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Our study findings suggest that end-demand rhetoric depicting im/migrant sex workers as vulnerable and victimized women acts not to protect them, but to justify targeted repressive policing that severely undermines sex workers' occupational safety. Despite prevailing trafficking victim stereotypes, all 20 participants reported autonomously choosing to support themselves through sex work. Under end-demand laws, participants faced institutionalized racism in law enforcement and substantial barriers to accessing police assistance which contributed to a high rate of workplace robberies. Further, in instances when police were called - in opposition to the rescue and prostitution abolitionist narratives that frame end-demand models - criminalization, stigma, and racism prevailed and restricted im/migrant sex workers from actualizing their right to police protection. Participants' experiences of end-demand policing strategies highlight the inherent opposition between legislative aims to protect those who sell their own sexual services and to abolish the sex industry, and raise critical questions regarding who, or what type of “victims” are recognized as deserving of protection or support under end-demand laws(Bruckert, 2014). Finally, our results illustrate how authorities’ exclusive focus on the spectacular violence of trafficking and exploitation among im/migrant sex workers contributed to routinized slow violence through ongoing punitive and racist policing, and acted to obscure and invisibilize the everyday oppression of sex work criminalization and lack of labour protections.

Participants experienced frequent, invasive police visits to their workplaces, highlighting the ongoing surveillance of sex work venues under end-demand legislation – particularly those managed/staffed by im/migrant women. These findings are consistent with community reports of increased policing, raids and charges in sex work venues operated by Asian im/migrants in Toronto since end-demand law reforms(Lam, 2018a; Malla, Lam, van der Meulen, & Peng, 2019). Our results build on intersectional scholarship on how racialized policing in Canada intersects with class, gender, and other axes of oppression, among Black communities including Black sex workers(Maynard, 2017) and diverse racial minority groups(Chan & Chunn, 2014). This reflects both the historical over-policing of racialized sex workers and new law enforcement efforts focused on addressing sex trafficking. As law enforcement is a highly discretionary process shaped by institutionalized biases, racialized stereotypes of both criminality and vulnerability contribute to the over-surveillance of people of colour(Chan & Chunn, 2014). End-demand ideologies mark a shift from conceptualizations of sex workers as ‘risky’ (i.e., as vectors for HIV/STIs/amoral behavior) toward women ‘at risk’ of exploitation(Brock et al., 2000; Bruckert, 2014; Ham, 2016; Krüsi et al., 2016), and this lens is represented as less punitive of women in sex work. However, our findings show that im/migrant sex workers continued to face discriminatory and racialized policing under end-demand laws, highlighting how intersecting stigmas based on sex work involvement, racialization, gender and immigration status continue to be amplified through processes of enforcing sex work criminalization. In this context, police surveillance represented not a source of protection, but rather an additional form of oppression that marginalized im/migrant women were forced to contend with.

To address the theme of value-affect now, we would propose delving into one among the many themes that the introduction to this discussion has presented-that of the nexus between production and social reproduction-and investigating it according to the indications that the analysis has suggested: first, from below, and second, in the immeasurable and immense non-place. To do this, one must still refuse the temptation to go down a simple path that is presented to us: the path of reintroducing the Marxian figures of use-value and pretending to renovate them in the context of the new situation. How do the philosophers and politicians who situate themselves in this perspective proceed? They reconstruct a fictional use-value that they nostalgically oppose to the growing processes of globalization; in other words, they oppose to globalization a humanistic resistance. In reality, in their discourse, they bring to light again all the values of modernity, and use-value is configured in terms of identity. (Even when use-value is not invoked explicitly, it ends up being inserted surreptitiously.) One example should suffice: the resistance of workers' trade unions to globalization. To establish this resistance, they resurrect the territorialization and the identity of the usevalue of labor-power, and they insist on this, blind to the transformations of productivity, desperate, incapable of understanding the new power that the immeasurable and immense non-place offers to productive activity. This path thus cannot be taken. We must then search for another one. But where can we find it? We have said "from below." Up until this point, in fact, we have reasoned on the basis of a Marxian relation that led from production to social reproduction and thus from value to the biopolitical reality. In this relation-seen widely could be included also affect; affect could emerge as a power to act on the lower limit of the definition of use-value. But this end point of the deduction of the conditions of value has only determined important effects when it has been assumed abstractly as an element of the unity of calculation. Now, then, one must change the direction of the reasoning, avoid that deduction, and assume rather an induction--from affect to value-as the line of construction. This line of construction has been adopted with good results, but the findings are nonetheless not sufficient to demonstrate to us the power of affect in the radicality and the extension of the effects that now, in postmodernity, await us. I am referring here to those historiographical and dialectical schools I cited earlier-from E. P. Thompson, to the European "workerists" of the 1970s, to the "subaltern" historiographers. Now, from this theoretical perspective, affect is assumed from below. Moreover, it is presented, in the first place, as a production of value. Through this production, it is represented, then, in the second place, as a product of struggles, a sign, and an ontological deposit or precipitate of the struggles. Affect thus presents a dynamic of historical construction that is rich in its complexity. And yet it is insufficient. From this perspective, the dynamic of the struggles (and their affective behaviors) determines, in fact, in every case, the restructuring of capitalist command (in technical terms, political terms, and so on). The development of affect is closely related to a dialectic that ends up presenting its dynamic as completely circular-as a dialectic, tout court. And there is no good dialectic to separate here from the bad dialectic: All the dialectics are bad. All are incapable of liberating themselves from historical effectivity and its enchantment. The dialectic, even a dialectic from below, is incapable of presenting radical innovation in the historical process, the explosion of the power to act (affect) in all its radicality. A line of reconstruction from below must thus be added to the perception of the non-place. Only the radical assumption of the point of view of the non-place can liberate us from the dialectic of modernity, in all its figures, even those that tried to develop from below the dialectical construction of affect. What does it mean, then, to add the approach from below, the perception of the non-place, and the rupture of every dialectical instance in a path that goes from affect to value? Affect can be considered, as a first hypothesis, as a power to act that is singular and at the same time universal. It is singular because it poses action beyond every measure that power does not contain in itself, in its own structure, and in the continuous restructurings that it constructs. It is universal because the affects construct a commonality among subjects. In this commonality is posed the non-place of affect, because this commonality is not a name but a power; it is not the commonality of a constriction or a coercion but of a desire. Here, therefore, affect has nothing to do with use-value, because it is not a measure but a power, and it does not run into limits but only obstacles to its expansion. But this first definition of affect as power to act opens toward other definitions. We could, in fact, note, in the second place, that if the relationship between singularity and commonality (or universality) is not static but dynamic, if in this relationship we witness a continuous movement between the singular that is universalized and "what is common" that is singularized-well, we could then define affect as a power of transformation, a force of self-valorization, which insists on itself in relation to what is common and which therefore brings what is common to an expansion that does not run into limits but only obstacles. But this process is not formal: It is rather material. It is realized in the biopolitical condition. In the third place, then, we speak of affect as power of appropriation, in the sense that every obstacle that is overcome by the action of affect determines a greater force of action of the affect itself, in the singularity and universality of its power. The process is ontological and its power is ontological. The conditions of action and transformation are from time to time appropriated and go toward enriching the power of action and transformation. In the fourth place, we could bring together the definitions of affect as power to act in a further definition: affect as an expansive power. In other words, it is a power of freedom, ontological opening, and omnilateral diffusion. Really, this further definition could be seen as pleonastic. If in fact affect constructs value from below, if it transforms it according to the rhythm of what is common, and if it appropriates the conditions of its own realization, then it is more than evident that in all of this there resides an expansive power. But this definition is not pleonastic. We can see that, on the contrary, it adds a new concept when we insist on the positive tonality of the non-place, on the irresistibility of affect as power beyond measure, and on its consequent absolutely antidialectical character. (Playing with the history of philosophy, which deserves nothing more than such a game, one could add that whereas the first three definitions of affect are Spinozian, this fourth definition recuperates a Nietzschean effect.) In any case, the omnilateral expansivity of affect demonstrates, one could say, the moment that transvaluates its concept, to the point of determining the capacity to sustain the shock or impact of postmodernity.

