Sex Work Politics

From Protest to Service Provision

Samantha Majic

• Publisher: University of Pennsylvania Press
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9780812209020
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Political Advocacy
• Index: Politics & International Relations

In San Francisco, the St. James Infirmary (SJI) and the California Prostitutes Education Project (CAL-PEP) provide free, nonjudgmental medical care, counseling, and other health and social services by and for sex workers—a radical political commitment at odds with government policies that criminalize prostitution. To maintain and expand these much-needed services and to qualify for funding from state, federal, and local authorities, such organizations must comply with federal and state regulations for nonprofits. In Sex Work Politics, Samantha Majic investigates the way nonprofit organizations negotiate their governmental obligations while maintaining their commitment to outreach and advocacy for sex workers' rights as well as broader sociopolitical change.Drawing on multimethod qualitative research, Majic outlines the strategies that CAL-PEP and SJI employ to balance the conflicting demands of service and advocacy, which include treating sex work as labor with legitimate occupational health and safety concerns, empowering their clients with civic skills to advance their political commitments outside the nonprofit organization, and conducting and publishing research and analysis to inform the public and policymakers of their constituents' needs. Challenging the assumption that activists must "sell out" and abandon radical politics to manage formal organizations, Majic comes to the surprising conclusion that it is indeed possible to maintain effective advocacy and key social movement values, beliefs, and practices, even while partnering with government agencies. Sex Work Politics significantly contributes to studies of transformational politics with its nuanced portrait of nonprofits as centers capable of sustaining political and social change.

CHAPTER 1

Institutional Negotiation: Sex Workers and the Process of Resistance Maintenance

One afternoon, in the fall of 2006, I sat across from Tasha in the Oakland office of the California Prostitutes Education Project (CAL-PEP), an organization that offers HIV/AIDS prevention and education services to sex workers and members of other street-based populations, including persons recently released from prison, substance users, and parolees. When I first met Tasha—a pleasant, soft-spoken African American woman in her early forties, dressed in a pale-blue pantsuit and with neatly cropped hair—she told me that when she was fifteen she dropped out of school, ran away from home, and started working in prostitution to support herself and her cocaine addiction. CAL-PEP’s mobile HIV-testing van was present in the community where she worked; when she was in her thirties, they provided the test that confirmed she was HIV positive. Although Tasha no longer works as a prostitute, she did not express regret or a sense of victimization about her participation in prostitution. Instead, she stated, prostitution “was a good thing” for her because it meant she “didn’t ask for no handout.” She went on to tell me that prostitution should be legal because then it would be less dangerous. “Girls are dying out there,” she said (Interview, 1 December 2006).

On another afternoon that fall, across the bay in San Francisco, I sat with Monica at the St. James Infirmary (SJI), the world’s only occupational health and safety clinic for sex workers (Interview, 24 October 2006). Monica, a Native American transgender woman in her late thirties, is a regular client here. Talkative, striking, and extremely confident, Monica told me how she worked as a street prostitute in San Francisco for ten years. Like Tasha, she also spoke openly to me about how she struggled with substance abuse and worked as a prostitute until she discovered she was HIV positive. Despite having experienced these challenges, she also expressed no sense of victimization or regret about her work in the sex industry. Instead, she explained, “Prostitution should be legalized to let girls make money to survive because it’s hard enough to make money as a trans [gender person]: sex work is the only way sometimes.” She then told me about the banner in the SJI’s community room that reads “Outlaw Poverty, Not Prostitutes.” She thought the SJI’s staff and clients “should take it to a rally.”

As I listened to Tasha’s and Monica’s stories, I was struck by how openly they referred to and supported legally recognizing prostitution as work. After all, despite their location in one of the more sexually liberal regions of the country, they are still in the United States—the only Western industrialized nation that almost universally criminalizes prostitution (Jolin 1994) and one where the mainstream media is replete with stories of prostitution involving coercion, violence, and human trafficking. Yet at CAL-PEP and the SJI, persons like Tasha and Monica, who participate in prostitution and other forms of sex work, not only receive free, nonjudgmental health services, but express views of prostitution that oppose mainstream conceptions of it and support efforts to change how society views sex workers.¹ These organizations therefore raise the following broad question I explore in this book: how did they develop and sustain themselves as spaces that offer services and support oppositional political stances (in this case, recognizing prostitution as legitimate work)?

