Sheila Jeffreys

'Body Art' and Social Status: Cutting, Tattooing and Piercing from a Feminist Perspective

This article analyses the developing industry of body modification, in which cutting, tattooing and piercing are carried out in studios for profit. It seeks to offer a feminist understanding of this industry which places it on a continuum of harmful cultural practices that include self-mutilation in private, transsexual surgery, cosmetic surgery and other harmful western beauty practices. The ideology created by industry practitioners, that ‘body modification’ replicates the spiritual practices of other cultures, reclaims the body, or is transgressive, is supported by the use of postmodern feminist theory. These ideas are criticized here. On the contrary, it will be suggested that such harmful cultural practices of self-mutilation are sought, or carried out on, those groups who occupy a despised social status, such as women, lesbians and gay men, disabled people and women and men who have suffered sexual abuse in childhood or adulthood.

Sex tourism: do women do it too?

This article examines a recent tendency amongst researchers of sex tourism to include women within the ranks of sex tourists in destinations such as the Caribbean and Indonesia. It argues that a careful attention to the power relations, context, meanings and effects of the behaviours of male and female tourists who engage in sexual relations with local people, makes it clear that the differences are profound. The similarities and differences are analysed here with the conclusion that it is the different positions of men and women in the sex class hierarchy that create such differences. The political ideas that influence the major protagonists in this debate to include or exclude women will be examined. The article ends with a consideration of the problematic implications of arguing that women do it too .

The queer disappearance of lesbians: Sexuality in the academy

Abstract This article suggests that the developing field of lesbian and gay studies shows a likelihood to discriminate against the interests of lesbians and certainly against lesbian feminist theory through the incorporation of a ‘queer’ perspective. Recent writings in the field suggest that ‘queer’ theory and politics are and should be based on the celebration of certain specifically male gay cultural forms, particularly those of camp and drag. The importance of camp as well as a worrying tendency to want to protect the study of sexuality from the intrusion of feminist insights promises to create lesbian and gay studies which disappear lesbians.

The UN Approach to Harmful Traditional Practices

Within the international human rights community, there is a growing concern with ‘harmful traditional practices’ (HTPs)1 which violate the human rights of women. The concept has been developed within the United Nations as a way of naming and combating some of the most blatant forms of male domination of women. This has been a response to concerted lobbying by feminist NGOs, of both the UN and the League of Nations before it, to get ‘culturally’ condoned forms of violence against women included within the UN human rights agenda. During the 1980s, and particularly in the 1990s, HTPs have become a visible part of UN platforms and actions on women’s human rights, culminating in 1995 with a comprehensive UN Fact Sheet devoted to this issue, Harmful Traditional Practices Affecting the Health of Women and Children (United Nations 1995). Laudable though this UN initiative is, it has some disquieting implications. The UN literature on HTPs, and in particular the 1995 Fact Sheet, is concerned for the most part only with practices in non-western societies. The single exception to this focus is the category of ‘violence against women’, characterized in the Fact Sheet as ‘other forms of non-traditional practices, such as rape and domestic violence’, and acknowledged to be ‘a global phenomenon’ (United Nations 1995: 22–3, 44). What concerns us about this UN focus on non-western societies is that it gives the impression that the metropolitan centres of the West contain no ‘traditions’ or ‘culture’ harmful to women, and that the violence which does exist there is idiosyncratic and individualized rather than culturally condoned. The terminology, ‘West’ and ‘non-western’, is not unproblematic, but we use

Keeping women down and out: The strip club boom and the reinforcement of male dominance

I n the Western world in the past decade there has been a rapid expansion of the strip club industry, particularly in the form of lap-dancing clubs: the industry is currently estimated to be worth US

IV. The Need to Abolish Marriage

75 billion worldwide (Montgomery 2005). Some writers in the field of gender studies have defended the practice of stripping, arguing that stripping should be understood as socially transgressive, an exercise of women’s agency, or a form of empowerment for women. These arguments exemplify the decontextualized individualism that is common to many defenses of the sex industry. However, the tradition of women dancing to sexually excite men (usually followed by the men’s commercial sexual use of the women) is a historical practice of many cultures, as seen, for instance, in the auletrides of classical Greece (Murray and Wilson 2004) and the dancing girls of Lahore, who are prostituted by their families from adolescence on (Saeed 2001). This practice does not signify women’s equality. The harmful Western practice of stripping (see Jeffreys 2004), too, I will argue here, signifies sexual inequality. This article will examine the context in which stripping takes place, looking at who owns and controls the industry and who benefits most from it, in order to expose some weaknesses in the argument that stripping can be a positive career for women. It will look at the evidence that suggests that both national and international crime gangs run the most profitable sectors of the industry, and it will show how, as the industry both expands and becomes more exploitative to create greater profits, the trafficking of women and girls into debt bondage has become a staple way of sourcing strippers in Europe and North America. Rather than empowering women, the strip club boom, as this article will contend, helps to compensate men for lost privileges.

