egalitarian spirit of Islam supports both men and women regardless of class and occupation.

To conclude, secular forces, instead of being weakened by Islamic feminists as Shahidian argues, can in fact draw on their arguments to question the absolutist base of religious rulings and to highlight the limitations of a legal system based in religion. They can also point to the factional differences within the Islamic Republic and use these as evidence that political power undermines the authority and legitimacy of religion, thereby strengthening their demands for the separation of religion from the state, and for equal rights for all citizens, regardless of religious belief.

Juliet Mitchell's theme is the importance of sibling relationships, not just for social and interpersonal relations but for their influence in the development of our subjectivities, including gendered subjectivities. She is writing against the psychoanalytic perspective in which 'the Oedipus complex and preOedipal motherinfant relationship are presented as the only nexuses that link the internal world of unconscious thought processes and affects with the external social world ' (p. 190). The book pursues the argument that sibling relationships are an equally important nexus of linkage between psychic and social worlds and finds a startling and important range of implications. If internalized social relationships are the major elements of the psyche (p. 1), then sibling relationships deserve a central place in our thinking. On the face of it, Mitchell's thesis might not seem as momentous as I believe it is. By the time that she has followed through the implications of her arguments, it looks not only as if psychoanalysis needs as radical an overhaul as it has already undergone (not least through the influence of feminists like Mitchell) but that feminist theory could find insights here that transform its understanding of sexual and gender difference. Her thesis has implications for a broad and politically relevant array of social issues:

Maternal fantasies and enactments with their babies as loved/hated angels or monsters, paternal sexual violence, worldwide wife-beating and the feminization of hysteria, war and peace: these are rooted not only in the interplay of generations but in the dilemmas which jump out at us if we look sideways. (p. 110) Once I started to 'look sideways', once the significance of sibling relationships started to jump out at me at every turn, I realized how profound is the absence of sustained intellectual thought on this theme. I was reminded how influential gaps in available discourses are. The evidence is there; it is empirically noted (as Mitchell demonstrates in the clinical psychoanalytic literature) but it is not considered theoretically significant and in psychoanalysis it is usually reinterpreted onto the vertical axis of parental relationships, following the orthodox Freudian emphasis that is encapsulated in the idea of the Oedipus complex. One rather crucial effect of this has been that analysts routinely miss the importance of sibling transferences in their own clinical work, as probably happened in their own training, so that they reproduce the sibling blind spot and this has effects on the body of theory that is continually being refined and revised through clinical experience. For Juliet Mitchell, it was only with hindsight, with the incremental effect of her own clinical experience over a long period, that she noticed the significance of sibling relationships. Fortunately she pursued this insight, creatively following its trail in some unlikely places.

Mitchell is not seeking to displace the importance of mothers and fathers, rather to modify how we understand their influence through including the trauma and developmental challenges that are precipitated by having siblings and the meaning of this in the context of the child's relationship with her or his mother (fathers get little attention). Because her argument is based in psychoanalysis and is critical of current orthodoxy about the centrality of the Oedipus complex, she is often engaged in some quite technical arguments internal to psychoanalysis, some of which will be quite hard to follow for social scientists. The first chapter sets the scene by drawing on a wide range of themes from sibling incest taboos in nonwestern cultures to hysteria (where she reviews her earlier arguments in Mad Men and Medusas [2000], the book where she first explored sibling relationships). Her theme leads her to draw on 'all the disciplines that study human society . . . and a range of sources, from anecdote to neuropsychiatry, via politics, gender studies, novels, films, anthropology' (p. x). Among the pages are some striking and thought-provoking visual images that illustrate the ideas.

The central argument, necessarily oversimplified here, is that babies and children are traumatized when a sibling is born. This trauma (on top of separation from the mother) is profound; a threat of annihilation of identity because who am I when I am no longer the baby? The child's experience of the trauma of sibling displacement means that violence is always latent and can be re-enacted in wider siblingsubstitute relationships if not with actual siblings. Hate coexists with love, deriving from the fact that 'baby' is expected to be a replica of oneself and therefore loved narcissistically. Sex and violence are expressions of these wishes, when acted out: sibling incest, for example, is fairly common in western cultures, and, unlike in some cultures, less heavily repressed than parental incest. Mitchell uses the idea of seriality to convey that, through sibling relationships, babies learn that they have a place in a series in which, although all are the same as the children of their parents, they are also each different. She introduces 'the law of the mother'. This . . . operates both vertically between herself and her children and laterally to differentiate her children one from each other. Vertically her law decrees that children cannot procreate children. . . . By differentiating between her children, the mother and her law allow for the concept of seriality to be internalised . . . there is room for two, three, four or more. . . . The mother has enforced, but the lateral relationship itself instigates its own processes of managing sameness through constructing difference. (pp. 51-2)

The implications of this line of approach could be very significant for feminist theory which is stuck for a way of conceptualizing identification across difference (e.g. Benjamin, 1998: xii-xiii;Hekman, 1999: 91), not least because of the influence of a psychoanalytic theory fixated on intergenerational, or vertical, relations. Here we have a model for the experience of sameness within difference and difference within sameness that is a universal feature of social relationships and therefore necessarily provides major elements of psychic life. The centrality of sex and violence to sibling relations makes this a relevant way of understanding, for example, gangs and bullying and wartime rape: all being lateral relations.

Siblings will be central also for the establishment of gendered identity. For Mitchell, siblings point to 'the engendering of gender as a difference forged out of the matrix of sameness' (p. 225); 'sisters and brothers mark the nuclear point of sameness and difference' (p. 129). To the extent that difference is a vertical construction, it is the absolute sexual difference that is demanded by reproduction. It is because psychoanalysis has concentrated on the parents in this way that it has had difficulty with gender difference, as opposed to sexual difference. Mitchell argues that both terms should be retained because they can be used to refer to very different processes. Gender difference, according to Juliet Mitchell, comes about via lateral relations (always in interaction with vertical ones): 'the perpetuation of the polymorphously perverse, non-reproductive sexuality takes place through lateral, not vertical relationships, starting with siblings in the context always of peers and later of affines' (p. 127). The child is offered two ways to mark the difference between itself and the new sibling; age and gender (p. 19). 'Gender difference comes into being when physical strength and malevolence are used to mark the sister as lesser' (p. 220). Mitchell argues that, because siblings are the same as well as being different, difference is not intrinsic to gender, as it is to sexual difference. Rather it 'indicates the possibility of transformation of what seem, but are not, the binary rigidities that are claimed for gender' (p. 225). Gender is not organized around the absent phallus, as is the sexuality of the Oedipus complex, but around the 'absent self', deriving from displacement and the shared absence that both boys and girls learn, namely that they cannot replicate themselves.

Juliet Mitchell expresses the hope that the ideas in this book will generate a dialogue: they are 'up for grabs'. I found myself wanting to think further about birth order and the different meanings of the threat of a new sibling depending on the age (and therefore dependence on the mother) of the child. I can see that it was traumatic for my older sister at two years old, when I was born. When I was eight, my brother arrived, and by then I had access to a different strategy and became the substitute mother. Along these lines, Mitchell points out that later siblings experience being hated and therefore know what sibling displacement feels like through identification. As regards age, she situates the stage of sibling interaction which is psychically determinant during a narcissistic and phallic period when there is minimal distinction of sameness and difference (p. 21).

The question of birth order is one small example of the lines of enquiry that this book suggests. There are so many novel ideas here that I have only been able to give a preliminary flavour of them. For this journal, I have concentrated on its implications for the concept of gender difference, but Juliet Mitchell's ideas cover psychopathy, women-identified men, bullying, wartime rape, learning to love and hate the same person, giving up grandiosity, the idea of an 'Antigone' complex and implications for attachment theory. The book deserves to be widely used and debated.

As an average American city, Dayton, Ohio gained fame as a testing ground for new products. Judith Ezekiel uses this typical town, far away from the well-known centres of American second-wave feminism, to test some of our general ideas about the US women's movement. Ezekiel's book makes a fresh and original contribution to the existing literature on US feminism, because it demonstrates that American feminism is more than the New York or East Coast groups, thereby challenging some of the prevailing myths about US feminism. In her reconstruction of the history of Dayton feminism, Ezekiel makes a fascinating counterpoint to 'the assumption that feminist ideas take on the same meaning in different times and places' (p. ix). Feminist ideas and practices that travel across time and space are not simply adopted, but take on a different shape in each context. They are interpreted, adapted and combined with personal experiences and resources. The history of Dayton feminism challenges the idea that away from the progressive centres only some diluted version of liberal feminism that focused on equal rights issues could take hold. Heartland feminism is neither a 'small-scale version of the "national" movement' (p. viii), nor a watered down version where radical ideas are toned down to make them acceptable. Ezekiel's detailed and rich study makes clear that feminism in the Heartland was far more diverse and unique in its own right:

The story of Dayton forcefully cracks open the apparent historiographic consensus around a universal, two-part movement, one in which liberal feminism is the earliest, the most durable and hence for many the most important part of the movement. In contrast to the two branch pattern so often described, a single strand of feminism emerged in Dayton, drawing inspiration from diverse philosophies but most closely resembling in scope and structure what various scholars have called the women's liberation, radical, or collectivist branch. (p. 242) Ezekiel has gathered a wealth of original primary resources that were not brought together in any archive before: newsletters, minutes from meetings,

European Journal of Women's Studies 12(1)


Wendy Hollway

Judith Ezekiel

TESTING GROUND FOR FEMINISM

Antigone' complex and implications for attachment theory. The book deserves to be widely used and debated.