At first glance, the answer appears rooted in a broader story of activists capitalizing on particular political and resource mobilization opportunities to facilitate such a project. But a closer examination indicates this answer is not sufficient, particularly for explaining how these organizations foster and sustain contentious issue positions in a political-institutional environment that presents seemingly intractable obstacles. In particular, their nonprofit status, grant agreements, and a broader political-legal climate that evinces hostility toward noncriminalizing approaches to prostitution significantly limits their capacity to maintain and promote an understanding of prostitution as legitimate work. But all of this does not necessarily preclude political opposition and claims making. This book draws on CAL-PEP’s and the SJI’s experiences to argue broadly that activists may in fact negotiate institutional constraints and advance oppositional political claims as nonprofits. Through what I label resistance maintenance, their founders and leaders strategically use the process of building and sustaining nonprofit health- and social-service organizations to continue opposing state policy, minimizing cooptation, and pursuing broader social-change goals.

Changing Political-Institutional Arenas? The Evolution of a Social Movement

CAL-PEP and the SJI were created by women who were active in Call Off Your Old Tired Ethics (COYOTE), the nation’s first prostitutes’ rights group. Formed in 1973 by Margo St. James, after she was arrested and tried for a prostitution offense in San Francisco, COYOTE initiated a social movement that sought to reshape social and legal understandings of prostitution from an immoral, criminal activity to a form of legitimate work. In so doing, Valerie Jenness wrote, COYOTE offered “a radical critique of popular views of prostitution by substituting a new ethic affirming prostitutes’ behavior as sensible and moral” (Jenness 1993: 4). To this end, as social-movement scholars term them, COYOTE employed repertoires of “collective action” or “contention” (Traugott 1995; Tilly 1978; Tarrow 1989, 1998). A frank and well-written newsletter, COYOTE Howls, provided a simple, inexpensive way to communicate with its membership and the public. And COYOTE was visible through protests and the media. Holding placards reading “Hookers Unite: You have nothing to lose but cop harassment,” “My ass is mine,” and “The trick is not getting caught” (Jenness 1993: 49–52), COYOTE followed the lead of the city’s gay community, which had successfully organized years earlier to protest against police harassment and for the right to participate in private consensual sex. COYOTE’s collective actions soon came to the attention of the national news media. St. James was a guest on Donahue, and Gloria Lockett, CALPEP’s current executive director, who joined COYOTE in 1984 after her own series of prostitution arrests, also appeared on Geraldo. Both women spoke on television (and in other media) of the need to legitimize prostitution as work in order to end the stigma and harms against women in the sex industry.

By the early 1980s, COYOTE’s collective actions succeeded on many fronts, albeit mainly in San Francisco. The San Francisco Barristers’ Club invited St. James to speak about prostitution law reform, and for COYOTE’s annual Hooker’s Ball (the organization’s major fundraising event from 1973 to 1979), COYOTE gained the solidarity and support of other workers in the city when, as Margo St. James stated, “even the fire department helped us hang banners” (Interview, 26 October 2006). COYOTE also provided crisis counseling, support groups, legal counseling, and testimony at government hearings; served as expert witnesses in trials; helped the police investigate crimes against prostitutes; and provided sensitivity training to government and other nonprofit agencies that serve prostitutes (COYOTE 2003).

Even with these gains, the COYOTE-led prostitutes’ rights movement, like many other social-movement organizations, eventually faced a new set of political opportunities.² In particular, the advent of the AIDS epidemic marked a transitional point for many COYOTE members. As Lockett stated, “We knew that in the very near future prostitutes would be scapegoated for AIDS. At the time, all the attention was on gay men. [But] anyone with any sense whatsoever knew that [since the disease] was sexually transmitted . . . the next group of people they would target would be prostitutes” (Lockett 1994: 209). Lockett was correct: when the first heterosexual males tested positive for AIDS, public-health officials assumed these results were due to their interactions with prostitutes, representing the historically familiar pattern of scapegoating prostitutes for the spread of disease (Cohen and Alexander 1995). And so with over fifteen years’ experience challenging the public’s perceptions of prostitutes, COYOTE began its own HIV prevention efforts. On a shoestring budget, the organization handed out condoms and informational fliers about HIV/AIDS, and it held discussion groups to inform prostitutes about the virus (Stoller 1998).

