Afrikan Sex Workers Lessons on homelessness and violence for Freud, Fanon and Foucault By Eric Harper I never hurt nobody but myself and that's nobody's business but my own. (Billie Holiday) It took many years of vomiting up all the filth I’d been taught about myself, and half-believed, before I was able to walk on this earth as though I had a right to be here. (James Baldwin) The axe forgets, the tree does not forget - A Swahili proverb (In Tswana, go lebala modiri, modirwa ga a lebale). I am not African because I was born in Africa but because Africa is born in me. (Kwame Nkrumah) ...the problem of experiences on the edge, those forms of experience that instead of being considered central, of being positively valued in society, are deemed to be a borderline experiences which puts into question what is usually considered acceptable (Foucault 1997:152). Words are like eggs. Once broken, they cannot be put back together (A Yoruba proverb) A person who sells eggs should not start a fight in the market (Zambia prover) If An Egg Breaks due to outside force inside Life ENDS, But If it Breaks from inside! Life Begins! (A Facebook message from a Kenyian youth leader, who I have huge respect for!) Introductionary remarks Accepting the supposition that the body, an egg, without organs, can be seen as a site of homecoming, I explore the question of who owns the body. This exploration is undertaken through an examination of the advocacy slogan, ‘my body, my business’and the placement of the Afrikan sex worker alongside Freud, Fanon and Foucault. The Afrikan sex worker in this work is a new feminist and LGBTIQ potentiality in much the same way that homelessness offers new post-colonial possibilities. The aim is to bring an informed interdisciplinary and gender perspective to bear on the concept of homelessness. While much of post-colonial criticism has centred on the problem of the colonized subject’s relation to the home, there has not yet been a sustained undertaking of the history and meaning of the concept of homelessness and, more importantly, its relationship to the experience of violence in the contemporary world. The history of homeless people tends to be recorded through surveillance and documentation by those institutions responsible for providing discipline, punishment, shelter and cure so as to ‘save’ and ‘rescue’ them. These responses, particularly when done systematically, can become frameworks that hold the homeless person ransom to a particular language game of ‘truth’, thereby restricting the homeless person’s movement and possibility of finding a voice. Outline of paper I apply the lens of homelessness – homeless in the symbolic sense but also sometimes homeless in the material as well – to a particular group of people on the margins, being sex workers in Afrika. After an engagement with sex work in Afrika and feminist responses to sex work more broadly, Freud, Fanon and Foucault’s ‘footnotes’ will be discussed. The paper ends by offering comments on those who exist in the ‘other/world World/scene is a term Richard Klein uses; it comes from Lacan who in turn gets the term from Sartre. Klein is using the term world to refer to those excluded from the accepted and taken for granted ‘scene’. We could simply use the word other, but I have placed world/other together to emphasis the spatial dimension of the process of othering and exclusion of those others cast out of the established scene. The scene is a symbolic-imaginary life stage where the drama of the social bond and a constituted identification are enacted. What drops outside the scene are abject objects which include marginalised speaking beings. The drama, script, stage is an ordeal with the want to be (lack). The person wants certainty and holds onto fictions of reality called normality. Even when these fictions are disrupted the person clings to the illusion of normality. This is abnormal, normality will return. The hope is that what constitutes that subject, the daily rituals which have an everyday certainty about can once again be engaged in and as such they can be part of what they imagine to be a normal scene.’, outside of the established and taken-for-granted scenes of ‘normality’. The dyslexic joining of words or gaps encountered in the text are not an attempt to construct portmanteau but evidence of an embrassment in an encounter my dyslexic. Why Afrikan Sex Workers? The question may be asked why one should focus on Afrikan sex workers in a discussion on homelessness. Firstly, most literally, many Afrikan sex workers are physically without homes; secondly, the mass murders of sex workers, stigmatization, and normalization of hate crime towards sex workers and the internalization of this violence results in an erasure of physical and mental space. Sex workers simply disappear and legal redress is ignored. Thirdly, sex work as an occupation remains stigmatized in many societies, including the Afrikan context, and given the dominant constructions of ‘correct’ female sexuality, sex workers remain constructed as ‘fallen’, ‘loose’ women, marginal and therefore without home in ‘respectful’ society. Fouthly, despite many Afrikan sex workers seeing themselves as feminists many feminists are hostile or worse, violent and excommunicate the voice of these women. The LGBTIQ movement is more embracing. Finally, western, including western sex work narratives, prioritise some outcomes, not all, that are alien to Afrikan sex workers and assert a North-South divide. It is for these reasons that one of the first challenges in work with Afrikan sex workers is to overcome barriers and create safe and creative spaces, adopted homes where sex workers can find a voice, both as a sex worker as well as a woman, trans-woman or –man, man or simply person. The focus area, sex work is a contested space both socially and within feminist scholarship and activism, arguably a focus area that divides the feminist community since sex workers continue to endure a lack of support from many within the feminist movement. While not wishing to rehash feminist neither critiques nor engage with a feminist analysis of sex work here, my concern or rather attempt is to understand what Afrikan sex workers can teach us homelessness and secondly what happens when the theories of Freud, Fanon and Foucault are grounded in an encounter with grass root African sex workers. The focus on sex work constitutes an attempt to apply a more critical lens to homelessness in its multi dimensions and indeed to interrogate what value the work of Freud, Fanon and Foucault can offer to a theory of homelessness, especially one that post-colonial. Sex Work arguably also speaks to the blind spots in the the work of Freud, Fanon and Foucault. Another reason for focusing on sex work is that it clearly highlights the issues at stake when support and intervention is framed by a rescue, rehabilitation and assimilation political discourse. Sex work, exposes a crude political ethic in which the aim to save and reform people, one in which sex workers are treated as passive objects in need of our pity. The net effect is that the sex worker is silenced. Johanna Oksala, Hester Eisenstein and Sylvia Walby call for a return of and foregrounding of feminism in socialist politics and “economic questions of redistribution in order to combat the hegemony of neoliberalism Oksala notes that some feminists have “identified post-structuralism and its dominance in feminist scholarship as being responsible for the debilitating move away from socialist or Marxist paradigms. Feminism and Neoliberal Governmentality.” http://rauli.cbs.dk/index.php/foucault-studies/article/view/4116.”  Afrikan Sex Workers speak directly to this call. Most feminist, despite there differences, call for an engagement with patriarchy. Patriarchy can be understood as a system of constraint, violence, a form of colonisation of the mind, a process of being given a history and identity, a means of creating an unequal division and domestication of labour, and a violence against the earth. Afrikan Sex Workers speak directly to this call. More and more feminists call for a location of feminist struggles within a post-colonial and Marxist feminist lens. Afrikan Sex Workers speak directly to this call. Why Freud, Fanon and Foucault? Deriving a concept of homelessness from the life and work of Freud, Fanon and Foucault allows for new insights. Freud, Fanon and Foucault, by virtue of being Jewish, black and homosexual, were positioned as outsiders, non-European. In this conversation with Freud, Fanon and Foucault not being at home in the world and not-belonging come into view as central to their autobiographies and epistemologies. All three of these men have made a substantial impact on nineteenth and twentieth century thought and have been widely discussed and commented on by other theorists. Through an exploration of their life and work (explored in depth as part of my PhD, but not elaborated here) one can trace out their subjective location and personal relationship to the Western homelands, simultaneously as ‘insider’ and ‘outsider.’ This uncertain relationship to the homelands, it can be argued, emerges out of a tension and paradoxical position where they are each in different ways seen as ‘other’ – Jew, black, Homosexual, yet also as Western, middle-class and educated male bodies Freud, Fanon and Foucault inhabited a privileged position. Through an investigation of the concept of homelessness as it emerges in the lives and theoretical texts of these three key writers we arrive at the question of the body, the lived body that writes texts, acts and experiences the effects of multiple and habitual forces of dispossession, destitution and displacement as well as oppression, appropriation and colonization. It is in Deleuze terms, that is without organs and open to new possible assemblages, that is sites of paradoxical ‘home coming.’ But at the same time in the course of their lives and identifications as middle-class, male, medical practitioners and academics, they risked alienating others, especially in their engagement with female sexuality. At times Freud and Foucault become ambassadors of western culture, especially Foucault, even if it a radical deconstruction of French culture. These thinkers offer a view of homelessness that is productive for thinking against the grain of dominant orthodoxies. This contrasts with the implication of pathologization of homelessness which arises in the frameworks of dominant political, therapeutic and social work approaches. The creation of homelessness also recalls the attendant violence of its experience. I argue that the space of homelessness needs to be contextualized. When homelessness is imposed, as with torture or a tsunami, there is a closing down of space; but when chosen, as with the Afrikan transgendered sex worker who leaves her home and community due to threats, impositions and judgements, homelessness may paradoxically open up space. Drawing on the insights from these theorists, I also suggest that the concept of homelessness may at a symbolic level serve rather as a space of resistance to hegemonic practices of belonging, offering a way of destabilising dominant patriarchal, heteronormative and Western constructions of home as seen with the the brothel or Khat houses in London (see the work/art of Charity Njoki Mwaniki). Homelessness cannot be kept outside the boundaries of the home; and neither can the homeless be fully assimilated into the homeland, as something within the home is irreducible to any ordering of things. The border, boundary and intersections of home and homelessness are blurred, forever incomplete, as the home finds itself ceaselessly stained and crossed with the uncanny, that is, the ‘unhomely’. Home, as noted by Delia Vekony (2010), is a site of hospitality. It is a space to think, play, and dream, eat, make love and raise children. But it is also a stage upon which the state apparatus, global economy, monotheistic religions and patriarchal order assert control over the body. Homelessness has been constructed as a material experience for many: a site of terror, abandonment and lack of direction. It is often experience it as free falling or as the mental foreclosure of space. Yet I underline another dimension of homelessness: as an experience of liberation. This ‘camping on the borders’ allows for a disruption of identification, a state of refuge from the demands of others and a form of nomadic thinking. Within any home setting lurks the uncanny, what cannot be housed, likewise within any homeless setting a becoming-at-home is possible. Both home and homelessness hold the possibility of terror as well as a comforting, exciting retreat and escape. The ‘body’ (Freud, Fanon, Foucault and Afrikan Sex Worker) with a different organisation The shadow of the objectified and marked body frames the space within which Freud, Fanon and Foucault write. The marked body is hyper-visible while the human face, the person living inside the body, is invisible and erased. Simply put, the stereotype of stigma is all that is seen, while the particularity of the person is unknown. The body is shamed and treated as a universal category in which the person is seen to represent all who are assumed to share the same markings. This experience, notes Klein (2012, personal communication), is similar to the experience of been driven mad: She is experiencing being robbed of a sense of self. Her body in the mirror, due to the hostile gaze of the Other, keeps changing. There is a disconnection between the property of her vision and intrusive gaze of the Other. It’s not possible for her to have any belief in the image in front of her, the identifications with her body in the mirror, as her specular image becomes a foreign and invasive image imposed from without. Between image and identity there is no link. She is now linked as an object to the gaze of the Other. Her body becomes a double to her, something alien. When it is perceived it will not be experienced as an ego, body. The double is non-ego. Against this objectification, fixity and shaming Freud, Fanon and Foucault develop an ethical orientation or practice that opens up space for the body to question, dream, desire and play. What is noteworthy is that, despite the attempt to apply theory to a practice, the work of Freud, Fanon and, to a lesser extent, Foucault, stumbles at the point of intersection with female sexuality. This is interesting as the work of all three men cross over most markedly into the field of sexuality, this being a space they attempt to reclaim. However, in so doing, they risk leaving female sexuality, in particulary Afrikan, on the outside. It is arguably within the space of male sexuality that they make their boldest claims; and they falter most when approaching or, arguably, ignoring, that of the Afrikan female. This assumption is not to ignore a host of rereadings of Freud, Fanon and Foucault. For example, Lacan’s concept of jouissance Jouissance is made up of those heterogeneous elements and forms of satisfaction that are particular to the subject, cannot be shared and which go beyond phallic enjoyment. and how his engagement with female sexuality has allowed for feminist engagement with Freud. Without reproducing yet another commentary on the gender problematics within the respective works referred to above, I wish to focus on one particular site of sexuality, which is also, arguably, a site of homelessness (with respect to physical homelessness and enduring social marginalization): the (Afrikan) sex worker, who appears as a marginal figure – a kind of footnote – in the work of Freud, Fanon and Foucault. Body, Space as a co-construction (assemblage) The commitment to opening up space in the face of erasure is the point at which politics, theory and practice converge in the life and work of Freud, Fanon and Foucault. When cleared of clutter, impingement, a body in motion comes into being, one that speaks, dreams, desires, plays and thinks and has sex. It is not an atomized individual and deterritorialized body but a body-memory that extends beyond personalized and biographical attributes of identity, a body that is always in the process of becoming or performance. Put another way, for many destitute people, surviving on the streets of urban Afrikan ghettos is something that brings pride, self-respect and street credibility. While many harshly judge (usually from the comfort of a middle class position) the selling of drugs, stealing, hustling or exchange of sex for money, when this enables a person not only to get through the day – something that cannot be taken for granted and which is often a monumental struggle – but also puts food on the table for their children, the picture of what constitutes choice, agency, work and respectability becomes more complicated. The person has in effect moved from the negative deterritorialized body and have inaugurated nomadic becoming, a voice detached from the despotic centre. Many, not all, sex workers in Afrika reclaim their bodies and find agency through sex work. By way of example, while working with sex workers what was demand from the sex workers themselves was that a community development and partnership approach was adopted. This included advocacy, in this case, sex worker led advocacy that challenged national strategic plans and laws that directly impacted upon sex workers. Another community approach used was social planning and networking which aimed to mobilize resources and partnerships to promote joint initiatives. The third community work approach used was neighbourhood development, being the mobilization of a group of people (in this case, sex workers) around shared concerns. The banner uniting the different programmes of action as originated by Valda Lucas was participation through education, specifically focussing on the transfer