Embodying Normalcy: Women Exiting Sex Work and the Boundaries of Transformation

Abstract

Studies have illustrated the role of the body as an improvable project that constitutes an important part of an individual’s self-identity and social life. For marginalized groups, the body project proves to be meaningful in gaining social respectability and negotiating stigma and visibility. While literature on rehabilitation and recovery has highlighted identity processes and the remake of moral subjectivities, current sociological and feminist literature has focused on embodied displays during recovery, but only in limited ways. Carefully researching dental care—which holds cultural meanings of beauty and social class, as well as medical meanings—reveals not only the stigmatized characters of embodied aspects, but also the ways embodied transformation is imagined and fantasized, as well as its boundaries. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork conducted at a rehabilitation hostel for women exiting sex work, I consider how the women embodied the negotiation of their identities on a normal-abnormal axis through the ways in which they experienced their lack of teeth due to drug abuse. First, dental restoration is imagined as the embodiment of normalcy: women view caring for their appearance and dental repair as important steps towards rejoining mainstream society. Second, dental restoration is revealed as meaningful both in real life—for the job market and one’s financial well-being—and as a fantasy, where it is imagined as an enhancer of a person’s potential to achieve a higher degree of beauty and success. At the same time, some women identify the boundaries of this transformation: dental restoration is recognized as temporary and removable, which subverts the imagined promise of transformation and calls into question the distinction between the pre- and post-rehabilitated body.