Download the free Kindle app and start reading Kindle books instantly on your smartphone, tablet, or computer - no Kindle device required.
Read instantly on your browser with Kindle for Web.
Using your mobile phone camera - scan the code below and download the Kindle app.
Follow the author
OK
Sex Workers Unite: A History of the Movement from Stonewall to SlutWalk Hardcover – January 7, 2014
Documenting five decades of sex-worker activism, Sex Workers Unite is a fresh history that places prostitutes, hustlers, escorts, call girls, strippers, and porn stars in the center of America’s major civil rights struggles. Although their presence has largely been ignored and obscured, in this provocative history Melinda Chateauvert recasts sex workers as savvy political organizers—not as helpless victims in need of rescue.
Even before transgender sex worker Sylvia Rivera threw a brick and sparked the Stonewall Riot in 1969, these trailblazing activists and allies challenged criminal sex laws and “whorephobia,” and were active in struggles for gay liberation, women’s rights, reproductive justice, union organizing, and prison abolition.
Although the multibillion-dollar international sex industry thrives, the United States remains one of the few industrialized nations that continues to criminalize prostitution, and these discriminatory laws put workers at risk. In response, sex workers have organized to improve their working conditions and to challenge police and structural violence. Through individual confrontations and collective campaigns, they have pushed the boundaries of conventional organizing, called for decriminalization, and have reframed sex workers’ rights as human rights.
Telling stories of sex workers, from the frontlines of the 1970s sex wars to the modern-day streets of SlutWalk, Chateauvert illuminates an underrepresented movement, introducing skilled activists who have organized a global campaign for self-determination and sexual freedom that is as multifaceted as the sex industry and as diverse as human sexuality.
- Print length272 pages
- LanguageEnglish
- PublisherBeacon Press
- Publication dateJanuary 7, 2014
- Dimensions6.3 x 1.05 x 9.29 inches
- ISBN-100807061395
- ISBN-13978-0807061398
Discover the latest buzz-worthy books, from mysteries and romance to humor and nonfiction. Explore more
Customers who viewed this item also viewed
Editorial Reviews
Review
—Feministing
“[Chateauvert's] portraits of individual activists and advocacy groups are well drawn, proving that humanization through story, not philosophical debates about personhood and privacy, will win this campaign… Chateauvert makes a strong case that 'engaging in sexual commerce should not be grounds for disenfranchisement.'”
—Publishers Weekly
“The breadth of the material impressively commemorates the movement’s decades long struggle.”
—Kirkus Reviews
"Sex Workers Unite is path-breaking in its claims about the expansive legacy of sex worker activism, and one hopes it will serve as a starting point for an even more expansive analysis."
—San Francisco Chronicle
“[T]he book makes important contributions to histories of feminism, lgbtq politics, and social movements and clears a path for further studies of these important topics.”
—The Journal of American History
“The sheer depth and breadth of study evident in the book ensures its usefulness as a resource. But Sex Workers Unite is much more than a collection of facts and figures, however comprehensive. Chateauvert displays a deft hand with subtle ideas.”
—Tits and Sass
“Readers will learn a great deal about contemporary sex workers rights organizing in the United States (and a little bit about Canada) by exploring this book.”
—A Kiss for Gabriela
“Chateauvert’s writing is blunt, honest and overwhelmingly liberal. Her dry but positive discussion of sex work and its employees aims to educate the reader. Her mission is to prove that those in the sex work industry are not deviants, addicts or victims. They are people making conscious choices who deserve equal civil rights and legal representation. She wants their stories told, their histories documented, and their allies counted.”
—Edge
"This is an important book—not only for understanding the history of the movement but also for debunking myths about sex workers."
—Dr. Joycelyn Elders, former US surgeon general
“From the movement's beginning with street-walking cop-fighting trans women at Stonewall at Compton's Cafeteria through feminist betrayal and the AIDs crisis all the way to today's sex work activists and artists who make this labor visible, Sex Workers Unite is a fact-driven, street-smart history. This book is crucial.”
—Michelle Tea, author of Valencia
“In this definitive history, Chateauvert recounts the many challenges and successes of the sex workers’ rights movement, and shows us how much farther we have to go to guarantee everyone’s fundamental rights to sexual privacy and self-determination.”