As an average American city, Dayton, Ohio gained fame as a testing ground for new products. Judith Ezekiel uses this typical town, far away from the well-known centres of American second-wave feminism, to test some of our general ideas about the US women's movement. Ezekiel's book makes a fresh and original contribution to the existing literature on US feminism, because it demonstrates that American feminism is more than the New York or East Coast groups, thereby challenging some of the prevailing myths about US feminism. In her reconstruction of the history of Dayton feminism, Ezekiel makes a fascinating counterpoint to 'the assumption that feminist ideas take on the same meaning in different times and places ' (p. ix). Feminist ideas and practices that travel across time and space are not simply adopted, but take on a different shape in each context. They are interpreted, adapted and combined with personal experiences and resources. The history of Dayton feminism challenges the idea that away from the progressive centres only some diluted version of liberal feminism that focused on equal rights issues could take hold. Heartland feminism is neither a 'small-scale version of the "national" movement' (p. viii), nor a watered down version where radical ideas are toned down to make them acceptable. Ezekiel's detailed and rich study makes clear that feminism in the Heartland was far more diverse and unique in its own right:

The story of Dayton forcefully cracks open the apparent historiographic consensus around a universal, two-part movement, one in which liberal feminism is the earliest, the most durable and hence for many the most important part of the movement. In contrast to the two branch pattern so often described, a single strand of feminism emerged in Dayton, drawing inspiration from diverse philosophies but most closely resembling in scope and structure what various scholars have called the women's liberation, radical, or collectivist branch. (p. 242) Ezekiel has gathered a wealth of original primary resources that were not brought together in any archive before: newsletters, minutes from meetings, leaflets and articles. This material was completed with 59 oral history interviews, which she conducted with activists from different generations. In the stories of the women who were the driving forces behind the Dayton women's movement, history comes alive. These stories are splendid illustrations of how personal experiences were transformed into politics. The book draws a lively and detailed picture of the rise and development of Dayton's women's movement, comparing and contrasting its particularities with findings from other research on US feminism.

The book chronologically recounts the history (1969-80) of four successive, overlapping organizations originating from one umbrella organization: Dayton Women's Liberation. This group created the Dayton Women's Center from which two other groups emerged: Dayton Working Women and Freedom of Choice. Also, some 'para-feminist' services like an abortion referral service, an abortion clinic and a rape crisis centre were established. At first sight, these four central organizations seem to be the result of a functional division, i.e. groups with different goals and tasks. Ezekiel's reconstruction makes clear that, in reality, these divisions also arose from personal and ideological conflicts.

The Dayton movement typically started with consciousness-raising (CR) groups. The first group of 20 women met in September 1969. After this first meeting the group started to gather regularly and adopted the name Dayton Women's Liberation (DWL). Their inspiration came from New Left ideas on participatory democracy and early feminist texts. Also, religious ideas on social justice were an important source of inspiration. According to Ezekiel, this was one of the most surprising characteristics of DWL activists: 'I know of no study on the influence of religion on feminist consciousness and on the second wave women's movement' (p. 35). Religion and church connections are mostly seen as insignificant, whereas in the Dayton case these connections were vital, both in personal and financial aspects of organizing the movement. Another defining and differing characteristic of the Dayton movement is that it kept a positive relation with its New Left base. 'The feminist-politico rift has been portrayed as fundamental in the early women's liberation movement nationally, but in Dayton, no such clear-cut lines can be found' (p. 24).

For four years DWL was the central motor of Dayton's emerging movement and covered an expanding range of issues like abortion, birth control, sexuality, childcare, divorce and racism. The group developed a radical identity where liberal and radical ideas coexisted. However, at the end of 1973 difficulties emerged and conflicts arose between early members and newcomers to the movement. Older activists lost their interest in CR as a strategy as it brought them 'no new discoveries' (p. 75). New activists accused earlier members of 'elitism' and controlling the movement. In 1974, DWL created the Dayton Women's Center (DWC) which was viewed as a 'utopian institution to carve out free space for women' (p. 80). It made the movement visible and open to a wider public, but also caused a major split in DWL. This stage in the Dayton movement is particularly interesting because it illustrates some of the basic dilemmas feminism faces when moving towards institutionalization.

Ezekiel pays considerable attention to the complicated questions of money and power in feminism. While these are well-known problematic issues, they are not very often highlighted in research on feminism. Ezekiel's detailed reconstruction of how the different Dayton organizations were set up challenges a vision of US feminism as depending less on state-funding than its European counterparts. The Dayton case makes clear that many feminist initiatives were founded with the help of state subsidies. Ezekiel draws a somewhat implicit picture of a 'marketeconomy feminism' as she describes the fate of the DWC, which ironically, despite the dominance of socialist-feminists in its leadership, was heavily determined by market mechanisms. While in the beginning, the money question sparked a lot of debate about the risks of cooptation and 'selling out', gradually financial arguments came to dominate major decisions. Programmes began to be judged by their profit and money became 'an essential consideration in all decisions' (p. 170). Dependence on funding and cooptation are often described as 'iron laws' or as natural, inescapable processes. However, Ezekiel demonstrates that reality is far more complex. Rather than victims of vile cooptation efforts, feminists are active agents whose choices may well contribute to these processes. Within the DWC, principles were repeatedly sacrificed to the survival of the movement. For instance, accepting Playboy money to pay a printing bill caused little debate. And more and more, the 'obsession with finances prevented some Center members from setting political priorities ' (p. 171).

Opportunistic strategies also played a role in creating a branch of the National Organization of Women (NOW) in Dayton. The rationale for this step was to have a taskforce for clerical workers, which was one of NOW's largest successes nationwide. As soon as it started to attract new activists to the Women's Center, it was made independent from NOW. The group continued as Dayton Women Working. After this split, the Dayton NOW branch waned. Despite its national strength, NOW never bloomed in Dayton, a remarkable deviation for which Ezekiel does not provide an explanation.

The fourth organization that Ezekiel highlights, Freedom of Choice, illustrates another 'market mechanism' at work within the women's movement, not one of money, but of competition between movements and issues. The rise of the antifeminist New Right created a 'countermovement dynamic' that revived the Dayton women's movement.

Ezekiel devotes considerable attention to the implicit racism in the Dayton movement. Despite the anti-racist ideology of the early movement activists and despite Dayton's significant black population, the women's movement remained predominantly white. According to Ezekiel, anti-racist discourse proved to be a facade with no real dialogues and only half-hearted efforts being undertaken to include women of colour in the movement.

While Ezekiel convincingly demonstrates that the Dayton case confronts the dominant narratives on American feminism, she comes up with few explanations for its particularities. Why, for instance, did a certain form of feminism prevail in Dayton and what characteristics of the Dayton context might have contributed to this evolution? Comparisons with other studies on second-wave feminism in the US would also have added to a better understanding of the Dayton case. It is remarkable that almost no references are made to Nancy Whittier's (1995) research on the women's movement in Columbus, Ohio. This having been said, however, Ezekiel's study makes an excellent contribution to the 'need for more history' (p. ix) and it will hopefully inspire other researchers to trace the local manifestations of a worldwide movement.

REFERENCE

Whittier, Nancy (1995) Feminist Generations: The Persistence of the Radical Women's Movement. Philadelphia: Temple University Press.

Conny Roggeband

Free University, Amsterdam

European Journal of Women's Studies 12(1)


BREAKING THE STEREOTYPES: WOMEN IN THE ARAB WORLD Manuela Marín and Randi Deguilhem, eds

Writing the Feminine: Women in Arab Sources London and New York: I.B. Tauris/Strasbourg: The European Science Foundation, 2002, 278 pp., ISBN 1-86064-697-2 Writing the Feminine: Women in Arab Sources is a remarkable work. It is the result of five-years' research carried out by women scholars from the Arab world, Israel and Western Europe, particularly from Spain, who, through this book, greatly contribute to gender investigation in the field of Arab studies as a whole.

Apart from a thorough and in-depth Introduction by the two editors, Manuela Marín and Randi Deguilhem, this book contains 13 chapters, each a highly learned essay, where stress is placed on the lifestyle and the private/public social role of women living in Arab communities up to the 20th century. The essays will undoubtedly prove very useful both to those beginning to study Arab culture and to experienced scholars. As a matter of fact, despite their being accessible to a wide range of readers, whether specialists or not, these pages have a deep scientific rigour. What strikes one most, is how they develop: each author does not broach the chosen subject directly, but touches on others before focusing on a central topic. Thus, they provide the reader with vast information allowing her or him to gain enough background knowledge to fully understand what follows. At the same time, new methodological approaches to source material are suggested.

