On the Boredom of Whoredom: Re-Writing the Politics of Sex Work Through Passivity and Femininity.

Abstract

By elucidating the average everydayness of prostitution, this essay shows-contrary to contemporary conceptions of sex work as either horror or utopia-that whoring is boring. Boredom is a stubborn aspect of modern Western existence. Yet in its philosophical portrayals, it is only described based on masculine parameters, and modeled on male figures such as the flaneur. As his feminine equivalent, the flaneuse shows that boredom is a pervasive yet under-explored feature of feminine life. Like the flaneur, the flaneuse turns to writing to process her impressions of the boring public sphere, but unlike him, the flaneuse is a literal streetwalker. On her strolls in the polis, her gaze never merely grazes the metropolitan landscape and its inhabitants, but solicits. As a queer femme or lesbian, she responds to the male gaze (only) when she is looking for work. Boredom is intrinsically linked to life under capitalism, but boredom may also be conceived as an important attitude for combatting its demands for ever-increasing productivity. Epitomized by the flaneur, the flaneuse, the scribe, and the whore, the meditations that make up this essay formulate a passive resistance against the capitalist logic of work. Through the political medium and passive modality of writing, they draw on the bored and impotent aspects of subjectivity in order to rethink political resistance through passive existence.