Being on top

ABSTRACT

Academics are fascinated by sex workers and until recently the subjects of this research gaze have been kept in a subordinate position. This contribution considers the different kinds of knowledge production that pertain to the field of sex work research and analyses the politics and tensions involved in these layers of knowledge production. The contribution does not intend to show that some forms of research are ‘better’ than others in regard to sex workers’ rights, though some forms undoubtably are more effective. Rather it draws on frameworks that sex workers have developed to critique injustice, specifically whorephobia, to reveal the unwavering structure of oppression written into academia and research. The contribution upends existing ways of seeing these concerns by placing whores in a position to save researchers from academic disciplining by explicating struggles over resources (funding, employment, social capital and authority) so that our collective contributions to the production of knowledge are sincere and revolutionary. The author concludes that sex workers’ desire for change is not unruliness to be contained, controlled, dismissed and/or destroyed; it is an advantage in the creation of knowledge and the path to radical, needed transformations in the extractive logics that pervade academia.

KEYWORDS:

• Sex worker rights
• research
• academia
• whores
• community based research

Ine Vanwesenbeeck’s observations on the range of social, medical and legal research into the lives and experiences of sex workers are twenty years old but her article could still be written very similarly today (Vanwesenbeeck, 2001). Researchers have asked and continue to ask big questions about sex workers: who are these sex workers and how did they get into the game?; why do these odd beings do what they do?; and what are the risks they pose to us (family, society and health)? Vanwesenbeeck notes that in the past, research was frequently inspired by intense emotions such as ‘feelings of abhorrence, astonishment, incomprehension and fascination’, cannily adding that by the turn of the twenty-first century, ‘[t]he literature is still much more about sex than it is about work’ (2001, p. 242; see also Minichiello et al., 2017, p. 2). The underlying tension is that restrained, measured ‘civilian’ representatives of the humanities, social sciences and sciences have feelings about their research subjects–the prostitutes, whores, sex workers, erotic performers–and therefore that these subjects must be kept in their place and contained.

I do not mean to imply, of course, that sexual relationships exist or are in any way condoned as part of the research practice. Rather I wish to point to the dance that accompanies the unequal power relationship in this field and the degree to which we do not talk about it. This failure to recognise and voice the issues has been to the detriment of sex workers, however this is beginning to change. People with experience as sex workers have been present in academia as graduate students, teachers and researchers, but until recently faced certain dismissal if ‘found out’ (Anonymous, 2021). Now, even though sympathetic, rights based research on sex work is still stigmatised for anyone who might do it, sex worker academics are finding resources, grants, writing articles and raising up their voices as sex workers (Dewey et al., 2019). At the same time, and this will be discussed more later, the benefits of being involved in professional research and university level teaching have greatly declined.

What were they thinking?

For almost thirty years in geographical contexts including Australia, North America and Latin America I have observed relationships between researchers and their research subjects (the sex workers) derail. I received a masterclass in my first few months as a community organiser in an Australian sex worker rights group when someone opined angrily that graduate students would never be allowed to hang out, ever again. ‘What happened?’ I asked. ‘This’, he said sternly and dropped a thick dissertation on the table. The research was shit, apparently, and worse than that no one in the community had even known that the research was taking place. What were they thinking? This research was a betrayal.

In order to get access to research data in sociology, anthropology, social work, economics, public health and similar disciplines, graduate students and researchers form relationships with individual sex workers and communities of sex workers. Research proposals, grant proposals, and ethics requirements are set up far in advance, and later sex workers are offered an ‘opportunity’ to ‘participate’ in the research. The secret research described above is an obviously egregious example of violation of trust, but what is far more likely to happen is that attempts are made to obscure the structures from the community groups that are being asked to sign on. I have directed programmes involving sex workers in Australia and the United States, and therefore I have often been approached as the broker (or possibly key informant). I and others in my type of position have patiently explained to researchers that unless sex workers are involved in the research design at very early stages, that problems will ensue (Jeffreys, 2010). Researchers have told me when I asked why sex workers were not included to brainstorm research ideas, be equal partners in grant applications and define the ethical guidelines was that they did not want to ‘worry’, ‘trouble’ or ‘disappoint’ sex workers by approaching them too early on.

There is no way to sugar coat this, this kind of ‘consideration’ is simply covering up an unequal power relationship. Many researchers may still believe that this is the way research should be done and some may believe that protecting sex workers from seeing bothersome paperwork is what is best for them. Others like Sudhir Venkatesh, for example, deliberately hide their unethical research practices in faux friendly encounters with individual sex workers and the sex worker community, in order to wow the general public with titillating falsehoods about the economics of sex work (‘The Gift That Kept on Giving’?, 2013).