I do not think that, in the polemics that have now for two hundred years accompanied the development of the theory of value, political economists have ever succeeded in decoupling value from labor. Even the marginalist currents and the neoclassical schools, whose vocation is dedicated to this decoupling, are forced to take this relationship into account (along with its support, mass living labor) every time they confront political economy in the concrete. In neoclassical theory, the analyses of market, entrepreneurial, financial, and monetary relations all refute in principle every reference to labor: in fact, it is no surprise that neoclassical theorists have nothing to say when they are faced with political decisions. The theory of labor-value springs forth again-and they are frozen in their tracks by it-precisely where the founders of the discipline situated it. The place of the conflict (and the eventual mediation) of the economic relationship as a social relationship reveals the ontology of economic theory. What has irreversibly changed, however, from the times of the predominance of the classical theory of value, involves the possibility of developing the theory of value in terms of economic order, or rather, the possibility of considering value as a measure of concrete labor, either individually or collectively. The economic consequences of this difficulty are certainly important, but equally important are its anthropological and social presuppositions. These latter elements are what I will focus on here-on this novelty that transforms the theory of value "from below," from the base of life. In the centuries of capitalist modernization (in the passage, that is, from manufacturing to large-scale industry, to use Marx's terms), the possibility of measuring labor, which had functioned more or less in the period of accumulation, progressively declined for two reasons. In the first place, the possibility of measurement declined because labor-as it became more highly qualified and more complex, both individually and collectively--could not be reduced to simple, calculable quantities. Secondly, the possibility of measurement declined because capital, which was becoming more financially oriented and more embedded in State regimes, made increasingly artificial and manipulable, and thus more abstract, the mediation between diverse sectors of the economic cycle (production, social reproduction, circulation, and the distribution of incomes). But all this is prehistory. In the global market, in postmodernity, the problem of measure itself cannot be located. It is certainly true that in the period of the passage to postmodernity, in the phase of the anti-imperialist and anticolonial struggles, the theory of labor-value seemed to rise up again in macroeconomic terms, as a theory of the international division of labor, of "unequal exchange," of postcolonial exploitation. But this renaissance quickly proved illusory, as soon as it became evident that the set of productive processes, beyond being immersed in the multinationalization of industrial activity and financial globalization, was further intensified by the technological processes of cybernetics and communication, as well as by the investment of immaterial and scientific labor. This does not mean that the international division of labor and postcolonial exploitation have come to an end. On the contrary, they have been extraordinarily accentuated. But at the same time, they have lost their specificity (and thus the possibility of reactivating the theory of value in concrete instances) because that type of exploitation has itself become globalized, has flooded metropolitan territories, and the measure of exploitation has definitively declined. In the economy of postmodernity and in the territories of globalization, the production of commodities comes about through command, the division of labor is given through command, and the articulation of the measures of labor is undone in global command. That said, however, my theme here, "value and affect," has not been broached thus far except through the suggestion of a reconsideration of the problem of value "from below." In effect, when we look at things from the point of view of political economy-in other words, "from above"-the theme of "value-affect" is so integrated into the macroeconomic process that it is virtually invisible. Economics ignores the problem without any recognition of difficulties. Among the numerous cases, consider two that are exemplary. The first case concerns the domestic labor of women and/or mothers/wives. Now, in the tradition of political economy, this theme can in no way be posed outside of the consideration of the direct or indirect wage of the worker (male, head of family), or rather, in more recent times, outside of the disciplinary techniques of the demographic control of populations (and of the eventual interests of the State-the collective capitalist-in the economic regulation of this demographic development). Value is thus assumed by stripping it from labor (the labor of women-in this case, mothers and wives), stripping it, in other words, from affect. A second example resides at the extreme opposite end of the spectrum. This case deals no longer with the traditional paradigms of classical economics but with a really postmodern theme: the so-called economy of attention. By this term, one refers to the interest in assuming in the economic calculation the interactivity of the user of communication services. In this case, too, even in the clear effort to absorb the production of subjectivity, economics ignores the substance of the question. As it focuses attention on the calculation of "audience," it flattens, controls, and commands the production of subjectivity on a disembodied horizon. Labor (attention) is here subsumed, stripping it from value (of the subject), that is, from affect. To define the theme of value-affect, we have to leave behind the ignorance of political economy. We have to understand it precisely on the basis of an apparent paradox that I would like to pose in this way: The more the measure of value becomes ineffectual, the more the value of labor-power becomes determinant in production; the more political economy masks the value of labor-power, the more the value of labor-power is extended and intervenes in a global terrain, a biopolitical terrain. In this paradoxical way, labor becomes affect, or better, labor finds its value in affect, if affect is defined as the "power to act" (Spinoza). The paradox can thus be reformulated in these terms: The more the theory of value loses its reference to the subject (measure was this reference as a basis of mediation and command), the more the value of labor resides in affect, that is, in living labor that is made autonomous in the capital relation, and expresses--through all the pores of singular and collective bodies-its power of self-valorization.

Although some White families used the Black breastfeeding body to profit, Blacktavists, constructing and circulating persuasive appeals to stop Medolac’s campaign, work through the Black breastfeeding body to assert Black mothers’ agency and to suggest their ability to control their worth in the marketplace. Figure 3 encapsulates these complaints with a drawn image of a Black woman exposing her breast to nurse a White infant. This image, appearing as a profile picture on the Facebook page for Breastfeeding Mothers Unite, is framed by text that reads: Why are women always being sold … told that they are doing something of “value” … but consistently devalued in the process? Once again we are being exploited for a 600% profit. When you learn how much you’re worth, you’ll stop giving people discounts. With a deliberate slippage between Black women being “sold” and “told,” this image macro highlights the profit that Medolac stands to earn from Black breastfeeding women. To imply Black breastfeeding women do not know their worth or they would not give discounts resists dominant narratives that Whites control the marketplace, and instead recenters Black mothers as both capable and responsible for valuing their own labor. A primary way that Black breastfeeding women are rendered valuable within Blacktavists’ discourse is through their relationship to heterosexuality. Specifically, within U.S. contexts, heterosexuality (like whiteness) has social value because its normativity can translate to varying degrees of influence for those who embody or can approximate this kind of relationality. As Rand (2013) explained, a framework called the heteroeconomy of desire structures social relationships, noting, “Heterosexual desire manages resources by motivating and shaping the consumption of popular culture products, and humans and identities acquire value directly in relation to the standards of the economy” (p. 131). In this way, Blacktavists construct a discourse that renders Black breastfeeding women visible in the consumer marketplace—not as objects/property but as participants within the heteroeconomy of desire whose worth is calculated basesd on the complex expectations for their performances of race, class, gender, and sexuality. Blacktavists’ efforts to render Black breastfeeding women visible as agents within the U.S. economy are also captured in a second image circulated on the Black Mothers Unite Facebook page. Figure 4 combines a historical photograph of a Black slave playing “horse” with a White child, framed by this text: “Medolac is making a 600% profit off the BACKS of our African American mothers! Selling your breast milk to Medolac will make you breastfeed longer. If you believe that, I’ve got a bridge you can buy.” The message communicated in this image macro works through several different logics. The expression “If you believe that, I’ve got a bridge you can buy” references a turn-of-the-century scam whereby con artist George Parker attempted to sell the Brooklyn Bridge to people interested in purchasing land (Cohen, 2005). This historical reference equates Medolac’s efforts to those of an infamous scam artist. In this way, Blacktavists reveal Medolac as untrustworthy and irresponsible. In particular, the textual part of the image macro addresses Black mothers as audience members capable of making decisions about how and where to invest their money and implying that they have the ability to make smarter choices than the woman in the image or the immigrants who tried to buy the Brooklyn Bridge. Image macros like those discussed here demonstrate Blacktavists’ efforts to render Black breastfeeding women visible as audience members and agents with the ability to act on their own behalf and can be contrasted with other Blacktavists’ image macros that position Black breastfeeding women as subjects within a profit-driven White industrial machine. In Figure 5, an image macro first appearing on Afrykayn Moon’s blog View From a Rack shows a hand-drawn cartoon portraying incapacitated Black women rolling down an infinite conveyer belt where octopus-like tools reach down from above, attaching to the Black women’s breasts to extract milk. The posters hanging on the wall of this illustrated factory show such statements as “We’ll pay for your milk $ $ $,” “Help NICU babies,” and “You can do it.” In this image macro, Blacktavists work through the medium of a political cartoon to make visible the profit that White interests reap from Black bodies and Black labor. Further, this image macro illustrates the embodiment of Black mothers’ oppression and engages the intersectional ways that race, gender, sexuality, and social class collude to erase Black motherhood—consuming it within a heteroeconomy of desire so that Black femininity can benefit some White, procreative, monogamous couples—and making Black women valuable only insofar as they service White, heteronormative sexuality.

The Western cultural imaginary that the market and intimacy are and ought to remain bounded spheres of human activity–the ‘separate spheres and hostile worlds’ view (Zelizer2005, p. 22)–affects the value of the activities that more visibly transgress it :sex and care work. Their construction as acts and attachments that should not be for sale generates and reproduces an ‘economy of affect’(Richard and Rudnyckyj.2009) which makes certain bodies more likely to perform these activities. In contemporary Western European countries it is indeed largely migrant women who occupy the positions of the carer (see for example Barone and Mocetti2011, Triandafyllidou and Marchetti2013)and the sex worker i.e. the market equivalents of the binary roles of the wife-and-mother or of the prostitute that the heteronormative order reserves to women (Grosz1990, p. 129). The transgression of the (fictitious) boundaries safeguarding the sphere of intimacy from the commodification of its constitutive acts and attachments (hereinafter the market/inti-macy binary) appears to be the condition of possibility of their migratory projects. However, in contexts increasingly characterised by restrictive mobility regimes(Vuolajärvi 2018) and repressive prostitution policies within and across national borders the intersection of work, intimacy and migration gives rise to different hierarchies of visibility and policy concern for the precarious, exploitative and hazardous conditions under which women perform their labour. Following Constable’s invitation to cast ‘the pairing of commodification and intimacy’ as the main topic of analysis (Constable2009, p. 58), and drawing from my ethnographic fieldwork in Italy, in this article I discuss the relationship between work and intimacy in thelives of migrant women for whom the commodification of intimate acts and attachments byand large encapsulates their opportunities to sustain themselves and their transnational intimacies. To this purpose I use Berlant’s concept of ‘cruel optimism’, which she defines as‘a relation of attachment to compromised conditions of possibility’ whereby a subject projects its continuity into an enabling object that is also disabling’(Berlant2006,p.21).For Berlant,‘the conditions of ordinary life in the contemporary world [. . .] are conditionsof the attrition or the wearing out of the subject’(ibid., 23). Hence, in this article I argue that the intricate entanglement–rather than the separation–of sex, care, love and work inmigrant women’s lives constitutes what makes their under-valued, exploitative and risky jobs meaningful and valuable to them, as they pursue their cruelly optimistic attachments toa better life for themselves and their family members. The dire conditions under whichwomen perform sex and care work attest to the workings of intersecting structures of inequality, as inflected (mainly) by gender, class, race and sexuality, and primarily the gendered and racialised (Brah1993) economy of affect engendered by the market/intimacybinary, restrictive mobility regimes and discriminatory prostitution laws. In showing migrant women’s predicaments I aim to contribute to contemporary feminist scholars’ and sex workers rights activists’ debates in academia and policy making spaces on the nature and regulation of prostitution, arguing for rescaling its relationship to harm from an ontological to a phenomenological level. This article is based on my larger ethnographic research project on the relationship between sex, pleasure and the market in processes of women’s subjectification incontemporary Western countries. In 2012–13 I conducted 14 months of fieldwork in Italy, moving across a continuum of spaces of leisure and work wherein Italian andmigrant women consumed and/or commodified their sexual desirability–pole dance schools, discos, strip clubs, and streets where the sale of sex is negotiated. I conducted41 open-ended interviews with women working as pole dance entrepreneurs and/or teachers, burlesquers ,ragazze immagine(image girls),3acrobatic strippers, lap dancers and indoor sex workers, and two with former street sex workers who are now activists working in harm-reduction programmes. Simultaneously, I collaborated for a year with two non-governmental organisations providing sexual and reproductive health infor-mation to street sex workers, and I regularly volunteered in the night-time outreach activities (hereinafter: mobile unit) organised by one of them.4This article brings together the experiences of migrant women occupying different positions in the sphere of commodified intimacy in Italy. The interview with Kate–a young Ukrainian woman working as image girl while in higher education–discloses the predicament of her mother, who travelled to Italy as an undocumented migrant and achieved family reunification with her daughter only after several years of informal employment as a careworker. The field notes from my activities with the mobile unit relay fragments of the conversations between ‘us’ in the van–frequently women, Italian, and in a self-ascribed ‘helping’ role–and the female sex workers whom we reached out to. Power flows across and structures all social situations (Foucault1977), and inevitably shapes the circulation of words, emotions, expectations and silences in the interaction between the researcher and the subjects of her research. I am therefore aware that my position as a white female researcher with Italian (i.e. EU) citizenship influenced my fieldwork, and that the power imbalances were particularly intense in the interaction with the women I encountered while on the mobile unit. This awareness is reflected in my analytic approach to these exchanges as narratives: their value, therefore, does not pertain to the realm of un/truth but to the performative. What they foreground is women’s negotiation of their predicaments in the context of the profound disparities shaping the space between us.The article is structured as follows. First, I trace the workings of intersecting gendered, class-based and racialised hierarchies of power in the economy of affectengendered by the market/intimacy binary. Next I highlight the place and meaning of this trope in feminist and sex workers rights activists’ debates on prostitution. Subsequently, I show how female migrants in Italy navigate care and sex work in contexts characterised by restrictive mobility regimes and discriminatory prostitution laws.

