From Criminalization to Liberation: Organizing Migrant Asian Sex Workers Across Oceans 

This event is organized by Red Canary Song, a community group based in NYC focused on migrant and Asian sex worker rights.

Although multiple models of policing sex work- including global anti-trafficking efforts as full criminalization (in the U.S), buyer criminalization (the Swedish model), legalization (in the Netherlands), and full decriminalization (as in New Zealand)- currently compete in activist, governmental, and policy-making circles, they all disproportionately affect migrant sex workers. This conversation centers theories and practices that emerge from organizing with Asian sex worker communities embedded in complex migration networks that span East Asia, Southeast Asia, and North America. The dominant anti-trafficking discourse in relation to migrant sex work reinforces policing and surveillance networks, stigmatizes sex workers, and isolates migrants, with the result that it often harms those who it is meant to “save.” Based on research and organizing in China, Hong Kong, the Philippines, Canada, and the United States, the speakers here insist that we think of sex work alongside rather than in contrast to other forms of work- shifting from criminal to labor law frameworks. The implications of migrant sex work organizing go beyond policy, suggesting new ways for transnational communities- arranged by differences of privilege based on language, education, immigration and citizenship status, race, gender, sexuality, and forms of sex work- to imagine futures beyond criminalization and toward liberation.

This panel will be followed by a Q&A and then a series of small breakout group discussions.

Co-sponsored by IRWGS, CSER and the Weatherhead East Asian Institute.

About the Panelists

Khokhoi de la Vida is a member of piliphinx shifterhood collective Walang Hiya (NYC), and works between New York City and the Visayas.

Elene Lam is the founder of Zi Teng, a non-governmental organization that provides assistance and community to women from Hong Kong and China who work as sex workers.

Chanelle Gallant is a co-founder of Migrant Sex Workers Project, a grassroots group of migrants, sex workers, and allies who demand safety and dignity for all sex workers regardless of immigration status based in Canada.

Kate Zen is a founder of Red Canary Song, a grassroots organization advocating and providing resources for Asian Migrant Massage Parlor Workers based in Flushing, Queens.

Elena Shih researches human trafficking, labor migration, and sex work in East and Southeast Asian borderlands. She is the author of the forthcoming Manufacturing Freedom: Rescue, Rehabilitation, and the Slave Free Good, a global ethnography of the transnational social movement to combat human trafficking in China and Thailand.

Reading of architectural and sensory space in the children’s book “Goodnight Moon” with Matthew-Robin Nye

Grad Fellow event.

About the Speaker

Matthew-Robin Nye is is a visual artist, cultural producer, and has exhibited, lectured and held residencies in Canada and abroad. He is a Joseph-Armand Bombardier PhD student at the Centre for Interdisciplinary Studies in Society and Culture at Concordia University, in Montreal. Employing a research-creation methodology, Nye traverses the fields of contemporary art, process philosophy and performance theory to think towards the problem of creating a ‘queer utopic space’, a wildness which evolves alongside a continually renewing present; or, the production of multiplicities in performance, installation, text-based and conceptual practice. Art-making and artistic experience are used to think about how to bridge the fields of environmental philosophy and queer theory, harnessing their potentials to constitute a limitless subject, unbounded by the pitfalls of either discourse in its singularity.

Feminist Media(tions)

Performing the Goddess: The Chapal Bhaduri Story

with filmmaker Naveen Kishore and Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak

cosponsored by Global Cultural Studies

Chapal Bhaduri, alias Chapal Rani or Queen Chapal, leading lady of Bengal’s traditional folk travelling theatre-in-the-round—the jatra—spent his life playing women. Feeling like a woman. Until history changed tradition and women began to play female roles themselves. Out of work, ageing, he turned to a new livelihood: that of playing Sitala, the poor person’s dreaded goddess of pox and disease, in dramatized performances of the goddess’s sacred saga.

This intimate video biography brings you face to face with a unique individual, reminiscing about the world of the Jatra, discussing what it means to become a woman night after night, talking for the first time of the woman inside his male body, of troubled sexuality, of a long domestic partnership with his older lover, of the essential loneliness of living as a human being on the edges of conventional society—and showing how he metamorphoses into the goddess in order to perform her story.

In-depth interviews, extracts from milestone fragments of Jatra plays, the make-up process that metamorphoses a man into a woman into a goddess, and documentation of the play on the goddess, provide you with a rare entry into an unusual world, and a close look at Chapal Bhaduri’s life and work.

A film by The Seagull Foundation for the Arts

44 mins. Colour. English subtitles.