Beyond the Periphery of the Skin

In the hands of government and other institutions, “identity politics” is a problem because it separates us into different groups, each with a set of rights—women’s rights, gay rights, indigenous peoples’ rights, trans rights—without acknowledging what stands in the way of our being treated with justice. We must be critical of any concept of identity that is not historical and transformative, that does not allow us to see our different and common forms of exploitation. But we need to address differently social identities that are rooted in particular forms of exploitation and are reshaped by a history of struggle still continuing in our time, for tracing our identities back to a history of exploitation and struggle allows us to find a common ground and collectively shape a more equitable vision of the future.

At the same time, women’s presence in almost every aspect of social and political life is having an impact on the public image of work, and institutional decision making. It serves to eroticize work, it creates the illusion that what we do is useful, constructive. It humanizes policies otherwise very destructive

Our bodies are shaped by class relations, as well as ethnic factors and the decisions we make in our lives.
Thus, the struggle to destabilize our assigned identities cannot be separated from the struggle to change the social/historical conditions of our lives and above all undermine social hierarchies and inequalities.

We must reject the idea that our social identities are completely defined by the capitalist system. The history of the feminist movement is exemplary in this context. Feminism has been a long battle against the norms, rules, and behavioral codes that have been imposed on us, which has significantly changed over time what it means to be a woman

This also applies to the question of gender identity. We cannot change our social identity without a struggle to change the economic/social conditions of our existence. Social identities are neither essences, fixed, frozen, determined once for all, nor groundless, infinitely shifting realities. And they are not defined purely by the norms that the capitalist system imposes on us. Social identities, including gender identities, are shaped by class, gender relations, and the struggles of the communities we come from.

We do so by reclaiming the means of our reproduction—the lands, the waters, the production of goods and knowledge, and our decision-making power, our capacity to decide what kind of lives we want and what kind of human beings we want to be

let’s be abolitionists, but not only with respect to sex work. All forms of exploitation should be abolished, not just sex work.

This is not to say that we should not fight to improve the conditions of sex work and, above all, struggle to build a society where we do not have to sell our bodies. All over the world, sex workers are fighting for that.

in the absence of adequate means of subsistence, women have always had to sell their bodies and not only in brothels and the streets. We have sold our bodies in marriage. We have sold ourselves on the job—whether it was to keep a job, to gain one, to obtain a promotion or not be harassed by a supervisor. We have sold ourselves in universities and other cultural institutions and, as we have seen, in the movie industry. Women have also engaged in prostitution in support of their husbands

it was the war on welfare that created the image of the black single mother, “parasitically” depending on welfare, hooked on crack, and producing dysfunctional families, which served to justify the politics of mass incarceration.