrant laborers “projects
an interruption of cosmopolitan mobility ...”1 8 2 Rather than deterritorializing
borders, “gay [tourist] identity reinsribes borders between metropolis and periphery,
and between modernity and its others”— a visibility and mobility that are
experienced very differently by undocumented immigrants.1 8 3 Puar thus argues that
the cosmopolitan mobility that is available to the queer bodies must be juxtaposed
against the heightening border containment and criminalization o f immigrants— a
division “between those who must travel for work and those who can travel for
leisure.”1 8 4
In fact, as Puar points out, in the Caribbean islands where governments are
known for suppressing gay/lesbian activism, the visibility of First World gay cruise
that “demands” to visit and consume at those very places means that Caribbean
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activists and organizations must “lay low” (to be invisible or less visible), “for fear
of the local exposure and a backlash against individuals as well as against nascent
gay and lesbian and AIDS-related nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) that were
barely surviving.”1 8 5 Queer visibility renders an ironic geopolitical disparity as the
pleasurable consumption by First World gay/lesbian tourists unwittingly
marginalizes citizenship contestation o f queers of color elsewhere. Puar asks:
“Whose visibility is enabled here, at the expense of whose invisibility?”1 8 6
As we have seen, the diasporic mode o f transsexuality’s jostling
dwelling/traveling narratives enable us to imagine citizenship beyond its dwelling
trajectory in the gender dimension as M and F. Transsexuality’s psychosomatic
“cosmopolitanism within” generates a lived imaginary where gender travelers cross
prescribed gender/sexual boundaries and territories in creating an abject and yet
cosmopolitan sexual third-time space within the sex/gender system. As
undocumented gender travelers in the interstices of sexual third time-space border
zones, transsexuals’ body narratives o f citizenship seem relevant to immigrant queers
and Third World queers, whose bordered movement is more constricted and less
deterritorialized, and whose traveling narratives are less predicated on a global queer
visibility and center more on the yet-to-be fulfilled needs of secure dwelling and
legitimate traveling. Transsexuality’s “cosmopolitanism within,” then, ultimately
brings us back to the global queer circuit of “cosmopolitanism without.” Through a
detour, the now queered narrative of Clifford’s diasporic discourse, “dwelling in
traveling, traveling in dwelling,” may be made applicable to gauge the
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dwelling/traveling aspirations of Third World queers and undocumented immigrant
queers. Given the increasing flows of different queer and transgender bodies in
globalization, I suspect that the effectiveness of political and cultural contestations in
the coming queer cosmopolitanism will hinge upon a more layered visibility that is
less about the imperative o f “coming out in travel” and more about buttressing global
queers’ citizenship claims in a fashion that, like transsexuality, must negotiate
between the needs of dwelling and traveling.
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NOTES
1 It needs to be noted that “queer” is not synonymous with “gay/lesbian,” which focuses exclusively
on a sexual identity o f homosexual orientation vis-a-vis heterosexuality. At the same time, they are
not mutually exclusive. I understand “queer,” at least in theory, to include not only the subjectivities
incorporated under the spectrum o f “LGBT” (lesbians, gays, bisexuals and transgendered people) but
also moving beyond the essentializing tendency o f these very identities as initiated, so to create even
more diversified subcultural sexual/gender identities.
In addition to “queer,” the term “transgender” also needs elaboration. I follow Sandy Stone
in understanding transgender to include “everything not covered by our culture’s narrow terms ‘man’
and ‘woman.’” This includes transsexuals, transvestites, crossdressers, drag queens and kings, stone
butches, hermaphrodites or persons with ambiguous genitalia, as well as people who choose to
perform ambiguous social genders. As Stone indicates, “Transgender is a term whose exact meaning
is still in dispute, and I consider that a very healthy sign.” The term has now often been designated as
a broader social and political transgender movement. See Sandy Stone, “Transgender,”
Sandystone.com, http://sandvstone.com/trans.html (accessed March 11, 2005).
2 Arjun Appadurai, “Disjuncture and Difference in the Global Cultural Economy,” in M odernity at
Large: Cultural Dimensions o f Globalization (Minneapolis: University o f Minnesota Press, 1996), 27-
47.
3 Martin F. Manalansan IV, G lobal Divas: Filipino Gay Men in the D iaspora (Durham, NC: Duke
University Press, 2003), 6.
4 Jose Esteban Munoz, Disidentifications: Queers o f Color and the Performance o f Politics
(Minneapolis: University o f Minnesota Press, 1999); Jose Quiroga, Tropics o f Desire: Interventions
from Queer Latino America (New York: N ew York University Press, 2000); Juana Maria Rodriguez,
Queer Latinidad: Identity Practices, D iscursive Spaces (New York: N ew York University Press,
2003); Manalansan IV, G lobal Divas; David L. Eng and A lice Y. Horn, eds., Q & A: Queer in Asian
America (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1998); Cindy Patton and Benigno Sanchez-Eppler,
eds., Queer D iasporas (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2000); and Amaldo Cruz-Malave and
Martin F. Manalansan IV, eds., Q ueer Globalizations: Citizenship and the Afterlife o f Colonialism
(New York: N ew York University Press, 2002).
5 Manalansan, G lobal D ivas, 8.
6 These are dynamically shaped both by the scholar’s background training in different disciplinary
fields (whether in history, literature, drama, performance art, ethnic studies, women’s studies, cultural
theory, anthropology, sociology, or geography) as well as by his/her different social locations.
7 David L. Eng and Alice Y. Horn, “Q & A: Notes on a Queer Asian America,” Eng and Horn, Q & A,
12 .
8 Ibid.
9 Jasbir K. Puar, “Transnational Sexualities: South Asian (Trans)nation(alism)s and Queer Diasporas,”
in Eng and Horn, Q&A, 406.
1 0 Ibid., 407. As Puar points out, whether in Paul Gilroy’s “Black Atlantic” or in James Clifford’s
traveling cultures, the queer body— the body that specifically disrupts the masculinist imagery o f
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home and nation— has not surfaced as a body that also travels. See Paul Gilroy, There Ain't N o Black
in the Union Jack: the Cultural Politics o f Race and Nation (Chicago: University o f Chicago Press,
1991); Paul Gilroy, The Black Atlantic: M odernity and D ouble Consciousness (Cambridge, MA:
Harvard University Press, 1993); James Clifford, “Traveling Cultures” and “Diasporas” in Routes:
Travel and Translation in the Late Twentieth Century (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1997),
17-46,244-277.
1 1 Puar, “Transnational Sexualities,” 418.
1 2 Shane Phelan, “Lesbians and Mestizas: Appropriation and Equivalence,” in Playing with Fire:
Queer Politics, Queer Theories, ed. Shane Phelan (New York: Routledge, 1997), 85, and n. 47, 94.
For examples o f problematic transsexual appropriation o f immigrant experiences, see Jennifer Finney
Boylan, “Gender Immigrant,” interview by Jennifer L. Pozner, AlterNet, May 14, 2004,
http://www.altemet.org/story/18671/ (accessed March 1, 2005); and Rich Watson, “Gina Kamentsky:
Gender Immigrant,” http://www.orcafresh.net/Watson/wt071403 (accessed March 1,2005).
1 3 In this case, Jiffy Javenella, the husband who was applying for permanent residency, faces
deportation when immigration authority leams that his wife, Donita Ganzon, now a U.S. citizen, went
through a sex change operation prior to obtaining her citizenship. The Bureau o f Citizenship and
Immigration Services (BCIS) denied Javanella’s request and revoked his working papers, and a letter
from the Department o f Homeland Security cited the 1996 Defense o f Marriage Act in informing
Javanella that his marriage to Ganzon constitutes a same-sex marriage that cannot be the basis for the
purpose o f immigration petition. See “Transsexual Filipino Couple Sues US over Denial o f Green
Card,” The Filipino Express Online, December 3, 2004,
http://www.filipinoexpress.com/18/49 news.html (accessed March 1, 2005).
1 4 Phelan, “Lesbians and Mestizas,” 86.
1 5 Considering the fact that many immigrants hold “dual loyalty” to both their homeland and their
adopted country, this is not to say that immigrants do not exercise their own instrumental agency (or
what Aihwa Ong calls “flexible citizenship”) in negotiating such tasking demand. In other words,
while in the context o f the citizenship interview and swearing-in ceremony there is no room for
ambiguous loyalty, this is not necessarily the case once an immigrant subject is “outside” the context
o f the interview and ceremony— that is, when the subject shifts from a “hegemonic” location to a
more “negotiated” one, in Stuart Hall’s terms. M y commentary on the “passing rituals” speaks
specifically to the context o f the citizenship interview and ceremony.
1 6 Jay Prosser, Second Skins: the Body N arratives o f Transsexuality (New York: Columbia University
Press, 1998), 107.
1 7 See “Stop the Suspensions!” Silvia Law Review Project,
http://www.srlp.org/index,php?sec=03 H&page-nycirdl (accessed March 1, 2005); and Jerimarie
Liesegang, “Social Security Administration Policy OUTS Transsexuals,” tgcrossroads.org, June 14,
2004, http://www.tgcrossroads.org/news/7aid~913 (accessed March 1, 2005).
1 8 It is undertheorized because transsexuality does not figure to be the preferred case o f gender
performance like drag queens or cross dressers in queer theory. It is overdetermined because theorists
and commentators have placed transsexuality in either essentialist/naturalizing terms (reifying
sex/gender system) or in postmodern constructionist terms (subverting sex/gender system). Instead o f
an elaborate discussion here, I will take up this issue in section I o f this paper.
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1 9 FTM refers to female-to-male transsexual, and MTF refers to male-to-female transsexual. The
naming vocabulary for transsexuals has been a fraught terrain. For example, some prefer the
acronyms “MTM” (male-to-male or male-to-men) or “FTF” (female-to-female or female-to-women)
based on their b elief that they have always been men or women despite bom with a body o f the
opposite sex. Still others prefer “F2M,” “FtM,” or “F-t-M” to signify a more playful postmodern
agency in reconstructing the transgendered body. See disc, in Jason Cromwell, Transmen and FTMs:
Identities, Bodies, Genders, and Sexualities (Chicago: University o f Illinois Press, 1999), 24-27.
C. Jacob Hale uses the lowercase “ftm” and “m tf’ in maintaining the ordering structure o f
the original terminology o f FTM and MTF to provide some sense o f location in gender transitioning,
though with a nonstandard lowercase to designate not an essence o f identity but a “general rubric for
... [more open-ended] potential life trajectories.’’ This lowercase usage is a symbolic gesture against
the mainstream medical-psychological-juridical-administrative definition o f transsexuality as
changing sex from a “real” man to a “real” woman and vice versa. See C. Jacob Hale, “Consuming
the Living, Dis(re)membering the Dead in the Butch/FTM Borderlands,” GLQ: A Journal o f Lesbian
and Gay Studies 4, no. 2 (1998): n. 1,341.
Hale’s deployment o f the nonstandard lowercase usage seems to me to be the best option.
However, as I will refer to many different transsexual authors in this chapter, even as I recognize that
appropriation o f terms for general usage are always subject to debate, for the purpose o f this paper I
will stick to the standard terminology o f FTM and MTF, and occasionally interchange them with
“transman” and “transwoman,” respectively. I want to note that even in using the standard
terminology, I still follow Hale’s suit in designating a sense o f location in transitioning without
committing to the idea that the gender binary poles (M and F) hold an essential or universal meaning
for every subject-in-transition.
2 0 Prosser, Second Skins, 13-14.
2 1 Judith Butler, G ender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion o f Identity (New York: Routledge,
1999; originally published by Routledge, 1990).
2 2 Here, the notion o f sex/gender system needs elaboration. Gayle Rubin’s foundational conception o f
the “sex/gender system” where she separates sex (a biological category: male or female) from gender
(a social construction or an ideological structure: man or woman) is an important distinction. See
Gayle Rubin, “The Traffic in Women: Notes on the ‘Political Economy’ o f Sex,” in Toward an
Anthropology o f Women, ed. Rayna R. Reiter (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1975), 157-210.
However, sex (or sexuality) and gender are rarely distinct and detached from one another in their
everyday politicized operation. In fact, while queer theory is often taken to be the study on
sex/sexuality while feminist theory is assigned the interrogation o f gender, transsexuality
demonstrates that its ambiguity within and impact on the sex/gender system is expressed dynamically
and interconnectedly through both o f its “trans-sexing” and “trans-gendering” qualities. Without
collapsing sex and gender into the same thing, throughout this chapter I speak o f sex and gender
together to underline the fact that power operates through both the channels o f sex and gender, rather
than one or the other. As Phelan rightly observes, “Our sexuality is always partly about gender,
though not in any simple sense. Gender, conversely, is partly about sexuality.” Shane Phelan, Sexual
Strangers: Gays, Lesbians, and Dilemmas o f Citizenship (Philadelphia: Temple University Press,
2001), 131
2 3 Janice G. Raymond, The Transsexual Empire: the M aking o f the She-Male (New York: Teachers
College Press, 1994; originally published by Beacon Press, 1979); Janice G. Raymond, “The Politics
o f Transgenderism,” in Blending Genders: Social A spects o f Cross-Dressing and Sex-Changing, eds.
Richard Ekins and Dave King (New York: Routledge, 1996), 215-223; Catherine Millot, Horsexe: An
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Essay on Transsexuality, trans. Kenneth Hylton (Brooklyn: Autonomedia, 1990); Sheila Jeffreys, The
Lesbian Heresy, (North Melbourne: Spinifex, 1993).
2 4 Raymond, The Transsexual Empire, 183.
2 5 Raymond, “The Politics o f Transgenderism,” 215.
26 Ibid., 216.
27 Raymond, The Transsexual Empire, 112.
2 8 Jeffreys, The Lesbian Heresy.
29 Dwight B. Billings and Thomas Urban, “The Socio-Medical Construction o f Transsexualism: An
Interpretation and Critique,” in Ekins and King, Blending Genders, 112.
30 Ibid., 99.
3 1 Bernice L. Hausman, Changing Sex: Transsexualism, Technology, and the Idea o f Gender
(Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1995), 140.
3 2 See, e.g., Judith Halberstam, “Perverse Presentism: The Androgyne, the Tribade, the Female
Husband, and Other Pre-Twentieth-Century Genders,” in Female M asculinity (Durham, NC: Duke
University Press, 1998), 45-73.
3 3 Prosser, Second Skins, 8.
3 4 Moreover, it is important to note that even the critic does not write without a body. As Prosser
argues, “Much as she might use her writing to block it out, Hausman too has a gender, a gender and a
body thoroughly embedded in her narrative, never divorced from her praxis o f reading” (Second
Skins, 132). Hausman begins her book with the anecdote that as a pregnant mother during the course
o f revising her book, she was “perhaps one o f few ... who worry that they will give birth to a
hermaphrodite” (Changing Sex, x) and, towards almost the end o f her book, states that “Those o f us
who are not transsexuals may wonder what it is like to feel oneself ‘in the wrong body’” (Changing
Sex, 174). Prosser observes, this suggests a feeling o f being unsettled and alarmed by the prospect o f
her/child’s body “resembl[ing] too closely her object o f study” (Second Skins, 133), and demarcating
that boundary, with a relief, in reasserting the distinction between the normal self and the uncanny
other. Hausman’s critique o f the medical construction o f transsexuality that reifies patriarchal norms
o f gender unwittingly rehearses the heteronormative imagery o f the “right” body experience for each
sex and, in the words o f Judith Halberstam, “maintains the fiction o f proper and normal genders”
(Female M asculinity, 162).
3 5 Arthur Kroker and Marilouise Kroker, “Scenes from the Last Sex: Feminism and Outlaw Bodies,”
in The Last Sex: Feminism and Outlaw Bodies, eds. Arthur Kroker and Marilouise Kroker (New
York: St. Martin’s Press, 1993), 1-19.
3 6 Butler, Gender Trouble, 33.
3 7 Ibid., 174-175.
3 8 Judith Butler, “Preface (1999),” in Gender Trouble, x x ii-x x iii.
281
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3 9 Butler, Gender Trouble, 33. Butler warns against this elision o f radical voluntarism in her critical
reading o f Foucault, who performs this very elision from the carefully constructed thesis in The
H istory o f Sexuality that sexuality is always “coextensive with power” and embedded in power
matrixes to a romanticized appropriation o f a nineteenth-century hermaphrodite in Herculine Barbin
as the “happy limbo o f a non-identity” (120).
40 Susan Bordo, “Postmodern Subjects, Postmodern Bodies (Review Essay),” Feminist Studies 18, no.
1 (Spring 1992): 171.
4 1 In other words, sex change is not simply initiated for the purpose o f “ reveal[ing] the imitative
structure o f gender itself ” as Butler would read it. Butler, Gender Trouble, 175.
4 2 Ironically, Butler’s celebratory appropriation o f the transsexual body in the 1999 preface is
precisely what she has earlier faulted Foucault for in his romanticization o f Herculine Barbin’s
intersexual body.
43 Prosser, Second Skins, 6.
4 4 See the entire disc, in ibid., 45-55.
4 5 Judith Butler, Bodies That M atter: On the D iscursive Limits o f “S ex” (New York: Routledge,
1993), 133.
4 6 Prosser, Second Skins, 48.
47 Ibid., 49.
4 8 Marjorie Garber, Vested Interests: Cross-Dressing and Cultural Anxiety (New York: Routledge,
1992), 10.
49 Ibid., 13.
5 0 Kate Bomstein, Gender Outlaw: on Men, Women, and the Rest o f Us (New York: Vintage Books,
1995), 97 (emphasis mine).
5 1 Ibid., 51-52.
5 2 Sandy Stone, “The ‘Empire’ Strikes Back: A Posttranssexual Manifesto,” Sandystone.com, January
1994, http://sandvstone.com/empire-strikes-back (accessed March 11, 2005). The essay was written
in response to Janice Raymond’s The Transsexual Empire.
5 3 Ibid. (emphasis mine).
5 4 By saying “no outside or no escape to power,” I do not mean that there is no possibility o f
resistance. Rather, I mean that there is no such thing as a resistance that is wielded by a body outside
o f power or independent o f hegemony. While I agree with Teresa de Lauretis that a critical subject
can be both inside and outside the ideology o f gender by simultaneously being constructed and also,
in her consciousness, sees through and demystifies such construction, it is not equivalent to be saying
that one can live outside the hegemonic arrangement. See Teresa de Lauretis, “The Technology o f
Gender,” in Technologies o f Gender: Essays on Theory, Film, and Fiction (Bloomington: Indian
University Press, 1987), 9-10.
282
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5 5 Smadar Lavie and Ted Swedenburg, “Introduction: Displacement, Diaspora, and Geographies o f
Identity,” in Displacement, Diaspora, and Geographies o f Identity, eds. Smadar Lavie and Ted
Swedenburg (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1996), 13-14.
5 6 Ibid., 15 (emphasis mine).
5 7 Halberstam, Female M asculinity, 27-28.
5 8 See Halberstam’s problematization o f the “masculine continuum” in ibid., 151. Halberstam points
out, for example, it is difficult to judge whether a butch lesbian is more or less masculine than a FTM.
5 9 Gloria Anzaldua, Borderlands/La Frontera: The New M estiza (San Francisco: Aunt Lute Books,
1987), 77-78.
60 She states, “I, like other queer people, am two in one body, both male and female” (ibid., 19).
5 1 Clifford, “Traveling Cultures,” in Routes: Travel and Translation in the Late Twentieth Century
(Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1997), 36.
6 2 Puar, “Transnational Sexualities,” 408.
5 3 Ibid., 406.
6 4 Prosser, Second Skins, 116.
6 5 Viviane K. Namaste, Invisible Lives: The Erasure o f Transsexual and Transgendered People
(Chicago: The University o f Chicago Press, 2000), 23.
6 6 Ibid., 1.
6 7 Namaste, “‘Tragic Misreadings’: Queer Theory’s Erasure o f Transgender Subjectivity,” in ibid., 9-
23. Namaste’s assumption o f a universal “transgender subjectivity,” however, needs to be
problematized.
6 8 Prosser, Second Skins, 6.
69 Ibid., 68.
7 0 Ibid., 80.
7 1 Ibid., 11.
7 2 Cromwell, Transmen and FTMs, 42-43.
7 3 Adrienne Rich, Blood, Bread, and Poetry: Selected P rose 1979-1985 (New York: Norton, 1986),
215. See also Prosser, Second Skins, 92-93.
7 4 Cromwell, Transmen and FTMs, 4.
7 5 Ibid., 107.
283
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7 6 Ibid., 105.
7 7 Ibid., 109.
7 8 Ibid., 127.
79 Henry Rubin, Self-Made Men: Identity and Embodiment among Transsexual Men (Nashville, TN:
Vanderbilt University Press, 2003), 3.
80 Ibid., 149.
8 1 Ibid., 10-11.
8 2 Ibid., 6-7.
8 3 Ibid., 124-125.
8 4 Ibid., 165.
8 5 Ibid., 146.
8 6 Bomstein, Gender Outlaw, 24.
8 7 Pat Califia, Sex Changes: The Politics ofTransgenderism (San Francisco: Cleis Press, 1997), 259.
8 8 Jay Prosser, “N o Place Like Home: The Transgendered Narrative o f Leslie Feinberg’s Stone Butch
Blues,” Modern Fiction Studies 41, nos. 3-4 (Fall-Winter 1995): 488.
8 9 Prosser, Second Skins, 116-117.
9 0 Halberstam, Fem ale M asculinity, 171.
9 1 Prosser, Second Skins, 83-84.
9 2 Rubin, Self-M ade Men, 106.
9 3 Prosser, Second Skins, 84.
9 4 Cromwell, Transmen and FTMs, 128.
9 5 See Prosser, “Mirror Images: Transsexuality and Autobiography,” in Second Skins, 99-134.
9 6 Prosser, “N o Place Like Home,” 506-507.
9 7 See ibid., 488-489.
9 8 Karin Aguilar-San Juan, “Going Home: Enacting Justice in Queer Asian America,” in Eng and
Horn, Q & A , 25.
9 9 Ibid., 38.
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1 0 0 Ibid., n. 2, 38.
1 0 1 See Judith Halberstam, “F2M: The Making o f Female Masculinity,” in The Lesbian Postmodern,
ed. Laura Doan (New York: Columbia University Press, 1994), 217.
1 0 2 Califia, Sex Changes, 211.
1 0 3 Anne Fausto-Sterling, Sexing the Body: Gender Politics and the Construction o f Sexuality (New
York: Basic Books, 2000), 3.
1 0 4 Ibid., 5.
1 0 5 Ibid., 31.
1 0 6 Ibid., 3.
1 0 7 See, e.g., Terri Webb, “Autobiographical Fragments from a Transsexual Activist,” in Ekins and
King, Blending Genders, 190-195.
1 0 8 Rubin, Self-M ade Man, 123.
1 0 9 Robert Stoller, Sex and Gender, Volume II: The Transsexual Experiment (New York: Jason
Aronson, 1975), 224.
1 1 0 Bomstein, Gender Outlaw, 237.
1 1 1 Cromwell, Transmen and FTMs, 130.
1,2 Ibid., 131.
1 1 3 Ibid., 133.
1 1 4 Ibid., n. 17, 171. Cromwell notes that trannyhawk “has a negative connotation and refers to men
who fetishize and prey upon MTFs/transwomen.”
1 1 5 Cromwell, Transmen and FTMs, 133.
1 1 6 Ibid., 134.
1 1 7 Fausto-Sterling, Sexing the Body, 108.
1 1 8 Judith Butler, Undoing Gender (New York: Routledge, 2004).
1 1 9 Quoted in Cromwell, Transmen and FTMs, 134. The original quote comes from C. Jacob Hale,
“Transgendered Strategies for Refusing Gender,” paper presented at the Society for Women in
Philosophy, Pacific Division, Los Angeles, CA, M ay 20, 1995.
1 2 0 Cromwell, Transmen and FTMs, 134 (emphasis mine).
1 2 1 C. Jacob Hale, “Leatherdyke Boys and Their Daddies: How to Have Sex without Women or Men,”
Social Text 15, nos. 3 and 4 (Fall/Winter 1997): 236.
285
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1 2 2 Ibid., 233.
1 2 3 Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, “A Response to C. Jacob Hale,” Social Text 15, nos. 3 and 4 (Fall/Winter
1997): 238.
1 2 4 Fausto-Sterling, Sexing the B ody, 113.
1 2 5 Prosser, Second Skins, 11.
