Débattre la prostitution: les politiques du savoir

Abstract

Prostitution seems to play a key role nowadays in academic and public debates about women's status in complex societies and the ways political discourses take into account sexualities. The aim of this article is to offer a survey of different manners of theorising prostitution. More precisely, it tends to free the subject of prostitution from a field imposed by a totalizing discourse driven by a medical gaze and oversaturated by ethical and dogmatic prejudices and to redeem its theoretical substance. We believe that this dialogue between traditional scholarly discrete disciplines on prostitution might open new perspectives on the democracy's assets and enrich the critical inquiry on gender and politics. Our view on this topic tries to debunk essentialist views inherited from the great narratives built up by political philosophy and bring the subject of prostitution to a critical condition, by exposing the discourses that shaped it.