of skills. In reality this work, briefly stated, involved consulting the sex workers on what services they wanted, ensuring satisfaction surveys were undertaken and, most importantly, enabling a transfer of skills so that the sex workers could run the programmes themselves. This involved the development of a peer education programme which was later reframed by the concept of human rights defence originated by Valda Lucas. By placing peer educators (called human rights defenders) at the forefront of outreach, research and advocacy interventions, the aim was to empower sex workers with skills so as to enhance their capacity to speak on their own behalf, feel more confident to address human rights concerns and make informed choices, including with regards their health needs. This became the strategic objective. It is an approach that further emphasis collaborative work and creates broad support for different campaigns and the use of public events to raise awareness around the concerns and challenges that sex workers face from civil society. At the centre of these partnerships, sex worker groups became the dominant voice both within the public and private space of organisational life. Hence it was imperative that any organisation working with sex workers is either sex worker lead or else there is a move towards a situation in which the staff composition is radically transformed to include sex work staff representation at all levels, including management level (through Board representation). Programme activities the organization ran need to be identified by sex workers, as well as run by them. The situation in Afrika is one in which sex worker led alliances, run by sex work organizations or movements has been established in Botswana, Nigeria, Namibia, South Africa, Mozambique, Zimbabwe, Kenya and Uganda and is continuing to expand to new countries like Ethopia and Congo. Sex work and human rights violations in Afrika Indifference to the killing of sex workers, alongside a host of other gross human rights violations, was a key theme and rallying point at the first-ever, sex worker led, African sex worker conference in Johannesburg in 2009 See the history of ASWA at www.africansexworkeralliance.org. As noted at the conference, sex workers in Namibia, Uganda, Kenya and Malawi simply disappear Post conference and in response to these violations various legal actions against the police occurred in South Africa, Kenya, Mozambique and Uganda. For example in Cape Town the South African Police (SAP) were taken to court for unlawful arrests of sex workers - a detention without trial, refusal to inform sex workers of their rights and failure to keep a record of the case or even open the case. The case went to the High Court and was won by SWEAT. For a history of these events see the ASWA and SWEAT website, www.africansexworkeralliance.org and www.sweat.org.za. The ignoring of sex workers’ rights to legal redress following human rights abuse was reported by all nine of the countries attending the conference. Consider the following press statement, delivered to the press by a delegation of female and male and transgendered sex workers representing a cross-section of African countries: From our government we need law reform and the decriminalization of sex work so that we have the spaces to access our rights. We demand rights and not rescue. As 153 sex workers from 9African countries: South Africa, Senegal, Zambia, Zimbabwe, Botswana, Malawi, Uganda, Kenya, Namibia and Nigeria, today we demand our governments to honour their agreement that every citizen has human rights, and give us the rights that we are entitled to as human beings. Your citizens are speaking, you have a duty to listen and act. The challenge that we face as 153 participants from different countries are almost similar. Many of us face violence and discrimination on a regular basis. Regardless of which country we are from many of us have experienced being raped, verbally, emotional and physical abuse from police, clients and community members. There is unfair discrimination from service providers. Sex workers are not protected or defended by the law when they are exploited and abused. We demand that these violations stop immediately and decisive action is taken against perpetrators. Put your stigma, discrimination and judgments aside. Let us work together to ensure that all Africans live equally and freely as human beings (www.africansexworkeralliance.org). A recent research report on the experiences of sex workers in Afrika (Scorgie, et al, 2011) further substantiated the above, reporting a wide range of human rights violations including those perpetrated by police and related authorities. Below is a summary of some of the findings: Sexual violence, perpetrated by police and related authorities, was common across all sites. Some SW SW refers to sex workers in this passage. (both female and male) had experienced this multiple times, often in the form of gang rape by police. Having to bribe the police, “all the time”, was deeply connected with sexual violence. A range of people on the fringes of the sex industry take advantage of sex work criminalization by extorting money or sex. Clients, according to female SW, commonly ignored their wishes or the occurrence of pain. By having paid for sex, clients appeared to feel they had ‘ownership’ of SW and objectified them in various ways. SWs described many instances of poor treatment once health providers – particularly those in public clinics and hospitals – became aware of their work. For many SW in this study, health providers were plainly described as “abusive” or “hostile”: “We are despised in the hospitals.” A key finding to emerge from research, the 2009 conference and anecdotal information from different sex workers, was a sense of their not being at home within their own countries. In light of the excessive violence that sex workers experience and not having safe spaces, one of the first challenges was to create safe spaces. Jackie Nakazibwe (2010, personal communication) who has pioneered the use of creative space as a means of giving sex workers space, states that creative space is “a place where sex workers can find a voice, both as a sex worker as well as a woman, trans-woman or man, or simply (as a) person”. Nakazibwe (2010, personal communication) elaborates on the value of the project, which she claims “... helps participants overcome feelings of isolation by building connections between participants. Theatre and dance pieces developed in the Creative Space can be performed for public audiences to provide a humanized and positive public image of sex workers.” Following the establishment of creative space, Nakazibwe (2010) went on to establish a drama group, UMZEKELO, the mission of which “is to use performing arts as a tool for education and fun by reaching out to different communities as well as sex workers to remind them that sex workers are human beings just like anybody and that the issues they face are often the issues the community face such as rape, different kinds of Discriminations, HIV epidemic, violence from police and health centres.” While assisting sex workers set up sex worker led national partnerships in Nigeria, Uganda, Kenya, Namibia, Botswana, Zimbabwe and Mozambique, I had the privellge of undertaking a wide range of exploratory visits and met with many sex workers on the ground and thereafter produced reports based on what I was told with each visit. What I discovered is that many Afrikan sex workers use sex work to overcome homelessness, abuse and patriarchal exploitation, as well as a means of gaining material independence. At the same time, many sex workers find themselves having to negotiate complex and often violent situations due to the regulation of the sex industry by criminals, and corrupt police officers and politicians A significant number of the women I spoke to cited high profile politicians, business men, religious leaders and military and police officers as clients. They informed me that some of these clients are the same individuals who speak out against sex work during the day but use the services of the sex work at night. My conclusion was that within context where sex work is illegal and sex workers are targeted by the police, sex workers are driven underground. This was verified by sex workers when the Vice Squad intensified police arrests in the build up the FIFA world cup. In response to the ongoing targeting of sex workers, sex workers in Cape Town organised two marches. In one, 3 March 2012, they marched and chanted “Stop harassing us! Tackle real crime! (www. sweat.org.za).Sisonke, a sex work movement in South Africa and SWEAT have undertaken an intensive campaign to tackle this abuse of sex workers and significantly have gained the support of the Department of Health especially after it was reported, to the Western Cape Department of Health, that the police were interfering with safe sex outreach work. . What is particularly relevant to the application of a theory on homelessness, and especially disturbing, is the fact that police officers will come to the homes and remove a sex worker from this sanctuary for the express purpose of extorting sex and money. During that time period we continually heard reports of this from sex workers in Hillbrow, Johannesburg. In addition to this, sex workers attending a national sex work conference organised by the Centre for the Development of People in Malawi in February 2010 reported not only being removed from their homes, but then being gang raped in police cells, often without a condom; and then having to pay the police officer to be released. While Afrikan sex workers want different things, from what I have been told, I understand the shared priorities to be the right and space to exist as a human being, and the right to work in safe conditions In addition they desire to make as much money as possible, have access to health care, human rights. For some this means advocating for law change, the right to use their bodies as they please, hence the slogan “My Body, My Business”. Political activism is taking place to make these demands a reality. For example Kenya has had public marches on the 17 December 2011 and a march on the 3 March 2012 to Advocate for access to health care and legal services (www. http://africansexworkeralliance.org/content/sex-workers-advocate-access-health-care-and-legal-services) in which thousands of sex workers came onto the street demanding their rights and setting the tone for activism in the rest of Afrika. My understanding of these advocacy demands is that it is in part, informed by the historical violence and deception many women suffer of in terms of what men declare they want from them in cross gender relationships, and the promises made in order to get what he wants, often simply sex. In the language of many Afrikan sex workers, it stems from the right not to feel manipulated and used which is underscored by the thinking “why should I give it away for nothing?” . Sex work becomes a means of obtaining space to exist, independence, employment and, for some, even enjoyment. In this regard, it is interesting to read the stories of sex work activists in When I dare to be powerful, edited by Zawadi Nyong’o (2010: 95-102) So when so-called feminists say that sex workers are victims, that we are being exploited by men, and that we are not in control of our lives, I tell them some of the times I have felt most powerful in my life, have been when I was doing sex work. Whenever I get an opportunity to negotiate the price, protection, and choose my client, in that moment, the ball is my court and I have the power. The situation is under my control so I don’t feel that I am being taken advantage of by these men...I also believe that many women in the feminist movement who are against sex work have been abused by men and that are not currently in heterosexual relationships. These women may have been empowered, but they are still hurting in their hatred towards men. In their pain, they also judge and hurt other women like us who they don’t even understand. It is really sad when women undermine each other because we need to stand together...I am very sexually active and I embrace my sexuality, but I don’t want anyone to objectify or degrade me...I want my son to respect women, whether they are sex workers or not. That is why I am going to tell him that I am or was a sex worker. Having worked alongside sex workers in nine African countries over five years, I have observed that the conditions under which sex work occurs vary vastly, and that both context and personal factors play a significant role in how the person experiences the work. It is predominately those sex workers who engage in sex worker rights and who possess a sex-positive consciousness Sex workers in Afrika as a group can be both united and also highly competitive and undermining of each other. They are not a homogenous group, as evidenced by a huge range of diversity and complexity within the sex industry in Afrika. In addition what sex work means vastly varies from person to person and changes over time. In therapeutic groups we ran in different brothels in Cape Town over a six month period, as well as one to one psychotherapy sessions, what I discovered was that age, burn out, control over the working environment, living in secret and having nobody to talk to, attitudes towards the provision of sex for money, amount of money made and abuse experienced, health status, levels of alcohol and drug use, achievement of financial and emotional independence all play a key role in how these women and men experienced sex work. who regard sex work as a form of independence, feminism and LGBTIQ LGBTIQ stands for lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgendered, intersex and queer. activism. What stood out in the tales of many of those I listened to was a sense of self-respect due to their achievement in putting their children through school and giving these children opportunities they themselves had never had. Sex work in Afrika is not without its contradictions. It is a profession that some women can use to their advantage. Consider in this regard a letter that Mrs G, who has been in the industry for seven years, gave to me to give to other sex workers and to the South African Law Reform Commission, which was debating different sex work models at the time. Mrs G was in the process of leaving sex work in a brothel and I had been seeing her for one-to-one therapy. She had seen women suffering abuse in the industry and becoming addicted to drugs. Mrs G stated clearly that she did not use drugs or drink when working. She was leaving sex work having made enough money to buy a house and a car and to put her children through school The build up to this letter was her concern about those women from poor backgrounds who suddenly find they are earning more in one day than their parents earned in a month. Some of these women who begin buying expensive things they would not have bought before. Soon they found themselves needing more and more money to maintain this life style and in the process started working longer and longer hours, using drugs to stay awake and even engaging in unsafe sex when offered lots of money. They get lost, isolated and sucked into a narrow existing. These women in the Cape Town industry are referred to those who chase the money. What I observed in my therapy groups is there are times when some of the women would find great relief in been able to say they enjoyed sex, as ‘sex workers are not supposed to enjoy sex’, but at the same time found certain sex with some clients unpleasant as noted discussions around ‘perverted clients’ who want you to call them daddy or want you to pretend to be their wives. This statement does not off course negate the times that sex with clients is enjoyable but also references times when it is not unpleasant and/or disturbing. What I have discovered in working alongside sex workers is that there are sex workers who want to continue doing sex work as long as they can and continue to make good enough money and there are others who want to exit sex work and those in between. Moreover attitudes to sex vary and shift. . She shared the following: We would like to have equal rights to those people working in other jobs. For example, sick leave, UIF (unemployment insurance fund), pregnancy leave, annual leave, and bonus. You must recognise sex work as a job, like any other job and must treat us equally. The biggest challenge working indoors is to remain focused on why you came into the industry, the goals you set yourself. Be careful of distraction. It is important to take time off. You(r) body and mind gets tired. That is when the girls get problems, when they don’t take time out, when they become isolated and only mix with people in the industry. You must take breaks. Go for a swim, mix with other people, do everyday things with people outside the industry. Take up a hobby. I do volleyball and kiddies mural. Don’t let the industry overtake your life, don’t become isolated. The moments you are isolated then you have the same thoughts over and over, going over the day, this can lead to depression as you cannot switch off. The biggest difficulty for me was becoming independent. Men are threatened when you can stand on your own two feet. Independence is good but it comes with a cost. People think you are too strong, intimidating. A lot of men want to be in charge. It is important to note that sex work in Afrika varies vastly The experience of those who can make as much as R10000 to R20000 for a few hours of work and who front as high-class striptease dancers (often white foreign women in large cities of South Africa) cannot be compared with those in Zimbabwe for instance, or with women who stand at the side of the road with a blanket