Advocating for Ourselves While Stigmatized
Prostitution is political, it carries the full weight of social control wherever it is. This can manifest in formal and informal sanctions. For sex workers, informal sanctions are the stigma – the general attitudes and stereotypes about sex workers that create exclusion, misunderstanding, and even physical violence. Civilians often rely on society’s general misconceptions about sex work to have a ready-made script on what a sex worker is, what her place in society is, and what it should be. Civilian interactions with a known sex worker reveal a lot about what their expectations and “demands” are from sex workers (Goffman 1963, 2-3). Our discreditable identity and the characteristics associated with us allow others to put us in a box and justify epistemic injustice against us (Goffman 1963, 4-5).
Society has created the sex worker: a distinct imaginary figure, usually gendered female, and racialized. The locations of her defilement and criminal activity are tracked for stigma and policing. Her physical body is imagined to be contaminated, unsanitary, full of STIs, and mental illnesses. There are subcategories like stripper, camgirl, escort, or dominatrix. There is the binary onto which all cis women in the sex industry are often placed: they can either be the “privileged” empowered sex worker or the trafficking victims often coerced by poverty or acting out previous sexual abuse, and “daddy issues”. Sex workers often choose which industry they will go into depending on how much information control it will allow, and how visible they will have to be. For example, doing porn will result in infamy because of the visibility of the stigma being displayed for the public, it offers less information control than escorting. While both professions use aliases to avoid personal identification, escorting is done privately, allowing the person to better conceal information (Goffman 1963, 58-59). Sex work requires that the person adopts a personal identity separate from their own to do business, often these identities can become intertwined. The downside of escorting is that its underground nature makes it more dangerous, and more liable to harsher informal and formal sanctions if caught. Much of this is a result of porn being legal, whereas escorting is illegal, and that society is more likely to associate escorting with poverty.
Sex work is both a discredited and discreditable stigma depending on the circumstances (Goffman 1963, 4). Having big plastic boobs, lip injections, wearing a red dress outside alone, wearing fishnet stockings and high heels can all be signs of one being a sex worker to “the normals”. There is in the public consciousness a stereotype of what a sex worker is said to look like. This can be tied to locations associated with sex work like motels, certain street corners, or being an unescorted woman in a hotel lobby or bar. Many hotels train employees to look out for signs of “sex trafficking” which are often signs of sex work and result in policing of certain women. Common signs of trafficking to the Marriot Hotels are not speaking English well, being a woman at the bar alone, having sex toys, condoms, lube. One hotel training protocol asked employees to look out for acrylic nails. The Nello restaurant banned a female executive because she was caught dining alone at the bar. The stigma against sex workers is so great that to fall into various characteristics, or locations that they are said to have often means taking on the stigma, and its consequences even if one is “normal”.
On October 27, 2020, the poster below was found throughout Manhattan from politician Judy Graham smearing and challenging Dan Quart. The black woman in the poster is a good friend of mine, an activist from DecrimNY, and the founder of Black Trans Nation, who goes by the alias TS Candii.
