I have some major editing, making-things-shorter, and filling in blanks to do, but at least it's getting there. I'm a bit frustrated to have more done on the stuff I don't really want to spend much time on than on the stuff that I think is more interesting and more important to talk about (the parallel between a detailed and contextual study of commercial sex and the study of "actually existing neoliberalism," for instance, and how actually existing neoliberalism in universities helps to define and limit what can be researched and taught about sex work). 

I'm not loving my discussion of homonormativity -- if it was up to me, I'd leave it out, but Dr. Wonderful asked me to "queer up" sex work for her class -- so any suggestions for making that more clearly about sex work and education and less just rambling about bad gay politics, would be appreciated. 

Teaser: show Angel trailer

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CA83BTUtojQ

How to research sex work

 “cultural studies of commercial sex”

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, 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 unrelated to any other industry or any other aspect of culture 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)

What I’m going to talk about takes academic work – studying, researching, teaching, and being in the university “community” – as the normatively “social” and investigates its interactions with sex work, an activity “denounced as morally wrong.”

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. 

context and detail: re: Pivot ToC

What we’re missing when we do this is what I hoped students will get out of looking at the Pivot Legal Society’s research and recommendations in Beyond Decriminalization. I asked them to just check out the table of contents and executive summary because I want them to understand how huge, complex, and sometimes contradictory the sex industry – and, consequently, research about the sex industry – actually is. No one person can deliver a polemic about “the industrial vagina” or stand up and “tell her story” or  show up to class with a “sex work 101” speech and actually tell you about the sex industry in a systematic way. What’s needed is for students taking classes about sex work, in labour studies, women’s studies, social work, sociology or wherever, to develop the skills to research sex work in detailed and contextual ways and, more importantly, for sex workers to have access to those spaces and skills for doing that research themselves.

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. I want to give students some interesting information about the sex industry and about education as an industry, but I also want to model a way of investigating sex work that doesn’t treat it as simple, easily totalized, or exceptional.

Sex worker students

transition bit:

What's with the sensational media reports "revealing" that students are doing sex work that seem to have come out every five minutes for decades? How can looking at cultural productions tell us more about these two industries?

university as conceived in sex work

One thing we need to understand is that knowledge production isn’t a one-way street. These are just brief bits of trivia, and I can recommend a source for finding out more for those who are interested, but the sex industry does produce a fair amount of “knowledge” about the university: how many of us had encountered, in sexual fantasy or in porn, the “professor/student” trope – i.e., “I’ll do anything to get an A in this class!” – before ever stepping foot on campus. Of course, in porn, the professors are never socially awkward nerds who are scandalized by the very idea (which is good because that would make for some really boring pornos), but this is one way that the sex industry reflects on, denounces, envies, satirizes, and reproduces the imbalanced power relationships, the economic pressures, and the race and gender politics of the university. Some other examples might be the continued meaningfulness of the word “coed”: we all know what a “sexy coed” is, but the term’s academic meaning has long been moot. And the last point of note is how marketable “student” identities are in the sex industry: flip through prostitutes’ ads online and you’ll find that they’re almost all students, probably because it connotes a justification for sex work and an element of class privilege that’s good for business.

fictional representations of sex worker students

-          “her worlds collide” = worst thing that can happen

clips from “Angel” (1:05:53-1:10:33) and “The West Wing”

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CJJob3KTdmE

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4j84V3jgXgY

I don’t really want to do and type out close readings, so maybe this is a good point for class discussion:

-          what do these representations tell us about sex workers?

-          what do these representations tell us about school?

-          why does “Angel” have to be an honour student, why does Laurie (tk?) have to be a law school student?

-          are there any other ways the clips reinforce that these women are living a contradiction?

