Hutchinson+AC+-+Andrew+Allsup+&+Trevor+Curiel+aff

Hutchinson AC – Affirmative – Sex Workers/Biopower

AFFIRMATIVE –

NOTES: This is a biopower aff - we answer all things in a strictly Foucauldian sense. There is no objective way that we decide to answer disads or counter-plans, it is strictly based on what disad or counter-plan it happens to be.

The project of modernity is characterized by the sovereign decision over life – this conflation of politics and the biological life of a population is what Foucault referred to as "biopower" – Foucault asserts that biopower coalesces around two distinct directives – first are political techniques that the state assumes to integrate the biological life of individuals into its center – second are the technologies of the self – these are processes that bind an individual to a particular identity and at the same time to an external power – this is the particularly important regarding sexuality and sexual politics – the identity of the "prostitute" has been constructed by particular social actors and defined by governmental policy – the proliferation of discourses has caused sex workers to be seen as "vile harlots" whose bodies are a "stinking s ewer" – The construction of these identities necessitated interventions designed at the limitation of health assistance and the controlling of the sale of sex – this identification of sex workers as a problem and the attempts to do something about it are exercises of biopolitical over the life and death of these sex workers as well as their identitiy such characterizations and exercises of power must be challenged through rigorous critique

Augustin in 2005 [Laura, Doctor of Sociology and Cultural Studies and Master of International Education, rhizomes.10, Spring, 2005, Helping Women Who Sell Sex: The Construction of Benevolent Identities]

1] This article addresses the governmental … worked upon and controlled.

The United States "Anti-Prostitution Pledge" is exemplary of biopolitics today – it unfairly conflates sex trafficking with sex work and is a primary weapon of the united states in its interventions designed to control the life and death of sex workers through refusing to give health assistance to sex workers unless they remove themselves from the sex industry

Cohen, Director of Government Affairs at the Guttmacher Institute, March 2005 [Susan A., "Ominous Convergence: Sex Trafficking, Prostitution and International Family Planning," The Guttmacher Report on Public Policy 8 (1), http://www.guttmacher.org/pubs/tgr/08/1/gr080112.html]

Sex trafficking is one component … the "test case" is on the immediate horizon.

And, the linkage with colonialism is not tenuous – historically the third world has been the demonized object against which western identity has been defined. Nowhere is this more true than in representations of non-western women and sexual propriety. The current crusade against prostitution mirrors the Victorian campaigns for the establishment of a normative, well-defined, proper feminine sexuality. This both elevates westerners as agents of moral rectitude and degrades non-western women as either passive objects of violence or immoral sexual deviants, justifying neo-colonial interventions

Scoular, Senior Lecturer at Strathclyde University Law School, 2004 [Jane, "The 'Subject' of Prostitution: Interpreting the discursive, symbolic and material position of sex/work in feminist theory," Feminist Theory 5(3), Sagepublications, 350-352]

In contract, Judith Walkowitz's work … and 'resisting' subject to challenge hierarchial relations.

There has never been a greater need for critical interrogations of our attitudes towards sex than now – sex panics are not simply isolated instances of violence, but are the ideological channel through which social violence is expressed and justified- in a militarist world with nuclear weapons, panics over sexuality can create unthinkable destruction

Rubin, Assistant Professor of Anthropology at the University of Michigan, 1993, [Gayle S. "Thinking Sex: Notes for a Radical Theory of the Politics of Sexuality," The Lesbian and Gay Studies reader, Eds. Abelove, Barale, & Halperin, p. 3-9]

Asked his advice, Dr. J. Guerin affirmed … and genuinely liberatory body of thought about sexuality.

Thus we demand:

That the United States Federal Government Should Increase Public Health Assistance to Sub-Saharan Africa by Rescinding the Anti-Prostitution Pledge.

Finally, our challenge to global violence is not abstract – the equation of monstrosity with sexual deviance produces precisely the ideological maelstrom that fuels the us/them politics of global violence. The recent efforts to stabilize compulsory, monogamous, conjugal, heterosexuality speaks to the link between sexual propriety and nationalism, a link which must be challenged if we are ever to escape the terrifying logical of "either you are for us or against us." The consequences of inaction include complicity in the face of militaristic imperialism, domination, and mass slaughter

Puar & Rai, 2002, Assistant Professor of Women's Studies and Geography at Rutgers & Cultural and Literary Studies at the New School University [Jasbir K. & Amit S., "Monster, Terrorist, Fag: The War on Terrorism and the production of docile patriots," Social Text 20.3 (2002), Project Muse]

How are gender and sexuality central … modernity, patriotism, and nationalism?