Surveillance Sex: Carcerality and Representation in Sex Worker Archives

Session Submission Type: Paper Session

Abstract

Contrary to the belief that 21st-century ushered in the end of the contentious sex wars, the rise in legislation, policing, surveillance, and discrimination against sex workers over the last eight years have revealed that they are, in fact, not over. Since the passing of SESTA/FOSTA in 2018 (Stop Enabling Sex Traffickers Act and the Fight Online Sex Traffickers Act), sex workers have faced renewed and intense discrimination. This panel “Surveillance Sex: Carcerality and Representation in Sex Worker Archives” examines sex workers and sex work grassroots organization responses to the heightened policing of their practices and how their analyses can be used to understand the shifts and changes in police and surveillance culture at large. While the focus is on sex workers, this panel makes evident to a wider audience how the laws and opposition that target sex workers inevitably come back to affect a wide population.

The different papers deploy a margins-to-center approach by starting with sex workers’ voices to reconfigure how we experience visuality, data-mapping, archives, and representation. In Elena Shih’s “Liberation Atlas,” she uses the data by the grassroot organization Red Canary Song, which provides mutual aid to Asian and migrant sex and massage workers, to turn surveillance back onto itself by mapping police raids against massage workers in Queens, New York. Brit Schulte turns their focus to digital spaces of online networking to reveal how sex workers build their imagined realities in the face of on-the-ground policing. Lena Chen analyzes community-built collections that exist in opposition to institutional archives that historically have been used to further criminalize sex workers of Asian descent. By focusing on the Private Practices archives of Asian American sex workers in Los Angeles, Chen works against tools of legibility to center creative engagements of memory-work of a community. Similarly, my paper on experimental films on sex work by sex workers/in collaboration with sex workers demonstrates how representation fails Black and Latinx sex workers as it models the surveillance eye of the state. In these films, form is used as a vehicle for an affective engagement rather than an archival account of epistemological production. Lastly, Kassandra Sparks’s essay “Policing Perversity,” draws out the libidinal desire that drives the policing of sex workers through the scattered history of police raids against dominatrixes in New York.

When everything can and will be used against sex workers, this panel demands methods of non-compliance as a way of historicizing vulnerable populations that respect their need to not be seen, their chosen names, and how they fabulate the image of their life and history. “Surveillance Sex: Carcerality and Representation in Sex Worker Archives” works to swerve theories of legibility demanded by institutions and instead considers how community collections, collective memory, digital sites, oral history, zines, and underground art function as faithful accounts of sex worker histories over institutional archives and the state.

Sub Unit

• Annual Meeting of the American Studies Association

Individual Presentations

• Archives as Surveillance: Resisting Representation in Experimental Films on Sex Work - Ayanna Dozier, University of Massachusetts, Amherst

• Policing Perversity: Tracing the Contingent Illegality of Dominatrixes in New York City - Kassandra Sparks, Sarah Lawrence College

• Liberation Atlas: Countermapping Against Surveillance and Policing of Asian Massage Work in NYC - Elena Shih, Brown University

• The Whore’s Imaginary & Sex Working Economies of Space - Brit E Schulte, University of Texas at Austin

Chair

• Ayanna Dozier, University of Massachusetts, Amherst

Biographical Information

Elena Shih
Elena Shih is Manning Assistant Professor of American Studies and Ethnic Studies at Brown University, where she directs a human trafficking research cluster through the Ruth J. Simmons Center for the Study of Slavery and Justice. Shih is the author of two books: Manufacturing Freedom: Sex Work, Anti-Trafficking Rehabilitation, and the Racial Wages of Rescue (University of California Press), and White Supremacy, Colonialism, and the Racism of Anti-Trafficking (Routledge). Recent op-eds about her research and organizing as a core collective member of Red Canary Song appear in the New York Times and Providence Journal. Shih serves on the editorial boards of Gender & Society, the Anti-Trafficking Review, and openDemocracy’s Beyond Trafficking and Slavery op-ed platform, and is a member of the Rhode Island State Advisory Council to the US Commission on Civil Rights.

Ayanna Dozier
Ayanna Dozier is a Brooklyn-based filmmaker-artist and writer working with performance, experimental film, installation, printmaking, and analog photography. Her past research in film navigates the history of distribution, archaeology, and radical work of Black feminist experimental filmmakers. While her current research and artwork is dedicated to examining how transactional intimacy (like sex work) redistributes care from the private sector into the public, social politics of relations. She teaches courses related to analog and video art production, aesthetics, and sexuality—paying close attention to how race and gender intersect within these fields. Her writing can be found in edited volumes on feminist studies, experimental film history, and decolonization that include Feminist Worldmaking and the Moving Image (MIT Press, 2023) and De-/Anti-/Post-Colonial Feminisms in Contemporary Art and Textile Crafts (KT Press, 2023) and the journals Feminist Media Studies (2017) and Hypatia (2021). Online essays on sex work and media makers include Ultra Dogme, Broadcast, and The Brooklyn Rail. She is the author of Janet Jackson’s The Velvet Rope (2020) and is currently working on a manuscript tentatively titled, Bad Sex: Women Experimental Film and Video on the Taboo During the Sex Wars.