1 2 6 Ibid., 203-204. Prosser indicates that “transsexualism” entered into the vocabulary o f DSM-III in
1980, the very same moment when homosexuality was taken out o f the manual (ibid., 106).
1 2 7 Prosser, Second Skins, 204.
1 2 8 Ibid.
1 2 9 On this point, Halberstam remarks,
Such rhetoric also assumes that the proper solution to ‘painful wrong embodiment’ (Prosser)
is moving to the right body, where ‘rightness’ may as easily depend on whiteness or class
privilege as it does on being regendered. Who, we might ask, can afford to dream o f a right
body? Who believes that such a body exists?
Halberstam, Fem ale M asculinity, 172.
1 3 0 Riki Anne Wilchins, R ead M y Lips: Sexual Subversion and the End o f Gender (Ithaca: Firebrand
Books, 1997), 144-145.
1 3 1 Ibid., 154, 187.
1 3 2 Lisa Bower, “Queer Problems/Straight Solutions: The Limits o f a Politics o f ‘Official
Recognition,”’ in Phelan, Playing with Fire, 267-291.
1 3 3 Halberstam, Fem ale M asculinity, 9. Halberstam was speaking in the context of, while extending,
the meaning o f the statement expressed by Frankie Addams in the film, The M em ber o f the Wedding.
See ibid., 6-8.
1 3 4 Paisley Currah, “Queer Theory, Lesbian and Gay Rights, and Transsexual Marriages,” in Sexual
Identities, Queer Politics, ed. Mark Blasius (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2001), 182.
1 3 5 Van Oosterwijck v. Belgium, judgment o f 6 November 1980, application no. 7654/76, European
Court o f Human Rights, http://cmiskp.echr.coe.int/tkpl 97/search.asp?skin=hudoc-en.
1 3 6 Eric Heinze, Sexual Orientation: A Human Right (Boston: Martinus N ijhoff Publishers, 1995),
100.
1 3 7 Rees v. the United Kingdom , judgment o f 17 October 1986, application no. 9532/81, European
Court o f Human Rights, http://cmiskp.echr.coe.int/tkpl 97/search.asp?skin=hudoc-en.
1 3 8 Cossey v. the United Kingdom , judgment o f 27 September 1990, application no. 10843/84,
European Court o f Human Rights, http://cmiskp.echr.coe.int/tkpl97/search.asp?skin=hudoc-en.
286
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1 3 9 Christine Goodwin v. the United Kingdom, judgment o f 11 July 2002, application no. 28957/95,
European Court o f Human Rights, http://cmiskp.echr.coe.int/tkpl97/search.asp?skin=hudoc-en; I v.
the United Kingdom, judgment o f 11 July, 2002, application no. 25680/94, European Court o f Human
Rights, http://cmiskp.echr.coe.int/tkpl97/search.asp?skin=hudoc-en.
In between Cossey and the two 2002 cases, there was also the case o f B. v. France (1992)
where M iss B., a MTF transsexual, was granted relief on Article 8, not because o f any innovative
interpretation o f the law and departure from precedents by the Court, but because the French system
was unlike that o f the Britain. In France, birth certificates are not used to record historical facts, but
are intended to be updated throughout one’s life. It is therefore perfectly possible for the authority to
insert a reference ordering the correction o f M iss B ’s sexual status, which the French authority
refused to do. See B. v. France, judgment o f 25 March 1992, application no. 13343/87, European
Court o f Human Rights, http://cmiskp.echr.coe.int/tkpl 97/search.asp'/skin^hudoc-en. In the end,
what the Court did was only to, in H einze’s words, “make French transsexuals more like British
transsexuals: less burdened in some respects, yet still unable to effectuate the full legal change...”
{Sexual Orientation, 101).
1 4 0 Currah, “Queer Theory,” 186.
1 4 1 Ibid., 186-187.
1 4 2 According to Currah,
Generally the most important instrument for the purposes o f marriage is one’s birth
certificate. Currently, only fifteen states allow postoperative transsexuals to change their
birth certificates. Individual states have different statuses and case law on amending birth
certificates, resulting in the patchwork o f [different] predicaments [for transsexual subjects]
... (ibid., 187).
1 4 3 Currah, “Queer Theory,” 191, 193.
1 4 4 Leslie Feinberg, Transgender Warriors: M aking H istory from Joan o f Arc to Rupaul (Boston:
Beacon Press, 1996), 125.
1 4 5 C. Jacob Hale, “Consuming the Living, Dis(re)membering the Dead in the Butch/FTM
Borderlands,” GLQ: A Journal o f Lesbian and G ay Studies 4, no. 2 (1998): 335 (emphasis mine).
1 4 6 Califia, Sex Changes, 265.
1 4 7 James L. Nelson, “The Silence o f the Bioethicists: Ethical and Political Aspects o f Managing
Gender Dysphoria,” GLQ: A Journal o f Lesbian and Gay Studies 4, no. 2 (1998): 213-230.
1 4 8 National Center for Transgender Equality, “HRC W ill Only Support Trans-Inclusive ENDA!”
INTRAA: Indiana Transgender Rights A dvocacy Alliance, August 7, 2004.
http://intraa.tgcrossroads.org/connections/storv/?iid=39&aid=955 (accessed March 23. 2005). As
Phelan indicates, the more progressive National Gay and Lesbian Task Force has adopted this
stronger position long before the HRC. She points out that this transgender-inclusive position comes
in part as a response to gays, lesbians and bisexuals who report that they experienced job
discrimination not just for their sexual orientation but also for their gender expression. See Phelan,
Sexual Strangers, 118.
287
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1 4 9 Dereka Rushbrook, “Cities, Queer Space, and the Cosmopolitan Tourist,” GLQ: A Journal o f Gay
and Lesbian Studies 8, nos. 1-2 (2002): 189.
1 5 0 Phelan, Sexual Strangers, 6.
1 5 1 Ibid., 92.
1 5 2 Cathy J. Cohen, The Boundaries o f Blackness: AIDS and the Breakdown o f Black Politics
(Chicago: University o f Chicago Press, 1999), 26-27.
1 5 3 Queer Nation, “Queer Nation Manifesto,”
http://userwww.service.emory.edu/~lderose/docs/politics/qnation/qnation.html (accessed March 4,
2002). This Manifesto, written anonymously by in 1990-1991, is divided into several sections, and
this quote is taken from the section o f “An Army o f Lovers Cannot Lose.”
1 5 4 Lauren Berlant and Elizabeth Freeman, “Queer Nationality: the Political Logic o f Queer Nation
and Gay Activism,” in F ear o f a Queer Planet: Queer Politics and Social Theory, ed. Michael Warner
(Minneapolis: University o f Minnesota Press, 1993), 210.
1 5 5 Bower, “Queer Problems/Straight Solutions,” 282.
1 5 6 Phelan, Sexual Strangers, 6.
1 5 7 Cathy J. Cohen, “Punks, Bulldaggers, and Welfare Queens: The Radical Potential o f Queer
Politics?” in Blasius, Sexual Identities, 203.
1 5 8 Ibid., 209.
1 5 9 Ibid., 212.
1 6 0 Ibid., 211.
1 6 1 Martin F. Manalansan IV, “In the Shadows o f Stonewall: Examining Gay Transnational Politics
and the Diasporic Dilemma,” in The Politics o f Culture in the Shadow o f Capital, eds. Lisa Lowe and
David Lloyd (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1997), 485-486.
1 6 2 Ibid., 491, 499.
1 6 3 Martin F. Manalansan IV, “Diasporic Deviants/Divas: How Filipino Gay Transmigrants ‘Play with
the World,’” in Patton and Sanchez-Eppler, Q ueer Diasporas, 186-191.
1 6 4 Ignatius Bau, “Queer Asian American Immigrants: Opening Borders and Closets,” in Eng and
Horn, Q & A, 60.
1 6 5 Manalansan, “In the Shadows o f Stonewall,” 498.
1 6 6 Manalansan, “Diasporic Deviants/Divas,” 185.
1 6 7 Manalansan, “In the Shadows o f Stonewall,” 498.
1 6 8 Bau, “Queer Asian American Immigrants,” 60.
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1 6 9 Manalansan, “In the Shadows o f Stonewall,” 499.
1 7 0 In fact, while Manalansan provides a good illustration o f the cultural nuance and specificity o f
Filipino gay identity, I disagree that immigrant queer subjects should shun away from any public
forum o f political contestation. One informant told Manalansan, for example, that they were “quiet
men” not “activists.” See Manalansan, “In the Shadows o f Stonewall,” 496. If Manalansan rightly
points out that some immigrant subjects cannot afford being public, he neglects that many queer
immigrant workers cannot afford being private: those who are fired from their job because o f racial
and sexual discrimination still need to organize, gain publicity and contest for their rights. They still
require strategies that do not count on “feelings and intuition,” but on organized labor unions and
publicized campaigns. Hence, while Bau also recognizes the dangers o f deportation in undocumented
queer immigrants involving in political resistance, he simultaneously asserts the need to continue
struggling for justice for racial and sexual minorities in the public forum. He writes,
Those o f us who are queers o f color who are now U.S. citizens or have legal immigration
status can afford to speak out about immigrant rights. It is part o f our larger struggle against
racism and for diversity in the gay/lesbian/bisexual/transgender/qucer communities ... [in
our] struggle for legal recognition and protection.
Bau, “Queer Asian American Immigrants,” 61.
1 7 1 Manalansan, “Diasporic Deviants/Divas,” 185. For example, the 1990 Federal Immigration Act
that repeals the ban on homosexuals strikes in contrast to California’s Proposition 187 in 1994 that
takes away public education, health care and other welfare benefits from undocumented immigrants.
1 7 2 See disc, in Manalansan, Global D ivas, 4.
1 7 3 See Caren Kaplan, Questions o f Travel: Postm odern D iscourses o f Displacem ent (Durham, NC:
Duke University Press, 1996), 89. Here I am borrowing from Kaplan’s critique o f Gilles Deleuze and
Felix Guattari’s poststructuralist notion o f deterritorialization and nomadology for romanticizing the
“absolute movement” o f Euro-American “nomads” in their aspiration to “becoming minor.” While
the mainstream gay and lesbian pride parade is far from Deleuze and Guattari’s radical
deterritorialized musing, there is a way in which both project a mobile and visible (Western)
subjectivity that is inaccessible to subaltern migrant travelers.
1 7 4 Kaplan, Questions o f Travel, 89.
1 7 5 Manalansan, G lobal D ivas, 4.
1 7 6 Jasbir Kaur Puar, “Introduction,” GLQ: A Journal o f Lesbian and G ay Studies 8, nos. 1-2 (2002):
1.
1 7 7 Jasbir Kaur Puar, “Circuits o f Queer Mobility: Tourism, Travel, and Globalization,” GLQ: A
Journal o f Lesbian and G ay Studies 8, nos. 1-2 (2002): 102-104.
1 7 8 Ibid., 108-111.
1 7 9 Ibid., 108 (emphasis mine).
1 8 0 Rushbrook, “Cities,” 187.
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1 8 1 Gabriel Giorgi, “Madrid En Transito: Travelers, Visibility, and Gay Identity,” GLQ: A Journal o f
Lesbian and Gay Studies 8, nos. 1-2 (2002): 63, 67, 68.
1 8 2 Ibid., 72.
1 8 3 Puar, “Introduction,” 3.
1 8 4 Puar, “Circuits o f Queer Mobility,” 126.
1 8 5 Ibid., 101-102, 127.
1 8 6 Ibid., n. 55, 137.
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Chapter 4
Bare Death: Lethal Travelers and Deathly Citizenship
How can suicide bombers help us rethink citizenship? It is a question that is
perhaps difficult even to ask. In the last three chapters, I have discussed how looking
at undocumented immigrant workers, global sex workers, and transsexuals as
traveling agents can help us rethink citizenship beyond the dwelling trajectory in its
national, political, economic, and gender dimensions. I wrote with the desire to
expand our conventional conception of citizenship to be inclusive o f these
“illegitimate” travelers who have always been written outside the category of
“citizens,” and I wrote with the enthusiasm to imagine alternative cosmopolitan
horizons with these subjects as active and rightful participants. But are we reaching
an impasse here, facing subjects who, through a horrendous act, take their own lives
and the lives o f other citizens in a blinking second? Doesn’t “terrorism” represent
the very negation of “citizenship”? How do we even “include” these subjects as our
fellow citizens? How dare we “imagine” them as participants in the cosmopolitan
public sphere?
In the post-9/11 public intellectual discourse, the figure of the suicide-
bombing terrorist has been rendered as beyond comprehension. Branding terrorists
as “killers on a rampage,” “ideological fanatics,” and “suicidal holy warriors,”
Michael Walzer argues that 9/11 terrorism was so brutal that it is not “morally
understandable,” and any efforts in trying to “understand” terrorism are “excusing
terror,” or “join[ing] the ranks o f terror’s supporters.”1 Terming the 9/11 act as
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“apocalyptic nihilism,” Michael Ignatieff argues that the hijackers’ “indifference to
human costs” makes terrorism not only outside the understandable discourse of
politics but also outside the human realm of war. Yet, as Jacqueline Rose notes,
“Behind the argument that suicide bombers should not, or cannot, be understood lies
a subtext of dehumanization.”3 She argues, there is a critical distinction between
“condemning the act [of violence]” and “denigrat[ing] suicide bombers and their
culture.”4 By reducing the 9/11 tragedy into binary narratives such as “good vs.
evil,” “human vs. monster,” “democracy vs. terrorism,” James Der Derian points out,
it “quickly squeezed out any complex, let alone critical, analysis of what happened
and why.”5 Except perhaps initially, inside the liberal state “there was very little
about 9/11 that was safe to say.”6
But even on the Left, most discourses have been centering on what went
wrong with the U.S. foreign policy (with charges ranging from empire-building,
imperialism, neo-colonialism, neo-liberalism, occupation, oil grabbing, state
terrorism etc.) without directly engaging the figure of the terrorist. For example,
Chalmers Johnson suggests, “‘terrorism’ is an extremely flexible concept open to
abuse” by the political and military establishment, shifting the label to fit the state’s
geo-political agendas.7 This is Noam Chomsky: “the official US definitions of
‘terrorism’ are virtually the same as the definitions o f counterterror.”8 Listen also to
Judith Butler: “the term ‘terrorist’ is used ... by the Israeli state to describe any and
all Palestinian acts of resistance, but none o f its own practices o f state violence.”9
All these statements are correct, but they also show that, when facing terrorism, Left
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scholars have been avoiding directly the figure of the terrorist and instead redirecting
the charge of “terrorism” to the liberal state or attributing the cause o f terrorism to
the liberal state’s own actions.
Terrorist violence, whether committed by non-state actors or states
themselves, needs to be condemned and held accountable to international standards
o f war crimes and crimes against humanity. But aside from categorizing it as “act of
war” or “criminal conduct,” there seems to be something even subtler about suicide-
bombing terrorism. As it is an act committed by individuals through illegitimate
traveling, like the other traveling figures we examined—undocumented
domestic/sweatshop workers, global sex workers, and transsexuals—terrorists have
long been under the Panoptical gaze of modem states. There has always an
embedded connection between travel and violence, tourism and terrorism that
troubles states. As Peter Phipps points out, state functionaries such as customs,
immigration, and police are “concentrated technologies o f transition ... designed
largely to regulate the flow of travelers under the scopic control of the state ...” He
writes, “Security cameras, x-rays and random searches are designed to screen o u t...
potential incendiary threats” embedded in unruly acts of travel: illegal aliens,
trafficking o f narcotics, terrorists, commodities, biological materials, firearms and
other prohibited substances. States depend on mobility just as they are
“simultaneously structurally threatened by mobility” and must guard it and regulate
it through intense monitoring.1 0 Phipps provides a comparison between the tourist
and the terrorist:
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The aim of the tourist, or legitimated traveler, is to pass through these points of
surveillance and control as quickly and smoothly as possible with the authorization
of all the authorities concerned. In a dark parallel, the terrorist or other illegitimates
in transit (smugglers, illegal aliens) attempt to slip around or through this regulatory
authority in the dis-guise of tourists; in the case of the terrorist, to deliver to such
legitimacy and omnipotence a mocking blow.1 1
Terrorism represents not simply a monstrous and murderous act, it further underlies a
subject’s ability to camouflage in the act of travel and turn back state surveillance on
its head with a deadly blow.
Precisely because they are travelers, in fact, travelers who seek to circumvent
state surveillance in order to accomplish their objectives— including the taking of
their own lives— they also, like other traveling figures, possess their own
dwelling/traveling narratives. Niliifer Gole comments in the aftermath o f 9/11 that
“Terror as usual was faceless, but also voiceless ... Absence of demands on the part
of the perpetrators, absence of meaningful narratives on the part of the spectators.”1 2
As I will argue, however, by looking at suicide-bombing terrorism as a traveling
mission, it will point us to the bombers’ needs and demands for dwelling/traveling,
which will in turn enable us to draw a narrative of (non-existent) “citizenship” in
their deathly acts.
In making this claim, I want to first clarify that, given the long and complex
history of suicide bombing, my proceeding discussion is limited to the current
context of Middle East, especially with regards to the Palestinian situation and to the
transnational al-Qaeda network. Moreover, my focus is on the bombers who actually
go into the missions, not the leaders o f militant organization that sponsor and provide
training of the bombers. As Barbara Victor points out, unlike the Palestinian youth
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bombers who actually shed blood by exploding their own bodies, the leaders of
militant organizations have shielded their own children away from the trauma and
violence of the Intifada by sending them abroad.1 3 Not only does it mark a
discrepancy in terms of power and privilege, it further points to a distinct
dwelling/traveling narrative that separates the Palestinian bombers from the leaders
and trainers of the organizations. The same goes for the 9/11 hijackers who actually
made the act of “travel” and Osama bin Laden who merely played a “spiritual” role
and provided financial assistance. While the bombers and the leaders may share
similar political or religious views, there is something distinctive about the bombers
that lead them, not the leaders, into the missions. There is something distinctive
about the act o f suicide bombing itself that induces a specific dwelling/traveling
narrative that can lead to a transgressive imaginary o f citizenship— which applies to
the bombers, not the leaders. In this way, I also want to contradict the claim that the
militant organizations function as a propaganda machine and the bombers are simply
brainwashed automatons who carry out the instructions from above. Rather, there is
a particular agency figured into the act of suicide bombing that propels certain
subjects, and not others, into the bombing missions. There is a particular narrative
about the bombers that makes them so determined to end their own lives.
My argument is thus the following: suicide bombers should be looked at as
traveling agents who transgress the dwelling trajectory o f citizenship in the ultimate
dimension o f “moral-legality” that figures citizens as civil, law-abiding subjects in
pursuit o f life, liberty, and happiness. Suicide bombing simultaneously embodies
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claims to both “dwelling” and “traveling,” and the bombers attempt to fulfill such
claims by digressing from the moral-legal trajectory of citizenship. Particularly, as
subjects who live in a constant state of insecure dwelling, and either forbidden
traveling away (as in the case of Palestinians) or see their current travel in the West
as a meaningless displacement and exile (as in the case of al-Qaeda members),
suicide bombers turn their unfulfilled aspirations and suffocative predicament into a
deadening rage against targets that they perceive have ruined their secure dwelling
and embodiment. This, however, is not simply a sign of hatred (as “an eye for an
eye”) but more an internal formation of pain— for a loss that, in their eyes, can never
be recovered, and for their powerlessness to change the situations. Citing
psychoanalyst Karl Menninger, Rose writes, “No one commits suicide ... unless they
experience at once ‘the wish to die, the wish to kill, the wish to be killed.’”1 4 Suicide
bombers do not set out to kill and to die unless they have lost all hope for the better,
seeing their current life as not worth living anymore. Islam does not propel them to
suicide, but its promised heaven in the afterlife provides a forlorn sense of secure
dwelling and embodiment denied in the worldly life. In order to attain that ordained
reward o f eternal dwelling, however, they have to take one last trip— one last
travel—by turning themselves into shahids (martyrs) through “sacred explosions”
against what they perceive as Islam’s enemy and oppressor.
Yet, while many see the “parochial” influence o f religion as central in
determining suicide bombing, they neglect that the very last traveling act—by dying
with strangers o f ethnic/racial groups o f other nationalities, and by, in Rose’s words,
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drawing them in “an act o f passionate identification” and taking them “in a deadly
embrace”—is also symbolically making a “cosmopolitan” claim.1 5 Hence, while
Islam, via the Koran, may provide these subjects a coveted sense of dwelling, the act
o f suicide bombing also underlines the limitations of Koran in its incapability in
providing them with their other needs in the material world—i.e., traveling, or
cosmopolitan aspirations of being a citizen who has a right to make grievances and
make claims on material resources as being part of the world. In my reading, suicide
bombing simultaneous embodies the unfulfilled need o f secure dwelling and the
thwarted desire for cosmopolitan traveling.
In this sense, suicide bombing can be seen as expressing a demand of
“citizenship,” with the right to dwell securely on one’s national territories and with
the right to claim justice in a world o f egregious power inequity. Caught in a
condition where they can neither safely dwell nor legitimately travel, suicide
bombers put to a lethal traveling to fulfill their needs and desires of dwelling (in the
ultimate afterlife) and traveling (realizing significance and “empowerment” in one
last chance as an individual who “counts” in the world). This lethal traveling that
ties in with unrealized citizenship transgresses the dwelling trajectory of citizenship
in its ultimate moral-legal dimension: the civil, law-abiding subject in pursuit of life,
liberty, and happiness. While undocumented immigrant workers, global sex
workers, and transsexuals all cross the moral-legal boundary in some way, none
crosses this line in the most potent and complete fashion than suicide-bombing
terrorists, who participate in the transgressive citizenship imaginary not in this life,
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but in and through death. If the liberal dogma states, “give me liberty or give me
death,” the suicide bomber claims, “only in death can I realize ‘life’, ‘liberty’, and
‘happiness.’” In this way, the suicide bomber induces an imaginary of deathly
citizenship that “travels” away from the moral-legal dimension o f the dwelling
trajectory in order to realize oneself as a non-existent “citizen.”
Through the detour o f examining their dwelling/traveling narratives, I argue,
we can then look at suicide bombers as lethal travelers who force us to reexamine
our existing assumptions of citizenship. Suicide-bombing terrorism does not
represent the negation o f citizenship; rather, it stretches our imagination of
citizenship to the most extreme. However, unlike previous traveling agents, my
vantage point here is different. My objective is not to demand our “inclusion” of
suicide-bombers in our democratic society and make them our cosmopolitan co
participants. Rather, by drawing them into the framework of “citizenship,” my goal
is to change the way we look at and react to these subjects—not as horrendous
