These are notes towards a combined guest lecture for Dr.CutiePants' class on sex work and Dr.Wonderful's class on queer theory and pop culture. (If you knew them, you'd think the silly fake names are totally apt.) It will be (I hope) a complete, coherent lecture by early February.  

Big Picture

In 2005, Laura Agustin called for the development of cultural studies of commercial sex. Despite the appearance of a proliferation of sex work-related research, media attention to sex work because of Bedford v. Canada, and a certain amount of mainstreaming of sex-positive and queer feminisms in universities (maybe a product of women's studies departments increasingly accepting and becoming gender studies departments?), the bulk of the research I've looked at continues to isolate sex work as an exceptional category for study: it's almost as if sex work happens in a void. We can study nearly anything and everything about it, sometimes including things that are transgressive and often including things that are unethical, but we still study sex work as if it's totally exceptional and as if we will eventually produce findings that define, once and for all, what sex work is like. Agustin writes:

Little work exists in a sex-industry framework, but if we agree that it refers to all commercial goods and services of an erotic and sexual kind, then a rich field of human activities is involved. And every one of these activities operates in a complex socio-cultural context in which the meaning of buying and selling sex is not always the same. The cultural study of commercial sex would use a cultural-studies, interdisciplinary approach to fill gaps in knowledge about commercial sex and relate the findings to other social and cultural concepts. [...] An approach that considers commercial sex as culture would look for the

everyday practices involved and try to reveal how our societies distinguish between activities considered normatively ‘social’ and activities denounced as morally wrong. This means examining a range of activities that take in both commerce and sex. (618-19)

So my premise is to understand academic work as something that sometimes includes "services of an erotic and sexual kind." I don't mean I think profs are secretly selling blowjobs out of their offices on their off-hours (though I'm sure someone, somewhere is), but rather that universities do often deal in sex in other ways -- as subjects for research and teaching -- and definitely, while they might sometimes try to deny it, deal in bodies: student bodies, bodies of knowledge, people role-playing teacher and student, people filling chairs and offices, people bringing their sexual, gendered, racialized bodies with them everywhere they go. On the very odd occasion, that's even sexy (e.g., the Northwestern thing in 2010). At the same time, academic environments, for better and for worse, are often the context in which sex work is assigned meaning. Is it violence against all women? An empowering experience of being the petty bourgeoisie? Plain old work under capitalism? Let's do some research and decide. 

Sex work is also often a place where our understanding of the university are formed and interpreted. I definitely encountered the porno-trope of Stern Professor and Naughty Schoolgirl long before stepping foot on a real university campus. I have revisited that trope in research (tk Kipnis) and read about how the roles are performed and consumed as an articulation and interpretation of tensions about gender and class. The word "coed" should have no meaning today, and it doesn't in universities where women's attendance is the norm, but it's kept alive and meaningful by porn. I suppose the contribution I want to make here is to figure out how to investigate sex work in a way that turns the lens on the environment where the investigation takes place, while still acknowledging the role of sex work environments in shaping and interpreting research. 

• How is sex work made a part of universities: as sex worker students navigate university systems, as sex work becomes a topic for classes, as sex workers who can't access education continue to be viewed as research subjects?
• How is the university made a part of sex work: as workers are called on to act out and interpret the roles of teachers, students, and doctors in various sex worksites; as "students" earn a premium price as prostitutes; as sex worker activists demand the resources for doing research themselves?
• What potentials and limitations for knowledge -- about sex work and about the cultures of research and post-secondary education -- are made possible by these interactions?

