YORE _Sex Work and Storytelling_ Toward a Feminist Epistemology in Oral History Research

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Sex Work and Storytelling:
Toward a Feminist Epistemology in Oral History Research
Hannah Yore
April 2015
Submitted to the faculty of Clark University, Worcester, Massachusetts, in partial fulfillment
of the requirements for the degree of Bachelor of Arts in the Department of International
Development and Social Change
And accepted on the recommendation of
Cynthia Caron, Chief Advisor

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Acknowledgements
I wish to thank Professor Cynthia Caron for the support, insight, and guidance she offered me
throughout this entire process. I also thank Professor Denise Humphreys-Bebbington who
provided helpful comments that greatly improved the manuscript. I also wish to thank Clark
University’s LEEP Fellowship program for providing funding to support this research and
the Department of Public Health, Professor Marianne Sarkis, and The Worcester Alliance
Against Sexual Exploitation for sponsoring the “Sex Work and Storytelling” oral history
project. Most importantly, I thank Hija del Sol, Adore, Tina, and Laura for sharing their
stories with me.

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Table of Contents
I. Abstract
II. Chapter 1: Introduction
a. Background
b. Thesis Outline
III. Chapter 2: Method and Methodology
a. Fieldwork
b. The Research Process
c. Oral History as Feminist Scholarship
IV. Chapter 3: Survivor Epistemology
a. Trauma Theory
b. Feminist Responses to Trauma Discourse
c. Emotions Beyond Fear and Betrayal
d. Cognition and Emotionality
V. Chapter 4: Precarity as Embodied
a. Constructions of Markedness
b. Surveillance and Discipline
c. Sexual Violence
VI. Chapter 5: Friendship and Support Networks
a. Recalling Friendship: Using Differences as Strategy
b. Sexual Intimacies Among Self-Identified Survivors
c. Giving Back
VII. Chapter 6: Ways Forward
VIII. Bibliography
IX. Appendices
a. Stories
i. Adore’s Stories
ii. Tina’s Stories
iii. Laura’s Stories
iv. Hija del Sol’s Stories
b. Agreement Form
i. Transcript and Tape Recording
ii. Author Agreement Form

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Abstract
The use of oral histories in social science research marks a shift away from positivist
paradigms and offers an alternative approach to knowledge creation. In this thesis, I use the
oral histories of four former sex workers living in Worcester, Massachusetts to show how
oral histories are essential to feminist scholarship. I argue that oral histories reveal alternative
ways of understanding and experiencing social life from the perspective of traditionally
marginalized communities such as sex workers. First, I discuss my methodology, outlining
the social context in which I conducted my oral history interviews and then present the
theoretical and analytical frameworks that structure and guide my analysis. The subsequent
three chapters explore how women’s’ experiences as sex workers influence the knowledge
they create about the world. This analysis begins with an exploration of how sexual trauma
informs survivors’ worldviews. I then use the idea of markedness to describe how sex
workers possess particular insights about policing authorities in light of their marginalization.
Lastly, I explore how former sex workers understand themselves as part of larger social
networks as a result of shared experience and epistemic insights. I conclude by briefly
describing the importance of acknowledging these knowledges in sex work activism and
organizing.

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Chapter 1: Introduction
Background
This thesis explores the stories of four former sex workers, Tina, Adore, Hija del Sol,
and Laura, living in Worcester, Massachusetts. These women shared their life stories with
fellow researcher, Mikayla Bobrow, and myself as part of an oral history project under the
supervision of Professor Marianne Sarkis and supported by The Worcester Department of
Public Health and the Worcester Alliance Against Sexual Exploitation (WAASE). We
conducted these interviews in the fall of 2014 after working on anti sex-trafficking work in
Worcester with organizations like WAASE and The End Demand Worcester Working
Group. The community organizers with whom I worked most closely focused much of their
efforts on exposing the gender-based discrepancies in prostitution-related arrests in
Worcester. We held meetings, hosted events, and staged a public demonstration rallying
against the Worcester police’s tendency to arrest more female prostitutes than male johns.
This work was publicized widely, catching the attention of major radio stations like WBUR
who broadcasted a story on disparate arrest rates between female sex workers and male johns
in Worcester.
With the exception of a few highly determined and articulate former sex workers, the
majority of WAASE leaders were not former or current sex workers themselves. When the
voices and experiences of former or current sex workers were included in public discourse,
they were ‘one-liners’ that supported popular media or WAASE campaign messages.
Troubled by this and eager to incorporate the women whose lives were most intimately
affected by this organizing, I reached out to former and current sex workers themselves to
seek their perspectives. From the onset of my work speaking with current and former sex

