Care as Resistance: Sex Work, Migrant Mobility, and Collective Action in Chile’s Extractive Borderlands

• In Event: Sociology of the Body and Embodiment Section Roundtables
  In Refereed Roundtable (60 minute): Table 4: Embodiment in Politics, Resistance, and Social Movements

Abstract

This article examines care as a form of resistance emerging from sex worker organizations fighting for their rights and supporting the most precarious among them in Chile. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork conducted with Fundación Margen—an organization linked to the sex workers’ union—in border cities, the study analyzes outreach practices that combine STI prevention, navigation of public health services, emotional support, and mapping of immigrant populations working in sexualized labor markets shaped by extractive and masculinized economies. These cities—structured by racialized and gendered labor hierarchies, intensified migration, and hostility toward migrants—concentrate migrant workers within sexual economies marked by structural, symbolic, and institutional violence.

Within this landscape of precarity and state abandonment, care emerges as a form of resistance. Sex workers describe their labor not only as economic exchange but also as attentiveness, emotional containment, and attention to clients’ bodily and affective needs. Workers sustain one another by sharing information, protection strategies, and material support in moments of crisis. Organized initiatives extend these intimate circuits into collective action: fundraising for the most precarious workers, distributing condoms, circulating legal and medical information, accompanying workers in their workplaces and on the street, and building spaces of moral, educational, and political support. These practices assert presence where state and social recognition are denied, turning care into a network of resistance, solidarity, and demands for basic labor rights.

By conceptualizing sex work and collective action as resistance, the article argues that care constitutes a material and relational practice through which workers confront violence, contest abandonment, assert political presence, and demand recognition as subjects of rights. By offering a territorialized account of sex work and collective action as a space where life is sustained under conditions of precarity and institutional neglect, the study contributes to feminist debates on social reproduction, migration, and precarized labor.

Author

• Pilar Ortiz, Universidad de Playa Ancha