Multiple Scripts: Mothers, Whores and Victims

Abstract

In Chapters 2 and 3, my discussion of women’s projects of migration and the factors that triggered exit from street prostitution touched upon the importance of gender for our analysis. In Chapter 2, I suggested that women’s migration could be read in terms of an escape route from oppressive patriarchal structures and in particular from situations of intra-family violence. Interestingly, respondents systematically glossed over these episodes of violence and did not include or expand on family abuse in the interviews; however, I got to know of these through informal conversations. The omissions of episodes of violence permitted the women to take up the position of protagonists in their narrative of migration, which might have been undermined by description of endured violence. Moreover, whereas women spoke of poverty as the main reason for migrating abroad, the recurring reference to poverty, in particular consistently at the very opening of the interviews, prompted me to pay close attention to the function that this reference plays in women’s narratives. I suggested that what I called the ‘motif of poverty’ performs a narrative function of enabling respondents to contrast poverty with prostitution and to distance themselves from being identified as prostitutes. This act of distancing is achieved, as I illustrated in Chapter 3, by downplaying the commercial transaction in sex work and framing it instead in terms of a romantic encounter. I suggested further that this permitted migrant women to sustain the construct of themselves as not really prostitutes and that this offers important insights into women’s subjectivities.

‘A whore! I fear this word.’

Ivana