monsters but as humans who are dispossessed o f a citizen’s need to dwell and travel.
Any solution that attempts to stop the cycle of terrorist violence and destruction must
thus engage these subjects’ needs and desires o f dwelling and traveling. Militant
solutions that suppress such needs are only likely to lead more dispossessed subjects
down the road o f violent martyrdom— and taking along with them the lives of
countless number of civilians. However righteous “Just War” may sound, there is
little use in putting up “death” as a threat and sanction on subjects who turn their
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own deaths into instruments o f weaponry and who renounce worldly life and aspire
to a rebirth in the Paradise after turning on the deadly switch.1 6
To further elaborate this thesis, I will divide up my following discussion into
five sections. First, I address three types of arguments that have sought to explain
the motive of suicide-bombing terrorism: culture, nihilism, and political history. In
my view, while the “political history” explanation advances beyond both the
“culture” and “nihilism” arguments. However, given the complex history and
phenomenon of suicide bombing, each of these explanations cannot directly explain
why certain subjects choose to become suicide bombers. Hence, rather than trying to
map out the whole history and rationale of terrorism, I want to instead focus on what
kind of narrative about the terrorist is being generated under each argument. I argue
that the “culture” argument leads to a narrative o f terrorists as being brainwashed and
indoctrinated by Islamic fundamentalism; the “nihilism” argument projects the
terrorists as disillusioned nihilists; and the “political history” argument constructs the
terrorists as avengers against the U.S. and Western domination. Going beyond these
narratives, I argue that tending to the terrorists’ needs and desires for dwelling and
traveling will enable us to weave an alternative narrative that figures suicide
bombers as (non-existent) “citizens.”
Second, while noting the religious influence in Islamic suicide bombing, I
further point to a process of “secularization of martyrdom” in the Middle Eastern
context that appeals to material needs and worldly wants beyond religion. This can
be seen in two respects: 1) the bombers’ justifications o f their operations that digress
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from a primarily religious trajectory; and 2) the difference in the attitudes towards
martyrdom between the premodem Muslim martyrs such as the assassins who
possessed a more “positive” outlook of their millenarian role, and the contemporary
suicide bombers who are reacting against a world that thwarts their individual
aspirations. This secularization of martyrdom opens up our inquiry into the
terrorists’ claims o f “citizenship” in terms of dwelling and traveling—what I identify
as deathly citizenship. Third and Fourth, I will look at how Palestinian suicide
bombers and al-Qaeda hijackers on 9/11 induce this imaginary of deathly citizenship,
respectively.
Finally, I argue that, facing terrorists’ “bare death,” that is, self-infliction of
physical pain and active pursuit of their own death, state sovereignty—whether in the
ordinary form o f the monopolized use o f legitimate physical force or in an
exceptional state o f what Giorgio Agamben calls “bare life”—is not only challenged
but also loses its point. Moreover, advocates of expanding state sovereignty in an
all-out “war on terror” neglect that, as lethal travelers feed off death, military actions
will only further the life of terrorism. The relationship between liberal state
sovereignty and suicide-bombing terrorism, rather than being oppositional, is
mutually reinforcing and directly proportional. The only possibility to stop the life
of terrorism is to give prospective suicide bombers a reason to live as citizens in the
earthly world.
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I. Narratives of Terrorism: Culture, Nihilism, and Political History
What is it that makes hundreds and thousands of dwellers in the Palestine,
men and women, willing to travel deep into the Israeli territory, blow up their bodies
to die along with the “enemy” of another nationalism, remote and distant strangers
they have never seen? What is it that turns traveling Muslim diasporas trying to
make a mark for themselves in the Western metropolises onto the deadly path of
martyrdom, perishing with subjects of other nationalities? Here, I will begin by
addressing three types o f arguments that have sought to explain the phenomenon of
suicide-bombing terrorism: culture, nihilism, and political history. In my view, the
“political history” explanation advances beyond both the “culture” and “nihilism”
arguments, and provides an important background context for our inquiry into
terrorism. However, given the complex phenomenon o f suicide bombing, none o f
these arguments can directly explain why certain subjects choose to turn into suicide
bombers. Instead o f trying to map out the whole history and rationale of terrorism
through these arguments, my focus here is thus to underline what kind of narrative is
being generated under each of these arguments and how I want to shift beyond these
narratives.
Since 9/11, pundits and commentators have sought to identify the “culprits”
that make the “monsters” of terrorism in the Middle East. In popular discourse, the
two most oft-cited explanations are “culture” and “nihilism.” The “culture”
argument attributes the cause of terrorism to Islamic fundamentalism.1 7 Yet, while
many suicide bombers do share faith in Islam, such an explanation neglects that
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neither do all Islamic fundamentalists believe that their religion justifies suicide
bombing nor have all the bombers been Muslims. The text of Koran itself opens the
space for its conflicting interpretation, leading to disagreements among Muslims on
whether suicide bombing constitutes the prohibited suicide or the honored
martyrdom.1 8 Moreover, the occurrence of suicide bombing in the Middle East has
not been restricted to Islamic fundamentalism. Loula Abboud, the female suicide
bomber who perished in resistance against Israeli occupation in 1985, was a
Lebanese Christian.1 9 National separatist groups like the Kurdish PKK in Turkey
and the LTTE (Tamil Tigers) in Sri Lanka are secular and distinct from Islamic
organizations.2 0 In Israel, not only are the leading figures in the Palestinian
Liberation Organization (PLO) Christian rather than Muslim Arabs, the Popular
front for the Liberation of Palestine (PLLP) is a secular Marxist organization that
does not have a religious bent like the Hamas or the Islamic Jihad 2 1 Culture, then, is
taking on too much to explain the whole history of suicide bombing. More
important, as Aristide Zolberg argues, “interpretations of the conflict as an
essentially cultural one, opposing Islamic fundamentalism to Western civilization,
foster suspicion o f Muslims o f any kind” that ultimately leads to prejudicial profiling
of Muslim subjects on the domestic front in the war on terrorism.2 2
The “nihilism” argument stipulates that terrorists are malcontents of
modernity, figures of aimless ressentiment who seek to overthrow the “Satanic”
Western civilization.2 3 But nihilism does not quite explain why suicide-bombing
terror does not seem to be springing from nowhere but has specific geopolitical
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targets. Palestinian suicide bombers have directed their attack upon Israeli targets,
and transnational networks such as the al-Qaeda have focused on the mighty symbols
of U.S. empire (WTC in 1993, and WTC and Pentagon in 2001), its military targets
abroad (the National Guard building in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia in 1995, the American
air base in Dharan, Saudi Arabia in 1996, and the American destroyer USS Cole in
the Yemeni port o f Aden in 2000), its embassies and consulates abroad (in Nairobi,
Kenya and Dar es Salaam, Tanzania in 1998, and in Karachi, Pakistan, 2002), and its
affiliated allies (three residential compounds in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia in 2003, the
Madrid commuter train bombings in 2004, the London subway bombings in Britain
and the hotel bombings in Amman, Jordan in 2005).2 4 As Said Amir Arjomand
argues, if the wrath originates from culture or nihilism, “the animus ... need not
necessarily be directed against the United States but can be directed elsewhere.”2 5
While terrorism did happen elsewhere,2 6 the U.S. and its allies have shouldered the
preponderant number o f attacks.
Beyond the culture and nihilism arguments, other scholars have attempted to
situate the phenomenon o f terrorism in a political and historical perspective,
especially the policies o f the West in the Middle East. Mahmood Mamdani calls this
a politicized understanding o f terrorism.2 7 He specifically points to the Cold War as
the breeding ground o f Middle Eastern terrorism, as the U.S. mobilized Muslims
worldwide around a holy war against the Soviet Union’s invasion o f Afghanistan.
He notes, the CIA “orchestrat[ed] support for terrorist and proto-terrorist movements
around the world.... and ... cultivatefd] ... terrorism in the struggle against regimes
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7R
it considered pro-Soviet.” The al-Qaeda, led by Osama bin Laden, was bom in this
context, as an ally o f the U.S. in the fight against communism. The alliance was
broken once the Russians were defeated, however, as “the Americans abandoned
Afghanistan to its fate and the Afghan freedom fighters, mainly Islamic
fundamentalists, turned against the United States.” Bin Laden's subsequent lost
bidding to the U.S. for the protection service o f Islam’s most sacred sites in Saudi
Arabia, Mecca and Medina— and by implication, the occupation by the “infidel”
American force there— adds further humiliating insult to bin Laden and his
fighters.2 9
Chalmers Johnson further links recent U.S. foreign policies to formations of
neo-imperialism and neo-colonialism that seek to buttress its preeminent position in
the Middle East by dominating and exploiting weaker states, including securing a
stable oil supply for its domestic use and military-industrial complex. These
imperialist postures breed militant responses.3 0 Rajeev Bhargava also identifies how
U.S.’s support for despotic regimes such as Egypt, Pakistan, Morocco, Jordan, and
Saudi Arabia for considerations of petroleum or geopolitical interests has thwarted
the struggle for democracy by reformers in those regions and given breathing room
to militant antagonism.3 1 Others have further pointed to the U.S. bombing of Iraq in
1991 in the Gulf War and its postwar embargo that killed half-million Iraqi children,
as well as its consistent support for Israel against Palestine in their territorial conflict
as contributing to feelings of humiliation and resentment against the U.S. on the part
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of Muslim subjects.
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These “political history” arguments, in my view, advance beyond the
“culture” and “nihilism” explanations and provide an important background context
for our understanding of terrorism. But given the complex phenomenon o f suicide
bombing, even the “political history” explanation does not quite explain why certain
subjects choose suicide bombing as a form of their resistance. In fact, why do
certain Muslim subjects turn into suicide bombers and not others, even though they
all live in similar political and historical conditions? In my view, whether culture,
nihilism, or political history, none of these arguments directly explains the
emergence of suicide bombing terrorism.
What I want to focus here, then, is not mapping out the whole history and
rationale of terrorism through these arguments; rather, I want to delineate what kind
of narrative is being generated under each o f these arguments. As I will note, all of
these explanations project specific narratives about the figure of the terrorists that I
want to move beyond. First, in the “culture” argument, the suicide bomber is
constructed as an indoctrinated individual by the radical cult of Islamic
fundamentalism: the militant organizations function as a propaganda machine and
the bombers are simply brainwashed automatons who follow their religion and carry
out the orders. Such narrative is too general and reductive, failing to take the
bombers’ own agency into consideration. It does not capture what separates the
bombers from the organization leaders: if the key is Islamic fundamentalism, then
why don’t the leaders who preach the faith go into the bombing missions
themselves? There is something else than a nebulous “culture” that nurtures the
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bombers’ (not the leaders’) desire in ending their own lives. Second, in the
“nihilism” argument, the terrorist is figured as a disillusioned nihilist under
modernity. However, by placing suicide bombers in a trajectory at a distance from
or as a negation of, cosmopolitan modernity, the nihilist narrative critically overlooks
that suicide bombing, by staging explosions in the public and drawing strangers into
a close contact o f death, it may actually express a (thwarted) desire to be included as
part of the world.
Finally, in the “political history” argument, the terrorist is figured as an
avenger against U.S. or Western domination. Bhargava argues that terrorism has less
to do with ressentiment than with “retributive hatred.”3 3 Such hatred is related to
“the use of American weapons against Palestinian civilians by Israel, our continued
bombing of Iraq, and our support for repressive Arab regimes that maintain our oil
supply.”3 4 Johnson sees terrorism as a “blowback” to U.S. foreign policy, which
reaps fruits o f what it sows.3 5 Ward Churchill, in a more problematic fashion, refers
to 9/11 as “chickens coming home to roost” in response to the U.S.’s bombing of
Iraq— a sign that “some people push back.”3 6 But particularly because suicide
bombing involves ending one’s own life, I disagree with the narrative of hatred and
vengeance— a description which may be reserved for the militant organization
leaders but not quite so in the case o f the suicide bombers. To kill others, it takes
hatred; to consciously kill oneself in the process, it takes pain, where one sees his/her
own life as unworthy o f living. In my reading, suicide bombing is not just about
revenge for your killing o f our people (as an eye for an eye), but about pain, from a
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prolonged state of powerlessness and desperation— for your scarring o f my
embodiment, your destroying of my possibility of secure dwelling, and your denying
of my claim to the world as a citizen.
Moving beyond the narratives of terrorists as the indoctrinated, the nihilists,
and the avengers, below I will weave a different narrative, through “dwelling” and
“traveling,” that figures suicide bombers as (non-existent) “citizens.” My intention,
again, is not to tell a general history, as if all suicide bombers should be understood
in this way. Rather, I want to point to the ways in which, under certain
circumstances and in certain ways, we may use this dwelling/traveling narrative to
understand terrorists as “citizens” and suicide bombing as a discourse of
“citizenship.”
II. Getting Close Enough to You to Make You Perish with Me:
Lethal Travelers and Deathly Citizenship
Suicide bombing in the Middle East is nothing new in the world history o f
suicidal warfare that is often employed to achieve specific military and political
objectives. The Japanese kamikaze pilots in the WWII are a case in point. While
cultural traditions or religious beliefs may be shored up to fortify the will to sacrifice,
suicidal attacks always underlie a consideration o f practicality, as a desperate, last
resort of “the weak.” Here, I want to specifically delineate a process of
“secularization o f martyrdom” in Islamic suicide bombing that appeals to material
needs and worldly wants aside from religion, thus opening up our inquiry into the
terrorists’ claims o f “citizenship,” in terms of dwelling and traveling.
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Christoph Reuter in My Life Is a Weapon has provided a historical account of
modem suicide bombing. Within the Islamic context, the genealogy of suicide
bombing is often traced to the cult o f martyrdom in the minority Shiite tradition, with
its emphasis on self-sacrifice and suffering, even though contemporary suicide
bombers (with affiliation to Hamas, Islamic Jihad, Taliban, or al-Qaeda) tend to be
the majority Sunni Muslims.3 7 Reuter in his study has identified the emergence of
the “assassins,” a radical offshoot o f the Shiite minority in the second half o f the
eleventh century, “as the forebear o f suicide bombing.”3 8 Led by Hassan-i Sabbah,
this group o f faithful rebels understood that they could never match the Sunni mlers
in open battle, “so they resorted to subversion, espionage and, ultimately, targeted
murder,” “inflictfing] fatal blows on the great powers” despite being a tiny minority.
The sacrificial or “suicidal” element was witnessed in the assassins as they, having
committed their missions with daggers, “never attempted to flee” and “allowed their
target’s bodyguards to stab them to death.” The assassins’ use of “tactics” facing a
powerful opposition and their seeming indifference facing their own deaths find
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incarnations in current-day suicide bombers.
Prior to the waves o f suicide bombing attacks, Reuter points out, the cult of
martyrdom was witnessed in two major events in the predominant-Shiite Iran
inspired by Ayatollah Khomeini: the Islamic Revolution that brought down the shah
monarchy armed and supported by the Western powers in 1979 where the protestors
refused to disperse in spite o f the bullets that were firing at them from the police, and
the Iranian “human wave attacks” in the ensuing Iran-Iraq War from 1980 to 1989
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where Iranian youths, with their sheer bodies, “ran at the Iraqi positions until they
either won the day or were all dead.”4 0
This Shiite cult of martyrdom, however, did not translate into actual suicidal
“human bombs” until 1983 in Lebanon, when the radical Shiite organization, the
Hezbollah, responded to the invasion of the Israeli, American and French forces by
imitating while “advancing” Iran’s massive and wasteful human wave attacks into “a
precisely controlled, well directed and sparingly used weapon, deploying it to
maximum possible effect.”4 1 As Reuter argues, the new martyrdom strategy of
suicide bombing targeting at the opposition’s military forces is not a triumph of
irrationalism, but “a new, coldly rational form of cost-benefit analysis” whereby the
weaker force (in terms of weapons and manpower) strikes a blow at the enemy with
relatively few casualties on its own.4 2 From the Hezbollah, only gradually did
suicide bombing spread out to Sunni or even secular groups, reaching “epidemic
proportions, ... [making] its way to Sri Lanka in 1987 (long before it reached as far
as Israel), ... [and] by the 1990s, it had arrived in Turkey, Kashmir, and
Chechnya.”4 3 Islamic Palestinian organizations such as Hamas and Islamic Jihad
started carrying out suicide bombings against Israel in the m id-1990s,4 4 but the
number of such missions did not escalate until the second Intifada (Palestinian
uprising) in late 2000, after many setbacks of the Oslo Peace Accords.4 5
What is important to note here is that, while suicide bombing often carries a
“religious” taintedness with its root in the Shiite cult o f martyrdom, in its spreading-
out process we also find elements of “secularization of martyrdom,” that is, with the
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bombers justifying their operations not strictly in religious but also in worldly terms.
This can be analyzed in two respects: 1) the bombers’ justifications of their
operations that digress from a primarily religious trajectory; and 2) the difference in
the attitudes towards martyrdom between the premodem Muslim martyrs such as the
assassins who possessed a more “positive” outlook of their millenarian role, and the
contemporary suicide bombers who are reacting against a world that thwarts their
individual aspirations.
First, different militant groups justify the targets of their attacks in different
ways. Hezbollah and other groups like the non-Islamic national separatist Tamil
Tigers in Sri Lanka limited their bombing operations to attacking enemy soldiers and
military targets, and condemned any attacks against civilians as “terrorism.”4 6
Palestinian suicide bombers, however, justified attacks on Israeli civilians as
legitimate defense against Israeli occupation. Yet, they considered the attack by al-
Qaeda hijackers on 9/11 as random criminal violence without a concrete legitimate
cause.4 7 This signifies not only different practical considerations (military and
political objectives) for different militant groups, it further underlines the ways in
which suicide bombing in the Islamic context is digressing from the religious dogma
(cult of martyrdom) and contains “worldly” aspirations. It does not mean that
religion plays no role; it simply means that religion plays a role only to the extent to
it fits different subjects’ “individual” purposes. Navid Kermani thus writes on the al-
Qaeda Sunni Muslim diasporas,
[I]t cannot be denied that this Shiite religious tradition [of martyrdom] has filtered
into the terrorists’ intellectual universe—but as merely one feature of a deeply
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syncretistic world view. They have constructed a tradition using quotations from the
textual sources, but removed from their linguistic context as well as that of their
historical reception, combined with borrowings from a past which isn’t even their
own, plus elements which are completely and utterly contemporary.4 8
Hence, while suicide bombing may contain influences of religion, it is more a
product of a “syncretistic world view,” containing issues that are worldly, material
and secular.
Farhad Khosrokhavar argues, in fact, justification of killing civilians is not
just a matter of going back to the antique religious text and renders it a new
interpretation but involves a process o f secularization of religion. He gives the
example of his interviews with several Islamic prisoners in France where the subjects
justify the three thousand deaths on 9/11 in largely statistical terms, arguing that the
American embargo in Iraq results in a much larger number o f deaths of Iraqi children
and old people among the civilians. They also defend Palestinian suicide bombing
by pointing to the more numbers o f deaths on the Palestinian side than on the Israeli
side in their longtime conflict.
Khosrokhavar sees this as indicative of the increasingly nihilistic sentiment
o f terrorism in modernity: “The modem imaginary relies upon statistics to disguise
its uncertainties and to back up its analyses.”4 9 While I think Khosrokhavar makes
an important point on secularization of religion, I view this reference to
quantification as less a sign of nihilism as a sign of corporeal and material demands.
We thus hear the prospective Palestinian suicide bombers claiming, “The Israelis kill
our children and our women. This is war, and innocent people get hurt.”5 0 In my
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view, what underlie such vengeful cry are corporeal wounds and unfulfilled needs
under the current asymmetry of global distribution of resources and power.
Second, this secularization o f martyrdom further signals a difference in the
fundamental attitudes towards martyrdom between the premodem Muslim martyrs
such as the assassins and their contemporary counterparts of suicide bombers. While
the former consists o f professional soldiers committed to their sacrificial role in
order to bring about a new world, the latter consists of ordinary individuals who
desire to destroy a world that reserves no place for them. Khosrokhavar puts it this
way,
Members of premodem sects were usually willing to die and to kill their enemies
