A Prostitutes’ Jamboree: The World Whores’ Congresses of the 1980s and the Rise of a New Feminism

Abstract

W e a r i n g a b l a c k c l o t h W r a p p e d around her head that obscured her eyes and nose, a spokeswoman for the Marxist-feminist English Collective of Prostitutes (ECP) gave a heated interview to a reporter from the British weekly The Observer in the wake of the second World Whores’ Congress in 1986. “Forget the reasons the academics and do-gooders come up with: women don’t go on the game for kicks, or because they were raped as children, or because they like the lifestyle—they do it for money,” she said, rejecting competing discourses that reduced women’s motives in selling sex to pleasure seeking, psychological pathology, or personal preference.1 Another masked woman, arms crossed defiantly, told the reporter that “women should have the right to choose whether to go on the game and not be forced into it because they need the money,” cautioning against what she understood to be a sanguine appraisal of the role of free will in sex work.2 Insisting on anonymity to protect the legal and social vulnerability of its members, the ECP rejected what it perceived as the prowork, institutional orientation of the congress, hosted by the European Parliament in Brussels and organized by two prostitutes’ advocacy organizations, US-based Call Off Your Old Tired Ethics (COYOTE) and the Red Thread of the Netherlands. Building on a history of radical confrontation with the state, ECP members boycotted the congress because of its alleged appeal to federal