Author: kwetoday

Bill #C36, #sexwork, and #lawschool

June 8, 2014Uncategorized#c36, bill c36, law school, Sex Work, sex work activism, wendy babcockkwetoday View all 2 comments

Last week was a really hard week for me. I am away at a pre-law program designed for Indigenous students and to help them excel in law school. You can read more about that program here.

Coincidentally, I also received my first assignment last week and boy was it a slap in the face (no biggie, I took it as a learning opportunity). But it wasn’t this assignment that made last week hard though many thought it was. What made it difficult was the Department of Justice introducing Bill C-36, which is in response to the Bedford v. Canada decision (I also wrote about it here).

On Tuesday, which was the night before the Bill was to be introduced, I spent trying to mentally and emotionally prepare myself for what was to come tomorrow—the Bill. I was definitely on edge and felt really isolated and alone not being able to talk about what was about to happen.

That’s the thing with sex work activism and being out as a former or current sex worker, it can definitely feel very alienating and isolating (even if you are out as a former sex worker). One must take into consideration how others will perceive them: will I be judged for my choices? Will I be further stigmatized? Will I have someone to talk about what is going on in my life without being judged? Just to name a few…

Tuesday came and went. I knew I could expect the worst because of the government’s previous statements to the media: prostitution is inherently dangerous and prostitution is violence against women. Yet after the Bill was released on Wednesday afternoon, I didn’t expect to be it even worse than I had imagined. I spent the day in and out of the bathroom getting sick and also crying. That night I went out for some wine (alone—not the brightest thing to do but I didn’t know what else to do…I also have a hard time reaching out for help). That night I also cried after I returned from home. I just wanted to scream, “These are people’s lives you are messing with!” Like actual real people who will be forced to put themselves into the pathway of danger if this Bill is enacted! People like my friends and their families…

Today, while I was out walking and getting some of the things I needed for next week, I started to think of another sex work activist, Wendy Babcock. She was also a law student. However, she committed suicide in her third year of law school. An article commemorating her memory (and also talking about how students rallied together to remember her) reads,

Halfway through her second year at Osgoode Hall Law School, she was struggling with money, housing, her health, and loneliness…“I don’t belong here,” she told me over lunch at the graduate students lounge that day. “They come from really nice upbringings and I come from the gutter. They’re not engaged in the same issues as I am.”[1]

I definitely don’t feel out of place in this program as I am sitting aside other Indigenous law students. But after last week, I definitely felt alone and isolated. I even met with the director of the program and I admitted that I don’t feel like I belong here–it was because of the fact I was a former sex worker and I wasn’t sure who I could talk to about this Bill. So when I re-reading these articles, I noticed I shared Wendy’s feelings—loneliness and not belonging. I didn’t know how to say to the director though, “Yeah I don’t feel like I belong here, as a (out) former sex worker, and because of this Bill that came out today and this Bill is worse than I ever imagined.” There really isn’t much of a sex work community in this city either. However, after talking to my sex work friend on the phone today, I was a little bit relieved. The response elsewhere in Canada to the Bill has been positive (or on the side of sex workers) and people are beginning to realize the realities of sex workers’ lives and how laws affect their livelihood and safety.

I thought, what was going through Wendy’s mind during her final year. Did she feel alone? Did she feel isolated? Did she feel alienated? Then I thought, “If this is what law school was like for her, do I have to look forward to something similar?” Then I was reminded of my best friend’s words to me on the day I said that I wanted to give up on my undergraduate degree at Western, “If you give up or drop out, I will slap you.” She would have slapped me, literally (lol). I miss her dearly. She was also a sex worker who committed suicide. In a previous post I shared a note from my personal journal. That entry read, “I had a dream I was going to U of Ottawa.” In the rest of the original entry which I didn’t post to my blog, it reads, “But there were a lot of obstacles and it was really hard to finally get there.” If this is just one of those obstacles, then I (hopefully) will be able to overcome what else is to emerge.

Rest in Power Wendy and Michelle

[1] http://www.thestar.com/news/gta/2012/04/27/porter_tragic_wendy_babcocks_legacy_still_growing_at_osgoode_hall_law_school.html

[An essay by @heyjessk] The Relations of Ruling, Affect, and the Virtual In-Between: Feminist Blogging as Textual Activism

June 7, 2014Uncategorizedfeminist blogging, Textual Activismkwetoday Leave a comment

The following is an essay by Jess Kiley who also blogs here and tweets here. Check her out (she’s pretty badass)!

The Relations of Ruling, Affect, and the Virtual In-Between:
Feminist Blogging as Textual Activism

Online feminist activism is a realm whose surface we have only just disturbed. The phenomenon of feminist blogging has dramatically affected the ways in which feminist thought is articulated through virtuality. As cyberspace emerges as a context in which feminists inscribe their politics, we must explore how Dorothy Smith’s articulations of the relations of ruling and text-mediation may be applied in the realm of virtuality. This theorization is best done with the view that the centrality of the body is necessary. This perspective is evident in Emma Dowling’s work on how affect occurs at the site of the body. To further extend my analysis, I interviewed Naomi Sayers, an Indigenous feminist blogger who writes at her site, Kwe Today: Fierce Indigenous Feminism (www.kwetoday.com). Sections of this interview will be used as qualitative data to enhance my arguments, as well as to explore Sayers’ specific affective relations in regards to blogging. I want to examine the connections that could be drawn between text-mediation, the relations of ruling, and affect within the virtual space of the ‘blogosphere’. Specifically, does blogging produce affective relations that promote or stymie feminists’ connection to the oft-cited perspective that the personal is political? How are the material and virtual bodies of feminist bloggers implicated in the act of blogging about personal and/or political issues? Does the act of blogging subvert the power dynamics inherent in the nation-state? Are those power dynamics present in an online context, and if so, how? I argue that the realm of the virtual promotes dynamic feminist spaces where feminist activist praxis is mobilized through textual affective relations.

The virtual realm has been the subject of much debate amongst feminist theorists/activists in terms of its potential both for productive feminist work and destructive replications of the same power systems that exist in the material realm. To further this work, I am interested in looking at the role of text in the virtual realm. Dorothy Smith outlines how text can mediate and depoliticize lived experiences: “social scientific methods of writing its texts created a standpoint from which the reader reflected on her life as if she stood outside it; taking up the relevances and focus built into the conceptual structures of the discourse. She became an object to herself” (Smith 39). The method taken up toward writing ‘legitimate’ texts in the social sciences, and indeed, in many other academic realms, is reliant upon a writer approaching a topic as though they had no personal connection to it. As far as knowledge production goes, this allows dominant bearers of ‘knowledge’ (who we may refer to as ‘the state’) to continue to legitimate particular forms of knowledge and knowledge production. In contrast, the very public nature of the virtual realm means that the blogosphere becomes a space in which people assert their own voices and broadcast that messaging. Taking up virtual space becomes an act in which feminist bloggers will define their identities and politics: “The argument for ‘situated knowledge’ as a new form of looking and knowing theorizes embodied spaces as ideal communities whose members generate collaborative identities” (Kaplan 213). I argue that the virtual is no less an embodied space than the material, as it carries forth the potential for new ‘forms of looking and knowing’. There are important theorizations that are made possible with the blending of a feminist blogger’s embodied identity and their virtual influence.

However, it is important not to romanticize the virtual realm as being some paradoxical fantasy of a ‘politically apolitical’ space. When I asked Sayers how she had come to blogging, she explained:

I wanted a way to respond to what I was hearing/reading in the media but without having to deal with the online forums where plenty of online/anonymous trolling occurs. I have tried to participate and provide feedback on articles online before but when I would go back to read what others have said, there really wasn’t any safe discussion going on. (Sayers)

The operation of her own site gives Sayers the ability to moderate comments and write her own thoughtful responses on a variety of issues. She values the space of her blog because she can write these authentic responses to the media, without feeling as though her commentary will disappear beneath a deluge of commentators who refuse to listen or who participate in ‘trolling’. As well, Sayers’ point about her blog giving her the ability to respond to the media is of particular importance. Frances Shaw describes the power of discourse and how it can inspire people to produce counter-discourses:

political agency is enacted in discourse, and in the ways that activists try to intervene in discourse through the creation of counter-discourses. This recognition is also important for the tradition of feminist political theory, in which linguistic intervention and consciousness-raising have formed a significant part of activism. (Shaw; emphasis added)

So it is not that there is a ‘new’ kind of political agency in virtuality, but that there are new methods through which activists can exercise their agency. The text of the virtual allows the creation of counter-discourses to be in personalized and politicized spaces over which the author can have control. Indeed, feminist blogging can construct a space through which one can resist disempowering structures of oppression which are replicated online: “I always say that simply being Indigenous in Canadian society today is a political act. We weren’t supposed to be here—creating my blog is a political act. The creation of my blog is also an act of resistance to the dominant discourses about Indigenous peoples, especially Indigenous women, in Canadian society” (Sayers). Sayers’ continually cited her Indigeneity as central to her political identity throughout the interview. Not only is the creation of the blogging space politically relevant, but the written contents of the blog inscribes the material realities of feminist activists within and through the virtual. However, this movement towards virtual organizing is often cited as a key generational difference in how activist efforts are taken up. In an interview with Wendy Harcourt, Sunila Abeysekera, an award-winning human rights activist from Sri Lanka, describes this generational dissonance: “For me it isanother world…New generations aretechnologically in tune with modernity…I feel the new technologies enable brilliant communication,but for me the virtual world is still not thesame as the real world” (Abeysekera qtd. in Harcourt 193). Feminist blogging as activist work is still a grey area for many people, due to the uncertainty of how embedded in reality it can truly be.

