Innocence and Purity Vs. Deviance and Immorality: The Spaces of Prostitution in Nepal and Canada

Source
Lisa Gibson
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Year
2003

Innocence and Purity Vs. Deviance and Immorality: The Spaces of Prostitution in Nepal and Canada

This paper adopts a critical feminist analysis in examining the way in which social and physical spaces operate to maintain race, class, and gender hierarchies in relation to prostitution. Critiquing the dominant anti-trafficking discourse that essentialises all 'third world" women as victims, the author problematises the construction of Badi women in Western Nepal as 'traditional prostitutes' and Aboriginal women in Canada as 'easy squaws'. This analysis demonstrates how in reproducing false divisions between 'virgins' and 'whores', and between the 'first' and 'third' worlds, material, symbolic, and discursive processes work to normalise unequal relations of power.

This paper includes sections on:

  • The construction of 'the prostitute', including location, behavior, ideoligy, and prostitution as an identity;
  • History of the prostitution discourse
  • Prostitution as exploitation, sex work as work, and the trafficking discourse;
  • The trafficking discourse in Nepal
  • Women of the Badi caste
  • An overview of the marginalisation of the First Nations as part of Canadian nation-building
  • Aboriginal women sex workers and the physical and social space of Aboriginal Women in Canada,
  • Implications of the 'Indian Princess' -'Squaw' dichotomy
  • Comparison and contrast between the Badi women and Canadian Aboriginal women in sex work.

You can download this 72 page PDF resource above. This resource is in English.