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Assignment 09

In his novel Aberrations in Black: Toward a Queer of Color Critique, Roderick Ferguson discusses how property, capital, and prostitution have historically become intertwined within our capitalist societal ideals. He basically implies that one does not exist without the other and explains how capitalism leads to social movements and change (or rather, transgressions, as these changes are often referred). Borrowing Marx’s ideas, Ferguson says that a prostitute is deemed the “property of communal lust” and a laborer is deemed the “property of capital” (Aberrations 8). To explain this concept, Ferguson talks about Britain in the nineteenth-century when prostitution was a popular form of sexual deviancy. As working mill girls earned wages they were able to purchase material goods and clothing, an act that was scrutinized by the middle-class. They turned the working-class’s desire for commodities into a desire for sex, which went against social and sexual norms. Needing someone to blame for the rise in sexually active young women and out-of-wedlock pregnancies, the bourgeois class looked at the working-class as the perpetrators of sexual and social chaos. In this sense, prostitutes represent how capital affects social organization and norms.