In 1985 the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) began a multisite study of HIV infection rates among female prostitutes in the United States (Darrow 1990: 22).³ The agency knew from experience with other stigmatized communities, such as drug users and gay men, that prostitutes would also be more likely to trust their peers than government officials, and so the CDC would have to work with this community to conduct the study and convey health information. COYOTE’s HIV prevention efforts thus came to the attention of researchers at the CDC’s San Francisco site, which was run by the Association for Women’s AIDS Research and Education (known as Project AWARE). Project AWARE teamed up with COYOTE in 1984, hiring three sex workers from its active membership, training them about HIV/AIDS transmission and risk reduction, and certifying them as phlebotomists (Cohen, Derish, and Dorfman 1994). They named their team the California Prostitutes Education Project.

Although COYOTE activists assumed CAL-PEP was temporary, government health authorities provided resources that would allow the agency to continue community-based health-service provision. CAL-PEP received its first grant from the San Francisco AIDS Office in 1987 and registered as a charitable nonprofit under Section 501c3 of the Internal Revenue Code (IRC) to obtain more funding and broaden its service repertoire. Further opportunities for COYOTE members to continue health-service provision emerged in 1999, when they discovered sex workers held in jails were having their blood drawn illegally for syphilis testing. They presented the San Francisco Public Health Department’s division of Sexually Transmitted Infection Prevention and Control (also known as City Clinic) with a plan for a clinic that would provide much-needed services to the sex-worker community and a site from which prostitution research would be conducted and disseminated (Alexander 1995a). The health department’s new director at the time, Dr. Jeff Klausner, was open to this project and provided the initial resources (namely, office space and clinic staff) to begin work. The St. James Infirmary, the world’s only occupational health and safety clinic for sex workers, opened on 2 June 1999 as a 501c3 charitable nonprofit offering HIV/AIDS prevention and other health services to sex workers, by sex workers, after hours in the City Clinic offices (it moved to its own office space in 2002).

CAL-PEP and the SJI as Social Movement–Borne Nonprofits

To some, CAL-PEP and the SJI may appear as little more than obscure, regionally specific organizations that serve a marginalized constituency. However, this book takes a broader view by situating them in a genealogy of what I term social movement–borne nonprofit organizations, which were created by activists involved in oppositional social movements that capitalized on resource incentives to continue “the work” of their movements through service provision. As such, they offer important insights into how activists continue their resistance efforts once their protest subsides.

Examples of social movement–borne nonprofits are wide ranging, including but not limited to women’s health clinics formed by reproductive-rights activists to challenge male-dominated, doctor-asserted control over women’s bodies (Morgen 2002); social-service organizations created by welfare-rights activists that involved and empowered welfare recipients in and through service delivery (Orleck 2005); AIDS service organizations like Gay Men’s Health Crisis, established by members of the gay community to create a safe, stigma-free space where persons with AIDS could gather, without harassment, and receive services from their peers (Kayal 1993); homeless-service organizations that involve and serve members of the community in direct services and policy advocacy (Cress 1997); and rape crisis centers formed by feminist activists who opposed violence against women (Maier 2011; D’Emilio and Donat 1992). Despite the range of issues this category of organizations covers, they all have in common registration as nonprofits and funds from government sources to offer health and social services to constituents represented by their activist interests (Cress 1997).

While capitalizing on resource opportunities may explain CAL-PEP’s and the SJI’s emergence—and that of many other organizations in this category—it does not explain how they continue supporting and advocating for the broader goals of their movement. In particular, it does less to explain how CAL-PEP and the SJI have continued supporting struggles for prostitutes’ rights by creating spaces where sex workers like Tasha and Monica may gather—not as criminals or victims who must be “rescued” from an immoral activity but as individuals who can develop and express a consciousness of themselves as workers with occupational health and safety needs. In fact, one may assume government patronage (in the form of grant agreements) would create institutional incentives to the contrary by forcing them to sacrifice such political-oppositional claims-making activities for “don’t-bite-the-hand-that-feeds-them resource dependence” (Chaves, Galaskiewicz, and Stephens 2004: 295). Although there is certainly truth in this assessment, my observations of and experiences with CAL-PEP and the SJI lead me to believe it is also a static understanding of many government-nonprofit relationships.

Instead, I explore how CAL-PEP and the SJI are shaped by and interact with their institutional environment, which I understand broadly as “relatively enduring collection[s] of rules and organized practices . . . that create capabilities for acting” (March and Olsen 2006a: 3). These may encompass both formal, state-oriented institutions (such as laws, policies, and administrative agency rules and practices) and informal institutions that are “created, communicated, and enforced outside of officially sanctioned channels” (Helmke and Levitsky 2004: 725), including dominant ideational structures, social norms, and cultural practices, among others. Informal institutions here are not simply norms and practices, however, because—like formal institutions—they are also communicated and enforced by state and societal actors (Banaszak and Weldon 2011). And so, as Guy Peters writes, the broad range of formal and informal institutions are unified by the fact that “they are in some way a structural feature of a society and/or polity” that is stable over time and constrains individual behavior (2005: 18).

