Race, Space, and Prostitution: The Making of Settler Colonial Canada
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This article examines the fundamental role that prostitution has played in securing settler colonial domination over Indigenous peoples and lands in the historical and ongoing making of the Canadian nation-state. Using the theoretical and methodological framework developed by critical anti-racist feminist scholar Sherene Razack, this article offers a spatial analysis tracing how prostitution has been deployed, repeatedly and in distinctly racialized and gendered ways, to secure settler colonial domination in Canada. This analysis focuses on four key examples: (1) early settlement in British Columbia; (2) the Indian Act; (3) the Pass System; and, more recently, (4) Vancouver's Missing Women. It also focuses on how these settler colonial deployments of prostitution contributed (and, in some ways, continue to contribute) not only to violence against Indigenous women and girls but also to the justification, legitimation, and erasure of this violence and, thus, its normalization within settler colonial society. Abstract: Le présent article examine le rôle fondamental qu'a joué la prostitution dans la domination colonialiste exercée sur les peuples autochtones et sur leurs terres au cours de l'histoire du Canada et de son développement comme État-nation. À partir du cadre théorique et méthodologique mis en place par la théoricienne Sherene Razack, féministe critique antiraciste, l'auteure fait une analyse territoriale des façons dont la prostitution a été déployée à répétition, et par diverses méthodes clairement racialisées et sexospécifiques, pour assurer une domination colonialiste au Canada. Cette analyse donne plusieurs exemples clés tirés du passé colonial du Canada, y compris les débuts de l'ère coloniale en Colombie-Britannique, les interdictions du potlatch dans la Loi sur les Indiens, la criminalisation de la prostitution et le système de laissez-passer, sans oublier l'exemple plus contemporain des femmes disparues à Vancouver. L'article montre aussi comment l'encadrement colonialiste de la prostitution a contribué (et, d'une certaine façon, continue de contribuer) non seulement à la violence faite aux femmes et aux filles autochtones, mais aussi à la justification, à la légitimation et à l'effacement de cette violence pour la rendre banale au sein de la société colonialiste.
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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 | 0.005 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.003 | 0.007 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.034 | 0.031 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.012 | 0.003 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.007 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.006 | 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".