‘Free from all uninvited touch of man’: Women's campaigns around sexuality, 1880–1914

I have a radical lesbian feminist position on marriage which is well expressed by the US lesbian legal theorist Ruthann Robson (1992) who argues for the general abolition of marriage saying that ‘lesbian survival is not furthered by embracing the law’s rule of marriage. Our legal energy is better directed at abolishing marriage as a state institution and spouse as a legal category’ (p. 127). Marriage is, of course, just one aspect of heterosexuality as a political institution. It is the legal mechanism whereby women are tied into this institution. One decade ago, in 1992, I was invited to contribute a comment to the Feminism & Psychology 2(3) Special Feature on heterosexuality which became the very useful text: Heterosexuality: A Reader. This was structured in a similar way to the Feminism & Psychology Special Features on marriage, with short pieces in which heterosexual feminists were asked to say how their heterosexuality was consonant with their feminism. The responses were fascinating and thoughtful. Some contributors wrote searching pieces about their own heterosexuality in relation to their lives as feminists and others contributed theoretical pieces addressing the role of heterosexuality within women’s oppression. I use the special feature as an irreplaceable resource when teaching the politics of heterosexuality. However, the contributions from the married, or aspirants to marriage, to the special feature on marriage do not seem to me to be as critical or as significant politically. A special feature on marriage might be expected to question the roots of women’s oppression profoundly. I admit to being very surprised, therefore, to see some contributors defending their decisions to marry on quite old-fashioned grounds and writing rather uncritical celebrations of this traditional practice of male dominance. This suggests that there has been a repudiation, or perhaps forgetfulness, of the feminist critique of marriage that was so well developed in the 1970s. The feminist movement that I entered in the UK in the 1970s was dominated by thoroughgoing critiques of marriage. The YBA Wife campaign, for instance, advised women that though they might dream of ending up in a man’s arms they were actually going to end up chained to his sink. It included a women’s theatre group touring the country and a poster agitprop campaign telling women that

Challenging the Child/Adult Distinction in Theory and Practice on Prostitution

Abstract The history of sex in the last 100 years has generally been represented as a triumphant march from Victorian prudery into the light of sexual freedom. From a feminist perspective the picture is different. During the last wave of feminism women, often represented as prudes and puritans by historians, waged a massive campaign to transform male sexual behaviour in the interests of women. They campaigned against the abuse of women in prostitution, the sexual abuse of children, and marital rape. This article describes the womens activities in the social purity movement, and the increasingly militant stance taken by some pre-war feminists who refused to relate sexually to men, in the context of the developing feminist analysis of sexuality. The main purpose of the paper is to show that in order to understand the significance of this aspect of the womens movement we must look at the area of sexuality not merely as a sphere of personal fulfilment but as an arena of struggle in which male dominance and womens subordination can be most powerfully reinforced and maintained or fundamentally challenged.

Desecularisation and Sexual Equality

This article argues that contemporary concern about ending child prostitution is misdirected in its strategy. Some theorists and activists, even the ILO, are seeking to create a distinction between adult and child prostitution as if child prostitution could be ended whilst adult prostitution remains intact. The motivation for the distinction relies upon trends in the 1990s to characterize mens prostitution abuse of adult women as constituting legitimate work, choice and agency for the women themselves, and to construct a profitable prostitution industry which can create profits for governments and sex industrialists. I will argue that child and adult prostitution are inextricably interlinked, both in personnel (the women and children work together), in terms of the abusers (who make no distinctions), in the harm they cause and in that both constitute harmful traditional practices which must be ended. The acceptance of mens prostitution abuse as the basis for the industrialization of adult prostitution increases the scale and harm of child prostitution. Thus only policies to eradicate all of mens abusive prostitution behaviour will serve to mitigate child prostitution.

Legalization The Australian Experience

There has been a rise in the political power of organised religions in both western countries and the non-west in the last two decades. There has been desecularisation of the public sphere in countries such as the UK and Australia which takes the form of deliberate government policy both to consult with ‘faith communities’ and to create an influential role for them in policy formation. These developments are likely to endanger sexual equality because the religious organisations are usually discriminatory with respect to gender and sexuality, both in their employment practices and their ideologies. This article will examine the ways in which desecularisation has been taking place in the UK and Australia and the implications of this for sexual equality.