Discussion

Sex Worker Students

• Tying these thoughts together is a feeling that scholarly work on sex workers who are also students re-tell the same narrative, over and over: that of students who upon finding themselves unable to pay for school, "turn to prostitution." The implication is that "student" is their first and primary identity, and sex work comes second, both chronologically and in terms of who they are. This is also reflected in corporate news media that report on this "phenomenon" in a tone of moral panic and titillation. This itself is an interesting narrative, but it also brings up questions about access to education for the many sex workers who are sex workers first, who live and work in poverty, who already traditionally have less access to education, and who are granted entrance only as research subjects.
• A second consideration centres around academic freedom. For a variety of reasons, sex worker students may have to hide their identities, and they may be caught in situations where they can't safely research their own working conditions because they're in the closet, or are expected to be interested in nothing but sex work because they are 'out.' There is also the matter of sex being a difficult topic in a lot of spaces, and sexual violence, an occasional working condition of some sex workers, particularly difficult. If sex worker students are pathologized or censored because they can't stick to "appropriate" topics. (E.g., I was in a class once where we were asked to describe our first jobs as "paper boys or babysitters" --- suppose one of the students' first job was prostitution or other criminalized, informal sector work, like drug dealing? How would she negotiate her "inability" to speak appropriately in that space? How could that class happen in a way that makes "inappropriate" experience and appropriate topic for discussion?)

"Fierce Humanities"

• These thoughts focus on storytelling and performance within the framework of what Cary Nelson calls the "fierce humanities": topics that consider "the human capacity for great evil" as well as culture's "capacity to bear witness to it"; "teaching that seeks not merely learning, but unlearning, that seeks to unsettle knowledge and assumptions in ways more fundamental than any exam can or should test." In other terms, "impossible knowledge," "testimonial," or, as the things I've been reading about rape disclosures keep putting it, "sensitive topics." There are huge questions related to testimonial about what is "true," and about how to find truth. (Myself, I like Avery Gordon's methodology in Hauntings, for tracking a "seething presence.") And I like the language of "fierce" because it speaks, however inadvertently or indirectly, to the queer potential for defining research here.
• I also have questions about how academic cultures are "storied up" in sex work scenarios, as noted above.

Academic Limitations and Queer Potential

• My questions here are about how the organization of universities limit knowledge about sex work, even as scholars continue to pull sex workers in as research subjects. Academic working conditions and neoliberalizing funding structures -- and along with them the understanding of what research, and especially humanities research, is and should be -- limit how research can be done, who can do it, where it can be published, and how it can be used to effect change. Meanwhile, sex workers are increasingly voicing their rejection of the "academic industrial complex," especially as it produces anti-prostitution feminist analyses. 
• I'm not sure yet why I paired them, except that it seemed like a good idea to do so, but a second consideration here is what possibilities do queer theories and transgressive modes of resistance offer for shaping our understandings of research, and for shaping the ways sex work is assigned meaning in academic space (or whether that continues to be the site where meaning is assigned at all). 

The linked subpages house very disorganized (and occasionally blank... all that typing is tiring) discussions of anything and everything I thought was interesting and related to the topic. I have every intention of narrowing and focusing as I work, but for the moment, it reflects the somewhat chaotic nature of my research process. (The folks I asked to look this over are definitely not expected to delve into all that, unless you really, really want to.)

What's Missing?

- Videos. The kids today like videos. I can't think of anything to show them. 

- I want to foster dialogue about reciprocity, commonality, and accountability between workers in both industries. That is easier said than done. I do not want to foster a debate about which job is "better" or whether or not this or that group of workers is oppressed. In my experience, this is also easier said than done. 

- I can't find any research, besides Jane Gallop's (and she's not exactly on the point I'm aiming for... plus she kind of creeps me out), on women's academic freedom in the 70s-90s, as women's studies departments were emerging, people were having "debates" about sexual harassment that tended to focus on women's rights vs. academic freedom, and the radical feminist anti-prostitution rhetoric we see today was crystallizing. I think this history might provide important context and models for other ways of doing things... and I think it must exist -- I just can't believe no one thought to reframe academic freedom debates in such a way that academic freedom and feminism were one and the same -- but I just don't know where to look. 