—Anthony D. Romero, executive director, American Civil Liberties Union
“With a historian’s eye for the illuminating detail and the street fighter’s passion for her cause, Melinda Chateauvert offers a sassy journey through the worlds of 'Working Girls and Boys,' black, brown, and white, trans, gay, and straight. Against rescuers and abolitionists, Sex Workers Unite recovers the collective action and labor organizing of sex workers for better conditions, living wages, cultural freedom, and social justice.”
—Eileen Boris, Hull Professor of Feminist Studies, University of California Santa Barbara and co-editor of Intimate Labors: Cultures, Technologies, and the Politics of Care
About the Author
Melinda Chateauvert is an activist who has been involved in many grassroots campaigns to change policies and attitudes about sex and sexuality, gender and antiviolence, and race and rights. As a university professor she has taught courses on social justice organizing, the civil rights movement, and gender and sexuality. She is a fellow at the Center for Africana Studies at the University of Pennsylvania.
Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.
SEX WORKERS ARE FIGHTERS. They aren’t young girls begging in a freezing Dickensian fog; they aren’t “Pretty Women” looking for Prince Charming; they aren’t victimized teenage runaways exploited by savage (read: black) pimps; they don’t have golden hearts; and they aren’t crack hos neglecting their babies to find a fix. They aren’t American or Jamaican gigolos looking to fleece middle-aged women or gay hustlers cruising for sugar daddies. And some sex workers may look like these stereotypes, yet they are fighters too.
Sex workers have been fighting for their right to work, for respect and justice, for a very long time. It would be extraordinary if members of the oldest profession had never complained, had never organized, or had never fought back. They have a lot to fight. Many wonder, “Why do they hate us?” Reverend Howard Moody of New York’s Judson Memorial Church heard a Times Square streetwalker complain about her confrontation with a passerby in the 1970s:
We ain’t doin’ nothin’ to them. Yesterday I’m just standin’ on the corner, not doin’ nothin,’ and this bitch come by and says, “Get off the street, you dirty slut.” If she hadn’t been so fast I’d have kicked her ass. I wasn’t hurtin’ her. Where does she get off, callin’ me names? You mean she ain’t never fucked for favors? We just tryin’ to make a livin’ like everybody else.
Moral judgments about prostitutes embolden people to throw stones and insults. Politicians pander to the “women’s vote” by introducing legislation to punish sex workers and everyone near them. Police target street-based sex workers to show they’re “cleaning up” the city; FBI and immigration officials arrest female sex workers as trafficked, and claim their associates held them in sexual slavery. In the face of such disempowerment, it’s no wonder that sex workers fight. Their survival depends on it.
Sex workers must fight for their lives. Serial murderers and rapists target prostitutes, and police compound the violence with sloppy or scant investigations of their deaths. In 2001, Gary Leon Ridgway admitted to killing forty-nine street-based workers in the Green River area of Seattle because he knew they were vulnerable. For twenty years, police did not pay attention as his victims disappeared. Ridgway is only one of some five hundred serial murderers convicted since 1970 who have preyed on female sex workers and women perceived to be sex workers; more than three thousand women have died in the last four decades.
This pattern of violence, combined with police neglect, is why sex workers lobbied the US government for years to acknowledge that these crimes are human rights violations. In 2011, the Department of Justice acknowledged the pattern of crimes committed against “persons in prostitution,” but has been slow to provide law enforcement officials with best practice guidelines for handling victims in the sex trades with respect.
Sex workers are laborers who earn money to perform sexual services or who provide erotic entertainment to clients individually or collectively. Their participation in the sex industry may be the result of choice, circumstance, or coercion. Carol Leigh—the Scarlot Harlot—coined the gender-neutral term “sex work” in 1978 to describe the many diverse occupations of the sex industry. Sex workers are escorts, exotic dancers, porn stars, peep-show workers, professional dominants, rent boys, phone-sex operators, strippers, webcam performers, erotic priestesses, prostitutes, and providers of a vast array of niche adult services. Additionally, the sex sector employs tens of thousands of service workers—security personnel, film and technical crews, and behind-the-scenes workers—who are not sex workers.