The sources studied in Writing the Feminine are both written and oral, and vary from literary works (epic, poetry, proverbs and autobiographies) and juridical ones to tafsı ¯r (Koranic exegesis) treatises, as well as hagiographic material and paintings. In other words, they are all documentary sources. The reason why such a choice is of fundamental relevance lies in the fact that this kind of text offers both a deeper and more authentic insight into reality than other types of material, in particular fiction, might do, when considering Arab women's concrete personal/social position in a community strongly influenced by religion, which, however, is not strictly Islam. Aiming to make this point clear, in the Introduction the editors write: 'It is important . . . to underline that in choosing the label, "Arab", for the sources under examination in this volume, the intention is to emphasise the fact that Islam, as a religion, is only one of the factors determining the cultural production of the societies under study' (p. xvi). The Arab people, whether Muslims, Christians or Hebrews, do share a common cultural background; furthermore, one should also keep in mind that women's segregation and culturally imposed passivity -which is widely considered to be almost peculiar to the Islamic society -is something inherent to the Christian one, too.

In this respect, it is particularly interesting to look at 'A Borrowed Space: Andalusi and Maghribi Women in Chronicles' by María Jesús Viguera Molíns. In this essay, before approaching the main topic, the scholar reveals a relevant discovery made over the last two decades -exactly the same period of time in which gender studies in Spain have been initiated -by Spanish Arabists focusing on Andalusi (and Maghribi) women. She explains: also in the ancient, medieval, modern and contemporary Christian society. Such confinement is conditioned in a general way by the level of economic development. With its cultural and ideological consequences, this development is rooted in the concerned social structure. These conditions more or less restrict the number of roles limited by specific conditions such as gender . . . age . . . and freedom or the lack of it. . . . As in the Andalusi case, this leads to a social structure which can be defined as patriarchal and agnatic whereby a woman depends upon her male relatives. (pp. 165-6) This passage shows that when dealing with gender problematics in al-Andalus, one should never overlook the fact that Islam and Christianity are equal in the way they have been working through the centuries as potential stumbling-blocks for women's emancipation: thus, the equations Islamic religion = women's total subjection as well as thorough submissiveness, on the one hand, and Christian creed = women's freedom and power, on the other, have to be considered something of a fallacy. This actually means that, within the somewhat strict Islamic rules defining the female sphere of activity from a religious, social, legal and economic perspective, there are important margins of autonomy often depending on marital as well as social status (and by man's sensitivity and understanding).

In the Arab sources studied in Writing the Feminine, it is common, for example, to read about medieval women from the upper social classes, who, despite their high position, could neither move or dress of their own will nor follow their lessons unless from behind a screen, if the teacher was not a close male relative. On the other hand, it is easy to find women in the countryside or those belonging to the lower degrees of the social ladder (slave-girls above all) coming in and out of where they lived without restraint. But, what is really important here is the fact that the scholars have discovered that, in specific situations, some restrictions to women's autonomy were dictated by fear of evil practices seemingly in widespread use rather than by a blind acceptance of and faithful obedience to religious or traditional codes.

Emphasis has also been put on the Andalusi (and/or Maghribi) women's 'capacity to act' and their 'possibilities for divorce' as well as on their very often painful submission to the practice of polygamy and on the difficulties they faced when choosing a holy life (as prophets or saints), a practice opposed because it was considered rebellious (although more to the world in general than to the rules of patriarchal society).

In two of the texts, however, which analyse source material going back to the 10th century, new light is shed on women's position within the particular context of Abbasid Baghdadi society, where they were even allowed to reach full power, and marriage could be a love-based contract rather than a mere economic and legal one. This is the reason why, at the end of the essay 'Women's History: A Study of al-Tanu ¯khı ¯', Nadia Maria El-Cheikh comments: Al-Tanu ¯khı ¯'s [an important male prose writer who died in 994] works are important for informing us that a particular sentiment existed, that it was possible for women to be involved in specific productive activities and that a number of them could become quite influential and wealthy.

Most especially, the Baghdad of al-Tanu ¯khı ¯ is peopled with vivid and lively female characters whose lives the reader is made to share in their most intimate detail. (p. 145) And it is not only in the medieval oriental Middle East that this sense existed and was expressed, but also in the more traditional West, that is al-Andalus, where the outstanding Islamic 12th-century philosopher Averroes wrote some texts which have been defined as 'almost "feminist" in character or rather "humanistic" ' (p. 170).

Whether consciously or not, much of these representations of Arab women have become part of the 19th-and 20th-century Arabs' culture and gender views, although, since the 1950s (and since 1967, for Palestine) much has been put into question again, due to the people's need for a 'return-to-roots' search for something whereby they can overcome extremely serious social, economic and political problems affecting the Arab world as a whole. This is particularly true for Palestine, where painters describe women as the symbol of the suffering Arab land and writers represent a society trying to regain traditional values and lifestyles in order to forget a cruel present.

But one must not think that Arab women's independence is just an illusion, because, despite the huge difficulties they have to face, their reality is very far from the stereotypical images common, say, in some medieval classical poetry and proverbs (which, however, may also turn out to be texts of paramount relevance to the historian, as widely shown in Writing the Feminine). And this development is mainly due to far-sighted men and women who have striven much (and still do) to allow Arab women to gain enduring self-assertion. Among them, gender female investigators.

Paola Viviani

Università degli Studi di Napoli 'L'Orientale' ◆

This research [on women in al-Andalus] has shown that the basic and clear difference between men and women consists of performing a leading role as a producer-consumer. With very few exceptions, Andalusi women did not have a role as producer-consumer. The restriction of a woman's role as a producer-consumer in al-Andalus is characteristic of their confinement to the private sphere, not only in Islamic societies, including the Andalusi one, but European Journal of Women's Studies 12(1)


to the Kantian tradition. In an ideal world there would be time to assimilate both, but if I had to choose I guess that Schott will better engage the emerging philosophical imagination.

Margrit Shildrick

Queen's University Belfast BATTLING THE BINARIES? REVISITING 'HE, SHE AND IT REVISITED' M. Lie, ed. He, She and IT Revisited: New Perspectives on Gender in the Information Society Oslo: Gyldendal Norsk Forlag, 2003, 304 pp., ISBN 82-05-31550-7 Even in egalitarian Norway and despite various efforts by the Norwegian government, private organizations, researchers and educators, a gender gap remains in the design and use of computers and the Internet. This book collects recent work by Norwegian scholars to achieve 'a better understanding of how and if ICTs become gendered and how they also may become "degendered" by both design and user activities ' (p. 29). The main issue addressed in this book is the influence of the hegemonic discourse of gender and ICTs on policy-makers, designers and users.

Although the sole focus on Norwegian researchers and Norwegian empirical material is a narrow one for an edited book and, in this respect, the title is misleading, this book does present an important contribution to gender and ICT studies. Norway is known for its high level of ICT penetration and the equality-oriented politics of the government, which Norwegians call 'state feminism'. Hence, an investigation into the effectiveness of this politics may well provide insight into the situation of other European countries. Moreover, Norwegian gender and ICT researchers have built up an impressive, high-quality body of research that dates back to the 1970s, making Norway one of the leading countries in gender and ICT research from a social studies of technology and co-constructivist perspective.

In the chapter 'Male Positioning Strategies in Relation to Computing', Corneliussen identifies the hegemonic discourse on gender and ICTs as follows: experience, interest and knowledge of computers are expected of men, and men are related to activities such as the 'actual handling of the computer (technical knowledge, software development) and activities related to play (computer games) ' (p. 110). This subject position is condensed in the image of the hacker. This is a persuasive stereotype, which keeps girls and women away from computers as they vigorously reject this style of life and compulsive way of engaging with technology. Hence, the subject position that remains for, and is associated with women, is the opposite of the hacker, a position of no special interest, experience or knowledge of computers. For women, the computer is supposed to be 'useful or a necessity, and . . . the computer first and foremost is seen as a tool for concrete objectives', e.g. for the use of email and word-processing (p. 112). In all the chapters, it seems that regardless of whether policy-makers, commercial firms and individual computer users accept the myth (and most do), they have been influenced by it.

In the chapter 'Forget the Hacker? A Critical Re-Appraisal of Norwegian Studies of Gender and ICT', Gansmo, Lagesen and Sørensen are interested in the extent to which researchers themselves 'may contribute to the conservation of unfortunate symbolic practices related to the production of misleading gendered dualisms' (p. 37). Interestingly, perhaps one of the most important publications of Norwegian researchers in the past did counter the hacker stereotype by showing non-stereotypical practices among Norwegian hackers [START_REF] Håpnes | Competition and Collaboration in Male Shaping of Computing: A Study of a Norwegian Hacker Culture[END_REF]. Apparently, 'doing things differently' and an analysis of these practices did not correct the hacker stereotype, a conclusion which the authors of this chapter do not seem to draw. Instead, they rather conclude that researchers should just 'forget about the hacker' (p. 68), which does not seem like a realistic option. This chapter does, however, offer a very good, broad and thorough overview of the main Norwegian research on gender and ICT.

