ABSTRACT
For the other two papers, the political issue is representation. For Cameron and Frazer, representation is first and foremost an issue of politics, and theory is a branch of politics. The gender of the representers matters, and women making representations are intrinsically challenging to the dominant representational and theoretical codes. As they challenge these codes, they reveal new and unexpected connections within them, as the Serial Sex Murderer is opened out as hero of post-Enlightenment philosophy. For Day, the problem is one of ethnographic representation. In addressing the lives of London sex workers, Day shows how these women can most easily expose the problems of representation and experience, but how they are simultaneously least able to do so. They are the subjects with the best evidence of rape as personal violation (the breaking of a formally agreed contract governing intimacy), but are the least able to defend themselves in public (because their profession is illegal, precisely because the contracts they draw up violate the category-divisions of English society). This ethnography, coming as it does from the home culture of the ethnographer, is able to speak for itself. As a representation, it stands in vivid contrast to the lived experience of those described.
