Concept Notes: Radical Feminism & Radical Constitutionalism Fighting over Sex Work
These notes are an early attempt to map (or, make sense of?) the volatile intersection where radical feminism, radical constitutionalism, and the politics of sex work collide, clash, and sometimes cannibalize themselves. A war amongst bodies, rights, and revolution. On Notes and Incompletion: These notes do not aim to resolve contradictions. They gather them, like dangerous seeds. Every map is partial. Every collision unfinished. These sketches honor the risk of thinking without safety nets.
A brief note on Radical Feminism's general view on sex work (across borders, divergent battles).
Focus
Sex work as patriarchal violence; "choice" seen as false consciousness; bodies are political battlegrounds. Female bodies are grounds filled with sexual resources that the patriarchal culture eyes to mine, conserve, drill, derive resources from whether through force, manipulation, money or crises. Like an open oil field that must be fenced, regulated, and exploited, but never owned by itself, the female body becomes a territory under permanent contest where the dreams of consent and will rot. “Radical feminism” is not monolithic.
Thinkers?
- Radical feminists like Andrea Dworkin and Catharine MacKinnon framed prostitution not as just an economic choice but as systemic sexual violence: a continuation of the patriarchal extraction of female bodies.
- Critical legal scholars like Duncan Kennedy have long questioned whether constitutional neutrality is just an illusion masking deeper hegemonies.
- Across borders, other radical voices complicated and challenged these frameworks.
- Angela Davis for a more intersectional, prison abolitionist view tied to sex work and systemic violence. Davis exposed how sex work, racialized incarceration, and patriarchal violence form an inseparable triangle — a critique often missing from mainstream radical feminism: Deeply critical of both mainstream white feminism and capitalist structures. Connected sex work debates with prison labor, racial capitalism, and systemic violence. She had: When women of color raise critical issues about racism and sexism in the criminal justice system, they are not simply demanding inclusion — they are fundamentally challenging the legitimacy of the system itself.
- Cherríe Moraga and Gloria Anzaldúa taught that liberation must begin at the faultlines: race, language, sexuality, not at the polished centers where traditional feminism first took root. Radical critiques of how white feminism ignored race, indigeneity, and class. Brought attention to the borderlands, literal and metaphorical, where oppression and survival tactics overlap.
- Audre Lorde: Not a "radical feminist" in the MacKinnon sense, but an uncompromising radical voice. Absolutely ferocious in calling out the failures of white feminism. Audre Lorde warned that the master's tools would never dismantle the master's house (TMTWNDTMH) : an indictment as true for the commodification of bodies as it is for the legal frames pretending neutrality.
- Sylvia Tamale: Critical of colonial legal systems in Africa. Fights for sexual rights, including decolonizing the sex work debate from both imperial and patriarchal biases. Sylvia Tamale’s radical legal critique urges a decolonized feminism where sexual agency is not redefined through European moral codes but reclaimed through indigenous understandings of autonomy.
- Flavia Agnes exposed how in postcolonial India, women's bodies became the battleground for religious, nationalist, and patriarchal contests, making any simple "liberation" narrative deeply suspect. Radical critic of the way Indian law treats women’s bodies — not just via "rights" but through caste, religion, and state power. Strongly involved in the rights of Muslim women and critiquing how Western feminisms flatten religious and cultural complexities.
- Kamla Bhasin: Feminist icon, radical critic of patriarchy, militarism, and capitalism. Huge voice across South Asia for feminist organizing. Brought gender critique to rural and working-class women, not just academia. Deeply skeptical of Western export feminism. Kamla Bhasin insisted that true feminist struggle in South Asia must reckon with feudalism, imperialism, and capitalist exploitation not merely legal reforms.
- Nighat Said Khan: Radical feminist activist and academic. Co-founded the Women’s Action Forum (WAF) in Pakistan — fighting military dictatorship, religious fundamentalism, and legalized misogyny (like Hudood Ordinances). Believes feminist struggle must be anti-authoritarian and anti-imperial — a double battle. Nighat Said Khan showed that in Pakistan, feminist radicalism meant fighting both state authoritarianism and religious extremism: a dual front Western models rarely accounted for.
- Gita Sen: Economist, feminist, policy thinker. Radical work linking gender, poverty, health, and global capitalism. Big figure in international women’s movements (DAWN — Development Alternatives with Women for a New Era). Gita Sen revealed that sexual autonomy without economic justice remains a hollow promise especially in a global economy built on women's precarious labor.
