Imperial views of “poor victimized” Thai women vs. $pread’s perception of “empowered” workers’ who can’t speak for themselves?

Chanelle Gallant: former manager of Good For Her, founder of the Feminist Porn Awards, and an activist at Empower Foundation

This post is an excerpt from my review that covers an analysis of $pread and This Magazine articles concerning sex workers’ rights mobilizing through recognition, honesty and the end of stigmatization.  My review takes a particular interest in Thai sex workers’ rights in relation to women from the NGO Empower (who are administrators, teachers or students of Empower’s programs).

• Rights-based advocacy is an appropriate starting point of the second part of my article which is historically located in a particular period in the transnational sex workers’ rights movement that’s emerged since the 1990s focusing on the right to “self-determination” in sex work as a legitimate choice of employment (“Mission”, $pread).
• In “At the Dark End of the Street: It’s Time to Legalize and Regulate Sex Work”, Tupper assesses misinformation by journalists and the need for more NGOs and more literature in Canadian and American contexts (13). He mentions $pread as an ideal example of an organized group of sex workers demanding recognition and by extension, creating change.
• How is this political method of altering and affecting knowledge production through NGOs and literature like advocacy journalism a useful tactic for initiating social change? Is it affective beyond representation, even after such representation insists on state-instituted recognition through legalization and other policy-making? Are these actions not still a matter of legitimation of the industry and what challenges are left to fall away in light of a focus on fundamentally gaining institutionalized respect?
• Tupper suggests that “if sex workers are ever going to get respect, they have to demand it for themselves, by taking control of the discourse and the industry” (13). Is respect all there is in a rights movement such as the sex workers’? I argue that the problem here with Tupper’s demand to take control of the discourse is that this is embedded, again, in the notion of a free neocitizen who is responsible for his or her own success or demise. This new, reclaimed discourse he preaches under the discursive category of “sex worker” obscures internal representation and contradiction.
• For example, the rights and recognition of Thai sex workers’ concerns differ from other sex workers’ concerns not because of culturally essentialist notions of diversity, but due to the fact of historical, cultural and geographical situatedness as noted by Gallant (which I will investigate further, shortly). Internal contradiction within the sex workers’ rights movement is also not acknowledged by Tupper, who seems to suggest an underlying belief in a singular, supportive community.
• He does not explain, for instance, why sex workers at Empower are educated and taught to be literate and “empowered”, yet they are not the ones with access to publishing about themselves in $pread – it is the visiting Canadian activist teaching them English classes who writes the feature I speak of (Gallant 29).
• I also want to emphasize that writers such as Chanelle Gallant are not necessarily to blame here. The dynamic of representation within the international sex workers’ movement is complex and regardless of hegemonic discourses existing, Gallant as a member and ally of the community has a subjective position that is necessarily a part of the movement – the concerns she raises in her coverage of Thai sex tourism are legitimate and are as central to rights discourse as the voice of Thai sex workers themselves.
• This position I take is similar to that of Himani Bannerji’s, whereby Bannerji argues that everyone has different access points to the same experiential phenomena (85). In “But Who Speaks for Us?”, Bannerji is explicitly referencing racism and valorization of non-white voices on this issue. I believe this is a useful allegory for positioning Gallant as having a different entry point into disproving the same discourse that is the anti-imperialist, ageist opinion that Thai women in the sex industry should not be liaising with older white male clients (29).
• Gallant’s criticism of the meta narrative of the “poor victimized” Thai woman is useful for opening theoretical and public space around the subject of Thai sex tourism in which she recognizes and breaks down the dominant binary between Western patriarchal predatory behaviour and feminized, submissive national imagery of Southeast Asian sex workers.