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workers, I was committed to incorporating the perspectives of women in local activism. I
believed it was important for current and former sex workers to be involved in anti-
trafficking organizing in the city and was looking for ways to involve them. When I began
actually speaking to women and hearing their stories, however, I realized an even richer
opportunity to engage current and former sex workers about their lives without the
interference of the city’s anti-trafficking organizing agenda.
While current and former sex workers stated they were grateful to anti-trafficking
activism in Worcester, they also expressed a desire to be heard and recognized as individuals
with unique histories and knowledges. These women wanted to share their lives and
experiences as individuals so that the Worcester community and beyond could hear an
uncensored account of sex work. They sought a forum in which they could share their
experiences and knowledges with the larger community without being held to a political
agenda or particular message. Mikayla and I developed an oral history project in response to
these reported needs and, with the support of Marianne Sarkis, collected sixteen stories from
four former sex workers over the course of four months. Collectively, these stories form a
public archive that can be accessed online. 1
This oral history project, entitled “Sex Work and
Storytelling”, is not intended to advance any particular activist organization or agenda.
Rather, it provides women a space to share their experiences and knowledge. These stories
are crucial not only because they speak specifically to the failings or successes of anti-
trafficking organizations, but also because they allow readers to learn from sex workers as
individuals with profound epistemic insights and experience.
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The online archive can be found at http://wordpress.clarku.edu/tellyourstory/.

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Thesis Outline
I begin my thesis with an explanation of my methodology and provide more
background information about my work with local organizations in Worcester and the
development of the “Sex Work and Storytelling” archive. I contextualize my analytical
framework by describing how oral history work supports feminist research paradigms. That
is, I argue that oral history research is a feminist alternative to the positivist research
methodologies that dominate social science research. In framing my evaluation of the
narrative data, I describe knowledge as experiential and argue that former sex workers’
experience offer them epistemic authority.
My second chapter describes how oral history data provides alternative ways of
understanding the effects of trauma. As self-identified survivors of sexual trauma, each of the
four narrators communicated different ways their experiences of sexual trauma continue to
influence their daily lives. Their narratives challenge anti-trafficking activists and researchers
who uphold traditional trauma theories that pathologize the experiences of survivors. I survey
feminist trauma theorists who argue that by listening to trauma beyond its pathology, we can
begin to understand and appreciate the realities and knowledge survivors try to communicate.
In keeping with my analytical framework, I argue that anti-trafficking activists must take
seriously the epistemic insights that survivors gain from traumatic experiences.
My third chapter explores how former sex workers experience policing authorities.
Rather than impose categorical insecurities for discrete analysis, I examine former sex
workers’ understandings of precarity as a result of power relations. This analysis is crucial
because it explores how processes of othering or markedness make sex workers particularly
vulnerable to police misconduct. Women’s stories implicate institutional authority as

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contributing to current and former sex workers’ feelings of insecurity. Former sex workers’
feelings and reservations about police officers and surveillance practices are important
despite the fact that not all of their experiences took place in Worcester. Their stories remain
relevant and valuable in the context of Worcester insofar that they reveal women’s historical
relationships with and perceptions of police. This consideration is particularly significant in
Worcester as anti-trafficking activists focus their efforts on the police’s role in combatting
prostitution.
My fourth chapter explores how current and former sex workers establish
relationships based upon these shared insights and experiences. This analysis centers on how
former and current sex workers manage trauma and markedness cooperatively as friends,
allies, and sexual and romantic partners. I analyze stories to demonstrate how these mutual
understandings allow women to support one another through particularly difficult times in
their lives. Their insights not only make them able to relate to one another but make them
particularly compassionate towards other former and current sex workers. This suggests that
former sex workers should be an active part in the healing and rehabilitation processes of sex
workers looking to leave sex work. It also suggests that women should not have to abandon
old friendships with former or current sex workers as part of their rehabilitation efforts.
Oral history data opens up new areas of inquiry by allowing narrators to direct their
own interviews. They also provide rich content because narrative data emerges as stories,
allowing us to understand how knowledge is based on experience and social positioning.
Each of these three data chapters explores how women’s experiences as sex workers
influenced the knowledge they create about the world around them. Not only do their stories
offer information about the lives of sex workers themselves, but they also challenge popular

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theories about trauma, offer alternative understandings about authority, and help us
understand how current and former sex workers engage with one another. In my work
conducting oral histories with sex workers and analyzing their narratives, I uphold the
important of recognizing sex workers’ insight and knowledge without the confines of
political messaging and traditional research strategies.

