The Social Justice Institute
Noted Scholars Series presents:
Dr. Becki Ross
Professor, The Social Justice Institute and Sociology, UBC
“Historicizing Criminalized Sex Work, Racialized Whorephobia, and Fugitive Queerness Under Settler Colonial Rule”
WHEN & WHERE
October 6, 12-1pm
on Zoom
RSVP for this event are now closed.
All events are free and open to the public.
In this lecture I interrogate the limits and possibilities of a primary source from the settler colonial archive: prisoners’ records of those charged with prostitution-related offences in early 20th century Vancouver. My excavation opens a window into complex dynamics of settler colonial rule, racialization, relations of gender and sexuality, and shifting geographies of work and leisure. Reading with and against the grain, I ask: who were the ‘sporting women’ who serviced a diverse clientele in downtown brothels and on city streets? How and why were some men entangled in police surveillance? What can we learn about the workers’ conditions of labour under carceral capitalism, alongside their queer networks of kin and care? On what grounds did moral entrepreneurs invest in the socio-legal regulation and stigmatization of sex work? I consider how sex workers’ fight for sovereignty, safety, and security in 2021 remains as urgently necessary as it was more than a century ago.
Becki Ross is a long-time academic-activist in struggles for 2SLGBTQ+ liberation, trans rights, sex workers’ sovereignty, and reproductive justice. Becki does her feminist anti-colonial teaching and research queerly in Sociology and the Social Justice Institute at UBC. With Jamie Lee Hamilton, Becki co-founded the West End Sex Workers Memorial in Vancouver. Becki is the author of Burlesque West: showgirls, sex, and sin in Postwar Vancouver (2009), and articles in BC Studies, The Journal of Women’s History, Canadian Theatre Review, Sexualities, The Journal of the History of Sexuality, Labour/le travail, and The Conversation.