The Western cultural imaginary of the market and the intimacy as bounded and hostile spheres gained strength in Western countries in the nineteenth century in the context of the dramatic social transformations brought about by rising industrial capitalism(Zelizer2005, p. 24). Against the cold, impersonal instrumentality of the market where The Western cultural imaginary of the market and the intimacy as bounded and hostile spheres gained strength in Western countries in the nineteenth century in the context of the dramatic social transformations brought about by rising industrial capitalism(Zelizer2005, p. 24). Against the cold, impersonal instrumentality of the market where men sold their labour, the home was imagined as a space of respite and nurture (Wilson2012, p. 41)–a shelter from commodification (O’Connell Davidson2014, p. 518),wherein relationships were based on reciprocity rather than self-interest. Intimacy, hence, signified both a space and the affects producing and involving its subjects through acts, emotions, attachments and orientations. As Marxist feminist economists have amply shown (see for example Folbre1994, Elson1998), however, the imaginary ‘of the home as a site of leisure and recreation–a “haven in a heartless world”’(Ehrenreich2004, p. 86) was a peculiarly male fantasy reliant upon the invisibilisation of the everyday work that women invested in the production of homey-ness. The scaffolding of intimacy, hence, rested on the suppression of the economic value of the activities that produced it, enabled by the affective makeover re-signifying women’s work into a gift–an expression of their ‘natural’ caring disposition. Class-based and racialised hierarchies of power arising at the intersection between the ideology of respectability and Western colonialism further contributed to making domestic and care work respectable occupations for working class women, prostitutes (see for exam-ple Agustín2007, Skeggs1997), and native women subjected by European colonial powers (see for example McClintock1995).Within this Western cultural imaginary the home was also discursively constructed as the shell of respectable sexuality, which was heterosexual, reproductive in purpose,and gratuitous. Prostitution was intrinsically at odds with this imaginary, as the sale of sex transgressed symbolically and materially its placement within the sphere of intimacy. The ensuing social disapproval for this activity, however, was unequally distributed among the parts involved in this exchange. Sexual double standards constructing men’s sexuality as ‘naturally’ voracious by and large tolerated their recourse to women prostitutes (Lyons and Lyons2011, p. 70)–whereas men’s purchasing sex from other men was invisibilised given that homosexuality was considered ‘unnatural’. For women, on the other hand, their use of sexuality signalled their positioning along a racialized temporality ranging from primitive promiscuity to the apex of modernity signified by Victorian women’s domesticated sexual desire (ibid.). Female prostitutes’ ‘promiscuous’ sexuality supposedly signaled their stunted development (Lombroso and Ferrero1903)and evolutionary proximity closer to the women inhabiting the lands colonized by Europe than to the respectable middle class women living in the European metropolis(Gilman1985, McClintock1995). Prostitution laws crystallized normative (albeit changing) definitions of where sex ought to be enacted, contextually producing women selling it to men as either objects or subjects, victims or renegades, workers or outlaws. Whether prohibited or regulated, however, the exchange of sex for money remained affectively enwrapped in social disapproval, and the blame, shame and stigma disproportionately attached to women prostitutes. The workings of this gendered and racialised economy of affect are still clearly discernible in contemporary Western European countries. The persistently low exchange value of care work (see for example: Hayes2017,O’Connor2018) arguably bears the traces of the affective makeover turning nurture and compassion into ‘natural’ i.e. effortless female dispositions. Concomitantly, despite the neoliberal urge to com-modify everything, including one’s ‘erotic capital’(Hakim2, the stigma on sex workers (see for example Plattet al.2018) remains particularly ‘sticky’(Ahmed2004, p. 120). This economy of affect, as I show in the next section, informs feminists and sex workers rights activists’ debate on the nature, roots and scale of the harm in prostitution, and their views on whether and how states should legislate over this activity. Following, I distinguish the two main positions in this debate based on what they identify as the root of the ‘prostitution problem’ i.e. gender or social inequality.

The principles of political economy forwarded by the IMF and the World Bank have represented, and still represent, the ideological framework from which the dominant vision of the IE has been structured. The rationale for policy intervention supplied by the Washington Consensus underlies the very explanation of the causes of the IE. An IMF-commissioned Working Paper concludes, ‘An increasing burden of taxation and social security payments, combined with rising regulatory activities, are the major driving forces behind the size and growth of the shadow economy’ (Schneider and Enste, 2000: 44). Similarly, a World Bank-sponsored policy paper on Latin America remarks, ‘The informal economy arises when excessive taxes and regulations are imposed by governments that lack the capability to enforce compliance’ (Loayza, 1997: 30). A further IMF-commissioned study states, ‘Heavy tax burdens and excessive regulation imposed by governments that lack the capability to enforce compliance drives firms into the underground economy’ (Dabla-Norris and Feltenstein, 2003: 3). In summary, the IE is seen here purely in terms of tax evasion or avoidance, and hence as entirely negative economic activity which must be prosecuted, punished and eradicated, a position which remains predominant despite the recent adjustment of the World Bank’s stance on this matter. Advocates of what may be termed the ‘legalist’ deterrent-centred approach sustain that public policy should correct the roots or the fundamental causes of informality by reducing heavy tax burdens and complex state regulatory systems and by enforcing the reign of the law more rigorously (Dabla-Norris and Feltenstein, 2003; McKinsey Global Institute, 2004). This view is informed by a belief that should these legal–regulatory imperfections be corrected, informal economic agents will ‘choose to go formal’. This represents an ‘indirect’ approach towards intervention in which the state, and not the individuals and businesses operating in the IE, is the main policy target. The state’s regulatory framework thus becomes the main cause of the IE as well as its main solution. Ironically, in developing countries this approach has been largely inspired by policies implemented in industrialised countries where the IE is now being increasingly recognised as a problematic feature of the contemporary economic landscape. Closely aligned with the assumptions of the legalist approach are policy approaches intended to streamline business registration, which is considered as a ‘rational first step’ in any serious reform effort aimed at reducing the IE (EC, 1997; ILO, 2002a). The nature of the complexities that businesses face in ‘going formal’ is here the main rationale for policy intervention. Complexities include complicated regulations (‘number of steps’ to get registered), high costs (‘fees’ to be paid), and an excessively bureaucratic implementation of regulations (‘time’ or business days involved) (Jansson and Chalmers, 2001). The self-employed and small businesses, who commonly lack financial resources and time, are the most affected. Business registration constitutes the ‘first encounter’ between entrepreneurs and government and so by lifting these complexities and facilitating initial registration, the tone is set for future relationships between businesses and government on such issues as compliance and law enforcement. During the 1990s numerous developing countries (DCs) undertook processes of reform to simplify the frequently lengthy and complex procedures and regulations (Chile, Mexico and Peru in Latin America), and a similar trend was followed by some Western market economies (including Australia, Canada and Spain). Based on this experience, a study by Jansson and Chalmers (2001) commissioned by the Inter-American Development Bank concluded that a regulatory environment that encourages the ‘voluntary formalisation’ of informal work should become the goal of public policy. To provide a ‘simple’, ‘quick’, ‘inexpensive’ and geographically ‘accessible’ scheme for initial registration (via a one-stop-shop registration service) becomes the key component of such an environment. However, while streamlining business registration provides a clear attempt to address specific ‘obstacles’ that economic agents face in legalising their activities, such an approach does nothing in relation to the attitudes of these agents towards the obstacles they face to ‘operate’ formally. Jansson and Chalmers (2001: 7; emphasis in original) themselves note that although this approach ‘does lower the cost of becoming formal [it] does little to raise the benefits or lower the costs of being formal’. This issue becomes a decisive barrier to formalisation for many economic agents, in both developing and developed countries, that ‘get by’ in the market place on the basis of generating marginal profits (Castell and Portes, 1989; Sassen, 1997).