Reliable statistics on the number of people working in the sex industry at any given time are difficult to calculate because of the illegality of some occupations and the stigma associated with even legal forms of sex work. Most calculations are based on arrests, skewing estimates toward street-based populations, but failing to capture sex workers arrested on charges other than prostitution. In 1990, health researchers estimated that one in one hundred US women had done some form of sex work during her lifetime. Perhaps the public education campaign of St. James Infirmary says it best: “Someone you know is a sex worker.”4
Many occupations in the US sex industry are legal, and the duties, skills, and responsibilities required to perform these jobs are described in international trade agreements and the Occupational Outlook Handbook, a federal guidebook for job seekers. Employment in legal commercial sex businesses, including the pornography industry, may account for half of all sex workers today. In California, there are over five hundred “escort” companies providing “all other personal services” in the state’s Economic Development Department database. Because many are escorts and exotic dancers by choice and may have college degrees and possess other forms of human capital and privilege, many consider these workers the most empowered. Nonetheless, they too have reason to fear harassment and discrimination because of the work they do.
Escorts are paid for spending time with clients as “dates,” as “girlfriends” or “boyfriends,” not for sexual services per se. Out of public view, independent sex workers are less likely to be arrested, in part because they tend to heavily screen prospective customers. The occasional newspaper headline about a high-profile bust, whether of New York Governor Elliot Spitzer or Deborah Jean Palfrey, “The DC Madam,” does more to restore the reputation of a scandal-rife police department than to shut down the escort industry. When public pressure to do something about crime mounts, police sweep up street-based workers. Neighborhood residents take false comfort in the belief that empty sidewalks discourage crime.
Some people engage in transactional sex casually or temporarily to supplement low-wage work, to cover extraordinary or emergency expenses, or to survive until the next meager social security check or food stamps arrive. “Girls do what they have to do to survive,” as do homeless boys, undocumented immigrants, transgender people of color, and other marginalized and social undesirables. They hustle, using sex—the one form of labor capital they possess—to obtain food, shelter, clothing, medicine, physical protection, and other necessities. Such trades are survival strategies for a population shut out of other forms of work, in a nation that does not affirm a human right to shelter, food, or health care.
Sex workers are fierce fighters because their jobs demand perspicacity, persistence, and a kind of emotional ruthlessness in order to succeed. These skills have also made them canny political activists, contrary to the stereotype of disempowered victims in need of moral rescue. Sex Workers Unite! tells stories about sex workers who have fought for dignity and human rights from the 1960s to today, documenting a global movement for self-determination that is as multifaceted as the sex industry and as diverse as human sexuality.
“No bad women, just bad laws” captures the movement’s longstanding demand to abolish laws criminalizing erotic services and sexual labor. There are dozens of reasons for decriminalization, and sex workers don’t all agree whether other laws prohibiting street solicitation, pandering, pimping, brothel-keeping, and moving across state borders should be repealed. Yet, based on the experiences of sex workers in other countries, US activists are skeptical that government regulation of the industry will enhance their rights as workers or as citizens.
“Decriminalization is the beginning of the solution, it’s not the solution itself,” argued Robyn Few, founder of the Sex Workers Organizing Project-USA (SWOP-USA). Contemporary activists believe that criminalizing sex work and related activities perpetuates structural and interpersonal violence, and thus endangers the lives and limits the choices of people in the sex trades.
Movement activists generally do not support legalization that allows state oversight and licensing of sex workers. Regulation, they believe, would not benefit workers and could harshly punish those who refused to be “pimped” by the state. Historically, official supervision has imposed mandatory health inspections on workers (but not clients) and usually designated prostitution zones controlled by the police. Registration as a prostitute becomes a public record, limiting the ability of sex workers to seek other forms of work when they want to leave the commercial sex industry.
Contemporary “deregulation” in the commercial sex industry has led to too little oversight, some say, pointing out that owners don’t comply with labor laws and health and safety regulations while workers are diligently policed. Activists think sex businesses should be regulated by the same government agencies that oversee non-sex businesses. If special rules are needed, then sex workers should participate in writing and enforcing them because, Carol Leigh suggests, self-regulation promotes human rights and political empowerment.
The time has come to talk about sex work. The issues are critical and contemporary. The United States is one of the few industrialized nations to criminalize prostitution. Sex work is legal in fifty nations, including Canada, Mexico, Brazil, Macau, the Netherlands, Austria, New Zealand, Israel, Germany, France, and England; it is legal with limitations in another eleven nations, including Australia, India, Norway, Japan, and Spain. In 1949, the United States voted against a United Nations convention calling for the decriminalization of prostitution; forty-eight countries endorsed it.
The uneven enforcement of prostitution laws across the United States, even within municipal boundaries, is the result of political pressure and police whims. This variation results in a suspect pattern of selective enforcement punishing women and transwomen of color on the street more than any other group. To activists and advocates, racism is blatantly apparent in the arrest and sentencing statistics. The disparate racial impact of prostitution laws on people of color, especially those who are gender-nonconforming, is one rationale for decriminalization.
