The Indescribability of Patriarchy

In my paper, I analyze the narratives of violence and trauma of women who already quit the prostitution industry and who are still selling sex in the context of temporal, spatial and emotional closeness and distance to their experiences in the industry. The narratives of the two groups differ significantly regarding their experiences, the violence committed against them, the trauma experienced and the nature of the prostitution industry. I parallel the differences in the narratives with the nature of the trauma and with the temporal, spatial and emotional distance from the prostitution industry which is inseparable from the phenomenon of violence against women. Through the differences in the narratives of these women, I examine how it becomes legitimate at the societal level that women in general – but economically vulnerable women even more likely – are exposed to patriarchal violence systematically and without consequences in the prostitution industry embedded in the capitalist world system. My further aim is to make the women’s invisible experiences of violence and traumas caused by violence visible in line with feminist empiricism.