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Chapter 2: Methodology and Method 2
Fieldwork
In the summer of 2014, I conducted research on prostitution in the city of Worcester
as a LEEP3
fellow under the supervision of Professor Marianne Sarkis. During this time, I
collaborated with various organizations throughout the city committed to reducing sexual
exploitation. I worked mostly closely with the Worcester Alliance Against Sexual
Exploitation (WAASE) and their subcommittee group, Main South End Demand Working
Group. WAASE describes its commitment to combating sexual exploitation in their mission
statement:
“The mission of the Worcester Alliance Against Sexual Exploitation (WAASE) is to
develop prevention and intervention strategies designed to address sex trafficking in
greater Worcester. We identify and respond to victims, survivors, traffickers,
buyers, and facilitators in order to improve the health and wellness of our
community.” (Worcester Alliance Against Sexual Exploitation 2014)
End Demand Worcester is affiliated with the Worcester Alliance Against Sexual
Exploitation and emphasizes its role in reducing demand for sexual exploitation in the city.
Four working groups compromise the organization: 1) Outreach and services for women, 2)
Public education, 3) Planning for a rally, and 4) Legislative and policy reviews. While
attending these working group meetings and speaking with various community organizers, I
noted a lack of former and current sex workers in this programming. I was curious as to why
former and current sex workers were not present at community meetings and wanted to better
understand their perspectives about local organizing. I was also interested to see if how they
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2
While some scholars may put these technical descriptions of method in an appendix, I
include this material in the body of the thesis because I believe it is an integral part of the
politics of my project.
3
LEEP Fellowships are awarded to Clark University undergraduate researchers to complete a
project sponsored by a Clark alumnus, LEEP partner, or faculty member. !

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spoke about their experiences of doing sex work differed from national and local reporting
about sex work. It was my initial intention that by reaching out to sex workers, groups like
End Demand Worcester and WAASE could more fully incorporate the perspectives of
former and current sex workers in their programming strategies.
Professor Marianne Sarkis, and fellow LEEP researcher, Mikayla Bobrow,
recognized the need to include more former and current sex workers in local campaigns
against sex trafficking too. With this goal in mind, we reached out to various women’s
support groups in Worcester and began attending meetings at Everyday Miracles, a
rehabilitation center in the city. I attended women’s group meetings at the center and
listened to women speak about their struggles with addiction problems, domestic violence,
and sexual trauma. While not every woman identified herself as a former prostitute, many
women that attended the meetings identified as having engaged in sex for material
compensation (e.g., money, drugs). Several women described being coerced into giving men
sexual favors so that they could satisfy their addiction habits, afford food, and pay rent.
These women used the language of “survival sex” to describe dependency on sex for pay. In
a 2014 New England Center for Investigative Reporting story, one Worcester woman
describes her reliance on sex work, stating, “I have to support my habit. I sell my soul on a
day-to-day basis. Without the men, how am I going to make money?” (McKim and Bottari
2014). Another women interviewed echoes these sentiments: “My body just screams
narcotics. I despise everything I have to do to get money” (ibid). It is not just dependency on
drugs that leads women to sell sex in Worcester. As Adore states in her story “To the Men”,

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“sometimes it’s not even about drugs, sometimes it’s about paying your rent to keep a roof
over your head.” (Adore, To the Men)4
As I grew increasingly familiar with this community of women and the particular
context of sex work in Worcester, I was struck by women’s willingness to share their
experiences with others and me. Women also demonstrated support for one another in their
healing processes by acknowledging the validity of one another’s stories and perspectives.
Everyday Miracles not only offered a healing and therapeutic space for women, but it
allowed them an audience to legitimize and acknowledge their unique insights and
experiences gained from sex work. While women were thankful for these spaces, however,
they also told me that they wanted the public to understand their stories and perspectives.
Several women cited fear of retribution as preventing them from speaking out publicly. This
was particularly difficult for women who had received material compensation for sex and for
women who were current or former drug users given the stigmatization and illegality of both
sex work and drug use. Not only were women prevented from sharing their stories with
larger audiences for fear of public backlash, but also expressed research fatigue in working
with journalists and advocates. Sex workers in particular described their relationship with
reporters as exhausting. One woman explains, “….women are tired of telling their stories
over and over again for reporters. We need to compile them and have one source. We also
need to be taken seriously” (Field Note, September 26, 2014).
The Research Process
In response to these concerns and observations, we used our LEEP fellowships to
develop storytelling workshops in collaboration with former sex workers and community
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http://wordpress.clarku.edu/tellyourstory/to-the-men/
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organizers in Worcester. Our goal was to create a space for former sex workers to write about
their lived experiences so that they could circulate and share their stories with a larger
audience, while also remaining anonymous. We coordinated these efforts with Pathways for
Change, a rape crisis center in Worcester, in order to ensure that a counselor would be
present at all classes. We also sought the advice of outreach workers in the city and
individuals with experience in memoir-writing classes such as Lani Peterson5
and conducted
such classes for approximately two months between July and August of 2014. Despite initial
enthusiasm for the project, many women were unable to attend meetings and reported feeling
intimidated by the writing process. They criticized the classes as being too academic and felt
alienated while writing their stories. Instead, they asked for the opportunity to share their
stories verbally and have someone transcribe them. In response, we reframed this storytelling
writing workshop into an oral history project. Women interested in participating in the oral
history project met directly with us and were free to communicate anything they wanted to
share with us. Given the conversational nature of these oral histories, we did not orient the
content of women’s narratives by asking structured interview questions.
Approximately one week after telling their stories, women reviewed their transcripts
with Mikayla and me. We provided each woman with an unedited version of her oral history
interview (including all major grammatical errors in speech and fillers such as “ums”) and a
minimally edited version of the narrative in which we removed our comments, reordered
phrases, and applied standard grammar. We presented both versions to each woman before
engaging in a collaborative editing process where she could decide which parts of her
narrative she wished to be included in a public archive. In each case, we asked women to
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Lani Peterson is a psychologist and storyteller who gives lectures and workshops focused
on storytelling and women’s development. (Peterson.)