• She skillfully explicates how anti-imperialist attitudes towards sex tourism in Thailand by Westerners and Thais alike are masking inherent racist attitudes towards interracial relationships between workers and clients that are often, but not limited to a “significant” or perceived age disparity. Examples of stereotypes she discusses include “Thai women who are so poor and desperate, they can’t set boundaries”, Thai women who have “unprotected sex upon request”, and Thai women who are “clever, even ze prostitutes” – i.e. they are assumed to be unintelligent (Gallant 29).
• To combat these stereotypical and racist narratives, Gallant directly quotes and speaks for sex workers she teaches and are friends with from Empower in the city of Chiang Mai. She overturns the so-called anti-colonial paradigm in public perception that is against Western exploitation of unprotected, desperate Asian women through destabilizing the structural discourses we assume are inherent in values of Thai sex workers, such as race.
• For example, one of the Empower offices has a mannequin known as “Mr. Perfect” who is “in short: supportive of sex worker rights, pays well, is presentable and a little bit romantic. What more could a working girl ask for?” (Gallant 30).
• However, the problem remains that more agency is needed beyond Chanelle Gallant’s coverage. Despite $pread’s staff being in the sex industry representing sex workers’ news, it is white Western women who frequently publish articles about non-Western events.
• Are activists-turned-journalists the new cultural observer within the sex workers’ movement in Southeast Asia? More importantly, how are local NGOs working with transnational activists to produce cultural specialists who appear to have more access to documenting the movement than the actual members who are the local sex workers?
• $pread is powerful in using the voices of sex workers, but is prone to epistemic hegemony through an overwhelming favourability of feature articles being written by educated or qualified North American authors who work with rights organizations (see “Selected Articles”, $pread).
• To elaborate, Gallant comments that “Thai sex workers do not need our help – as women, as Thai people, or as sex workers – but they could do with our solidarity” (32). She frames Thai women in the sex industry as agents who are not victimized and make informed decisions on the basis of wanting to protect their health while making good business.
• I agree with Gallant that the discourse of “help” offered by Western social service agencies and NGOs is frequently one embedded with naturalized attitudes about Thai or non-Western people not being capable of helping themselves. It is problematic that such an attitude is additionally neo-colonial in the process of providing aid.
• In spite of this, a similar argument can be made against Gallant insofar as the alternative press and NGOs such as Empower (for which she works) do work in solidarity, but through using the power of their “white” (economically privileged, educated, mobile, literate) voices as a source of credibility and normalcy in order to attract the attention of the status quo.
• NGOs such as Empower also need to be held equally accountable for the erasure of sex workers who do not identify with or have access to their educational programs and activism. Empower is an organization with a primary focus on women and I question whether there are discourses of exclusivity at work that leave out other prominent groups of sex workers in Thailand such as men who are having sex with men or T-girls (trans women and shemales to provide a few terms that are not necessarily self-identified with by these workers themselves).
• To reiterate this point, Empower’s newsletter is titled “Bad Girls” (“Bad Girls”, Empower). The fact that “Bad Girls” is the name of their newsletter raises important questions around whom the organization categorizes as being a “girl” – is this definition trans-inclusive?
• Moreover, a press release by Stella in 2006 on the 16th Annual AIDS Conference features an interview with Empower, in which they are positioned as being the token Thai sex worker group (“Sex Workers’ Rights: Time to Deliver!”, Stella).
• In this article, Empower representatives are quoted for saying “It’s not what we do… it’s how we do it. Safe, fair working conditions save lives. The power we share, the power we have!” Not only is it a particular group of activists who work for Empower, I can only guess there were further limitations on which Empower-affiliated sex workers were able to travel to Toronto for the AIDS Conference in 2006.
• In retrospect, it is useful to note how Empower’s website is another alternative media source I use to provide details on the organization’s activities and history. This highlights how the operations of NGOs and alternative media are interconnected in perpetuating a common cycle of strategic representation and coverage of sex workers’ rights.
• That the very outlets of social movements are potentially divided in theoretical considerations of the efficacy of sex workers’ rights organizing is an incorrect method to approaching the analysis of any rights-based advocacy.
  