In various chapters, the consequences of the hegemonic discourse for equal opportunities policies in its broadest sense are discussed. In Chapter 5, 'Limits of State Feminism: Chaotic Translations of the "Girls and Computing" Problem', Gansmo considers the Norwegian education policy on girls and computers. And in Chapter 8, 'Don't Girls Want to Have Fun? Designing Multimedia for Women', the commercial design of a CD-Rom for girls and an Internet service 'for the whole family' are studied. Neither the governmental policy-makers nor the commercial designers have exploited, what the authors Spilker and Sørensen call, 'the potential to co-construct gender and ICT in a more dynamic and heterogeneous way' (p. 250). Perhaps even more interesting is the chapter 'Advertising Computer Science to Women (Or Was it the Other Way Around?)' by Lagesen. In this chapter, advertisement campaigns to change the image of computer science in the hope of attracting more female students to computer science are studied. The campaigns aimed at directly challenging the symbolic connection between computers and masculinity, by stating that 'women's competences, such as communication skills, are also needed in computer science'. As Lie writes in the introduction, it is interesting to observe that people 'apparently find it easier to redefine what ICT is than to change their own and other people's ideas of gender differences' (p. 29).

The researchers in this book have found that most policies have uncritically adopted the dominant discourse, resulting in actually reinforcing gender differences. Hence, Lie concludes that a main 'challenge for policy makers in this field is to untie such dichotomous understandings of men and women and of ICT skills' (p. 28). The dangers of the politics of difference are neatly summed up by Lagesen: they 'reinforce gender stereotyping, which in turn may limit the spaces for action by women in relation to ICT', 'dichotomies are easily ranked' (and usually the masculine is ranked higher), 'it is naïve to think that arguments, previously used to exclude women, may simply be transformed into arguments to include them' and, last but not least, women as 'good communicators and good with people' will easily be understood as the opposite of 'good with technology ' (pp. 100, 101).

Probably the most interesting and certainly the richest empirical chapters of He, She and IT Revisited analyse how the dominant discourse on gender and computing influences people's individual gender identities: what they do, what they say they do and where they are. In the aforementioned chapter by Corneliussen, there is discussion of how male computer scientists 'possess different abilities of meeting the discourse's expectations of men, and they also employ different positioning strategies in their relations to computing', but what they share is that 'men and computer knowledge are so closely connected within this discourse, that being a man may in itself function as a qualification, in order to be regarded as computer skilled' (p. 133). Hence, choosing computer science and acquiring computer skills seems like an easy choice for most of them, even if they differ in how much experience and skills they have acquired.

In contrast, Håpnes and Rasmussen studied 14-to 16-year-old girls' identity construction in relation to computers in the chapter 'Gendering Technology: Young Girls Negotiating ICT and Gender'. They define themselves as opposite to 'young children or guys ' (p. 177) and computers at the same time -particularly by counterposing themselves against male computer game playing. However, the computer did fit perfectly in the girls' culture as long as they perceived what they did with the computer as 'social', i.e. not 'nerdy' activities. As a 'Typing Room', the computer was 'used for reflecting upon oneself and on relations to classmates' (p. 185), whereas the computer as 'Information Market' functioned 'in the same way as pop magazines and the weekly tabloids do' (p. 188) and as 'Meeting-Place' the girls could use the computer to chat for hours (p. 190). Unfortunately, the authors had to conclude that in the end, 'It seems that the male gendering of ICT was not disturbed by the wide use by girls ' (p. 197), which begs the question what activities, words or policies would change the dominant discourse on computers and the masculine nerd?

Perhaps the words of Internet cafe users, studied by Laegran in the chapter 'Just Another Boys' Room? Internet Cafés as Gendered Technosocial Spaces', offer an opening to a less masculine interpretation of the nerd stereotype? She describes how 'the stereotyped label of embodied computer enthusiasts, signified by antisociality and a less desired body appearance, is renegotiated locally to change the content [to one] based on competence and skills' (p. 215), making the nerd stereotype more accessible for women. Nevertheless, Laegran also shows how gender segregation is maintained in Internet cafes, either in space within the cafe or in a division of time between the various cafe users. Hence, these cafes are not very effective in attracting women to computers, or in disturbing the hegemonic discourse.

In the final chapter, 'The New Amazons: Gender Symbolism on the Net', Lie offers an important discussion and rethinking of the hard-to-grasp symbolic level on which computers and masculinities have become connected. Moreover, on the basis of her analysis of computer games such as the SIMS and Tomb Raider's Lara Croft, she concludes that a new model of gender might be appropriate nowadays, a model in which gender is conceived as 'an "empty shell" which can be filled with desirable attributes and qualities based on personal preference' (p. 276), a model in which external and internal attributes are not necessarily the same anymore. With the results of the research done in the previous chapters still fresh in my mind, I am not convinced that such an optimistic end to this book is warranted.

Regarding the book as a whole, there are some points of criticism to be made. The structuring and order in which the chapters are presented seems more or less arbitrary and although the chapters clearly fall into the same research tradition and tackle similar issues, the overall line is, as with most edited volumes, hard to follow. Nevertheless, this is a very relevant and timely book, which clearly expresses the present way of thinking about gender and ICT within social studies of technology and which offers valuable insights into the more general relationship between stereotypes and its consequences for both policies and individual experiences.

European Journal of Women's Studies 12(4)


Manuela Ribeiro

Octávio Sacramento

Violence against Prostitutes Findings of Research in the Spanish-Portuguese Frontier Region

Keywords:

Violence has long been assumed to be an intrinsic trait of female prostitution. However, it has been mostly associated with the locale in which the activity is exercised, i.e. with working time and space. In this article, based on data gathered by direct observations, in-depth interviews and the compilation of socalled time-budgets, the authors demonstrate that violence is as pervasive and omnipresent a feature of prostitutes' ostensibly private 'off-duty' (non-working) time and space, though it takes on varied and distinct forms and configurations, compared to violence in the workplace.

INTRODUCTION

The reflections presented in this article 1 bring together some of the results of an ongoing project that began in January 2001, titled 'Female Prostitution in Frontier Regions'. 2 The geographical focus of the project is a corridor approximately 100 km wide that takes in both sides of the Portuguese-Spanish frontier, and whose length is delimited by a line joining Valença (Portugal) to Vigo (Galícia, Spain) in the northwest hinterland of the Atlantic coast, to one connecting Vilar Formoso (Portugal) and Fuentes de Oñoro (Castilla-León, Spain) in the central interior of the Iberian Peninsula.

Given that 'indoor' or sheltered prostitution, more precisely that taking place in the so-called clubs, is the predominant form in the particular area where the research referred to in this article was conducted, it therefore constitutes the main empirical point of reference for our reflections.

Prostitution and the clubs where the sex trade is systematically undertaken is by no means a new phenomenon in the geographical area in question. What really constitutes a quantitative and qualitative break with the past is the fact that, over the past decade, there has been both a large expansion in number and an upsurge in the social visibility of such establishments.

Also completely new is the fact that, nowadays, prostitution in clubs is being fed, almost exclusively, by immigrant women, coming from various less developed countries, principally from Latin America. As a matter of fact, while our fieldwork turned up a few women from African countries, we detected few if any women of Iberian origin, or from other European nationalities (including Eastern European countries) working in these frontier clubs. Latin America has been the major provider of women who have come to work as prostitutes in clubs in these remote areas: Dominican, Ecuadorian, Colombian and, above all, Brazilian women dominate the 'club labour force' on both sides of the border. 3 Our field research included the direct local observation of a total of 87 clubs; an extensive, structured questionnaire applied to around 200 women prostitutes, of which 10 were interviewed in depth. 4 From among the many dimensions that, in general, prostitution involves and that our research explored, we have opted in this article to focus on a specific issue that is generally taken to be central to every type of prostitution -namely the problem of violence. We define violence in the very widest of senses (as did [START_REF] Bourdieu | A Dominação Masculina[END_REF] -the act itself, its frequency and location, the means used to inflict it and the symbolism that is so often part of the process. Furthermore, we take it to mean any act or occurrence that, broadly speaking, aims to restrict or repress an individual's physical, psychological, intellectual and/or emotional development or integrity. Violence in its most varied forms, degrees and domains has been widely researched and amply referenced (for example, [START_REF] Alexander | Contextual Risk versus Risk Behaviour: The Impact of the Legal, Social and Economic Context of Sex Work on Individual Risk Taking[END_REF][START_REF] Farley | Prostitution in Five Countries: Violence and Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder[END_REF][START_REF] Kinnell | Murderous Clients and Indifferent Justice: Violence against Sex Workers in the UK[END_REF][START_REF] Pisano | Yo Puta. Hablan las Prostitutas[END_REF] and, more specifically, has been recognized as something that permeates and integrates all types of relations that female prostitutes establish in the workplace during working hours -with clients, bosses, pimps and procurers, the police and with each other.

