Jeffreys, Sheila, Professor

By Stine Adrian on 20 Jul | 0 comments

Sheila Jeffreys is professor of Social and Political Sciences, University of Melbourne, Australia 

GEXCEL PROJECT
At GEXcel I will be working on forms of men’s behaviour which have been normalized and have come to be seen as acceptable or inevitable in the late twentieth and early twentieth century. One of these forms of behaviour is men’s prostitution of women which has been normalized as the sex industry has been legalized and legitimated and become a significant market sector in national and global economies. Another is the practice of ‘transgenderism’, which has now attached to itself rights to surgery and hormone treatment on public health services, to law change and to various forms of social support. My examination of these practices starts from the understanding that these forms of behaviour are socially constructed, problematic for women’s equality, and in the case of transgenderism, harmful to the male aspirants.

1/  Men and prostitution
I am interested in particular in the ways in which male elites network through use of the sex industry to establish their profits and their connections. Thus men in business utilize strip clubs and brothels to entertain clients in ways which exclude businesswomen and place obstacles in the ways of equal opportunity. Travelling businessmen receive access to prostituted women as hospitality, and to encourage favourable business relations. Corporations in Australia, for instance, buy in escort services for visiting executives. The VW human resources department provided prostituted women to trades union officials as well as to executives out of a slush fund set up for this purpose. But men in political and sporting elites utilize the sex industry in similar ways. Thus the burgeoning growth and diversification of the sex industry provides a parallel social and political world in which men can form links and cement their advantages. This work forms part of an ongoing project to move beyond the ways in which the sex industry has been considered within feminist theory and research, i.e. as either a form of violence against individual prostituted women or an exercise of their agency, to look at the wider social and political implications of the growing industry, particularly for women’s equality, for good governance and democracy. At GEXcel I will be looking at men’s use of business and leisure prostitution through, in particular, an analysis of websites, such as PunterNet from the UK, on which prostitutors access difference forms of prostitution and discuss their practice.

2/ Disability and prostitution
I am also working in the area of disability and sexual exploitation. I am interested in the ways in which men with disabilities, often those suffering from age-related disabilities, have become an important niche market for the industry of prostitution. In legalized regimes such as Australia state welfare benefits are used to enable intellectually and physically disabled men and boy to visit brothels, or to use escort services, and to pay for their female carers to act as sexual facilitators. This is taking place in the UK but not through brothels which are still illegal there. Brothels and escort services also make visits to aged care facilities to provide ‘sexual services’ from several women at one time to the men living there. Another area of interest on which no research has yet been done is the sexual exploitation of paid carers of disabled and older men. These carers are likely to be migrant, sometimes trafficked, women, who are in a poor position to reject the sexual expectations of their employers. Thus issues of globalization and migration, disability, the male sex right, and prostitution link together in interesting ways. Recent work in nursing studies and disability studies is arguing that disabled and older men have the right to the services of ‘sexual facilitators’, and even that nurses should masturbate these men or help them to use the bodies of prostituted women, sometimes in situations where more than one woman is available to be so used.

3/ Transgenderism
The other form of mainly men’s behaviour I will be working on is the practice of transgenderism and its social and political implications. This work will form part of the book I am writing with Dr Lorene Gottschalk of the University of Ballarat.

The book blurb is as follows:
This book proposes that in western culture gender is socially constructed as the basis of male dominance. Thus the idea and practice of gender has the potential to hurt many. In transgenderism the hurt can take several forms. People who feel that their ‘gender’ does not fit their bodies may suffer psychological hurts. They then get physically ‘hurt’ by the medical profession which diagnoses and treats them. They are further hurt after treatment when they find themselves marginalised and excluded, and some may even consider that they have made a mistake which cannot be easily rectified. The phenomenon of transgenderism can hurt others too, such as the wives who find their husbands now consider themselves to be women, and lesbian partners whose lesbianism is thrown into doubt when their girlfriends become ‘men’. The book is sympathetic to those who consider themselves ‘transgender’ and the problems they encounter, but goes further than other literature on the topic by exploring the wider social and political context and implications of the phenomenon of transgenderism.

GEXcel seminars and workshops

Internal seminar: Transgenderism and male domination: the social and political implications of a harmful traditional practice.

Talk for mini-conference:
Male buyers in the global sex industry: outsourcing women’s subordination in business and leisure prostitution.

 
MINI CV

Prior to moving to Melbourne in 1991
I was involved in feminist and lesbian feminist politics in London and Leeds in UK from 1973. I was involved in setting up the London Feminist and Lesbian History Groups and the London Lesbian Archive, and in campaigns against sexual violence against women and pornography.

I was employed in teaching mostly in further education colleges.

I moved to Melbourne to take up a position as Lecturer in the Department of Political Science (now in the School of Social and Political Sciences).

Current position
1991-present: School of Social and Political Sciences, University of Melbourne.