We find a reduction in the tax rate or an increase in enforcement (1) increases the level of output and decreases the size of the informal sector in the steady state and (2) increases the rate of convergence to the steady state. While small changes in the tax rate cause measurable changes in both the level of and convergence to the steady state, modest changes in the enforcement variable (i.e., increases in the probability of detection without substantial penalties) have negligible effects on the size of the informal sector. In order for enforcement to have a measurable effect, the government must impose penalties rather than just increase policing. This suggests that governments interested in reducing the size of the informal sector should reduce the tax rate and/or increase the tax penalty of informal agents who are caught. If the economy wants to maintain tax revenues as a percent of GDP (for public good provisions), the model suggests lowering the tax rate and increasing enforcement simultaneously. Therefore, when the World Bank sends mobile tax units to countries for tax collection, this increase in enforcement has minimal effects on the standard of living. Alternatively, if their objective is to increase the country's standard of living, the World Bank should encourage governments to lower tax rates along with increasing tax collection efforts. To quantify the distortion introduced to an economy by their informal sector, we calculate the difference in the present discounted value of the capital stock between an economy with no taxation or informal sector and (a) our model and (b) an economy with a tax on formal output but no informal sector. We found the majority of the welfare loss comes from a tax rate on formal output rather than the distortions introduced by the informal sector: the informal sector only contributes 2 percent to the total welfare loss of the economy. This finding provides support for those who believe the informal sector should remain a functioning part of the economy. Of course, we should keep in mind that tax policies can alter the size of this sector and, therefore, the standard of living. We now turn to Section 2 where we describe some stylized facts associated with informal employment. The theoretical economy is presented in Section 3. In Section 4 we discuss the selection of parameter values. The model simulations are presented in Section 5, and we demonstrate how the model matches time-series and cross-sectional data. We conduct policy experiments in Section 6. We examine transitional dynamics and quantify the effect of tax policies in an economy with an informal sector. Concluding remarks are found in Section 7.

Successful examples of the extension of social security coverage to workers in the informal economy have focused on two broad policy approaches. In many countries, the extension of social security to larger groups of the population has followed an approach that could be described as “extend social protection through formalization”, focusing mainly on existing social protection mechanisms (typically social insurance, to some extent also mutual funds (mutuelles) and other community-based microinsurance). This approach tends to prioritize specific groups of workers who are already close to the formal economy and have some contributory capacity, and may therefore be relatively easily covered by employment-based social protection mechanisms. In many cases, the extension strategy includes not only a change in legislation but also the adoption of measures to remove administrative obstacles to contributions by facilitating administrative processes and adapting contribution rates and benefit packages. Some examples are the inclusion of domestic workers in maternity and unemployment insurance (South Africa); occupation-/sector-based mutual funds or mutuelles (Senegal); facilitating registration and the collection of taxes and contribution collection through monotax mechanisms (Argentina, Uruguay); and the inclusion of self-employed workers in social insurance schemes (Algeria). In other countries, the extension of social security to larger groups of the population has been pursued through a large-scale extension of non-contributory social protection mechanisms to previously uncovered groups, independently of their employment status and largely financed through government revenue derived from taxation, mineral resource revenue or external grants. This approach could be described as “extend social protection independently of status”, based on the expectation that investing in people through social protection helps workers to facilitate their access to health and education and enhance their income security and enable them to take greater risks, thereby enhancing productivity and facilitating the formalization of employment in the medium and long terms. Some examples are the introduction and expansion of cash transfer programmes for children and families (Brazil, Mexico, Mongolia), persons with disabilities (South Africa) and older persons (social pensions in Lesotho, Mauritius, Namibia, Nepal, Timor Leste, South Africa), as well as national health services.

CONTINUE

World financial leaders gathered recently in Washington for the annual meetings of the World Bank and International Monetary Fund. But missing from their agenda was one of the biggest and most misunderstood barriers to economic growth: The vast agglomeration of businesses that evade taxes and ignore regulations, often referred to as the "informal economy." The informal economy is not just the unregistered street vendors and tiny businesses that form the backbone of marketplaces in Asia and other emerging markets. It includes many established companies, often employing hundreds of people, in industries as diverse as retail, construction, consumer electronics, software, pharmaceuticals and even steel production. In India, Pakistan, Indonesia and the Philippines, as much as 70 percent of the non-agricultural workforce is employed in informal businesses. Despite the prevalence of the informal economy, Asian policymakers show surprisingly little concern. Some governments argue that it helps relieve urban employment tensions and will recede naturally as the formal economy develops. Development experts contend that informal companies themselves will grow, modernize, and become law-abiding if given some help. And most policymakers implicitly assume that the informal economy does no harm. But there is little evidence to support these beliefs. Research by the McKinsey Global Institute found that informal economies are not only growing larger in many developing countries, but are also undermining enterprise-level productivity and hindering economic development. The reasons why informal economies grow—and keep growing—are not hard to uncover: High corporate tax rates and the enormous cost of doing business legally. It takes 89 days to register a business in India, compared with eight days in Singapore. It takes 33 days to register a property in the Philippines, compared with 12 in the US. It takes five and a half years to close an insolvent business in Vietnam. All in all, emerging-market businesses face administrative costs three times as high as their counterparts in developed economies. No wonder so many choose to operate in the gray. The costs imposed by the informal economy are not limited to the hundreds of millions of dollars in foregone tax receipts; more damaging is its pernicious effect on economic growth and productivity. The unearned cost advantage informal businesses enjoy from ignoring taxes and regulatory obligations allows them to undercut prices of more productive competitors and stay in business, despite very low productivity. Informal software companies in India appropriate innovations and copyrights without paying for them, reducing the industry's productivity and profitability by up to 90 percent. Informal apparel makers in India gain a 25 percent cost advantage over their law-abiding competitors by not paying taxes. Informal businesses thus disrupt the natural economic evolution whereby more productive companies replace less productive ones. This discourages investment and slows economic growth. Even worse, it creates a vicious cycle in which governments increase corporate tax rates to raise revenue, which prompts more companies to evade taxes, thus causing the informal economy to grow still further. The notion that informal companies might grow and become more productive is unfounded. They can't borrow from banks or rely on the legal system to enforce contracts or resolve disputes, and they structure relationships with informal suppliers in ways that make it difficult to come clean. In fact, informal companies often shun opportunities to grow and modernize precisely so they can continue to avoid detection. As a result, informal businesses remain a persistent drag on national productivity and living standards. Governments are often unaware of the huge economic gains that result from reducing informality, and of what they can and must do to address its causes: high taxes, complex tax systems and onerous regulations, weak enforcement, and social norms that see noncompliance as legitimate. Addressing these problems is essential in reducing informality. Reducing the tax burden on businesses is perhaps the most critical step to reducing informality, since high taxes increase the incentives for companies to operate informally. For many Asian governments, one path to lower taxes is through broadening the tax net: collecting taxes from more companies can enable governments to cut tax rates without reducing tax revenue, while simultaneously breaking the tax-evasion cycle. Many Asian countries also have large governments and generous social programs similar to those in rich countries, and this poses a heavy burden on business. The Indian government, for instance, spends over 30 percent of the country's GDP, about the same as the Japanese government. But in the early 1950s, when Japan had the same level of per-capita income as India does today, Japanese government consumption accounted for only 20-22 percent of GDP. When the US had the same level of per-capita income, in the early 1900s, its government spent just 7 percent of GDP. Another key to reducing the extent of the informal economy is to streamline regulatory procedures. Registering a new business is often an onerous process. But when businesses fail to register, collecting taxes from them and enforcing regulations is nearly impossible. Tax codes are often overly complicated as well. Spain increased the amount of taxes collected from small and mid-sized businesses by 75 percent after giving small businesses the option of calculating taxes based on physical characteristics, such as a store's square footage, rather than reported revenue, which is difficult to verify. Governments have the power to reduce informality, and can reap sizable economic gains in the process. The political challenges are considerable. But policymakers must remember that any short-term disruption is far outweighed by the longer-term boost to productivity and economic growth.

All the characters and events found in this book are real; none are invented. What I know about the lives of these young women has been culled from the journals of rent collectors; surveys and monographs of sociologists; trial transcripts; slum photographs; reports of vice investigators, social workers, and parole officers; interviews with psychiatrists and psychologists; and prison case files, all of which represent them as a problem. (Some of the names have been changed to protect confidentiality and as required by the use of state archives.) I have crafted a counter-narrative liberated from the judgment and classification that subjected young black women to surveillance, arrest, punishment, and confinement, and offer an account that attends to beautiful experiments—to make living an art—undertaken by those often described as promiscuous, reckless, wild, and wayward. The endeavor is to recover the insurgent ground of these lives; to exhume open rebellion from the case file, to untether waywardness, refusal, mutual aid, and free love from their identification as deviance, criminality, and pathology; to affirm free “motherhood (reproductive choice), intimacy outside the institution of marriage, and queer and outlaw passions; and to illuminate the radical imagination and everyday anarchy of ordinary colored girls, which has not only been overlooked, but is nearly unimaginable. Wayward Lives elaborates, augments, transposes, and breaks open archival documents so they might yield a richer picture of the social upheaval that transformed black social life in the twentieth century. The goal is to understand and experience the world as these young women did, to learn from what they know. I prefer to think of this book as the fugitive text of the wayward, and it is marked by the errantry that it describes. In this spirit, I have pressed at the limits of the case file and the document, speculated about what might have been, imagined the things whispered in dark bedrooms, and amplified moments of withholding, escape and possibility, moments when the vision and dreams of the wayward seemed possible. Few, then or now, recognized young black women as sexual modernists, free lovers, radicals, and anarchists, or realized that the flapper was a pale imitation of the ghetto girl. They have been credited with nothing: they remain surplus women of no significance, girls deemed unfit for history and destined to be minor figures. This book is informed by a different set of values and recognizes the revolutionary ideals that animated ordinary lives. It explores the utopian longings and the promise of a future world that resided in waywardness and the refusal to be governed.”

