Sex Worker Resistance in the Neoliberal Creative City: An auto/ethnography

Alex Tigchelaar

doi:10.14197/atr.201219122

Abstract

Sex workers are subjects of intrigue in urban and creative economies. Tours of active, deteriorating, or defunct red-light districts draw thousands of tourists every year in multiple municipalities around the world. When cities celebrate significant anniversaries in their histories, local sex worker narratives are often included in arts-based public offerings. When sex workers take up urban space in their day-to-day lives, however, they are criminalised. Urban developers often view sex workers as existing serviceably only as legend. A history of sex work will add allure to an up-and-coming neighbourhood, lending purpose to its reformation into a more appropriately productive space, but the material presence of sex workers in these neighbourhoods is seen as a threat to community wellbeing and property values. This paper considers how sex workers, continuously displaced from environments they have carved out as workspaces, may use the arts to draw attention to these ongoing contradictions. It investigates how sex workers may make visible the idiosyncratic state of providing vitality to a city’s history while simultaneously being excluded from its living present. Most critically, it suggests ways in which sex workers may encourage those involved as producers and consumers of neoliberal urban revitalisation projects to connect these often fatal paradoxes to the laws that criminalise their labour.

Highlights

In the fall of 2016, I met with the Russian collective Chto Delat (What is to be done?) to discuss a collaboration for Toronto’s Nuit Blanche in September 2017
This paper considers how sex workers, continuously displaced from environments they have carved out as workspaces, may use the arts to draw attention to these ongoing contradictions
The installation was to be a grouping of shipping containers ‘producing a small village... a veritable mass-shipped revolution that unpacks into a world.’[3]. Chto Delat would curate about half the containers featuring ‘a different moment in revolutionary history ranging from the Mexican Revolution, Yugoslavia and China to May ‘68, Cuba, and to Zapatista.’[4]. The others would be curated by local artist-activists

Summary

Introduction

In the fall of 2016, I met with the Russian collective Chto Delat (What is to be done?) to discuss a collaboration for Toronto’s Nuit Blanche in September 2017. The groups involved in The Viminal Space engage in outreach work in different geographical, cultural, and industry locations They were chosen to highlight the multiplicity of issues faced by sex workers under criminalisation, and to illustrate how these laws impact both our ‘presence’ and, by extension, our futures. To self-supporting communities of sex workers,[38] continues to experience ‘tensions between home-owners trying to shut down social services and the needs of new immigrants, sex trade workers, methadone clinic users, and various low-income residents.’[39] These disjunctures are perfect examples of the viminal space: sex workers may be able to check many boxes to qualify as ‘artepreneurs’ and they may even score high on Florida’s absurdly named Bohemian Index.[40] As gritty emblems of the urban environment, they are frequently exploited by cultural producers[41] in multiple spaces of creation.

41 Mammalian Diving Reflex’s Diplomatic Immunities

Conclusion