because of their millenarian convictions ... and their positive image of the role they
were playing ..., believfing] that ... [they were] helping to construct a newpolis in a
new world. Modem martyrs, in contrast, act out of a hatred for a world in which, as
they see it, they are being denied access to a life of ‘dignity’, no matter whether they
are Iranian, Palestinian or members of a transnational networks such as al-Qaeda.
Whereas the sectarian martyrs of the Islam of the premodem age were convinced
that their actions would bring about the advent of a new world and the destruction of
the old, the actions of modem Muslim martyrs are intended to destroy a world in
which there is no place for them as citizens of a nation or of an Islamic
community.5 1
The sacrificial act of modern-day suicide bombing seems to spring from a sense of
powerlessness in attaining material resources and worldly demands. In
Khosrokhavar’s words, “Dying a holy death allows them to accede to dignity
through sacrifice, whereas everyday life is dominated by insignificance and lack of
dignity.”5 2 Or, as Reuter puts it, “It isn’t a matter of winning, but of dying on the
right side.”5 3 The frightening sacrificial acts o f suicide bombing underline a desire
to turn a nameless life into an everlasting inscription o f death.
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As many scholars point out, suicide bombers consist of ordinary individuals
coming from different strata of society with a determined will to end their own lives.
Such will, however, comes from the individual rather than determined by religion.
Having studied dozens of biographies of Palestinian suicide bombers, Psychologist
Ariel Merari of Tel Aviv University points out that they “come both from the poorest
areas of Gaza and from Ramallah, the West Bank’s wealthiest and most
cosmopolitan town.” In fact, “Today’s suicide commandos ... are a mirror image of
their society. You find men from the lumpenproletariat along with university
graduates, poor people, and also the sons o f millionaires. They are still primarily—
though not only—people o f the faith.” Importantly, the will and desire to embark on
the journey o f sacrificial bombing, Merari argues, “comes from the individual
himself, from his experiences, from his beliefs.”5 4 Islamic militant organizations are
not able to “create” suicide bombers like “booby-trapped automatons;” their role, at
the most, is to “reinforce existing predispositions.”5 5
The reason for these subjects to go on the path o f “martyrdom,” Reuter
argues, has less to do with religion than with the individuals’ personal expectations
and the unfulfilling o f their needs and wants. He writes,
The presupposition that the attackers consist solely of fanatical, single, uneducated
men from the slums is simply wrong: women and secular people are just as likely to
blow themselves up and, ... the readiness to commit such an act increases with the
person’s level of education.... [Wjhat is crucial is the relationship between the
individual and his status and expectations—or, more to the point, the thwarting of
these expectations.”5 6
Khosrokhavar echoes: “sacrifice is certainly experienced as an act dictated by Allah,
but the sacrifice is made by an individual who tries to leave his own mark on it.”5 7
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Suicide bombing, in Khosrokhavar’s view, expresses “the despair of an embryonic
individual who maintains his links with the sacred whilst striving to assert himself in
^ o
a world that is deaf to his aspirations.” Rose argues, if there is any unifying theme
of modem terrorism, “the story o f suicide bombing is a story of people driven to
extremes.”5 9
The secularization of martyrdom thus simultaneously designates a shifting of
focus from the religious trajectory to the more worldly needs as well as the persistent
unfulfilling of those very needs in the current Middle East context. I argue that,
especially in the cases of Palestinians and al-Qaeda subjects, such needs can be
further interpreted in terms o f “dwelling” and “traveling.” Both groups can be
considered caught in a condition where neither dwelling nor traveling is presented as
a viable option. For Palestinians, they suffer from a sense of insecure dwelling under
Israeli occupation, not only without a home, but also under fierce unemployment and
lack o f material resources that do not correspond with their education level.
Persistent surveillance and military raids by the Israelis add to the existing fears and
tensions. As Palestinians’ mobility and movement around the occupied territories
are monitored and regulated, they are unable to travel away from this condition
without sufficient resources. For Muslim diasporas affiliated with al-Qaeda, feeling
displaced as outsiders in Western cosmopolitan cities, they have never felt at home
in their “traveling.” Exposure to the media barrages o f the Israeli bombing of
Palestine, U.S. bombing of Iraq, and U.S. “occupation” of Saudi Arabia (in Mecca
and Medina) contributes to a sense o f their (real) “home” back there being ruined,
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destroyed, and polluted by Western powers. In a state of empty traveling and forlorn
dwelling, these diasporic subjects are in a suffocative predicament like their
Palestinian counterparts, even if in different ways.
In this sense, Koran's provision of a fulfilled afterlife in Heaven for the
devout martyrs can be seen as providing a coveted sense of embodied dwelling for
both groups. According to the Shiite theologian Morteza Motahhari, Islam combines
“faith (iman), migration (hijrat) and holy war (jihad).’ ’ ' Here, “[m igration means
leaving this life in order to achieve a sacred goal through martyrdom.”6 0 Suicide
bombing can thus be interpreted as the means o f transportation, a “lethal traveling,”
that takes the bombers through martyrdom to the destination of eternal dwelling.
Putting this in traveling narratives: in order to find a place o f dwelling or a state of
embodied and fulfilled being, one must migrate, or travel, taking leave o f the current
worldly life where one’s existence is shattered and where dwelling is impossible, via
martyrdom, to reach a final destination where one’s body and soul can peacefully
reside.
But suicide bombing also represents traveling in another sense: it underlines
thwarted cosmopolitan aspiration o f being a citizen who has a right to express
grievances and make claims on the world. As subjects who do not even possess
national citizenship (in the case of Palestinians) or face ostracism in the Western
metropolises (in the case of al-Qaeda diasporas), the last traveling act enables the
suicide-bombing terrorists to make a symbolically “cosmopolitan” claim by forcing
strangers into an “intimate” contact o f death. Rose speaks o f the Palestinian
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situation: “As Israel becomes a fortress state and the Palestinians are shut into their
enclaves, and there is less and less possibility of contact between the two sides,
suicide bombing might be the closest they can get.”6 1 Suicide bombing symbolizes a
deadening scream at the shutoff distance and political indifference that have
sustained the bombers’ dispossessions and powerlessness; it forces strangers across
national boundaries to witness their “empowerment” as subjects who “count” in the
world.
Suicide bombing represents then, not so much a negation o f the world as a
thwarted desire to be part o f the world. Khosrokhavar notes that, “The act of
martyrdom oscillates between suicide and the killing o f the other, between
resignation and self-assertion. There is at once a desire for self-assertion and a
realization that it is impossible.” Suicide bombing enables that “self-assertion,” if in
proxy, by inscribing the bomber into a position in making grievances and claims on
the world. Khosrokhavar argues, “the sacred is not so much a theologically defined
Islamic ideal as a desire to be part o f the world, to be recognized as having a right to
one’s dignity.” Martyrdom offers a way out of the dilemma o f “‘the impossibility of
being’ for a generation o f young people haunted by the dream o f being part of the
world.”6 2 Rather than treating the act as isolation from civilization, Rose argues,
“Suicide bombing is an act o f passionate identification— you take the enemy with
you in a deadly embrace.”6 3 And only after the last “traveling” (cosmopolitan) claim
is made can the bomber attain a sense o f closure, with the “feeling o f existing as an
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individual,” reaching a final destination that “guarantees a happy end whereas life on
earth is profoundly unhappy.”6 4
I thus see suicide bombing as configured not simply by hatred but by pain, a
sense of disembodiment when one’s hope for secure dwelling is shattered and when
one is not given the voice to make claims on the world as a citizen to change his/her
predicament. Suicide bombing simultaneously embodies both the unfulfilled need of
secure dwelling (now “attained” in the afterlife through Koran) and the thwarted
desire for cosmopolitan traveling (now “attained” through the bombing act). Taking
it further, suicide bombing constitutes a transgressive imaginary of “citizenship” that
claims the “right” to dwell securely and the “right” to cosmopolitan justice in a
world of egregious power inequity—but only in and through death. This imaginary
runs counter to the dwelling trajectory of citizenship that stipulates a moral-legal
citizen to be a civil, law-abiding subject in pursuit o f life, liberty, and happiness. But
it is not a negation o f citizenship, for it takes a detour through the immoral and
illegal act of suicide bombing in order to attain a renewed “life,” “liberty,” and
“happiness” by realizing oneself as an empowered individual and as a non-existent
“citizen.” I call this imaginary that “travels” away from the moral-legal dimension
of the dwelling trajectory, deathly citizenship. In the next two sections, I will
specifically look at the deathly citizenship o f Palestinian suicide bombers and al-
Qaeda hijackers on 9/11.
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III. Shattered Dwelling, Shattered Bodies: Fragments of Citizenship
in Palestinian Suicide Bombing
The bomber’s family and the sponsoring organization celebrate his
martyrdom with festivities, as if it were a wedding. Hundreds of guests
congregate at the house to offer congratulations. The hosts serve the juices
and sweets that the young man specified on his will. Often, the mother will
ululate in joy over the honor that Allah has bestowed upon her family.
But there is grief, too. I asked the mother o f Ribhi Kahlout, a young
man in the Gaza Strip, who had blown himself up, in November, 1995, what
she would have done if she had known what her son was planning to do. “I
would have taken a cleaver, cut open my heart, and stuffed him deep inside,”
she said. “Then I would have sewn it up tight to keep him safe.”
Nasra Hassan, “An Arsenal o f Believers”6 5
Since the Six-Day War of 1967 when Israel occupied the West Bank and
Gaza, the Golan Heights, and East Jerusalem, numerous U.N. resolutions have called
for the withdrawal of the Israeli forces from the Palestinian territories. However,
Israeli settlements kept expanding, especially so since the Oslo Peace process in
1993. In December 2001, Mary Robinson, UN High Commissioner for Human
Rights, while calling on Palestinian suicide bombers to stop attacking Israelis,
pointed to the Israeli government’s policies o f “collective punishments, such as
prolonged siege and closures of the territories and destruction of homes and
agricultural land,” leading to ‘“ increased poverty and a steady economic decline in
the West Bank and in Gaza,’ conditions that fuel desperation and extremism.”6 6 The
decision by the Sharon government to pull out Israeli settlements from Gaza and
portions of West Bank in August 2005 might be described as a “positive”
development, but it came much too late for the suicide bombers and their victims
who perished in the years o f bloodshed— and too late to reverse the reality that the
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Palestinian resistance has functioned as both a catalyst symbol for Muslim
antagonism against the West and a central site of inspiration for willing martyrdom.
Robinson’s description o f Palestinian life under Israeli occupation captures a
sense of “shattered dwelling” for Palestinians who live on fragmented territories
without the bounded-ness o f nationhood. While Palestinians do not have an official
“home” as a recognized nation-state, they do share a sense of being part of a nation
and cultivate a relationship with their lands as their dwelling sites. High rate o f
unemployment, lack of material resources, and the persistent surveillance and raids
by the Israeli forces that contribute to feelings of insecurity and humiliation,
however, make their dwelling exceedingly difficult. In the context o f Palestine,
extreme desperation means that one is trapped in a condition where one does not feel
at “home” and yet is unable to move away. Suicide bombing simultaneously
embodies a desire for dwelling, a home, and traveling, an escape, getting away from
occupation. Khosrokhavar describes the sense of being “strangled” for Palestinians
living on the Gaza Strip:
Life becomes stale when it comes into closer contact with the tense situations ... that
test everyone’s mental stability ... More than 80 per cent of the population are
unable to leave it, as access to West Bank and Israel is restricted by the Israelis. The
rate of unemployment is more than 70 per cent. For these young men, death is a
glorious escape from a spatial and economic confinement that is literally suffocating
them. In Gaza, it is not simply the daily spectacle of deliberate humiliation that is
intolerable, but also the feeling of being strangled in an enclave where life is
impossible because there are too many people living in a tiny territory, without
any occupation or prospects.6 7
Dr. Eyad Sarraj, Palestinian psychiatrist and director o f the Gaza Community Mental
Health Programme, further illustrates the difficulty o f dwelling and traveling under
the Israeli state’s monitoring surveillance:
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You are given an identity number and a permit to reside. If you leave the country
for more than three years in succession, you lose the right to residence. When you
leave the country on a trip, you are given a laissez passer, a traveling document,
valid for one year and it tells you in its recording of your particulars that you are of
undefined nationality.... To survive under Israeli occupation, you are given the
chance to work in jobs that Israelis do not like: sweeping the streets, building
houses, collecting fruit or harvesting. You will have to leave your home in the
refugee camp in Gaza at 3 A.M., go through the road blocks and check posts, spend
your day under the sun and surveillance, returning home in the evening to collapse
in bed for a few hours before the following day. We simply became the slaves of
our enemy.... The struggle of Palestinians today is how not to become a bomb....
The amazing thing is not the occurrence of the suicide bombing but rather the rarity
of them.6 8
Aside from Gaza, the suffocating condition where one can neither dwell nor
travel is also illustrated in the case of Jenin, a dismal town in Palestine surrounded
by Israeli checkpoints and filled with young, prospective suicide bombers. There,
one sees panoptical surveillance with “Israeli soldiers ... stationed behind sandbags
and inside bunkers and towers just outside the town to seal it off and monitor traffic
in and out. Israeli tanks seem to emerge from nowhere to block cars on the road,
allowing only those deemed suitable to enter Jenin. And few are allowed to leave
once they were inside.” As Joyce Davis describes, inside Jenin, there is little that
“makefs] life more attractive than death.”6 9 There are essentially no jobs, and “many
have watched their houses destroyed by Israeli bulldozers in retaliation for an attack
on a Jewish settlement, and others have seen boys shot down by Israeli soldiers.
Most have watched their fathers humiliated at Israeli checkpoints after waiting in
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lines hours long, trying to bring sick, crying babies to the hospital.” Living in a
condition where hate becomes a duty, “young men in Jenin see no future outside of
war,” outside of fighting the Israelis to regain their land.7 1 The militant
organizations that sponsor the suicide bombers indicate that there is no need to
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coerce or cajole anyone to sacrifice oneself for the nation, for “there is a ready cadre
o f young men, and increasingly o f young women, who sign up for such
operations.”7 2
This shattered sense of dwelling and traveling is further compounded by the
disparity that the Palestinians see in their own lived conditions and those of the
neighboring Israelis. There is a marked discrepancy between the Palestinians’
education level and their want of resources. Nasra Hassan finds in his interviews
with nearly two hundred and fifty Palestinian suicide bombers that “none of them
were uneducated, desperately poor, simple-minded, or depressed. Many were
middle class and, unless they were fugitives, held paying jobs.”7 3 It is thus not
simply a personal matter of financial distress, but the unequal distribution o f material
resources between the Israelis and Palestinians under occupation that generates
feelings of injustice and powerlessness. Khosrokhavar notes, “The Palestinian
economy’s dependency on Israel makes them fragile: they are turned down for jobs
commensurate with their qualifications because these are reserved for Israelis or for
other nationalities that are not suspected o f terrorism.”7 4 In addition, water, a major
issue in the Occupied Territories, is unequally distributed with Palestinians allotted
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to seven liters per day while Israeli Jewish settlers get 350 liters. Furthermore, the
settlers live on the top of hills, enjoy Western middle-class standard o f living, and
“overlook the Palestinian villages lower down the slopes.”7 6 Khosrokhavar
observes, “The symbolic domination (above/below) is mirrored in an economic
superiority that stems from Jewishness and not class relations: Israeli Jews are
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granted rights denied to Palestinians, who are reduced to a form of neo-colonial
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inferiority within an apartheid-like system.” In Sarraj's words,
[I]f you are a little Palestinian child growing up next door to a settlement and you
see Israeli children enjoying swimming pools when you have no drinking water, you
don’t learn how to love Jews. You leam how to be envious of them. When you
have bombs falling on your house, you leam how to hate and not make peace. You
don’t need a teacher to teach you how to hate because the best teacher is Ariel
Sharon. Fear and paranoia are intertwined, and the Zionist project has failed. It was
supposed to give Jews a safe haven and instead it has given them constant
bloodshed.7 8
In the testimonies of Israeli survivors who suffer severe injuries from suicide
bombing, one often finds narratives such as “I used to be active, to play soccer two
7 0
or three times a week, I was on teams, I danced.. . These narratives put emphasis
on a citizen’s right to pursue life, liberty, and happiness that is taken away by the
bombing perpetrators. For Palestinian suicide bombers who do not possess such
right as citizens, their bombing acts do not represent negation o f such pursuit; rather,
having been denied such pursuit for all their life, they want it back, though not in this
life, but in and through death—in the afterlife.
As subjects without a nation and living under occupation, with “no worldly
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goods, no access to the benefits o f modernity, and no feeling of pride and dignity,”
the prospective suicide bomber cannot feel “life” as an embodied subject. The
promised Paradise scripted in the Koran for the ordained martyrs provides the hope
o f an embodied state o f dwelling for those who have coveted it for so long. As
Khosrokhavar indicated earlier, suicide bombing oscillates between resignation and
self-assertion; it is a realization that one’s life is not worthy living anymore and a re
ignited hope that one can attain a second chance o f life in a divine state. Labib
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Kamhawi, a political analyst who has researched suicide bombing, argues, “It takes
desperation, anger, loss of hope. It's believing that your life is not worth living
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anymore.” At the same time, the bombers take consolation in their belief that,
through martyrdom, their “life” will be redeemed and renewed in the heavenly place.
As Izzidene al Masri, a 23-year-old Palestinian youth from Jenin who blew himself
up inside Jerusalem’s Sbarro Pizzeria in 2001, affirmed his mother before his
mission: “it’s the afterlife we should seek, not this life.”8 2
Living in a persistent state of shattered dwelling, Palestinian suicide bombers
attempt to find their “sublime” place of dwelling by taking a “lethal travel,” while on
the road “takfingj Israelis with him and reducing] them to the situation they have
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imposed upon his country.” There is thus some sense in the seemingly ironic
statement made by an Islamic Jihad militant: “if you want to be a holy martyr, you
have to want to live!” For the devout, the Paradise promises a sacred rebirth, a
sublime state of eternal dwelling that would recover the lost sense of embodiment for
the willing martyrs.
As Khosrokhavar argues, the territory o f a nation can be seen as a
metaphorical dimension o f one’s body, such that “as he moves around his country,
the individual has a feeling o f being at home that is experienced inside the body.”
Nation-state does not simply convey a sense of identity, but a metaphoric home
where one feels located and embodied. For Palestinians who are denied such a
“home” in the earthly life, the body is experienced as in a constant state of
dislocation. As we have also seen, the daily searches and raids by the Israeli security
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and the want o f material resources in Palestine further add to the senses of
“fragmentation, mutilation and dismemberment.” For a suicide bomber,
Khosrokhavar argues, by exploding oneself to pieces, it “reproduce[s] the image o f a
Palestinian land that has been shattered by the settlement into fragments.” But as his
body is blown into thousands of pieces, “his martyrdom will makes it intact as is the
idealized Palestine in his mind.” In other words, while the lethal travelers seek death
of oneself and others, they are also seeking renewal as a “re-bom” individual.
Khosrokhavar writes, “By ridding himself of a body that has been cut to pieces, he
acquires a higher unity that washes away his sins and gives him what he was refused
in this world: status, a life, a sublime meaning and, in a word, an individuation that
could not be made flesh in a real life in a sovereign nation without a unified
territory.” Through martyrdom, “he ‘spiritualizes’ himself, renounces all his ties
with life on earth, where it was impossible to understand what it meant to have a
fatherland or a country o f his own as a metaphorical extension of his body.”8 5 Only
in destroying his/her dislocated earthly body into fragments can the suicide bomber
attain a renewed sense o f embodiment on the journey home— in the afterlife.
At the climatic point where the Palestinian subject’s desire to continue
earthly life evaporates, the tide is also turned. As Khosrokhavar argues, “Sacrificing
one’s life challenges ... [the] material superiority [of the West], which has as its
corollary a fear o f death.”8 6 For the suicide bomber, Reuter points out, “the more
powerless he may have felt before committing the attack, the more dramatically
death will exalt him. After a life devoid o f any previous significance, he now