However, as we were able to observe during our research process, violence against women prostitutes also arises from many other sources, circumstances and situations that are external to the immediate contexts of the sexual work in which they are engaged and can assume many other forms than simply physical and sexual injuries. Despite its relevance and varied impact on women prostitutes' lives, the particular configurations and expressions of violence outside the workplace are far less well studied and documented than violence that occurs as a direct concomitant of the sexual services transaction. As Agustín (2002b: 7) has remarked, very often, even 'those involved in projects [related to prostitution] hardly know anything about how sex workers live when they are not working'.

In this article we propose, therefore, to present and discuss evidence of the existence and the modus operandi of the type of violence against women prostitutes that manifests itself in and extends into other domains of prostitutes' non-work-related, or 'off-duty', daily lives.

EVERYDAY FORMS AND EXPRESSIONS OF OFF-DUTY VIOLENCE

Based on our direct observation, the collection of data through in-depth interviews, questionnaires and the compilation of time-budgets, 5 we identified as the principal expressions of this type of violence the pervasive vacuity, monotony, claustrophobia and the social rejection inherent in the daily lives of women we contacted. This was particularly true in the case of those women for whom the club (or brothel) functioned both as workplace and residence.

From the service provider's perspective, 'indoor' prostitution has proven to be much safer than other forms, with risk and occurrence of violence at much lower levels than in street prostitution [START_REF] Carrington | Risk and Violence in Different Scenarios of Commercial Sex Work in Panama City[END_REF][START_REF] Farley | Prostitution in Five Countries: Violence and Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder[END_REF][START_REF] Kinnell | Murderous Clients and Indifferent Justice: Violence against Sex Workers in the UK[END_REF][START_REF] Price | Violence Against Prostitutes and a Re-Evaluation of the Counterpublic Sphere[END_REF]. Nevertheless, we would argue that violence -albeit with quite particular forms, characteristics and effects -is a factor of substantial importance in both informing and shaping the lives that the vast majority of prostitutes lead outside the workplace and working hours of their profession. Due to the mute, insidious and hidden nature of this violence, it is often neither recognized as such nor verbalized by the prostitutes themselves.

Our understanding is that the daily off-duty violence to which these women are subjected has largely to do with the following four aspects of their life and work:

1.

The rootless pattern of employment that characterizes 'indoor' prostitution; 2.

The frequent practice of working and residing in the same premises; 3.

The nocturnal nature of the profession and the social consequences of the corresponding distribution of free time; and 4.

The omnipresent stigma of being a prostitute.

From One Club to Another -Club-Based Prostitutes as Rootless Itinerants

For almost all the foreign women who exercise prostitution in the clubs in the border areas covered by this research, arriving for the first time and beginning to work in either Spain or Portugal is a time of great trauma involving, as it undoubtedly does, not only a giant step (often into the unknown), but also an enormous effort in terms of adaptation to a new culture, different climate, unfamiliar food and the lack of the fallback support normally provided by friends and family.

Everything here was completely unfamiliar and made me feel so weird! Everything I'd left behind -my country, my people -began to mean so much to me! (Colombian woman, 28)

With these words, punctuated by uncontrollable sobs and tears, a recently arrived Colombian woman tried to explain what she felt as she began to work in the brothels of the border area between northern Portugal and Spain.

Due to the need of the clubs' owners to regularly renew the labour supply on the one hand and, on the other, the fact that many of the prostitutes are illegal or unregistered immigrants who opt to keep a low profile and remain undetected, women will tend to have only a short-term attachment to a particular club, in some cases the term being fixed in advance, 6 and in others, subject to assessments and decisions made from time to time either by the boss, or by the women themselves. Since the periods they spend in any one club are variable, and the work irregular, there tends to develop a more or less systematic and frequent 'rotation' of staff between the clubs throughout the border region. In most cases, it is the prostitutes themselves who decide to leave one club for another, as well as the time they remain in each of them (Ribeiro and Sacramento, 2002: 210).

This continuous wandering from club to club makes it particularly difficult for women to maintain and deepen any sort of friendship that might develop between them, or with third parties, or to enjoy any sort of a wellestablished non-work-related social life. This means that, to a great extent, their daily round is reduced to a continuously repeated succession of more or less superficial, spontaneous and fleeting contacts. For the most of these women, the human relationships they develop in their profession typically tend to be ephemeral, fragile, limited in extent, yet repetitive.

From my experience, that when you're on the game ['no mundo da putaria'] real friendships either just don't happen or happen very rarely. (Brazilian woman,22) The inevitable rotation of women between different workplaces has the effect of constantly changing the membership, yet renewing the scale and composition of the female groups that share the same accommodation. This leads to the constitution of 'domestic' environments dominated by tensions and mutual distrust, and which, therefore, function on the basis of defensive strategies that are essentially individual and/or individualistically oriented. Due to the purposes, features and functioning of the housing they are forced to share, women look on their accommodation as merely transitory. Unable to personalize the spaces they are occupying as temporary guests, these remain devoid of any historical or relational reference to their own identity: as a 34-year-old Brazilian woman remarked, 'we never even get around to unpacking our cases'. For all these reasons, the women's accommodation constitutes one of the most visible faces of the social and emotional rootlessness that characterizes their daily lives. On the other hand, women constantly confront the unknown as a result of their itinerant circulation between clubs and between territories; as such, they are constantly assailed by fear, anxiety and the threat of their hopes and expectations being dashed -with particular intensity, as many interviewees confirmed, in the first weeks after arriving in Europe.

The Undifferentiated Life Spaces of the Prostitute: Working and Living in the Same Establishment

Club owners nearly always provide the women who work there with accommodation -either on the club premises, or less commonly in apartments or houses they either own or rent. In both situations, particularly when the women live in the building where they also provide sexual services, the accommodation fails to provide them with the necessary distance that allows it to function as a refuge in which they could extricate themselves -albeit temporarily -from the web of relationships in which prostitution involves them. On the contrary, the fact that accommodation is physically coterminous with one's workplace, or is controlled in one way or another by the club owner, confirms the spatial and temporal continuity that exists between workplace and 'home', increases the opportunities for one world to impinge on the other, threatens the minimal individual privacy that may exist, and exposes private space to interference and invigilation on the part of club owners and/or their henchmen.

The practice of requiring women to live and work either in the same building, or in facilities owned/controlled by the club owner, evidently restricts these women's individual liberty and autonomy to a significant degree, and imposes on them daily regimes that are highly regulated, and in which both transgressions and defiance are quickly discovered and punished.

There are clubs where, if you need to go to the hairdresser's, do some shopping or go to the doctor's, you have to ask the owner's permission. I worked in one where the boss actually fined me twice -50 euros -just because I'd stopped in the street to say hello and chat with a friend. I don't know how he found out, but by the time I got home, he already knew everything I'd done while I was out! (Brazilian woman, 21)

The exercise of this type of control implies that, in the most extreme yet, admittedly, least frequent cases, bosses impose a wide range of constraints on the women that work for them, ranging from which doctors they can consult, 7 to the taxi drivers they may use. 8 In many cases, the often total overlap between workplace, residence and the bosses' sphere of control means that women spend their nonworking hours largely restricted to their accommodation. For many foreign women this confinement is even more accentuated due to their obvious need to maintain a low profile for fear of discovery by the authorities. Indeed, while bosses tend to use this same fact to justify the tight supervision under which they maintain their 'staff', the women themselves deploy the very same argument to explain why at times they impose upon their own movements the same or even more draconian restrictions.

I came to this city two months ago, but I hardly know it at all even now. As I don't have any papers, I'm really scared of being caught. I live with some other girls on the other side of the river in one of the boss's apartments, but I've never been to the city itself. I spend all my time at home: I sleep, watch TV -lots of TV -I read the horoscopes, phone my mother . . . and wait until the car comes to pick me up for work. I don't even go to the hairdresser's. I'm lucky my hair's naturally nice. (Brazilian woman,22) Furthermore, the fact that work and home are frequently coterminous and tend to function as extensions of each other inevitably means that these women share many of their non-working hours in the company of their work-mates. Clearly, this type of situation further strengthens the tendency towards the establishment and maintenance of closed circuits of communication, that in turn feed into the interpersonal conflicts, tensions and disputes that may already exist between one sphere and the other, ultimately making them more continuous, and consequently selfreinforcing.

For reasons that are fundamentally related to the competition for clients, relations between women working as prostitutes tend to be overlaid with generous doses of tension and conflict, and this has led some authors to conclude that 'usually, the "women of the night" see each other as enemies' (Oliveira et al., 2001: 27).

Notwithstanding its relevance, we should not conclude that competition and the interpersonal tensions that it generates are restricted to the sphere of prostitution. However, in the concrete case of prostitution, the articulation of market competition and interpersonal conflict develops more complex contours. In the absence of the type of spatial or temporal discontinuities that arise from a clearer demarcation between the workplace and personal space, and which provide access to safe havens, escape zones and tension-reducing strategies that help to relieve the pressure generated by the more pronounced and problematic types of interpersonal clashes, there is a much greater potential and propensity for an upward spiral of misunderstanding and conflict between women. This type of situation is also conducive to an exaggerated emphasis being placed on particular individuals' most prominent characteristics or behavioural patterns, a tendency that is accentuated by the close physical proximity in a confined space to which many women are subjected and/or subject themselves. The high degree of circulation of women between clubs, which interrupts cohabitation and disrupts a given domestic environment, allows hostilities to be suspended -albeit temporarily -and retards the further development of spiralling conflict.

