Fetishizing Oppression and Adapting the Language: Authentic Suffering in Words We Can Understand
On March 5th, 2006 Tufts Women’s Center in conjunction with Tufts Feminist Alliance and Reslife sponsored the production of Deborah Fortsen’s Body & Sold. Purportedly about trafficking, the performance featured a handful of actors reading adaptations of personal narratives interspersed with occasional and seemingly arbitrary choreography. A question and answer session followed the piece.
Body & Sold catered to a voyeuristic trope of fetishized oppression among college students, complicating issues of sexuality, class, home, family, and sex work for viewers. At the same time, its messianic manner reinforced some of the most dangerous misunderstandings about sex work while flattening the issue. Director of the Women’s Center, Peggy Barrett’s, subsequent explanation of her sponsorship indicated dangerous campus-wide misunderstandings of agency.
Employing adulterated first person narratives to tell a “humanizing” account of sex-trafficking, effectively erased and delegitimized actual identities. Within her “accounts,” Fortsen clearly edited the words of her respondents. She had her characters using comparatively intellectualized language and gender studies specific-jargon, which overpowered the tales.
When I spoke with Fortsen a week after the performance, she assured me that the message her characters conveyed was representative of the messages she had gotten from the interviews. So why change the language at all? It was as if Fortsen was helping the people express themselves better than they could without her, as if she was able to articulate words they meant to say (if only they knew them.) Fortsen privileges her own words over others’, seemingly authentic dialects over actual slang, and specificity over more nuanced linguistic construction and capable heteroglossia.
What Fortsen tacitly does in translating her interviews into allegedly communicable ideas goes farther than making stories “intelligible to ignorant audiences.” She makes a statement about what is normal, what is understandable, what is rational, and consequently makes another statement about what is not. Fortsen is guilty of reifying the dangerous classist and racist realities, which help perpetuate violence against women. As Ratcliff points out in “Violence Against Women,” and Cabreros-Sud touches on in “Kicking Ass,” whenever it is convenient, women on the margins are in danger of being erased.
These are often women who, because they are poor or less educated, are perceived as less intelligent, less credible, and less important. Therefore they signify as inferior women. Cabreros-Sud demands we stop homogenizing women based on race and class. But Fortsen makes matters worse as she tailors voices to be heard, making strong but silent statements about what is worth listening to.
Body & Sold also contributed to a thriving campus fascination with oppression. Dorothy Allison talks about the difficulty of relaying spectacular poverty in the first essay of her book, Trash. There she explains how her own history can only occur as a drama- a tragedy or comedy—but can never be re-realized in anecdote. This same limitation principle ensures that Fortsen’s play does nothing more than elevate the audience above the unfortunate and suffering sex workers.
I spoke to director of the women's center, Peggy Barrett, a few days after the production to try to better understand her motives for bringing the play and possibly raise questions about the actual implications of the show. Barrett explained that she wanted to warn women to be careful the choices they make. She has become increasingly aware of students trading sex for favors (at Tufts and on other campuses.) She wanted to nip the issue in the bud.
This explanation, however, betrays a deep misunderstanding of the economic aspects of sex work. Barrett’s warning implies that women in sex work are women who made unwise decisions or have allowed themselves to be duped. Barrett did sneak in a brief and seemingly requisite plug for recognizing women’s agency; she told me that some women do like sex work and reminded me that she isn’t criticizing them. Unfortunately that argument only worsened the trouble by saying that women who are unhappy in sex work are gullible, dumb, desperate, or sick. The only actual effects of this type of warning are, of course, to further stigmatize sex workers on campus.
This is especially dangerous because the student body at Tufts is largely white and largely not poor. To say that women should be wary of the situations in which they become entangled, fundamentally criticizes the Fortsen’s trafficked youth. In this case, it questions people with unstable families- particularly poor people, sons and daughters of single parents, and people whose families have a history of addiction and abuse. This may not explicitly pathologize the poor and people of color (disproportionately “disadvantaged”) but it does reiterate dangerous racist and classist fallacies.
Body & Sold catered to a voyeuristic trope of fetishized oppression among college students, complicating issues of sexuality, class, home, family, and sex work for viewers. At the same time, its messianic manner reinforced some of the most dangerous misunderstandings about sex work while flattening the issue. Director of the Women’s Center, Peggy Barrett’s, subsequent explanation of her sponsorship indicated dangerous campus-wide misunderstandings of agency.
Employing adulterated first person narratives to tell a “humanizing” account of sex-trafficking, effectively erased and delegitimized actual identities. Within her “accounts,” Fortsen clearly edited the words of her respondents. She had her characters using comparatively intellectualized language and gender studies specific-jargon, which overpowered the tales.
When I spoke with Fortsen a week after the performance, she assured me that the message her characters conveyed was representative of the messages she had gotten from the interviews. So why change the language at all? It was as if Fortsen was helping the people express themselves better than they could without her, as if she was able to articulate words they meant to say (if only they knew them.) Fortsen privileges her own words over others’, seemingly authentic dialects over actual slang, and specificity over more nuanced linguistic construction and capable heteroglossia.
What Fortsen tacitly does in translating her interviews into allegedly communicable ideas goes farther than making stories “intelligible to ignorant audiences.” She makes a statement about what is normal, what is understandable, what is rational, and consequently makes another statement about what is not. Fortsen is guilty of reifying the dangerous classist and racist realities, which help perpetuate violence against women. As Ratcliff points out in “Violence Against Women,” and Cabreros-Sud touches on in “Kicking Ass,” whenever it is convenient, women on the margins are in danger of being erased.
These are often women who, because they are poor or less educated, are perceived as less intelligent, less credible, and less important. Therefore they signify as inferior women. Cabreros-Sud demands we stop homogenizing women based on race and class. But Fortsen makes matters worse as she tailors voices to be heard, making strong but silent statements about what is worth listening to.
Body & Sold also contributed to a thriving campus fascination with oppression. Dorothy Allison talks about the difficulty of relaying spectacular poverty in the first essay of her book, Trash. There she explains how her own history can only occur as a drama- a tragedy or comedy—but can never be re-realized in anecdote. This same limitation principle ensures that Fortsen’s play does nothing more than elevate the audience above the unfortunate and suffering sex workers.
I spoke to director of the women's center, Peggy Barrett, a few days after the production to try to better understand her motives for bringing the play and possibly raise questions about the actual implications of the show. Barrett explained that she wanted to warn women to be careful the choices they make. She has become increasingly aware of students trading sex for favors (at Tufts and on other campuses.) She wanted to nip the issue in the bud.
This explanation, however, betrays a deep misunderstanding of the economic aspects of sex work. Barrett’s warning implies that women in sex work are women who made unwise decisions or have allowed themselves to be duped. Barrett did sneak in a brief and seemingly requisite plug for recognizing women’s agency; she told me that some women do like sex work and reminded me that she isn’t criticizing them. Unfortunately that argument only worsened the trouble by saying that women who are unhappy in sex work are gullible, dumb, desperate, or sick. The only actual effects of this type of warning are, of course, to further stigmatize sex workers on campus.
This is especially dangerous because the student body at Tufts is largely white and largely not poor. To say that women should be wary of the situations in which they become entangled, fundamentally criticizes the Fortsen’s trafficked youth. In this case, it questions people with unstable families- particularly poor people, sons and daughters of single parents, and people whose families have a history of addiction and abuse. This may not explicitly pathologize the poor and people of color (disproportionately “disadvantaged”) but it does reiterate dangerous racist and classist fallacies.
posted by RNovack at 12:59 PM
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