- Diversity of radical feminist thought: Radical critiques of sex work were never monolithic. Black, Chicana, Asian and African feminists reframed the debate from the margins, exposing layers of race, colonialism, and survival that mainstream radical feminism often erased.
A brief note on Radical Constitutionalism's assumptions about sex work and law.
Focus
- Rights, autonomy, anti-moralism; but often assumes a "neutral" legal frame that’s anything but neutral.
- Sometimes, so neutral it is far from the reaches of common woman.
- Sometimes, so neutral it is the complacent, benefit-mongered elevator of patriarchy.
Thinkers?
- Radical constitutionalists, especially post-1960s libertarians and critical legal theorists, emphasized autonomy, individual rights, and skepticism toward moralistic governance yet often embedded "neutrality" that served existing hierarchies more deeply, disguising domination as freedom.
- Duncan Kennedy and the Critical Legal Studies (CLS) movement exposed how legal structures that claimed neutrality were often saturated with hidden political commitments.
- Catharine MacKinnon (crossing over between radical feminism and CLS) argued that "neutrality" in law often meant male dominance naturalized and codified.
- CLS fractured partly because it couldn’t reconcile the tension between radical deconstruction of law and the need for actionable political projects.
- Roberto Mangabeira Unger pushed constitutional theory beyond rights language entirely, urging "institutional imagination" to dismantle ossified hierarchies.
- Robin West (though a bit later) critiqued how libertarian constitutionalism sacrificed substantive justice for hollow autonomy.
- Patricia Williams (Critical Race Theory) showed that legal liberalism’s promise of universal rights was a mask over deep racial and economic stratification.
- At its radical edge, constitutionalism became a battle not merely to defend rights, but to expose how rights themselves could be weaponized to sustain injustice.
- This mirrors how radical feminism sometimes collapsed into cannibalism over “what counts” as oppression or agency.
A thought on where their principles overlap (even if they hate to admit it, like The Awkward Family Resemblance).
What Radical Feminism and Radical Constitutionalism believe about the body, rights, and freedom.
- Both obsess over the body as a site of struggle.
- Both define freedom in absolute terms — but interpret it differently.
- Freedom is coded in beautiful black and white; rights are (somehow?) wild, complex creatures that refuse to be tamed, no matter who claims to charter them.
Where the fights over sex work explode (key flashpoints).
- Where they agree on critique but diverge on solutions.
- Sex work as both labor and subjugation: unsolvable tension.
When internal contradictions eat their own movements alive.
- Feminists who silence other (trans- and sex worker-inclusionary) feminists.
- Constitutionalists who secretly encode moral judgments while claiming neutrality.
What new battlegrounds are emerging?
- The legal recognition battles, public discourse wars, international policy clashes.
- Sweden's 'Nordic Model' versus New Zealand's full decriminalization: a constitutional fight by proxy.
- Global south versus global north framings of sex work rights: who defines liberation?
- Decriminalization debates in South Africa (ongoing 2023–2024) — huge battleground.
- Trans rights legal fights linking bodily autonomy + sex work legality (especially in U.S. + UK).
- Online platform labor debates (OnlyFans banning explicit content briefly in 2021 — then reversing): How "sex work" is policed economically by "neutral" corporate platforms. When will be lean in even harder to how data commodification makes the body a new oil field especially through predictive policing, bio-surveillance, OnlyFans, TikTok identity commodification, etc. The future isn't just sex work as labor — it's desire itself as pre-monetized output.
- Hudood Ordinances in Pakistan — how "morality" law crushed women's sexual and legal rights. (links to constitutionalism hypocrisy.)
- New Zealand Prostitution Reform Act 2003 — first fully decriminalized sex work — based on bodily autonomy arguments. (links to constitutionalism radicality.) — reframed sex work as labor — a constitutional rupture few Western nations have dared match since. But, post-decriminalization discrimination in New Zealand still persists for migrants, trans sex workers.
A reflection on how both can turn cannibalistic (e.g., feminists devouring feminists; constitutionalists eating their own strategy).
What if Radical Feminism misunderstood autonomy from the beginning?
- Perhaps autonomy was never a pure good, but a bargaining chip traded in a rigged game of bodily exploitation.
What if Radical Constitutionalism secretly preserves the same moral judgments it claims to reject?
- The law disrobes itself of god, only to slip quietly into the old garments of power.
How does the legal frame collapse when bodies become markets and "the body" becomes a commodity?
- The body, once deemed sacred or sovereign, becomes nothing but another asset to be taxed, trafficked, or trashed according to the whims of commerce.
