Introduction

the discussion throughout this book considers the effects of transnational free-market economics, ongoing urbanization, and growing concerns regarding home and homeland security on contemporary representations of and responses to street-involved sex work in Canada.Canadian leaders regularly cite the rigorous policing or elimination of the street-involved sex industry as key components of urban "cleanup" projects that will make cities into attractive, or "safe and clean" global investment centres.Analyzing a combination of legislative initiatives, media representations, police and sex worker activist-produced texts, and literary texts, I interrogate such sanitizing urban agendas, especially the seeming requirement that many streetinvolved sex workers in Canada give up their basic human rights, and even their lives, for the orderly global cause.Foregrounding the current legality of prostitution in Canada, as well as the growing number of serial kidnap and murder cases involving inner-city sex workers across the country, this project brings together two broader cultural debates: one regarding the moral and cultural legitimacy of prostitution in Canada and one regarding the socio-economic disposability of the poor and other culturally marginalized populations in an emergent global order.I thus work to expose and interrogate the necropolitics, or privatization of the right to secure, police, or take deadly action against private citizens who xVI INTRODUCTION are considered "disposable," 1 which I find at work in these cases; and the subsequent cultural portrayal of already marginalized victims as enemies of the state. terminologyAs literary theorist Terry Goldie poignantly observes, "All of the terms in any analysis are of course themselves 'loaded'" (4).This is especially true in discussions of sex work and sex workers.Indeed, a number of the terms used throughout this extended analysis of the increasingly fraught relationship between sex work, sex workers, and Canada's cities require definition.More than ten years of research and discussion have led me to believe that sex work's current legality in Canada is not common knowledge.This ignorance would seem, in part, to reflect popular understandings of the terms we use to discuss the sex trade.Despite ongoing efforts to reconnect prostitution with its origins in pre-historical pagan cultures wherein priestesses had intercourse with religious celebrants in order to facilitate their experience of the divine, 2 the words prostitute and prostitution retain their modern, pejorative, and morally inflected connotations.Literally denoting-in the necessarily culturally inflected Oxford English Dictionary-"a person, usually a woman, who engages in sexual activity for payment," the word prostitute invokes a historically informed moral repugnance toward female sexual transgression.The special disgust reserved for prostitutes-especially those perceived to be willing participants in the sex industry-in contemporary European and North and South American settler societies reflects two thousand years of patriarchal Judeo-Christian and colonial investment in the regulation of women's bodies and the social enforcement of monogamous heterosexuality.International sex workers' rights activist and feminist scholar Gail Pheterson refers to this repugnance as "whore stigma," a conflation of sex for sale as "selfhood" for sale (Prism 11).Often described as prostituting oneself, the selling of sexual services thus connotes perpetuation of and participation-willing or no-in an especially abhorrent form of slavery.My own analysis follows that of researcher and activist Elya Durisin, who contends that "in analyses of sex work…a distinction between the commodification of labour power and the commodification of the body in its entirety, as in slavery, should be maintained."As Durisin explains, "Sex work exists within Indigenous acknowledges both the specificity of the experiences of colonized peoples in Canada as well as transnational connections between First Peoples and ongoing de-colonization initiatives globally.My use of the terms sex work and sex worker is meant to distance my discussion from current cycles of combative and repetitive debate in and outside of feminism regarding the symbolic and "real world" function of prostitution. 5This is not to say that the positions put forward by participants in these debates are without merit.For example, Razack argues that prostitution plays a significant role in "securing racial patrimonies in today's transnational world" ("Race" 376).She explains, "To suggest as I have that the of inner-city neighbourhoods" that such renewal projects entail (City 227-28).Davis further observes, "The city, self-consciously adopting the idiom of urban cold war, promotes the 'containment' (official term) of the homeless in Skid Row along Fifth Street east of the Broadway, systematically transforming the neighborhood into an outdoor poorhouse….Every night on Skid Row is Friday the 13th, and, unsurprisingly, many of the homeless seek to escape the 'Nickle' during the Furthermore, that more and more street-involved sex workers of all races are being harassed, bullied, or otherwise targeted by police as well as private citizen groups and violent criminals illustrates contemporary necropolitics in Canada with alarming clarity.Canadian criminologist and longtime prostitution law researcher John Lowman observes, "After 1985, the year in which the However, as Silver et al. acknowledge, such socio-geographical analyses only begin to explain the high numbers of kidnapped, assaulted, raped, and brutally murdered Aboriginal women in Canada.Archetypal colonial images of conquest and domination also inform the violence that many Indigenous women experience, both inside and outside Aboriginal households.First Nations and postcolonial critics, academics, and activists regularly critique the construction in Euro-American society of the inherently "violable," or "rapable," Aboriginal body.Examining the roots of this damaging archetype for Aboriginal women, Kim Anderson writes, "In both western and Indigenous frameworks, Native women have historically been equated with the land.The Euro-constructed image of Native women, therefore, mirrors western attitudes towards the earth.repercussions of these women's supposedly irresponsible choices and lives.Under this manufactured culture of fear, the murdered women themselves become the threat, not the victims, of a particularly heinous form of violence.My discussion in Chapter 1 draws on previous academic findings that such mainstream news sources rarely feature the views of politically active sex workers, let alone average "worker-on-the-street" concerns about conditions in particular neighbourhoods.The current exception to this choking off of sex workers' voices in the news is the interviews with sex workers that occur immediately following incidents of violence against persons involved in the sex trade.Nonetheless, when reporters and the politicians and police they routinely interview turn from bloody stories of mutilated bodies in Edmonton, Saskatoon, Regina, and Winnipeg, or haunting tales of human DNA on a farm outside Vancouver, to report the voices of those who may have known the victims, they rarely focus on the need to interrogate and take apart whore stigma.Chapter 2 examines how sensational stories about metropolitan crime waves, about the allegedly inherent dangers of street prostitution for sex worker

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