Sex Workers (and Liberalism)

Yesterday I was somewhat hastily invited to sit in on a meeting for which I hadn’t been briefed. Three people came into the office and exchanged business cards with us (I definitely wished I had sprung for York business cards before I left). From their cards and the conversations I could see they were all advocates for Ugandan sex workers’ rights and were currently seeking to follow through on a case against an abusive police officer and secure protection for the litigating victim in the interim. Two of the people present were women (one of whom was the litigant) and were both coordinators of separate but collaborating sex worker advocacy organizations. I assumed the litigant was an advocate who had been harassed due to the nature of her work, I did not think she was a sex worker. The third person present was a male doctor who has taken a role in the case. As we filled out an intake form, I was somewhat annoyed seeing the man tell the woman exactly, word-for-word how to fill out the intake form which asks her to describe her case. After the meeting was complete I did some research on the organizations and found out that both women who came to us were (as of their last public writings) active sex workers who had taken up advocacy and organizing within their working environment to respond to the abuses they had experienced and witnessed in their line of work.

I am someone who is open minded, and I have for a long time supported the rights of sex workers, and been against their criminalization . I don’t flinch talking about or advocating for sex workers rights any more than I would talking about gay rights or anti-racism (ie: not at all). Yet I still displayed an implicit reaction when I assumed that neither woman was a prostitute. Mind you, I don’t think I should start assuming that women I meet ARE prostitutes, but that’s not my point. Rather, there is an implicit classism present in assumptions about who is able to be an advocate (or trustee), and who is able to speak eloquently and directly in the public and judicial domains about social and legal issues. ’Advocate for sex workers’ is consonant, whereas ‘advocates who are sex workers’ is dissonant.

My Googling turned up an article (link) written by one of the women at the meeting wherein she describes her experiences turning to sex work (a term I now greatly prefer to ‘prostitution’) as a way to fund herself through the completion of her secondary school, which turned out to be so profitable she was able to support her sibling’s schooling as well as her mother. Eventually she politicized her experiences after a colleage was attacked and began to seek advocacy opportunities.

The other woman present had shared her own story in a collection of stories called “When I dare to be powerful”. The editor of that collection recounted the launch event for the book:

“As the audience listened to Daughtie Akoth of Kenya and Daisy Nakato of Uganda share parts of their stories, we could see the transformation happening before our eyes. Although one person in the audience assumed that we were ‘preaching to the converted’ it became apparent during the question and answer session that there were in fact a number of people that were engaging with the discussion of sex worker rights for the very first time, and still held negative perceptions about the industry and the people engaged in it. We also later discovered that when Daughtie and Daisy began to speak a lot of people in the room were surprised that there were sex workers in the room, and that they could speak for themselves in a powerful and articulate manner.”

This audience was surely as caring and liberal a bunch as any. Yet liberalism and humanitarianism in general still rests on a similar classism to my own which only allows the members of the upper strata of society (generally based on educational achievement) to be the legitimate (and well-paid) advocate for equality.

This is a paradox which resonates when I visited the large secured UN village in the heart of Kampala (secured by the Ugandan Police), when I make the transition from the untarmacked road leading up to my workplace to the large and stately building housing my modern office, as well as when I look around posh offices apartments then look at poorly paid domestic workers. Or perhaps when my housemate, after hearing my small diatribe against Coca-Cola and bottled water, reminded me of how I turned my nose up at the prospect of using boiled tap water in my morning coffee.

So, retrospectively, I could see that the male doctor was facilitating a process for a politically active sex worker whose moderately hindered literacy might otherwise hinder her from filling out a form which assumes that human rights advocates are fully literate English speakers (who can fill out a form in 10 minutes instead of an hour).

I think this critique dives into a discussion about voice, agency, and the subaltern – a discussion which also dives into totally unintelligible and inaccessible academic language (see Butler, Spivak, Homi Bhabba, etc…). But let me briefly put it (and these are not rules, but patterns)… when injustice occurs to articulate members of liberal society, it is intolerable, prosecutable (as Judith Butler would say, grievable). But when injustice occurs to inarticulate (sub-altern) non-members of liberal society, it is perhaps regrettable (when relayed by articulate elites), but largely invisible, as in the case of refugees warehoused in camps for decades, sex workers raped by police officers and beaten by clients. The result is a tiered system of justice both nationally and globally in which some people lose access to that justice due to their ‘invisibility’.

Sex workers who are advocates belong to the same group of people as Brazil’s landless persons movement (MST) or perhaps the Zapatista’s of Mexico: people who seek representation, rights, recognition, ‘a seat at the table’, but who do so outside the historically bourgeois liberal sector of professional human rights workers and activists.

Follow up::

Read Macklean’s personal story

Contact Akina Mama wa Afrika to get a copy of ‘When I Dare To Be Powerful’, the collection of stories from East African sex workers.

Check out the websites for the African Sex Workers Alliance