Both the prostitutes and club owners we interviewed repeatedly referred to the fact that violence forms a part of the everyday non-working lives these women spend in accommodation provided by their boss. The club owners also referred frequently to such conflicts, as a means of illustrating what they consider to be the innate incapacity of most women prostitutes to develop any sort of civilized personal behaviour or community life. They argued that it was in the women's own best interests that a strict and rigid regime be imposed, so as to 'protect them from themselves'. 9

The Topsy-Turvy Daily Life of Club Prostitutes Prostitution in general and the activities of the 'indoor' prostitute, in particular, are a nocturnal phenomenon. As a general rule, the clubs are open from between 9.00 and 10.00 at night until around 4.00 in the morning on weekdays or 5.00 at weekends. 10 The working period is continuous and interruptions would only occur as a result of a lack of clients. As a general rule, women have to comply rigorously with this timetable.

If you're late, the boss starts shouting at you straight away! (Ecuadorian woman, 29)

In most establishments, women are allowed to take a day (or rather, a night) off once a week. For obvious reasons, days off correspond to slack periods, such as Mondays, and are totally prohibited at weekends. Nevertheless, many women said that they had either never, or only very rarely taken time off. Those that tend not to take time off say that this is due to the financial burden they took on at home in order to enter prostitution. Sometimes this refers to the income support they provide to their families back home, in other cases to debts they incurred before coming to Europe; there are also women who set themselves financial targets to achieve before they abandon the profession and return home.

I came to Europe with a very clear target in mind. I need to earn enough money to buy a house and provide a bit more comfort to my mother who is very sick. I didn't come here as a tourist, or just to play around. I'm here to work as hard as possible so as to reach my target as quickly as possible and go home again. I've got a fairly good idea of how much I need to earn. So every day I make a note of every cent I earn and every cent I spend. That way I can control and plan my life a bit better. (Brazilian woman, 21)

The number of hours women are required to work per day, and the fact that it is exclusively night work, along with the tension to be found openly or latently in the profession ensures that the 'daily' lives of the women concerned are almost completely socially disconnected. Indeed, the 'daily round' of women prostitutes is almost totally counter-cyclical in comparison to the lifestyle of most people: they work all night long, sleep through most of the daylight hours and are rarely if ever able to enjoy the weekend off that most people take for granted. In a society that is basically structured around the need to respond in a specific and differentiated manner to predominantly daytime working practices, the temporal working patterns of prostitutes are eccentric to say the least and in clear contrast to the dominant forms of socially distributing and using both time and space. This 'topsy-turvy' world almost always has pernicious effects, as some of the women we interviewed were able to confirm.

Even if I've had a good sleep, when I get up, I never really wake up fully. I feel half zonked most of the time. It's like I'm never totally conscious. I walk around as if I'm half anaesthetized. (Brazilian woman,35) The data collected from the time-budgets show that the non-working time of prostitutes i.e. grosso modo the period between the end of the night's work 11 and the time at which women go down to the bar at around 9.00 the following evening, in fact consists of a series of very routine occurrences, almost devoid of meaningful content, predominantly leisureoriented and often focused on the preparations necessary for the night's work. In brief, the club prostitutes who spend their days, weeks and months in this way experience a mere half-life conducive only to their further social and spiritual impoverishment.

The late mornings and early afternoons are taken up with dreaming. Most of the women get up at around 2.00 in the afternoon and immediately perform all the routine acts that characterize the start of anyone's day. Lunch is usually only taken after 3.00 in the afternoon. Most of the rest of the day is spent in their accommodation, doing nothing in particular, or 'relaxing' as many people called it: watching lots of TV -mainly Brazilian and Mexican soap operas that the Portuguese and Spanish stations broadcast in liberal doses, that in some way offer a brief virtual trip back home. They also listen to music, read romantic magazines and the like, or just 'chat with some work-mate or other' (Brazilian woman, 35). During the afternoon, they will also wash and iron some clothes, maybe dye and/or style their hair, or just do their nails. There may also be time to telephone relatives back home -some keeping in contact almost daily, others more sporadically. Remarking on the expense involved, a 35year-old Brazilian woman joked -'my mobile phone is my pimp!'

The direct and constant contact that these women maintain with relatives they left behind in their countries of origin not only serves to give concrete form to shared responsibilities and concerns, but also provides a very real means of substituting for the emotional contact, solidarity and support so often lacking in the eccentric lifestyle the profession imposes on them. The telephone is a means of sharing the pain, the failures, the little victories and happy moments out of which their daily round is constructed.

[If I have a problem] I don't talk things over with anyone here. I lock myself in my bedroom and cry. Or I phone my mother. (Brazilian woman,31) The time between lunch and dinner is also frequently occupied with little forays outside, almost always in groups, to go to the hairdresser's, the supermarket or a shopping mall, or just to have a coffee or a drink and pass the time in some local bar or cafe. Sometimes, as the fieldwork confirmed on numerous occasions, some prostitutes spend the afternoon out with a client with whom they have established a special, closer relationship, that in some cases approximates that of a regular boyfriend. Others revert to their chosen profession by doing a few 'extras' (as they call the 'tricks' they do outside the normal hours and locale of their work). These 'extras' are essentially to compensate for loss of earnings and to ensure that they are able to meet the income targets they have set themselves. Accepting these daytime tricks usually corresponds with periods of slack demand at the clubs where the women work, i.e. when, for whatever reason, fewer nocturnal clients put in an appearance.

On a working day, dinner -normally taken at around 8.00 in the evening -ends the club prostitute's non-working day. Now is the time to begin the preparations for a long night's work, which primarily involve the visual metamorphosis required by the profession and, in some cases, the little rituals that may offer some protection from the innumerable risks that the night affords, so familiar to all and experienced by most.

I light a candle and pray that Nossa Senhora de Fátima will protect me and that it'll be a good night. (Brazilian woman,35) Both the time-budgets we compiled and the direct observation that was undertaken during the fieldwork indicated that club prostitutes' daily periods of non-work do not involve a great deal of activity. The general atmosphere is dominated by a kind of lethargy and a certain degree of existential torpor, in which women essentially maintain the same network of relationships -albeit with some differences in intensity and nuances in form -that characterize their working hours. There are few gaps or discontinuities that, one way or another, might allow tensions to be released, anger assuaged, or conflicts resolved; consequently, there is little opportunity for the emergence of even slightly differentiated lifestyles that might help to restore equilibrium. On the other hand, as some of the interviewees remarked, the fact that non-working hours are passed in such a banal and sterile manner is conducive both to the invention of pretexts for arguments and the prosecution of the consequent disputes.

There are a lot of girls living here [in an apartment rented by the club owner]. Though some are better than others, there are arguments all day long! You wouldn't believe how much gossiping goes on. We're here all day with nothing to do -so what do you expect? (Brazilian woman, 24) Faced with the excessive standardization, sedentarization and trivialization of their daily round of (in)activity and (inter)relationships, exacerbated and accentuated by the residential, social and existential confinement that multifaceted exclusion imposes on them, women prostitutes tend to regard their lives as both physically and mentally painful, violent and claustrophobic. In some cases, women resort to alcohol 12 -and much less frequently drugs -as a means of coping with the repetitive and limited routine of their lives, in particular the long periods spent without anything meaningful to do.

The daily round is hard for the women. That's why they often start drinking too much. (Club owner,50) From the preceding observations, it can be readily inferred that the profession exercised by the female club-based prostitute profoundly and decisively moulds the content of the time that is not filled by her work.

The Omnipresent Stigma -Always and Only Prostitutes

There are many other sources and manifestations of violence in the nonworking lives of club-based women prostitutes, which take the form of more or less distinct practices of exclusion and/or marginalization that are most frequently associated, in the view of many of the women interviewed, with the stigma of prostitution. According to [START_REF] Goffman | Estigma -La Identidad Deteriorada[END_REF], a stigma is a socially constructed pejorative attribute used to distinguish a given person such that his/her identity becomes configured primarily in terms of the characteristic imputed to him/her rather than on any other basis. [START_REF] Ramos | La Dificil Vida Cotidiana. Los Estigmas[END_REF] argues that social exclusion is the corollary of stigma, with these two phenomena being articulated in the following way:

Emphasis is placed on characteristics that are presumably to the discredit of those possessing them [stigma], making it impossible for society to accept persons so identified [exclusion].

The majority of those who confided in us that they had been victims of discrimination against their professional activities identified personal humiliation as the most immediate and direct effect. They freely admitted that such experiences not only considerably eroded their self-esteem but were also extremely detrimental to the construction of any positive selfimage. Our interviewees identified as directly associated with stigma, the following types of off-duty violence:

1.

Ostracism and rejection at home: Neighbours in the apartment blocks where their bosses housed them reacted negatively in a number of ways, ranging from refusing to share the lift with them, to the organizing of petitions demanding that they leave their accommodationtypically referring to their occupation as the main source of discontent.

