Abstract

In this chapter, the principle of commodification of women is further developed. The aim of the chapter is to show how male workers compulsively refer to the logics of market economy as what, metaphorically, they refer to as a brothel. It shows that these male workers repeatedly resort to the idea of sex work (from a moralistic perspective) to depict the hyperbolic capitalist tendency to commodify every element of social existence. This is epitomized in a commonly found phrase in these writings which reads: ‘[E]verything is now prostituted’. As it is defended in this chapter, this idea is most likely inspired by Adolphe Granier de Cassagnac’s work on sex work and its relation to class degeneration. This metaphorical use of sex work to depict the logics of the market economy, as it is argued, operates in a twofold way: on the one hand, the abstract figure of the sex worker comes to translate into Chilean popular culture the Marxist concept of exchange value. In other words, the sex worker is depicted in the press as someone who is corrupted to such degree that has lost her individuality, personhood and proper name to become the archetypical figure of the exchangeable commodity. This correlation between exchange, des-identification and bodily mutation of commodified women is theorized by resorting to (1) Catherine Malabou’s concepts of ontological capitalism, and (2) Luce Irigaray’s Feminist critique of exchange value in Marx’s Capital. On the other hand, this derogative way to refer to sex workers is used in the press to exclude female workers from the revolutionary cause based on the argument that they actively betray their class companions by ‘selling their bodies’ to bourgeois men and by rejecting the love of male workers. At the end of this chapter, the core principles of political philosophy present in the press and its relationship to sexual difference is fully developed under two principles: (1) workers depict the market economy as a hyperbolic brothel; and (2) they, metaphorically, posit the revolution as the recuperation of an idyllic and uneconomic female lover. Hence, any reference to sexual difference in the press is considered part of a corpus of political philosophy built upon patriarchal values which operate as key elements in the translation of European political theory to Chilean political culture.