  Stella - a sex workers community organization in Montreal

Foregrounding Sex Workers’ Rights: New Social Movements and NGOs

Learning by doing - Empower

This is the first of several posts summarizing the fundamental content of my review.  This post basically reviews Susan Berger’s concept of the “neocitizen”, its relationships with NGOs and how her criticism of the new women’s movement in Guatemala parallels how neoliberal democratization has affected other closely related movements such as the sex workers’ movement in Thailand.  It then positions NGOs such as Empower Foundation in the context of the third wave of transnational women’s mobilizing since 1985. These themes are related to the formation of new power relations in neocolonialism.

Neoliberal Democratization – Empowered Sex Worker as “Neocitizen”:

• Berger in “Face-Off: Gender, Democratization, and Globalization” discusses neoliberal democratization with regards to its emergence and affects on the women’s movement in Guatemala since the 1980s. She explicitly criticizes how NGOs or CSOs (non-governmental/civil society organizations) covertly reduce state intervention and responsibility from servicing society while simultaneously reducing social movements to a politics of democratic tolerance – through focusing mobilization on legalization, for example (6). Berger discusses how new social movements in Latin America came as a relief to observers who were desperate for any alternative to state authoritarianism for change. However, I believe her point about the hidden challenges in unifying social movements is relevant to all contemporary social movements to this day.
• Susan Berger states that civil society is fraught with power inequities, making it difficult for any movement to sustain a collective political identity (3). Central questions such as who has the right to speak for a community and who will set community goals are rightly justified not only in the context of the sex workers’ rights movement in Thailand.
• These questions are relevant in Empower’s particular representation of Thai sex workers’ rights in regional and international networks such as the International AIDS Conference in Bangkok 2004 and Mekong Regional Forum in Chiangmai 2006 (“Empower Story”, Empower). They are also important in the positioning of Empower as a token representative of the Thai sex industry in (alternative) media publications such as $pread or press releases by Stella’s (a sex worker community resource organization in Montreal).
• The NGOization of the women’s movement in Guatemala as a result of neoliberal democratization parallel’s the work of Empower Foundation in Thailand due to their shared replacement of protesting politics with policy work: NGOs become the helpmate of the state in reifying and imposing a neoliberal agenda (Berger 2). Neoliberalism refers to a redefinition of liberalism since globalization that embraces policies such as free markets and free trade.
• Empower’s position as the envoy of Thai sex workers’ mirrors the shift in the women’s movement in Guatemala due to their explicit focus on educating sex workers’. This is demonstrated through their original English language programs that provided the basis for two decades of development into a school of learning with nine centers in four provinces of Thailand (“Empower University”, Empower).
• Consequently, the loci of social change in Thailand shifted from being on attaining better working conditions to resigning to educational reform for personal empowerment in order to adjust to normalized perceptions of respected civil society. These perceptions include being literate, bilingual, and so on. Empower focuses on individual survival tactics such as self defence classes rather than mass state resistance to combat systemic violence in the sex trade.
• As an NGO, Empower actually works implicitly with the government at the risk of perpetuating oppressions on which they rely to operate. Organizations such as Empower also pose “discursive and ideological orientations under the guise of individual rights” (Berger 6). For example, English language programs reinforce the valorization of Western knowledge systems as a route to empowerment and mobility for Thai sex workers, viewed through the profitability of attracting more traveling clients.
• NGOs potentially (some – not all regardless of cultural location) reinforce neoliberal democratization’s model for what Berger calls the “neocitizen” in the advent of globalization. The neocitizen has “market rationality, individual choice, personal responsibility, control over one’s own fate and self-development” (4). Therefore, it is the sex worker’s onus to be successful, self-empower and survive.
• This writer Peter Tupper describes how sex workers need to speak out for themselves and promote attitudes of openness in Vancouver in order to strengthen pressures to legalize and regulate the industry (13). Yet he remarks that anywhere between eight to 20% of workers in Vancouver are on the streets (Tupper 13). Does it not occur to him that some workers are not in a position to access organizations or venues in order to voice out their concerns on a wide scale publicly? The neocitizen is deceptive due to the misleading appearance that such new agents are capable of controlling their own self-development, when I argue they are not operating on “equal footing in the same playing field” (Berger 5).
• Beyond critical reservations about who or what dominates these sex worker affiliated organizations,
  

  Susan Berger on NGOs - Awareness or Action?

  networks, and publications, I believe it is important to recognize $pread as an excellent international tool for networking between those who have access and the means for submitting news articles and coverage. The fact that this magazine aims to provide an open forum for sex workers worldwide that tries to acknowledge different experiences and attitudes towards the sex industry is far better than promoting an inherently essentialist cultural perception under which everyone belongs to the category “sex worker”.

