Liberation Atlas: Countermapping Against Surveillance and Policing of Asian Massage Work in NYC

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

Abstract

Inspired by the praxis of critical cartography (Kim 2015) and unmapping (Goffe 2023), this paper presents “Liberation Atlas” as an alternative to big data surveillance techniques commonly used by carceral anti-trafficking organizations. Liberation Atlas is a collaborative mapping project between grassroots by Red Canary Song (RCS) and Brown’s Center for the Study of Slavery and Justice which depicts the landscape of policing of migrant Asian massage work throughout New York City in the past two decades. Incorporating oral histories collected by RCS’ outreach team, publicly available data of NYPD arrest records and NYC Office of Administrative Trials and Hearings (OATH) filings via NYC OpenData, and public media from New York city officials, the map portrays parallel transitions in policing strategies with rhetoric utilized by the city to highlight the continued racialized policing of Asian women body workers and Asian owned businesses.

These anti-massage/body/sex work narratives hinge upon the fabrication of a moral panic about migrant massage work as a social contaminant which utilizes figures of innocence such as children to strengthen its rhetorical power. Such regressive anti-trafficking approaches have traditionally deployed maps that purport to visualize the “Illicit Massage Industry” stoking xenophobic fears around massage work as a site of human trafficking, leading to policies that demand the criminalization of racialized and gendered low wage work. Rather than address the social and economic needs to migrant Asian massage and body workers, anti-trafficking interventions that seek to “rescue” Asian massage workers, have resulted in the increased policing and surveillance of their communities and their deportation. Liberation Atlas applies countermapping skills into a larger narrative depicting the effects of xenophobic rhetoric and criminalization to draw attention to worker voices and to call for the end of policing beyond decriminalization.

Author

• Elena Shih, Brown University