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becomes a powerful ideal; his very name inspires fear.’" 8 7 Setting up oneself as a
human bomb gives the dispossessed bomber, for the first as well as the last time, a
sense o f being in control and existing as an individual—in short, an “empowered”
subject whose actions will “count.” While the Israeli state is much stronger in
military terms, its citizenry has also grown weaker in a deeper sense: “They have
grown soft . . they want to live, and live well, and they are afraid o f death.”8 8 In
Barbara Victor’s words, “if Palestinian society has become a culture of death, ...
then Israeli society has become a culture o f fear.”8 9
This newly attained status of “empowerment” also stages one’s claim to
unfulfilled needs as a “non-existent citizen.” Khosrokhavar argues that for
Palestinians who do not even have rudimentary forms of citizenship, martyrdom
provides “some of the attributes o f a non-existent citizenship.” To begin with, the
sacrificial rite against a foreign state has the function of generating and reinforcing
“a shared feeling of belonging to one nation.”9 0 Moreover, it also voices one’s
discontents and unfulfilled needs when the forum of citizenship for Palestinians is
denied and suppressed in the international arena. As Khosrokhavar argues, the goal
of martyrdom “is not so much to destroy Israel (young Palestinians are convinced of
its undeniable superiority at the military and technological level), as to kill Israelis
and to make his voice heard in a world where, unlike Israelis and Americans, he is
denied the status of an individual with his dignity and decency.”9 1 This last bombing
act thus forces strangers to witness and take into account the “claims” of the
dispossessed bombers as non-existent citizens. In this sense, suicide bombing
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expresses not so much a negation of the world as a thwarted “cosmopolitan” desire
to be included and counted as part of the world, as a citizen-subject who has a voice
and a right to express grievances and make claims.
Rose argues, “When life is constant degradation, death is the only source of
pride.”9 2 The act o f Palestinian suicide bombing is indeed a declaration to the
Q-5
outside world: “We fear humiliation more than we fear death.” In fact, even more
correctly: we fear disembodiment and shattered dwelling more than we fear death.
To stop Palestinian men and women from embarking on the journey of lethal
traveling to Israel, the immediate priority is to engage and fulfill their needs of
secure dwelling and legitimate traveling: to have a right to land and territory, to live
without the surveillance and occupation under a foreign power, and to be recognized
as a nation-state with full-fledged citizenship that gives them a voice both
domestically and internationally. Then, even though Palestinian Muslims continue
to believe in the Paradise for the ordained martyrs, life in this world will still be
considered worth living, and “traveling” would no longer be seen as a legitimate or
necessary lethal gateway to life in another world.
IV. Cosmopolitan Inferno: Al-Qaeda, 9/11, and Travel
The date that the transnational al-Qaeda terrorist attack struck the World
Trade Center and the Pentagon o f the United States on September 11, 2001 also
marks the twenty-eighth anniversary of the 1973 coup in Chile by General Augusto
Pinochet—with active involvement from the U.S. government under the Nixon
administration— that overthrew the freely elected government of socialist President
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Salvador Allende.9 4 After the coup, the then Secretary o f State Henry Kissinger told
President Nixon in a conversation that, “We didn’t do it. I mean we helped them.
[Garbeled] created the conditions as great as possible.”9 5 To be sure, it is unlikely
that there is a direct connection between the “first” and “second” 9/11. Yet, while
those involved in the “second” 9/11 were not “militant Chilean communists,” the
past U.S. political-military subversions elsewhere based on its geopolitical interests
and agendas both during and after the Cold War years— escaping the foresights of
Kissinger—might have also created the conditions as great as possible for the
emergence o f today’s transnational terrorists keen on subverting the U.S.’s
hegemonic position and thwarting its expanding influence in the Middle East.
Without claiming that the U.S.’s foreign policies directly contribute to transnational
terrorism, I want to point to the ways in which its actions in the Middle East
nonetheless help amplify the senses o f non-belonging, dislocation, and disembodied
dwelling for Muslim diasporas, who are already in a state o f spiritual-less traveling
in the metropolitan West. In the end, the “second” 9/11 also leads to an imaginary
discourse o f deathly citizenship based on the intertwining claims of dwelling and
traveling.
Like Palestinian suicide bombers, al-Qaeda subjects do not fit the stereotype
of the desperately poor. While devotion to Sunni Islam is a must and the
membership is strictly limited to men, al-Qaeda consists of subjects from diverse
backgrounds in terms o f age groups and ethnic origins, drawing from Saudis,
Pakistanis, Egyptians, Palestinians, Sudanese, Algerians, Indonesians, Malaysians,
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Filipinos, as well as subjects of British, French, German, Spanish, and American
descent.9 6 While older affiliates had participated in jihad in the Afghan war, younger
recruits tend to come from both the less well-off immigrants and the new middle-
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class diasporas o f Middle Eastern origins in Europe. Khosrokhavar indicates that
diasporic recruits are fluent in modernity and “better educated than the average
European.” They speak several languages, and have mastered “code-switching” in
the multicultural metropolises.9 8 In the case of the nineteen 9/11 hijackers, “ 15 were
from Saudi Arabia and had no financial worries. They had a modem education and
the vast majority of them had lived in the West for a long time.”9 9 As Eric
Hershberg and Kevin Moore point out, they are essentially “sons of relative
privilege, well educated and widely traveled,” even though their worldviews “appear
to have been shaped by a profound sense of powerlessness and resentment.”1 0 0
Khosrokhavar notes that 9/11 cannot be understood as a struggle between
Islam and the West, but rather one between “the at least partially ‘Westernized’
against a mythical West.”1 0 1 Migrating to the West engulfs these immigrants in the
sea of modernity and generates a forlorn sense of displacement. Khosrokhavar
writes,
Living in different countries and different cities heightens the feeling that they do
not belong rather than the feeling that they have at last found somewhere hospitable.
The whole world feels like a place of exile.... The point is that they [global cities
like London, Paris, Hamburg, Madrid, and Rome] have no concrete content in the
eyes of individuals whose feeling of ‘not belonging’ dominates everything else.
This is one of the unexpected dimensions of these great cities. They are global cities
where different cultures mingle, but they are also places where new forms of
rejection and exclusion are concocted. They are places where some people develop
a new imaginary based upon a ‘siege mentality’: they become deeply antagonistic to
a globalised whole, and metaphorically describe it as ‘the West’. It is mainly in the
Western megalopolis that the feeling of absolute antagonism to the West prevails
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amongst people who feel that they are being mistreated—either in person or in
proxy—by this dominant power. Islam becomes the name for a new principle of
opposition....1 0 2
Middle-class status does not spare them from insidious forms of discrimination and
ostracism in the metropolises, rendering a feeling of indignation and humiliation that
is compounded by Western domination in the Middle East. Seeing themselves as
exiled and displaced outsiders in Western metropolitan cities, these diasporic
subjects have never felt at home in their “traveling.” Non-belonging, dislocation,
and disembodiment delineate their current state of “dwelling.”
Particularly because o f their relatively high education level, they hold higher
expectations that are difficult to be fulfilled. Khosrokhavar observes, “Loss of
dignity, which is often experienced by proxy, is the fate of the minority who are
better off and therefore have the time and the leisure to take offence and to brood
about their loss o f dignity all day long, either in solitude if they live along, or in the
company of compatriots or coreligionists who are suffering in the same way.”1 0 3
After all, discrimination and ostracism are not exclusive to Middle Eastern
immigrants. Many immigrant dwellers from Latin America, Africa and Asia in the
global cities also experience similar ordeals but have coped with or resisted their
subjection in different ways.
But there is one additional factor that further separates Muslim diasporas
from immigrants o f other origins: the U.S.’s foreign policies and military actions in
the Middle East that amplify Muslim subjects’ senses o f shattered dwelling in their
already spiritual-less traveling in the metropolitan West. Exposure to the media
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barrages o f the U.S.’s “occupation” of Saudi Arabia in the sacred sites of Mecca and
Medina, the U.S. bombing o f Iraq, and the Israeli bombing of Palestine with
weapons sponsored by the U.S. contributes to a perception of their “home” back in
the Middle East being ruined and scarred by the U.S. in particular and the West in
general.
The World Islamic Front Statement of 1998 signed by bin Laden, Zawahri,
and leaders o f other Muslim militant groups point to three major acts by the U.S. that
injure Muslims: 1) its occupation and “defilement” of the two holy sites of Saudi
Arabia, Mecca and Medina; 2) its massacres in Iraq in the Gulf War and the post-war
embargo; and 3) its alliance with the Israeli occupation o f Palestine.1 0 4 The
American occupation of Mecca and Medina in Saudi Arabia, the two most sacred
sites in Islam, was seen in Muslim eyes “an affront not just to Saudi nationalism but
to Islam itself.”1 0 5 As bin Laden states in an interview with ABC News in May
1998:
The call to wage war against America was made because America has spear-headed
the crusade against the Islamic Ummah, sending tens of thousands of its troops to
the land of the Two Holy Mosques over and above its meddling in its affairs and
politics, and its support of the oppressive, corrupt and tyrannical regime that is in
control. These are the reasons behind the singling out of America as a target. And
not exempt of responsibility are those Western regimes whose presence in the region
offers support of the American troops there.1 0 6
Bin Laden has also on numerous public occasions pointed to the deaths of Iraqi
civilians in the Gulf War, especially the hundreds of thousands of deaths of Iraqi
children due to the U.S.-imposed post-Gulf War sanctions against Saddam Hussein
that prevented the inflows of nutrients and medicine as a major Muslim grievance
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against the U.S.1 0 7 In addition, the Palestinian resistance against the Israeli
occupation supported by the U.S. continues to function as an important symbol of the
oppression of Muslims by the West. As Arjomand indicates, what is impossible to
miss on the TV screens of Israeli raids of Palestine, shown throughout the Middle
East, is “the Israelis’ conspicuous use o f American weapons, especially o f F-16
fighter jets and smart bombs, since May 2001.”1 0 8 Sulaiman Abu Ghaith, the
spokesman of al-Qaeda, thus states on al-Jazeera one month after 9/11: “[The 9/11
youths] have moved the battle into the heart of America. America must know that
the battle will not leave its land ... until America leaves our land, until it stops
supporting Israel, until it stops the blockade against Iraq.”1 0 9
The worldviews of Muslim diasporas affiliated with al-Qaeda reflect what
Bhargava identifies as the “cognitive content” of the discontented feelings widely
shared by Muslims living in the Middle East. That is, “the world is governed by two
sets of international laws, one exclusive to America and its allies (rich, Western,
white), and the other for the rest o f the poor, non-Westem world. A single American
life is worth more than a thousand others.”1 1 0 For Muslim diasporas, their own
ostracism in Western societies as outsiders and the U.S. military actions in the
Middle East reinforce the validity o f such worldviews. Daily immersion in the
cosmopolitan West cultivates their sense o f what Immanuel Wallerstein calls the
“less-ness o f the rest of the world ... ingrained in the American psyche.”1 1 1
However, here I also want to make an important note. While I do not doubt
that the 9/11 hijackers hold similar political views as those o f al-Qaeda leaders such
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as bin Laden, Zawahri, and Abu Ghaith, the hijackers’ narratives are different. That
is, for Muslim diasporas to hijack the planes and plunge into the World Trade
Center, it takes not simply retributive hatred against the West, as an eye for an eye,
but a profound sense of loss where one feels trapped in a unfulfilled state o f dwelling
and yet is unable to move away. A distinction needs to be made between al-Qaeda’s
leaders such as bin Laden who sat in the role as a spiritual guider and financier,1 1 2
and the hijackers who are determined to end their own lives. As the hijackers live as
modem diasporas in the West, their feeling for the losses back in the Middle East can
only be by proxy. For these willing martyrs, the repeated references by bin Laden
and his cohorts to the U.S. (and Western) domination in the Middle East that destroy
lives and homes are less important in fanning hatred as serving a constant reminder
in amplifying their senses o f shattered dreams and hopes for a secure, embodied, and
spiritual dwelling. In other words, not only are they placed in a forlorn displacement
and exile in the West, their idolized imagery of “home” back in the Middle East are
also mutilated, scarred, dismembered, and tainted by Western forces. Now, they
have no home to return to in the earthly life. In Davis’ words, al-Qaeda subjects
“want less to destroy or take over our world than to get us out of theirs.”1 1 3
It takes something deeper than the whim o f hatred or revenge in order for
someone to be so determined and exact in plotting out his own death in the process
o f inflicting violence on others; it takes a profound sense o f loss and a belief that the
current life offered no hope for living. In the diasporic hijackers’ eyes, bin Laden’s
references to the U.S.’s military actions in the Middle East thus serve as less a sign
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of revenge than as a key reminder that the Americans have occupied our spiritual
“dwelling” back home and ruined our only chances for a renewed “embodiment” in
the worldly life, where everything is dominated by meaningless travel and dislocated
exile in the cosmopolitan inferno.
Bringing the war to our borders through lethal traveling is a desperate, last
resort for these subjects who are powerless to attain “home.” Al-Qaeda subjects’
“martyred” acts embody the desires for a secure and sublime state of eternal dwelling
after their tiring and forlorn traveling in the world-in-motion. The Paradise inscribed
in the Koran for subjects who go on the martyrs’ journey offer such hope and
possibility. Hijacking the planes is seen as taking one last “travel” in exchange for a
renewed afterlife— for an eternal dwelling of the soul. The World Islamic Front
Statement of 1998 emphasizes this peaceful state of dwelling in the afterlife as a
reward for martyrdom:
Almighty Allah also says: “O, ye who believe, what is the matter with you, that
when ye are asked to go forth in the cause of Allah, ye cling so heavily to the earth!
Do ye prefer the life of this world to the hereafter? But little is the comfort of this
life, as compared with the hereafter....”1 1 4
For the first time, after a life o f aimless traveling in the global cosmopolitan
cities, this ultimate “lethal travel” is filled with spiritual meanings and guidance.
Abdullah Azzam, the mentor o f bin Laden, states, “Travel provision is among the
most important items on this march. The provision consists o f meditation, patience
and prayer.”1 1 5 Finally, they have a goal, a direction: they are going somewhere. In
a letter left behind by one o f the 9/11 hijackers, it carries a delightful narrative o f
traveling:
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Pray for your soul, the bag, the clothes, the knife, your stuff—whatever that stuff
is—your ID ..., your passport, and all of your papers. Check your weapons, before
departure, and before you leave; and “let every one of you sharpen his knife and kill
his animal and bring about comfort and relief of his slaughter” before the journey....
When you arrive and see (M) [airport— matar in Arabic] and get out of the
taxi, then say the supplication of the place and every place you go to say in it the
supplication of place and smile, and be comforted for God is with the believers, and
the angels guard you and you do not feel them....
When you ride the (T) [plane— Ta ’ irah in Arabic] the moment you put in
your leg and before you enter it, make supplications and remember it is an
expedition for the way.... Then when (T) moves slowly and heads to (Q) [probably
taking off—Iqla ‘ in Arabic] say the supplication of travel for you are traveling to
God the Almighty, “Enjoy the travel.”1 1 6
It is because o f this ultimate destination to God and Paradise—the symbolic place o f
secure and fulfilled dwelling—that these displaced diasporas feel they can “enjoy the
travel,” for both the first and last time, in the worldly life.
Hence, if Palestinians are trapped in a condition of shattered dwelling and
panoptical surveillance where they can neither dwell nor travel, al-Qaeda subjects
are stateless cosmopolitans who are capable o f traveling afar but have never felt at
home in the world-in-motion, and whose desire for returning to a home free from
Western domination is persistently left unquenched. Like Palestinian suicide
bombers, they turn “traveling” into a lethal weapon against those who, in their eyes,
have defiled and destroyed their home. In a world where one’s body is feeling
permanently dislocated from home and where one feels deep humiliation from the
constant subjection to a foreign power, it generates a forlorn desire in renouncing the
earthly life that promises no hope in exchange for a renewed afterlife. The ritual of
martyrdom provides a path, by way o f religion, out of an endless and hopeless
traveling towards an eternal dwelling o f the soul. For these subjects who have never
enjoyed travel in the earthly world, martyrdom is seen as the last trip that would both
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vent one’s suppressed rage and discontent from the indignity o f not being “part of
the world” as a citizen, and leading towards the eternal home of the Paradise.
If Palestinian suicide bombing generates a feeling of belonging to one nation
as non-existent citizens, al-Qaeda’s terrorist acts across the world similarly generate
a sense of belonging to a transnational neo-umma as “citizens” o f a global Islamic
community. More important, as subjects with precarious citizenship status in the
West who feel powerless in changing their current state of displaced
dwelling/traveling, what happened on 9/11 allowed the hijackers to feel a fleeting
moment of significance and empowerment vis-a-vis Western domination, “voicing”
their discontents and unfulfilled needs by forcing strangers o f multiple nationalities
to witness their deadening rage. Abu Ghaith refers to 9/11 as making the Americans
“taste from our hands what we have tasted from theirs.”11 7 Bin Laden also states in
an interview that, “The 11 September attacks were not targeted at women and
children. The real targets were America’s icons of military and economic power.”1 1 8
But 9/11 is not simply about exacting revenge for the loss o f lives and suffering
under Western oppression. Rather, extending beyond both Abu Ghaith and bin
Laden, 9/11 is about resisting the U.S.’s military and economic power that has
completely shattered the Muslim diasporic subjects’ last bit of sense of secure
dwelling. It is about claiming their own right to the pursuit o f (a renewed) “life,
liberty, and happiness” in the heavenly place with God that was denied to them in the
earthly life. The hijackers make the Americans “taste from our hands what we have
tasted from theirs” only to the extent that they make the Americans (and other
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Westerner) feel what it is like to live in a constant state of insecure dwelling and
fearful traveling. It is also in and through death that the nineteen hijackers, rather
than negating the world, insist on being included and counted as part of the world—
in their last existing moment on earth— as “citizens” in pursuit o f a re-bom and
eternal “freedom” and “happiness.”
Arjomand argues that whether bin Laden truly cares about the actual plight of
Muslims is besides the issue as the U.S.’s foreign policy and military actions provide
ample evidence for Muslim grievances that sustain the life of terrorism.1 1 9 As Reuter
indicates, in an online survey conducted by al-Jazeera, “only 8.7 percent o f the 4,600
people questioned considered Bin Laden to be a terrorist. Most of them saw him as a
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mujahid, a freedom fighter in a holy war.” It appears that, however, the “success”
of bin Laden in his battle with the West hinges less on his being perceived as a
freedom fighter against Western domination than on his ability to continue exploiting
and amplifying Muslim diasporas’ senses o f insecure and disembodied dwelling in
the cosmopolitan West (from which, of course, the U.S. has provided much needed
ammunition), and by pointing to “lethal traveling” as a gateway to the alternative,
i.e., the Paradise. Walzer points out that despite acting in their name, the 9/11
terrorists barely represent Muslim people and have been unable to win their
authorization or mobilize them into a significant political opposition.1 2 1 But given
the global asymmetry where the West has continued to dominate the international
forum, it seems that, sadly, the al-Qaeda has enabled Muslim subjects to be counted
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as “citizens” who can make claims on the world— not through democratic citizenship
in the earthly life, but through a lethal way of acting out “citizenship,” in death.
V. Bare Death: Flexible Terrorism and Deathly Cosmopolitanism
The world must leam that what we say, goes.
Former US. President George H. W. Bush1 2 2
The Americans love Pepsi-Cola. We love death!
1 23
A young Taliban fighter
[B]ut there is another pervasive, understated sentiment that Israel’s political
and military elites would never admit to: a feeling o f helplessness, of
impotence. It was manifest in the tearful lament o f a police officer at the
joint funeral of two Russian-bom Israeli teenage girls, who perished along
with nineteen others in a June 2001 suicide attack on a Tel Aviv nightclub.
Trembling with rage, the red-eyed officer at first declared that all Palestinian
terrorists should be killed. Then he paused abruptly, and started weeping
again. “What are we supposed to do, then?” he almost shouts. “Threaten to
shoot him if he blows himself up? All he does is laugh, and press his button!
What are we supposed to do?”
Christoph Reuter, My Life Is a Weapon 2 4
I say yes, yes (to) what the American officials are saying that we are going to
launch attacks against America ... However, we will execute these attacks in
the time we choose and the place we choose and the method we choose. Not
Dick Cheney, not the American Secretary of Defense, not the American
President can determine the place, the time, the method and the means that