-          what’s up with that “community food” line in The West Wing?

media representations of sex worker students

The standard narrative is, more or less, that students, finding school quite expensive, are "turning to" the sex trade to make ends meet. If the photos accompanying corporate news media are to be believed (but don't worry, they're not), those students are ciswomen, traditionally feminine, and white. We can also assume they hold a certain amount of wealth -- until they became students, they didn't have significant enough financial troubles to warrant doing sex work -- but not too much; they don't have access to unlimited funds to pay for school. If you check the comments threads on news articles, there is an additional assumption expressed that the only people who attend university are those with access to tuition funds, and that students "turning to" sex work are facing significant financial barriers because they're living beyond their means, drinking too much, and consuming too much tech (oh, the iPhones!). "Titillating" is a bit of an understatement. Only very occasionally are men sex workers mentioned. (Just from this year; hookers everywhere!)

It's always the same sort of thing: a "shocking" revelation that there are more prostitutes, more strippers, more cam hos, and more people who "shouldn't" be in such positions doing the work. I'd love to see news stories revealing that more sex workers who didn't have access to education were turning to education (say as the financial crisis cuts into profits?), but I haven't seen many of those, for some reason. And I can kind of imagine this reaction that those other, marginalized, "survival" sex workers don't want education, need other kinds of "rescue," or are unable to participate because of their drug addictions or whatever. (It's far from being that simple, actually, but I can hear the objection in the back of my mind anyway.)

I could compare the students-turned-sex-workers narrative with rhetoric about how "too many" people are getting "useless" degrees that they can't afford, flooding the market for middle-class jobs, and dragging downt he quality of education: much like the stories of sex worker students' excess, and of sex workers excesses in general (note to self: dig up news stories about sex workers and Craigslist, blackberries, internet), a lot of that rhetoric focuses on young people's tech uses (Facebook! On their iPhones! In the classroom!). While some of the stories about sex worker student seem to be aimed at education reform that reduces the cost of education, many of them seem to follow the same path of "revealing" how and why there are too many of the wrong kind of people in universities, making the system unsustainable and useless. 

Also intriguing is this repetition of the language of "turning to" sex work, so often that it almost becomes impossible to think of a different way to talk about university students who become sex workers. I get the implication that it's a last resort and all, but in the interest of turning the lens on the environment where my investigation is taking place... what kind of industry are they turning from?

what? you wanted to talk about hookers and porn? too bad, i want to talk about neoliberalism.

before all the below:

-          define: “actually existing neoliberalism”

-          what does austerity do to universities: anti-democratic policies and regimes (York/CIGI thing, UofT/Munk thing... do things like these happen at our own universities and not get publicized as much? How could students find out about their school’s governance? <-- maybe for discussion?); trading public funding for private; reducing access to education (reiterate above about “useless” people getting “useless” degrees); shit working conditions; union-busting; anti-union students' unions 

rising tuition fees and new realities for students

tk

-          that article about Australian students by Whatshername

-          moral panic around youthful “excess” (from media representations)

-          youth unemployment

contingency, tenure, and teaching porn

tk

-          contingent work is becoming the norm – so how can the detailed, funded, complex research required for understanding sex work happen?

-          with privatization, who is going to fund it? (Compare to social services: without HIV/AIDS funding, sex work advocacy couldn’t happen.)

-          Feona Attwood: “don’t do it unless you have tenure”

-          Whatshisname: student evaluation about learning about her clitoris (Q: when are you ever going to use this in the real world? A: all the fucking time.)

but how to be a sex worker in a class about sex work? (re: Dr. Wonderful’s suggestion about racialized students, queer students also having to be “in” or “out” or marked in classes about racism, queerness; also: do sex workers need the debate or sex work 101?)

-          “Sharing Secrets Slowly” tk Researchers' recommendations for including sex worker students in classes not about sex work, but where sex worker students wanted to research their own lives. Repeat discussion of some of the different levels of "coming out" and the effects of imagining sex workers absent on trust and academic freedom. 