2.

Prejudice in public spaces: Clients (in particular female clients) of some of the bars, cafes, shops and hairdressing salons frequented by prostitutes adopted attitudes based on prejudice. As a Brazilian prostitute (aged 27) remarked:

. . . in this city, people are really prejudiced. As soon as they hear the Brazilian accent, they start staring at us. Or they sit as far away as possible from us as if we were contagious.

To avoid, as far as possible, such manifestations of prejudice, particularly in the smaller frontier cities and towns whose characteristics are conducive to even more active and closer social control, prostitutes often patronize more modest establishments -especially cafes and restaurants -away from the urban centre, with a less affluent clientele, and where their presence is more readily tolerated or even openly welcomed, by owners and customers alike. This is yet another example of how the prostitutes' occupation and status further constrain the scope of their interaction with the rest of society, restricting them even more to a limited number of closed and frequently overlapping social and relational circles, making their daily round and their lives as a whole more claustrophobic than ever.

The pronounced degree and extent of the hostile attitudes and reactions encountered in off-duty prostitutes' social milieu fully justify the assessment made by a Barcelona prostitute, Carreras ( 2002), and echoed by most of the women to whom we talked, namely that 'what's hardest in this line of work is people's inability to understand, their intolerance and insults ' (cited in gara.net, 2002).

ILLEGAL IMMIGRANT AND PROSTITUTE: THE CONVERGENCE OF TWO STATUSES IN THE CONTEXT OF OFF-DUTY VIOLENCE

Off-duty violence, in the circumstances and the forms we have identified in the earlier sections, emerges and flourishes where distinct yet mutually reinforcing factors intersect: some of these are quite specific to and inherent in the particularities of the local universe that were the object of our observation, while others are of a much more general nature. Among all these factors, however, we consider the most relevant for an understanding of the subject under analysis to be (1) that most of these women are illegal immigrants and (2) that their occupation and behaviour is generally seen as a form of deviance. In the two sections that follow, both these dimensions are examined in more detail.

The Vast Majority of the Women Working as Club-Based Prostitutes in the Study Area are Illegal Immigrants

Despite their many differences, the prostitutes we interviewed and we contacted during our fieldwork also have many characteristics in common, perhaps the most remarkable of which relates to their socioeconomic origins. Almost all these women come from the poorest groups of the poorest regions of their less developed countries of origin, and almost all of them can be counted among the most deprived of the poor, a fact that confirms the global trend towards the feminization of poverty. Given the socioeconomic precariousness of their lives in their countries of origin, and the extremely restricted range and scope of opportunities open to them to make a living, these women envisage prostitution in the world of the rich as the most immediately effective and accessible chance for dealing with the multiple, profound and urgent problems of material survival that they and their families (namely, their children) face.

The women interviewed most commonly cited the success stories of the women from their own localities who had preceded them as the most powerful factor fostering their own decision to travel 13 to the other side of the Atlantic -i.e. the classic demonstration effect. To put such a decision into practice, almost all of them could count on the help and the support of what might be called 'small-scale informal networks', that is, a sister, a friend, a neighbour, a relative that left before and is able to 'arrange', by themselves or through the intermediation of a club owner or manager, the financial means for them to come too. This implies that almost all of the women travelled 'on credit', almost always as 'inflated debtors', 14 nominally as tourists and yet knowing the real aim of their journey. Widely recurrent among Latin American women exercising this profession in the clubs along the border between the northern Portuguese and Spanish interiors, such a profile of recruitment and travelling confirms the thesis that the link between international migration and female prostitution does not develop solely as a result of women being coerced and/or duped into the profession, nor does it evolve exclusively under the aegis of international organized crime in general and human trafficking networks in particular [START_REF] Agustín | Trabajar en la Industria del Sexo[END_REF](Agustín, , 2002a;;Casas, n.d.;[START_REF] Garaizábal | Una Mirada Feminista a la Prostitución[END_REF]OIT, 1998;[START_REF] Robinson | Sex and The City: La Prostitution à l'Ère des Migrations Mondiales[END_REF]STELLA, 2002).

Due to the particular historical relationships between Portugal and Spain and their former Latin American colonies, Brazilians benefit from a special status that allows them to travel to Portugal as tourists without a visa; the same facility of entry into Spain also applied, until quite recently, to many of the Spanish-speaking countries' citizens. For many of these Latin American women, the possibility of arriving in Europe as mere tourists, i.e. broadly speaking as 'legal immigrants', has at least facilitated the first phase of their lives in Europe by making it possible to move without restriction throughout 'the European space free of border controls', even though entry is more and more scrutinized, surveyed and controlled by the increasingly suspicious authorities at European airports. As tourists, new arrivals are given an authorization to stay for a limited period of about three months. When this temporary permission expires, a few may return home, only to return later with a renewed permit for a further period of three months. But the majority opt to stay on and these women become illegal immigrants, an unavoidable status that is almost impossible to change, given the fact that it is out of the question for those working as prostitutes to apply to legalize their status. In general terms, according to the current immigration laws of both countries, work and residence permits are closely dependent on the applicants' ability to show that they are in regular employment, that is, in short, to be in possession of a formal labour contract.

Despite the fact that both Portugal and Spain have decriminalized 15 the exercise of prostitution, 16 neither recognizes it as a legal occupation or professional activity for which a contract of employment can be signed, and on the basis of which a work permit could be issued. In a word, in both countries, the legislation reproduces the incoherence, ambiguity and contradictions found in the legislation of many other countries on this issue; that is, it neither really forbids prostitution nor really authorizes it 17 [START_REF] Pryen | Stigmate et Métier. Une Approche Sociologique de la Prostitution de Rue[END_REF]. This situation forces most of the foreign women aiming to work in Europe as prostitutes to go clandestine after the expiry of the time limits defined by their tourist visas.

Their illegal status compels these women, along with all immigrants 'without papers', to adopt different strategies to avoid detection by police and other immigration officers, for the consequences of being caught would be repatriation and prohibition from returning for several years. To circulate freely, moving regularly from one of the numerous clubs in both countries to another and, exceptionally, to even include other countries in their peripatetic working lives, is the fundamental prerequisite for surviving, for as long as possible, as illegal immigrants This process converts prostitutes into permanent migrants, who are constantly on the move (Agustín, 2002a;van der Helm, 2002): they simply cease to have a place to live, be it a house, a town, a country, and embark upon a nomadic, rootless, erratic way of life, made up of successive periods of just a few days' duration, spent in one town or other, lodging in an apartment somewhere and, of course, working in a given club. Throughout all this time the only permanent element is their suitcases: the sense of belonging, the personal attachment to a specific living and/or working context are suspended and tend to be replaced by a feeling of 'just passing through', corresponding closely to the more general feelings widely expressed by these women regarding their stay in Europe and in the sex trade. The transitory nature of their working lives clearly impacts on the forms and the content of how they use their off-duty time: it accentuates the perception that it is merely time spent waiting for the next move, an interval in which to do nothing, simply to be endured. Moreover, in order to reduce the visibility of their presence and to diminish the chances of being detected as illegal immigrants, most of these women opt or, in some cases, are even obliged by the club owners and managers, to spend most of their off-duty time inside the houses or apartments where they are temporarily accommodated.

Obviously, their illegal immigrant status and all the surrounding circumstances impose extraordinary limits on the choices available to them and inhibit their ability to use part of their spare time to take advantage of any opportunities for self-improvement in their lives as individuals and citizens. Thus the immigration problem as a whole and, in particular, the ever more restrictive national policies regarding immigration, reinforced by the ambiguous status of prostitution, constitute one of the main frames of reference for a huge part of what we consider to be the insidious violence generally implicit in the day-to-day non-working lives of the foreign women linked to prostitution clubs.

The Condition of Deviants: Stigmatization and Social Exclusion as Ideologically Repressive Constructions

Much of the violence that manifests itself in the off-duty lives of women prostitutes is both directly and indirectly related to the predominantly negative ways in which society view and value commercial sex (Bindman and Doezema, 1997: 3). The profound and extensive social exclusion that women identified as prostitutes generally experience proceeds from the pronounced stigmatization to which they are subjected (Pheterson, 1999: 1;Pons and Serra, 1998: 499).

In effect, commercial sex is taken as the only reference point around which society defines the identity and personal existence of women prostitutes [START_REF] Briz | Ni Victimas, ni Esclavas: Trabajadoras del Sexo' (interview with Cristina Garaizábal)[END_REF]. In April 1998, Gabriela Leite 18 had no hesitation in saying that,

The greatest violence inflicted on the prostitute is the prejudice against her activity and the stigma attached to it.