When discussing the challenges of blogging, Sayers identified racism as one of the main issues that she dealt with as an Indigenous feminist blogger:

…definitely racism. I had to change the way I allowed comments…after receiving a rash of comments earlier on that were really offensive towards Indigenous peoples…I do still receive the odd racist comment but I just delete them…I tend to find racists not the brightest bunch in the world—they also put their full name and email (and then their IP is recorded). It’s quite funny actually. (Sayers)

The specific targeting of Sayers’ ‘fierce Indigenous feminist’ blog-space by people who left racist comments clearly shows the intent to delegitimize her political thought through her virtually represented materiality. Though Sayers’ views the situation with a degree of humour, she outlined how she had to change her comments settings to ensure she was able to exercise her authority over the space of her own blog. Sayers’ also added that she does not “deal with too much sexism as a feminist blogger” (Sayers). Racism is also reflected through Shoshana Magnet’s work on sites that purport to be ‘feminist’, such as an online commercial site called Suicide Girls (www.suicidegirls.com), “which features the online journals, profiles and nude photographs of young, heavily tattooed, punk women” (Magnet 577). She identifies two opposing theorizations of feminist cyberspace in her article – ‘utopian cyberfeminism’ (cybersex as liberating) and ‘dystopian cyberfeminism’ (cybersex as exploitative) (578). In her analysis of both perspectives, she finds that neither attends to ethnicity and race at all: “Any analysis of cybersexuality must attend both to the impact of ethnicity and racism and must not essentialize women either as completely sexually empowered or victimized” (Magnet 588). Her focus is on cybersexuality, but her argument can be extended into analyzing the feminist blogosphere. Sayers’ outlines how mainstream media discusses Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women: “in terms of Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women, which is also a term that gets thrown around a lot in politics, they are only ever talked about in the media if they were a homeless, druggie, alcoholic, or a street based sex worker” (Sayers). So her creation of counter-discourses on her blog seems to be mainly motivated by these intense experiences of racism through mainstream media, which tries to place Indigenous women in this impossible limbo of sexualized victims made deviant through intensely negative racialization by the media. Caren Kaplan bluntly expresses that “[r]ace matters in cyberspace as do all the other identificatory epistemologies of the last several hundred years…The figure of the cyborg, a mix of flesh and machine, has been discussed at great length by numerous commentators…it is a vital player in these questions of boundaries and binaries of modernity” (Kaplan 219). Discussions of affective experiences of feminist bloggers need to centralize race, as the virtual makes it very clear how gender is intensely racialized.

Sayers views virtuality as a space where this centralization can be accomplished extremely effectively:

the virtual space allows Indigenous feminist politics and concerns to be heard and seen as a way to resist the dominant discourses that causes an erasure of the Indigenous identity and body in the mainstream. It speaks back to these discourses and forces others to think critically about how the media constructs Indigenous bodies and identities…in terms of Indigenous feminist politics, I always say that I am Indigenous before I am woman and that my feminist politics does not exclude Indigenous men/two-spirit/trans individuals. (Sayers)

As we have seen thus far, the body does not disappear in virtuality. When we are analyzing feminist work, we must pay mind to how race and ethnicity are sidelined as unimportant, as often occurs in the material world within mainstream (White) feminist movements. The affective connections, both positive and negative, must be attended to in order to think through whether virtuality provides a different space or different methods through which to challenge the relations of ruling. Emma Dowling’s work is helpful here, though she writes specifically of the role of intersubjectivity in her affective relations as a waitress: “What I produce is affect and that is the value of my work. Crucially, I can’t do this on my own. I need you to be part of this process” (Dowling 110). The interplay of different bodies meeting in a restaurant is different from, but not dissimilar to, the meetings of bodies in virtuality as they negotiate the power dynamics between each other. There is a replication of material power structures, but there are also strong sites of resistance and solidarity across platforms. Smith describes what these structures look like in the material realm: “Normal sociological and political economic practices divide these relations and apparatuses of ruling into a variety of spheres which are treated as quite distinct from one another, although they interact in various ways: management, state, professions, mass media, and so forth” (Smith 41). These relations and apparatuses change form but still retain meaning in virtuality, especially when it comes to how people support or do not support each other online. Sayers explained what blogging had revealed to her about these structures:

Blogging has shown me that when it comes to Indigenous and feminist voices, there is definitely a power dynamic at play here and people don’t like it when you point it out…I created the hashtag #WomenOnlyExcusesForPaikin which was in response to horrible, misogynistic blog post trying to address the issue of inadequate representation of women on Steve Paikin’s show…A lot of the women who responded to this hashtag were also supportive of it but there were a few women who were not supportive of it and called it “snarky” and “vilifying” to Paikin. (Sayers)

Sayers pointed out that this seems to be a recurrence of Sa’ar’s “liberal bargain” (Sa’ar 680) even in online activism and organizing. There are material consequences to getting involved in campaigns online or writing about the material realities that one deals with in their workplace. Sayers explained how this liberal bargain was enacted online: “these women were ignoring the fact that women are inadequately represented in MSM [mainstream media]…and…agreeing with Paikin without actually highlighting the fact that women face real systemic gender issues…all in exchange for their jobs” (Sayers). Sayers is careful to maintain that “everyone has to eat” (Sayers) but this serves as a reminder of how the virtual can be an incredibly political space, one which wields uncertain consequences for women in their workplaces. Bodies are made particularly vulnerable in a virtual context, because they can be so closely linked to their political stances and actions online.

Affective relations in the virtual realm also have a great capacity for productive feminist work and cathartic healing processes. Indeed, as feminists engage with the virtual, they can also engage in personal work that is tied up in their political values and strengths: “Blogging has helped me a lot in terms of my own healing and grieving. I lost my best friend to suicide in August 2012…I actually created another tumblr (http://kweok.tumblr.com/)…in order to help me with writing to help with grieving” (Sayers). The exploration of grief, pain and/or loss in the virtual realm embeds that very embodied suffering into textual form. Caren Kaplan articulates this clearly in her work on mobility in new technologies: “the self is always somewhere, always located in some sense in some place, and cannot be totally unhoused. New technologies appear to promise ever-increasing degrees of disembodiment or detachment, yet they are as embedded in material relations as any other practice” (Kaplan 210). The virtual body of a feminist blogger experiences the material impact of these intra-relations with the self, or interrelations with others online. Sayers was able to use the space of a blog to write out her grief, but also to work through her grief. When a person can pour out their grief into a post and then receive supportive comments, this can be another way to feel as though they are not alone. While grief is not the only experience in which this emotional solidarity can occur, it is one of the most powerful ones. The political solidarity that can be found through blogging must not be undermined:

I have met some really awesome people within blogging communities. I had the chance to meet Lisa Charleyboy and also Jessica Danforth (Jessica Yee). They ended up following me on twitter and following my blog. I get a lot of support from these two women and I am forever grateful from it…I think their own writings online definitely help me in everything I do. Lisa asked me to be a contributor to her Urban Native Magazine (which is super awesome) and I tend to cite Jess’s stuff in my essays and blogs a lot. (Sayers)

Not only does blogging promote, support and uplift Sayers’ political praxis, but it also gives her connections that assist in her academic work. This ability to connect with people who identify with your work is one in which the virtual seems to far surpass the confines of the material. The accessibility that the virtual affords to feminists is essential to understanding why online activism is becoming so central to feminist/activist organizing: “Online social activism is growing exponentially and, as Jessica Valenti has mused, “maybe the fourth wave [of feminism] is online” (qtd. in Solomon)” (Eudey 240). While this is an important point, we must also be wary of how mainstream (White) feminism has defined the ‘waves’ of feminism by very particular standards. This assertion of a new wave by a White feminist is a claim that we must take with much caution – but her point still stands that certainly many feminists are taking to the virtual to extend and enact their politics.

Liz Newbury wrote a news article covering the ‘Feminism 2.0’ conference held in Washington, D.C. in 2009. She identified the central role of online feminist bloggers in building feminist communities and sites to begin actions: “Cohesive online communities demonstrate reciprocity, and feminist blogs were shown to link between and among each other, drawing the community closer together” (Newbury 10). This conference showed the meshing of the virtual and the material, as the role of social media and new technologies was the central focus of the event. Much of this community-building is facilitated through the writing and (online) sharing of texts. Indeed, as Smith reminds us, “Our knowledge, practices of thinking, theorizing, images of the world, are textually grounded and grounded in the relations of ruling. The ‘knowledge-power’ relationship that Foucault has proposed is a metaphor for this reality, an organization of power mediated textually. And of course we can’t do without it” (Smith 43). While this seems overwhelming, this system is not without its weaknesses. If power is mediated textually, then that means that the production of personal, political and/or academic texts also holds a degree of power. Though the relations of ruling may seek to delegitimize these texts as ‘too personal,’ ‘not academic enough,’ or ‘biased,’ the virtual realm possesses a particularly new and relatively unknown kind of power. An article or video that gets a lot of ‘hits’ or ‘shares’ suddenly becomes a text that is imbued with meaning afforded to it by an active online community (or communities). That person suddenly has access to a lot of power through their online following. Also, they may or may not choose to put material and virtual work into a hierarchy through that articulation of their power. Sayers describes this tension as one possible disadvantage of working in virtual spaces:

Maybe the only disadvantage is when individuals who have a larger following/more readers begin to say that movements created within the virtual space do not matter as much as the work that is happening on the ground. I know this is where the indigenous feminist community remains divided. Some say that social media/blogging/writing is important and others say, it is not as important as the work happening in the communities…I think both is important because these virtual spaces create the space to share with other communities the successes and failures of projects or actions. We know that the virtual space allowed Idle No More to happen and I don’t think we can argue that it wasn’t important. But we can’t go and say that the work that is happening on the ground isn’t important either—because that happened first before the virtual. (Sayers)

There is a new balance that is still struggling to be made – between valuing the work on the ground and the work in cyberspace. Disagreements around these valuations can be sites for productive conversations on what activism can look like, how it can manifest, and the impact it can have. As has been made clear, “work happening in the communities” is occurring both online and offline. Even someone who does both kinds of work may value one over the other. Or perhaps they have a more nuanced view about what virtual and material work can accomplish, together or separately. Regardless, this engagement creates spaces of action and dialogue:

discursive activism is sometimes a response to discursive crisis…the points of disagreement between mainstream and counterhegemonic discourses…moments of discursive crisis can also be understood in terms of aural metaphors such as ‘dissonance’…’dislocation’, or…’rupture’…Such concepts provide a powerful way to understand not only the importance of discourse, but also the role of affect in political action. (Shaw)

Many feminist bloggers come to blogging through such affective experiences as those that create ‘dissonance’, ‘dislocation,’ or ‘rupture’ in their daily lives. While these are metaphors that carry negative affective meaning, they also inspire action as a response to mainstream discourses that do not align with feminists’ lived experiences. This means that the affective relations that feminists experience with(in) the virtual are complex, as they continually oscillate between feeling powerful and feeling powerless. If negative affect from mainstream media is one way that a blogger can begin her work, such as with Sayers, then it is clear that the act of feminist blogging is one in which there is joy found in resistance, as well as pain. As blogging most often intersects with other social medias, there are a variety of ‘movements’ online that can positively and negatively affect feminist bloggers: “These circulations and expansions appear to be economically, politically and intellectually beneficial, giving rise to innovation and new kinds of identities and communities. However, the movements can be viewed also as discrete, always uneven and infused with power relations of tremendous complexity” (Kaplan 211). It is not enough to claim the virtual as a space where the relations of ruling are carbon-copied exactly, nor can we claim it as a ‘new’ space free from those power dynamics.

