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Feminist Theory
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This body which is not mine

The notion of the habit body, prostitution and (dis)embodiment

Maddy Coy

London Metropolitan University, m.coy{at}londonmet.ac.uk

This paper explores women's accounts of prostitution in terms of the lived experience of the body, drawing on life story narratives and arts images created by women in the sex industry. These narratives show that women's experiences of prostitution constitute a spectrum of (dis)embodiment that is inflected, not determined, by settings and contexts. Theoretical approaches to embodiment were sought that acknowledged tensions between violation and a sense of empowerment. Therefore, the ontology of selling sex, and associated experiences such as violence, drug use and self-harm are explored using feminist applications of Merleau-Ponty's notion of the `habit body'. A key focus is how the body is constituted by embodied experiences of abuse (e.g. the work of Parkins and of Weiss), and how women negotiate ownership of the body within commercial sex transactions. This highlights the process of repositioning the body by selling sex, in accordance with the accumulated experiences of the habit body. Thus, to borrow from Wendy Parkins, women perceive that they are acting meaningfully through the body, even when reproducing dynamics of objectification and dissociation.

Key Words: embodiment • habit body • prostitution

Feminist Theory, Vol. 10, No. 1, 61-75 (2009)
DOI: 10.1177/1464700108100392
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