Sex Workers Unite: A History of the Movement from Stonewall to SlutWalk
Melinda Chateauvert
Language: English
Pages: 272
ISBN: 0807061395
Format: PDF / Kindle (mobi) / ePub
A provocative history that reveals how sex workers have been at the vanguard of social justice movements for the past fifty years while building a movement of their own that challenges our ideas about labor, sexuality, feminism, and freedom
Documenting five decades of sex-worker activism, Sex Workers Unite is a fresh history that places prostitutes, hustlers, escorts, call girls, strippers, and porn stars in the center of America’s major civil rights struggles. Although their presence has largely been ignored and obscured, in this provocative history Melinda Chateauvert recasts sex workers as savvy political organizers—not as helpless victims in need of rescue.
Even before transgender sex worker Sylvia Rivera threw a brick and sparked the Stonewall Riot in 1969, these trailblazing activists and allies challenged criminal sex laws and “whorephobia,” and were active in struggles for gay liberation, women’s rights, reproductive justice, union organizing, and prison abolition.
Although the multibillion-dollar international sex industry thrives, the United States remains one of the few industrialized nations that continues to criminalize prostitution, and these discriminatory laws put workers at risk. In response, sex workers have organized to improve their working conditions and to challenge police and structural violence. Through individual confrontations and collective campaigns, they have pushed the boundaries of conventional organizing, called for decriminalization, and have reframed sex workers’ rights as human rights.
Telling stories of sex workers, from the frontlines of the 1970s sex wars to the modern-day streets of SlutWalk, Chateauvert illuminates an underrepresented movement, introducing skilled activists who have organized a global campaign for self-determination and sexual freedom that is as multifaceted as the sex industry and as diverse as human sexuality.
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Body Language: How Our Movements and Posture Reveal Our Secret Selves (Revised and Updated)
Scientific Controversies: A Socio-Historical Perspective on the Advancement of Science
Culture as Praxis (Published in association with Theory, Culture & Society)
Bruno: Conversations with a Brazilian Drug Dealer
Neighborhood.15 St. James became a “known prostitute,” situating her in the same offender category as convicted gay men, lesbians, and other “sex deviates.” The bar where she had worked as a cocktail waitress fired her upon her conviction. Without regard to constitutional due process, the mere charge of prostitution (or homosexuality) made it difficult for someone to obtain legitimate employment or even rent an apartment.16 St. James had a college degree, but no job skills. Her work options were.
Infirmary. The model for a peer-led occupational health and safety clinic for sex workers was first conceived in 1985; St. James wanted to “disprove all this bullshit about how we were the spreaders of disease and stuff.”100 Ironically, the state’s mandatory HIV testing law gave St. James the leverage to obtain start-up funding from the city for the clinic. In 1998, she heard from a woman in jail whose blood had been drawn without her consent. Recognizing the incident could turn into a political.
Others played and saved, determined to return to Brazil in the future. At what point, or whether, a dancer’s “performance” of gender, sexuality, and exoticism became an “enacted” truth can only be determined by the woman herself. The “girlfriend experience,” the “weekend boyfriend,” and the “sugar baby” may also balance on a line between continuous role performance and enactment.57 As sociologist Elizabeth Bernstein notes, “Contemporary ‘intimacy providers’ (as some in the industry have taken to.
Specifications for the uniform, which Wolfgang called “more bare than hare.” HERE also wanted a rule that allowed customers to look but not touch. Wolfgang found out about the problems at the Playboy Clubs from her own seventeen-year-old daughter, Martha, whom she sent in undercover to work as a Bunny. Though underage, Martha was hired. She told her mother about the “no wage” policy: bunnies worked only for tips, they weren’t even paid the paltry below-minimum-wage restaurant worker hourly rate.
Served as district attorney in Brooklyn in the 1980s, explained the difficulty of prosecuting someone accused of rape when the victim did sex work. New York State offered no protection, she said. [Sex workers] are viewed as the dregs of this earth. You can try to prosecute . . . but the defense can bring in every single prior sexual act she’s ever had, on the theory that if she’s ever said “yes” once, she’ll say “yes” again.41 Changes in the city’s rape shield laws have limited introduction.