Current teaching
Undergraduate:
2nd/3rd Year: Sexual Politics
2nd/3rd Year: International Gender Politics

Postgraduate (MA International Politics):
Women in Global Politics

Phd supervisions completed:
2000: Lorene Gottschalk’s ‘Feminism and the Construction of Lesbianism. A Comparison of Lesbians’ Experiences in Feminist and Non-Feminist Contexts’.
2005: Mary Sullivan. ‘Making it work: the legalization of brothel prostitution in Victoria’.
2006: Carole Moschetti. ‘Conjugal Wrongs don’t make Rights: feminist campaigns against child marriage between the two world wars’.
2006: Lauren Rosewarne. Skin Trade Policy.Public Policy and the Portrayal of Women in Outdoor Advertising.
2006: Jennifer Oriel. ‘All Quiet on the Western Front.’ The International Sexual Politics of HIV/AIDS.
2006: Jodie Kline. Discovering Lesbian Community? An exploration of lesbians' experiences and perceptions of shared community

Current Phd supervisions:
Rheya Linden. Animal liberation.
Sarah Elliott. Reproductive technology.
Meagan Tyler. The prostitution of sexuality.
Natasha Rave. Prostitution in the community: the social and political effects of legalization in Australia.
Kaye Quek: Marriage trafficking.
Caroline Norma (with Carolyn Stephens in the Asia Institute). Sex industry in Japan in the high growth era.
Laura Tarzia (with Tim Marjoribanks in Sociology). Contemporary understandings of sexuality and evolution.

Publications

• Books (single authored)

  Jeffreys, Sheila 2008 (Forthcoming, October): The Industrial Vagina: a political economy of the global sex trade. London: Routledge.

  Jeffreys, Sheila 2005: Beauty and Misogyny. Harmful Cultural Practices in the West. London and New York: Routledge.

  Jeffreys, Sheila 2003: Unpacking Queer Politics. A lesbian feminist perspective. Cambridge, UK: Polity.

  Jeffreys, Sheila 1997: The Idea of Prostitution.  Melbourne: Spinifex.

  Jeffreys, Sheila 1993: The Lesbian Heresy.  A feminist perspective on the lesbian sexual revolution. Melbourne:Spinifex, London: The Women's Press, (1994), Munchen:Frauenoffensive, (1994), Madrid:Caixsa, University of Valencia Press, (1995).

  Jeffreys, Sheila 1990: Anticlimax. A feminist perspective on the sexual revolution. The Women's Press U.K., New York University Press (1991).

  Jeffreys, Sheila 1985 : The Spinster and Her Enemies.  Feminism and Sexuality  1880-1930. London:Pandora Press, Routledge, Kegan, Paul. Melbourne:Spinifex (1997).

• Book chapters (last 5 years)

  Jeffreys, Sheila (2009). ‘Body modification as self mutilation by proxy.’ In Hearn, Jeff and Burr, Viv (eds), Sex, Violence and the Body: The Erotics of Wounding. London: Palgrave MacMillan. In press.

  Jeffreys, Sheila 2006: ‘The Traffic in Women: Human Rights Violation or Migration for Work?’ In Agrawal, Anuja (ed). Migrant Women and Work. New Delhi, Thousand Oaks, California, London: Sage Publications. pp194-217

  Jeffreys, Sheila 2004: ‘Prostitution as a Harmful Cultural Practice’. In Chris Stark and Rebecca Whisnant (eds), Not for Sale. Melbourne, Australia: Spinifex  Press. pp386-399

  Jeffreys, Sheila 2003: ‘Western Concepts of Gender and Prostitution as Obstacles to Ending the International Traffic in Women’. In Bird, Delys, Wendy Were and Terri-Ann White (eds), Future Imaginings: Sexualities and Genders in the New Millennium. Perth: University of Western Australia Press. pp41-54

• Journal articles (last 5 years)

  Jeffreys, Sheila 2009 (In press): ‘Disability and the Male Sex Right’. Women’s Studies International Forum.

  Jeffreys, Sheila 2008 (October): ‘Keeping women down and out: the strip club boom and the reinforcement of male dominance’. Signs. A journal of women in culture and society. 

  Jeffreys, Sheila 2008: ‘They Know it When They See It: the UK Gender Recognition Act 2004’. British Journal of Politics and International Relations. 10 (2), 328-345.

  Jeffreys, Sheila 2007: ‘Double Jeopardy: women, the US military and the war in Iraq’. Women’s Studies International Forum. In press.

  Jeffreys, Sheila 2006 : ‘Judicial Child Abuse : The family court of Australia, gender identity disorder, and the ‘Alex’ case.’ Women’s Studies International Forum 29, 1-12.

  Jeffreys, Sheila 2006 : ‘Making abuse visible. Combating the normalisation of prostitution. Moderna Sprak. August. pp64-82

  Jeffreys, Sheila 2003: ‘Sex Tourism: Do Women Do it Too?’ Leisure Studies 22 (July) pp223-238