“So It’s Not Always the Sappy Story”: Women of Colour and Indigenous Women in the Indoor Sectors of the Canadian Sex Industry Speak Out
Bibliographic record
Abstract
The lived experiences of racialised and Indigenous indoor sex workers are often made to be invisible.Frequently, they are left unmarked and are imbedded within White indoor sex workers' experiences; alternately, stereotypes about racialised and Indigenous sex workers mean their experiences are overgeneralised and assumed to be part of street-based sectors.This study draws on forty in-depth interviews with racialised and Indigenous indoor sex workers from nine different cities across Canada in order to bring their intersectional experiences to the forefront of contemporary discussions.Grounded in Kimberlé Crenshaw's conceptualisation of intersectionality, this dissertation takes a post-intersectionality approach of collaborative intersectionality to examine the multilayered experiences of research participants and expose multidimensional, inter-categorical complexities of and differences between participants' experiences.With the objectives of deconstructing and, at times, decolonising normative assumptions, attitudes, and political initiatives that essentialise the experiences of women in the Canadian sex industry, this study addresses a much-needed research gap by looking at racialised and Indigenous women's participation in different indoor sectors.Furthermore, it contributes to valuable analyses on human rights, employment standards, agency, and resistance within a growing body of critical sex work literature.Tracing the experiences of research participants involved two key components: first, mapping their decisions to enter and work in the sex industry by weighing the costs and benefits against various systemic challenges; and second, exploring their everyday intersectional experiences in multiple spaces and at different times -for instance, the diplomatic negotiation and navigation of their identities, the entrepreneurial tasks performed to compete in the marketplace, their experience interacting with law enforcement, and their encounters with sex work activism.These discussions involve situating research participants' experiences within social, political, and economic contexts that are informed by historical events such as colonialism, slavery, and moral panics, as well as by contemporary events that are centred around, for example, neoliberal commercialism and whorephobia, in order to navigate the effects of stigma, criminalisation and marginalisation in their day-to-day lives.indoor sex workers' experiences have been brought into this conversation (Anderson et al., 2016;Butterfly, 2016;Goldenberg, Krusi, Zhang, Chettiar, & Shannon, 2017;Ham, 2017;Ham & Gilmour, 2016;Lam, 2016).There is, however, still a gap in the literature.For instance, while we know that 80-95% of the Canadian sex industry is made up of indoor sectors (Benoit & Millar, 2001; Hanger, Maloney, Canada.Parliament.House of Commons.Standing Committee on, & Canada.Parliament.House of Commons.Subcommittee on Solicitation, 2006), we do not know much about the experiences of trans people or racialised and Indigenous women in these spaces; thus, more empirical research is necessary to help us understand the various realities that impact their everyday lives.This study addresses the existing research gap by focusing on racialised and Indigenous women's participation in the indoor sectors of the Canadian sex industry.Based on qualitative interviews with forty racialised and Indigenous indoor sex workers across nine cities in Canada, this study contributes to valuable analyses of human rights, employment standards, agency, and resistance.My primary research question is intentionally broad: How do women of colour and Indigenous women experience the indoor sectors of the sex industry?This question allows research participants to describe multiple layers of experience, from their decision to enter and work in the sex industry to how they negotiate their everyday intersectional experiences in various spaces and at different times.Within this context, mapping my participants'experiences involves exploring the process of weighing the costs and benefits of entering the sex industry, the diplomatic negotiation and navigation of their identities, the entrepreneurial tasks performed to compete in the marketplace, their experiences interacting with law enforcement, and their encounters with sex work activism.Discussions of such salient
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.033 | 0.023 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.007 | 0.003 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.005 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".