The photo was taken during a protest that attracted media attention. To be seen with a sex worker is usually risky for “the normals”, as being with a sex worker, being the same place as them, talking to them is often used to cast suspicion, contaminate, or damage the reputation of anyone seen around them (Goffman 1963, 47-48). Ultimately the image reveals the issue of “mixed contact”, when the stigmatized and the normal are in the same social situation. These moments are when the impacts of stigma have to be confronted by both sides. Our society reinforces this segregation. Furthermore, it sends a message to sex workers on the importance of “passing”, and the dangers of speaking up and being political. Sex workers take a huge risk by organizing for rights, as they have to constantly try to appeal to the normals for support, and they have to brace themselves for the various ways that they will be received by all sides (Goffman 1963, 12-13). Advertisements and smear campaigns like this are meant to communicate that the political world and sex worker’s rights should be separate and that any “good” normal person shouldn’t support us. The fact that Graham picked a black woman, with a revealing red dress in her ad (there were other sex workers at the event he took photos with) was a conscious choice. In the photo, Candii serves as a kind of prop, a stigma symbol to devalue Dan Quarts as a politician. The stigmatizing power behind this image would not be as severe if Graham had picked someone with disindentifers, like a preppy-styled white male sex worker (Goffman 1963, 42-45). Since sex work is racialized and gendered, the “normal” of our society being white man acts as disindentifers, they don’t meet with the same stigma, violence, and outrage that female, POC sex workers have to face. This advertisement then invites the viewer to give Candii the “nonperson” treatment, where people are expected to glance at her and look away in disgust or gawk at her image as if she were a despicable object (Goffman 1963e, 83-85). This behavior is reinforced by various businesses from hotels to restaurants that instruct employees to gawk, and analyze women’s bodies for stigma symbols, or behaviors that could profile a woman as a “hooker” to be kicked out of the establishment or have the authorities summoned. This means that Graham wanted this to be as stigmatizing as possible to elicit outrage and disgust from the public. The viewer is meant to stare at Candii’s body for evidence of her “spoiled identity” (identities that cause people to experience stigma), it is meant to reaffirm societal associations of promiscuity, criminal activity, and black bodies. It shows the importance of information management, as information in the wrong hands can lead to someone being discreditable if the information is released. This means that the discreditable person or the discredited goes into damage control, carefully contemplating a plan to save face, minimizing the situation, or attempting to neutralize the stigma.
Many expressed outrage in response to save face, pointing out the characterizations against the LGBTQ, and BIPOC community that Judy Graham was employing in her ad. Some attempted to stigmatize Graham in return, associating her with Donald Trump, while Elisa Crespo (a democratic candidate for NYC Council District 15) characterized Graham as part of the elite class with a “silver spoon in [her mouth]”. Others pointed out that the poster was on city property and was therefore illegally placed and threatened to call 311 to report it. Dan Quart responded by saying, “I have been a vocal supporter of decriminalizing sex work. My opponent has no right to single out anyone else. Her actions are vile, dangerous, and racist. Attack me all you want but I will not tolerate smears against the tireless activists I work with. Take these posters down.” Dan Quart attempts to humanize and destigmatize Candii by ascribing her with a moral attribute - being a “tireless” hard worker for social justice and focusing on her occupation as an activist. People who came to a similar defense were the Stonewall Democratic Club of New York City, Assembly member Ron Kim, and Brian Romero from GMHC. Becoming visible, networking and organizing can eventually lead to a normalization, and increased acceptance of stigmatized people, it can also create protection. In this case, we decided to affirm our status, engage in militant activism, we sought out sympathetic others within our own group (e.g. LGBTQ orgs, HIV/AIDs groups), and those outside our group like cis white men and women with families and white collar careers. Our supporters learn that to be a good ally means to openly engage in hostile bravado against those who don’t accept sex workers.
During my time protesting alongside Candii, I have noticed how much the stigma around sex work are compounded, or even eclipsed by anti-blackness. On July 23, 2019 Red Canary Song and DecrimNY hosted a protest against the Church of the Incarnation in NYC. My friends and I entered the church chanting, and afterward quietly sat down to plan our next move. When Candii followed behind us, politely giving out flyers to anyone who would take them security immediately grabbed her arms and told her she (alone) needed to leave. It wasn’t until we angrily protested her being singled out, that the security guards told us we all had to leave. We would rather go down together, and be allowed in an exclusionary place for assimilating and staying silent.
References
Goffman, Erving. 1959. The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life. New York: Doubleday.
_______. 1963b. “Stigma and Social Identity.” In Stigma: Notes on the Management of Spoiled Identity, 1-40. New York: Simon & Schuster.
_______. 1963c. “Information Control and Personal Identity.” In Stigma: Notes on the Management of Spoiled Identity, 41-104. New York: Simon & Schuster.
_______. 1963e. “Face Engagements.” In Behavior in Public Places: Notes on the Organization of Public Gatherings, 83-111. New York: Free Press.