The growth of the multibillion-dollar international commercial sex industry has altered the meaning of decriminalization, particularly since many activists have legal jobs in the industry or pursue careers outside it. Although providing intimate, erotic services is a crime in most states and territories, it is not a crime to offer erotic entertainment, as long as community decency standards are observed. Working in the pornography industry, sex chat rooms, peep shows; serving beer at Hooters; and doing other sex work for commercial establishments (brick and mortar as well as virtual) are perfectly legitimate.
This form of legalization has not eliminated discrimination. Though legal commercial sex workers pay income taxes, state officials often dismiss complaints about labor, civil, and human rights violations. Lackadaisical enforcement shows that neither decriminalization nor legalization will bring rainbows and unicorns. People in the sex trades will continue to confront stigmas and public policies that penalize their work choices, their personal freedoms, and even their families, lovers, and friends.
Sex workers want to stop trafficking and end sexual coercion too, and they have assisted people trapped by criminals into unlawful labor contracts in the sex industry. Trafficking, they agree, is a human rights concern that exemplifies the ills of neoliberal globalization and anti-immigration policies. Trafficking occurs when labor contractors or smugglers exploit the undocumented immigrant’s status: refusing to return a passport, forcing them to work without pay, threatening to report their “illegal” status to authorities. Coerced and undocumented workers labor in every low-wage industry in the United States, and are far more numerous in agriculture, food processing, and food service sectors than the sex industry. Though international conventions already prohibit forced labor, the United States categorizes trafficked sex workers as special victims, subjecting them to interrogation before (perhaps) issuing special-category visas. Lawyers with the Sex Workers Project of the Urban Justice Center (SWP), one of the first US programs to assist survivors of human trafficking, believe that decriminalizing prostitution would allow immigrants to more easily seek protection from criminals who have abused them.
“Stop shaming us to death!” sex workers chant. Activists believe decriminalizing prostitution would empower workers to organize on their terms. Sex workers want respect and human rights, the basic necessities for democratic participation. Activists want a voice in the political process; they believe that engaging in sexual commerce should not be grounds for disenfranchisement. Rescue, rehabilitation, and prostitution diversion programs reinforce stigma and victimization.
Around the world, sex workers have organized Red Umbrella campaigns to resist violence and discrimination, and to symbolize their collective strength. Activists want the human rights expressed in the landmark Declaration of the Rights of Sex Workers adopted in Brussels in 2005. Human rights for sex workers means recognizing them as people fully capable of making decisions about their lives, to move freely in cities and to migrate to other nations, to defend themselves against violence and threats to their health, to enjoy the respect of fellow citizens and the public servants who are supposed to protect them. They want access to public resources and meaningful participation in the body politic. Criminalization is a human rights issue because it disregards the fundamental principles of self-determination, bodily integrity, and sexual freedom.
This history of the sex workers’ movement is a collection of stories about activists and their allies who confronted moralistic politicians, paternalistic feminists, and fraternizing business owners who sought to make their careers and pimp their livelihoods off workers in the sex industry. People have fought back in many different ways, as this book attests. Their stories are varied in time, intent, and locale; and the people in them relied on different tactics, strategies, and goals. Some talked to me about politics wearing hooker heels; other activists preferred their bunny slippers or Doc Martens. In some stories, sex workers win, sometimes they lose, and sometimes they just discover new movement allies.
Readers who are sex workers or activists—or both—may find the stories here will help them become better activists. For readers who are neither, I hope these stories lay to rest the old, tired stereotypes about prostitutes, and recognize sex workers’ long fight for rights, respect, and justice.
