I guess I started with the sex workers’ rights movement
by just being a sex worker.
I saw myself as someone experiencing homelessness,
doing what I needed to do to survive.
Most countries criminalize sex work in one way or another.
The problem that we see with criminalization generally
is that it does nothing really to help sex workers themselves.
The Sex Workers’ Pop-Up exhibition,
I believe the goal to be: creating open discussion
and a space for creating questioning, discourse,
understanding, and an exchange,
a civil exchange of the realities of people who are in the workforce.
It is really important and it has been a vehicle in which
sex worker advocates have used to engage people
people with our message and also to challenge
some of the misconceptions.
Sometimes, when you kind of break down …
the misconceptions about sex workers is quite comical,
it’s quite ridiculous when you really break it down.
And I think sometimes turning that into an art or a performance
highlights the ridiculousness of some of the perceptions
that people have about sex workers.
You feel it and it becomes a part of you and you can see
the struggle, the fight.
You can see all the emotion that everybody put
into all this artwork that made it so amazing.
We hope the visitors take away the message that
sex work is work.
Sex work is often misrepresented and stigmatized, and
we want visitors to listen to first-person narrative accounts
from people who have a sex worker history
and hear from them directly.
You know, there’s videos, there’s art, and then people
who will be able to learn and go out there
and advocate for the sex workers’ rights.
Because sex workers are human beings just like anyone.
And the sex worker movement must also be a movement,
a feminist movement, a movement for migrants,
against the carceral system,
for LGBT rights.
We have to include all of these issues because we are part
of all of these communities, and oppression
comes in very different ways.
And I think for me, this exhibition is about showing our diversity,
showing our realities, which are ones,
as you can see, if you come and see this exhibition,
are amazing, proud individuals standing up
as sex workers saying: I am human, look at me.