Feminist activists are becoming more familiar with working in these in-between spaces. That is to say, feminists are becoming aware of the complexity in highlighting the potential of the virtual without romanticizing it and participating in the erasure of negative affective experiences. In particular, Indigenous feminists and feminists of colour are at the forefront of this movement, as they are intimately familiar with the histories of feminist movements that exclude Indigenous women and women of colour and of other social justice movements that exclude women. They are the experts on resisting and working from these in-between spaces, and their work continues to inspire me as well as younger generations who are even more immersed in the culture of virtuality. The virtual allows the creation of personalized, politicized texts by feminist activists, in a setting where there are familiar challenges as well as new methods for transformative change. Whether feminist activists’ affective experiences are positive or negative, both kinds of affect can be used as motivations to continue their work and extend it farther out into the world. As well, the community-building that occurs in the feminist blogosphere creates online support systems that they can access to continue resisting the relations of ruling in a virtual context. My final question to Naomi Sayers asked what aspirations she had for the future of her blog: “I try to use the example of my blog for inspiration to other young Indigenous women. I am hoping that my blog will inspire others to create, share, and write their own stories.”

Works Cited

Dowling, Emma. “The Waitress: On Affect, Method and (Re)presentation.” Cultural Studies ↔ Critical Methodologies. 12.2 (2012): 109-117. Print.

Eudey, Betsy. “Civic Engagement, Cyberfeminism, and Online Learning: Activism and Service Learning in Women’s and Gender Studies Courses.” Feminist Teacher. 22.3 (2012): 233-250. Print.

Harcourt, Wendy. “Crossborder Feminisms: Wendy Harcourt in Conversation with Srilatha Batliwala, Sunila Abeysekera and Rawwida Baksh.” Society for International Development. 55.2 (2012): 190-197. Print.

Kaplan, Caren. “Transporting the Subject: Technologies of Mobility and Location in an Era of Globalization.” Sara Ahmed, Claudia Castañeda, Anne-Marie Fortier, Mimi Sheller. Uprootings/Regroundings: Questions of Home and Migration. Oxford and New York: Berg Publishers, 2003. 207-223. Print.

Magnet, Shoshana. “Feminist sexualities, race and the internet: an investigation of suicidegirls.com.” New Media & Society. 9.4 (2007): 577-602. Print.

Newbury, Liz. “Feminism 2.0 Conference Brings Together Grassroots and Online Activists.” National NOW Foundation Times 2009, Spring 10. Web. 25 Feb. 2014.

Sa’ar, Amalia. “Postcolonial Feminism, the Politics of Identification, and the Liberal Bargain.” Gender and Society. 19.5 (2005): 680-700. Print.

Shaw, Frances. “(Dis)locating Feminisms: Blog Activism as Crisis Response.” Outskirts: Feminisms Along the Edge. 24. (2011): N/A. Web. 25 Feb. 2014.

Smith, Dorothy E. “Feminist Reflections on Political Economy.”Studies in Political Economy. 30. (1989): 37-59. Print.

#EndDemand: Why Bill #C36 is like working at MacDonald’s (if purchasing burgers were criminal)

June 4, 2014Uncategorizedanti-prostitution laws, bedford, Bedford v. Canada, Bill C-36, Prostitution, Sex Workkwetoday Leave a comment

[Trigger Warning: Violence]

Today was a hard day. I had a day full of classes (okay, not exactly full day of classes more like ended at 2pm and then I had to stick around for a couple of meetings). It was a busy day, nevertheless.

Aside from classes and these meetings, the Department of Justice also released their Bill entitled The Protection of Communities and Exploited Persons Act. You can find a direct link in the link provided here but I suggest reading the provided link here first. It is a much easier read.

This Bill works off the premise that it will protect the alleged victims from the alleged pimps, johns, and the big bad traffickers. It also assumes that consensual sex between adults is inherently violent and degrading. It adopts the “End Demand” approach to prostitution as opposed to the harm reduction model (ie/ reducing harms and making it safer for sex workers).

I was thinking today about what this means for sex workers and their families and friends. The Bill doesn’t just target the pimps, johns, and traffickers. It also points to further alienation and isolation from support networks for sex workers (which is really fuckin horrible because the industry was previously alienating and isolating under the old legal regime). I noticed a lot of commentary on this Bill and some interesting analogies on twitter especially from non-sex workers. It got me thinking about another analogy… Why Bill-C36 is like working at MacDonald’s (if purchasing burgers were criminal).

I have never worked at MacDonald’s but that’s okay because many non-sex workers who come up with their own analogies never done sex work either (and I say many because some non-sex workers might have been sex workers in their life at one point). So not having experiencing working in fast food doesn’t negate this analogy because I ate their burgers before too! That’s just like having sex and automatically becoming an expert on sex work!

First things first, the burger that MacDonald’s is selling, the act of buying it is criminalized (amongst many other behaviours associated with selling the burger—like where they can sell it, and how or who they can advertise to sell it). The whole objective of criminalizing the purchasing of burgers is to “end demand” of burgers. Stop your degrading burger cravings from happening again!

Note: Above burger is not an actual real MacDonald’s burger.

The first way MacDonald’s is like sex work is that not everyone wants to do it. Still, some people have to do it whether they like it or not—they still need to eat. And heck, I hear you get 50% off burgers at McDicks if you work there! Though that part isn’t like sex work because they still have to pay for their burgers at McDicks at full price.

But what if buying burgers at MacDonald’s was criminalized? And I don’t extend this analogy to all products being sold at McDee’s because sometimes people just want a big juicy burger to satisfy their cravings. In the sex trade industry, with this new Bill, it appears that it will just be targeting full service sex workers or sex workers that only advertise sexual services that are criminalized (not all sex work is criminal, like exotic dancing). This is an important point to make because not all sex workers offer the same services and not all services involve sexual services (like oral or full service). So you can equate prostitutes (and I use that term purely as a legal term) to workers at MacDonald’s—BUT only the workers that make the big, juicy burgers (you know, sometimes with all the extra toppings… mmmmm).

So you are craving a MacDonald’s burger, what do you do? On one hand, well, you go out looking for a MacDonald’s. The MacDonald’s doesn’t come looking for you—well okay maybe except those stupid television commercials and flyers that the postman delivers. Except now, the networks that air those commercials and the postmen that are being paid to deliver those flyers, yeah, they are now criminalized too! They are advertising those big juicy burgers and enticing you to buy those burgers! Bad, bad bad! We must stop that so that you stop craving those burgers! *poof* ALL MACDONALD’S ADVERTISEMENTS ON THE TUBE AND IN THE MAIL GONE!

But you know what, you still want that burger…

You then get into your car, knowing that there is a MacDonald’s out there somewhere that is selling that burger. Except now, the one thing about MacDonald’s is that they are never in residential areas (sometimes in smaller cities, no where near a school or a church). Within the context of this Bill, it would be criminal if you found a MacDonald’s in any of those areas (near a school or church) and purchased that burger to help quench your cravings. So instead, what you have to do is drive to the outskirts of town (let’s say) just to get that burger.

On the other hand, sometimes, people don’t crave burgers from MacDonald’s. Some people buy MacDonald’s just because they see it! The Big “M”! Nom nom nom nom nom! And sometimes people buy MacDonald’s just because they are about to drive by one. “Wait, turn! I want some McDee’s!” The availability of it all—the big “M,” the juicy burger… *drool* And actually, research by John Lowman indicates that the industry is not driven by the demand of burgers, it is driven by the supply of the burgers. No really though, John Lowman, a criminologist, has found that the clients of sex workers are not driven by their demand but the supply (or the availability) of services.[1] So whether it is a craving, people are still going to be selling burgers at MacDonald’s and whether it is criminal to sell burgers at MacDonald’s near a school or a church, people are still going to be selling burgers somewhere. And people want to buy burgers for all sorts of different reasons—because they are craving the burger or they see the “M!” for example. And I mean, the fries and the drink that you want to buy that come with the cheeseburger meal, that’s okay to purchase. You just can’t buy those damn burgers!

You drive up into MacDonald’s and you know that the burger you so strongly want to eat (no pun intended), people are going to look down on you for eating it because the policy that says eating it (again no pun intended) is inherently violent and degraded to the person selling it. DON’T EAT MY BURGER THAT I AM SELLING YOU BIG BAD PERSON! Lol

Yet, the person selling the burger knows all of this—they know that the burger they are selling is a criminalized act. In fact, they know that working for their employer, MacDonald’s, and those pictures of the burgers all over the place…that’s criminal too! They know that they shouldn’t have children in the building and they know that anyone under 18 shouldn’t be working there and that anyone who is under 18 (or is believed to be 18) shouldn’t be even near another employee that is under the age of 18 years (that’s criminal too). So, only adults are able to work at MacDonald’s now. You then have to get rid of all the playgrounds and no more Happy Meals! And that darn fuckin burger, you still want it.