Product details
- Publisher : Beacon Press (January 7, 2014)
- Language : English
- Hardcover : 272 pages
- ISBN-10 : 0807061395
- ISBN-13 : 978-0807061398
- Item Weight : 1.46 pounds
- Dimensions : 6.3 x 1.05 x 9.29 inches
- Best Sellers Rank: #3,036,437 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
- #1,747 in Labor & Industrial Relations (Books)
- #2,056 in Labor & Industrial Economic Relations (Books)
- #6,147 in General Gender Studies
- Customer Reviews:
About the author
Melinda Chateauvert, Ph.D., is a writer, historian, and activist with three decades of experience in movements for gender equality, sexual freedom, and civil rights advocacy. Working with the NAACP Legal Defense Fund, Dr. Chateauvert has served as an expert witness in class action litigation challenging race discrimination in higher education and public contracting, as well as documenting racial bias in death penalty cases. Marching Together: Women of the Brotherhood (University of Illinois Press, 1997) documents the work of African American women in organizing the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters, the first international black trade union in the AFL-CIO; it remains the standard for labor historians. Her recent book, Sex Workers Unite: A history of the movement from Stonewall to SlutWalk (Beacon Press, Jan. 2014) traces the vital activism of sex workers at the fringes of gay liberation, AIDS activism, labor organizing and the long struggle against police violence and criminalization.
Photographer Copyright Credit Name: Tracey Primavera, 2013.
Customer reviews
Customer Reviews, including Product Star Ratings help customers to learn more about the product and decide whether it is the right product for them.
To calculate the overall star rating and percentage breakdown by star, we don’t use a simple average. Instead, our system considers things like how recent a review is and if the reviewer bought the item on Amazon. It also analyzed reviews to verify trustworthiness.
Learn more how customers reviews work on AmazonTop reviews from the United States
There was a problem filtering reviews right now. Please try again later.
- Reviewed in the United States on January 20, 2014A very timely book for these times of human trafficking mania. I really wish it had talked a bit more about survival sex and teen prostitution. It's such a charged and difficult topic. I really wish the author would have discussed it more.
It's difficult to argue with anything in the book. But the book presupposes voluntary entry into prostitution. While giving lip service to survival sex - it really misses this major area of societal concern.
I learned much from this book.
- Reviewed in the United States on October 25, 2019Interesting perspective
- Reviewed in the United States on March 4, 2014Finally--a history of sex worker activism that places sex workers at the center of struggles for human rights. In this lively and fast-paced book, Chateauvert traces the creative and innovative campaigns that sex workers have led in the fight for self-determination, bodily integrity, and sexual freedom, from the 1960s to the present. Sex Workers Unite is alive with sex workers' own words and actions, challenging the reader to rethink the meaning of prostitution policy, labor rights, gender equality, and freedom.
In the contemporary debates around issues of consent in sex work, many people overlook the battles that sex workers themselves have fought in movements for social and economic justice. Chateauvert delivers an untold story of how sex workers were, and continue to be, first responders to the most urgent human rights violations in the country: the AIDS epidemic; the dismantling of workers' rights and rising economic inequality; and mass incarceration and the ongoing surveillance, policing, and abuse of poor, nonwhite, and trans* people.
Sex Workers Unite is an illuminating read, essential for anyone concerned about structures of power at the intersection of gender, sexuality, race, and labor in the US.
- Reviewed in the United States on December 31, 2015Some good information; however, somewhat disorganized and selectively sourced.
- Reviewed in the United States on March 25, 2015SEX WORKERS UNITE seems to be a rather strange title for a work that might be more aptly called" THE LAST CIVIL RIGHTS BATTLE: Freedom for Sex Workers in Puritanical America." Professor Melinda Chateauvert presents a very important, well-researched book on the history of the fight for legitimacy and fairness in the sex industry beginning with Stonewall in 1969 (which many may regard as the dawn of social activism in LGBT rights, but which Chateauvert correctly sees as intertwined with sex worker activism as the two many times overlap) to Slut Walk in Toronto, Canada in 2011.
Chateauvert covers every important group and movement within the fight for sex workers' rights over nearly half a century. The main concentration is on prostitutes, but exotic dancers, porn film actresses and actors, as well as many other sex-industry jobs are mentioned. The average reader may be suprised at how many different occupations can be found within the sex trade, and those who know will be suitably pleased to see the various jobs viewed under one major umbrella: the last frontier in the fight for civil rights.
In the 1970s, tremendous progress was made with prostitutes' rights. Margo St. James and the organization she founded, COYOTE, get a fair share of attention in Chateauvert's work. "COYOTE asserted that women who worked as prostitutes should have the same citizenship rights as 'straight citizens.'" St. James felt that "hookers' lib" was really a privacy issue, one of a woman's control over her own body. St. James and her organization were also concerned about the racial profiling and assumptions of and about women of color.