- As markets evolve, the commodification of bodies increasingly extends beyond flesh into data, metadata, and predictive algorithms, where autonomy is not only sold but anticipated and engineered.
- Every radical dream is also a wager against time — and time, relentless, corrupts all architecture.
Is it possible for both camps to be (fatally) right — and fatally wrong — at once?
- Each glimpses a shard of truth; each bleeds into the same abyss they claim to resist.
Why does every revolution cannibalize, devour its children?
- Because the hunger for purity outpaces the patience for imperfection, and even the most righteous cause, when cornered, must feed on its own to survive.
Is autonomy even salvageable after capitalism?
What if "agency" is a mirage generated by trauma?
What if "neutral rights" are structurally incapable of grasping collective survival needs, because they fetishize the individual?
Closing note: an open-ended question or provocation, not a neat summary.
- If both radical feminism and radical constitutionalism stumble over the politics of sex work, where else might the logic of liberation be quietly failing us? And if our best frameworks turn cannibal at their extremes, what remains of the dream of liberation itself?
- These are ghosts we (have to...?) carry. These notes circle around histories of betrayal: by the state, by law, by movements themselves. Every dream of freedom leaves behind its ghosts. Some howl; some whisper. Some demand new maps.
- If liberation demands impossible solidarities — between bodies selling survival and laws pretending neutrality — how do we name the struggle without consuming it?
Future Fieldnotes (Ghostnotes?)
(Fieldnote, 2045):
"The wars of freedom collapsed into wars of markets. The laws promised neutrality but delivered nothing but cold dominion. The ghosts, it turns out, built the next empire."
(Fieldnote, 2060):
"Consent, once a rallying cry, had become a checkbox inside every algorithm. Autonomy flickered briefly — then was uploaded and sold at auction."
(Fieldnote, 2073):
"The last courthouse burned not with fire, but with laughter. Freedom arrived wearing borrowed clothes and a counterfeit badge."
(Fieldnote, 2081):
"Sex became a subscription service Liberation was offered — but only with a 30-day free trial."
(Fieldnote, 2057):
"The old feminisms came back, limping on prosthetic slogans. Nobody could remember if 'choice' had been a promise or a curse."
(Fieldnote, 2099):
"Autonomy was redesigned by committee. You had to fill out six forms to feel anger legally."
(Fieldnote, 2105):
"The Constitution was rewritten in emoticons. Every clause ended with a shrug."
(Fieldnote, 2112):
"Bodies no longer required identification. Ownership was assumed by whoever uploaded you first."
(Fieldnote, 2088):
"Somewhere deep in the ruins, a small group still whispered the old names: Freedom. Justice. Solidarity. They treated the words like endangered seeds."
Additional Notes for the Unfinished Map
On the Failure of Language:
Maybe freedom itself is a word too small to hold what a body knows.
On the Price of Neutrality
Neutrality is a country built on the graves of those it refuses to see.
On the Myth of Rights
What if rights were not shields, but mirrors? And some mirrors, once cracked, can only ever wound.
On Global South Feminisms
The map of liberation drawn in Paris or New York never fit the scars worn in Lagos, Karachi, or Bogotá.
On Thinking Itself
Thinking dangerously is remembering that every theory, once worshiped too long, demands its own blood sacrifice.
On Radical Movements
Every movement, if it forgets its ghosts, eventually builds a prison out of the very stones it meant to hurl.
On Incompleteness
The unfinished thought is the only honest one.
On Witnessing
Some violences are not spoken — they are only inherited, breathed, and carried in the break of the voice.
On the Violence of Safety
Safety is often just the name the powerful give to their cages.
On Ownership of the Body
A body is never "owned." It is only ever stewarded, temporarily, against the claws of history.
On Silence and Speech
Some truths can only be spoken once they have been betrayed.
On Imported Feminisms
Liberation scripted in the empire’s tongue will always mistranslate the wound.
On Forgetting and Survival
To survive, sometimes you must forget what survival costs. But the body remembers — under the skin, in the break of bone, in the refusal to obey.
On Legal Ghosts
Every constitution hums with the unfinished funerals of the ones it refused to save.
On Commodification
First they sold our hands. Then our faces. Then our data. Now they auction our desires before we even know them ourselves.
On Movements and Memory
Every revolution forgets the street vendors first.
On Law and Love
The law pretends to be neutral. Love pretends to be pure. Neither survives the market without bleeding.
On Failure
A failed movement still teaches the soil how to breathe differently.
Reading Dump
- https://lareviewofbooks.org/article/our-bodies-our-business/