You walk into MacDonald’s and you notice that there are no advertisements for burgers—you see fries, salads, chicken nuggets, pop, muffins. But no fuckin burgers! So you quietly ask the employee taking your order, “Do you have any burgers for sale?” The employee doesn’t really know who you are but the employee knows that if they spend too much time talking to you trying to determine if you actually want just a burger or are some sort of predator that is asking for burger but want the whole fuckin menu without paying for it, they could cause some unwanted attention from the Burger Police. And nobody likes the Burger Police. The employee really doesn’t have any time to negotiate how serious your burger cravings are… the burger is sold anyways without even determining a firm price of the burger. The employee brings the order to you, and then tells you the price of your burger. You are upset! You did not expect to pay that much for that burger and now you want your money back. All. Of. It! You threaten the employee that if you don’t give back the money you paid for your entire order (not just the burger), that something terrible will happen to either the employee or at the place of business (MacDonald’s). The employee, out of fear that you will do something terribly bad, gives you back your entire monies that you paid for your order. That, or you just beat the employee and take the money too. Because you know that, with her working for her employer, her employer isn’t supposed to be selling those burgers and that she could lose her job if anybody found out.

After you leave, her employer is upset that you stole money or that you threatened the employee in order to have your money returned to you (even after you ate the burger). So then, her employer forces her to work longer hours and for less than minimum wage.[2] And all of this: working longer hours and being paid less than minimum wage, it is violation of employment and labour codes/rights.

But that’s where this analogy ends.

For people who work at MacDonald’s, they do have access to rights, like the right to be paid minimum wage (because we all know if MacDonald’s could pay their employees less, they probably would), and these employees have recourse if they experience rights violations. Sex workers, when their work is criminalized (either the selling or purchasing of their services), they do not have any recourse for anything—violence, assault, sexual assault, etc. That’s why the decriminalization of sex work is important—it creates access to other rights that other non-sex work individuals have access too like labour and human rights.

I choose MacDonald’s because, in our society, it is a stigmatized job. The argument that the antis always bring up is, “Nobody dreams of becoming a prostitute!” And when I was growing up, I heard similar arguments for MacDonald’s (nobody wants to work at MacDonalds!). But you know what, some people do work at MacDonald’s whether they like it or not. The difference is that they can file complaints to address rights violations. Sex workers can’t … and that is because of criminalization. This will be the case under Bill C-36. It won’t help with accessing services, like health care, any better either. And if you are thinking this analogy is ludicrous, good job! That’s the Bill for you: it’s so ludicrous that it’s downright unbelievable!

Anyways, my final point is this: Instead of having everyone suddenly claiming to be a sex work expert, let’s just all sit back and let actual sex workers be the real experts on the issue. Just because you had sex once, doesn’t make you a sex work expert 😉

[1]Lowman, John, and Chris Atchison. 2006. Men who buy sex: A survey in the greater vancouver regional district*. The Canadian Review of Sociology and Anthropology 43, (3) (08): 281-296, http://search.proquest.com/docview/234926978?accountid=15115 (accessed June 4, 2014).

[2]Although I recognize various gender identities work in the trade, I use the pronouns she/her because this Bill was aimed at “protecting vulnerable women and girls.”

Education? What’s all the hassle for!

June 4, 2014Uncategorizedkwetoday View all 3 comments

Education? What’s all the hassle for!

This is sort of a follow up to a previous post that where I wrote the following,

As I stated earlier, this isn’t an individual thing. This isn’t me being super sensitive, easily offended. This is an institutional thing. This is a larger problem within society, especially Canadian society, where these experiences serve to maintain these structures and power (including both individual and institutional power).

In this post, I talked about my experiences all through out education. However, I focused entirely on my experiences as an Indigenous student—devoid of any gendered analysis. This post, I hope, will open that discussion to a gendered analysis of my experiences in education.

I will admit. I am a crier. I sometimes cry (like a lot). I cry when I am angry, when I am frustrated, when I am sad… basically anytime I am not happy or laughing—I cry. Okay maybe that is a bit of an exaggeration. But still, like any human being capable of showing emotion, I cry (and yes, I acknowledge that some people just can’t or don’t cry… that’s okay too—you are a human being too!).

Someone might say, like the quote above, that I am super sensitive and easily offended. Am I super sensitive? Probably not. One doesn’t have to be super sensitive to cry. They also don’t have cry to show their sensitivity. Am I easily offended? Yeahno. It takes a lot to offend me. And by a lot… I literally mean a lot. So why do I cry a lot?

Well, for one, I think it speaks to the fact that I am sometimes in situations where, as a woman, my voice is silenced, ignored or completely dismissed–for whatever fuckin reason someone wants to silence, ignore, or dismiss me. And this happened a lot within my educational experiences. So I tend to cry a lot in these situations where my voice isn’t being heard or when literally what I am saying is being ignored. And it’s not for attention. This silencing, ignoring or dismissing of an individual happens a lot with women especially in institutional settings and if they do not have any significant power or control over their situations—kind of like in educational or professional settings where the majority of them might be seen as subordinate, or you know, at the bottom.

That happened earlier today. I mentioned to someone (a male) that I was frustrated with a particular situation that had nothing to do with my feelings. I asked if something specific could be done. But by the end of the meeting, things started to grow really frustrating.

Without going into too much detail…

At the moment that I started to grow frustrated because well, I wasn’t being listened to, this male took it upon himself to say, “Sorry this is making you uncomfortable.” What. The. Actual. Fuck. At no point in the conversation did I say I was uncomfortable or feeling uncomfortable. I actually expressly stated that I was frustrated at one point and on the point where he brought up me being uncomfortable, I quickly reminded him of this frustration again. Because well, it was… how do I put this? Frustrating.

In her discussion on interlocking systems of oppression, Sherene Razack defines this system as a type of social relation and an approach or analysis that is focused on these social relations. Razack outlines that interlocking systems of oppression in these social relations is an approach to understanding systems of domination, wherein it rejects either/or constructions. Instead, an analysis focused on the interlocking systems of oppression, it forces us to acknowledge these relations and ask questions about institutional arrangements. As an alternative, we are forced to analyze the “central fact that difference is a relation” (p. 135) as opposed to the rights that grants one access to institutions or systems, which is individualized in nature. As Fanon argues, the Black man knows who he is by what he is not: not white. In other words, the Black man begins to know he is different from the white man because he is not white and institutionally, the rights or access he is granted is limited by this difference. Razack further states that this analysis characterizes these relations as “a set of interlocking social arrangements that constitute groups differently, as subordinate and dominant” (p. 136). These dichotomies are embedded within liberal discourse and important to the relation of domination.

Central to the liberal discourse is the idea that “Everyone can make it! If they just try hard enough!” Those who don’t try hard enough? Well, they are just lazy, and (the obvious) they didn’t try hard enough. Hmmm, if that were only the case.

This situation where my issue was reduced to something centered on my feelings as opposed to addressing the actual issue is a reality for many women. Oh you poor little woman who can’t figure things out herself, it must be associated with your feelings! Are you sad? Are you angry? Are you upset? Are you uncomfortable? That’s basically what happened here. Whether he meant it or not isn’t the issue—the issue is that as a male, he had the privilege to instead focus on my womanly feels.

Did this situation make me feel uncomfortable? No, it didn’t make me uncomfortable. It made me frustrated because not only was I not being listened to, but also literally, my issue was reduced to a feeling that I was not experiencing (rather, it was what the male thought I was experiencing–you know men, they can tell how women feel all the time). Who has the privilege in doing that to a female and not be questioned on their own behaviours (or feels)? A male. But what happens when a woman brings up the idea “Oh you know how males can be!”? Can they remain complicit to male privilege? Yes. 100%. In Razack’s article, she refers to the complicity of women in maintaining these systems of domination or interlocking oppressions–they benefit from this too (kind of like Sa’ar’s Liberal bargain). Rather than questioning the institutional arrangements (like gender) that make up these interlocking systems of oppression, we turn our attention to the individual and their behaviours–like calling attention to women’s feelings or expressions.

Razack examines this concept of interlocking systems of oppression in the context of feminist law reform: how can feminist law reform benefit from an analysis which characterizes relations as “a set of interlocking social arrangements that constitute groups differently, as subordinate and dominant”? Education has really been such a pain for me. I always end up asking myself, why put up with all the hassle? For me, this discussion is even more important because I do want to do this law school thing. But I know that this “male privileged” experience will be amped up about 100x in a mainstream JD program. That is the thing that scares me the most. But I guess what doesn’t kill me will make me stronger… this is only the beginning.

#LetsDoThis

[Personal] A sort of uncomfortableness…

May 26, 2014Uncategorizeddomestic violence, personal post, restorative justice, suicidekwetoday Leave a comment

I have been struggling to put this into words here.

Today with this post, I will try to put these thoughts into words here.

I have written about restorative justice before and I have written about my experiences (somewhat) within the (in)justice system, and where I am today—in a much better place. What I have not written about are my experiences before arriving to that point in time.

When I was much younger, I was very much into my culture—my family travelled to powwows, we danced, and we participated in ceremony. I remember I was even apart of this dance troupe back home. Being a member of this dance troupe, we sometimes went to participate in mini powwows and cultural activities with inmates at the local remand centre. I remember dancing there and being able to share what dancing meant for me as young Indigenous woman.

I don’t know what happened but eventually I stopped doing these cultural activities and I distanced myself entirely from my culture. I can’t really tell you what happened or why it happened. It is just something I cannot remember. Perhaps this is a response to some of the trauma I experienced later on.

Then, by the time I was 17/18 years old, I was arrested. The last time I was arrested I was 23 years old. In both instances, it was for similar reasons, but I won’t go into details here. For the first instance, I received a conditional discharge. On the final and last time, I also received a conditional discharge. Conditional discharge means that discharge came with certain conditions that had to be fulfilled.

During the first instance, I was placed in remand at the same centre that I used to dance at in my traditional regalia—strange how that happened. I was placed on suicide watch. The courts also stated that they did not want me to live on my own and my family was too worried about my own safety if I returned home. I ended up being placed in a women’s shelter where I met other Indigenous women fleeing domestic violence situations. As part of my conditional discharge I had to participate in counselling, follow a curfew, and live at the women’s shelter (until after the three month mark where I was expected to find a permanent place to live). The crazy logic the court used to keep me in remand is the same logic that contributed to me no longer being able to move back home with my family or to move back to my old apartment—they said, “it was for my own safety.” I was displaced from my own home and my own family. I don’t know how that is considered safe. Then, the counselling was also meant to re-introduce me to my culture, and I don’t know if it succeeded or not.

When I moved to London ON, these same cycles continued—getting arrested, conditional discharges, displacement (but the more extreme of displacement, homelessness). It just sucked big time since I moved to London ON to get away from the problems I experienced back home. Yet, the same shit kept happening, except this time in London ON where I had no family and very few friends.

