« Pictures! | Main | Perverts' Saloon - April 3 at Galapagos »
Managing Roles
April 02, 2006
The trouble with a roundtable is that organic conversations never move point by point in any kind of linear way. Incidentally, this is also the amazing thing about these conversations. The roundtable Melissa Gira and I moderated last Thursday ended up being a little bit all over the place, but it was extremely participatory, which is exactly what we were aiming for, so that was excellent.
The thing about this roundtable is that it grew out of conversations we were having on our blogs as well as in emails. Last fall when the Sex Work Matters conference was announced, Melissa and I were both struggling with ways to approach writing a proposal for the conference, and I commented on a post she wrote, asking how she planned on presenting herself – as a sex worker, an activist or an academic. A few rapid-fire comments and emails back and forth, and we decided to pitch a co-moderated roundtable about exactly that decision process, that weird dance between worlds.
A few weeks ago, between emails, IMs and phone calls, we came up with a list of questions we were interested in wrestling with:
a. In what ways do these roles (sex worker, activist, artist, academic) compete with each other?
b. Does the hierarchy of how these roles are valued shift in different contexts, in different communities?
c. What are the values and detriments of outness and degrees of outness in various contexts?
d. Why do sex workers in academia often stay closeted even when working on issues facing sex workers?
e. In what ways can sex workers use their personal experiences in a relevant and not merely anecdotal way in academic discourse?
f. How can sex workers support one another in becoming and remaining visible and heard in related activist, artist, and academic communities?
The final list of roundtable participants included Robyn Few (Sex Workers Outreach Project), Carol Leigh (BAYSWAN), Jessice Melusine (boa), Elizabeth Nanas (Wayne State University) and Catherine MacGregor. Everyone took about five minutes to introduce themselves, and then we leapt right into discussion, and from the start there was pretty much no separation between the audience and the roundtable participants. Melissa stayed up on stage with the roundtable participants, and I took the wireless mic and walked around the room Donahue-style, which turned out to be a pretty cool way, spatially, the moderate the conversation.
The main thread throughout the hour and a half was the issue of outness, and things were a little jumbled, but overall it seemed that the people in the room who spoke up supported sex workers being out in varying degrees. Of course this is a pretty predictable stance from the people on the roundtable itself, since many of them are out sex workers rights activists on a pretty much full time basis. Many of the other folks in the room sang the praises of outness too, but once we started to get into the nitty gritty of “managed identities,” it got more complicated. There are differences between being out to friends, lovers, families, straight job employers, and dissertation committees. And then there’s the kind of peculiar flip side of choosing how out one should be as an activist to one’s clients and employers within the sex industry. There was also the big question of “what kind of harm can outness bring?” and a few people said that being out hasn’t brought them any harm. While this may be true, I think that’s also a very limited way of looking at things – publicly associating yourself with sex, and especially commercial sex, marks a person as a member of a kind of ghettoized piece of the cultural pie. So, it might not wreck havoc on one’s life in all ways, but it does change things. To claim that associations with sex and sex work is anything like “business as usual” is kinda insane.
There’s also the complex issue of chosen versus forced outness – there were a number of women in the room who were very out as sex workers largely as a function of having been arrested and made the subject of intense media scandal. That is a totally different beast than measuring your degrees of outness, which also can be used as something of a preventative measure: if you’re out and proud, maybe you’ll be more shame-resistant. I know a little bit about that from my experience of coming out to the family last fall.
When we were discussing the usefulness of outness within the academe Barb Brents, a non-sex worker academic who researches sex work out of the University of Nevada in Las Vegas, said that she thinks it is becoming increasingly acceptable for sex workers to be out within the academic system and make use of their experience in their work, but not just in an anecdotal way. I’m not sure that I’m convinced of this, but I really hope it’s true. During our roundtable at least there seemed to be a lot of interesting spoken and unspoken dialogue around the relationship between sex workers and academia. Melissa told me that from the sessions she attended in the afternoon she felt like she might actually trust academics a little bit more, because there seemed to be a lot of listening happening, and less of that creepy Researcher On High thing happening.
Sex Work Matters was only a one day conference, and I could talk to these folks forever. It seems like a lot of good collaborative seeds were planted though, so there’s a lot stirring. Plus a lot of people at this conference will also be making appearances in Vegas this July, for a four day sex worker conference sponsored by SWOP and the Desiree Alliance. Lots of conversations will continue there, and lots of stuff will continue to happen between now and then as well. This stuff totally gets me jazzed, because there’s the talking – but there’s also an intense focus on the doing. And that’s just amazing.
It doesn’t seem like it’s up yet, but when the tech stuff has been sorted out, you’ll be able to watch our whole session on the New School’s website here and see and hear all the stuff I forgot to write about, plus tell me that I misinterpreted things or just generally see for yourself what the roundtable was like. Unfortunately I don’t think you’ll see the awesome tights Melissa was wearing. Trust me when I say they were awesome (and red).
Ladies and gents, the blogging bug has bit me hard once again, and I’ve got so many thoughts a-churning. It’s kinda crazy. I’m totally gonna be making up for my slight absence over the past few weeks.
Posted by Dacia at April 2, 2006 07:58 PM
Trackback Pings
TrackBack URL for this entry:
http://www.wakingvixen.com/cgi-bin/mt-tb.cgi/506
Comments
(Pats your back)
‘That’s it dear, get it all out.’
Better to write it out than have it churning around in your mind. The mind is a bad storage system.
Posted by: Viviane at April 2, 2006 11:53 PM
Yay! looks forwards to bloggy goodness Also, it’ll be good to watch that video. That is a discussion I would have LOVED to have sat in on.
Posted by: Lioness at April 3, 2006 10:13 PM