near the port in Maputo and who will provide sex for an entire night so as to have something to eat. The rural versus the urban sex worker, or a male sex worker doing drugs with a client in a Cape Town club as compared to the young man from a Nairobi slum willing to have unsafe sex as he has not eaten for two days, present vastly different experiences, despite the shared categorization of sex work.. Boyce and Isaacs (2010: unpublished report) point to a host of diverse considerations that undermine the assumption of homogeneity within the Afrikan sex industry. They conclude: Personal developmental milestones [family background], language, vernacular, cultural and tribal affiliations, including inner city and peri-urban influences – and migrant sex work populations -have created mini-sub-cultures that often contain specific mores, codes of behaviour, class divisions and gender rivalry. This anthropological diversity must be addressed -sensitive to the needs, aspirations and participation of all concerned. This in turn can offer important insights into sex workers life experiences in a manner that can offer new and significant pathways for addressing social vulnerability, rights, risks, HIV prevention and health. The boundaries as to who is and is not a sex worker The definition is even more convoluted when applying self- definition. What emerges are tenuous boundary lines, for example a new young man on the gay scene who is ‘kept’, as opposed to a self identified rent boy. Many women working in brothels or from the internet will distance themselves from those working on the street and do not see themselves in the same way, they are ‘hostesses’, or ‘call girls’ while the women on the street who sells cigarettes and sweets but is also willing to provide sex, sees herself as a business woman. Guy De Lancey (2012, personal communication) has noted how in Cape Town woman working on the street refer to business as a jump, she gets into a car or goes into the bushes and tries to do the business as quickly as possible while in Nigeria a women will talk about business as ‘being carried’. She will want to stay in the hotel with the man for the night knowing that she will have a place to sleep. The realities have subtle yet marked differences. There are self identified sex workers, and those, probably in the majority, who do not identify as sex workers yet engage in transactional sex, those who move in and out of the sex industry, those who will do anything, including selling sex to survive. There are those who find a safe space to be gay or ‘trans’ through the provision of sex work. Marcos Benedetti(2010, personal communication), who has worked extensively with both female and transgender sex workers, informed me, that for some transgendered women sex work is the only space they can exist and be accepted. become even more blurred when we include those who engage in stripping, transactional sex or those who have multiple partners with fringe benefits. One of the most interesting findings communicated to me by sex worker was that while the general public focuses on the word ‘sex’, many sex workers say that they are interested in the word ‘work’. At the same time, it is clear that it is not straightforward as to what the work of a sex worker is. For some clients, the sex worker may be a drug partner, while for others the sex worker will ‘do something the wife will not do’. For many, the sex worker is the avenue to a quick ‘blow job ‘or even a truer expression of sexual orientation, such as in the case of a man who has desires for other men and who wishes to maintain a closeted existence While working at SWEAT and also with ASWA, we have repeatedly heard many Afrikan sex workers speak of being sex therapists, social workers, of comforting the lonely or enabling men in society to maintain their split realities. I have even heard sex workers, noted in two of the therapy groups I was running in brothels in Cape Town, speak about inhibiting male rape, a position that does not sit comfortably within different feminist readings, both those for and against sex work. . When offering sex workers space to speak, be it through blogs (see for example, the SWEAT and ASWA websites) or the media, what has stood out as a consistent theme in their writing and interviews is the relationship between sex work and marriage! Many sex workers will report having been told that, if it were not for them, a marriage would have fallen apart. Some sex workers, as reported to me in the therapy groups we ran, went so far as to argue that the real business of sex work is keeping secrets. Sex work exposes us to the ‘secrets’ employed to keep the ‘home’ together. These secrets enable men and women to maintain the social and morally respectable positions that society often demands. Equally, sex work is embedded within the complex social positions that women, gay and transgendered persons occupy in Afrikan society and the history of transactional sex and multiple sexual partners. In most Afrikan settings, transactional sexual arrangements have traditionally existed, as did, for that matter, sex between men. This is something that is erased in the historically dishonest presentations by those who proclaim sex work and homosexuality are not Afrikan, but a dysfunction brought to Afrika by the European male. What is also true is that the contexts informing transactional sex and, for that matter, men having sex with men have significantly changed and are in a process of continual change. Moreover, it is difficult and perhaps even foolish to try to arrive at any singular reading of sex exchanges that involve money or rewards. For example, even when focusing on a specific area, being transactional sex on university campuses in the Western Cape, Shefer, Clowes and Vergnani (2012) note a complex interplay between self-agency and exploitation: There are clear signs in participants’ narratives that transactional sexual encounters on campus are not simply about money but also involve a range of material and emotional transactions that can confer benefits on both men and women. Women are not necessarily passive victims in these exchanges, they may actively and strategically engage in such relationships as has been argued by Gukurume (2011) in his study on a higher education campus in Zimbabwe. And at the same time there are hints that a few female students are aware that women also have sexual feelings and can experience sexual desire, although they also recognise that it is risky to acknowledge this publically. It is especially noteworthy that students’ narratives highlight a continuum of relationships in which the boundaries between a transactional relationship and a ‘normal’ intimate relationship are not clear. What becomes more important is to differentiate between relationships that are equitably transactional and those which involve intersecting axes of power which facilitate possibilities for exploitation and abuse of either partner. Sex work in Afrika is linked to a plethora of terminologies or narratives For example what I have discovered in working with sex workers in Mozambique is that many young girls in Mozambique have to leave school at a young age, some live with a life expectancy of 35, such that by the time they are 18 it could be described as a ‘mid-life’ crisis. These and other submerged narratives exist around sex work. Despite this complexity sex work is more often than not reduced to simple binary categories in many debates. Surely the discussion should be about what it means to live with a shortened life expectancy! One of those submerged narratives is a form of genocide against the Afrikan sex worker, the extreme violence and murders, which are not investigated unless they take on horrific and gross dimensions, as with serial murders which capture the public attention and imagination. An example of this is in Kenya, 2011, where sex workers reported to the police that there was somebody engaged in the serial killing of sex workers. Only when this man started killing women thought not to be sex workers was this case taken seriously. The secret is that the normalization of violence against sex workers is a subtle way of accepting violence against women and people from the LGBTIQ community. It is a way of maintaining hate crimes through the belief that it is ok to abuse certain women or gays. The secret is that sex work in Afrika offers society an outlet for both sexual expression and hate. The role of the sex worker is thus to provide sexual release as well as absorb violence and hatred. Were sex work not illegal then another hated group would need to be found. which need to be unpacked if one is going to attempt to talk about the Afrikan sex industry. With the coming of the white man, Christianity, Islam, capitalism and, lately, the rise of the ‘big men’ of Afrika, sexuality was restructured. Sex work needs to be linked to slavery, colonisation, and the brutalization of Afrikan and black male sexuality, the myths of black female sexuality, urbanisation, and poverty, lack of education, capitalism and globalization. Sex work needs to be included in urban and migrancy studies. It also needs to be placed alongside Afrikan LGBTIQ and feminist struggles to achieve autonomy and spaces for self expression. Again, it is an over-determined space that cannot be understood in one-dimensional terms, it is an assemblage with endless mutlplicity and further unfoldings and folding back. Sex work and feminists Once upon a time women in England demanded the vote. This was thought too much, a step too far. Then in the sixties women in the USA demanded the same pay as men. This was thought too much, a step too far. Then lesbian women spoke out and demanded women only spaces and wanted men excluded This was thought too much, a step too far Then African American women spoke out and said their white sister must stop speaking for them This was thought too much, a step too far Now African sex workers are speaking out Starting a revolution of independent women and inclusion of LGBTIQ This was thought too much, a step too far Radical means what and for whom? Is radical grassroots!? Is it radical to claim that men want sex and that women in Africa are tired of giving it away for nothing? What is radical? Is it the very public display of female sexual agency? Or is it the revelation that sex for money is not different to most, perhaps all, marriages? Is it the combination of both these realizations that is too radical? Sex workers are told they are selling their bodies to men. Sex workers reply they are claiming their bodies both from men and from those women who tell them what they can and cannot do with their body. This self-righteous middle-class, Western interference and undermining of African women's attempts to overcome and gain independence. But it is true for many sex workers sex work is not liberating. Liberation comes with control over ones environment and a state of consciousness. Black liberation activists cried out that people needed not only to change laws, but liberate their minds. Biko promoted Black Consciousness which goes beyond simply the colour of your skin. As female sex workers and role models, human rights defenders, We are developing an African sex worker consciousness. At the centre of this liberation is 'my body, my business.' At the centre of this liberation is the realization that sex can be fluid. One can have sex with men and women. One can have sex for money and without money. Sex work can provide independence, freedom of movement, money and sexual self determination. But sex workers have to fight a battle on three fronts The abusive client Laws which undermine control over the environment And from other women It is these women who call themselves feminists who attack sex workers that make sex degrading and who turn sex workers into an object and tell us that you are a bad girl. At the same time as telling us they are trying to save you and they know what is best for you. It is like been called the head mister office in which you then have to justify what you are doing. This must stop. Time to stop having to explain and justify ourselves and time to start asking these women: Sister, how can you continue to call yourself a feminist when you deny my voice? Sex work gives me equal pay We can have sex with both men and women We have female, male and transgender sex workers We can speak as black women As women from the working and under class As African women We are feminists We fight for the independence of women and LGBTIQ inclusion I am a feminist, now it is time for you to tell me if you are a feminist? Are you a feminist my sister? (extract from Daughtie Ogutu’s presentation at the Regional ‘Changing Faces, Changing Spaces’ Conference, organized by UHAI with the theme “Moving Beyond” Nairobi, Kenya; 4 – 6 May 2011). There are many feminist perspectives on the issue of sex work (or what some feminists call prostitution). These debates overlap with other discussions about sex between the sex-positive feminists (like Camille Paglia, Gayle Rubin, Carol Queen and Annie Sprinkle) and anti-pornography feminists (like Catharine MacKinnon and Andrea Dworkin). Feminists are divided on their position towards sex work. For some, like so-called radical feminists Catharine MacKinnon and Andrea Dworkin, sex work labelled as prostitution is viewed as inherently problematic and considered a form of violence against women that undermines gender equality and should be illegal. For such authors, ‘prostitution’ and pornography are seen to perpetuate a distorted perception of women's bodies and the availability of women as sexual objects of satisfaction. Selling sex is seen as degrading and something that reduces women to commodities. These viewpoints often results in abolitionist policies, stigmatization and denial of human and reproductive health rights. These feminists may be religious, conservative, liberal or even radical. They push the belief that that sex workers should find other jobs and that sex workers should be “rescued.” They see sex workers as victims of a male-dominated society and believe sex workers to be psychologically unstable women in need of help. There are those opposing this are those feminists who see sex work as a means to better the economic circumstances that women knowingly embark on within particular cultural, national and global contexts Placed within an Afrikan context, consider this women’s view point. The article is entitled Pissed off Feminist. (http://www.sweat.org.za) Zimbabwe is a multi- cultural country that believes in traditional, cultural norms and Christian values. The issue of sex work is considered dirty and leads to sex workers being outcasts and viewed with contempt. Sex work is one of the oldest professions dating back to the early times in the Bible. I am a female sex worker living in the City of Kings and Queens in Bulawayo. I am the national coordinator of sex workers for the African Sex Workers Alliance. I advocate and fight for sex workers rights. Sex workers are always treated with disrespect in societies and communities simply because they choose to earn a living through commercializing sex. Sex workers are marginalised which makes us so vulnerable to diseases, violence, rape, hate crimes, verbal abuse, emotional abuse etc. Sex workers are raped each and every day and if we report rape cases to the police they refuse to assist us. Sex workers should therefore be protected in order to protect others. Why pay bride price? Why sell a woman? There is no difference between a married woman and a sex worker as we all are for sale, because a man has to pay somehow for their sexual services directly or indirect. The same applies to dating couples if you ask a girl out she will start telling you about paying for her bills, rentals, buying pizza, lingerie, chocolates etc, then after all that she is all yours whether you want to have sex there and there it’s up to you but you have already paid for your services indirectly. Let us face the facts in other words; paying of bride price simply means you are paying for permanent sex. As a married woman you will have sex whenever your husband needs it and you will have children. As a sex worker I offer my clients temporary sex. I render the services that my client needs and we part ways no strings attached, strictly business. The question then is who is a prostitute? Most people will say that a prostitute is someone who offers sexual services in exchange for goods or money directly or indirect. Then all women might be prostitutes as they are paid, indirectly or directly for sex. Sex is something that is supposed to be celebrated, embraced and enjoyed without fear. Why is it that the word ‘prostitute’ always refers to women who have different sexual partners? Remember we don’t have sex by ourselves as it takes two to tango. What then do we call the men that we have sex with? Are they also prostitutes? Society needs to sit down and rethink its attitude towards sex work. Stop this name calling and blame game! Ours is a water-tight profession because we do not intend to break families, it’s a straight forward transaction of sex and money, no further intentions unlike the so-called “small houses” and “girlfriends” whose main objective is to be loved by someone else’s boyfriend/husband and they will do the unimaginable in a bid to oust the wife out of the matrimonial home. Sex work is a completely different industry that does not break up homes as it does not involve love. You may concentrate on sex but we concentrate on the work! Let us work together as a nation to find a strategy to stop our enemy HIV/AIDS from taking lives. Together we can make a difference, Unity is power!. Moreover, it is important to note, firstly, that anti-prostitution feminist readings are imposed in a forceful manner and secondly, that Western