Then I met a counsellor who literally changed my life (one of the two who meant a lot to me in London ON). It really didn’t clue in the struggles I was going through until I was no longer receiving counselling (you know, because I fulfilled my conditional discharge). I had forgotten her name, much like I forgotten every other counsellor’s name I have previously seen. There are just some things you don’t want to remember, and when you are forced to see someone you don’t really want to see (because I sometimes didn’t want to see these counsellors but I literally had too or else… back to jail) you tend to forget about them. However, I went to a presentation on residential schools during my second year at Western University, which is the university I just recently completed my studies in criminology (funny how that happens, eh?) with a minor in women’s studies. I had no idea who the woman speaking was until she started to speak. It was the same woman who I had to see as part of my conditional discharge.

I will never forget the words when she described how residential schools took away Indigenous cultures, and her work as a counsellor in the justice system, that it was now a different institution that was giving it back. Specifically she said, “It’s funny how Aboriginal [men & women] now learn their culture in a Federal institution when it was an institution that took it away.”

And this is where my struggles with my culture come from today. I sometimes feel ashamed that, you know, I used to practice it but then lost it, and that it was an institution that insisted on saying that I had to plead guilty in order to access the supports (my culture) to help me overcome the situation(s) I was in. You would think that it would be the other way around, right? Maybe, you know, have Indigenous people access the supports they need to help them overcome situations instead of waiting until they are in the system. That’s why I am not too fond of the restorative justice approach especially for Indigenous women who have been victims of violence but are in turn arrested themselves. I struggle with my culture because I sometimes feel ashamed. I sometimes resist re-learning it so much that I avoid certain practices or situations. As I sit here today writing this post, I am struggling with this sort of uncomfortableness again. But it’s funny how this uncomfortableness works.

I am sitting here today, working towards law school in the fall and attending a pre-law program with a group of wonderful and amazing Indigenous students who I am learning from each day I am in class with them. It’s funny because like my friends joke, who would have thought I would have studied and then graduated university with a specialization in criminology!? Then when I think back to when I was younger, who would have thought I would have went back to that remand centre not as a visitor but as an inmate?! Albeit that situation is more ironic as opposed to funny… remand isn’t funny. Then, who would have thought I would be here studying law and working toward law school in the fall?!

I am grateful for this experience and even the uncomfortableness that it brings. It can only go up from here. Life is great (and also entertaining, maybe?) that way!

On #SexWork and #Empowerment: But what does it all mean?

May 23, 2014UncategorizedBelle Knox, Duke Porn Star, empowerment, Network of Sex Work Projects, Sex Work, UNAIDskwetoday Leave a comment

I am writing this post because I see something missing from the discussion of sex work, and more specifically, how sex work can be empowering for women, especially women in Western society. What I see missing in these discussions on sex work and empowerment is the lack of the definition of empowerment or what it means to be empowered when one is engaging in sex work.

This post isn’t about whether or not sex work is valid work. As a former sex worker, I acknowledge that sex work is work and should be considered as such. I also acknowledge that sex work is not inherently exploitative—exploitative situations are a different class of experiences and should not be considered sex work. Although exploitative situations may appear in the context of sex work, these are not inherent to sex work itself. These exploitative situations are usually inherent to the criminal regulation of the trade.

In her article entitled, “I Don’t Want Your Pity: Sex Work and Labor Politics,”[1] Belle Knox writes, “The argument that people should only work in jobs that they enjoy or find empowering comes from a place of privilege.” I agree—being able to both work in employment that is empowering and enjoyable is a form of privilege and it is also a privilege to be able to argue that one must work in jobs that are both empowering and enjoyable. Ms. Knox articulates this point rather clearly. I do not disagree with her on this point. Following this point, though, she concludes that yes, her work as a sex worker does happen to be both rewarding and empowering. In another article critiquing Ms. Knox’s argument that porn is empowering, the author argues that porn is not empowering and that porn is degrading.[2] The author attempts to argue that Ms. Knox is a teen and that she does not know what she is doing. She also attempts to argue that Ms. Knox will regret this decision in coming out at the ripe age of 18, because you know, we all regret the decisions we made when we were 18. I am, however, not here to argue whether Belle Knox’s experiences in sex work are both empowering or rewarding.

In both of these articles, neither of them takes time to define empowerment or what empowerment means in the context of sex work. In writing this post, I hope that I can contribute to this discussion on empowerment and sex work— What does empowerment mean within the context of gender equality? What does it mean to be empowered as a sex worker? And why are we focused so much on sex work as a form of empowerment to achieve gender equality (ie should we be directing our attention elsewhere or asking different questions about sex work)?

In support of Belle Knox coming out as a sex worker at 18 years old, I also started sex work at the age of 18 years old. But I was not attending a prestigious university. I was still in high school. It was literally the weekend after my 18^th birthday that I began escorting. I know, scandalous. Not really, all my peers at the time were either having sex or experimenting with sexual acts—for free. At the time, I wasn’t even thinking about empowerment or reward. Like Knox, I wanted to be “trading the smallest amount of my time for the maximum profit, on my schedule.” Before I began escorting, I was working two minimum wage jobs—one job that wasn’t particularly enjoying having to accommodate my school schedule and a second work schedule. Hey! I had to pay rent, bills, and for groceries somehow, right?

Three years earlier, I also was in a major car accident where I sustained a major brain injury (an ABI to be specific). I went from earning high 80s to earning high 60s. There is nothing wrong with earning high 60s, but I wanted to go onto university and I knew then that high 60s did not get one accepted into university. Following this accident, my doctor told me that because of my recently acquired brain injury that I would most likely graduate in four or five years instead of the two I was expected to graduate at normally (So I was expected to graduate at the age of approximately 22 instead of 19). Struggling with learning how to live with a newly acquired brain injury, I had to learn and adapt to studying with a learning disability (why the reduction in my overall average—my doctor told me to expect this so this wasn’t um, you know, unexpected). Working two minimum wage jobs was tiring along side going to school full time and it was major pressure on my goal to complete schooling at a rate less than what my doctor had predicted. So I had to work hard. I also had to learn to adapt to living with a brain injury–my friends changed and my life changed drastically.

One of the things that I had trouble with was communicating my disability with my employers at my retail and waitressing job. I was left with little room to study to maintain my high grades because of my brain injury–I had to study longer hours and I had to change my study habits (no more direct memorization). Then during the fall, I decided I needed to find a type of employment that was more better and more accommodating if I wanted to achieve all of what I dreamed of accomplishing before my car accident: graduate on the honor roll and go to university. Thus, I enter the world of escorting. Was I naïve? No. I knew what the hell I was doing. Did I regret it? Not one bit—I got to where I needed to be (albeit a bit more slower than expected, but hey, life happens). Was I empowered? What the hell does it even mean to be empowered to do sex work?

This idea that sex work is or isn’t empowering is complicated by the fact that we can rarely find a universal definition of empowerment which is applicable to all situations and contexts at all times. I mean, sex work could be empowering, but it also cannot be empowering—what do we do then? This is where I want to go with this post.

To begin, we have to examine the concept of empowerment. Both women who authored the above articles mentioned are white, cis, and reside in a Western/developed country. One recognizes her privilege. The other not so much. As such, the concept of empowerment in relation to sex work must be viewed through this lens. This is a point I also want to discuss.

Jawad Syed in “Reconstructing gender empowerment,” argues that “gender research continues to be dominated by Eurocentric paradigms” which is also true for the discussion on empowerment and sex work. In his article, Syed seeks to argue “the dominant (Eurocentric) notion of women’s empowerment does not adequately take into account the diverse and complex nature of gender relations in various socio-political contexts.” Citing Mohanty, Syed also posits that employing a dominant notion of women’s empowerment to all women, everywhere, in all contexts, robs non-Western women from their historical and political agency” (283). Within his article, Syed cites the following definition for empowerment, “an interactive process through which less powerful people experience personal and social change, enabling them to achieve influence over the organizations and institutions which affect their lives and the communities in which they live” (284). Specifically pointing to the use of the word power in this definition, Syed highlights that power relates to the ability to make choices. Thus, Syed writes, “empowerment refers to the process which by those who have been denied the ability to make choices acquire such ability” (284). The tool to measure gender empowerment is also critiqued by Syed as being inadequate because of its capitalist, elite, and secular biases, just to name a few. This tool will not be critiqued any further. Rather, I will call attention to some of the issues with the dominant definition and conceptualization of gender empowerment raised by Syed.

First, Syed argues that the usual perspective regarding empowerment, which is adopted by Western feminists, assumes that access to paid work is crucial to economic independence and empowerment. Syed points out that access to paid work by itself does not result in empowerment. Second, this sole focus on access to paid work ignores socio-economic aspects of women’s lives, which “has not completely alleviated their disempowerment in societies and organizations” (286). Third and final, Syed highlights the fact that the dominant conceptualization of empowerment also homogenizes “women” and argues for a more holistic approach to conceptualizing empowerment which includes adopting a relational framework (including macro, meso, and micro levels) for gender empowerment.

If the definition of empowerment is “an interactive process through which less powerful people experience personal and social change, enabling them to achieve influence over the organizations and institutions which affect their lives and the communities in which they live,” then the result of gender empowerment will translate to the transfer of power from the powerful to the powerless (which results in personal and social change, etc). Within the context of sex work, especially in Canada, this is not the case due to criminal regulation. The power remains in the hands of the powerful—the creators of legislation and the enforcers of legislation. If we focus exclusively on paid work as being crucial to economic independence and empowerment, then potentially sex work might be empowering. I say potentially since many sex workers are also employed in other industries. But like Syed points out, the sole focus on paid employment ignores the soci-economic aspects of women’s lives which does not address disempowerment elsewhere in their lives (whether individually, institutionally, or systemically). This point is particularly emphasized when it is acknowledged that many sex workers are lower class and/or women of colour.[3] For women from marginalized positions in society, they experience many negative assumptions, which are informed by negative social and institutional stereotypes, about who they are as a person. Syed writes:

“A person is prone to experience the positions of disadvantage under the inﬂuence of negative social/institutional stereotypes. However, she exercises her unique agency to respond to various macro-level and meso-level factors to negotiate and improve her power. Her individual experiences and perspectives are dynamic, continuously shaped by the multiple identities she holds, such as based on her religion, gender, or family role. Indeed, neither women nor men are homogeneous social categories; they are shaped and inﬂuenced by the issues related to class, age, race, ethnicity and sexual preference (Charmes & Wieringa, 2003: 420). Therefore, contextualised understanding of dynamic and complex inter-sectionalities is instrumental to tackle gender empowerment in a society.”

