Rendering the sex worker invisible

As we listened to the presentation about Kindred House this morning, I felt a complex range of emotions run through me. On one hand, I felt hopeful because it was comforting to know that there are amazing people in the city that are, not only willing but, wanting to specifically help marginalized women who work in street sex work. However, on the other hand, I felt very disappointed knowing that Kindred House is among one of the very few places in Edmonton that are meant to help and protect these women. 

This made me think of the ways in which we, as a society, attempt to render woman identified sex workers invisible and push them into hiding because they do not fit into our strict framework of "normalcy". We want to say that they are exceptions, that they "are not like us", that they deviate from the majority but most of all, our society desires their silence and invisibility in order to build the framework that enables us to pretend they do not exist. This is very reminiscent of the Audre Lorde reading on the function of prisons that we engaged with last week. By attempting to push sex workers into confined spaces (both physically and mentally) where people cannot see them, unless they are actively seeking them, we are relieving ourselves of taking responsibility for our part in contributing to a cyclical system of oppression.

Obviously, I was extremely saddened by this thought. To an extent, even Kindred House itself, a space of “respite and refuge” for these women, must play along with the realities of visibility for woman sex workers. As Shawna explained, on the outside of Kindred House there are no indicative signs and there is even a back door for women to leave quietly without being seen. While I believe that the measures implemented by Kindred House to ensure respect for the anonymity of its women are important and admirable, I can’t help but feel sad that even within a space that is mean to be their “designated” safe space, these women are perpetually being forced into hiding. 

Another point highlighted today that really made me think about how society essentially desires the disappearance of woman sex workers is the criminalization of “selling sex” within a certain distance from a school. This made me think of the problems that will arise as the public and private realms of sex workers bleed into one another. For example, let’s say a listed sex worker has a young child who attends a public elementary school and wants to pick up said child after classes. Would there not be a certain degree of risk for arrest for the mother? Although it may seem “ludicrous” for someone (namely the police) to accuse this woman of attempting to sell sex while picking up her child, I do think that there is something to be said about how certain stigmatized or “deviant” acts can lead to the conflation of the performance of body acts with the identities of those bodies. While a woman may want to switch in and out of the roles of "mother" and "worker", the two may seem indistinguishable from each other as they are roles performed by the same body. As we have seen numerous time in many cases, the justice system fails again and again to keep a distinction between "woman" and "sex worker" when they work with these people. 

Opposed to some other marginalized groups who want to be seen and heard in order to improve their conditions, woman sex workers have been conditioned to believe that they will actually lose more if they gain visibility. What’s interesting, and horrifying, is the uniqueness of the oppression of sex workers. Our society does not only want to confine these women into smaller spaces but want to completely eradicate them from being acknowledged. For example, the patriarchy attempts to constrain the larger category of “women” to stay within the domestic realm, to serve the purpose of fulfilling the role of mother, housekeeper, nurturer, etc. The home and private places where these roles take place are acceptable and even encouraged to be acknowledged as women's spaces.  However, in the case of sex workers, society does not only want to push them into little spaces but  actually wants to push them out because they do not serve a “conventional” purpose within the constructed “normalcy” that it depends on.