Through my research with CAL-PEP and the SJI, I identified two institutional arenas that provide the stable yet constraining structures that influence the behavior of these organizations, their leadership, and their constituents. The first is more formal, encompassing the laws and rules governing nonprofit organizations’ capacity for and engagement in political activities, defined broadly to include indirect activities (such as empowering a constituency) and direct involvement with formal political institutions (such as lobbying legislators or participating in political campaigns and policy development). The second is issue related and includes the formal and informal historical, legal, and ideational institutional structures that shape dominant societal and political understandings of prostitution.

Nonprofit Organizations

While adopting a nonprofit health and social-service organizational form may risk activists’ capacities to maintain and advance oppositional political commitments, Mary Fainsod Katzenstein writes that this formalization mirrors a long-standing tendency observed on the American political landscape since the writings of Alexis de Tocqueville to create associations (1998a: 12). Nonprofits, as a specific associational form, have a long, varied history in American service delivery, policy advocacy, and social movements (Jackson-Elmoore and Hula 2001) dating back to the English Poor Laws of 1601 (Block 2000).⁴ The early colonial settlers in America adopted and applied their ethos, delegating responsibility for the poor to church and county officials, commonly through local, voluntary charitable organizations (Block 2001). Charitable giving and nonprofit formation grew even further at the beginning of the twentieth century, when such wealthy families as the Carnegies and Rockefellers created foundations to protect their wealth from taxation (Incite! Women of Color Against Violence 2007: 3).

Even with the ascent of the New Deal and Keynesian economic policies, Americans’ misgivings about excessive government power limited the scope of government social protections and left ample room for the charitable, voluntary nonprofit sector to grow (Salamon 2003; Sokolowski and Salamon 1999). President Lyndon B. Johnson’s War on Poverty extended government service provision through nonprofit organizations. Theda Skocpol writes that in the mid-1960s the federal government began to engage more in administration “by remote control” by using grants and contracts to induce nonfederal actors to pursue desired goals (2004: 6). In particular, amendments to the 1967 Social Security Act (Title IV-A) provided heavy inducements to encourage states to enter contracts with private agencies to provide services (Morgen 2002; Skocpol 2004). In turn, state and local governments often designated private nonprofits to run social programs, making the nonprofit sector the “theatre of operations for the enlarged welfare state” (Morgen 2002: 161).

Many critics argue that government-nonprofit (and also, by extension, foundation-nonprofit) partnerships have served to coopt social-change efforts (see, for example, Kivel 2007), but a closer examination reveals that a major goal of these collaborations was not (entirely) to dampen the visible, disruptive activism of the era but to foster political participation. The Community Action Programs (CAPs) developed as part of President Johnson’s War on Poverty provided an important example of how community-government partnerships may foster political participation and social change. Funded by the Economic Opportunity Act of 1964 to encourage the “maximum feasible participation” of residents in local areas, CAPs were formed based on the rather paternalistic view that the poor lacked a tradition of community organizing.⁵ By providing the poor with collective-action structures and strategies, CAPs would theoretically help them become more politically efficacious, empowered, and able to harness resources to benefit their community and combat poverty (Banks et al. 1996). CAPs thus emerged in such poor communities as Harlem to serve youth, through such organizations as the Mobilization for Youth and Harlem Youth Opportunities Unlimited Associated Community Teams project (Cazenave 2007). CAPs also served African Americans, to develop community and political leadership (Banks et al. 1996), and women (Naples 1991a, 1991b, 1998).

Although various authors have dismissed the War on Poverty as largely a well-intentioned but poorly executed set of programs that failed to eliminate poverty (Stricker 2007; Quadagno 1994), if one looks closely, the CAP element created an institutional environment that provided opportunities for marginalized groups to develop civic and political skills and engage in the broader political realm. CAPs that served and involved poor women provide one of the most notable examples here. Nancy Naples’s extensive studies collected focused life histories of women employed by various CAPs in ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half title
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• List of Abbreviations
• 1. Institutional Negotiation: Sex Workers and the Process of Resistance Maintenance
• 2. Oppositional Implementation
• 3. Community Engagement
• 4. Claims-Making Activities
• 5. Lessons Learned: Social-Movement Evolution and the Nonprofit Sector
• Appendix. A Note on Methods
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index
• Acknowledgments