experiences are normalized. There is blindness to the realities of those who most lack economic, social and political power or obtain power and independence through sex work The sex work debate speaks to a middle class failure to understand the position of the working and underclass women living in the so-called Third World. It imposes a middle class perspective. See current debate in New York Times and Marth Nussbaum's contribution, ‘Ignore the Stigma and Focus on the Need’. http://www.nytimes.com/roomfordebate/2012/04/19/is-legalized-prostitution-safer/ignore-the-stigma-of-prostitution-and-focus-on-the-need . Feminist arguments about prostitution portray financial transactions in the area of female sexuality as demeaning to women. But all of us, with the exception of the independently wealthy and the unemployed, take money for the use of our bodies. The stigmatization of prostitution may be based on convincing, well-reasoned arguments. But it may also be based on class prejudice or stereotypes of race or gender. When prostitution does not involve coercion or force or the use of children, the most urgent issue is the poor employment opportunities for working women and their lack of control over the conditions of their employment. The legalization of prostitution would likely make things a little better for women who have few options to begin with. The really helpful thing for feminists to ponder, if they deplore the nature of these options, will be to help expand those possibilities through education, skills training and job creation. When prostitution does not involve coercion or the use of children, the most urgent issue is the poor opportunities for working women. Keeping prostitution illegal only increases the threats of violence and sickness and abuse that women face because illegality prevents adequate supervision, encourages the control of pimps and discourages health checks. And prostitution's continued illegality hampers any efforts on behalf of the dignity and self-respect of prostitutes. Women in many parts of the world are especially likely to be stuck at a low level of mechanical functioning, whether as agricultural labourers, factory workers or prostitutes. The real question to be faced is how to expand opportunities for such women, how to increase the humanity inherent in their work and how to guarantee that workers of all sorts are treated with dignity.. Third-world feminists like Chandre Gould (2008) and Sylvia Tamale (2011) emphasise concerns about the realities of women who have restricted access to education, literacy and formal jobs but have the burden of having to take care of extended families. Within the feminist debate on sex work, there are feminists trying to find a middle ground, for example those who see “prostitution” as anti-feminist but a strategic necessity for women to survive. The middle ground viewpoint Included in this middle ground group are those who are pragmatic in which the primary concern is the risk of violence and sexually transmitted diseases. This position is one some religious groups have also taken in arguing that from a pragmatic view point, legalizing sex work reduces risk of violence and disease. This is a so-called reality based position. They argue it should be legal but do think it hurts the goal of equality. At the same time there is recognition that those who have tried to abolish sex work, even through the use of brutal and violent practices, have failed to stop sex work, have only driven it underground and under the control of criminals, often men. Violence against women can only be tackled in a decriminalized context and the criminalization of sex work increases women’s vulnerability. , argues Linda Le Moncheck (1997: 116, 117) calls for a view point that allows for us to see sex work both in terms of “women’s sexual subordination and in terms of women’s sexual liberation from oppressive norms...in terms that are neither exclusively oppressive nor unilaterally liberating.” Shifts of opinion by feminists often come about due to sex work groups throughout the world challenging their feminist sisters about the lack of support in the struggle for recognition of sex workers’ rights as human rights. There are also feminists who are sex workers and who identify as feminist sex workers as a way to advance the feminist struggle. Surely there voices matter in the construction of opinions of what they want? Sex work contextualized Le Moncheck (1997: 120) in her review of some of the literature points out that what makes sex work threatening is that it exposes the fundamentally commercial nature of sex. Quoting Engels, the bourgeois wife is presented as somebody who only differs from a sex worker in that her body is sold once and for all into slavery, with the women becoming totally financially dependent upon the man. Le Moncheck (1997: 124) notes that the context in which sex work takes place is sometimes more important than the content of the work itself. For Le Moncheck (1997: 127), to attack sex work is to address a symptom, a social location within a patriarchal society which determines the scope of sexual degradation. Le Moncheck (1997: 129) sums up that a woman can be harmed without being regarded as a commodity: Therefore, if we address only the ‘sex’ in ‘sex object’, without addressing her complex ‘object’ status, those contexts that turn a woman’s objectification into her degradation remain indeterminate. Sex work only degrades and subordinates when, as Le Moncheck (1997: 129) notes, the message that woman are naturally subordinate to men, already exists and is integrally part of the society’s views. Le Moncheck (1997: 132) calls for a more nuanced reading, one which can look at the fascinating dialectic between reality and fantasy and subject and object positions in both sex and sex work, as well as what it means to be a bad girl, the redefinition of sexuality in women’s terms (1997: 137): “What kind of woman wouldn’t choose sex work?” As long as sex workers are stigmatised any woman can be turned into a bad girl (1997: 138). She concludes that the overemphasis on objectification or its potential for female agency is not helpful and calls for an “embrace of some tensions and highlight some of the complexities in our attitudes towards sexuality and the sex industry.” What is required for Le Moncheck (1997: 216, 217) is a more representative picture, not only of sex workers but of female sexuality. She calls for a depiction that allows for contradictions and incorporates diversity, complexity, ambiguities of women’s sexual lives and fantasies. Moreover, female sexuality, as with sex work, is comprised of individual and institutional forces of oppression on the one hand and the possibilities of sexual exploration, passion and pleasure on the other. What is required is a “sexual ethic of care.” Laura Agustín (2005) , not only calls for a more embracing approach in the study of sex work but also points to dangers inherent within current scholarship: With the academic, media and ‘helping’ gaze fixed almost exclusively on women who sell sex, the great majority of phenomena that make up the sex industry are ignored, and this in itself contributes to the intransigent stigmatization of these women. A cultural-studies approach, on the contrary, would look at commercial sex in its widest sense, examining its intersections with art, ethics, consumption, family life, entertainment, sport, economics, urban space, sexuality, tourism and criminality, not omitting issues of race, class, gender, identity and citizenship. (at http://www.lauraagustin.com/sex-industry-cultures-not-just-sex-work-or-v...) Having partially contextualized the contemporary context of sex work in Afrika and juxtaposed it with feminist work on sex work, I now turn to reflect on the work of Freud, Fanon and Foucault, towards both foregrounding their limitations and the possibilities their work opens up for questions on homelessness. Male fantasies In the work of Freud, the sex worker is confined to theories of male sexuality, as all sexuality for Freud is male in that it is orientated around having, or not having, a phallus. For Freud, the ‘prostitute’ is a fantasy object for men. Freud uses the desire to have sex with a prostitute as a model to help us understand some of the conditions for men falling in love. He speaks of the important role the female sex worker plays in male sexuality, but he does not address the unconscious longings and desires of the sex worker. Freud (1910: 251) exposes the binary logic of male desire: “Where they love they do not desire and where they desire they cannot love.” Put another way, where the man loves (the affect current resulting in the idealized substitute mother), he cannot desire, and where he desires (the sensual current resulting in a debasement of the women seen as a whore), he cannot love. The love relationship is seen to be a displacement or re-enactment of the male’s desire and attachment for the mother. The desire for the whore is an attempt to escape this attachment to mother. This resonates with the feminist analysis of the whore-Madonna binarism in which a dominant discourse in patriarchal societies is the construction of woman as either the mother (nurturing and innocent ) or the woman who is sexual and bad. Moreover, there is the construction of permissible violence: ‘bad women’, like the young child who flirts or the woman who dresses like a whore deserve what they get, albeit violence, since they are ‘asking for it’. This discourse has been shown to be popular in constructions of sexuality impacting on safe sex practices in Southern Afrikan contexts. Freud’s formulation implies a conflict in bringing love and desire together. In his paper, On the universal tendency to debasement in the sphere of love, Freud (1910: 250, 251, 252) informs us that men project onto women two separate aspects: the over-valued love object, who is regarded as unique and irreplaceable, but who fails to provide the desired sexual satisfaction, and the harlot whom the man can and needs to debase, as it is this debasement of the (mother/woman) ideal that frees male sensuality and allows for uninhibited sexual expression. The challenge, usually a failed one, is to be able to both love and desire the same person. The man has split the loved object into an over-valued object (the mother) and a debased object (the prostitute). For a satisfying love relationship to occur, the affectionate and sensual currents need to combine. In A special type of choice of object made by men Freud (1910) tells us that the woman who in some way or other of bad repute sexually and whose fidelity is open to some doubt triggers male desire. The prostitute, in this reading, is akin to the mother who becomes unfaithful in that she loves the father (or the other child), and does not exclusively love the boy child. This man is only able to desire in triangular situations, as they re-trigger the so-called oedipal situation where he feels betrayed by the mothers love for another. The thought of other men conditions this triggering of desire, allowing for a state of jealously that enables his passion to reach its height. With this type of desire, what is ‘most startling’ to Freud (1910: 234) is “the urge they show to rescue the woman they love. The man is convinced that she is in need of him, that without him she would lose all moral control and rapidly sink to a lamentable level.” Men will try to justify this by highlighting the dangers of her social position, even when there is no such basis in reality. In effect, Freud is telling us that the man rescues the woman from a danger and the excesses that exists inside him. Perhaps Freud’s most revolutionary comment on sex work needs to be extracted from his comments on sexuality, specifically his theory of ‘the drive’, which implies that there is something about sexuality that takes us beyond the site of identification. Consider Freud’s (1905: 57) remarks on homosexuality: Psychoanalytic research is most decidedly opposed to any attempt at separating off homosexuals from the rest of mankind as a group of a special character. By studying sexual excitations other than those that are manifestly displayed, it has been found that all human beings are capable of making a homosexual object-choice and have in fact made one in their unconscious. Indeed, libidinal attachments to persons of the same sex play no less a part as factors in normal mental life, and a greater part as a motive force for illness, than do similar attachments to the opposite sex. On the contrary, psychoanalysis considers that a choice of an object independently of its sex - freedom to range equally over male and female objects - as it is found in childhood, in primitive states of society and early periods of history, is the original basis from which, as a result of restrictions in one direction or the other, both the normal and the inverted types develop. Thus from the point of view of psychoanalysis the exclusive sexual interest felt by men for women is also a problem that needs elucidating and is not a self-evident fact based upon an attraction that is ultimately of a chemical nature. Freud stated over and over that homosexuality is not a form of psychopathology. He argued that seeing homosexual behaviour as a sign of degeneracy is a value judgment, a condemnation and not an explanation. Furthermore, Freud lobbied for the decriminalization of homosexuality, was fairly open about his own homosexual thoughts, supported a mother with her son’s ‘coming out’ process and opposed Ernest Jones attempt to restrict a potential psychoanalytic candidate on the grounds of sexual orientation. Freud’s drive theory, which is premised on the assumption that an alien and impersonal foreign thing (das ding) leads the subject beyond itself in the construction of new possibilities, constructs a theory of sexuality that is independent from anatomy. There is no one unified drive (ganze Sexualstrebung) but a number of partial drives, despite the attempt to bring together all these partial drives under the sign of genitality. The effect of which, we are told by Freud, is that it becomes impossible to discern any normative libidinal attachments, even in heterosexuality. Despite the strength of this argument and the subversion inherent within the drive theory, Freud, as noted by Kenneth Lewes (1988), finally adopts a deviant and normative theoretical model. This model involves a theoretical shift from the drive theory, such that homosexuality is now the manifestation of a pre-genital fixation and is represented as an inverted object choice. Homosexual object choice, Lewes (1988: 36) observes is now ascribed to a certain arrest of sexual development, and takes place, Freud believes, due to an inhibition of normal sexual development. Freud analyzed male homosexual object choice primarily in terms of the mother/child bond, the so-called negative-Oedipal complex and the manifestations of paranoia. As Lewes (1988: 29 to 31) notes that that not only was the language of psychoanalysis saturated with derogatory definitions of homosexuality - ‘perversion’, ‘pathological flight from woman’, ‘a fixation in childhood’, ‘an arrest of sexual development’, ‘regression to partial drives of childhood’ and ‘an inhibition in development of the consolidation of partial drives’ - but for a long period, psychoanalysis enforced the game of classifications in which homosexuality, and male homosexuality in particular, functioned as a pathological form of sexuality needing to be cured. It is a system that leads to brutal attacks and violations of human rights, in the name of curing. It is only over the last 10 years that psychoanalysis has come to accept homosexuality as normal, something that can be seen to be happening in most Western societies and as also been shown to be normative in different ways in many societies historically and internationally. Sex work, it seems, is the next contested site. This comes up against the moral panic, the loathing, the murderous anxiety of nationalist purity. Central to this ‘thinking’ is the category of degeneracy within the piety of moral theory, which assumes the right to say what is good for each of us, and where and how we might find it. Our experience matters to the degree that it conforms, or fails to conform, to what is seen to be good and obligatory. We construct the home and family and the nation through excluding from ourselves those we take to be abnormal, irrational and bad, but who are needed, in one way or another, usually as labour, at the same time to hold these institutions in place. The sex worker functions as that which is uncanny within the home, lurking beneath the shadows, while also binding the home together. This is built not only on a fear that the husband may frequent sex workers, or that the daughter may sell sex, but also on the repressed awareness that marriage itself is often a form of sex work. The household is thus bound together through the inhibition of desire so as to maintain the group identification. The hope being that the inhibited drive will bring about lasting ties. Within the home, the sex worker has both a sacred and profane function. Freud tells us that what appears in the place of the repressed is a symptom. I would like to pose the idea that the sex worker functions as the symptom for the home, as the incompatible idea, the ‘vorstelung’ representation of sexuality that is in distressing opposition to the home but at the same time often needed to hold the home together. Post-Freud psychoanalytic discourse, along with the engagement with sex workers, is often limited to pathologisation and the rhetoric of rescue. Lacan –who was alleged to have been happy to visit brothels – does not reflect this limitation. Alongside this, many feminists claim the ‘prostitute’ is subjecting herself to male desire, being