Simply, the concept of empowerment must be context specific and we must not attempt to apply the concept of empowerment universally to all women in all situations, everywhere. This contextualization of empowerment, as noted earlier, adopts a holistic framework.

Within this framework, Syed identifies three relational levels that must be considered in the conceptualization of empowerment: the micro-level, the meso-level, and the macro-level. The micro-level is defined as recognizing women’s multiple identities (and thus, recognizing intersectionality) (p. 291). This level also includes adding value to women’s agency (ability to make choices for their own well-being) and autonomy (addressing issues of power and inequality in other realms) (p. 291). The meso-level relates to organizations and institutions within a particular society, and assigning value to policies within these organizations and institutions that affect women. For instance, Syed lists legal compliance such as the legal compliance with legislation and anti-discrimination laws within an organization as a measurement of empowerment. The macro-level includes legal empowerment (assigning value to provision of equal opportunity in national legislation and its effective enforcement); Political empowerment (assigning value to women’s participation in political structures); Economic empowerment (assigning value to women’s participation in religious structures and decision making); and finally, social empowerment which seeks to address social stereotypes (slut/whore shaming/stigma). All of this information is on page 291 of Syed’s article.

With respect to sex work and the discussion of empowerment, this contextualization of empowerment becomes important. We must refrain, like in the two articles mentioned above, from employing the concept of empowerment without defining what we mean by empowerment. Syed’s inclusion of various levels of empowerment is crucial to this discussion. It is important because once we include the micro, meso, and macro-levels of empowerment, the idea that sex work is empowering falls short. This isn’t because, for some, sex work is exploitative or degrading—I noted at the beginning that although exploitative situations may appear in the context of sex work, these are not inherent to sex work itself. These exploitative situations are usually inherent to the criminal regulation of the trade itself which is a result of the disempowerment of sex workers.

If sex workers are excluded from making decisions about their own lives due to criminal regulation, then sex work is not empowering. If sex workers are excluded from accessing the same labour and employment rights afforded to other industries, then sex work is not empowering. If sex workers are excluded from legal, political, economic, and social spheres, then sex work is not empowering. Sex work is not disempowering because it is degrading or abusive. It is disempowering because of the fact that sex workers are excluded from making decisions about their own lives due to the criminal regulation of their employment (especially within Canada). When sex work is criminalized, it prevents sex workers from making choices without the threat or fear of arrest (Note: this threat or fear of arrest isn’t dissolved through the Nordic model as some feminists argues since criminalization of sex workers occurs in many ways especially sex workers who are racialized or indigenized or who come from a lower income bracket).

For sex workers, empowerment does not rest solely on the ability to be paid for their services. Empowerment, for sex workers, means being included in the discussions and the decisions that (in)directly affect their lives and livelihood, including discussions on the criminalization and decriminalization of the sex trade.

So should we be really focused on whether sex work is empowering or not? But what does it really mean to be empowered as a sex worker or through sex work?

As a partial answer, we should direct our attention to whether or not sex workers, as persons who have the right to live with dignity, security, and safety, are able to access the same rights as non-sex workers instead. We should also work to address the social stereotypes about sex workers. These stereotypes about sex workers not only affect sex workers lives but also non-sex workers lives—everyone benefits when we reveal these assumptions about sex workers or sex in general. Because let’s face it, mainstream society does not have healthy ideas about sex or sexual health.

One example that the rest of the world can look to as championing the empowerment of sex workers is the Songachi Project in India, which adopted a multi-prong approach to addressing HIV prevention. A part of this project was their empowerment method and messaging. The Songachi Empowerment Methods and Messages are “Sex Work is valid work” and “sex workers deserve to protect themselves.” Relating to their multi-prong approach, the project’s approach included “defining HIV and STIs as occupational health hazards; articulating human rights of sex workers, providing access to condoms and resources for treating STDs, creating a sense of community and political awareness” which ultimately resulted in economic, political, and occupational power for sex workers in Calcutta. A part of this project included employing peer leaders, who were sex workers from chosen communities, to “build skills and confidence in providing education and to foster empowerment and advocacy for local sex workers” (4-5). Empowerment activities within the project included “sustained engagement with local sex workers; showing an interest sex workers’ health and well-being and that of their children; nurturing group solidarity among sex workers; and raising consciousness about sex workers’ rights” (p. 5). For sex workers in India, empowerment then translated to harm reduction and safer sex practices which included collective bargaining with structures of power (effectiveness of interventions), as well as self organizing.[4]

UNAIDs agrees through their best practices on safer sex that “modifications in the way sex work is organized must be encouraged and, in some cases this may be supported by policy enforcement” UNAIDs continues by stating that “possible approaches to building such support include enlisting sex establishment owners and managers to protect their workers’ health and physical safety, working with police to reduce harassment, and promoting self-esteem and workplace solidarity among sex workers.” Thus, changes in sex work organizing as a means to access rights and achieve empowerment can be achieved through the decriminalization of sex work.[5]

In closing, I will share this quote by members of the Network of Sex Work Projects:

“Ultimately, the sex workers’ rights movement seeks resources to enable sex workers to participate in civil society and in decision-making that concerns them. However, as long as commercial sex is seen as degrading and workers as tainted, efforts to improve their working conditions and lives will not succeed. Until this attitude begins to change nothing else will.”[6]

Through the relational framework of gender empowerment, sex work only becomes empowering once sex workers are included in decisions that directly affect their lives, including their dignity, safety, security, and well-being—something that isn’t accomplished through the criminalization of the sex trade. The time is now to include sex workers in the discussion and debate on sex work as a means to achieve gender empowerment.

Oh and to the point made by Docketerman, as a former sex worker, I can say that we don’t give two fucks what frat boys think of us and as for employers? I wouldn’t want to work for someone who discriminates against a class of people based on whatever fucked up false assumptions they have about sex work(ers).

Citation for Syed’s article:

Syed, J. (2010). “Reconstructing gender empowerment.” Women’s Studies International Forum (33), pp. 283-294.

[1] http://www.huffingtonpost.com/belle-knox/sex-work-politics_b_5148528.html

[2] http://time.com/13095/the-duke-porn-star-isnt-as-empowered-as-she-claims/

[3] http://www.studentpulse.com/articles/28/a-feminists-argument-on-how-sex-work-can-benefit-women

[4] http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2826108/

[5] http://www.thelancet.com/journals/lancet/article/PIIS0140-6736(03)13595-7/fulltext

[6] ibid.

2014 #AllOurSisters: #HumanTrafficking & #SexWork: The REAL truth. #LdnOnt

May 12, 2014Uncategorized#AllOurSisters, #LdnONt, All Our Sisters, human trafficking, Human Trafficking Lies, London Abused Women's Centre, London ON, Sex Workkwetoday One comment

Well, look at what we have here, another conference in London ON. But it is not just any conference (you know the typical boring conference). No, it is the 2014 All Our Sisters Forum. I am kind of sad I am missing this conference, as my friend told me about it earlier this year. I almost submitted a proposal to present but it did not fit into my schedule.

Last week, I was asked to help promote it (for free—meaning unpaid labour). When I was approached, I already knew what was going to be asked of me. So I started researching the event prior to even receiving the email with the details on this event.

The All Our Sisters Forum website can be accessed here. On their site, it states the following:

Together, through our national network and events, we focus on safe, sustainable housing for women coast to coast. Through dialogue, research, events and lived experience, we promote security of housing and safe communities for all women in Canada.

The reason this conference caught my eye was due to the fact that it advertised as addressing topics including, “safe housing, violence, human trafficking, addiction, sex work, poverty and other issues related to homelessness among women.” (Source). This event has been on my radar for a while now. So when I was asked to help promote this event it was mentioned because my blog posts and tweets related to the topic of sex work.

Learning to help out issues, events, or other such stuff has been a battle for me. I have to be conscientious of time and energy—if I offer to do anything for free, it is because I want to and it is because I see that what I am being asked to do will have some real benefit to others. Yet, when I was looking over the topics to be discussed relating to sex work at this event, there was only one presentation that mentioned sex work (and talking about the grey area between sex work and human trafficking—no, there is no grey area because sex work isn’t trafficking) and then I noticed another presentation that mentioned human trafficking. My heart dropped to the bottom of my stomach. The name listed on the presentation was the name of the same woman who was interview by the London Free Press and dragged my best friend’s suicide through the dirt for her own anti-sex work agenda. You can read that article here. Specifically, the article reads:

“The hardest part is losing them,” she said, referencing a girl who hung herself three months ago. “Her stage name was Alex, but I want to say her real name out loud – it’s Michelle – because she was a real person,” said Stacey.”

There were two things my best friend taught me when I first arrived at the club we worked at, “Trust no one” and “Mind your own business” (I wrote this in my personal journal dated October 21, 2007).

“Stacey” is lying in this article about my best friend’s suicide and her claim to help her. I am extremely angry with the politicization of my best friend’s suicide to fulfill an anti-sex work agenda. Did she not consider what type of effects this would have on my friend’s family or friends? This is in print media. What if my friend’s son starts searching for answers about his mother? Does anyone have any respect for the dead anymore? My friend wasn’t lying when she said everyone always talked about her…even after her death.

When I used to write about my best friend, I never used to talk about her working as a dancer in the industry. In fact, I kept that very private. However, when I read this article and “Stacy” is quoted as saying both her real name/stage name, I knew I had to step in and let the truth be known. The real truth. I frequently read about the anti-human traffickers and anti-sex workers creating lies and falsifying stories to their benefit (such as in this example of a well-known anti-human trafficking activist). You can even google “human trafficking lies” and a shit load of links will appear discussing the myths and lies that the anti-human traffickers tell to help garner support for their cause (or access the millions of dollars being poured into anti-human trafficking efforts). But, I didn’t think it could ever happen to me or so close to home.