we will use to launch those operations.
Sulaiman Abu Ghaith, al-Qaeda’s spokesperson in the aftermath
o f 9/111 2 5
The Hobbesian social contract was based on the notion that men work to
form the commonwealth due to their fear o f death. They lay down arms and
weaponry only to render the power of violence into the hands of the state.1 2 6 As Max
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Weber noted, the state is a human association that possesses “the monopoly o f the
1 27
legitimate use o f physical violence within a given territory.” Notwithstanding
Foucault’s masterful treatise on the evolution of penal institutions from public
spectacles of torture to meticulous techniques of discipline that control and utilize
prisoners’ docile body, states have long derived— and continued to derive— authority
from their sanctioned power to punish and inflict pain through physical force.1 2 8
Elaine Scarry’s statement on torture is resonant with liberal state punishment in
general: “it is in part the obsessive display o f agency that permits one person’s body
to be translated into another person’s voice, that allows real human pain to be
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converted into a regime’s fiction of power.” To Mark Juergensmeyer, terrorists’
free-willing mass murders thus illegitimately “break the state’s monopoly on morally
sanctioned killing ... [b]y putting the right to take life in their own hands.”1 3 0 This is
a source of danger, Seyla Benhabib argues, for the loss of this monopoly o f violence
manifests symptoms o f a decaying and weak state.1 3 1 The war on terror is thus partly
an effort by the liberal state to resuscitate this loss of strength, declaring an
exceptional state of sovereignty to reassert its sole grasp of power.
But the lethal travelers, in actively seeking their own death rather than
evading it, have also disrupted the structure o f state sovereignty predicated on the
logic of pain and the fear of death. In other words, what the suicide-bombing
terrorists do is not simply, as Juergensmeyer and Benhabib indicate, challenging the
state’s monopoly o f violence; rather, it renders the state’s reassertion of sovereignty
and use o f violence meaningless. Kermani puts it this way, “For those who see
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martyrdom as their release from an earthly vale o f sorrows, death holds no terror,
and that is something with which political rulers simply could not and cannot deal,
since death and torture are the ultimate means by which they assert their power.”1 3 2
Reuter similarly notes that suicide attackers “annihilate the entire logic o f power [of
state sovereignty], since no credible threat can be made against someone who has no
i
desire to survive.” In short, “There is no sanction beyond that of death.”
Khosrokhavar thus argues, suicide bombers might be “powerless in life,” but at the
very moment that they actively embrace their own passing against those who cling to
life, they become “powerful in death.”1 3 4 Hence, while Scarry is right that human
pain is translated into a regime’s fiction of power, that fiction evaporates facing
subjects who actively embrace physical pain and violence by shattering their own
bodies into pieces. State sovereignty hinges on people’s will to live, and its use of
violence loses the point when a subject self-prescribes “torture” to one’s own body.
In his Home Sacer, Giorgio Agamben argues that, beyond the monopolized
use o f legitimate force, the ultimate state sovereignty lies in its capacity to place
subjects in a state o f “bare life.” Taking Foucault’s biopolitics as a point of
departure, Agamben looks at modem state sovereignty at the intersections of
juridical-institutional power and biopower, animated most fully in the modem
concentration camp, with subjects in a lingered state of “bare life,”1 3 5 in Butler’s
words, a state of “suspended life and suspended death.”1 3 6 The camp demonstrates a
condition in a state o f exception where one is neither living as a political subject
endowed with legal protections nor dead or outside the rule o f law. Bare life signals
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the being of a “homo sacer (sacred man), who may be killed and yet not
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s a c r i f i c e d That is, while law designates the ban on his sacrifice, his killing
would go un-condemned and unpunished in the state o f emergency.1 3 8 In the camp,
“life and politics ... begin to become one, all life becomes sacred and all politics
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becomes the exception.” More critically, to Agamben, the emergence of the camp
in our time is also “an event that decisively signals the political space of modernity
itself... [as] the State decides to assume directly the care of the nation’s biological
life as one o f its proper tasks.”1 4 0 He argues that modem democracies that were
founded on anti-totalitarian principles actually carry an “inner solidarity” with
totalitarianism as “the exception everywhere becomes the rale,” rendering a growing
power of the sovereign liberal state over the bare life o f the citizens. He writes, “the
realm of bare life ... gradually begins to coincide with the political realm, and
exclusion and inclusion, outside and inside, bios and zoe, right and left, enter into a
zone of irreducible indistinction.”1 4 1 Agamben asserts, “Bare life is no longer
confined to a particular place or a definite category. It now dwells in the biological
body of every living being.”1 4 2 In all, bare life underlies the political arrangements
of modem liberalism wherein each citizen is reducible to a biological minimum.
With its overarching intention, however, Agamben’s provocative treatise
suffers from two critical lapses. First, while he provides concrete historical
illustration o f bare life in the concentration camp, the implication that bare life is
everywhere becoming the rale in modem democracies needs more specificity and
contextualization. In fact, assuming Agamben is right that every citizen is reducible
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to bare life, his argument has yet to indicate, as Butler points out, “how this power
functions differentially, to target and manage certain populations, to derealize the
humanity o f subjects who might potentially belong to a community bound by
commonly recognized laws ... [or how state sovereignty] works by differentiating
populations on the basis of ethnicity and race ...”1 4 3
In the U.S. context, given the history of slavery, eugenics (on the mentally
retarded), Japanese internment camp, and what is going on now at the Guantanamo
Bay, the most compelling illustration of bare life where subjects are reduced to a
biological minimum by the sovereign state seems to be witnessed in subjects of
particular ethnic/racial descents, mental state, and class status rather than humanity
across the board. From Agamben, we still need a more solid sense o f how certain
populations might be more susceptible to being reduced to this naked state of
biological minimum than others, and under what particular conditions.
Second, more important in the context that I am speaking of, Agamben’s
delineation of this ultimate sovereignty in the state of exception— in its reducing
subjects to a state of bare life, a biological minimum, a condition o f suspended life
and suspended death— also takes for granted subjects’ desire to live. In other words,
while for Agamben the condition o f bare life illustrates the ultimate state sovereignty
(in the state of exception), he neglects that “bare life”—this ultimate state
sovereignty—hinges on people’s will to live on in their naked biological state.
When suicide bombers refuse to live and inflict their own death, in a condition that
we might describe as “bare death,” the logic of bare life and state o f exception is also
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interrupted and undermined. There is no homo sacer for the state to look for
amongst the suicide bombers, only subjects who have long given up hope for living
in the earthly life, seeking a radical rebirth through sacred explosions.
This point is also underscored by Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, though
in a different context. While their notion that a formless global biopolitical machine
and imperial sovereignty has replaced the old imperialist paradigm along nation-state
lines is rather apocalyptic and problematic, Hardt and Negri make a pertinent point
on the necessity of subjects’ will to live in order for the Empire to function: “Just as
capital constantly relies on the productivity of labor and thus, although it is
antagonistic, must assure its health and survival, so too imperial sovereignty depends
not only on the consent but also on the social productivity of the ruled.”1 4 4 Empire
needs us to live so to exploit us to keep itself functioning. They write, “Those over
whom Empire rules can be exploited—in fact, their social productivity must be
exploited— and for this very reason they cannot be excluded.”1 4 5 For subjects to
subtract themselves from this relationship o f power—that is, voluntarily excluding
themselves— Empire would be sapped out of its lifeblood of social producers and
“simply collapse in a lifeless heap.”1 4 6
In all, state sovereignty, whether in its ordinary state o f monopoly o f the
legitimate use o f violence or in its exceptional state of bare life, loses the point
facing suicide-bombing terrorists’ bare death. Even more so, advocates of expanding
state sovereignty in an all-out “war on terror” neglect that, as lethal travelers feed off
death, military actions will only further the life of terrorism. The relationship
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between liberal state sovereignty and suicide-bombing terrorism, rather than being
oppositional, is actually mutually reinforcing and directly proportional. This point
needs elaboration.
The self-infliction of death in suicide bombing has now taken on a fluid and
flexible character: one never knows when and where it is going to hit, and liberal
states, however widespread their intelligence networks and surveillance systems, are
unable to catch and foil any bombing attempts at civilian targets. Foucault’s famous
dictate that power comes from “nowhere and everywhere” takes on an added
meaning in what might be called the modern-day “flexible terrorism.” Not only are
states’ assertion o f sovereignty and use o f physical force unable to expunge the
existence o f terrorists, it only drives them underground as they regroup, establish
multiple beachheads, networks, and cells with militant organizations elsewhere, and
plot out their next operations. If modem states attempt to teach terrorists a lesson
through military force, “Never again dare the supremacy of the powerful,”1 4 7 its
lesson has only given the terrorists stronger motivation and desires to exploit cracks
and holes in the states’ all-encompassing surveillance to light up the arson—with
ever stronger intensification.
William Lacquer has distinguished between “classic terrorism” and “new
terrorism.” Whereas the former “was directed against leading figures in state and
society,” the latter “has become quite indiscriminate in the choice o f its targets.”1 4 8
In fact, the new “flexible terrorism” is distinct not only in the will o f the agents to die
and turn their own bodies into weaponry but also in its built-in technical flexibility.
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In the case of Palestinian suicide bombing, the “bombs” are relatively easy and
cheap to make. According to Reuter, aside from the will to sacrifice oneself, all one
needs are “nails, an explosive, a battery, a switch, a short bit of cable, a couple of
chemicals, and a sturdy belt with large compartments.”1 4 9 Hassan estimates the cost
of a bombing operation at around a hundred and fifty dollars, with the most
expensive item being “transportation to a distant Israeli town.”1 5 0 In addition, the
bomber is relatively mobile. As one senior Hamas leader stated, “With an explosive
belt or bag, the bomber has control over vision, location, and timing.”1 5 1
Palestinian suicide bombers need not go through intensive physical training
as in a conventional military. All one does is to strap on belt and turn on the
switch— at a pre-selected crowded spot— with the more important part being the
mental preparation prior to the action. It is not even imperative for the bombers to be
long-time members of militant organizations. While there is a screening process for
the militant organizations to select among the willing martyrs to conduct specific
operations, one can just join and be sponsored— if the organizations find him/her to
be determined and disciplined enough in carrying out the bombing. This is most
illustrative in the case o f female suicide bombers who usually have no prior ties to
militant organizations.1 5 2 In fact, as Reuter points out, compared to men, “women
more easily conceal bombs under their clothes by ... passing themselves as
pregnant.”1 5 3 The camouflaging between “militant terrorists” and “ordinary
civilians” makes it difficult for the Israeli state to intercept the flexible tactics of
suicide bombing. As Abdel Hakim Masalma, Islamic Jihad’s spokesman in the West
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Bank, states, “W e’re not a state or a government or a military base that can be hit.”1 5 4
The fact that the bomber dies along with the victims also leaves few clues for further
criminal investigation.
Transnational networks like the al-Qaeda manifest similar trademarks of
flexibility and fluidity. In fact, if transnational business corporations in the age of
neo-liberalism have often been described as “post-Fordist” in their fluidity in
crossing national borders and establishing multiple local networks in gaining wider
shares of global consumers, the al-Qaeda may also be seen in a “post-Fordist” way in
its capacity in globalizing and transnationalizing its membership of willing martyrs.
As Khosrokhavar argues, compared with the traditional pyramid structure of terrorist
organizations, the al-Qaeda has a more decentralized network structure, making it
easier to connect to and recruit diverse members with “very different intentionalities
and aims.” All it takes is creating a “bond ... based upon friendship and cultural
closeness, as well as the shared feeling o f ‘humiliation.’” Each cell operates
autonomously, takes initiatives in operations, and has a very brief shelf life,
disappearing after the missions have been completed.1 5 5 The funding of al-Qaeda
comes from businessmen in Saudi Arabia and Persian Gulf, as well as “Islamic
charitable organizations, the diamond and gold trade, stock investments, and even
drug trafficking and cigarette running.”1 5 6
Like post-Fordist multinational corporations, al-Qaeda is fluid across national
borders and able to keep reproducing and regenerating itself in formation o f cells and
networks in multiple locations.1 5 7 Reuter notes, “The network is everywhere and
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nowhere, using each and every regional conflict as a convenient staging-ground for
its global mission. Al-Qaeda seeks out and colonizes existing conflicts, [establishing
beachheads and offshoots] from Chechnya to Kurdistan, Kashmir, and Karachi— and
makes them worse.”1 5 8 It “operates like McDonald’s: according to the franchise
system,” offering local militant organizations “their know-how with respect to bomb
making, poison manufacturing, guerilla tactics, and obtaining financial aid.”1 5 9
Thus, “being driven out o f Afghanistan ... didn’t so much defeat Osama bin Laden’s
followers as drive them underground.”1 6 0 Abu Hafs, an operational leader within al-
Qaeda, makes the following video-statement after 9/11 on al-Jazeera that captures
the flexibility o f the organization vis-a-vis state sovereignty:
The biggest budget of all the intelligence apparatuses in the world is spent on
American intelligence. The FBI, with offices everywhere and dozes of other
apparatuses, is entrusted with safeguarding America’s security, on which the
Americans spend billions of dollars of their tax money and their private funds so that
they will entrust their security ... These apparatuses have satellites, ground stations,
millions of spies and huge budgets. It is said that they know what is happening in
the bedrooms, that they know the shoe sizes of the wanted [men]. How did a group
of people manage to stay for years, to train inside the US and to plan this operation?
They trained in America, not in Afghanistan ... Those people found a security
breach as big as a whole fleet of hijacked civilian aircraft, and managed to shove
America’s nose into the ground, to strike it with this lightening, to take it by surprise
and to strike it with the greatest of military, security, political and economic
blows.1 6 1
As flexible terrorism feeds off death, it is unlikely to be annihilated by
military force that will only help extend its life in the underground. Paradoxically, at
the very moment that it appears that terrorists are destabilizing sovereign power, they
also unwittingly reinforce it by facilitating the liberal state bringing into a salient
order of state o f exception. The cycle continues as the more intensified the state
adopts a sovereign posture via the war on terrorism, the more widely terrorist
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networks grow, expand, and spread out. What appears to be an inversely
proportional relationship between state sovereignty and flexible terrorism turns out
to be a directly proportional one. The apparent opposition between the sovereign
power of liberal state and the potency of lethal travelers thus feed off one another
and become mutually reinforcing, even as though neither is fully capable of
undermining the other.
So how do we as citizens end this pointless cycle? If, as indicated earlier,
state sovereignty hinges on people’s will to live, then it must be noted here that
suicide-bombing terrorism hinges on subjects’ will to die. Precisely because flexible
terrorism absorbs and feeds off death, the political solution to detach the lethal
travelers from working for terrorist organizations does not lie in physical threat and
sanctions; rather, it is to give them a reason to live. For prospective terrorists to
exclude themselves from this desire for death, then flexible terrorism would be
sapped out o f its lifeblood. Indeed, what deathly citizenship has shown is that
terrorism is not the antithesis o f life and citizenship; rather, it stretches citizenship to
the extreme by giving it a deathly form. The distinction between citizens and
terrorists is, then, merely a thin line. If thwarted citizens can become terrorists, then
the reverse is also true: we can, through the threads o f their dwelling/traveling
narratives, turn prospective suicide bombers back to living citizens.
To turn lethal travelers back on the path o f life and citizenship, instead of
rebuilding walls, shutting off terrorists as fanatics and monsters isolated from
civilization, we should look into their (thwarted) desires to be included as part o f the
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world as “citizens.” Instead of asking why anyone in a rational state of mind would
give up their own lives and destroy ours in this brutal fashion, we should ask what it
is that makes them so determined to transfer the desire for living in the earthly life to
a sacred rebirth in an afterlife. Instead of treating them as criminals who destroy our
cosmopolitan tolerance, we should see them as subjects who turn strangers marked
by political indifference into a “deathly cosmopolitanism.” It means that we will
need to reexamine our presumptions of citizenship predicated on the pursuit of life,
liberty, and happiness: in particular how our own government’s proprietary and
imperialist pursuit of these goods in our name have severely dispossessed other
national subjects’ needs and desires for secure dwelling and traveling. Unlike
tactical citizens, tainted citizens, and mutating/morphing citizens, deathly citizens are
subjects we would never want to see again in our interactive cosmopolitan horizons,
but one thing that can at least be learned from suicide-bombing terrorism is that,
rather than following the dwelling trajectory of citizenship in the pursuit of life,
liberty, and happiness as a civil and law-abiding subject, we should re-script it in a
different direction— a citizenship based on our cosmopolitan interdependency and
common linked fate in this existing earthly world.1 6 2
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NOTES
1 Michael Walzer, “Excusing Terror: The Politics o f Ideological Apology,” The American Prospect
12, no. 18 (October 22, 2001), http://www.prospect.Org/print/V 12/18/walzer-m.html (accessed May 1,
2005).
2 Michael Ignatieff, “It’s War— But It Doesn’t Have to Be Dirty,” The Guardian, October 1, 2001.
3 Jacqueline Rose, “Deadly Embrace,” London Review o f Books 26, no. 21 (November 4, 2004),
http://www.lrb.co.uk/v26/n21 /roseO 1 .html (accessed April 28, 2005).
4 Ibid.
5 James Der Derian, “9/11: Before, After, and In Between,” in Understanding Septem ber 11, eds.
Craig Calhoun, Paul Price, and Ashley Timmer (New York: The N ew Press, 2002), 178.
6 Ibid., 177.
7 Chalmers Johnson, The Sorrows o f Empire: Militarism, Secrecy, and the End o f the Republic (New
York: Metropolitan Books, 2004), 121.
8 Noam Chomsky, H egem ony or Survival: A m erica’ s Quest fo r G lobal Dominance (New York:
Metropolitan Books, 2003), 188-189.
9 Judith Butler, Precarious Life: The Powers o f M ourning and Violence (New York: Verso, 2004), 4.
1 0 Peter Phipps, “Tourists, Terrorists, Death and Value,” in Travel Worlds: Journeys in Contemporary
Cultural Politics, eds. Raminder Kaur and John Hutnyk (New York: Zed Books, 1999), 75-76.
n Ibid., 76.
1 2 Niliifer Gole, “Close Encounters: Islam, Modernity, and Violence,” in Calhoun, Price and Timmer,
Understanding Septem ber 11, 334.
1 3 Ibid., 114-115.
1 4 Rose, “Deadly Embrace.”
1 5 Ibid.
1 6 For “Just War” theory, see Michael Walzer, Just and Unjust Wars: A M oral Argument with
H istorical Illustrations (New York: Basic Books, 1977); Jean Bethke Elshtain, Just War Against
Terror: the Burden o f American P ow er in a Violent World (New York: Basic Books, 2003).
1 7 For a sampling o f the “culture” argument, see Salman Rushdie, “Y es, This is About Islam,” The
New York Times, Novem ber 2, 2001, A 21; Walter Laqueur, “Life as a Weapon: the Twisted History
o f the Suicide Terrorist,” Times Literary Supplement, September 6, 2002, 3-4; Mark Juergensmeyer,
“Religious Terror and Global War,” in Calhoun, Price and Timmer, Understanding September 11, 27-
40; Jack A. Goldstone, “States, Terrorists, and the Clash o f Civilizations,” in Calhoun, Price and
Timmer, Understanding Septem ber 11, 139-158. It needs to be noted that Laqueur’s argument centers
on the culture o f collectivism and obedience (including both religious indoctrination and nationalist
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propaganda) than specifically on Islam. But since his argument includes Islam, I put it in this camp o f
argument.
1 8 See Christoph Reuter’s discussion o f “the feud o f the fatwas” in Christoph Reuter, M y Life Is a
Weapon: A M odern H istory o f Suicide Bombing, trans. Helena Ragg-Kirkby (Princeton, NJ: Princeton
University Press, 2004), 115-129.
1 9 Joyce M. Davis, M artyrs: Innocence, Vengeance, and D espair in the M iddle East (New York:
Palgrave Macmillan, 2003), 70-71, 80-84.
20 Reuter, M y Life Is a Weapon, 10.
2 1 Said Amir Arjomand, “Can Rational Analysis Break a Taboo? A Middle Eastern Perspective,” in
Critical Views o f Septem ber 11: Analyses from around the World, eds. Eric Hershberg and Kevin W.
Moore (New York: The N ew Press, 2002), 168.
2 2 Aristide R. Zolberg, “Guarding the Gates,” in Calhoun, Price and Timmer, Understanding
September 77, 298.
2 3 For a sampling o f the “nihilism” argument, see Salman Rushdie, “Fighting the Forces o f
Invisibility,” Washington Post, October 2, 2001, A25; Navid Kermani, “A Dynamite o f the Spirit:
Why Nietzsche, nor the Koran, is the Key to Understanding the Suicide Bombers,” Times Literary