used by men and perpetuating the patriarchal order through allowing men to be able to buy sex. In this reading, the ‘prostitute’ is presented as somebody ill-informed, broken, on drugs or without choice. This position is founded on the belief that no woman would choose to do sex work. What the argument fails to distinguish, especially in an Afrikan context, is the difference between career and work. The fact is that most women in Afrika, as well as most men, operate within an informal economy where part-time work rather than a career is the norm. For a sex worker with minimal education, sex work provides a higher income for fewer hours of work than other jobs within the informal economy. As Gould and Fick (2008) point out, for women who have little education, sex work offers far more lucrative final rewards than those, with the same levels of education, employed in other professions. The sex worker can obtain the same amount of money with two to three clients as she would make as a domestic worker for the entire week. Moreover, many domestic workers are in any case subjected to sexual harassment from the men in the home, without this unwanted sexual engagement providing any financial reward (see Motsei, 1990; Hassim, 2010). The presentation of sex workers in Afrika is, firstly, gendered and normative; secondly, it is premised on a lack of agency. By Western standards, she (the sex worker is also seen as only female) must be mad, bad, sad or uninformed, as well as in need of rescue, often from herself. When attempting to think about the sex between the sex worker and client, the argument is often that the sex worker uses various forms of dissociation to cope and undergoes a process of depersonalization. Again, we see the ideological line that no woman would choose to have multiple sexual encounters with strangers and, if she does so, it is pathological and she must use certain defence mechanisms to cope. The arguments above assume firstly, that the sex is the same with all clients. This is immediately counteracted by the fact that there is almost always a range of clients, including a few ‘special’ clients who will often be kept after the sex worker leaves full-time sex work. Secondly, it assumes that all sex workers are the same and operate in the same way. Again, this falls short when we observe that the interaction with clients varies according to who the person is, what is going on between the sex worker and client and under what conditions. Sex work in a criminalized environment is structured very differently to an environment where sex work is not a crime (as is seen with any people who work under the table without rights, a contract and legal protection). As Ine van Isenbeeck (2005) notes, the sex is context-specific. Depersonalization may be a strategy to cope with negative conditions and experiences in sex work, but is also significantly related to indicators of stress, emotional exhaustion and working conditions, such as the lack of management support. As noted by Gordon Isaacs (2010, personal communication), sex workers spend the majority of their time waiting, so boredom is a key factor. Sex workers are also in competition with others, gossiping, in anticipation, on the lookout, ducking and diving, dealing with stigma and hustling. Eventually there is an interaction with the client who, if new, needs to be assessed and managed. In contrast, the popular view of sex work simply projects onto sex workers feelings that often have little to do with sex work and speak volumes about the issues that society and researchers grapple with, particularly with reference to sexualities. Freud seems to have some inkling of this. He acknowledges the work dimension of sex work, alongside the moral judgment projected on women who choose sex work as a profession. It is in the terms Freud (1910: 234) uses to talk about “prostitutes” that we get some indication of how he sees the desire and needs of the sex worker, as well as how he sees sex work. There is “the woman of bad repute”, used to describe a stigma that men place on women who might love or desire more than one man. This also refers to the need of some men to see the woman to have verisimilitude to a prostitute so as to trigger the male desire. Alongside this, there is the term “Dirne”, similar to the English word harlot. Again, this is used by Freud to describe a term that men use to categorize women, here describing the unfaithful woman or the woman who has more than one sexual partner, and who is not, to use Freud’s words, of ‘unimpeachable moral purity.’ Freud (1910: 237) also uses the term “unfortunates”, implying that they do not have the same fortune or inheritance as other women. Most interestingly, Freud speaks of prostitution as profession. In Freud’s case study The Rat Man (1909: 95), he refers to “a certain female profession”. Likewise, in A special type of choice of object made by men(1910: 237), Freud talks about “certain women who practice sexual intercourse as a means of livelihood.” He adds that they are held in contempt because they practice sexual intercourse as a means of livelihood. Here we see the acknowledgement of work, alongside some understanding of the moral judgment projected on these women, even while on another level, he seems to be engaging in the same moral judgment as found in his engagement with homosexuality. Freud observes that knowledge of the “prostitute” provides young men with insight into the “secret of sexual life” (Freud: 1910: 237), which destroys the authority of adults. It does so through the young person’s discovery that his mother’s love goes beyond him. The secret of sexual life is the discovery that one cannot be everything for the other, even (and most importantly) for the mother. The mother is unfaithful in that she can love more than one child, despite the announcement that all her children are loved the same. In other words, people want more and can love more than one person. People are not inherently monogamous. Freud points out that some men from the upper classes keep a secret mistress while probably others, I would add, wish they could, even if only as a fantasy. Finally it is amusing to consider three biographical details. The first time Freud got into trouble with the authorities was at school in which he knew about boys visiting brothels. In his visit to Charcot he alleges that he was told that the underlying cause of hysteria was sexuality, yet what he does not mention is that the hospital was famous for the incarnation of women engaged in sex work. Finally in his visits to Italy he describes what can be called an uncanny moment of somehow getting lost and ending up time and time again in front of the same brothel. Black and white love and sex Leaving Freud and turning to Fanon, again we see that the conception of ‘prostitution’ needs to be extracted. In Black Skin, White Masks, Fanon offers us three descriptions of sex work: firstly, sex work as an initiation or rite of passage for black men; secondly, whoring yourself as a black woman to white men; and thirdly, the white female sex worker’s fantasy of sleeping with a black man. Fanon’s (1972: 52) first description of sex work (“prostitution”, in his terms) is his depiction of the brothel. He refers to as going “off to the houses” as a rite of passage. This rite of passage is cited in the context of the man of colour and the white woman. For the black man coming to Europe, specifically France, going off to the houses was an initiation into manhood There is a good chance that those friends of Fanon who visited the houses, brothels, included Fanon. But then again Fanon being the stubborn person he was, there is also a good chance he may not have. Perhaps he wanted to prove he could sleep with white women without having to pay for it! . In undergoing this rite of passage, the black man, we can assume, occupies his body thanks to the service of the female sex worker who appears to be white. Is Fanon saying that to be a man and adapt to white society, the black man must sleep with a white sex worker? If this is the case, is this transaction a positive one in which sexual expression is affirmed or is it an act of revenge? Is Fanon saying that the only home that the black men can occupy is ‘the houses’, occupied by white women who are outcast and stigmatised like the black male? Is there equivalence between the way the sex worker and black male subjectivity get constructed? The problem in trying to unpack this is that Fanon is not allowing for equivalence between the white and black sex worker. A black woman who sleeps with (or even desires to sleep with) a white man is a slave. We can of course wonder about the exchange between black men and black female sex workers. The figure of the white sex worker returns in Fanon’s chapter entitled The Negro and Psychopathology (1972) in a very interesting way. Fanon tells us of a “prostitute” who, at the mere thought of going to bed with a Negro, experienced an orgasm. The sex worker went in search of Negroes and never asked them for money. It seems that, for Fanon (1972: 112), the black man displaces the sex worker as the sexual object of desire, even if everything takes place on the genital level. So powerful is the fantasy of the black male penis that it upstages the role of the white “prostitute” and, in fact, for white men, results in fear and revulsion that leads to sexual revenge in the form of lynching. In Fanon’s essay entitled The Woman of Colour and the White Man (1972), it seems a black woman who has sex with a white man must be a prostitute and a slave. This is something still thought by many today in many parts of Afrika. Fanon (1972) tells us that white men do not marry black women, thereby implying that all a black woman can be for a white man is an object, a whore or, at best, the substitute woman while the man is away from home. In this essay, the reference is to transactional sex. Mayotte is a woman of colour who loves a white man and who “submits in everything”, as “he is the lord” (Fanon, 1972: 32). Fanon here presents women as frantic, waiting to be taken by white men at any price. He scornfully adds that one day they will learn that white men do not marry black women. The disgust Fanon feels for Mayotte who wants to be part of this opulent white world is akin to the contempt many Afrikan men feel when ‘their women’ end up with a mulungu, a white Many people writing about Fanon have pointed to the irony of him dictating to his white wife his thoughts on relationships between white and black males and females. This is however not entirely accurate, as Macey (2000: 133) points out Marie-Josephe Duble was said to be a mix of Corsican-gypsy decent which places her outside the mainstream. It is true that Fanon’s first child, Mireille Fanon, was through intercourse with a white woman. . Fanon (1972: 40) encounters many Martinique women who would never marry a black man, as the white world is seen as the only way out. Fanon points to racism as well as Negrophobia. In his regard, Gordon Isaacs (2012, personal communication) refers to internalized self-oppression and desire for white approval as the motivating factors. Ironically, in this text Fanon does not mention poverty as an essential factor. Fanon’s portrays Negrophobia and uses Adler’s inferiority complex to explain this desire for white approval, but what gets left out of the equation is how this self-oppression and phobia manifest in the relations between the woman and man of colour. In other words, is it white approval that the woman wants, or economic advantage, or escape from the violence inflicted by some black men who take out their frustrations and internalised self-oppression on ‘their women’? In Cape Town, it is a not an uncommon occurrence for black women, as reported to me by close friends, that when walking alone down a street they are sometimes sexually and aggressively harassed and insulted by township Xhosa men Another example, as informed by black sex workers in South Africa, is that some black South African men are very verbally abusive and degrading, making them feel like ‘a dirty whore’. Again, surprisingly, this kind of abuse is not as common amongst white clients or if it is, it is underreported. The white clients are said to be kinkier wanting to do things like smell the sex worker’s panties or for her to call him daddy. However, this picture changes in other parts of Afrika, especially male to male sex, where the white male is more abusive towards the black male sex worker than the black male client is. This information comes from therapy groups and informal discussions and as such cannot be generalised. I still though think it is worth noting as I heard this comments often. ;yet ironically, this abuse is very seldom directed towards white women At the same time, interestingly Xhosa men in Johannesburg tend to act differently to those in Cape Town, treating both women and whites in a different manner. This (over generalised) difference can be explained by the fact that Cape Town remains the closest model to apartheid in South Africa and was the first area in South Africa to be colonised. The black woman becomes an easy and safe target for violence. Moreover, Johannesburg is a major international and cosmopolitan city. . This is not to imply that it is only Xhosa men that are abusive to black women in the streets of Cape Town. The point is that, while Fanon may feel betrayed by women who end up with white men, and may feel they are no different to “prostitutes”, some woman of colour feel deeply betrayed by the levels of violence or deception inflicted upon them by black men. Others simply want to survive and see around them men who are not able economically to provide for them and their children. What is helpful within Fanon’s analysis is the opportunity it provides for thinking about the legacy of slavery and colonization on male and female sexuality in Afrika and how this informs male and female interaction and larger social practices. Fanon’s analysis alludes to slavery, and the violence and dependency that were imposed on the female slaves when forced to have sex with the master and give birth to his offspring. Moreover Fanon’s work does surface the issue of when the sexual exchange is one of choice and when it is forced. Sex work and trafficking Fanon seems to fall into the same ideological trap at play in our contemporary society in which sex work and trafficking get blurred or even confused as one and the same thing. What is of concern is that the anti-prostitution, abolitionist, conservative and sex-negative feminist agenda, which encompasses the mainstream voice on sex work, argues that sex work is forced. It is a position informed by a political conservative agenda. All forms of ‘prostitution’ are presented as rape and secondly, ‘prostitution’ and ‘trafficking’ are seen as the same. Barbra Nyangairwe(2009) in her research on sex work and trafficking concludes that there is a mistaken belief that sex work and trafficking are linked. She concludes that treating sex work as if it is the same as sex trafficking both ignores the realities of sex work and endangers those engaged in it. My own opinion is that the conflation of terms is often deeply dishonest and unhelpful and at times seems driven by a political agenda – dirty politics. Moreover what we have witnessed on more than one occasion, both in Cape Town and London, is the deportation of women trafficked and an indifference to their suffering. Having worked as both a therapist and social worker with women who have been trafficked in London, Cape Town and Denver, it is clear to me that trafficking is a form of torture but also that trafficking and sex work are two very different phenomena in much the same way that consensual sex and rape are two different phenomena. In speaking before the Counter Trafficking Coalition and other bodies in 2010, we tried to bring out both the political dimension, border control as well as the subjective experience. We argued that while concern around trafficking allegedly emerges out the history on slavery and its modern day equivalents, it comes into legalization at the same time that Western countries are developing tighter border controls. In this regard we noted the reluctance of Western countries to make an apology for the Atlantic slave trade let alone provide compensation. I further argued in my presentation that not only is trafficking conflated with sex work but that numbers are misreported and exaggerated and that the focus is often exclusively on people trafficked into sex slavery and excludes other forms of trafficking, like child labour, body parts. The trafficking discourse has become a political tool to attack sex work and pushes a moral agenda. In my presentation I challenged the often immediate deportation of people trafficked, which I see as deeply unethical. People who get trafficked often break the law to obtain entry into the republic, as with border crossings. Moreover, in some situations, women will knowingly enter sex work only to then find themselves in a trafficked situation. The person will in many situations not want to be return and will want to remain in South Africa. In some situations they will be dealing with a complex range of emotions and experiences which are not clear cut. They will have broken the law to enter SA, face dire poverty back home and have suffered betrayal and brutal abuse. A knee jerk deportation response risks doubly victimising the person. It is a double bind to demand that the victim/survivor comply with legal prosecution of the abusers or else face deportation. Lessons learned from rape and domestic violence need to inform any approach. Not everybody is willing to testify or even if willing, sometimes not capable due the extreme nature of the abuse. Sex work and trafficking are surrounded by dirty politics, nationalism (border control) and right wing religious and patriarchal ideologies. This was especially evident in the build up to both the German and South African hosting of the FIFA world cup. It was stated that thousands of women would be trafficked when in reality this did not occur and the figure was very low. Significantly, research undertaken Richter (2011) found that: “During the 2010 World Cup period, there were not significantly more clients seen per sex worker during the World Cup period. Sex workers’ demographics did not change significantly during the World Cup period, indicating no major influx of young sex workers, for example. Demand and supply of sex work remained constant across the World Cup period. Our data also does not support fears about an increase of children or foreign migrant sex workers into the sex industry during the World Cup period. The challenge is to think about a host of terms alongside each other, for example the historical legacy of slavery, migration, urbanisation, the relations between white men and Afrikan women and more broadly, between black men and women. We need to understand how poor families who cannot survive will often knowingly sell their children into domestic work or sex work. The historical legacy of colonisation and slavery, including the continuation of economic dependency, lives on in parts of Afrika. The fabric of the ‘indigenous’ and ‘traditional’ home has been changed forever as a result of slavery, colonial occupation and the emergence of new ‘tribal’ or ‘ethnic’ elites who surfaced as a result of division and rule. These new hybrids, masters (often male), are blends of Western patriarchal Christian and Islam models mixed with traditional patriarchal dimensions which in turn have been structured by global market economy and the maintaining of self-interest. We need to understand how certain individuals will knowingly exploit marginalised black Afrikan men and women but be the first ones to shout out about racism. It is within these sites of overlapping contradictions that we need to dwell and attempt to come up with provisional ‘truths.’” These conflicting narratives have opened up a whole new playing field, one which has resulted in great confusion as to what constitutes the home, and how to deal with a huge abundance of people living in homeless conditions and informal settlements. A different set of rules apply, formal and informal. It is a world in which one is pushed to take the opportunities that are presented, like the expedient survival strategy to directly or indirectly use sex as a means of exchange. In the case of transactional sex, which existed in a different form before the arrival of the white coloniser, the largest client group (‘boyfriends’) is not made up of the European tourist, but of the local population who are only too happy to have ‘their cherries’ on the side. This dynamic unfolds in the form of multiple concurrent relationships and, in reality, opens up new and differing sexual realities. Clearly, sexuality is no longer confined to the home, not that it ever was! For Fanon the question of grounding, home and homeless cannot be separated from questions of the movement of the body, in particular the site of sexual expression. Fanon reads this contested ground as a battlefield, one in which the black male needs to preserve a black consciousness in the face of the relentless attack on the sexuality and social standing of the black male and father figure. The position of the black female is more complicated as it is one which returns us to the fight of the slave women in the face of white (and now we can add black) male sexuality and exploitation. These questions are as relevant today as they were in the day of Fanon. Thanks to the growing body of Afrikan feminist writers like Tamale (2011) and Oyewumi (1997) these questions are been framed in different ways. The central concern remains the body, space, but the reading is nuanced with conflicting complexities. For example how does the black woman claim her voice, body and particularity and move beyond the stereotype of her as a maid, sexually exotic, strong woman or an angry black woman? Freud and Fanon do not help in this regard and at times reduce the black women’s sexuality to that of the ‘dark continent’ (Afrika), in which her body remains a site of colonization. Moreover, as noted by Charity Njoki Mwaniki (2010), Fanon’s reading of black women borders on an essentialist argument, which is not the situation in understanding black men. In summary, the colonization of the body of the Afrikan woman occurs not only through men, but also by women, white and black, and even by those who may term themselves feminists. Brothels and the heterotopia Let me now move to Foucault, a man who no doubt hung around rent boys and did not only think about sex work from an intellectual position. Unlike Freud and Fanon, Foucault writes about male and female sex workers as well as pimps. In his terms, the police who are used to discipline, punish and control female sex workers. What is of central interest is less his commentaries on sex workers but more his placement of the brothel and psychiatric institution alongside each other. In trying to understand this placement of the brothel and psychiatric institution alongside each other, it is helpful to consider Freud’s placement of the church and army together. In doing so, for example, in the Group Psychology Paper, Freud (1921) is offering a model of identification. It is the ideal which binds the group together. The army and church, it seems, are the antithesis of the brothel and psychiatric institute in that the sex worker and ‘mad’ person share so-called displays of excessive behaviours, unbound seriality, and are sites of excess that refuse to be bound together by some ideal. At the same time, it is important to note that the client of the brothel is often the soldier, priest, Imam or orthodox Jew. Having argued elsewhere for a reading of the ship of fools to be placed alongside the slave ship and witch hunts as examples of colonization of the mind and body and advent in the history of homelessness; we now need to place the brothel alongside the mental asylum. Each of these spaces is an example of what Foucault refers to as heterotopias or Foucault (1998: 176) different space, like heteropias, is not the space of emplacement (“defined by relations of proximity between points or elements”) but the space of outside, “by which we are drawn outside ourselves.” The heteropia as argued by Foucault (1998: 176) is not a utopian space, for example a mirror utopia, ‘where I see myself’ as the same, but rather a space of ‘where I am not’. Ironically, the brothel, like the church, also includes a priest; only it is a priestess of pleasure, of excess. In ancient Egypt and Greece the sex worker was the high priestess. This engagement is similar to the way the mad person used to be accepted in many Afrikan societies as the therapist, following a rite of passage. . A heterotopia is a “place without geographical co-ordinates”, a “different place compared with ordinary cultural spaces”, with a “precise and specific operation within the society” (Foucault, 1998: 179 to 184). He includes the brothel as an example of heterotopia. Homelessness, as with sex work, opens up different spaces, and is akin to a crisis heterotopia. For Foucault (1998: 179), a crisis heterotopia is a “privileged or sacred or forbidden place reserved for individuals who are in a state of crisis with respect to society and the human milieu in which they live. Adolescents, menstruating women, women in labour, old age, and so on. In our society these crisis heterotopias have all but disappeared” (ibid: 179). The brothel and psychiatric institute are spaces where excess manifests but is usually restricted and controlled by the men who run these institutions. These spaces have the potential to allow excess to flow. Foucault is alluding to the sites as festivals where excesses can exist. The brothel, like the bathhouses that Foucault frequented, has the potential to allow for the establishment of different kinds of bonds. Within this elaboration, Foucault is offering us an outline of what he calls a critical community. The sex worker and mad person, when given space, present us with different kinds of social bonds. Rajchman (1991: 144) who elaborates on the ethics of the critical community tells us that Foucault wants to establish a new erotic to resist, deform, and depart from the taken-for-granted history presented as a universal, timeless given about who and what we are and how we can and cannot identify in the world. Foucault wants to find sites not yet governed by law, rule or habit. As such, he calls for the invention of new relationships, new forms of community, of co-existence and pleasure, not based on the exigencies of the superego (Rajchman 1991: 144). The mythological brothel run by the high priestess and the rite of passage that healers – who would later be classified as mad by Western psychiatry - underwent in traditional Xhosa culture allude to different kinds of space where new and creative relationships can unfold. In this reading the space of the homeless, the sex worker, and the traditional Xhosa healer, is an attempt to establish some kind of bond outside the traditional plane of identification. The possibility of the critical community comes when there is an interruption, refusal or reversal of forms of the given community, leading to the exposure of the ways community supports the system. Rajchman (1991: 144) reads Foucault to be arguing that the critical community problematises identity, thus making our subjectivity an open and endless question. The art of living thus frees itself from rule, law and habit: critical problematisation frees up space; and possibility and a revolution in ethics occurs. In opposition to the critical community, we have regulation which begins in the home. Consider Foucault’s (1978: 3) remark: But twilight soon fell upon this bright day, followed by the monotonous nights of the Victorian bourgeoisies. Sexuality was carefully confined; it moved into the home. The conjugal family took custody of it and absorbed it into the serious function of reproduction. On the subject of sex, silence became the rule. The legitimate and procreative couple laid down the law. The couple imposed itself as model, and forced the norm; safe guarded the truth, and reserved the right to speak while retaining the principle of secrecy. A single locus of sexuality was acknowledged in social space as well as at the heart of every household, but it was utilitarian and fertile one: the parent’s bedroom. Open space, critical space with the possibility of different kinds of relationships not hemmed in by rigid identifications Identification takes place with the support of the identity bearing imagery, signifiers and ideals of the nation state as provided to the child in the home setting. Identification with these signifiers and ideals enables the person to triumphantly assume the image of the citizen. At the same time it is a process built upon exclusion and distancing from the atypical citizen from the other/world by stigmatising others. in much need in a world which is becoming more and more regulated, especially in Western settings. Enforced space is one in which there is a demand that the body assimilate and cast out and disregard those identity bearing signifiers and identifications that previously orientated the person, for example their Afrikan name or polytheistic gods. Yet history shows us that this enforced space, which demands one, assimilates and adopts the master’s values, still operates through exclusions, often in a subtle way. For example, some of the assimilated Jews in Vienna in Freud’s life time hated the Ostjuden, some coloured men in Cape Town distance themselves from Afrikan men, and some gay men despise transgendered people. Those who were once excluded and deemed to be objects, and who have gained a subjective position, gain further acceptance through distancing themselves from those once deemed to be kin. By way of illustration, one of the most powerful examples of this is the transgendered African sex worker. There is a shaming or even killing of the body that refuses those identifications and expressions of love and desire which do not tally with the norms of the nation state. One of the most brutal forms of attack in Afrika is against transgendered persons Richard Klein (1999) offers an analysis of the film Boys don’t cry: “Boys don't cry is the movie that begins the new millennium with a kind of gender meltdown. Of course, the movie is extremely dramatic. Nevertheless, there is a future in it somewhere for all of us. Of course, the boy finally did cry. It took a lot of punishment to make him cry. The rape scenes are not ordinary rape scenes. I am not going to make a distinction between ordinary rape and extraordinary rape. I am not quite that daft. Rape is a "special kind" of violence to the body usually done to a woman though not always. I am totally unable to describe this "special kind", what distinguishes it from other forms of violence to the body. In the rape scenes of Boys don't cry there is this special kind of violence that is common to all rape. But there is more which makes the whole thing even worse. “Brandon has a relation to a young man in a trailer at the beginning of the film. It is a fraught relation, but it seems to be reasonably contained. The young man calls Brandon a dike. Brandon says that he not a dike which is quite correct. Brandon is not a homosexual. He is a man who loves women, or a special woman in this film. Brandon life involves a movement from female to male. Brandon was lucky. He had a family name that he could use as a masculine name. I wouldn't want to push this too far but there is a rape when questioned around the proper name. His name was Teena, I think. Now if there ever was a girlish name, it's Teena. Brandon was using the signifier outside the law. He had it stitched onto his jacket. It was very moving watching him in his jacket with Brandon printed on it. As I recall his name was brought into question twice. Firstly, after the police chase, he had to show his papers. The police didn't examine them very closely, and he got away with it. Secondly, when he was in jail and in court, the clerk of the court called out his name, Miss Teena Brandon. He could not reply to the name. It isn't that he was a criminal and wanted to avoid some penalty which would have been a rather minor penalty. It is that he could not reply to a woman's name. There was a split between recognition and identification. “He is changing his form of existence from female to male. He had his breasts bound very, very tightly. Something like a medieval woman might do who decided to devote herself to God. It evoked that image and also the image of feet-binding in China. At first he stuffs paper down his pants to provide himself with a bulge. Then, he gets the idea of using a dildo. This is a very moving dildo. He manages to acquire a rather enormous penis. Brandon makes masculinity correlative to size in his apprenticeship at becoming a man. I see this dildo rather late. He uses it to make love to the young woman. I myself was first amused at this great big thing he pulls out. Then I was rather moved by it but I am not too sure about Brandon's dildo. Brandon's dildo is a prosthetic device. The liquidization of the sexual position is nevertheless not quite the same as Brandon's problem which led him to what we might call the mechanization of sex. A dildo is a kind of machine, and the effect is the mechanization of sex. He is seeking an apprenticeship in becoming a man. As part of this he befriends the ‘trailer trash’ colleagues who are going to rape and kill him. These are two men who are always somewhat outside the law. Brandon is not a criminal but he is beyond the everyday humdrum laws that make others a man or a woman. He is forced into identification with two men beyond the law. They become his same gender pals, same gender buddies. He is raped by two men with whom he is identified. Those identifications are destroyed along with the body of Brandon. The mother of one these men, plays a very ambiguous role. She sees that her son has a gun. She looks stressed about it, but does absolutely nothing to persuade him not to undertake the course of events which unfolded anyway, much like in a Greek tragedy. She does not use her influence at all on the son. “The unveiling of his genitals in the mother's house, extremely painful. They pulled his underwear pants down, and that was the moment when Brandon was murdered, not when he was actually shot. Brandon ceased to exist and became an object from that moment onwards. He now had only one way to cling to this world which was in the relationship he had developed with the young woman. His reality narrowed to her. “Brandon died for his gender. He sacrificed his life for his gender identification. The film for me provided me with a lot of pain. Certain scenes were unbearable.” For Klein (2009) this transgendered person has both his physical and symbolic body violated and his identity removed.. Transgendered sex workers in some parts of Africa, for example, Uganda, speak of the hostility they receive from the gay community, yet how they are accepted by female sex workers. Others, for example in Namibia, will speak about acceptance within the gay community but hostility from female sex workers. Others, for example in Cape Town, will speak about belonging nowhere, neither among the gay community, transgendered persons or sex workers. Gordon Isaacs (2011, personal communication) frames the process of transitioning in terms of mourning and concludes that all gender identifications involve a mourning or fear of mourning. Isaacs (2011, personal communication) ponders