Archives as Surveillance: Resisting Representation in Experimental Films on Sex Work

• In Event: Surveillance Sex: Carcerality and Representation in Sex Worker Archives

Abstract

“Archives as Surveillance” examines the histories of various forms of body labor across the Chelsea/Meatpacking and Tribeca districts in New York as expressed in contemporary experimental films that center Black and Latinx sex workers’ history. I examine Sasha Wortzel’s This is an Address (2020), Tourmaline’s Salacia (2019), and my own work Bounded Intimacy (2024). The Chelsea/Meatpacking and Tribeca districts, as the photographic work of Efrain Gonzalez reminds us, were renown the various sex industries that occupied the area. These industries and sites included sex clubs (like The Clit Club), cruising sites, occupied housing at the piers, and a hub for sex workers who were disproportionately occupied by people of color and as a result became targets for surveillance. Using Black feminist research theories on resisting representation (like Sylvia Wynter’s work on cinema) in dialogue with contemporary scholarship on sex work, surveillance, and sexuality in experimental film, I argue that the feminist experimental form deployed in these works go against nostalgia (or romanticizing hardship) and instead work to recuperate community that provided care and safety for many marginalized individuals. As Juana María Rodríguez writes in Puta Life (2024), sex workers are always a troubling vision for visuality as sexual stigma is read as a bodily difference to them. Thus, moving away from the institutional archive, where sex workers appear through the means of being surveilled, and to sex workers’ collections of how they imaged themselves allow for a more expansive engagement on their lives that do not reproduce institutional harms or methods of surveillance culture.

The filmmakers intentionally ignore any attempt to “authentically” represent the past across their works; these are not documentaries but inventive interventions on the historical image of sex workers of color. In so doing, these aesthetic decisions allow them to make images that foreground the desire and affect that still roam and haunt these areas. For example, the narrative portrait short Bounded Intimacy subverts the gaze of the surveillance to make the viewer the mark of the subject. re-animates those “illicit” trades that took place across the meatpacking district. Whereas Salacia uses the film to cast a spell that collapses time and space between working girls of color in New York City across the 19th, 20th, and 21st centuries. Lastly, This Is An Address highlights how laws targeting the sex workers are also directed at unhoused people to configure them as “public deviants.” By following the activist work by Marsha P. Johnson and Sylvia Rivera, both This Is An Address and Salacia use film to revive and mirror activist methods of resistance of surveillance by the state. As Lisa Duggan and Nan Hunter write in The Sex Wars (1996), the goal of policing public sex is an ultimately a goal of erasing public sexual dissent. The aforementioned media makers understand that legibility is a trap and in their work on precarious lives and thus turn trouble the form of visibility by which we image sex workers’ history.

Author

• Ayanna Dozier, University of Massachusetts, Amherst