I'm pretty uneducated on the topic, so I'd like some wisdom from the many who are more well read on it.

  • MuinteoirSaoirse [she/her]
    ·
    2 months ago
    Part 9: Sex Work Activism

    Much like with drug use, when a market is criminalized it does not prevent the market from existing: rather it creates the purest form of capitalist free market. A market completely devoid of oversight or recourse for the workers. Decriminalising sex work will help to redress the imbalance of power that sex workers face as they are able to openly organise and engage in struggle.

    Sex workers deserve our solidarity in this struggle, as they’ve given so much of themselves to struggles through the years.

    In medieval Europe brothel workers formed guilds and orchestrated strikes for improved working conditions. In the fifteenth century, prostitutes in Bavaria asserted before a city council that what they did was work. In 1917 200 prostitutes marched in San Francisco to demand the end of brothel closures. A speaker said “Nearly every one of these women is a mother or has someone depending on her. . . They are driven into this life by economic conditions. . . You don’t do any good by attacking us. Why don’t you attack those conditions?

    In 19th century Britain and Ireland prostitutes created mutual aid networks, sharing income and child care (a tradition that is alive in sex worker communities to this day).

    When eight sex workers were murdered in Thika, Kenya, in 2010, hundreds of sex workers, including the Kenya Sex Workers Alliance came from around the country to protest police violence. Aisha, a sex worker in Thika, said, “we wanted people to know that we call ourselves sex workers because it is the wheat our families depend on.” Sixty years earlier, in the 1950s prostitutes joined the Mau Mau revolution to free Kenya from British rule.

    In the 60s street trans sex workers were at the front of the charge in the Compton Cafeteria and Stonewall Uprisings, putting their lives on the line to battle police for queer liberation. They also were in the line of fire for the fight for civil rights.

    STAR (Street Transvestite Action Revolutionaries), founded by two street sex workers, Marsha P. Johnson and Sylvia Rivera who were involved in the Stonewall Uprising, was a network of radical street queens who worked together in community. Sylvia Rivera joined the Gay Liberation Front and the Young Lords, marched to protest Angela Davis’s arrest, and met in conference with Huey P. Newton.

    In Disarm, Defund, Dismantle, sex workers contribute their knowledge on the importance of sex worker organizing in tackling violent policing and the criminalisation of racialised people.

    Maggie’s Toronto Sex Workers Action Project is one of the oldest sex-worker-led organizations in Canada and has worked to protect street sex workers, and provide support for trans people. Their essay Sex Worker Justice – By Us, For Us: Toronto Sex Workers Resisting Carceral Violence details their work in searching for a missing Black and Indigenous trans street worker, Alloura Wells, when police refused to mobilize a search for her. They have been active in abolitionist movements, understanding the necessity of ending policing and prisons for the lives of sex workers. Their work with helping trans street workers access hormones is documented in Namaste’s Invisible Lives.

    Trans rights and sex workers rights are deeply linked: trans people are frequently kicked out of homes, excluded from institutions and social services, and often work as prostitutes. 44% of Black trans women in the US have done survival sex work.

    As Viviane K. Namaste says, “systemic and institutionalised discrimination against prostitutes impedes and prevents their access to health care and thus the ability of many transsexuals to live their bodies as they choose. Such discrimination is evident in numerous locations: gender identity clinics, prisons, and health care and social service agencies. It is discrimination against prostitutes that orders the experiences of many transsexuals—especially MTF transsexuals—within the institutional world. How relevant is a “transgendered” social movement that does not make the decriminalization of prostitution a priority?

    In 1974 Ethiopian sex workers joined the Confederation of Ethiopian Labour Unions and engaged in strike actions with them against the government.

    In 1975 sex workers in France occupied churches to protest poverty, criminalisation and police violence. In London, the English Collective of Prostitutes occupied churches in King’s Cross in 1980.

    Marxist feminists like Silvia Federici and the Wages for Housework movement has from its inception been intertwined with the organisation of sex workers, and has stood in solidarity with them in their quest to have their labour recognised as real work so that they might demand their emancipation from such work through a radical transformation of society.

    In the words of Black Women for Wages for Housework: “When prostitutes win, all women win.”

    • MuinteoirSaoirse [she/her]
      ·
      2 months ago

      Further Reading

      Conquest: Sexual Violence and American Indian Genocide – Andrea Smith

      Are Prisons Obsolete? - Angela Y. Davis

      Abolition. Feminism. Now. - Angela Y. Davis, Gina Dent, Erica Meiners, Beth Richie

      Insurgent Love: Abolition and Domestic Homicide – Ardath Whynacht

      Border & Rule: Global Migration, Capitalism and the Rise of Racist Nationalism – Harsha Walia

      Transition and Abolition: Notes on Marxism and Trans Politics – Jules Joanne Gleeson

      Transgender Marxism – ed. Jules Joanne Gleeson and Elle O’Rourke

      How We Get Free: Black Feminism and the Combahee River Collective – ed. Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor

      We Do This ‘Til We Free Us – Mariame Kaba

      Revolting Prostitutes – Molly Smith and Juno Mac

      Policing Black Lives: State Violence in Canada From Slavery to the Present – Robyn Maynard

      Disarm, Defund, Dismantle: Police Abolition in Canada – ed. Shiri Pasternak, Kevin Walby, Abby Stadnyk

      Caliban & The Witch: Women, The Body, and Primitive Accumulation – Silvia Federici

      Beyond the Periphery of the Skin: Rethinking, Remaking, and Reclaiming the Body in Contemporary Capitalism – Silvia Federici

      Revolution at Point Zero: Housework, Reproduction, and Feminist Struggle – Silvia Federici

      Invisible Lives: The Erasure of Transgendered and Transsexual Individuals – Viviane K. Namaste

    • Cowbee [he/him, they/them]
      ·
      edit-2
      2 months ago

      Fantastic essay, thank you very much for posting this! Really helped reframe my understanding. Thank you! Already had Caliban and the Witch next in my reading list, I'll add Revolting Prostitutes like you suggested as well, along with the rest eventually.

      Shoutout to Hexbear posters for helping me kill my brainworms one effort post at a time

        • Cowbee [he/him, they/them]
          ·
          2 months ago

          No, thank you for writing it up! I've been far-too libby until this year, so I'm trying to do a lot of catch-up, and I wouldn't be able to do it without posters like you helping guide me in the right direction. Appreciate it!

      • MuinteoirSaoirse [she/her]
        ·
        2 months ago

        I wrote this for real life educational purposes, it's not anywhere public, but I could throw a PDF up on like catbox or something if you wanted

        • SchillMenaker [he/him]
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          2 months ago

          It's an informative and enjoyable read, very well put. While I'll freely admit to being relatively uneducated on sex work theory, I found the essay not really changing my opinions, but instead crystalizing the rationale behind them from a vague notion of justice into concrete thoughts.

          I also admire your correct framing of this of the top as a here-and-now subject rather than opening the door to hypothetical frameworks. As much as the ND part of me wants to expand out into infinity on something as complicated as this, defining the discussion to reality as it currently exists makes it very uncomplicated. Thanks for sharing.

        • Thallo [she/her]
          ·
          2 months ago

          Oh, that would be really cool!

          It's a bit hard for me to read in a chain of comments on my phone chomsky-yes-honey