Track E- Harm Reduction and Outreach

In order to theorize the experiences of transgender sex workers, I will utilize Iris Young’s work on “the five faces of oppression.” As she defines them, these five faces are: exploitation, marginalization, powerlessness, cultural imperialism and violence. In order to theorize the position of trans sex workers in society, I will discuss the transgender sex worker vis-à-vis these five concepts. I will focus particular attention on violence and how systemic use of violence against trans people and sex workers furthers the systems of domination under patriarchy and how it functions to continually create and recreate hierarchies of worth for human life and to collaborate with state-sanctioned institutions that oppress and degrade particular bodies that are marked as “other.”

In addition to discussing oppression, this paper will discuss activism, agency, resistance and social change. In academia, trans folks and sex workers are often theorized as victims of oppressive circumstances. While oppression is real, this does not diminish the multiple ways that sex workers, transgender people and their allies have fought back against pervasive discrimination and violence. (For instance, The Transgender Day of Remembrance and the International Day to End Violence Against Sex Workers.) These events have raised awareness and called attention to systemic violence against trans and sex working communities in the U.S. and internationally. However, depending on the individual event, they may not operationalize an intersectional approach and develop alliances between diverse social justice movements. In particular, I will offer a critique of segments of the mainstream transgender/GLBT movement, which have failed to address systemic racism and classism, and have rendered sex workers invisible due to replicating dominant stigma, erotophobia and cultural taboo as well as internalized oppression and notions of “good” trans subjectivities. I will proffer that GLBT movements have taken a “top down” approach rather than a “Flood-Up” approach as developed by radical social justice organizing groups like FIERCE! In New York City.

My goal with this paper is to provide a basic understanding of the ways in which trans sex workers are oppressed by dominant society in order to highlight how this oppression is consistent with the perpetuation of white-supremacist capitalist patriarchy. In addition, I would like to highlight how sex worker and trans communities have responded to violence, and how they have sometimes faltered in this work. Finally, I would like to make some suggestions for strengthening our social justice work through promoting intersectional and coalitional work, questioning movement priorities and breaking down culturally imposed barriers to collective liberation.

Notable Tips and Tricks that will be covered:

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  Business skills to increase safety
  
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  Self-care and time management
  
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  Ensuring your privacy
  
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  Money management and budgeting
  
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  Taxes
  

3) Field workers such as health advocates and peer educators will learn a variety of concrete strategies for outreach to trans and female sex working communities, including communities of color, that will implement the combined peer education approach.

Format: This workshop will utilize grassroots education strategies that mix a variety of presentation formats. Each presenter will provide an element of work. One will present an overview of drug use information, another will speak to stigma, the effect of violence and marginalization. The workshop will also include interactive and creative elements.

Materials: Interactive exercises modified from the National Sex Worker Leadership training curriculum will engage participants via creative interactions and trial program modeling. Participants will be able to design a combined outreach program that addresses issues in their communities (all communities have specific features) and leave with a plan for change to take back to their organizations.

The purpose of this survey conducted during October 2009 was to examine the demographics, sexual behaviors and attitudes toward sex work in a nationwide sample of men who locate and contract with non-transgendered female Internet Sexual Service Providers (ISSP) through posting and reading reviews on The Erotic Review.com. Participants were solicited through invitational messages posted on the regional and national discussion boards of the site. Over 550 men completed a 104-item online questionnaire which identified demographic information, sexual preferences enacted with sex workers in general and with ISSP in particular, as well as attitudes toward sex work and beliefs concerning sex workers. Results showed that participants had a preference for ISSP who offer the girlfriend experience (GFE) over all other behaviors. Penile-vaginal coitus with condom was the most preferred sex act with ISSP. There was a positive correlation between the degree of emotional attachment to an ATF (all-time favorite) provider and additional money and/or material goods given to her beyond the contracted fee for sexual services. There was also a weak but positive correlation between rape myth acceptance (RMA) and preference for the GFE. The study contributes to the understanding of a rapidly emerging segment of men who use the Internet to solicit independently operating indoor sex workers.

From about 1900 until U.S. entry into World War I, prostitution held a central symbolic place in the minds of Americans, and various Progressives and Reformers set their sights on combating this social ill. The moral panic over prostitution brought to the fore questions about the sexual double standard, women’s desire to achieve economic independence via a living wage, and the ways in which women’s desire for increased geographic mobility challenged bourgeois notions of ideal womanhood. Numerous representations of prostitution in films, fiction, legislation, and other sources of this period depict the virtue of single women in the city as gravely imperiled. Historians have mostly assumed that this simplistic view of prostitution held sway. But the visual culture of the radical press, in particular political cartoons published in the socialist journal the Masses offer a different voice. These images demonstrate a backlash against this dominant position and clearly present a point of view more sympathetic to single urban working-class women who turned to prostitution, and an understanding that sexual mores were changing.

The Masses, a journal noted for the high quality of its visuals, included among its editors a number of the artists who would go on to form the Ashcan School of American art, a movement whose innovative contribution was its focus on everyday urban life. John Sloan in particular, an artist whose paintings, drawings, etchings and lithographs often focused on working-class women and prostitutes, made a number of editorial cartoons on the subject of prostitution for the Masses. A close reading of the cartoons in the Masses in comparison with other contemporary images reveals a nuanced perspective on prostitution.

By the mid-1910s, the prostitute as symbol for fallen women could no longer maintain the central focus of a new sexual era, try as the reform movement might to keep her image alive. The anxieties that single women living in the city raised in the minds of those who attempted to continue ideals of bourgeois womanhood would no longer be sustained by the working women themselves who were their objects of scrutiny. In the face of women’s insistence on their own sexual agency, the plethora of cultural productions warning of the ills of prostitution and white slavery might then be read not as evidence of prostitution’s predominance, but rather as evidence that raising its specter could no longer deter women from leading independent sexual lives.

Objectives: The paper therefore will explore the spread of HIV/AIDS which has resulted due to a number of socio-economic issues: prostitution, the men and women who solicit them, and the seldom use of condoms and other contraceptives. The study is based on the fact that fisherfolk are known to migrate in search of productive fishing grounds. This nomadic way of life has positively and economically led the springing up of satellite towns around Lake Victoria. Others include behavioral pattern and way of living based on cultures and traditions (such as wife inheritance) making the entire society “high risk” for AIDS. Also a factor to consider is widest spread of AIDS through prostitution and the concerted efforts being made to solve these problems by different stakeholders.

Methods: The secondary issues of the Lake Victoria fisherfolk communities’ economy- which has reached an alarming rate, job security as a catalyst spread of AIDS, migration patterns, inadequate health care and homelessness.

Results: The population of fisherfolk among whom HIV/AIDs was first identified in epidemic form has until recently been overlooked with the dire consequence that they have been left largely beyond the reach of prevention, treatment and mitigation programmes. The reality is that HIV/AIDS is more than just a health problem; it is also a threat to sustainable rural development. Need to have mobile beach banks, mobile healthcare facilities and radio programmes for Fisherfolks.