Their reading list:

Required - 

Anonymous, Ph.D.. "I'd Rather Be a Whore Than an Academic." Bad Subjects 46 (1999). http://bad.eserver.org/issues/1999/46/anonymous.html

Recommended - (I've suggested they skim everything, and read in detail the things they find most interesting)

Craft, Nikki and Melissa Farley. "Why I Made the Choice to Become a Prostitute."Prostitution Research and Education. 1996. http://www.prostitutionresearch.com/WhyIMade.html

Isola, Mark John. "Academic Whores and Publishing Pimps." Bad Subjects 75 (2006). http://bad.eserver.org/issues/2006/75/isola.htm

Smallman, Vicky. "Contingent Academic Work in the Canadian Context." Retrieved from http://www.chicagococal.org/downloads/Unions-Canada.pdf

Purvis, Lara. "Hostile Clashes Dominate Women's Conference." Xtra. 18 July 2011. http://www.xtra.ca/public/Ottawa/Hostile_clashes_dominate_womens_conference-10497.aspx

Pivot Legal Society. Beyond Decriminalization: Sex Work, Human Rights and a New Framework for Law Reform. Vancouver: Pivot Legal Society, 2006. http://www.pivotlegal.org/sites/pivotlegal.org/files/BeyondDecrimLongReport.pdf (table of contents and executive summary, not the whole thing)

My reading list:

Agustin, Laura M. "The Cultural Study of Commercial Sex." Sexualities 8.5 (2005): 618-631.

Branch, Kathryn A., Rebecca Hayes-Smith, and Tara N. Richards. "Professors' Experiences With Student Disclosures of Sexual Assault and Intimate Partner Violence: How 'Helping' Students Can Inform Teaching Practices." Feminist Criminology 6.1 (2011): 54-75. <http://fcx.sagepub.com/content/6/1/54.abstract>

Gordon, Avery. Ghostly Matters: Haunting and the Sociological Imagination. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 2008.

Haig-Brown, Celia. "Creating Spaces: Testimonio, Impossible Knowledge, and Academe." International Journal of Qualitative Studies in Education 16.3 (2003): 415-433. <http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/0951839032000086763>

Haberkom, Tyrell. "A Political Pedagogy, or In Lieu of Dismantling the University." Academic Matters: OCUFA's Journal of Higher Education. Oct-Nov 2011. 4 Dec 2011. Web. <http://www.academicmatters.ca/2011/10/a-political-pedagogy-or-in-lieu-of-dismantling-the-university/>

Lantz, Sarah. "Sex Work and Study." Traffic 3 "Write the Wrongs" (2003): 31-50.

MacDonald, Gayle.  Feminists Making Change in the University, "Dean's Work, Sex Work, Feminism and Social Change: What do these things have in Common?"  University College Dublin, Ireland, March, 2011. [I doubt I'll get a copy of the paper itself, but I sent an email asking what it was about, so maybe I'll get something interesting.]

Plaid, Andrea. "No, I Would Follow the Porn Star's Advice." Feminism FOR REAL: Deconstructing the Academic Industrial Complex of Feminism. Ed. Jessica Yee. Ottawa: Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives, 2011.

Roberts, Ron, Sandra Bergström, and David La Rooy. "Sex Work and Students: An Exploratory Study." Journal of Further and Higher Education 31.4 (2007): 323-334. <http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/03098770701625720>

Roche, Brenda, Alan Neaigus, and Maureen Miller. "Street Smarts and Urban Myths: Women, Sex Work, and the Role of Storytelling in Risk Reduction and Rationalization." Medical Anthropology Quarterly 19.2 (2005): 149-170. <http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1525/maq.2005.19.2.149/abstract>

Rosenbloom, Susan Rakosi, and Tina Fetner. "Sharing Secrets Slowly: Issues of Classroom Self-Disclosure Raised by Sex Worker Students." Teaching Sociology 29.4 (2001): 439-453. <http://www.jstor.org/pss/1318945>

Sycamore, Mattilda Bernstein. "There's More to Life Than Platinum: Challenging the Tyranny of Sweatshop-Produced Rainbow Flags and Participatory Patriarchy." That's Revolting: Queer Strategies for Resisting Assimilation. Ed. Mattilda Bernstein Sycamore. New York: Soft Skull Press, 2008.

Wilson-Kovacs, Dana. "Some Texts Do It Better: Women, Sexually-Explicit Texts and the Everyday." Mainstreaming Sex: The Sexualization of Western Culture. Ed. Feona Attwood. London: I.B. Tauris, 2009. 

Yee, Jessica. "Sex Work and Feminism: An Interview with anna Saini." Feminism FOR REAL: Deconstructing the Academic Industrial Complex of Feminism. Ed. Jessica Yee. Ottawa: Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives, 2011.