Laboring Bodies: Interview with Evren Savc ı
By: The Yale Herald
Tags: Features, Sex Work, Transgender

Members of Kirmizi Semsiye, a Turkish sex worker’s NGO, at an International Women’s Rights Day protest (Credit: nswp.org)

Evren Savcı is an assistant professor in the Women’s, Gender, & Sexuality Studies (WGSS) department. Savcı’s interest is in transnational sexualities, and she roots her work in feminist and queer theory as well as ethnographic methodology. Her past work has explored the intersections of language, knowledge, sexual politics, neoliberalism, and religion, and she is currently finishing her first book Queer in Translation: Sexual Politics Under Neoliberal Islam. Interview by Rachel Koh, SM ’20.

RK: Can you tell me about how sex work features in your area of scholarship?

ES: I’m not a scholar of sex work per se… but trans sex workers intersected with my research for my first book, which is about queer social movements in contemporary Turkey, as they’ve been critical in LGBT organizing, historically and contemporarily in Turkey. […] I’ve dedicated an entire chapter to trans sex workers’ relationships to public space, neoliberal urban redevelopment, changing political economy, the law and the police, and security regimes and the growing authoritarian state. So even though I don’t consider myself a scholar of sex work, I have written about sex workers, specifically about trans sex workers, who do end up having a very different place both in the national imaginary and in the way police treats them versus cis women who engage in sex work.

[…]I think a lot of progress that feminist work has done is in positioning [sex work] as a question of labour and not of morals, and also to think about the larger frameworks within which sex work can be discussed, with “trafficking” being one of the most current iterations of that.

RK: Can you explain a bit more about the particular experience of trans women sex workers in Turkey?

ES: […]The imaginaries of trans women as sex workers has a lot to do with the way the media has historically represented them as monstrous figures who are out to trick innocent men on the highway and attack the innocent male public body with switchblades and things like that. There was a big discourse about the so-called “transvestite terror” that was being unleashed. And this is in the context where a lot of trans women were being murdered by men, often times clients or potential clients. That representation, as well as the fact that they have little access to higher education and other forms of labour, means that they do find themselves structurally in a position where sex work is the most available form of labour. […] Trans women equals sex work in the eyes of the state, the police, the random average citizen. Their presence in public space spells out sex work. […] Even if [they] are not sex workers. Even if they’re going to the grocery store. There was a law passed [in Turkey] in 2005 that gives the police a lot of liberty to determine who is engaged in “unlawful occupation of public space,” that sometimes just means they can chase street vendors away. But they also use that law to give fines to trans women even when they are walking to the grocery store, or the bus stop, or to their friend’s house. Because it’s never imagined that they’re not soliciting when they’re in public space. Sex worker becomes a master status for trans women. That really affects how they live, what they’re able to do, their access to public space and their relationship vis-à-vis the police.

RK: What do you think are the main myths that people have about sex work, and how do they come up against the realities of sex work based on your experience and study?

ES: […] There are particular representations of sex work, such as the ’90s moment of movies like Pretty Woman, that show the undeserving, actually innocent, pretty, well-meaning, funny, smart woman who’s doing it to save money to go to college. It’s the angel-esque stereotype. Scholars point out the connection this has to narratives about sex trafficking, which operate on the back of the idea that there are bad actual prostitutes and then there are the good innocent women who wouldn’t do it if they could, or are doing it because they are trafficked. […] A lot of people enjoy sex and they don’t see a problem with doing it for money, the way that we don’t see a problem with selling other forms of labour for money — we are all doing it. So there’s an imagined binary between the deserving and undeserving sex workers: the kind that men will fantasize about marrying and saving, and the kind that is unsaveable.

RK: Do you think that there is an ideal policy regime that states should take towards sex work? For example, the Nordic model where you criminalize the purchase of sex but not the selling or sex, or total decriminalization.

ES: Looking at the model in Turkey, where sex work is not criminalized but legal and regulated by the state, I totally see the downfall. First of all, I don’t believe in any form of criminalization regarding sex work. I don’t believe in punishing sellers or buyers. But I would like to see protections of the laborers as laborers, the way you protect people who do other kinds of physical bodily labour. It’s not okay for people to be injured on a construction site. Similarly, there should be protections in place and ideally unionizing, so that people can have structures in place that protect them as workers.