So how do I know she is lying?

Well for one, she gets the date wrong of my best friend’s suicide.

Two, she said she tried to help her and save her. My best friend hated her because well… she hated her (I worked with her and my friend at the same club). Her claim that she tried to help my best friend also suggests there is human trafficking at the club she worked at–there was none. Another lie.

And the circuit she talks about in the article I quoted above, I’ve worked the same circuit–I have never seen human trafficking occurring on this circuit. Sure I’ve seen movement from one club to another but not human trafficking. I mean, aren’t adults allowed to determine when and where they can work, sex work or not?

Finally, she was not allowed anywhere near the club. In fact, she was fired and told not to come back to the premises (as told to me from a DJ who used to work at the club and who I worked with while she worked there). This is also proven by the fact that she did not work at the club for a long time (yeah, I stopped working there in 2010 and still have friends who work there that I visited with until I moved in April 2014—and yes, I will probably, meaning very likely, visit again in the future lol).

I stand by my word: yes, she is a liar.

I really wish I could have attended this conference and in particular, “Stacey’s” presentation–just like how she attended the past only two sex work related events in London ON including the one I spoke earlier this year, where she left immediately after my presentation (probably because she recognized me and if she brought up the same old “But I was trafficked” line like she did at the 2012 sex work event, I would have called her out on her lies). She spoke on opening day and it is entertaining that the presentations for that day are under the heading, “Connecting to ‘the edge’: Speaking Truth.” “Stacey” obviously didn’t mind her own business and on the advice of my best friend, clearly, you can’t trust her.

RIP Michelle/Alex.

Related post: Caught in human trafficking lies

Indigenous Peoples: Language Revitalization & Gender Identity

May 3, 2014Uncategorizedgender identity, indigenous language, indigenous language revitalization, Indigenous sovereigntykwetoday View all 2 comments

At the core of European legal thought is sustaining binaries such as the colonizer v. the colonized, the conqueror v. the conquered, the civilized v. the savage, or the male v. the female. During her lecture on systemic violence at Concordia University, Andrea Smith explains how colonialism legitimized gender violence through the installation of patriarchy, a male system of domination over females (Smith, 2011). Smith (2011) states:

Of course, patriarchy is built on a gender binary system. You can’t have patriarchy unless you have two genders, one that dominates another gender. So consequently, in many Native communities that were not built on a gender binary system, those who did not fit that system were often targeted for destruction as well (at approximately 2:05).

Patriarchy in Native communities was essential to create a hierarchy “so that colonial domination would seem natural” (Smith, 2011, 2:13). Many North American Indigenous communities were matriarchal, which is in direct opposition to patriarchy and colonialism (Smith, 1999). The ways in which patriarchy furthered the expansion of colonialism occurred through sexual violence, the forced removal of children from their homes to residential schools, and the annihilation of Indigenous languages and cultures (McGeough, 2008). For Indigenous peoples, the loss of language translates to a loss of connection to their culture and other systems of being.

In Medicine Bundle of Contradictions, an essay authored by Lous Esme Cruz (2011), the limitations of the English language are examined in relation to Indigenous identities and gender identities. Cruz (2011) writes, “English is a very limited language that doesn’t give very many options for explaining gender expression and roles” (p. 54). Frantz Fanon (2004) in his work entitled Wretched of the Earth defines colonialism as the “entire conquest of land and people” (p. 14). Indigenous peoples were colonized through the loss of their land and languages and through—the less often talked about—the loss of important gender roles within their culture. Cruz states further, “gender is not a culture, it is a role within culture” (p. 55). Sometimes erased from this discussion of colonialism and loss of culture for Indigenous peoples is the loss of gender roles that exists outside the Western gender binary, male/female. For this paper, I will explore the connection between loss of language and colonialism and how the loss of language impacts gender identities in Indigenous populations. This paper will contribute to the larger discussion of gender identity, how both Western concepts and the English language is restrictive for gender roles and expressions, and the importance of language revitalization for Indigenous peoples.

For Frantz Fanon, the definition of colonialism is rather simple despite its complex nature. As stated earlier, Fanon defines colonialism as the “entire conquest of land and people” (p. 14). An effective way to further the conquest and domination of an entire population group is through violence, and Fanon argues that this violence dehumanizes the colonized (Fanon, 2004). Associated with this dehumanization is Othering and Linda T. Smith calls attention to the role of Othering in Decolonizing Methodologies. Smith (1999) argues that the construction of the Indigenous problem becomes embedded “within the wider discourses of racism, sexism, and other forms of positioning the Other” (p. 90). Othering then permits for the complete dehumanization of Indigenous populations, legitimizes the colonial violence, and the destruction of Indigenous social structures and relations.

Cynthia C. Wesley-Esquimaux (2009) explores the connections between the effects of colonialism and the loss of gender roles for women within Indigenous communities (p. 14). While she focuses solely on roles of Indigenous women (as opposed to men), her paper provides a historical context on “alien social structures and disrupted gender relations” for Indigenous populations (Wesley-Esquimaux, 2009, p. 13). Wesley-Esquimaux (2009) highlights that before contact with colonizers, Indigenous populations ranged from “an estimated 90 million to 112 million” with “15 million to 18 million living in what is now the United States and Canada” (p. 14). Following settler contact in 1492, it was estimated that “90 to 95 percent of the Indigenous population was wiped out by epidemic disease, warfare, and famine, with most people dying within 100 years of contact” (Wesley-Esquimaux, 2009, p. 14). An extreme event such as this is devastating for any population group, and also key to domination, destruction and colonialism. Though not a critique of Wesley-Esquimaux, often missing from this discussion of colonialism and Indigenous peoples is the loss of gender roles outside of gender binary system of male/female.

When settlers first arrived to the Americas, their relations with Indigenous populations were vital to their survival (Mawani, 2001). However, once more settlers began to arrive, the relations with Indigenous populations became more of an inconvenience (Mawani, 2001). By 1867, Canada’s first prime minister, Sir John A. MacDonald enacted the Indian Act, 1867 and this act was (and continues to be) a useful tool to police Indigenous populations (Comack, 2012). Brock Pitawanakwat (2009), in his research on Indigenous language revitalization, argues, “Canadian Indian Policy sought to undermine Indigenous independence and eradicate Indigenous languages” (p. 2). The eradication of Indigenous languages is then essential to colonialism since it promotes policy objectives, like those objectives associated with the enactment of the Indian Act. The primary objective behind the Indian Act was “to get rid of the Indian Problem” (Leslie, 1978). To accomplish this goal, colonizers forcibly removed Indigenous children from their homes to attend residential schools, where they were forbidden to practice their culture or speak their language (McGeough, 2008). Further, Pitawanakwat (2009) states, “the efforts to spread European languages in the Americas were fuelled by the colonists’ desires for administrative efficiency” (p. 2). While these are historical accounts of undermining Indigenous languages, the loss of language as an effect of colonialism still exists today. For example, within Canada, the loss of Indigenous languages occurs “at an even faster rate than the global average” (Pitawanakwat, 2009, p. 1). It has been shown that the main reason for loss of Indigenous language is European colonization and by 2100, it is predicted that only four of the original sixty Indigenous languages will be retained (Pitawanakwat, 2009, p. 1). For Indigenous peoples, the language is directly connected to their culture and from the perspective of the colonizer, it is a sensible policy and practice to prevent Indigenous peoples from both speaking their language and practicing their culture.

Brock Pitawanakwat’s research into Indigenous language revitalization, specifically Anishnaabemowin, provides a crucial perspective for which to examine how language for Indigenous peoples is connected to loss of gender roles and loss of culture. On the importance of Anishnaabemowin, Pitawanakwat (2009) maintains that Anishnaabemowin “has intrinsic value to Anishnaabeg that is rooted in their history, identity, spirituality and territory” (p. 8). Part of the Anishnaabeg identity and culture includes the agokwa and okitciakwe (McGeough, 2008, p. 78). The agokwa and the okitciakwe are Anishnaabe terms for “the biological male that preformed the gender roles of a woman” and “for a biological woman who performs the gender roles of a man” respectively (McGeough, 2008, p. 78). The agokwa and the okitciakwe also held esteemed roles within Anishnaabeg nations (McGeough, 2008, p. 78). Unfortunately, the agokwa and the okitciakwe were considered to be both immoral and unnatural under the colonial lens (McGeough, 2008). For Indigenous nations, the significance of one person’s role within the culture and community were not wholly dependent on their biological sex. Traditionally, as highlighted by McGeough (2008), the Anishinaabeg nations “have seen gender as being fluid and not fixed or determined by one’s biological sex” (p. 76). Thus, the patriarchal gender binary system was a tool of colonization to undermine Anishnaabeg culture and traditions, like the roles of the agokwa and the okitciakwe. Pitawanakwat also outlines how language and identity are interconnected when he cites the work of Native Studies professor Roger Spielmann. Spielmann, as cited by Pitawanakwat (2009), argues that language and identity “can go a long way in preventing assimilation to another culture and preserving tradition-specific ways of relating to others—be they human or other-than-human persons” (p. 8). An example of other-than-human persons would be the agokwa and the okitciakwe (McGeough, 2008, p. 79). Similar to Andrea Smith’s point on patriarchy, establishing various patriarchal institutions, including the gender binary system, normalized systems of domination, like colonialism and patriarchy.

Though there are many efforts to restore Indigenous languages and culture, this colonial objective, to get rid of the Indian problem, still manifests itself in other ways in a contemporary context. From a legal perspective, within the Canadian court system, the value of Indigenous languages and cultures are diminished. This undermining of Indigenous languages and cultures is illustrated within the lower court decision in Delgamuukw v. British Columbia (hereinafter referred to as Delgamuukw) (Borrows, 1999). John Borrows, an Anishnaabeg legal scholar, examines how the value of Indigenous languages and culture were belittled in Delgamuukw. In the case of Delgamuukw, McEachern C.J. diminished the importance of Indigenous languages in Canadian law when he did not accept evidence in the form of song or oral history from the plaintiffs, House of Delgamuukw, as proof of Aboriginal title. Specifically, McEachern C.J. (1991) viewed these songs and oral histories as songs, folklore, or mythology (p. 93). Borrows, however, outlines the importance of language for Aboriginal people’s political, economical, and legal systems. He writes, “Indigenous languages and cultures shaped their legal, economic, and political structures, and the socio-cultural relationships upon which they were built. Many of these narratives were considered private property” (p. 9). Indigenous language has formed the basis for Indigenous law, and in relation to colonialism, the loss of Indigenous language indicates a loss of Indigenous political, legal, social and economical systems. The Supreme Court of Canada also established that McEachern C.J.’s decision discovered, “a trend imbricated in the very bedrock of western European legal thought” (Burrows, 1999, footnote 22, p. 29). As noted earlier, central to European legal thought is sustaining binaries such as the colonizer and the colonized, or more specifically, the male and the female.