Supplement, March 29, 2002; Farhad Khosrokhavar, Suicide Bombers: A llah ’ s N ew M artyrs, trans.
David Macey (Ann Arbor, MI: Pluto Press, 2005), 149-224. Khosrokhavar’s work is a notable in that
he balances history, religion, modernity and globalization in his analysis, from which I draw
substantively in building my later arguments in the paper. However, his argument on the
transnationalization o f Islam ultimately slides towards an understanding o f it as a manifestation o f
Nietzschean ressentiment. In this sense, his otherwise sophisticated historical view o f terrorism thus
displaces factors o f power and politics. See Khosrokhavar, Suicide Bombers, 58,215.
2 4 For listing o f the attacks, consult Richard M. Pearlstein, Fatal Future? Transnational Terrorism
and the New G lobal D isorder (Austin: University o f Texas Press, 2004), 43; Venzke and Ibrahim, The
al-Qaeda Threat, 218-230; Reuter, M y Life Is a Weapon, 142-144; Khosrokhavar, Suicide Bombers,
162.
2 5 Arjomand, “Can Rational Analysis Break a Taboo,” 169.
2 6 See Pearlstein, Fatal Future, 43-44.
2 7 Mamhood Mamdani, “Good Muslim, Bad Muslim: A Political Perspective on Culture and
Terrorism,” in Hershberg and Moore, 48.
2 8 Ibid., 49.
2 9 Johnson, The Sorrows o f Empire, 139.
3 0 Johnson, The Sorrows o f Empire.
3 1 Rajeev Bhargava, “Ordinary Feelings, Extraordinary Events: Moral Complexity in 9/11,” in
Calhoun, Price and Timmer, Understanding Septem ber 11, 327-328.
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3 2 See Ward Churchill, ‘“ Some People Push Back’ On the Justice o f Roosting Chickens,” D ark Night
Press, September 11, 2001, http://www.darknightpress.org/index.php?i=print&article=9 (accessed
May 5, 2005); and Arjomand, “Can Rational Analysis Break a Taboo,” 172.
3 3 Bhargava, “Ordinary Feelings, Extraordinary Events,” 328.
3 4 Arjomand, “Can Rational Analysis Break a Taboo,” 170.
3 5 Chalmers Johnson, Blowback: the Costs and Consequences o f American Em pire (New York:
Metropolitan Books, 2000).
36 Churchill, “‘Some People Push Back.’”
3 7 Reuter, M y Life Is a Weapon, 22, 37-39; see also Kermani, “A Dynamite o f the Spirit,” 13-14.
3 8 Reuter, M y Life Is a Weapon, 23; see also Khosrokhavar, Suicide Bombers, 23-25.
3 9 Reuter, M y Life Is a Weapon, 24-25.
40 Ibid., 34-47.
4 1 Ibid., 63.
4 2 Ibid., 58.
4 3 Ibid., 2.
4 4 According to Reuter, the “first ‘human bomb’ that rocked Israel” came in 1993, “the first year o f
the Oslo peace process and before the 415 exiles were allowed back home ... after endless diplomatic
wrangling” (My Life Is a Weapon, 100).
4 5 Human Rights Watch, Erased in a Moment: Suicide Bombing Attacks Against Israeli Civilians
(New York: Human Rights Watch, 2002), 1. For disc, o f the failure o f Oslo Accords that set o ff the
Palestinian resistance, see Khosrokhavar, Suicide Bombers, 111; also Barbara Victor, Arm y o f Roses:
Inside the World o f Palestinian Women Suicide Bom bers (Emmaus, PA: Rodale, distributed to the
book trade by St. Martin’s Press, 2003), 55-60, 89-91.
46 On the Hezbollah, see Reuter, M y Life Is a Weapon, 78; on the Tamil Tigers, see Laqueur, “Life as
a Weapon,” 3.
47 For example, Sheikh Ahmed Yassin, spiritual leader o f Hamas, holds this view. See Davis,
M artyrs, 108-109.
4 8 Kermani, “A Dynamite o f the Spirit,” 14.
49 Khosrokhavar, Suicide Bombers, 27.
5 0 Nasra Hassan, “An Arsenal o f Believers: Talking to the ‘Human Bom bs,”’ The New Yorker,
November 19, 2001, 38.
5 1 Khosrokhavar, Suicide Bombers, 24-25.
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5 2 Ibid., 49.
5 3 Reuter, M y Life Is a Weapon, 47.
5 4 Quoted in Reuter, M y Life Is a Weapon, 109.
5 5 Reuter, My Life Is a Weapon, 10, 109.
5 6 Ibid., 10.
5 7 Khosrokhavar, Suicide Bombers, 27.
5 8 Ibid., 45.
5 9 Rose, “Deadly Embrace.”
60 Khosrokhavar, Suicide Bombers, 39.
5 1 Rose, “Deadly Embrace.”
6 2 Khosrokhavar, Suicide Bombers, 45-47.
6 3 Rose, “Deadly Embrace.”
6 4 Khosrokhavar, Suicide Bom bers, 45.
6 5 Hassan, “An Arsenal o f Believers,” 41.
6 6 Quoted in Davis, M artyrs, 37.
67
Ibid., 137.
6 8 Eyad Sarraj, “W hy W e Have Becom e Suicide Bombers?” M ission Islam,
http://www.missionislam.com/conissue/palestine.htm (accessed October 18, 2005).
69 Davis, Martyrs, 104.
7 0 Ibid., 105.
7 1 Ibid., 104.
7 2 Ibid., 105-106.
7 3 Hassan, “An Arsenal o f Believers,” 38.
7 4 Khosrokhavar, Suicide Bom bers, 129.
7 5 Ibid., 118, and n. 54, 246.
7 6 Ibid., 118.
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7 7 Ibid., 118-119.
7 8 Quoted in Victor, Arm y o f Roses, 118.
7 9 Human Rights Watch, Erased in a Moment, 11.
80 Khosrokhavar, Suicide Bom bers, 126.
8 1 Quoted in Davis, M artyrs, 104.
8 2 Ibid., 107-108.
8 3 Khosrokhavar, Suicide Bombers, 135.
8 4 Reuter, M y Life Is a Weapon, 128.
8 5 Khosrokhavar, Suicide Bombers, 135.
86 Ibid., 161.
8 7 Reuter, M y Life Is a Weapon, 3-4.
8 8 Ibid., 15.
8 9 Victor, Army o f Roses, 279.
9 0 Khosrokhavar, Suicide Bombers, 111.
9 1 Ibid., 47.
9 2 Rose, “Deadly Embrace.”
9 3 Reuter, M y Life Is a Weapon, 3.
9 4 W hile the U .S .’s direct involvement in the coup remains debated, the Nixon administration, through
a series o f cross-border political maneuvering leading to the coup, exert diplomatic pressures and
economic sanctions in obstructing the policy objectives o f the left-leaning Allende government.
Recently declassified documents show that CIA had sought to depose Allende under the operation o f
“Project FUBELT” since his election in 1970. “Salvador Allende,” Wikipedia, the Free
Encyclopedia, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Salvador Allende (accessed August 8, 2005). After
Pinochet assumed power, the U.S. provided support for the military regime that was sympathetic to its
interests, turning “many o f Pinochet’s officers into paid contacts o f the CIA or U.S. military” despite
record o f their involvement in human rights abuses. See “U.S. Intervention in Chile,” Wikipedia, the
Free Encyclopedia, http://en.wikipedia.Org/wiki/U.S. intervention s Chile (accessed August 8,
2005). See also Seymour M. Hersh, The P rice o f Power: Kissinger in the Nixon White House (New
York: Summit Books, 1983); and U.S. Senate, Covert Action in Chile, 1963-1973 (Washington: U.S.
Government Printing Office, 1975).
9 5 Quoted in “U.S. Intervention in Chile” (emphasis mine).
9 6 Juergensmeyer, “Religious Terror and Global War,” 30.
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9 7 Khosrokhavar, Suicide Bombers, 174-175.
9 8 Ibid., 154.
9 9 Ibid., 175.
1 0 0 Eric Hershberg and Kevin W. Moore, “Introduction: Place, Perspective, and Power— Interpreting
September 11,” in Hershberg and Moore, Critical Views o f September 11,4.
1 0 1 Khosrokhavar, Suicide Bombers, 61.
1 0 2 Ibid., 159.
1 0 3 Ibid., 160.
1 0 4 World Islamic Front Statement, “Jihad Against Jews and Crusaders” (February 23, 1998) in Voices
o f Terror: Manifestos, Writings and Manuals o f Al-Qaeda, Hamas, and O ther Terrorists from around
the World and Throughout the Ages, ed. Walter Faqueur (New York: Reed Press, 2004), 411.
1 0 5 Johnson, The Sorrows o f Empire, 237.
1 0 6 Ben Venzke and Aimee Ibrahim, The al-Qaeda Threat: An Analytical Guide to al-Q aeda's Tactics
& Targets (Alexandria, VA: Tempest Publishing, 2003), 81. The U.S. continued to hang on to the
precious grasp o f the fertile and oil-producing Saudi Arabia, and withdrew its troops only after the
occurrence o f 9/11 in 2001. As Johnson points out, the U.S. and Saudi Arabia announced the
withdrawal o f American forces from the land in April 2003, more than a year-and-a half after 9/11.
Yet, the history o f imperialism teaches us that it is unlikely that the U.S. has cut o ff all o f its
influences and stakes “in the world’s riches oil-producing nation.” After all, “it has retained a small
maintenance unit at the air base,” and the Vinnell Corporation, a large private military contractor
based in Fairfax, Virginia, continues to provide training o f the Saudi National Guard. See Johnson,
The Sorrows o f Empire, 241-242.
1 0 7 Venzeke and Ibrahim, The al-Q aeda Threat, 81, 85.
1 0 8 Arjomand, “Can Rational Analysis Break a Taboo,” 162.
1 0 9 Venzeke and Ibrahim, The al-Q aeda Threat, 44.
1 1 0 Bhargava, “Ordinary Feelings, Extraordinary Events,” 324.
1 1 1 Immanuel Wallerstein, “America and the World: the Twin Towers as Metaphor,” in Calhoun, Price
and Timmer, Understanding Septem ber 11, 348.
1 1 2 Pearlstein, F atal Future, 59-60.
1 1 3 Davis, M artyrs, 192.
1 1 4 World Islamic Front Statement, “Jihad Against Jews and Crusaders,” 412.
1 1 5 Quoted in Rohan Gunaratna, Inside al Qaeda: G lobal Network o f Terror (New York: Columbia
University Press, 2002), 4.
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1 1 6 “The Letter Left Behind,” in Laqueur, Voices o f Terror, 414-417.
1 1 7 Venzeke and Ibrahim, The al-Qaeda Threat, 34.
1 1 8 Ibid., 120.
1,9 Arjomand, “Can Rational Analysis Break a Taboo,” 172.
1 2 0 Reuter, M y Life Is a Weapon, 20.
1 2 1 Walzer, “Excusing Terror.”
1 2 2 The statement was made in the context o f the U.S. attack on Iraq in 1991. Quoted in Churchill,
“‘Some People Push Back.’” See also Noam Chomsky, ‘“What W e Say G oes’: The Middle East in
the N ew World Order,” Z M agazine, May 1991, http://www.zmag.org/chomsky/articles/z9105-what-
we-sav.html (accessed August 15, 2005).
1 2 3 Quoted in Reuter, M y Life Is a Weapon, 139.
1 2 4 Reuter, M y Life Is a Weapon, 82.
1 2 5 The statement was made by Sulaiman Abu Ghaith with an unknown interviewer on June 23, 2002.
See Venzke and Ibrahim, 92.
1 2 6 Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan, eds. Richard E. Flathman and David Johnston (New York: W. W.
Norton & Company, 1997).
1 2 7 Max Weber, “Politics as a Vocation,” in From M ax Weber: Essays in Sociology, trans. and ed.
Hans H. Gerth and C. Wright M ills (New York: Oxford University Press, 1958), 78.
1 2 8 Even Foucault him self states that, “There remains ... a trace o f ‘torture’ in the modern mechanisms
o f criminal justice— a trace that has not been entirely overcome, but which is enveloped, increasingly,
by the non-corporal nature o f the penal system.” See Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish: the
Birth o f the Prison, trans. Alan Sheridan (New York: Vintage Books, 1977), 16.
1 2 9 Elaine Scarry, The B ody in Pain: the Making and Unmaking o f the World (New York: Oxford
University Press, 1985), 18.
1 3 0 Juergensmeyer, “Religious Terror and Global War,” 35.
1 3 1 Seyla Benhabib, “Unholy Wars. Reclaiming Democratic Virtues After September 11,” in
Calhoun, Price and Timmer, Understanding September 11, 244.
1 3 2 Kermani, “A Dynamite o f the Spirit,” 13.
1 3 3 Reuter, M y Life Is a Weapon, 3.
1 3 4 Khosrokhavar, Suicide Bombers, 133.
1 3 5 Giorgio Agamben, Homo Sacer: Sovereign P ow er and Bare Life, trans. Daniel Heller-Roazen
(Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1998).
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1 3 6 Butler, Precarious Life, 67.
1 3 7 Agamben, Homo Sacer, 8.
1 3 8 Ibid., 73
1 3 9 Ibid., 148.
1 4 0 Ibid., 174-175.
1 4 1 Ibid., 9-10.
1 4 2 Ibid., 140.
1 4 3 Butler, Precarious Life, 68.
1 4 4 Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, M ultitude: War and D em ocracy in the A ge o f Empire (New
York: The Penguin Press, 2004), 335.
1 4 5 Ibid., 336.
1 4 6 Ibid., 335.
1 4 7 Bhargava, “Ordinary Feelings, Extraordinary Events,” 329.
1 4 8 Laqueur, “Life as a Weapon,” 4.
1 4 9 Reuter, M y Life Is a Weapon, 87.
1 5 0 Hassan, “An Arsenal o f Believers,” 39.
1 5 1 Quoted in ibid.
1 5 2 See Victor, Army o f Roses. Victor’s book contains som e problematic interpretations, though for
my purpose it does illustrate how these female Palestinian suicide bombers who have no prior ties to
the militant organizations simply enlist the sponsorship o f the organizations when they decide on
undergoing the operation. For a critique o f Victor’s interpretations o f these women suicide bombers’
motivations, see Rose, “Deadly Embrace.” It needs to be further noted that the situation o f Palestinian
women suicide bombers cannot be generalized to those in Sri Lanka and Kurdistan, where female
bombers are mostly affiliated members o f militant organizations such as the Tamil Tigers (LTTE) and
the Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK). See Reuter, M y Life Is a Weapon, 155-166.
1 5 3 Reuter, M y Life Is a Weapon, 161. Whether Palestinian women should be allowed to participate in
martyrdom operations has been debated within Islamic authorities, who often change their religious
interpretations o f the situation depending on political considerations. The first Palestinian
organization to use female bomber— Wafa Idris on January 27, 2002— was the al-Aqsa Martyr’s
Brigade, the military wing o f the now deceased Yasser Arafat’s more secular Fatah organization. At
the beginning, Arafat’s rival Islamic organizations, Hamas and Islamic Jihad, opposed to this practice
o f using women as bombers. However, upon seeing popular support for the practice in the street, they
changed positions and employed women too in their own bombing operations. And yet, when
Palestinian men complained about the “excessive” role played by women in these operations, the male
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leaders o f these organizations now changed their position again by telling women to stay home and
produce babies first before joining in the martyrdom. See Victor, Army o f Roses. Up to this point,
transnational organization such as the al-Qaeda has yet to enlist women to participate in its operations.
1 5 4 Quoted in Davis, Martyrs, 142.
1 5 5 Khosrokhavar, Suicide Bombers, 167; and Pearlstein, Fatal Future, 59.
1 5 6 Pearlstein, Fatal Future, 61. It needs to be added that in the inception o f al-Qaeda (before it was
formed into an organization), the CIA provided a significant amount o f covert aid to the Afghanistan
mujahideen in countering the Soviet Union, including the use o f drug trade to finance their military
operations. The al-Qaeda learned the craft o f doing this from the CIA. See Mamdani, “Good
Muslim, Bad Muslim,” 54.
1 5 7 Ibid., 63.
1 5 8 Reuter, M y Life Is a Weapon, 17.
1 5 9 Ibid., 146.
1 6 0 Ibid., 153.
1 6 1 It was a video statement aired on al-Jazeera. See Venzke and Ibhahim, The al-Q aeda Threat, 44.
1621 borrow the notion o f “common linked fate” from Raymond Rocco, who is speaking o f the need to
incorporate the Latino communities into the orbit o f citizenship. While the context I am speaking o f
is different, it bears similar meanings. See Raymond Rocco, “Transforming Citizenship:
Membership, Strategies o f Containment, and the Public Sphere in Latino Communities,” Latino
Studies 2, no. 1 (April, 2004): 4-25.
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Conclusion
Deviant Democracy
The current globalization process that is shattering people’s secure dwelling
is creating more and more undocumented and “illegitimate” travelers. As traveling
agents, they do not passively migrate. In spite o f their status as outsiders, they all
want something back from the system o f citizenship that has long excluded them. As
I indicated throughout the project, traveling signals a spirit in search for betterment,
home, identity, and justice that cannot be easily tamed or put down. As long as
global inequity persists and worsens, an ever increasing number of deviant traveling
agents is to be expected, and in the most tragic cases, powerless individuals who give
up hope for embodied dwelling in the worldly life can go to the extreme of violence
and death to stake a claim through travel.
In the midst of this need and desire for traveling (in search for alternative
sites of dwelling), citizenship in its conventional sense bears less and less meanings
for these traveling agents. The dwelling trajectory o f citizenship that places subjects
in a fixed social order o f acting as citizens becomes suffocating when it fails to
provide for their dwelling/traveling needs. In seeking their alternative dwelling
spots, traveling agents will cross the necessary boundaries to obtain what they need,
regardless o f what citizenship says, and even if in the process become fugitive
outlaws. This is not simply a crisis o f national citizenship facing the onslaught of
globalization. Rather, it constitutes a potent and all-encompassing challenge to the
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dwelling trajectory of citizenship in its many dimensions, from nationality, gender,
politics, economics, to moral-legality.
Yet, every traveling agent is nurtured by the need of dwelling. Hence, even
as they disobey and digress from the proper rules of nationality, gender, politics,
economics, and moral-legality, these traveling agents continue to come back to
citizenship, attempting to inscribe themselves into, rather than outside, the
framework o f “citizenship.'’ They travel away from the dwelling trajectory only in
order to dig up alternative dwelling spots for themselves to live as legible denizens
and (not-yet-existent) “citizens” who count. This is witnessed, thus, in
undocumented domestic and sweatshop workers’ invoking subversive tactics at
workplace (via hidden transcripts and calculated conformity) to “participate
politically” in demanding better wages and working conditions entitled to citizens, in
global sex workers’ turning their private body parts and sexual organs into
instruments of work and contesting for the recognition as legitimate citizen-workers,
in transsexuals’ reconfiguring and expanding the gender categories o f citizenship so
to live as other kinds of gender dwellers and travelers, and finally, in suicide
bombers’ staging cross-border demands at the pinnacle o f death in order to rekindle
and pursue their once thwarted desire for “life, liberty, and happiness” in a renewed
afterworld. Citizenship is not yet bankrupt or undermined, but it is being stretched,
reshaped, twisted and reconfigured like a mundane object and cultural artifact.
As traveling agents change the contours of citizenship, they also change the
cosmopolitan horizons o f democracy. Long isolated and excluded from the proper
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terrain o f “what it means to be citizens,” these traveling figures, having come from
afar by crossing over the numerous boundaries o f citizenship—whether national,
gender, political, economic, or moral-legal— now inscribe themselves into the public
sphere as legitimate dwellers with rights, voices, and claims. In a sense, democracy
is becoming deviant, as the “citizens” who make up the republic are no longer the
same. Alongside ordinary citizens, one finds also tactical citizens, tainted citizens,
morphing citizens, and deathly citizens. In the reconfigured cosmopolitan sphere
that I call, deviant cosmopolitanism, these various travelers come here, and in their
abject and uncanny ways, living, acting, and participating along with the city
dwellers as (non-existent) “citizens.”
This does not mean that democracy is radically transformed. While traveling
citizenship delineates a momentary deviance from normative citizenry, and deviant
cosmopolitanism marks a space of difference from the corporate cosmopolitan logic,
democracy is still, by and large, contained, subsumed, and absorbed into the neo
liberal capitalist way of life that perpetuates global inequality and heightens the
dispossessions of rights and livelihood o f global denizens, especially so in the urban
ghettos of First World metropolitan cities and across the Third World regions.
Deviant cosmopolitanism thus does not name a radical or transformative alternative
to the hegemonic system. But in the cracks and holes around modem state
surveillance, these traveling agents have also managed to generate moments of
participation as (non-existent) “citizens,” thus changing the democratic citizenship
trajectory. Liberal democracy is still unable to operate by itself alone even at the end
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of communism, but must exist side by side with a deviant dynamic, an internal abject
presence of deviant cosmopolitanism. Borrowing from Anne McClintock, these
deviant traveling agents “[return] to haunt modernity as its constitutive, inner
repudiation: the rejected from which one does not part,”1 all the while slowly and
tactically expanding and reshaping our interactive cosmopolitan horizons in the
public sphere. Deviant cosmopolitanism does not directly constitute “anti-
globalization” or “counter-empire,” but within limited terrain, it rides on the back of
globalization as a parasitic element in redirecting our cosmopolitan futures.
If these stories o f travel have exposed the limits of citizenship, they have also
shown that the key is not to dispense with it. The point here, thus, is not to scratch
nation-state citizenship and move on to global human rights, but to balance both.2
Placing citizenship in the dialectical framework of “dwelling-in-traveling, traveling-
in-dwelling” means that citizenship must mediate the needs o f dwelling and the
desires for traveling. In other words, the belonging and empowerment animated
through citizenship must be both local and global, both subnational and
transnational. And as we have learned from transsexuality, the globe of
cosmopolitan citizens also needs to be expanded from ethnic-nationals to sexual-
nationals. As Bonnie Honig argues, the point o f a democratic cosmopolitan vision
“is not to replace the state with an international government,”3 but to move citizen
fellows “into democratic action along multiple registers: subnational, antinational,
transnational, and national.”4 She writes,
The state remains an important potential and actual organizer of social welfare as
well as a potentially powerful ally to citizens and groups stmggling to hold
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accountable certain powerful local and international institutions. But the state also
remains the institutional source of a great deal of injustice, inequity, and violence in
the lives of its citizens and residents. Thus, it is important for social democrats to
find ways to offset the still too singular power of the state by multiplying the
memberships and affiliations of state residents.5
Citizenship matters, then, precisely because it remains the sole arena that has
the very potential to multiply our memberships, belongings, affective ties, and
empowerment through the local, national, global, and sexual channels. What
citizenship theorists and democratic actors can learn from these traveling agents is
that citizenship is an elastic concept that can be made to “dwell” as well as made to
“travel”—both in theory and in materiality. A “democratic” citizenship ought to care
for the needs of dwelling for subjects on the ground, while also allowing them a
space to travel beyond national, racial, gender, sexual, political, and economic
boundaries. From the vantage of deviant cosmopolitanism, the ultimate challenge for
democracy is to empower these traveling figures with rights that would provide them
with a sense o f secure “dwelling,” thus also transforming the way they do “travel.”
362
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NOTES
1 Anne McClintock, Im perial Leather: Race, Gender and Sexuality in the Colonial Contest (New
York: Routledge, 1995), 72.
2
Hence my sympathy and disagreement with Bryan Turner’s claim that democracy ought to move
beyond citizenship to human rights. Turner maintains that given the constriction o f citizenship to the
boundary o f nation-state, it may not be the most suitable framework o f rights-distribution in the
current process o f globalization. In contrast, the discourse o f ‘“human rights’ appears to be more
universal ... , more contemporary ... , and more progressive.” He writes,
[W ]e can conceptualize human rights solidarity as a historical stage beyond citizenship-
solidarity. Whereas citizenship as a doctrine has been a progressive feature o f Western
societies in terms o f universalistic values behind the welfare state, human rights concepts can
be seen as a progressive paradigm which is relevant to a world system.
Bryan S. Turner, “Outline o f a Theory o f Human Rights,” in Citizenship and Social Theory, ed. Bryan
S. Turner (Newbury Park, CA: Sage, 1993), 178.
3 Bonnie Honig, Dem ocracy and the Foreigner (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2001),
102 .
4 Ibid., 118.
5 Ibid., 102-103.
363
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Asset Metadata