the transition from man to woman in terms of the letting go, symbolically, of the status as male. The female relinquishes the ascribed power of masculinity in order to become a female. Those who cannot transition are in a state of perpetual crisis. But the transitioning itself does not dependent on the actual body. For example, having a vagina and not a penis is not necessarily preferred by Namibian transgendered women, who do not want to have their penises removed. For them, the ultimate sense of being a woman was to have breasts. They wanted an additional something (breasts), not to have something removed. Moreover, for them their anus was a vagina, so anal intercourse was more than satisfying. As regards the penis, it gave them sensation, enabled them to climax, and moreover, allowed them to still be men despite being women. This contradiction Isaacs (2011, personal communication) explains by the fact that they saw themselves as female gays. Isaacs (2011, personal communication) contrasts this situation with that of the young transgendered sex worker from Uganda who speaks of abuse from the gay community. She feels no affinity with the gay community and defiantly does not see herself as gay. As regards transitioning, this is not part of her vocabulary and moreover is costly. She knows she is a woman Isaacs (2011), who undertook workshops with transgendered sex workers from different parts of Afrika, observes that some transgendered sex workers in Afrika like to talk about sex – sex is what they do for a living –- while others who are more strongly identified with transgender identity politics find it deeply intrusive and a violence to pry into the sex life of a transgendered persons. For the more politically identified transgendered sex worker identity, sex work and gender need to be spoken about in political terms, spaces transgendered activists have fought hard to claim. There is a deep suspicion, towards the gay community and fear that within LGBTI the T is subsumed by gay. I concur with Isaacs’ (2011, personal communication) analysis which reminds me of a remark I overheard in which a lesbian psychologist spoke about transgendered person in the most damning and pathologising manner, as “those people who mutilate their bodies and waste the state’s money” Isaacs (2011, personal communication) is of the opinion that transgender sex workers in Afrika clearly do not present a homogenous face and in fact more variations than similarities exist. What is common is the depiction of homelessness. Consider a young working-class mixed race transgendered sex worker, one of the few transgendered sex workers I have met who actually identifies with the term transgendered sex worker. Most transgender sex workers prefer to see themselves as ‘trans people’ or better still trans-woman or simply a woman who sell sex. This person, when it comes to business, refers to herself as a ‘chick with a dick,’ something the more ideological transgendered sex workers find offensive. She has a girl friend and when she makes love to her girlfriend she uses her penis and in fact has made her girl friend pregnant. Perhaps the usage of the term chick with a dick applies to her private life as well, only in this case in an inverse sense, in that having or not having a penis, does not make her woman. . As noted by Gordon Isaacs (2011, public lecture) with a history of colonialism and oppression, Afrika is a continent with a collective wound. As with all crises of transition, and transformation, a period of vulnerability and anticipated healing co-exist. This paradox situates itself in the interlinked themes that make up modern-day Afrika: that of trauma and gender based violence, HIV/TB, addictions and stigma As an example consider South Africa which has amongst the highest rates of gender based violence in the world. It manifests in many ways: rape, “corrective rape”, sexual abuse, incest, child sexual abuse, and intimate partner violence in familiar surroundings. In Gauteng, the Medical Research Council concluded that over half of the women surveyed had experienced some form of gender violence, and that despite the statistics of reported rape in 2009/10 as over 55,000, it is recognized that only one in 25 rapes are reported annually, and at least half of the reported violent episodes are committed by persons younger than 18. [Kriel – Trauma Unit]. The inextricable link between trauma, violence and substance abuse is clear. The vulnerable conscience and the heightened anxiety are key drivers to self- medicate our traumatic pain. In my opinion – stigma- underscores the pain and humiliation of persons in the context of trauma and recovery. Stigma is a social virus which mutates in the placebo of culture, tradition, morality and fearful beliefs. Stigma is often internalised as self oppression. It is this stigma, often compacted into moral injunctions, that we as mental health practitioners are confronted on a daily basis, and to echo the words of the late Steve Biko: the liberation from internalised self-oppression – or self-stigma is seminal for healing. Known as primitive incorporation: we have the confidence and humility to know that our symbolic devoured body and spirit by the legacy of the past – also contains the spirit of resilience and has the ability to regenerate, and this calibration sanctions the all -consuming components of the intervention process: providing succour – hence the freedom to be repeatedly incorporated. . Isaacs (2011, public lecture) states the following: The historic manipulation of communities and associated splintering of family life has impacted upon the countries exponential increase in GBV, HIV, and substance abuse. Social dislocation, poverty, unemployment, homelessness, migration fuel the hungry appetite of violence. In addition entrenched patriarchal norms and beliefs form the basis of male gender entitlement percolated through social institutions and the socio-cultural scripts for female submissiveness and male hegemony. Divisive class structures, racial divides and the loss of a National Identity compound these phenomena. What is called for is a space free from the patriarchal gaze. In the work of Freud, which we can extract from a careful rereading of Foucault’s (1993: 34) critique of Freudian (dream) interpretation, Foucault (1994: 56) points to a particular woman’s attempt to resist masterful (male) interpretations. Foucault tells us that over above the interpretations Dora’s dream expressed her disgust, her refusal to assume her feminine. “Dora got better, not despite the interruption of the psychoanalysis, but because by deciding to break it off, she went the whole distance to that solitude toward which until then her existence had been only an indecisive movement”. Foucault is of the opinion that psychoanalysis explores only one dimension of the dream universe, that of its symbolic vocabulary via a process of interpretation. What Foucault is arguing, in effect, is that the meaning of the dream that Freud explores is one that involves a reductionism. For Foucault (1994: 35), the dream is analyzed only in its semantic function, as Freudian analysis leaves its morphological and syntactic structure in the dark. The result of which is that the distance between meaning and image is closed, and the particularly imaginative dimension of the meaningful expression is completely omitted. The space of dream-retreat is penetrated and saturated by the male medical gaze. Foucault (1994) is calling for a subjectivity that cannot be rescued by masterful (we need to add, male) interpretations in much the same way that many Afrikan sex workers are asking for rights, not rescue. This is much the same way that Dora’s A female patient who refused to be rescued and mastered by Freud. refusal of the interpretation needs to be placed alongside the refusal of many sex workers to be rescued, that is, to be constituted by a male subjectivity. In Jungian terminology the female sex worker Male sex work introduces a different order of complexity, for example the male sex worker knows that for some older clients what they want to see is him with an erection as this constitutes in their minds the belief that they can still arose a young man, but the trickster dimension remains. can be seen as the trickster, beating men at their own predatory game. Sex (work), like dreams, has the potential to offer the subject a radical way of experiencing his or her own world, one which reverses the familiar normative heterosexual perspectives through fantasy. Sex Work, dreams become a performance, in the Judith Butler sense of the term, that resists the normative. With Freud’s reference to prostitution and the radical dimension of desire, that which refuses love or symbolization, the ‘drive,’ he pushes us in the direction of radical subjectivity But we have to wait for Lacan and his analysis of female jouissance to move from the exclusive male focus. However, like dreams, sex (work) can also be mandarin, repetitive and traumatizing. What is truly radical is not simply the possibility to imagine or voice other and contradictory dimensions of self, or even to transport (as with transference) oneself into another world, but the possibility of solitude, that no matter how powerful or engaging or masterful the moment, one is alone with the other/world. . The brothel in the broad sense of the term, a space where sex worker and client engage, is a much needed site allowing for the possibility Of course much of what happens sexually is often routine, but it is less a question of how creative the sex is but more if the encounter allows for the possibility of experiencing the space as liberating, racial and creative. Put another way, something akin to the spaces that open up when people engage in creative visualisations or are entranced by something. of something other and radical in the field of sexuality to play, dream and be voiced. It is a home for that which is homeless in an analogous way that the ego-body, symbolic body is (often a reluctant) home for the drives, which is experienced as something uncanny. The space of the brothel must not be viewed in a concrete manner, as something restricted to sex worker and the client, rather what is called for is the allowing of all women the possibility to be a ‘whore’, someone whose desire refuses patriarchal straightjackets and whose desire is not limited by male heterosexual desire and/or practice/power in heteronormative sexual relations between men and women i.e. that centre around an active and dominant male sexuality. This radical dimension is simply a refusal to reduce all sexuality and its expression to one dimensional identification system. In Richard Klein’s (2000, personal communication) terms, it is the movement from gender to enjoyment. What we are attempting to articulate are those sites, via the example of sex work, that challenge normative notions of gender, further challenge normative notions of home and allow for momentary transcendence, or better still, an experience in which one is not self aware. To be so caught up in something so that conscious self awareness is absent. What seems to be at play is the unfolding of those contested spaces where identity formation and the possibility to go beyond the game of identity manifest. It is making room for the excesses, what Freud refers to as drive, that civilization cannot ‘tame’ and which surface as a site of discontentment. Conclusion It seems to me that in order to negotiate extremely complex realities that defy or deeply challenge our moral positions on what is right and wrong and what we can and cannot bear witness to, simplified realities – ideological positions – are presented. This occurs even amongst the sex work activists themselves and the UN. For example, while I oncur with the UN position that one needs to be eighteen to identify as a sex worker, much like identifying a legal age for marriage, it is complicated in terms of how we describe what young people do under the age of 18, those who choose to sell sex. While it is easy to speak of this in terms of extraordinary conditions, the challenge is that for more and more Afrikan young women (and many gay and transgender young people) this is not an extraordinary condition. Of course we would like to say that it should not be the norm, that it is wrong, that these children should have homes and returned to school, but the reality is far more complicated. I concur with Asha Mohamud who argues that our starting point should not be to judge, rather to try and understand these situations from different perspectives, as opposed to simply a one fit explanation. As noted by Asha Mohamud (2012, personal communication) “Young people are choosing to use sex to survive; it is not a choice they necessarily want to make. Most importantly these young people’s rights are often negated and not considered of value, many do not have safe homes to go to at night, are hungry a great deal of the time and do not have safe drinking water.” People are quick to say it is wrong, but to what end, if not to make the observer somehow feel less helpless and less upset by the situation. Or worse, is it the fear of contamination from these unhygienic broken bodies? The concept I wish to use to understand the field of complexity is one of ‘living in parallel worlds The co-existence of parallel worlds is not confined to sex work. The very taking on of a role which excludes other vital dimensions of self when at work for most people is a challenge. More and more people live many lives, operate through multiple and conflicting roles and move in spaces which are in opposition to each other but which co-exist, the time line the Stoics outlined. ’ something Deleuze writes about in relation to paradox, the non-sense of sense and parallel time of the surface. Yet in an Afrikan context this takes on an additional series of paradoxes. Young people at risk of sexual exploitation, those engaging in survival sex and sex workers live in parallel worlds which do not come together. Most live in state of material homelessness. The construction of a universal in which one operates in parallel worlds can be thought about as a necessary strategy to endure lived spaces which do not sit comfortably together. While people assume a harmonious and consistent progression of self throughout the day this is a fiction. The different, conflicting and paradoxical realities and lives that people live, especially in Afrika; result in living in parallel universes or experience. This is not a good or bad thing but a different kind of reality and time in which the time of Aion and Chronos do not come together. The more the person can endure and live with these paradoxes and contradictions, the less conflicting are the lived realities. Freud has some understanding of this in the recommendation that one free association and allows conflicting realities to exist without the need to negate the one reality at the expense of the other. The young person engaged in survival sex speaks of the howls of the depth that Deleuze seems to role model around the work of Artaud. The paradox of the depth is different to middle class neurotic (ego) existence. It is one in which the contact barrier, for Deleuze, the binary logic of language and ego, no longer mediate contact with objects. The time of Aion does the work that the Lacanian gap cannot do; it introduces parallel time and a different contact between body/word/experience. If this world is called schizophrenic is only due the construction of capital that creates these impossible contradictions. The young person response is an illustration of a schizoanalysis that attempts to unbind and produce a Non-European production. For the young person engaging in survival sex from Mozambique, when she goes onto the street at night, she walks within a woman’s body; she knows how to be a hustler and learns how to compete with sex workers selling a youthfulness they cannot offer. When she goes home she returns to a child’s body only to then have to take care of her child. Or the sex worker who walks through a door in which as a professional she engages with the excesses, absurdity, vulnerabilities, embarrassment and aggression of male sexuality only to then change back into her home outfit, walk back home with the fear of being discovered and then to sit around the dinner table with her family and her secret. She belongs to Fanon’s wretched of the earth that stand at the forefront of the revolution, but a revolution as Fanon could only have dreamed it alongside Deleuze and Guattari, which is to say, to dream a dream in which one is no longer trapped in the dream of the other! I have used sex work as a test case to understand how Freud, Fanon and Foucault embrace homelessness. Freud, Fanon and to a lesser extent Foucault could only go so far in imagining a home and understanding the homeless condition of the sex worker. Freud enables us to understand male libido that the female sex worker has to engage but at time he imposes and speaks for women. This limits his engagement with the Afrikan sex worker and restricts how far he can go in unpacking how the sex workers engagement with male libido structures her sexuality. Fanon understands the lasting legacy of slavery, as with trafficking, but fails to differentiate sex work and slavery and understand the liberating potential the black women finds through sex work. Michael Foucault (1998: 179-184) ‘corrects’ the work Freud and Fanon with the concept heterotopia - a “place without geographical co-ordinates” and a “different place compared with ordinary cultural spaces”. Extending the work of Freud, Fanon and Foucault we can turn Casarino (2002: xxvii) who following Benjamin is interested in space as a potentiality “in which one may become other than what one already is”. Moreover rather than reassuring and reconfirming