Perspectives to Self-Representation, Hierarchies and Allyship Sex Workers' Activism in Finland and Beyond

Sex workers have been protesting for their rights for decades. Although ‘prostitution’ was loudly framed as a women’s issue in the second-wave feminist conversations, the sex workers’ rights movement’s history rather intersects with LGBTQA+ and racial justice movements development than the women’s rights movement which has failed to recognise the diversity of sex worker’s positions and situations. Many sex workers are part of marginalised communities or at least share experiences of being stigmatised with them. However, this does not mean that the sex workers or their rights movement are not hierarchical in any mean. Especially in public debate, sex workers with more racial, economic, and gender privileges may have more chances to use their voice or get it heard than less privileged peers. In my work, I study sex workers’ possibilities and their limits to self-representation in public space which may vary depending on the sex worker’s position in society. Together with the sex worker’s community in Finland, and based on multimodal participatory observation in co-created art and activism spaces, my study develops an understanding of various ways in which sex workers articulate their identities, needs, and demands today. In addition to the concrete acts of activism and self-representation in public space, my presentation highlights angles on allyship, social recognition, and peer support in sex workers’ communities. It seeks answers to how sex workers find the internal hierarchies of the community and how people from outside of the community can either help develop sex workers’ rights or make it harder reach them for the whole community or some people in it, such as trans-sex workers or undocumented immigrants.