The stigma attached to the provision of sexual services for money functions as a powerful ideological and symbolic mechanism of repression and control over a way of life that does not conform to hegemonic social values and moral canons, and is therefore perceived as deviant. Prostitutes' predominantly commercialized sex-life diverges from institutionalized patterns and appears to constitute a 'disorder' with respect to society's established principles regarding sexuality and gender and consequently consigns them to the category of transgressors [START_REF] Adelman | Paradoxos da Identidade: A Política de Orientação Sexual no Século XX[END_REF]. Since prostitutes' sexual behaviour is defined as both transgression and 'abnormal' and, as such, a danger and a threat to society, it is adopted as the sole characteristic of their social identity and constitutes the grounds and justification for society's systematic disapproval (Ericsson, 1980: 344).

VIOLENCE AS BROAD-BASED REPRESSION -CONCLUDING THOUGHTS

In prostitution, violence expresses itself transversally in a series of ways and, in particular, in the socially, legally and economically precariousnot to mention temporally 'topsy-turvy' -daily existence of the women who sell sexual services. Victims do not always understand what violent acts may entail for their autonomy and self-determination, nor the full extent of the personal damage that it may inflict on them. This is particularly true of symbolic violence, namely 'that which is undertaken essentially using the purely symbolic means of communication and knowledge or, more precisely, of uncertainty and recognition or, in extremis, that of feeling' (Bourdieu, 1999: 7). The specific form of violence that, in the case of prostitution, basically manifests itself in social stigmatization is grounded in systems of perception, appreciation and action, socially legitimized as somehow inevitable, natural and basic. In other words, it corresponds to what Bourdieu (1999: 29) refers to as 'naturalised social construction'.

As our fieldwork has shown, violence in prostitution transcends the strict limits of the structural axis on which gender relations are founded, and very often, as it happens in the non-working situations, it lacks a directly and personally identifiable aggressor (supposedly the client and/or the pimp, procurer or brothel owner). It is, in fact, a faceless violence with only vaguely delineated outlines, which manifests itself much more at the psychosociological rather than the physical level, extending beyond the restricted context of sexual transactions and thoroughly permeating both the spaces and times supposedly reserved for the 'off-duty' activities of the women involved. In the interstices between the nocturnal periods in which the prostitute's profession is exercised, diverse and prevalent forms of violence are to be found, ranging from social disembeddedness, spatial and physical seclusion, through inertia and the generalization of trivial off-duty routines, to stigmatization and social ostracism, all of which emerge, directly or indirectly, from the lifestyle that dominates and shapes the exercise of this profession. In contrast to what happens in working contexts, this type of violence tends to be almost socially invisible.

The extreme social stigmatization and exclusion imposed on women prostitutes (APDHA, 2002), as well as the legal precariousness of their immigrant and labour status, are the central and the most determinant factors underlying the configurations of their daily lives, especially with regard to the situations they experience in their non-work daily life. Clearly, where these constraints converge a set of circumstances are generated that are highly conducive to various distinct forms and expressions of violence, particularly the more subtle, subliminal and indirect violence that pervades the off-duty, non-working hours of prostitutes, further subjecting them to moral, intellectual and psychological damage. NOTES 1. English translation by Chris Gerry and Audrey Gerry. 2. Project SAPIENS/99 (POCT1/36472/SOC) -'Female Prostitution in Portuguese Semiperipheral Border Areas', undertaken by researchers of the Universities of Trás-os-Montes and Alto Douro (Vila Real), Minho (Braga) and Beira Interior (Covilhã). 3. The fact that the languages of the places of origin and destination are so similar is the most commonly advanced justification for the predominance of Latin American women in this occupation in the regions studied. 4.

Besides these 200 women who were formally surveyed, the members of the research team had numerous shorter informal contacts with many more women who, for a variety of reasons, were unwilling to answer the questionnaire. 5. As the term suggests, a time-budget aims to calculate the use of the time people have at their disposal. In broad terms, the method involves compiling a register of how much time people devote to each of a given category of activity or task [START_REF] Cain | Household Time Budgets[END_REF]. In this specific case, women prostitutes were asked by an interviewer to recall and to enunciate, in a sequential manner, what they had done in the previous day, i.e. since they had awoken till they had gone to sleep again, including the number of clients they met. 6. Most commonly, a woman will stay 21 days, referred to in the profession as a plaza or 'term'. 7. In this regard, [START_REF] Anderson | Working in Nevada[END_REF] quotes a former prostitute who stated categorically that, in her own experience, the brothels 'discourage and in many cases forbid prostitutes to see doctors of their own choosing'. 8. The club owners' practice of monitoring women's behaviour beyond the limits of the workplace and the working relationship was even felt by the researchers during the fieldwork: the women we asked to fill in questionnaires or participate in interviews expressed over and over again their fear that the boss would find out, that he wouldn't like it, or wouldn't allow it, always with the assumption that the boss would be angry about their participation. 9. These comments are representative of the wider use of derogatory representations and a denigrating discourse by the great majority of the club owners and managers regarding the women that work there: they are viewed and portrayed as lesser beings -mentally and morally handicapped. 10. This timetable varies only very slightly between establishments on either side of the border and between the autumn, winter and spring and summer seasons. 11. Before going to bed, women usually eat a light supper and take a bath or shower, a procedure that has also a clear symbolic-ritual dimension, manifest in some of the comments made by interviewees, particularly those with the strongest sense of the social stigma attached to their profession: 'I can't get to sleep unless I've had my shower. I just have to scrub myself all over. It makes me feel as though I've cleansed my soul' (Brazilian woman, 26).

12. 'Alcohol may be employed as a means of overcoming stress and boredom (among prostitutes, for example)' (Montalvo and Echeburúa, 2001: 19). 13. The multiple constraints surrounding the acts and the processes -the material, political and ideological factors of the context, the structural inequalities, the system of power relations -should all be seen as intrinsic parts of the decision-making process. 14. They must repay double or even threefold the real costs of their journeys, and this constitutes one of the diverse forms of exploitation to which they are exposed in the club-based prostitution business. 15. That is, adult sex for commercial gain is not considered against the law. 16. In this sphere, the law only considers (1) incitement to prostitution and (2) the exploitation of women prostitutes by third parties for profit (pimping) to be crimes. 17. With regard to the typology of 'classical' approaches to national prostitution legislation that can be identified in the literature, namely prohibitionist, abolitionist and regulatory (see [START_REF] Apdha | Una Aproximación a la Prostitución y a la Industria del Sexo', paper presented at the workshop Mujeres Immigrantes que Hacen de la Prostitución su Modo de Vida[END_REF]Mestre, n.d.;CLES, 2002;Garaízabal, 2002;[START_REF] Danna | Trafficking and Prostitution of Foreigners in the Context of the EU Countries' Policy about Prostitution[END_REF]

I

  never feel able to let myself go.(Brazilian woman, 20) We don't live like other human beings -we just vegetate. I'm no animal. I want to get out of this line of work.(Brazilian woman, 27)

  Days off are controlled to a certain extent. You have to say in advance when you want one. It's never allowed at the weekend and, on top of that, you can't have the whole day off. But from Monday to Wednesday, you're free to choose which day you'll have off.(Brazilian woman, 35)

  , current Portuguese and Spanish legislation corresponds, in general terms, to the second. 18. Leader of the Rio de Janeiro prostitutes' movement and president of the NGO DaVida. Scambler, Graham and Annette Scambler (1997) Rethinking Prostitution: Purchasing Sex in the 1990s. London and New York: Routledge. Shrage, Laurie (1994) Moral Dilemmas of Feminism: Prostitution, Adultery and Abortion. London: Routledge. STELLA (Organisme d'Aide et de Defense des Prostituées) (2002) 'Stella et le Debat sur la Prostitution'; at: www.cybersolidaires.org/docs/debatts.html (accessed 10 March 2003). Van der Helm, Thérèse (2002) 'Migrations and Mobility of Sex Workers in the Netherlands', Research for Sex Work 5; at: www.med.vu.nl/hcc/artikelen/ vdhelm.htm (accessed 15 November 2002). Manuela Ribeiro is Associate Professor of Sociology at the University of Trás os Montes and Alto Douro (UTAD), Vila Real, Portugal. Besides her lecturing activities, she has carried out research on different themes related to rural development, such as: rural women and agriculture; rural means of livelihood; socioeconomics of rural mountain households; rural tourism; and valorization and protection of traditional food products. This research activity has been, partly, carried out within transnational projects, financed by the EU, and their results are documented in various national and international journals and congress and seminar proceedings. Currently, she is coordinating a research team investigating female prostitution in the Portuguese-Spanish border areas. Address: UTAD, Dept. Economia e sociologiga, 5000-660 Vila Real, Portugal. [email: mribeiro@utad.pt] Octávio Sacramento is a graduate in social-cultural anthropology and pursuing a postgraduate programme in the sociology of culture and lifestyles. He is currently a lecturer in applied development anthropology and social work at the University of Trás os Montes and Alto Douro, Vila Real, Portugal. He is a member of a team that has been carrying out research on female prostitution in the Portuguese-Spanish border areas. Within this project, he is preparing a master's thesis on the customers of female prostitutes. Address: UTAD, Pólo de Miranda do Douro, Rua. D. Dinis.

s/n, Portugal. [email: riosacra@portugalmail.pt]

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Ribeiro and Sacramento: Violence against Prostitutes

European Journal of Women's Studies 12(1)