This body which is not mine

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

Bibliographic Data

ID4367266
AuthorsMaddy Coy (0000-0002-9598-4342, London Metropolitan University, corresponding author)
Year2009
Volume10
Issue1
Pages61-75
Publication date2009-04-01
Peer ReviewedYes
Open AccessYes
TypeARTICLE
VenueFeminist Theory (JOURNAL)
Journal identifiersISSN: 1464-7001 • E-ISSN: 1741-2773
PublisherSAGE Publications Inc (PUBLISHER)
DOI10.1177/1464700108100392
OpenAlexW1987761788
LanguageEN
Citations received26
References cited41

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

Embodied cognition · Empowerment · Epistemology · Harm · Narrative · Negotiation · Objectification · Political science · Sociology · Gender Studies · Gender, Feminism, and Media · Psychology · Sex work and related issues · Sexuality, Behavior, and Technology · Social Psychology

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