Creator Lee, Charles Tsung Tang (author)

Core Title Deviant cosmopolitanism: Transgressive globalization and traveling citizenship

Contributor Digitized by ProQuest (provenance)

School Graduate School

Degree Doctor of Philosophy

Degree Program Political Science

Publisher University of Southern California (original), University of Southern California. Libraries (digital)

Tag OAI-PMH Harvest,political science, general,sociology, ethnic and racial studies,women's studies

Language English

Advisor Sturken, Marita (committee chair), Banet-Weiser, Sarah (committee member), Hamilton, Nora (committee member), Renteln, Alison Dundes (committee member)

Permanent Link (DOI) https://doi.org/10.25549/usctheses-c16-622844

Unique identifier UC11335998

Identifier 3233792.pdf (filename),usctheses-c16-622844 (legacy record id)

Legacy Identifier 3233792.pdf

Dmrecord 622844

Document Type Dissertation

Rights Lee, Charles Tsung Tang

Type texts

Source University of Southern California (contributing entity), University of Southern California Dissertations and Theses (collection)

Access Conditions The author retains rights to his/her dissertation, thesis or other graduate work according to U.S. copyright law. Electronic access is being provided by the USC Libraries in agreement with the au...

Repository Name University of Southern California Digital Library

Repository Location USC Digital Library, University of Southern California, University Park Campus, Los Angeles, California 90089, USA