[NextGenderation]
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Dear all
At the meeting in london we had a short but important
discussion on how it is meaningful for nextgenderation
to make interventions in different forms. And one of
the form would the support existing actions which
claim different feminist spaces. The IUSW
(international union of sex workers), with whom I am
working, is organising an action of protest around the
Women's Library in London (I have been sending emails
about it already: do you remember?). At the NG meeting
it was decided to support the action and being
included as NG among those 'protesting with'. I am
very happy about it, and I am including the leaflet in
the following: the action is next thursday the 23th at
17.30 in front of the Library: hope to see you there!
giulia
The women's library + prostitution: what is going on?
A red umbrella intervention
Our mobilization outside the current exhibition and
programme of the Women's Library 'Prostitution: what
is going on?' comes from our implication in struggles
around gender, labour and migration as they happen in
sex work and from the urgent need to create alliances
across different working positions, nationalities, and
class if we are to change the sex industry.
The Library's programme of speaker events excludes sex
workers, sex workers' organisations, as well as anyone
speaking from a perspective that considers their
struggles in the UK and around the world. Speakers on
migration and informal sector work are also excluded.
The exhibition is patronising and offensive in its
representation of sex workers and the sex industry. It
gives the idea that sex workers are poor women victims
(read: weak) of sexually aggressive men. And clearly,
as too often, prostitution is only spoken about sex
workers and not by sex workers.
No space is given to represent sex workers as working
women, men, and transgender people who attempt to
individually and collectively struggle to improve our
lives, be freer, move across countries, and work in
better conditions. No space is given to analyse how
the exploitation and coercion that do exist in the sex
industry are due not to evil men but to precise and
changeable laws, regulations, and discourses, which
produce the criminalisation of the industry, the
impossibility for sex workers to work together, to
unionise and organise, the impossibility for most
people in the world to migrate in a legal way, the
impossibility for many people, traditionally but not
only women, to make good (read: 'highly skilled' and
male) money in legal and regulated areas of the labour
market.
By choosing to represent and discuss prostitution in
such a way, the Women's Library has made a serious
political choice, and inscribes itself in a larger
strategy of exclusion of migrants, sex workers and
allied activists around the world who try to organise
to change conditions in the sex industry from a labour
and migrants' rights perspective.
There is more than one feminist position on sex work.
When feminism only sees prostitution as violence of
'bad men' against 'innocent women' it erases the
complex experiences of many workers, including those
who use the resources of sex to mediate a variety of
financial problems and/or migrate, and find themselves
in exploitative and abusive conditions. It silences
the workers who consciously make the decision to work
in the sex industry but who are at some point subject
to abuse. The abuses we undergo, and our
stigmatisation, are considered to be natural
consequences of our willingness to work as
prostitutes, meaning it is our own fault. This
reinforces the classic dichotomy between innocent and
guilty women, thus fostering the idea that 'innocent'
women deserve of protection and 'guilty' ones can be
abused with impunity.
When feminism denies sex work as labour it forces us
to spend our time defending the existence of our work
instead of struggling for its transformation. It
forces us to deny any of the pleasures of our work, or
to invent them.
When feminism contributes to and promotes the moral
panic about 'trafficking' it makes itself complicit in
the increase of states' border control, restrictions
to migration, worsening migrants' dependency, police
raids in working places and deportations. This
discourse in effect becomes the legitimisation of
state violence and of the creation of hierarchies of
citizenship.
We are in the process of developing conversations and
actions that disrupt this tendency within feminist
theory and practice. We believe in a feminism which
starts from and talks to the people for whom sex
becomes labour. Selling sex is in many ways a labour
process similar to other personal services exchanged
on the capitalist market. At the same time, we
recognise that the ways in which sex work exists are
also deeply interrelated to the ways in which 'female'
services such as caring, domestic, sexual and
reproductive activities are supposed to be provided.
The demand of money for sex in a transparent and
potentially contractual way is often a break and
significant shift in the way people, traditionally but
not only women, are expected to give these services
for no remuneration. Therefore, central to this
feminist vision is the autonomy of all people of every
gender employing their resources in the sex industry
and/or moving across borders.
We ask the Director of the Library to include the
present leaflet in the exhibition, and the IUSW
banner, along with the Sex Workers in Europe
Manifesto, endorsed by a conference of 120 sex workers
in Brussels in October 2005 (
www.sexworkeurope.org/manifesto )
A communiqué from the
The International Union of Sex Workers
23 November
http://www.iusw.org/
Protesting with us are:
x:talk: English classes for workers in the sex
industry
London NoBorders
Sexual Freedom Coalition
International Committee on the Rights of Sex Workers
in Europe
NextGenderation
(others still to be confirmed)
"If you have come here to help me you are wasting your
time. But if you have come because your liberation is
bound up with mine, then let us work together"
Lila Watson, Australian Aboriginal Activist
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