Transnational Women’s Movements – Empower Foundation in The Third Wave:

• The coalition of NGOs since 1985 in the women’s movement are akin to the coalition of organizations in the sex workers’ rights movement. While these movements obviously overlap, it is rights-based advocacy that they have in common. Aili Tripp describes the new focus on rights-based advocacy in the third wave as a combination by activists and NGOs of sustainable development and human rights, an action that effectively coalesced the concerns of the “North” (Western) and “South” (non-Western areas such as Latin America, Africa) (65).
• To understand rights-based advocacy in a relevant example, Gallant quotes Tuk, a Bangkok sex worker with years of experience, defending Thai sex workers from stereotypical views of families pressuring their daughters to find work in the sex trade in order to survive (32). Tuk explains that while this was an occurrence that took place 20-30 years ago, it is no longer the case and girls are now choosing this career out of their own informed, educated decisions (Gallant 32).
• Empower’s project began in 1985, right when the third movement of transnational mobilization began, and was and continues to be a project dominated by and for women (“Empower Story”, Empower). Their focus on educational and pedagogy in subjects such as leadership and activism in Empower University are significant expressions of third wave cross-cultural equity-based concerns.
• Stella, a community organization created in 1995 in Montreal to address similar concerns in terms of resources and education arrived 10 years after Empower (“Who Are We?”, Stella). It is not surprising then that Tripp argues international forums have enabled truly transnational growth with non-Western and Western countries alike, allowing for multidirectional influences across the women’s movement (51). I speculate the sex workers’ movement is developing in the same manner and static conceptions of transnational growth operating by spreading from the West outward are a myth.
  

  Aili Tripp explores transnational mobilizing

Quick update: approach

Voice recorded blogging trial

(Disclaimer: I’m new to podcasting; working on cutting out “um” will take some time!)

$pread Magazine: Feminist Authorship?

Buck Angel on $pread Issue 2.2

Hey readers,

Tonight I’m going to continue contextualizing my sources.  I’ve been an avid bathroom reader of $pread for a while, but I never took a closer look before at their FAQ until now thanks to our Studies in Postcolonialism assignment!

I’ve raised issues in previous posts about grand narratives.  I want to insert here a short anecdote from my Queer Writing course and note how I feel narratives of incoherance and fragmentation can be really powerful (potentially in a poststructuralist sense?) in re-envisioning identity, which is crucial to the sources I use since $pread itself is staked precariously as being read as pseudo-feminist, yet not.  Adrienne Rich, in her 21 Love Poems, constantly emphasizes tension between community and difference, but ultimately emphasizes how we live communally in a terrain of differences on the same land.

So what’s the deal?  Is $pread feminist?  Why the hell does it matter?  Feminism needs to be viewed, in my mind, through an etymological genealogy (not sure if that’s the right term, I tend to make up words when I’m blogging! I see it as a poststructural liberty all bloggers take *wink*).  It needs to be historically and culturally situated.  Everyone has different conceptions of feminism(s).  We (we being academics or women’s studies enthusiasts of an intersectional, transnational approach) are potentially exposed to this kind of diversified, contradictory imagery of feminisms.  However, the audiences of alternative magazines are not all academics, not all theorizing enthusiasts.  There are popular ideas feminism evokes.  For me, what comes to mind is the common criticized trope of Western women organizing in exclusionary ways in terms of what constitutes “woman”.

Consequently, I think it’s interesting to reflect about the $pread’s FAQ’s answer to “Is $pread feminist?”:

“We don’t explicitly call $pread a feminist magazine because we don’t want to discourage sex workers who don’t identify as feminists from reading and contributing. Like most American women, most female sex workers probably don’t call themselves feminists. Also, many people think of feminist projects as exclusive to women. $pread has male staff, volunteers, writers, and artists. However, as a magazine that aims to give voice to a largely marginalized population of mostly female workers, how could we not be feminist?”