Gender is a tool of war. There is a war waged against our bodies, our minds, and the potential of our relationships: the social war. What is gender and what is it to be gendered? Genders are socially constructed categories that correspond to nebulous parameters surrounding behaviors, sexualities, aesthetics, socio-cultural roles, bodies, et cetera. Genders concretize differently in different places, times, and individuals; some will experience gender as very constricting, while others will never hit the boundaries their genders impose on them. Gender is inextricably connected to sexuality, and both perpetually shape and define each other. The two most commonly imposed genders are man/ male and woman/female, and to stray away from them, move amongst them or act against them summons the enforcement agents of society. Gender benefits those who want to control, socialize, and manage us and offers us nothing in return. Every time a person is scrutinized and gendered, society has attacked them, confined them, waged war on them. Social war is the conflict that spans all society. Social war is the struggle against society– that is to say, against all existing social relations. The self-destructive tendency within society, so-called “anti-social behavior,” the desire to command and to obey, acts of rebellion and acts of reinforcement, the riot and the return to work: these are the attacks and counter-attacks in this war. Social war is the battles between those who wish to destroy society and those maintaining it. Chaos against control. Nothingness and potential, against everything and the existent. Everything that holds society together insulates us from each other; each blow to domination and control is a step closer to each other, a step away from our imposed identities, our alienation, and toward infinite possibility. Because society is everywhere, the only way to escape is to win the social war: to destroy society. Gender is one of the fronts on which the social war is fought. Gender itself is used as a tool for centralizing and colonizing. As Europeans moved outside of Europe to further colonial projects, they brought their ideas and conceptions of gender. The nuclear family and the specific genders and sexualities that it requires were foreign to many non-western cultures that form families in any number of other ways. The nuclear family is a unit that fits most easily in the social narrative of dominant western cultures; it plays easily into patriarchal power dynamics. Within the nuclear family, the patriarch does the work of the colonizer: socialization, policing behaviors and roles, and of course the enforcement and reproduction of genders capable of existing more peacefully within western hierarchies. The expansion of the church and the spread of Christianity played a large part in the spread of the nuclear family and western conceptions of gender and sexuality. Some populations accepted Christianity, integrating it into their cultures to varying degrees, while others were violently forced to “accept” it. This isn’t to say that gender didn’t exist in some form outside of colonialism and western cultures. Other forces are surely at play in defining and limiting what gender is, but what is certain is that the current “universal” and “natural” ideas of gender now stem in part from colonialism and a need to centralize and control non-western forms of life. The cis/trans binary also furthers centralization and colonialism, assimilating and categorizing all identities outside of itself. Like all forms of representation, the cis/trans binary as an all-encompassing set of categories is both flattening and inadequate. There are genders that are not cis but do not place themselves under the trans umbrella. Despite this, anyone who isn’t cis is assumed to be trans, and vice versa. An LGBTQ avant garde moves to assimilate all “unusual” genders, and even the lack of gender, into trans-ness. This leaves no room for anyone to fall outside of these categories. This often plays out in a colonial manner, rendering non-western genders legible to and manageable by western LGBTQ narratives of gender and sexuality.

The way in which this operates is through neoliberalism’s creation of a subjectivity and forcible deployment of that subjectivity onto life in such a way that it becomes primed for capture. This neoliberal-subjectification is one of individualism, in which the affective intensities of life become captured, and collapsed, within the referent of a universal signifier; an atomized individual.[10] Often taking the form of normativity, individualism is able to produce a model of life that semiotizes itself around the possibility of being articulated within rights; a determinate whole that merely has to have the ‘proper’ definition applied to it to be understood. The problem with this sort of subjectification is not merely that it justifies the process by which neoliberalism is able to penetrate into all aspects of life, but in the sense that it re-creates the process of othering for which marginalized bodies are dealt. Examples of this are unfortunately everywhere, but can be clearly seen in the turn towards ‘trans liberalism’ in which the creation of a coherent categorical transness that can be ‘protected’ vis a vis rights has worked to justify the further eradication of trans women of color.[11] To elaborate, given the definition for which transness comes to be under ‘trans rights’ becomes centered around the possibility to transition through the medical industrial complex, acquire specific gendered ‘parts,’ and ‘pass’[12] as cisgender it will always privilege white trans folks.[13] Or in other words, “neoliberal states, in which these demands are made, reproduce socio-economic divisions along intersecting lines of race and class, gender, sexuality, dis/ability, nationality and immigration status.”[14] In this context then, the neoliberal process of subjectification is utilized in order to create a semiotization of transness in which trans poc, especially black trans women, are perpetually framed out in order to further justify their lack of protection, death at the hands of police, and eradication from trans ‘history.’

There have been countless other opportunities missed in linking sex worker issues with other movements. That prostitutes are not seen as obvious and valuable allies in the anti-trafficking movement or as part of the migrant workers movement is only to the detriment of these movements and their efforts to build in inclusive and sustainable ways. We as prostitutes understand this because many of us come in direct contact with women who have purposely left their countries to come here and work in “houses.” And we hear about and witness the injustices that are done to them, the exploitation they are vulnerable to because as migrant workers and as sex workers, the law does not protect them; because as sex workers they live with the fear of being arrested; becasue, as with all migrant workers, there is the additional fear of being deported; and because they live with the stigma of prostitution and the isolation that comes along with it. That we cannot hold complexity in the experiences of sex workers prevents us from seeing this different perspective. It prevents us from understanding the many reasons why women would want to come to this country to work as sex workers. It prevents us from understanding how they could then feel exploited when they are asked to work in unreasonable conditions for very little pay. It justifies our paternalistic tendency to want to save “these women.” It prevents us from understanding how our own beliefs about prostitutes make us complicit in these forms of exploitation. In short, it prevents us from seeing immigrant women who trade sex for money as fully human. When we speak for experiences that are not our own, that we do not fully understand, and when we engage in a rescue-savior mentality towards prostitutes, we assume disempowerment in women and therefore perpetuate violence towards women, however unintentionally. Rather than empower we disempower, we become complicit in violence, we participate in erasure. When we isolate prostitution as problematic relative to other jobs and other forms of sexual contact, we miss an opportunity to understand all forms of wage labor as exploitative and minimize the extent to which all women have been confronted (at one time or another) with the choice to leverage their sexuality in order to gain access to resources. When we enthusiastically support physical safety and labor rights for “all women,” only to the exclusion of prostitutes, we assert that our compassion and their humanity is conditional. There is a tendency to simplify the motivations behind entering the sex industry, insisting upon a strong distinction between people who enter consensually by “choice” and those who are “forced.” While it is true that working in the sex industry is a choice that many women have made for themselves, it is equally one that (like most other economic choices) is largely circumstantial. When we fail to see the complexity behind this choice we run the risk of denying, neglecting and erasing the inequalities many women of color continue to experience after they have made the empowered decision to survive. Personally, I could never bring myself to buy into the rhetoric of empowerment through normalization that the mostly white middleclass sex worker rights movement was selling. To create a language around and an image of a “Sex Worker” that is normalized and free of stigma did not seem very revolutionary to me. To me it said, “accept us because we are just like you.” Well, what if we’re not like you? What then will you do to us? The campaign to push forward the picture of the fully autonomous and sovereign woman in prostitution contributes to the polarization of ‘The Prostitute’ into two cartoon figures — one of total empowerment and one of total degradation. In reality, women’s experience in the sex industry and their motivations for entering it are vastly complex. This polarization is an oversimplification of both privilege and oppression and of people. There is a disgrace reserved for prostitutes with limited alternatives that women of color know first hand cannot be easily escaped.

I write this as a woman who has survived financially by the wisdom of her risk-taking and the resources of men with disposable income, obtained with something as autonomous as personal choice and as inherent as a body. I also write this as a Latina, as a person of color who has grown up poor, who has not enjoyed the same privileges of empowerment as white women or the “educated,” who has not been stereotyped as a minority who has something good to model. For me, sex work has not been easy. As a young woman I experienced my unfair share of hostility and violence. But none of these dangers or issues of racism or classism were created by prostitution and none of them would disappear from the world or even my life if I were to simply exit the sex industry. As a matter of fact, I was experiencing these things in painful ways long before the thought of prostitution ever entered my mind. I posted my first ad on craigslist because I was exhausted from struggling financially, I entered prostitution in order to escape the oppressive force of limited options. I entered in order to have access to money, and therefore resources. So I acknowledge that there are obstacles and I acknowledge the concerns of people of color regarding prostitution, not only because they are valid, but because I have personally lived them. The very idea of prostitution as illicit pushes it further underground, causing the women who work within this trade to become isolated, leading to forms of increased exploitation. My lived understanding of the sex industry is that isolation and violence go hand in hand. The exchange of sex for money has been portrayed as so forbidden that the great majority of prostitution occurs out of plain sight. Many laws created around prostitution are directly influenced by this fear of prostitutes. As a matter of fact during the emergence of the HIV test in the mid 80s, policies that were supposedly created in order to safeguard public health did not take into account the civil and human rights of groups of people who were stigmatized (black people, gay men, trans women, and prostitutes) and therefore blamed for the spread of HIV. These communities were immediately marked as a threat to public health rather than as part of the same public these laws were seeking to protect. This is one of the many ways in which the stigma and subsequent silence around prostitution has played a part in halting practical and actual attempts to educate, treat and reduce the spread of HIV In this way we as a society use “delinquent”communities as scapegoats. When we scapegoat women in prostitution (or any other group) as the “cause” of disease, drug abuse, poverty or any other societal “ill,” and we don’t really address these issues. In HIV prevention many years were lost policing and criminalizing women who were seen as tainted and therefore worthless. These are years we will never get back that could have been better utilized in understanding the needs of entire communities and addressing the spread of HIV by “how” it is actually spread, rather than “who” is spreading it, something that experts in HIV prevention are now beginning to address. In recent years these same experts are beginning to see sex workers as a valuable resource for developing and improving safer sex education and the prevention of STIs. In this way a deeper understanding of women in prostitution is essential in addressing not just HIV, but a great many other issues with the understanding that criminalizing people tends to push behavior underground and does more harm than good.