But there also should not be state regulation. In Turkey, for example, the state decides how many brothels and therefore how many sex workers are allowed in the entire country. And if you heard the numbers, you would laugh. They’re ridiculously low. The work hours are nine to five, like you’re going to a state office, and you can’t choose your clients, the way most workers who work for the state don’t get to choose. You serve whoever comes for service. It’s really poor pay. […] It’s legal work, you do get a paycheck and you even get retirement and other benefits that come with a state job, but it’s really unappealing work conditions. This also means, and this has been historically true in a lot of places, the moment you legalize but make it state-regulated, you are opening an entire can of worms about illegal prostitution. So the same way that there’s a production of victims versus bad subjects, there’s now legal prostitutes versus illegal, clandestine sex work. […] Scholars in Turkey have written about how police have used that to harass women. This research is from the late ’90s but I wouldn’t be surprised if it’s still going on. […] So moral expectations play out in the strange legal liminal zone where anybody who’s not registered as a sex worker could be an illegal sex worker. So that gives a lot of powers to the police and to the state to harass people.

RK: How do you think issues surrounding sex work are employed in North American discourse, particularly in relation to countries and peoples who are perceived as less developed?

ES: There’s been great work on the discourse on sex trafficking, and how it creates a world order, basically, of more righteous and less righteous countries. East Asian countries, especially, have been pegged as countries that don’t do a good enough job preventing sex trafficking. […] It’s coming from the U.S. hegemonic power that has created a hierarchy between morally upright and morally failed nations based on how well they are doing in fighting sex trafficking. It happened rather fast — within ten years. Before that there was no such concern and then suddenly sex trafficking arose as a huge global concern.

And it seems a bit devoid of actual knowledge. […] There are a lot of women who engage in sex work but are not trafficked. And they treat [sex-trafficking] as different from other forms of labour trafficking. The problem with other forms of labour trafficking is that you don’t get paid. The problem with sex trafficking is that you do get paid for the labour. So it’s already a quite questionable construct. […] My class, Transnational Approaches to Gender and Sexuality, is asking these larger questions of how seemingly simple human rights issues are implicated in the larger global political economy, and how these particular and very specific supposed measures around “human rights violations” are used to discipline certain nations into behaving according to U.S. standards. This also produces a very racialized understanding of victims, villains, and heroes.

RK: What areas of sex work do you think are currently understudied and less understood as they can be?

ES: […] I would like to see more studies on the role sex trafficking is made to play in the neoliberal economy, and how it becomes — Elizabeth Bernstein has written eloquently about this, but I’d like to see more beyond a U.S.-centric perspective — how does sex trafficking become a moral flag that different corporations are waving to engage in a type of redemptive capitalism? It becomes a do-good project for a lot of corporations that are doing a lot of evil, and have been historically, so it would be interesting to see what that looks like in other locations and how that’s perceived. If, let’s say, Google is engaging in these projects — which it is — what does that do to Google’s relationship with Venezuela or China, which are put in the hot seat for their “failure”? I think these types of transnational political economy questions can be asked. The other thing is: […] sex trafficking is not at all a discourse in Turkey, and neither is it in most countries in the Middle East. Now that there’s a huge Syrian refugee population in the Turkey, I think questions of forced sexual labour are becoming more urgent […] But I think there’s a way in which the Middle East gets off the hot seat of the United States when it comes to sex trafficking because Muslims are seen as already “prudish” and “repressed” and “conservative” when it comes to sex. Obviously there is sex work everywhere in the world, including Muslim-majority countries. But it’s interesting to see what moral sticks East and Southeast Asia get beat up with, and which moral sticks the Middle East gets beat up with — which is mostly alleged homophobia, and patriarchy. So it would be interesting to look at these larger stories as well: not just sex trafficking in and of itself, but the disciplining and hierarchizing mechanisms of the moral map of the world.