A new zine in the ‘Bootlegs’ Collection, taken from the Lies Journal and written by Pluma Sumaq; this text offers deep reflections on prostitution and the sex industry and there intersections with race, class and gender identity; whilst attempting to bring forward critical engagements and critiques around Prostitution/Sex Work and the Sex Industry- and attempting to counter narratives brought from Liberal and White Feminist trajectories.
Quotes from the Text:
“Personally, I could never bring myself to buy into the rhetoric of empowerment through normalization that the mostly white middle-class sex worker rights movement was selling. To create a language around and an image of a “Sex Worker” that is normalized and free of stigma did not seem very revolutionary to me. To me it said, “accept us because we are just like you.” Well, what if we’re not like you? What then will you do to us? The campaign to push forward the picture of the fully autonomous and sovereign woman in prostitution contributes to the polarization of ‘The Prostitute’ into two cartoon figures —one of total empowerment and one of total degradation.”
“We have been taught to believe in a world that is good and bad, up and down, righteous and evil, and this serves us. It validates us when we are called to separate our vulnerability, and therefore our intimacy, from our work. It informs our logic that there is never any choice or agency in poverty, in being oppressed, in prostitution. We are manipulated into ignoring broken systems and are instead coerced into seeing broken people who will only choose survival if they are desperate enough, as if survival were some extreme option. But no one can say “prostitution has nothing to do with me.” It exists precisely because of the economic and misogynistic system we participate in every day.”
PDF HERE: Disgrace