-          how many syllabuses are designed with the idea that the students learning about sex work can’t also be sex workers? (How about for Prof. Cutiepants’s class?)

are sex workers served by universities?

-          contrast UVic website that mentions sex workers only in context of social work placements

-          McGill website that lists sex shops as sexual health resources

-          women’s and LGBTQ centres don’t mention services for sex workers

-          U (tk) in UK denies sex workers attend university

“homonormativity” and the sexual politics of neoliberalism

We read the McKay article, “Is Sex Work Queer,” which provides a very helpful analysis of how commercial sex is a practice of transgressive or “forbidden” sexual identities and desires. And this is important to queer theory; it’s a way of advancing a critique of the gay politics that conceives of queerness as something apolitical and individual that happens in people, rather than as something socially constructed that happens between people and their contexts. But it also misses something, and this something is very illuminating about where sex workers fit in to academic queer theory: not only is sex work queer, but sex workers are queer. Sex workers are a disproportionately queer and 2-spirit population. Sex worker organizing and advocacy is overwhelmingly undertaken by queer women and queer men, and its tactics are derived from the more standard versions of queer liberation and gay assimilationist politics.  Inasmuch as much of the sex industry is a response to poverty, colonization, and patriarchy, this makes sense. Queer and 2-spirit women disproportionately face economic disadvantages, especially when they are young and have fewer resources for dealing with homophobia and transphobia in their communities and homes and schools.

So why, when I want to make the case that sex work is an issue for queer theory, do I need to establish that sex work is queer? Why don’t we conceive of sex workers as a queer population? I think this has to do in part with the media images of sex workers that we see – “Angel” and “Laurie,” in the video clips are both excluded from stable heterosexual relationships and because clients of sex workers are overwhelmingly (though not exclusively) male, we’re given to understand that sex workers are heterosexual – but also to do with a creeping homonormativity of queer studies in university’s broader neoliberal culture and economy.

Gay marriage, as a homonormative agenda, was supposed to return queers to a “prepolitical” state – that is, if queers weren’t denied these few rights granted to heterosexuals, they’d never politicize, and so they’d never radicalize. Homonormativity poses “gay” identity as apolitical, “virtually normal,” in the words of Andrew Sullivan, and a “reasonable” gay political agenda as limited domestic privacy combined with a reduced public sphere: no public sex, no public queers, no queer politics. This idea of “pre” political is important because it’s the counterpoint to the homonormative argument that queer politics – including sex worker advocacy that embraces transgression and public sex – are “anachronistic” (Duggan tk). They’re a throwback to a time when we really had something to be angry about, and now that we have gay marriage or now that US gays can be soldiers, they’re no longer needed. For queers of colour, trans folks, sex workers and other queers who don’t have access to privacy, of course this is a problem, and it’s not at all an apolitical position—it’s the usual neoliberalism cloaked in its usual stance of “neutrality.”  Homonormativity creeps into universities because it’s the “sexual politics of neoliberalism”; as neoliberalism creeps, so creeps the “reasonable” gay.

One experience I had with this was talking to an administrative guy at my undergraduate university, who told me not to say “queer”—it discriminates against men and it’s not necessary. I was a bit confused at the time because we were talking about a project I was doing at AU for credit at York, and he got kind of forgiving about it and blamed my supervisor, saying “well, it’s Athabasca – they’re so nineties.” I’m not confused any longer because I’ve encountered a few more of AU’s professors and realized the deck there is more than a bit stacked in favour of socialism. So it’s not just the word “queer”—what he was commenting on was a perceived failure to get on board with the “fact” that in a post-racial, post-feminist, post-gay, revitalizing world, these leftist politics, the queer movement, feminism, anti-globalization, etc are over.

Another way that universities and homonormativity get together is through universities’ roles in gentrification and “creative class” revitalization in the urban centres they occupy

-          e.g., UoIT’s role in downtown Oshawa; complicity with zoning laws affecting John Howard Socitey and AIDS Committee