Prostitution as a Male Object of Epistemological Pain

• Published in: Gender, work, and organization Vol. 9; no. 2; pp. 167 - 185
• Main Authors: Letiche, Hugo, Van Mens, Lucie
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: Oxford, UK and Boston, USA Blackwell Publishers Ltd 01.04.2002
• Subjects: Artaud; Consciousness; Derrida; Gender; Irigaray; Prostitution; research episteme; Sex workers; Sexual behaviour; Social exclusion; Social theory
• ISSN: 0968-6673; 1468-0432
• DOI: 10.1111/1468-0432.00154

It is not, in the first place, prostitutes’ physical and psychological pain that is examined in this article, but the pain encountered in trying to come to terms with the studying of prostitution. Prostitution upsets consciousness’ efforts and confuses its epistemes of representation. It reveals issues of (male) avoidance and over‐rationalization that apply just as well to how business and organization are (not) studied, as to prostitution. Following Artaud, we examine how, because prostitution is both consciousness (idea, theory, representation) and body (sex, body, the physiology of the brain), it poses the problem of doubling. How can one apprehend both: (i) that one is the physical hyle (materiality) of thought and also (ii) remain aware of the contents of consciousness? Artaud claimed that only in ‘cruelty’ and the ‘scream’ could the mind and body be grasped at once. By contrast, Derrida proposes via the subjectile to glide over the space between consciousness and body, trying to acknowledge but not be stymied by the double. Finally, we turn to Irigaray who has accepted doubling and has made it epistemologically productive.