It is still relatively rare for sex workers to take the step of writing a concerned letter to a University’s Institutional Review Board, as is the case in regard to the Sex Worker Outreach Project’s (SWOP) and Sex Workers Action New York’s (SWANK) letter about Sudhir Venkatesh, or addressing research in an open letter (To: Sex Working Community RE: SEXHUM Research Project, 2018). Sex worker rights advocates have more frequently addressed unethical, unwanted, misguided or useless research during International AIDS Conferences (Collins, 2004). In all these instances researchers are very likely thinking that sex workers do not understand the steps involved in research or they may even fear being unfairly exposed to an angry mob of disgruntled career sex worker rights advocates. If any researcher has this anxiety, I have a remedy. The time has come to acknowledge the power structure between the researcher and researched, and deal with it. The structure of inequality permeates the entire encounter, from the incomes that researchers have, the social capital that students can accumulate, the fine cup of coffee that can be brought into the room in a fancy cup, the interviewed who cannot taste it, the place on the podium at the big international conference that the whores will not have and the retirement plans. Acknowledging that the academic enterprise is as much part of the capitalistic extractive project as anything else, does not mean that the researcher is admitting to having been a bad person. This divide just is, until we decide to overthrow it and do something new.

Sex work encompasses a very broad range of practices that are culturally specific, but it is fundamental that sex workers all around the globe specialise in transactions. In order to be successful in sex work, sex workers observe the flows of power involved in these transactions, using this to leverage payment and ensure safety. Sex workers may not have been privy to all the machinations involved in institutional research projects but will always have observed that powerful people wanted something from them and the terms were bad. This is perhaps why sex workers, in particular low income women of colour, are often labelled a ‘hard to reach population’ by medical researchers who speculate that ‘prostitutes’ are too beaten down to engage (Bonevski et al., 2014). It easily could be the opposite. Sex workers may not have wished to engage in a losing transaction, a response that is intensified at moments in history when they do not see the benefit in the research or do not have the leverage to get what they want.

When approached by researchers, sex workers and sex worker rights advocates, will therefore often be able to see the pitfalls in the project before ethicists do (Jeffreys, 2010; see also Agustín, 2004; Kim & Jeffreys, 2013). They may tolerate some issues in order to get a project done that will benefit, they may hustle around the institutional research to get the small stipends that community members desperately need or they may reach a consensus to block the research. Researchers may not always be aware of exactly why the community closed down and turned away, or perhaps they could not bring themselves to accept that they were not fully in control of the research subjects. The information, however, was always there. Researchers just needed to want it and take the time and/or initiative to ask what sex workers were thinking about them. On the occasions that sex worker communities have proactively let researchers in on their analysis, this is a valuable moment of learning rather than a slap in the face.

The community response

What I have been describing above intersects with many forms of oppression. Black sex workers and indigenous sex workers are far less likely to be taken seriously when they address researchers than white sex workers. Sex workers who are in custody, court systems, or are incarcerated are forced to engage with researchers seeking to justify their methodologies (see for example, Roe-Sepowitz et al., 2014). Sex workers in South East Asia have been erroneously considered compliant subjects for medical research leading to harm and rights violations (John, 2004). Much research carried out with migrant sex workers from this region has taken place in detention centres in countries of destination and has bolstered stigmatising stereotypes of these workers as lacking agency and victims of trafficking, no matter their experience on their migration pathway (Kim & Jeffreys, 2013).

A central element of sex worker rights organising is confronting the rationale for constructing sex workers as the passive object of initiatives, specifically whorephobia–the hatred of sex workers, the belittling of them as unintelligent and worthless–and intersecting issues such as racism, transphobia, and xenophobia. Sex workers in Thailand for example, who have been stereotyped as ‘gentle and sweet’ and/or ‘sex trafficked’, established the Can Do Bar to illustrate how sex work can be run cooperatively, showing that sex workers ‘can do’ and do not need rescuing (Beltran, 2019). The Can Do Bar skewers whorephobia by showing a successful business run by sex workers who have also stood up to military intimidation and oppression since the Thai coup. They have done so by doing daily research on national politics, always one step ahead of policy changes and authoritarian trends, keeping their community well informed, prepared and protected.

In the field of research and knowledge creation we also find resistance to the whorephobic notion that sex workers are incapable of reflecting on their own lives and that they are in need of saving by those with more distance and qualifications. Members of the Young Women’s Empowerment Project (YWEP), girls and young women aged 12–23, were repeatedly told by authority figures such as health care workers, the courts and researchers that they could not comprehend their own oppression (2009). They challenged this by designing their own research project called Girls Do What They Have to Do to Survive, collecting and analyzing their own data, and overturning the accepted wisdom of the experiences of girls and young women in the sex trades. Their research documented the root causes of violence they experienced as being parts of systems, such as shelters, police and the courts, rather than solely at the hands of individuals. A peer led migrant sex work research project carried out by Scarlet Alliance in Australia gathered hundreds of surveys resulting in the largest research project on the experiences of migrant sex workers in the country to date (Kim & Jeffreys, 2013). This research documented in detail the numerous ways in which accurate knowledge could be created by migrant sex workers and that this surpassed what non-sex worker researchers could generate. The Move Along (2008) community based research, a project I was involved in, provided paid training opportunities for numerous community members representing sex workers, drug users, the trans community and immigrants, and deployed a survey inspired by Sharmus Outlaw. Move Along (2008) had a people centred outcome, a plan to overturn the harmful Prostitution Free Zone policy in the District of Columbia, a goal that was achieved a decade later.