I argue that precisely because $pread is a forum for diverse opinions seeking to maximize its readership, it chooses to skirt its political stances as a way to avoid discouraging readers from exploring the content of their publication.  Likewise, this tone of diplomacy is similar in their answer to why they don’t include pornographic images – to avoid making anyone uncomfortable (including sex workers) who would otherwise be interested in reading what they have to say.

On the subject of feminism and how it potentially alienates readers, I’ve included a picture of the cover of Issue 2.2 from 2006 with a cover story on the FtM trans porn star Buck Angel.  I think it’s appropriate since trans studies and the trans movement have had historical tensions with feminism and this is a heavy-loaded cross-cultural issue with significant literature about it.  If anyone wants me to provide resources, I can comment with a few!  I don’t want to detour too much from issues of neocolonialism, however… Let me think for a second….

I believe in regards to neocolonial aspects… one reason why a publication’s stance on feminism is relevant is due to the cultural specificity of this term.  $pread has contributors from “all over the world” (according to their FAQ), thus, feminism can have very different significant and personal embodied meanings for contributors.  That aside, a tension I’ve noticed in $pread’s articles so far is a dominance of academic and Western authorship regarding non-Western case studies.  I don’t know if this is a consistent problem I’m recognizing, to what extent it is a problem, who’s problem it is, and how I will address it in my review.  But I definitely want to think on this and get back to you (readers out there, if you’re out there).  I recognize I risk wanting to simply find “THE SOURCE” for blame and as someone who supports the celebration of small triumphs in equity rights movements… I will try to avoid being totally negative!

For now, let me just quickly make a connection to Saundra Sturdevant’s work “Who Benefits? U.S. Military, Prostitution, and Base Conversion” (2001).  In this article Sturdevant is critical of literature on sex workers (specifically in the Phillipines).  Saundra criticizes how assertions about prostituted labour in feminist circles are dominated by formally educated North American and Northern European women (141).  A parallel can be drawn to the alternative press and the challenges in finding writers who can cover issues in non-Western countries who are a part of and belong to those experiences of sex work or the sex industry.  Saundra also highlights that this is potentially due to barriers in language, which I agree are the case here.  While I wholly support academics and researchers or NGOs increasing the visibility of non-Western sex workers’ rights concerns, I wonder if there are better ways to negotiate how these lines of communication are being sought.

Here’s the media kit for $pread if anyone is interested, since I provided a link to UTNE’s press kit.

Reflecting on academia

This is a brief post that’s off on a tangent from my assignment (which, if you are new to this site, is roughly about: in alternative (sometimes independent) magazines such as Spread, what are 1. the narrative positionings of and 2. emerging issues in non-Western sex workers rights organizing or lack thereof, and its potential relations to state bureaucracy/policy).

I recognize that in academia we are tempted to tell grand narratives ourselves and don’t even realize it.  I sometimes question why.  I also think it takes a lot of courage sometimes when you’re a student to face topics or issues you aren’t familiar with or feel intimated by.  I’d guess this could contribute to how we specialize ourselves into particular disciplinary corners of the intellectual world.  There’s what we love and feel invested in, and then there’s what we just stick to talking about theoretically or historically because that’s what we know.  Our comfort zones.

In the future, I want to make it a personal goal to overcome these sorts of anxieties and insecurities around knowledge and our ability to learn and unlearn.

To bring this back to my assignment and the value of alternative media, I think that grand narratives are an issue to any kind of journalism and we have to evaluate our methods and practices even as we criticize/analyze OTHER media coverage or visibility issues.  I’m going to try and reflect about this in my review.  I think right now I’m forgetting that I need to orient my writing through focusing on an aspect of and emerging “issue” in neocolonialism.

