Resumen

TORRES-QUIROGA, Miguel Ángel. Agency, Gray Areas, Sexual Exploitation. Tópicos (México) [online]. 2025, n.72, pp.431-471.  Epub 11-Ago-2025. ISSN 0188-6649.  https://doi.org/10.21555/top.v720.2943.

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.

Palabras llave : gray areas; atrocities; agency; prostitution; feminism.

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