Although there was a tremendous split in the the women's/feminist movement in the 70s regarding the sex industry (one side felt that prostitution, pornography, and exotic dancing was degrading to women and made them subjects of sexual slavery and a kind of institutional rape), there were great strides made with the other half, the women who actually worked in the industry, and felt differently. It was unfortunate that the split between feminists was so vast. Although St. James and other activists of the times attended many national and international conferences, they were never treated legitimately. This period of time was a rather angry time in sisterhood.
Just when the movement started to gain momentum, the early 80s brought AIDS. In the beginning, prostitutes were blamed for spreading it until research discovered the true roots of transmission. Prostitutes - male and female - were among the first to adapt to safe-sex routines. Prostitutes already had a higher usage of condoms than the general population, and savvy workers quickly adapted to other ways in which to practice safe sex with clients.
Still, it was a battle and a time when rights for sex workers went on the back burner. Again, a connection between the LGBT world and the sex industry served for the two communities to come together and educate others, promote safe sex, and participate in positive activism.
Still, the movement was set back decades. "In thirty-four states, prostitution is a felony if the sex worker is HIV positive, without regard to the type of service performed or whether transmission to the client occurred. No HIV-positive client, it appears, has ever been prosecuted." As recently as 2009, the mere possesson of more than three condoms convicted nearly forty people on prostitution charges in Brooklyn, NY. In Louisiana, those convicted under a questionable and basically unconstitutional sodomy law are forced to register as sex offenders. In many cases, sex workers just talked about the act but didn't perform it. Now they have SEX OFFENDER printed on their driver's license, a rather scary and Hitler-like tactic. A prostitute is a sex offender for talking about an act that hasn't been committed and probably isn't illegal anyway? Don't most Americans think of sex offenders as child molesters and rapists? Apparently that is not the definition in Louisiana.
The women's liberation movement has been going on for a long time, and although the battle is still going in many areas, life has improved greatly for women in general. Unfortunately, for sex workers, the battle is just beginning . . . .again. As long as we have men who make jokes: "If you have sex with a prostitute and don't pay her, is it rape or shoplifting?" and think it's funny, then the fight for civil rights for sex workers will continue. But the battle isn't just male vs female (after all, who generally patronizes prostitutes?), but also a struggle within the women's movement and the division of feminism.
Chateauvert makes no mention whatsoever of Camille Paglia who, in the 1990s, helped to bring attention to prostitutes through books such as her "Sexual Personae" where prostitutes were, essentially, put on a pedestal and worshipped. Of course, Paglia was writing philosophy and Chateauvert is writing history. Still, it seems that Paglia deserved a mention. She may not have been a part of direct activism, but she did get attention for the cause even though it was done in a more indirect way.
Has Chateauvert written an important book? Yes. Will it be widely read? Probably not. This is concerning as it needs to be. The book is very good history of the movement, but it is a bit dry and makes for slow reading. Since America has seen the racial civil rights movement and is currently moving through the gay civil rights movement, it seems logical that sex workers' civil rights movement should be next. But how does one reach Middle America? Certainly not through a book as academic as this one. Although excellent at capturing all that went on between Stonewall and SlutWalk, Chateauvert is, at heart, an academic writer. It would be interesting to see if she could come up with a work that could speak to the average person, a book with cameos of real individuals, a little humor (not of the sick kind quoted above), and something that would bring people to the cause. Because, after all, those who have been thinking know that sex workers' civil rights are right on the horizon. No, not because it has been there before and faded away time and time again, but because now is the time to make it happen.
- Reviewed in the United States on September 11, 2014I received Sex Workers Unite for free in a Goodreads giveaway. and I’m really grateful that I did. Despite the provocative title, it was well researched, useful for both casual readers like myself and more serious academics. Gloria Steinem once wrote that we should listen to people, not paper, and Chateauvert does just that. Instead of talking about sex workers, she talks to them, delivering their words right to the readers. She discusses the absence of sex workers in the civil rights movements, in feminist politics, in the gay rights movement, and in our societal discourse in general. Sex workers are talked about, talked down, to and even as we demand their services, shamed for existing.
With a passionate tone, Chateauvert sets out to provide examples for activists and confront the stereotypes and stigmas about sex work. Unfortunately, the examples that Chateauvert provides don’t provide a clear map for making sex workers’ lives better, as she would have hoped, but they do show readers where to start-by listening to the workers themselves. Her work highlights the resilience and self care that has kept sex workers alive and fighting, stronger than society gives them credit for.
Sex Workers Unite is a fascinating read and one that leaves you reconsidering every preconceived notion you had about sex work that you ever had.