Select exhibitions institutions include BRIC (Brooklyn, NY), Microscope Gallery (New York, NY), Block Museum (Chicago, IL), Gantt Center (Charlotte, NC), MoCA, Arlington (Arlington, VA), Hauser & Wirth (Los Angeles, CA), PLATFORM Centre (Winnipeg, MB), and The Shed (New York, NY). She was a 2022 Wave Hill Winter Workspace Resident (Bronx, NY), a 2018-2019 Helena Rubinstein Fellow in Critical Studies at the Whitney Independent Studies Program, a Joan Tisch Teaching Fellow from 2017-2022 at Whitney Museum of American Art (New York, NY) a Franconia Sculpture Park Writer in Residence, and a 2024 Penumbra Workspace Resident. Her film work is in the permanent collection of the Whitney Museum of American Art and the National Museum of African American Museum of History and Culture. She is an assistant professor in Film Studies at University of Massachusetts, Amherst.

Kassandra Sparks
Kassandra Sparks is a PhD Candidate in Sociocultural Anthropology at the University of California, Berkeley whose work examines questions of perversity, alterity, and violence in transactional sex economies. Her dissertation research is an ethnographic study of paid BDSM sessions as erotic stagings of dramas of colonialism and capitalism. Her work has been published by WSQ, DSQ, Sex Work Today (NYU Press, 2024), and New Sexuality Studies (Routledge Press, 2022). She is on the board of CLAGS: The Center for Gay and Lesbian Studies at CUNY and is a frequent collaborator with Kink Out. She is working on a documentary about the history of the BDSM industry in New York City.

Brit Schulte
Brit Schulte is a doctoral candidate in Art History at the University of Texas at Austin, an artist-educator, and community organizer. They hold bachelor degrees in English Literature and Art History from the University of North Texas, and a master's degree in Art History, Theory and Criticism from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. They study paper objects, radical print culture, as well as sex working, queer and trans* histories. Brit's dissertation, "Constellating Zines & Zineness: Undertheorized Affects of Political and Personal Print Objects", focuses on political and personal modes of community making and memory work. Their current organizing efforts involve grassroots defense campaigns alongside criminalized survivors, prison/police abolition, and the decriminalization of sex work.

They've facilitated art installations at the Museum of Reclaimed Urban Space in NYC's Alphabet City, worked as a label author for the Leslie-Lohman Museum for their exhibition ON OUR BACKS: The Revolutionary Art Of Queer Sex Work, and recently curated a show, Foldwork: Zines & DIY Making, at the Visual Art Center in Austin, Tx. They are the 2024 - 2025 Mellon Fellow in Modern & Contemporary Art at the Blanton Museum of Art, teach workshops with Texas Trans Futures, the 2025 Digital Humanities Fellow for the Denton Music and Arts Collaborative, are a librarian with the Sherwood Forest Zine Library, and actively organize with the Support Ho(s)e Collective and Survived & Punished. Brit is also a founding member of Bluestockings Cooperative, Survivors Against SESTA, Hacking//Hustling, Survived & Punished NY, and Red Canary Song. They've been featured in the collections, "We Too: Essays on Sex Work and Survival" (Feminist Press, 2021), "We Do This 'Til We Free Us: Abolitionist Organizing and Transforming Justice" (Haymarket Books, 2021), and "Abolition Feminisms Vol. 2: Feminist Ruptures against the Carceral State" (Haymarket Books, 2022). Their writing may also be found online and in print at The Funambulist, In These Times, Monthly Review, Kernel Magazine, Excursions Journal, The Avery Review, Tits & Sass, and Truthout.

Lena Chen
Lena Chen is a Los Angeles-based artist and Ph.D. student at the University of California, Berkeley in the Department of Theater, Dance, and Performance Studies. Her research examines the performance practices of Asian American/diasporic artists, sex workers, and community organizers in Los Angeles and New York City. An internationally exhibiting artist, she has been awarded grants from Mozilla Foundation, Sundance Institute, and the Center for Cultural Power.

She has been published in Amerasia Journal, PUBLIC, Performance Research, and in the edited volumes Curating as Feminist Organizing (Routledge, 2022), Sex Work Today: Erotic Labor in the Twenty-First Century (NYU Press, 2024), and To Be Named: The Cultural Politics of Naming. (Routledge, forthcoming). She has taught classes on feminist theory, Asian American performance art, and socially engaged art.

She is the recipient of the Thomas Marshall Graduate Student Award from American Society for Theatre Research, Emerging Scholars Award from American Theatre & Drama Society, and Dunbar Ogden Essay Prize in Theater History from UC Berkeley's Department of Theater, Dance, and Performance Studies. She is the co-coordinator of the Performing Asian American & Diasporic Sexualities Working Group at UC Berkeley's Center for Race & Gender.