Purportedly, postracism marks the end of racial discrimination and separates interpersonal experiences with racism from the historical, institutional, and structural legacies of racial oppression in the United States (see, e.g., Goldberg, 2002; Joseph, 2012; Squires et al., 2010). Blacktavists, as we demonstrate, resist these imposed silences about race and the subsequent discursive invisibility it creates not only by calling specific attention to their raced bodies but by contextualizing Medolac’s efforts within a historical and ongoing context of racism. Responding to the inception of the company’s campaign, Blacktavists discursively linked Medolac’s efforts to the institution of slavery, making U.S. racism and the exploitation of Black female bodies visible within the “postracial” landscape of the United States. Within popularly circulating discourses of postracism, Medolac’s efforts to recruit urban African-American women can be read as colorblind and unmotivated by racism; however, Blacktavists’ rhetoric reveals a pattern of Black labor being exploited for White interests and frames Medolac as part of this exploitative pattern. Afrykayn Moon (2015a), in her blog titled View From a Rack, noted: How does offering to purchase breast milk from African American mothers compare to slavery? Slavery is a legal or economic system under which people are treated as property. Knowing that, the essence of slavery is using people as property, exploiting a group because of their race, economic status or religion for financial gain. Does that ring a bell for you? Medolac is proposing to collect African American women’s milk from low-income areas of Detroit, and sell it to hospitals for seven dollars. That’s a six hundred percent profit made off the backs (or breast in this case) of African American mothers! (para. 5) Moon’s blog post clearly situates Medolac’s efforts within a much larger historical context of discrimination and oppression, drawing parallels between the company’s use of Black breastfeeding women and slave owners’ use of Black labor. Calling attention to Black bodies, Moon remarks that Medolac is profiting “off the backs (or breast in this case) of African American mothers.” Race scholars have indicated the tension between discursive and material constructions of race, suggesting that embodiment is essential for understanding marginalization (see, e.g., Moraga, 1983). Using this lens we see how Moon, focusing on the materiality of Black mothers’ bodies, moves between the discursive constructions and the material conditions of race to make racism visible on and through the bodies of Black breastfeeding women. Rendering U.S. histories of racism visible within civic discourses that circulate the myths of postracism and colorblindness, Blacktavists resist and reject being categorized and labeled through White narratives and instead manage how they are seen by providing an intersectional account of the ways their raced, gendered, sexed, and classed bodies have been abused. As executive director of BMBFA and Internet blogger Kiddada Green (2015a) noted, “African American women have been impacted traumatically by historical commodification of our bodies” (para. 3). Similarly, Allers (2015), a consultant for BMBFA and independent blogger, addressing Medolac, articulated, “You disrespected the historical relationship between Black women and white women and our breast milk by not respecting the community enough to reach out to any Black breastfeeding advocates, advisors or organizations in devising your scheme” (para. 2). In both accounts, Green and Allers resist Medolac’s efforts to discursively construct their bodies as commodifiable by calling on the unique intersection of history, race, and gender. Specifically, by rooting their critique within these intersections, Green and Allers frame Black mothers as members of a supported and sustaining community and make an alternate narrative of Black motherhood visible within public discourse. Blacktavists’ strategy to link Medolac’s campaign to histories of Black exploitation is articulated discursively as well as represented through powerful visual images, image macros that can shape public discourse and manage the visibility of Black breastfeeding women. Image macros were one Facebook group’s primary contribution to the #StopMedolac campaign. The anonymous organizer(s) of the page “Breastfeeding Mothers Unite” posted a number of image macros during the campaign that were circulated and shared by other Blacktavists across various platforms. Both Figure 1 and Figure 2 were posted as profile pictures to the Breastfeeding Mothers Unite Facebook page and contextualize mothering rhetorics within a complex web of history, race, class, gender, and sexuality. In Figure 1, a drawing of a Black woman nursing a White infant appears in the foreground, while a White woman, presumably the infant’s mother, lies in a comfortable bed in the background of the image in a well-furnished bedroom. Visually representing the legacy of Black women working as wet nurses for their slave-owning mistresses, the image states, “Those who forget the past are doomed to repeat it” and includes the following: “#StopMedolac from targeting Black mothers in Detroit for breast milk.” This comment directs the viewer to connect slavery-era racial exploitation, a narrative that is banished from contemporary discourses of the postrace era in the United States, to Medolac’s campaign in Detroit. The relationship between the mistress, the slave, and the nursing child at once relies on embodiment to reinforce the heteronormativity of whiteness, while propagating the marginal sexuality of blackness. This occurs insofar as the White mother, having satisfied reproductive expectations (Carter, 2007), reclines to rest, while the wet nurse bares her Black breast for a White infant. Drawing together cultural expectations of race, gender, sexuality, and social class, this image macro reinforces generalizations of White motherhood as leisurely, privileged, and separated from the physical care of the infant, while motherhood is exploited, laborious, and inextricable from satisfying the physical needs of White women and infants. Highlighting the ways that Black female sexuality has been milked for White interests, Blacktavists position Black mothers as hypervisible within a postrace discursive landscape—requiring viewers to not only see race and racist relationships but also the complicit ways that gender, sexuality, and social class inform contemporary racial relationships in the United States.

Black, Indigenous, and other minority groups tend to congregate in the solidarity economy, also known as the third sector, as a place of refuge when they are marginalized and alienated from the state and private sectors. Not everyone can participate equally in the economy, a fact that is especially true for people of African descent. Economist Gordon Nembhard (2014a), in her work on structures of wealth building in low-income African American communities, argues that building an intentional community allows excluded people to create their own wealth systems. These teachings of collectively building wealth are not new. In “Caliban, Social Reproduction and Our Future Yet to Come,” Black Canadian scholar Mullings (2021) shows that when Caribbean people have had their humanity stripped away, they learned to build in ways that make their own lives whole, as well as those of others they care about. This is the work of the solidarity economy: correcting an inhumane market system that relegates people of African descent, Indigenous people, and other minority groups to the sidelines (see Hossein, 2018). The risk inherent in challenging dominant economic systems forces the solidarity economy into hiding—sometimes in plain sight. People who choose to come together even knowing the risks are building a new economy because they cannot dare to chase formal charities and businesses (Spade, 2020). Research on the social economy highlights the work of White organizers, especially those working to “interact” with other sectors, in this way erasing the cooperative economies of people of color. The Ogoni people of the Nigerian delta (Carr et al., 2001), the Self-Employed Women's Association in India (Bhatt, 2007), the Kuy people in Cambodia (Lyne, 2017), and the Movimento dos Trabalhadores Rurais Sem Terra (MST Landless Workers’ Movement) of Brazil (Dias Martins, 2000) are some of the examples of people using solidarity economies to bring change in business and society. So too are the bottom up efforts of Quilombos of Brazil, the Zapatistas of Mexico, the Black Lives Matter (BLM) movement, the Underground Railroad, and the Neechi Commons of Manitoba, Canada. As Black women scholars working in political economy, we choose to use the term, solidarity economy. In our rejection of the language of the social economy, we say no to the erasure of collective organizing done by excluded groups outside in the Global South and historically excluded groups in the West. By choosing the solidarity economy, we highlight the contributions the Black diaspora, Indigenous, and Global South people have made to social economics. We only ever use the “social economy” when the word Black is in front of it. This way, we nullify the generic use of the “social economy” because its European origins do not resonate for many people (Hossein, 2018). We know that many Western countries opt for the term “social economy,” but this concept fails to acknowledge the tensions and exclusions within the economy and the social economy itself. The social economy is also known as the third sector—a sector in which actors are neither state nor business firms. In the third sector, nonstate and noncapitalist institutions remake economies that are inclusive of those left out. The social economy is often told with its origins located in France. In France, the social economy has a “long tradition of defending the right to work and of searching for routes into work,” with a push to consider the inclusion of socially disadvantaged groups (Spear et al., 2017, p. 111). Canada's social economy legacy includes the Antigonish movement on the east coast and the Desjardins movement (cooperative banks) in Quebec. The former movement arose out of a search for solutions to the chronic socioeconomic problems that plagued the Atlantic provinces from the late 1800s (St. Francis Xavier University, 2018). With the help of two priests Coady and Tompkins, poor fisher folk organized into cooperatives to escape poverty and to gain power over their own means of production. Alphonse and Dorimène Desjardin set up the first Caisse Populaire in Levis, Quebec, beginning in the early 1900s, which became one of the most successful cooperative movements in the world (MacPherson, 2007). But it is the story of the working class artisans known as the Rochdale Pioneers, who protested against hazardous work and low wages that has come to dominate what we know about cooperativism (ICA, 2018). Through their cooperative, they provided quality foods and other basic goods at lower prices to the cooperative's members. “Most scholars” recognize this group of pioneers as the first cooperative, dating back to 1844 (Wilhoit, 2005). While these accounts are important to the rich history of the social economy, this history is Eurocentric and acknowledges only formal activities that interact with the state and private sectors. Historians John Curl (2012) and Richard C. Williams (2007) both highlight the contributions of Indigenous, African descended people and folks in the south. Professor Ash Amin (2009) in his edited collection takes note of the ways people, through the situated practice of knowing the local context, come together. In the 1990s, the mothers of the Plaza de Mayo took to the streets of Buenos Aires to mobilize against the murders and kidnapings of their sons, husbands, and brothers by the state (Navarro, 1990). This form of protest by the women of Argentina was collective and it took a lot of courage, and they were in no position to negotiate with state officials who were harming them at the time. Those who support an “interactive social economy” miss the point that many people cannot (or will not) interact with the government or private sectors because of the danger to their lives. To assume that actors in the third sector are socially inclined to work with the private and public sectors is a wrong one. Societies which are culturally stratified makes for complications in the allocation of goods. In the edited collection in the Black Social Economy (2018), the point was that the social economy like any other sector contains the tiering of class, race, and gender that affect its actors. Futures of Black Radicalism (Johnson & Lubin, 2017), edited by Gaye Theresa Johnson, and Alex Runin, reveal that many people who have endured enslavement, colonization, systemic racism, and racial capitalism are not ready to cooperate with their oppressors. They also show that Black people and other racially marginalized people will organize on their own. While the social economy is not equipped to reform a corrupt political economic system, the solidarity economy is mindful of action by racially marginalized people as noted in the work of Gordon Nebhard (2014). The solidarity economy is curated by those who have been excluded and who agitate for complete transformation. Black, Indigenous, and racialized people, especially those living in White-dominated countries, have had to struggle and contest openly to make change—and this can be deadly at times (Gordon Nembhard, 2014b; Hossein 2019; Mbembe, 2017). In the first section of our article, we define social economy and solidarity economy to understand why we choose the latter term. In the second section, we explain our use of Black feminist theory, building on Hill Collins’ (2000) political economy work and anchoring our understandings in G.K. Gibson-Graham's theories. We also situate our work within Gordon Nembhard's (2014a) research on intentional communities and organizing during adversity and hostility. The methods we draw on to complete this analysis are based on critical discourse analysis and case studies. In the concluding section, we draw on case studies to show why solidarity helps oppressed people. The social economy has served as a place of refuge for racially marginalized people to access and achieve financial and social goals. However, the history of the social economy largely excludes racialized populations, whose stories of organizing go untold within the Eurocentric perspective of the social economy's white gaze. The stories that dominate our learning about the social economy are the Rochdale Cooperative in the United Kingdom, the Antigonish movement on Canada's east coast, and the Desjardins cooperative movement in Quebec.1 Many social economy practitioners and scholars ignore such examples of the Black experience, failing to grasp the contributions of Black and racialized people, especially women, in informal arenas (Banks, 2020; Hossein, 2013, 2019). The monies for social innovations are redirected away from people, women with the lived experience to bring lasting change. Defining the Social Economy Definitions of the social economy often assume that sectors can interact (Quarter & Mook, 2018). In Canada, the social economy is defined as “a bridging concept for organizations that have social objectives central to their mission and their practice, and either have explicit economic objectives or generate some economic value through the services they provide and purchases they undertake” (Quarter et al., 2017, p. 4). This means that the social economy is distinct from both the public sector (the government) and the private sector (corporations and for-profit businesses). The concept of “bridging” assumes this overlapping of sectors is useful, and while this is true in some contexts, it is not the case everywhere. This definition also presupposes that the three sectors can “engage” and “interact” and that perhaps this is the goal. Nevertheless, how can all three sectors “interact” when conflict and harms are taking place? The definition does not consider the possibility that these three sectors may be in complete opposition to one another. What happens when a segment of society is harmed by and fears the state and corporations or chooses to self-exclude and to not overlap with them? The Fallacy of Bridging Given these tensions in the social economy, it cannot “bridge” the state and private sectors. The meaning of “bridge” in the social economy literature cannot encompass those who are left out or how their needs can be heard. Quarter et al. (2017) offer a classification of the social economy as a means by which to visualize the third part of a capitalist economy. In it, they suggest four categories for social economy organizations: public sector nonprofits, community economic developments, social economy businesses, and civil society organizations. These categories largely comprise a white-washed and generic list of organizations whose work does not prioritize profit. Despite the social economy's definition as “bridging” the state and private companies (Quarter & Mook, 2010), the idea that the three sectors—private, public, and social economy—can work toward a common goal is a fallacy. It discounts the struggles being undertaken in the solidarity economy and the exclusions of groups from the social economy. No room is made for those left out of the system because of racial inequities or racial capitalism. The concept of belonging is lost when we assume that we can “bridge” and build “partnerships.” Such an assumption is erroneous, as the following quote of John A. Powell, a civil rights expert and director of the Othering and Belonging Institute at UC Berkeley, shows: “Belonging is based on the recognition of our full humanity without having to become something different or pretend we’re all the same. We are always both the same (humanity) and different (human), and are also multiple and dynamic, constantly renegotiating who we are” (Powell, 2021). Powell thus notes that difference is key to making people feel they are free to engage in the economy and society. His point highlights that this notion of “belonging”— that is, taking note of people's identities—is important in considering how goods are shared. The “bridging” concept should recognize the need for extra steps in the current ecosystem of the social economy to remove the alienating politics from within it and to listen to excluded groups and minorities to ensure they have a sense of belonging. Some scholars have invested in this idea of bridging when they write about the social economy. However, they ignore the bias that is within the social economy when they push for this bridging. The Venn diagram in Figure 1 displays the interactive social economy according to Quarter et al. (2017). The spheres depict the overlapping of the three sectors, but the diagram fails to show the exclusions. The actors of the social economy who can negotiate with the dominant powers do so, and those who cannot are relegated to the vague space called “civil society.”

