On Exploitation

You know how I've been struggling with the exploitation narratives. So I found an authoritative (read academic) book, Freakery: Cultural Spectacles of the Extraordinary Body.  With a chapter about "The Problem of Volition and Valorization," by David Gerber. Thinking it might hit the question right on the nose, I ordered the book from Interlibrary Loan, waited until 2 days before it was due, and opened the chapter.

Gerber asks, "If an individual consents, by virtue of what appear to be acts of free choice, to being degraded, exploited,or oppressed, does the act of consent end the moral problem that his or her situation seems to constitute?" (38).  I guess that's one way of putting it. Things got dicey early on. You remember that one of my many points of connection to Julia is that we both exhibited our extraordinary bodies (hers more than mine -- extraordinary). But I was an exotic dancer once upon a time, eventually promoted to stripper and proud of it by gum! But no, Gerber and people he calls "contemporary feminists" look down on "women who choose to work as go-go dancers," lumping us in with mud wrestlers and prostitutes. "Rituals of debasement" he calls it, "Oppression by unwanted attention." Unwanted?



And yes, Gerber and my own contemporary feminists conclude that what Julia and I did is wrong wrong wrong. Reflecting on Tom Thumb's life, he argues that such exhibition can be seen as a "gesture of defiance" towards a "hostile, insensitive world of ignorant suckers." Somehow I don't think Julia saw it that way. I know I didn't.