“What’s Wrong with Prostitution?”: The Discourse of the Print Media in the Perestroika Era

Abstract

The article analyzes the programmatic discourse on prostitution that arose in the Soviet print media in the era of Perestroika. Within the framework of situational discourse analysis, the construction of the image of women who provide commercial sex services is studied. One of the main theses of the article is that “prostitution” is a heterogeneous discursive assemblage, which includes various elements mutually constituting each other. During Perestroika, the discourse on prostitution was simultaneously a discourse about the role of the journalist, gender order, state and national boundaries, capitalism and socialism, motherhood, currency, power relations, labor, consumption, forms of life, and morals. Th e consideration and attention to the heterogeneity of the composition of “prostitution” as a discursive assemblage/object opens the possibility for feminist analysis and critique of this phenomenon, based not on pre-established positions and categories, but on situational, immanent and de-essentialist analysis of discursive production. Thus, the position of certain feminist researchers who argue that prostitution in its essence represents the oppression of women by men, the objectification of the female body, and the exploitation of female sexuality, is questioned. Instead, it is argued that feminist politics that refuse essentialist assertions must be attentive to the multitude and variety of experiences, situations, discourses assembled under the umbrella term “sex work/prostitution”.