A growing body of scholarship highlights that accumulation by dispossession (Harvey, 2003) creates surplus populations who must sustain themselves outside wage labor (cf. Li, 2010; Perreault, 2013; Sanyal, 2014 [2007]; Sassen, 2010). Noting that many of the dispossessed turn to the informal economy, this literature establishes the need to interrogate how informal aspects of the economy are bound up in processes of accumulation by dispossession. However, there is a tendency to focus exclusively on how accumulation by dispossession leads people to become informal workers. Disrupting the unidirectional nature of this narrative, this article explores how informal workers create new spheres of accumulation that the state and formal capital seek to capture. The article is based on analysis of the attempt by the Johannesburg Council and its Pikitup waste management company to grant a tender to a private company to recycle materials at the Marie Louise landfill in Soweto, South Africa. It draws on 42 group interviews with informal reclaimers who salvaged materials at the dump and 63 individual interviews with reclaimers, Pikitup management, and Council representatives conducted between March 2009 and August 2010 as part of a longer social history of the dump. I argue that the Council and Pikitup’s desire to enclose the dump must not be taken as the simple effort to dispossess reclaimers of a pre-existing resource. Historically, garbage dumps have been the final burial grounds for unwanted commodities and sites for the permanent destruction of value. Drawing on Searle’s (2006) theorization of social ontology, I explore what is required to transform a dump from a commodity cemetery to a resource mine. I argue that at Marie Louise (as at many dumps across the developing world), it was informal reclaimers who re-cast the waste as valuable and the dump as a site for the production of value through a combination of intellectual labor, physical labor, and struggle. In attempting to enclose the dump, the municipality sought to capture the physical materials interred within it as well as the very framing and establishment of these materials as valuable, while simultaneously erasing the role of reclaimers in these processes. The reclaimers’ understanding that they produced both the knowledge and the new sphere of accumulation that the Council and Pikitup were trying to appropriate played a pivotal role in spurring them to contest and ultimately prevent the enclosure of the dump. ‘‘Epistemic injustice’’ that disregarded the reclaimers in their capacity as knowers (Fricker, 2007) and epistemic dispossession were therefore central to both the attempted process of accumulation by dispossession and how it was successfully challenged. Highlighting the epistemic and social agency of informal workers frequently considered the epitome of ‘‘human waste’’ (Bauman, 2004) establishes the importance of recognizing all informal workers as producers of knowledge who transform social reality and interrogating the implications for how we theorize accumulation by dispossession. The article proceeds in six sections. The first reviews literature on accumulation by dispossession and the informal economy. The second draws on Searle’s (2006) theorization of social ontology to understand how sanitary landfills are established and transformed as social facts. The third section explores how reclaimers converted Marie Louise from a commodity cemetery into a resource mine, while the fourth analyzes how neoliberalization created a motivation for the municipality to enclose the dump in order to benefit from this transformation in its social ontology. The fifth section argues that ‘‘epistemic injustice’’ (Fricker, 2007) and epistemic dispossession are central to accumulation by dispossession and struggles against it. The final section draws out implications for theorizations of accumulation by dispossession. Accumulation by dispossession and the informal economy In Capital, Marx (1990) focuses primarily on the dynamics of expanded reproduction within capitalism. However, since Perelman (2000) highlighted the continuing nature of primitive accumulation throughout capitalism’s history, a growing body of literature theorizes the role, form, and nature of primitive accumulation within contemporary capitalism (cf. de Angelis, 2001, 2004; Hart, 2006; Harvey, 2003). The understanding of primitive accumulation as an ongoing process is most closely associated with David Harvey’s arguments in The New Imperialism (Harvey, 2003). Harvey argues that in order to assist capital in addressing a crisis of overaccumulation, neoliberal governments are creating new spheres of accumulation by privatizing public goods and services and facilitating the enclosure of common resources. As this form of accumulation is not limited to the birth of capitalism, Harvey argues against calling it ‘‘primitive’’ and proposes the alternative concept of ‘‘accumulation by dispossession.’’ Webber notes that Harvey’s theorization of accumulation by dispossession differs from Marx’s understanding of primitive accumulation in important ways. Most crucially, while for Marx primitive accumulation changes class relations by separating producers from their means of production and forcing them into wage labor, Harvey’s accumulation by dispossession includes the erosion of common property rights to means of consumption (Webber, 2008: 401). As it is not focused exclusively on changes to access to the means of production, the concept ‘‘accumulation by dispossession’’ opens the possibility that dispossession is not necessarily bound up in a shift to wage labor. Li observes that even at the time of the initial enclosure movement, dispossessed peasants did not move seamlessly into waged employment (Li, 2010: 70–71). She and a range of scholars argue that a key feature of accumulation by dispossession in the current era is precisely the fact that dispossession is delinked from proletarianization, as capital values the resources to be enclosed, but not the people who must be dispossessed of them. Rather than being a central mechanism for bringing people into capitalist labor relations, accumulation by dispossession plays the opposite role of rendering increasing numbers of people permanently surplus to the needs of capital (Li, 2010; Perreault, 2013; Sanyal, 2014 [2007]; Sanyal and Bhattacharyya, 2009; Sassen, 2010; Soederberg, 2012). As many of these people turn to the informal economy to generate their livelihoods, this understanding facilitates fresh ways of theorizing the relationship between enclosure, dispossession, the informal economy, and capitalism. Scholars working with a classical Marxist understanding in which the transition to wage labor is central to primitive accumulation see the rise of the informal economy as pathological and as evidence of a stalled transition to ‘‘real’’ capitalism (Moore, 2004: 91–92). By contrast, Sanyal sees informal workers (other than those subcontracted by capital) as part of the ‘‘need economy’’ constituted by people excluded from capitalist relations. Rather than serving as evidence of an incomplete capitalist transition, they are an integral part of the ‘‘capital – not-capital’’ complex that, as Sanyal argues, characterizes postcolonial economies. According to Sanyal, because India is a democracy, government cannot simply abandon the excluded and must engage in ‘‘developmental governmentality’’ to reverse the effects of primitive accumulation by supporting people in the ‘‘need economy’’ to reproduce themselves outside the circuits of capital. For Sanyal, government support for the informal economy is not about promoting budding capitalists, but is, instead, about containing the political effects of dispossession by ensuring that people excluded from wage labor are able to sustain themselves (Sanyal, 2014 [2007]). Gidwani and Wainright (2014: 44–45) correctly note that Sanyal overstates the separation of the need economy and the accumulation economy and fails to recognize that, far from being permanently quarantined within the informal economy, people move between wage labor and informal work. In addition, it is important to note how economic activities themselves cross the so-called need and accumulation economies. While Sanyal and Bhattacharyya claim there are two distinct spheres within the informal economy – one linked to circuits of capital through subcontracting and outsourcing and one completely outside capitalist circuits (Sanyal and Bhattacharyya, 2009: 36) – reality cannot be parsed into such neat categories. For example, informal reclaimers salvage materials for a range of purposes that span the so-called need and accumulation economies. They reclaim reusable items such as food, clothing, furniture, and building materials for personal use and for sale to people who will use them as is or as inputs into informal production. They also collect recyclable materials that may initially be sold informally to intermediaries but are transformed into inputs for formal production as they are sold upwards into highly globalized value chains. Reclaimers’ decisions regarding what to collect and sell are informed and conditioned by a number of factors, including access to waste; knowledge of and access to markets; conditions in the multiple markets for their materials; relations with the state, formal business, customers and the community where they work; and power-laden social relations of gender, race, ethnicity, and nationality between reclaimers themselves.1 While reclaimers’ actions are, therefore, undeniably shaped and constrained by other actors and the contexts within which they work, reclaimers are also active and central agents in the forging of recycling systems. As elaborated below, in most postcolonial contexts, recycling services were created informally by reclaimers. Until the point when municipalities develop formal policy on recycling, reclaimers’ integration into formal circuits of capital results from their own decisions based on known constraints, opportunities, and conditions, rather than being determined by the informalization strategies of capital as assumed by Sanyal (Samson, forthcoming). Once it is understood that the formal and informal economies constitute an interrelated, dynamic, complex whole, it is possible to develop a more nuanced understanding of accumulation by dispossession and the informal economy than that presented by Sanyal. Sanyal’s focus on the relationship between accumulation by dispossession and the informal economy is one-sided and unidirectional, focusing only on how accumulation by dispossession and exclusion foster the creation and expansion of the informal economy. However, Soederberg’s (2012) theorization of the extension of formal credit to poor Mexicans who previously relied on informal lending as a form of accumulation by dispossession demonstrates that accumulation by dispossession can also involve the formal economy capturing a sphere of accumulation forged within the informal economy. Unfortunately Soederberg does not analyze the dynamics of this process or ask crucial questions related to how the informal market was created, functioned, or was affected by the capture of a significant proportion of clients by formal lenders. She also does not interrogate how workers and lenders in the informal credit market resisted accumulation by dispossession or were affected by it. Answering such questions is, however, crucial to developing a more complete theorization of accumulation by dispossession and the informal economy. This task is taken up in the remainder of the article through a study of how the state and formal capital attempted to capture recycling activities created informally by reclaimers at the Marie Louise landfill in Soweto, as well as how this was contested. As I am particularly interested in understanding how reclaimers informally create a new sphere of accumulation, I am closely attentive to their role as creators of both knowledge and resources.