UTNE: A Closer Look

Video: Bryan Welch, publisher of UTNE, live at Elephant Journal

In my last post I provided a brief summary of where my research is at right now.  I noted how using UTNE was going to be useful since they review a plethora of alternative “off the beaten path” sources.

I wanted to stop and question how this shapes my interest in narratives about non-Western sex-trade workers rights generated in alternative media, to the potential risk of colonial/racial discourses.  According to the UTNE’s media kit, the majority of this magazine’s readership is politically “influencial” – involved in green issues or policy issues, activism, education, etc.  At the same time, over 75% have graduated from university.  I question then the usefulness of alternative sources such as UTNE: are we, with an advanced education and interest in “alternative” politics, preaching to the converted (more than likely)?

Furthermore, how does UTNE decide what is “good” alternative press?  How is it marketing itself as a force that rivals the rhetoric of mainstream media?  These are all heavy inquires.  For now, I’ve posted this video clip I found that gives you a sense of where UTNE comes from.  It raises the fact that alternative media is still regulated by publishing houses that determine what gets “put out there” in the “margins” for wider, socially aware audiences.

Producing a draft: preliminary thoughts about sources

I just created this blog today after fidgeting with a few different platforms last night (Blogger, Squarespace, Movable Type).  Given that this blog needs to be launched with some significant content within the next week, I decided it only made sense to (a) find a free, user-friendly (idiot’s guide) to push button publishing, (b) avoid fussing over aesthetics and focus on functionality.

So why am I posting about this seemingly arbitrary process?

Marie, a TA for another course I’m currently taking with some content on (post)colonialism, is also running a blog herself.  She observed a lack in the amount of reflecting about “the process” that teaching enables.  Likewise, I don’t think there should be a separation between my own process and the final product here on this blog.  The fact that I am using a blog as my chosen medium of communication highlights my belief in learning and observing (such that I am reviewing alternative media on a particular topic of concern to a course I am taking in school) as a continuous process that falters, reconfigures itself, re-cognizes its subjects and so on.

A note to Rachel, if you are reading this post: I’m not sure of where this assignment is taking me so far, but in terms of how I am “situating the alternative media coverage” I’m probably taking more of a personal angle (my own prior knowledge).

With that said, here are my preliminary thoughts on this assignment (re: see the “Context” tab for an explanation of exactly what the purpose of this blog is for):

1. I just finished editing my review for PART II of the course for which this assignment is due (Thursday, December 4).  I’m kind of tired.  I also have an essay to complete in between now and Monday, December 1 for another class.  Consequently, I won’t be working on the very meat and bones of this third, and final review until next week.
2. I am using several sources that are considered “alternative press”.  There’s a good chance I will narrow down the number of articles.  My reason for using alternative magazines is their familiarity.  Several years ago I was on the editorial collective of the feminist independent youth magazine Shameless.  This opportunity exposed me to the diverse world of feminist journalism and I was very inspired by “indie mags” and the power to publish content that lacked exposure in the mainstream media, by and for alternative voices.  Thus, with subscriptions to magazines like Bitch or Bust, I fell in love.
3. These sources are: Spread: Illuminating the Sex Industry; This Magazine: Because Everything is Political; and UTNE: The Best of Alternative Press.  That I am using the UTNE Reader is crucial because this is an alternative source of commentary of the very alternative sources I want to draw articles from.  Links of these publications’ websites will be posted on the sidebar, shortly.
4. Themes that are emerging so far from briefly reading several articles of interest:
   • The hegemonic racialization of women’s bodies as submissive or susceptible to victimization in sex tourism, specific to the “East” (I.e. Thailand).
   • Alternative media’s positioning of sex workers “rights” as state-instituted economic oppression in non-Western societies VERSUS as a concern taken up in Western social movements.  How does this reinforce narratives of First World democracy versus Third World authoritarianism?  Or narratives of countries that cannot govern themselves (relevant to neocolonialism)?
   • How do these narratives of Western empowered collective resistance and non-Western oppressive, politically nihilistic solitude come into being through NGOs (re: an article in the current issue of the UTNE Reader about the “new colonialism” of humanitarian groups).