No. 72 (2025): Mayo-agosto
Filosofía en el espacio público

Agency, Gray Areas, Sexual Exploitation

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  • Miguel Ángel Torres Quiroga
Miguel Ángel Torres Quiroga
Universidad Autónoma Metropolitana Unidad Iztapalapa

Published 2025-04-29

Keywords

  • gray areas,
  • atrocities,
  • agency,
  • prostitution,
  • feminism

Copyright (c) 2025 Tópicos, Revista de Filosofía

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This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.

How to Cite

Torres Quiroga, M. Ángel. (2025). Agency, Gray Areas, Sexual Exploitation. Tópicos, Revista De Filosofía, 72, 431-471. https://doi.org/10.21555/top.v720.2943
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Abstract

Grey areas, conceptualized by Primo Levi in the context of the Nazi extermination camps, are moral ambivalences that make it difficult to assign responsibility or blame between victims, accomplices, and oppressors. Claudia Card took up the concept for her paradigm of atrocity, an ethical model able to identify and confront evils in institutions and social practices. From this viewpoint, I analyze the stance of radical feminism in challenging prostitution. The agency of women vulnerable to sexual exploitation confronts asymmetry and their lack of options, while the gray zones built by oppressive institutions materialize complicities. Faced with the questioning of the pro-sex work movement, radical feminism could go beyond the strictly punitive penalty to johns and pimps, and add a policy aimed to address the sex and gendered evils that, despite their name, are built by class and race oppressions as well.

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