In fact, however, distinctions in the method of wage payment—the different forms that wages take, the different means by which they are paid, and the different measures of output they represent—have been central to the history of service work. Attention to the systemic feminization and racialization of various wage systems not only lets us connect sex work with other forms of service work but also links service work to longer and more global histories of hyper-exploitation within informal labor markets. Attention to the history of waitressing in the United States, for instance, reveals an intimate connection between tipping and the feminization of certain professions. Early twentieth-century union activists and Progressive Era feminists who believed tipping would encourage female immorality even sound rather like Fleming; thus, one reformer argued “the tip establishes between [the male customer] and the girl [waitress] a relation of patronage which may easily be made the beginning of improper attentions,” while the Industrial Workers of the World claimed that tipping would make female service workers “servile, slavish . . . and [likely] to succumb to ‘the easier way’ of loose morals” (qtd. in Cobble 1991: 42). Such accounts suggest that tip work was feminized because tips elicited excessive feminine “servility” and “slavishness.” In fact, however, tip wages were the result of a hyperexploitative labor arrangement already yoked both to racialization (one of the first US companies to force employees to rely almost entirely on tips was the Pullman Company, which hired only Black men from the South because “the southern negro is . . . more adapted to serve with a smile”) and to gender (Seagrave 1998: 17–18; see also Cobble 1991; Oat- man 2016). Meanwhile, the connection between waitressing and sex work ran the other way, too, as sex workers caught by police with cash in their pockets and in danger of arrest often claimed it was tips from their waitressing job (see Cobble 1991: 24–25). All these workers—the Pullman porters, the waitresses, and the sex workers who claimed to be waitresses—have been left out of traditional working-class organization not because cash is sleazy, and not because those who rely on tips have “loose morals” or are somehow more abject than those who punch a time clock for their wage, but rather because these forms of work and these methods of wage payment have been so effectively racialized and feminized

The Western cultural imaginary that the market and intimacy are and ought to remain bounded spheres of human activity–the ‘separate spheres and hostile worlds’ view (Zelizer2005, p. 22)–affects the value of the activities that more visibly transgress it :sex and care work. Their construction as acts and attachments that should not be for sale generates and reproduces an ‘economy of affect’(Richard and Rudnyckyj.2009) which makes certain bodies more likely to perform these activities. In contemporary Western European countries it is indeed largely migrant women who occupy the positions of the carer (see for example Barone and Mocetti2011, Triandafyllidou and Marchetti2013)and the sex worker i.e. the market equivalents of the binary roles of the wife-and-mother or of the prostitute that the heteronormative order reserves to women (Grosz1990, p. 129). The transgression of the (fictitious) boundaries safeguarding the sphere of intimacy from the commodification of its constitutive acts and attachments (hereinafter the market/inti-macy binary) appears to be the condition of possibility of their migratory projects. However, in contexts increasingly characterised by restrictive mobility regimes(Vuolajärvi 2018) and repressive prostitution policies within and across national borders the intersection of work, intimacy and migration gives rise to different hierarchies of visibility and policy concern for the precarious, exploitative and hazardous conditions under which women perform their labour. Following Constable’s invitation to cast ‘the pairing of commodification and intimacy’ as the main topic of analysis (Constable2009, p. 58), and drawing from my ethnographic fieldwork in Italy, in this article I discuss the relationship between work and intimacy in thelives of migrant women for whom the commodification of intimate acts and attachments byand large encapsulates their opportunities to sustain themselves and their transnational intimacies. To this purpose I use Berlant’s concept of ‘cruel optimism’, which she defines as‘a relation of attachment to compromised conditions of possibility’ whereby a subject projects its continuity into an enabling object that is also disabling’(Berlant2006,p.21).For Berlant,‘the conditions of ordinary life in the contemporary world [. . .] are conditionsof the attrition or the wearing out of the subject’(ibid., 23). Hence, in this article I argue that the intricate entanglement–rather than the separation–of sex, care, love and work inmigrant women’s lives constitutes what makes their under-valued, exploitative and risky jobs meaningful and valuable to them, as they pursue their cruelly optimistic attachments toa better life for themselves and their family members. The dire conditions under whichwomen perform sex and care work attest to the workings of intersecting structures of inequality, as inflected (mainly) by gender, class, race and sexuality, and primarily the gendered and racialised (Brah1993) economy of affect engendered by the market/intimacybinary, restrictive mobility regimes and discriminatory prostitution laws. In showing migrant women’s predicaments I aim to contribute to contemporary feminist scholars’ and sex workers rights activists’ debates in academia and policy making spaces on the nature and regulation of prostitution, arguing for rescaling its relationship to harm from an ontological to a phenomenological level. This article is based on my larger ethnographic research project on the relationship between sex, pleasure and the market in processes of women’s subjectification incontemporary Western countries. In 2012–13 I conducted 14 months of fieldwork in Italy, moving across a continuum of spaces of leisure and work wherein Italian andmigrant women consumed and/or commodified their sexual desirability–pole dance schools, discos, strip clubs, and streets where the sale of sex is negotiated. I conducted41 open-ended interviews with women working as pole dance entrepreneurs and/or teachers, burlesquers ,ragazze immagine(image girls),3acrobatic strippers, lap dancers and indoor sex workers, and two with former street sex workers who are now activists working in harm-reduction programmes. Simultaneously, I collaborated for a year with two non-governmental organisations providing sexual and reproductive health infor-mation to street sex workers, and I regularly volunteered in the night-time outreach activities (hereinafter: mobile unit) organised by one of them.4This article brings together the experiences of migrant women occupying different positions in the sphere of commodified intimacy in Italy. The interview with Kate–a young Ukrainian woman working as image girl while in higher education–discloses the predicament of her mother, who travelled to Italy as an undocumented migrant and achieved family reunification with her daughter only after several years of informal employment as a careworker. The field notes from my activities with the mobile unit relay fragments of the conversations between ‘us’ in the van–frequently women, Italian, and in a self-ascribed ‘helping’ role–and the female sex workers whom we reached out to. Power flows across and structures all social situations (Foucault1977), and inevitably shapes the circulation of words, emotions, expectations and silences in the interaction between the researcher and the subjects of her research. I am therefore aware that my position as a white female researcher with Italian (i.e. EU) citizenship influenced my fieldwork, and that the power imbalances were particularly intense in the interaction with the women I encountered while on the mobile unit. This awareness is reflected in my analytic approach to these exchanges as narratives: their value, therefore, does not pertain to the realm of un/truth but to the performative. What they foreground is women’s negotiation of their predicaments in the context of the profound disparities shaping the space between us.The article is structured as follows. First, I trace the workings of intersecting gendered, class-based and racialised hierarchies of power in the economy of affectengendered by the market/intimacy binary. Next I highlight the place and meaning of this trope in feminist and sex workers rights activists’ debates on prostitution. Subsequently, I show how female migrants in Italy navigate care and sex work in contexts characterised by restrictive mobility regimes and discriminatory prostitution laws.