The examples of knowledge creation listed here stand in contrast to extractive research models, which are still the norm in many disciplines. YWEP’s community organising model that included research, created a ladder for girls and young women to attain social capital through training, paid internships, outreach positions, up to and including running YWEP. No one person benefited from the research alone. Scarlet Alliance provided 36 sex workers training in research skills, building the capacity of sex worker organisations to do peer education and outreach, and enhancing migrant sex worker leadership in those organisations. Move Along (2008) was ultimately successful because the investment in trans community members as part of the research process allowed for folks to get positions in the local city council, to establish and run trans-led organisations and to stay involved in ongoing work that exists today as DecrimNowDC (Tracy, 2019).

To the rescue: the unruly struggles of sex workers may save research

In this commentary I have used images that evoke a struggle for power between the ‘researcher’ and ‘sex workers and advocates’ that border on incendiary. As is often the way in social change, the battle is not truly with each other–though it can be–but with the institutions that disciplined and individualised the researchers, who then in turn seek to quiet the unruly subaltern. The line between who is an institutionally based researcher and who is a sex worker subject is fast becoming blurred as well, as people with sex work experience crowd into academia. However, this may be a red herring because those who succeed within institutions may only do so by bowing to the relentless pressure of respectability politics and success institutionally is now very limited in its scope. Academia and university education are eating themselves alive. Seventy three per cent of all faculty positions are no longer tenure track and casual, part-time positions are becoming the norm (Flaherty, 2018). The price that is being paid to study and perhaps one day become a researcher is astronomically high (Hess, 2020). Losing resources, with no job security and continually fundraising for their positions, many academic researchers have lost their academic freedom, a cornerstone of the research process.

Sex workers’ independence, to the degree that criminalisation ever allowed, is also being eroded through attacks on digital assembly and extension of state sanctioned theft of sex workers earning to private entities (Human Rights Violations of Sex Workers, People in the Sex Trades, and People Profiled as Such, 2019). Despite this alarming set of legislative changes originating in the United States and affecting sex workers worldwide, the legitimacy of sex workers voices is growing rapidly. These voices are amplified through social media and through other forms of protest and resistance. Sex worker led organisations are building on global information sharing about how to engage in community based research, rapidly producing credible documentation of the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic, for example, and cutting off attempts to roll back rights (see for example, Scarlet Alliance, 2020).

Sex workers cannot, of course, take up the role of large institutions who continue to do the vast bulk of research. However, to be frank from the community standpoint, much of that research was either not helpful or harmful. What sex worker rights advocacy can contribute are some observations that can help those researchers, including our many good allies, who are disillusioned with the way the institutions are heading. We learned from our interactions with traditional research methodologies that sex workers’ lives are supposed to have no value except in being used to accumulate value for the benefit of the individual careers of others. Sex workers have rejected this definition of value and instead have used research methodologies that are community centred, putting the health and well-being of criminalised people first. This model of research allows sex worker led organisations to provide opportunities for community members to thrive and make change. Now, those inside the research institutions are learning that their lives have no value except in being used to accumulate value for the benefit of the individual careers of others. In essence, institutions are treating the formerly respectable researchers like whores.

I propose that non-sex worker researchers and academics find a way to embrace this, and this will be the start of the change.

Although what is happening in academia is dire, researchers who study sex workers are surrounded by the people who can confront this situation. Real live sex workers have years of experience in organising, surviving, thriving and creating new knowledge despite being shut out of respectable, high status research processes and shown the door like whores. Sex workers have an advantage in the creation of knowledge under difficult circumstances and, because of their activism, they have an unruliness that cannot be contained, controlled, dismissed or destroyed. Most researchers have heard the rallying cry from sex workers that there should be ‘nothing about us without us’. Transforming this phrase can help us see that the paradigm can shift. In order for the research enterprise to be rescued from the current extractive model that is so controlling that it ascribes a lower status to practical and applied research like that done by YWEP, Scarlet Alliance and Move Along, we could change the chant to, ‘without us, research and policy have nothing’. As illustrated above, sex workers have exceeded what can be done through and within institutions. It might be time to stop focusing solely on the need for inclusion and think about radically new ventures. This shift in thinking is useful for researcher allies who have tried for years to create safe spaces for sex workers in institutions that can never be in their interests. It is time to stop accommodating whorephobia and follow the sex workers’ lead.

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