everything that she is, we need to be drawn to a whole other space in which she may live otherwise. Casarino following Deleuze notes that Foucault tried to teach us the indignity of speaking not only for others but ourselves as well. To explain this Casarino (2002: xxiii) points out how forms of representation have become the commodity form. He notes that “to the extent to which something is representable and nameable it is already part and parcel of history as status quo, while the forces that disrupt such a status quo are refractory to any form of representation”. He concludes that to “the extent to which representation does take place, it needs to be understood and studied as the by-product of a forever incomplete and forever renewed process of exploitation of the unrepresentable.” By way of the example of sex work I have attempted to show how sex work as a homeless example merges with Fanon and Foucault’s treatise of homelessness. In particular, the term heterotopia assists the reader in co-exploring the space of outside and the paradox of a space “where I am not” – in other words located in one space, but simultaneously searching for another. The direct challenge of patriarchy frames sex work within a dichotomy of desire, on the one hand, and victims of violence and poverty on the other. At the same time there is another, more existential face to homelessness: the desire to have no face, to be anonymous and to be left alone. Following my engagement with the ideas of Mwaniki (2011), I argue a more sober reading to see this kind of travelling homelessness as a state of trance or a condition of fugue. I further argue that fugue is akin to what Deleuze and Guattari (1987) call the line of flight. With homelessness, there is leaving of the scene for the world, what can be called a fugue and line of flight. Such a traveller is suffering from a dissociative disorder, according to the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders ( DSM). It was at one time considered a hysterical phenomenon, to wander. It was a categorization cast onto the wandering Jew or Afrikan considered to be without history or the poor without the identity bearing attributes needed to cover oneself. In this work, following Klein (2011), I do not see fugue as a mental disorder, but rather as a post-colonial orientation. The homeless, which includes Afrikan sex workers, as noted by Jill Sloan (2012, Personal Communication) can be seen as fugitives, hiding from the super-ego law and thereby beyond the law. They hide from the guilt imposed upon them but, sadly, this results in what Freud refers to as an unconscious sense of guilt in which the person acts out a crime to confirm a sense of guilt that preceded the crime. What I am attempting to do is reframe the meaning of the term fugue. Ian Hacking (1996: 425) uncovers the dissociative fugue flourished in France for more than a decade but faded by 1910: “It was closely associated with vagrancy as a social problem.” Fugue was seen as flight, a deviation from customary behaviour and resulting in unexpected travel. The person became a fugueur. Hacking (1996: 427) tells us that fugue became “a medical entity in Bordeaux in 1887, following in the footsteps of the multiple personality, dedoublement de la personnalite as the companion disorder.” It was a form of degeneracy connected to vagabondage, suicide, prostitution, homosexuality, insanity and vagrancy. Hacking further elaborates:“Jean-Claude Beaune argues that the medicalization of fugue was part of a strategy to get rid of vagabonds; he goes so far as to speak of genocide – the elimination of a class of people, occasionally by actually killing them, but usually by putting them in institutions” (Hacking 1996: 428). Hacking (1996) further notes that the most celebrated of fugue cases was the wandering Jew. Wikipedia speaks of fugue as having two dimensions, a psychological and musical meaning. A fugue state describes a state of mind where a person experiences a dissociative break in identity and attempts to run away from some perceived threat. They may disappear and assume another identity. The term fugue also refers to the state of mind attained by a gifted musician or athlete where the person attains a high degree of focus and attention to their art or actions. This is also dissociation from one's surroundings, involving concentration on the work at hand. It can also refer to a musical form that is repeated What is interesting in the above is the cross-over of medical and music, something that does not seem to have occurred in the West since the good doctor’s discussion of love (harmony) in the Symposium.. When fugue is linked to the concept of the line of flight, as Mwaniki (2012, personal communication) following Deleuze argues, it drills a hole into the coded practices and habits presented as commonsense and opens up creative possibilities. Mwaniki (2012) in her depiction of homelessness presents the line of flight as a delirious moment in which the person goes off the rails and no longer follows common and good sense, an act which can be seen as demoniacal woman who is finding her own way, even at the risk homelessness and through homelessness. Homelessness seen as a state of fugue, the expression of the line of flight, enables us to move away from an either/or approach. The result is that we find that homelessness is both symptom and cure. This is not to imply that the symptom is the cure, but that in the retreat and disengagement from the scene via so-called trance states, there is in a state of fugue a refuge - the person leaves home to create a new life, the possibility of invention and a state of agency. The placement of the shadow of Afrikan sex workers alongside Freud, Fanon and Foucault allows for the echo of the cry of witches drowned and burned, and hysterics subjected to shock therapy. We are witnessing mass murder (arguably genocide) of sex workers and indifference to the plight of young people engaged in survival sex throughout Afrika Interestingly it was sex workers who have tried to support and engage youth involved in survival sex, as many of them understood their plight.. When Afrikan sex workers united and formed sex worker led alliances, their vision and mission become a small-scale revolution of independent women demonstrating an embrace of sexual diversity in the face of erasure, rescue and murder, thereby creating a home for those living in the other/world and excluded from the accepted sites. This points to the fact that homelessness is not a singular experience; on the contrary, it surfaces as a montage of different and conflicting stories, giving rise to a host of new terms. While undertaking a life skills retreat with young people from different inner cities (Nairobi and Mombasa ghettos), what became apparent is that the overriding theme for these young people who sell sex in order to survive is violence. In a group of twenty four young people almost all of them had been raped and witnessed other young people being assaulted or murdered. Their daily existence involves deprivation, the inability to fulfil basic needs like secure shelter, food, water and they live with constant hunger. All of them only eat one meal a day while many of them had endured two days without food and either thought about or stole when starving. Most of them came from single parent family backgrounds, absent fathers, in some cases a lack of secure attachment and child abuse. Drinking and drugs were another concern, but need to be contextualised, namely, in an environment where there is no clean and uncontaminated drinking water and in which alcohol enables people in the community to self-medicate or sedate themselves. All of them spoke about the crippling effect of stigma. This stigma is due to the fact that they come from the ‘slums’ or their sexual orientation or the use of sex as a means to survive. Having spent twelve years working with war trauma and torture, I have witnessed similar symptoms of trauma – flash backs, inability to sleep, numbness, depersonalization, etc- however, what makes this situation particularly shocking, is its framing. They do not come from a war context, yet find themselves brutalized. In war the violence is either self protective or malicious. It is self protective when the person’s life and integrity are under threat .Malicious violence is of another order and is often linked to sadism via the mechanisms of power, control and pleasure. The young people from the ghettos of Nairobi and Mombasa find themselves victims of calculated malicious acts of cruelty in which there is no sense of remorse and concern for the victim/young person. It is as if the perpetrators cannot or refuse to see that the other person has feelings and simply treats them as an object, flesh, meat. Many of the acts of violence involve calculated manipulation in which the act is an attempt to manipulate, often through the use of power, and use the child to meet the abuser’s needs. Young people are seen as more easy to manipulate and do with as one pleases, particularly if the person is homeless. The act is an imposition, in which there is a taking away and undermining of the young person’s capacity to experience themselves in terms of their own frame of reference and at a particular moment in time. The situation is made worse by the fact that these acts include violence committed by trusted persons in positions of authority, thereby breaking down basic trust in the world and leaving the person in a state of fear. For example in Namibia I heard similar stories of betrayal from trusted adults; for example, the fifteen-year old who escapes a rape scenario and in seeking out police protection only to then be raped by the police officer. In this context one might ask who this young person will turn to in developing their moral code of conduct as they will struggle to find adult role models to identify with as models in authority routinely abuse power. What is also of particular concern is the fact that these young people do not have safe spaces to which they can retreat. This experience is one of a ‘brute ever present reality’ permanently in their face, a pure presence without an absence. Without safe spaces within which to retreat, sanctuary, the place from which one comes into the world, the person is swallowed up by the impact of direct and indirect (structural) violence. There is forced removal, a taking away of the space to find, to live a personal rhythm, voice and from which to feel safe to enter into the world. Put another way, to get through the day people need to screen out excessive stimuli so as to create a coherent organised reality or perceptual map of the world. When overloading the mental system with unscreened stimulithe person feels under attack, without agency, intentionality is removed. Life in these situations becomes a reactive as opposed to a proactive form of existence. In hearing the stories and experiences of young people in these conditions it becomes clear that each day is a struggle to survive; they exist with hunger and the threat of death, be it from violence, polluted water, disease, risk of engaging in unsafe sex to get money, or simply outright starvation. Some of these young people fear to closing their eyes at night, while yet others suffer from night terrors. Yet each of these young people took on the challenge of youth leadership and role modelling very seriously and wanted to ensure that not only their voice, but the voices of the voiceless from the ghettos are heard. The ghetto is both a home and not a home. It is within this paradoxical space that we need to think. If Freud is to offer us a post-colonial project that is not male in its construction, it is through creating a space, other-world, for the atypical citizen. But more than this psychoanalysis needs to move from gender to enjoyment (Klein 2001, personal communication) and in so doing the call, ethics, of Antigone. Antigone who lived as an independent homeless woman outside the walls of the state, could find sisterhood with those witches and whores and ordinary women sometimes labelled hysterical, neurotic or simply ‘too much’, and deemed to be in need of medication. If Fanon is to offer us a post-colonial project that is not male in its construction it is found in those spaces in which he humbly co-constructed healing spaces with the female borders A term he used to describe his patients, seen as fellow borders, thereby offering hospitality.. In this co-construction, we find the echo of a Beloved (Toni Morrison 1987) enjoyment of black music, dance and voice, a reterritorialization of the Atlantic crossing and discourse of the master. If Foucault is to offer us a post-colonial project that is not male in its construction it is found in this, critical communities and heterotopias and Deleuze and Guattari’s “becoming” a multiplicity of forces comprised of the interplay of the formal and informal counter-bodies without organs, fluid, humbly castrated by a pure nomadism and passionate-becoming. The history of home and homeless is what Foucault calls “a history of bodies”, a body condemned to subjection. On the one hand, the body is invested with political meaning, for example, the sex worker, bound up in complex relations of power and domination; but on the other hand, it’s defined by its constitution as labour power and only becomes useful when it is a productive body, that is a subjected body. Foucault, and for that matter Lacan and Adorno, both argue against being a totally subjected and useful body, through the notion of excess, that which transgresses normalization, symbolization and representation. As both Foucault and Lacan point out, no matter what the state does, symbolic inscription and forced assimilation fails. Within any home setting lurks the uncanny The structure of uncanniness for Martin Heidegger can occur at any moment, often, perhaps always, taking us by surprise. For example to fall (“befall”) into a state of dread “in the midst of the most familiar environment. What threatens us is nothing definite and wordly...Indeed, what threatens in this indefinite way is now quite near and can be so close that it is oppressive...we can then say: one feels uncanny (or in more idiomatic English: ‘Things look so weird all of a sudden’ or ‘I’m getting this eerie feeling. ‘One no longer feels at home in his most familiar environment, the one closet to him, but this does not come about in such a way that a definite region in the hitherto known and familiar world breaks down its orientation, nor that one is not at home in the surroundings in which one now finds himself, but instead in other surroundings. On the contrary, in dread, being-in-the-world is totally transformed into a ‘not at home’ pure and simply” Heidegger (1992: 283)., what cannot be housed, likewise within any homeless setting a becoming at home is possible. Both home/homelessness offer a terror as well as comforting and exciting retreat and escape. It is a scene/other-world made up of smells, sounds, touch, sensations that go beyond the universal representations, identifications. This involves a movement from gender to enjoyment, from scene to the other-world, a fluid and unfolding space. Home in this reading, as pointed out by art critic Delia Vekony (2008, personal communication) is that which nurses the particularity, a site of hospitality, proximity and neighbourhood to the other (Vekony 2008), in Klein’s (2011) terms, the other-world. I argue that the idea and understanding of homeless is “irreducible to a fixed notion about the community but rather should be seen to produce multi-faceted, multi-cultural sites that are in a continual process of becoming”. For Charity Njoki Mwaniki (2011, personal communication) we have two senses to the movement between home and homeless, firstly that which can be referred to as the operation of machine of capital which generates and expends power by operating on the bodies of those who move in these spaces. Power that is in relation to the global scene and a governing space – colonisation and territorialisation – that already exists, a reality that is the everyday where everyone knows the rules, the ‘judgements of God’, the coding system which is the governing body and space, the common sense knowledge. This includes the external re-imagining of the homeless community through the dominant culture - an exercise of othering (alterity) and homogenising of the minority group. When the particular local sites are understood they reveal common place contradictions, ambivalence through the cultural practices that are performed in the sites. The homeless are not simply passive but active agents, the generators of the different sites, understood to be continually in a process of transition and continual transition and becoming, which as mentioned by Homi Bhabha with his concept of functions as a “third space”. This refers to the other movement between home and homeless, which following Deleuze and Guattari, as Mwaniki (2011, personal communication) points out is in the direction of the interstice. Within this intertwined relationship and movement between home and homeless spaces there are moments, described by Deleuze and Guattari, as line of flight that involves the exciting energy that is built up in us and moves us to be creative. So to go off the rails can be a kind of the homeless demonic delirious state that forms part of the interstitial. It is the middle that has no fixed points, but which jumps across intervals, and from one interval to another. I think the movement between home and homeless experience occurs within the minute gap or crevice where things pick up speed and what lies between things does not designate a localizable relation going from one thing to the other and back again, but a perpendicular direction and transversal movement. P PAGE \* MERGEFORMAT 1