Indigenous language is connected to Indigenous culture and Indigenous culture is tied to gender roles and identity. Even though Delgamuukw provided a framework for Aboriginal title, Borrows also stated that it weakens Aboriginal title, and to a larger extent, Indigenous sovereignty (Borrows, 1999). For Cruz (2011), the fight for Indigenous sovereignty includes “liberation from the confines of gender baggage” (p. 53). Language revitalization is essential to Indigenous sovereignty and as maintained by Pitawanakwat, language revitalization is consequential for Indigenous culture and identity, including the diverse gender identities rooted in Indigenous culture. McGeough states, “Contemporary Western society is only beginning to understand what many Aboriginal societies have known since time immemorial” (p. 77). It is time to support language revitalization efforts as a way to advance equality for all gender identities and to ultimately fight against colonialism and the continued diminishing of Indigenous sovereignty.

#FNCFNEA “Truancy officers,” the #IndianAct, and more #Reconciliation bullshit

May 2, 2014UncategorizedIndian Act, reconciliation, residential schoolskwetoday Leave a comment

Back in 2010, Indian Act sections were repealed relating to education. One particular section made specific reference to “truancy officers.” On the AANDC website, it says that these sections were no longer in use and are being repealed (Source). It just came to my attention (I did not read the First Nation Control of First Nation Education Act FNCFNEA aka Bill C-33 as of yet… been busy doing other things) that similar titles are in this Bill. I didn’t know about this until now and thank you/miigs to my friend Ariel Smith.

As cited in the (Source), these sections that were in the Indian Act “allowed the Indian residential schools to operate.” These sections were apparently repealed in an effort of reconciliation. Yet, with this Bill C-33, it makes reference to the Truancy officers (the same officers mentioned in these sections that were repealed). Reconciliation my ass…

From one colonial piece of legislation to the next.

The previous sections that were repealed are below:

Agreements with provinces, etc.

114. (1) The Governor in Council may authorize the Minister, in accordance with this Act, to enter into agreements on behalf of Her Majesty for the education in accordance with this Act of Indian children, with

(a) the government of a province;

(b) the Commissioner of Yukon;

(c) the Commissioner of the Northwest Territories;

(c.1) the Commissioner of Nunavut;

(d) a public or separate school board; and

(e) a religious or charitable organization.

Schools

(2) The Minister may, in accordance with this Act, establish, operate and maintain schools for Indian children.

R.S., 1985, c. I-5, s. 114; 1993, c. 28, s. 78; 2002, c. 7, s. 184.

Regulations

115. The Minister may

(a) provide for and make regulations with respect to standards for buildings, equipment, teaching, education, inspection and discipline in connection with schools;

(b) provide for the transportation of children to and from school;

(c) enter into agreements with religious organizations for the support and maintenance of children who are being educated in schools operated by those organizations; and

(d) apply the whole or any part of moneys that would otherwise be payable to or on behalf of a child who is attending a residential school to the maintenance of that child at that school.

R.S., c. I-6, s. 115.

Attendance

116. (1) Subject to section 117, every Indian child who has attained the age of seven years shall attend school.

Idem

(2) The Minister may

(a) require an Indian who has attained the age of six years to attend school;

(b) require an Indian who becomes sixteen years of age during the school term to continue to attend school until the end of that term; and

(c) require an Indian who becomes sixteen years of age to attend school for such further period as the Minister considers advisable, but no Indian shall be required to attend school after he becomes eighteen years of age.

R.S., c. I-6, s. 116.

When attendance not required

117. An Indian child is not required to attend school if the child

(a) is, by reason of sickness or other unavoidable cause that is reported promptly to the principal, unable to attend school;

(b) is, with the permission in writing of the superintendent, absent from school for a period not exceeding six weeks in each term for the purpose of assisting in husbandry or urgent and necessary household duties;

(c) is under efficient instruction at home or elsewhere, within one year after the written approval by the Minister of such instruction; or

(d) is unable to attend school because there is insufficient accommodation in the school that the child is entitled or directed to attend.

R.S., c. I-6, s. 117.

School to be attended

118. Every Indian child who is required to attend school shall attend such school as the Minister may designate, but no child whose parent is a Protestant shall be assigned to a school conducted under Roman Catholic auspices and no child whose parent is a Roman Catholic shall be assigned to a school conducted under Protestant auspices, except by written direction of the parent.

R.S., c. I-6, s. 118.

Truant officers

119. (1) The Minister may appoint persons, to be called truant officers, to enforce the attendance of Indian children at school, and for that purpose a truant officer has the powers of a peace officer.

Powers

(2) Without restricting the generality of subsection (1), a truant officer may, subject to subsection (2.1),

(a) enter any place where he believes, on reasonable grounds, that there are Indian children who are between the ages of seven and sixteen years, or who are required by the Minister to attend school;

(b) investigate any case of truancy; and

(c) serve written notice on the parent, guardian or other person having the care or legal custody of a child to cause the child to attend school regularly thereafter.

Warrant required to enter dwelling-house

(2.1) Where any place referred to in paragraph (2)(a) is a dwelling-house, a truant officer may not enter that dwelling-house without the consent of the occupant except under the authority of a warrant issued under subsection (2.2).

Authority to issue warrant

(2.2) Where on ex parte application a justice of the peace is satisfied by information on oath

(a) that the conditions for entry described in paragraph (2)(a) exist in relation to a dwelling-house,

(b) that entry to the dwelling-house is necessary for any purpose relating to the administration or enforcement of this Act, and

(c) that entry to the dwelling-house has been refused or that there are reasonable grounds for believing that entry thereto will be refused,

the justice of the peace may issue a warrant under his hand authorizing the truant officer named therein to enter that dwelling-house subject to such conditions as may be specified in the warrant.

Use of force

(2.3) In executing a warrant issued under subsection (2.2), the truant officer named therein shall not use force unless he is accompanied by a peace officer and the use of force has been specifically authorized in the warrant.

Notice to attend school

(3) Where a notice has been served in accordance with paragraph (2)(c) with respect to a child who is required by this Act to attend school and the child does not within three days after the service of notice attend school and continue to attend school regularly thereafter, the person on whom the notice was served is guilty of an offence and liable on summary conviction to a fine not exceeding five dollars or to imprisonment for a term not exceeding ten days or to both.

Further notices

(4) Where a person has been served with a notice in accordance with paragraph (2)(c), it is not necessary within a period of twelve months thereafter to serve that person with any other notice in respect of further non-compliance with this Act, and whenever that person within the period of twelve months fails to cause the child with respect to whom the notice was served or any other child of whom he has charge or control to attend school and continue in regular attendance as required by this Act, that person is guilty of an offence and liable to the punishment imposed by subsection (3) as if he had been served with the notice.

Tardiness

(5) A child who is habitually late for school shall be deemed to be absent from school.

Take into custody

(6) A truant officer may take into custody a child whom he believes on reasonable grounds to be absent from school contrary to this Act and may convey the child to school, using as much force as the circumstances require.

R.S., 1985, c. I-5, s. 119; R.S., 1985, c. 32 (1st Supp.), s. 21.

Denomination of teacher

120. (1) Where the majority of the members of a band belong to one religious denomination, the school established on the reserve that has been set apart for the use and benefit of that band shall be taught by a teacher of that denomination.

Idem

(2) Where the majority of the members of a band are not members of the same religious denomination and the band by a majority vote of those electors of the band who were present at a meeting called for the purpose requests that day schools on the reserve should be taught by a teacher belonging to a particular religious denomination, the school on that reserve shall be taught by a teacher of that denomination.

R.S., c. I-6, s. 121.

Minority religious denominations

121. A Protestant or Roman Catholic minority of any band may, with the approval of and under regulations to be made by the Minister, have a separate day school or day school classroom established on the reserve unless, in the opinion of the Governor in Council, the number of children of school age does not so warrant.

R.S., c. I-6, s. 122.

Definitions

122. In sections 114 to 121,

“child”

« enfant »

“child” means an Indian who has attained the age of six years but has not attained the age of sixteen years, and a person who is required by the Minister to attend school;

“school”

« école »

“school” includes a day school, technical school, high school and residential school;

“truant officer”

« agent de surveillance »

“truant officer” includes

(a) a member of the Royal Canadian Mounted Police,

(b) a special constable appointed for police duty on a reserve, and

(c) a school teacher and a chief of the band, when authorized by the superintendent.

R.S., c. I-6, s. 123. (Source)

May 15 – Celebrate Land and Treaty Rights Defenders Grassy Narrows First Nation

May 2, 2014Uncategorizedkwetoday Leave a comment

#SCC

Indigenous Peoples Solidarity Movement Ottawa

On May 15^th Grassy Narrows First Nation will be going to the Supreme Court of Canada in order to protect their lands and treaty rights.

The Keewatin appeal is the next major Aboriginal Law Case to reach the Supreme Court of Canada and covers issues of jurisdiction, duty to consult and accommodate, and treaty interpretation.

“For Treaty Nations across the country, it is hard to over-emphasize the importance of the Keewatin appeal.” (First Peoples Law, Dr. Bruce Mclvor)

Join us to celebrate their efforts at a community feast.

Thursday May 15^th, 5:30pm – 8:00pm
St. Andrews Hall, 82 Kent St. (at Wellington), Ottawa

Pot luck supper with presentations from community members.

https://www.facebook.com/events/318301988316981/

Please Donate

Please bring a dish to share if you are able. Please let us know what you plan to bring.

We are also seeking donations from supportive organizations and individuals to cover the…

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