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clarify certain parts of their stories by providing additional information that contextualized
each narrative. Participants were also able to take out entire sections of their narrative and/or
add considerable content to their stories. This second meeting or editing collaboration
occurred at least one week after the initial oral history interview to ensure that women had
enough time to process their experience and reflect upon what they shared with us. The
women had the final say in what was included in the archive and to what extent their original
narratives were modified. We also worked with women to change identifiers in their stories
such as street names and names of friends or colleagues. Women were able to choose these
replacement markers and choose a pseudonym for themselves in order to protect
confidentiality.
Collaboratively editing the stories with participants allowed women to hide their
voices and subsequently helped us protect their confidentiality. We used Rebecca Jones’
(2004) oral history editing processes in which she identifies four principles that inform oral
history editing choices. That is:
1) “The purpose of the project and its audience
2) Enhancing communication with the audience
3) The responsibility of the author to the narrator 6
4) The necessity of allowing the narrator to review the edited version.7
“(Jones
2004: 28)
Next I will discuss the application of each of these principles in the creation of the “Sex
Work and Storytelling” archive.
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Note on terminology: I use the word “author” here in quoting Jones and describing the oral
history practice guidelines that I draw upon. However, I position myself as an editor
throughout the rest of this thesis in acknowledgement of former sex workers as both the
narrators and authors of their own stories.
7
Note on terminology: Following Yow’s (2005) model of oral history practice, I use the term
narrator instead of interviewee because it “places primary importance on the person telling
the story. Interviewee uses the suffix ee, which is a derivative form, secondary to the primary
noun, interviewer” (157).

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Principle 1: The purpose of the project and its audience
“Sex Work and Storytelling” is a collaborative, participatory project aimed at
responding to the reported needs of former and current sex workers. Each of the four
women who told stories to what eventually became a public archive communicated
different reasons for wanting to be involved, however they all saw their participation as
an opportunity to share their knowledge and experience with larger audiences. One
participant, named Adore, saw her involvement as helpful in garnering support for sex
workers and spreading awareness about their struggles through storytelling. In a written
statement about the project, she shared “I really appreciate you as Professors, Students,
and Colleagues; taking the time and interest to put this together. I just wish it had
happened a lot sooner. Maybe there would have been a lot more women’s lives saved”.
Hija del Sol, another contributor, offered a different outlook on the purpose of the
project by emphasizing the therapeutic and empowering nature of the work. She stated,
“I would like to say thank you for the opportunity to express and purge my thoughts. The
process was great! You all made it very comfortable and easy”. Despite the various
perspectives of individual participants, the principal purpose was simply to collect and
share former sex workers’ stories given that they felt they had not previously had the
opportunity to do so publicly. Following Portelli’s establishment of the purpose of oral
history projects, I maintained that the purpose of the archive was “to amplify their voices
by taking them outside, to break their sense of isolation and powerlessness by allowing
their discourse to reach other people and communities” (Portelli in Yow 2005, 136).
Principle 2: Enhancing communication with the audience
We did not establish a particular audience for women’s stories. Therefore, it was
important that women’s narratives were accessible to a range of people. It was also

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crucial that women felt comfortable honestly communicating their stories with us
without worrying that their voices would be recognized over audio recordings.
Therefore, we edited the oral histories in such a way that they could be translated from
oral accounts to publishable text that could be available online. We believed this was the
“most accessible and enduring product for the widest cross section of the population”
(Jones 2004, 31).
Principle 3: The responsibility of the editor to the narrator
Mikayla and I also took very seriously our responsibility to the narrators. These
responsibilities included showing compassion for individuals as they opened themselves
up to us during the interview as well as being accountable for the dissemination of their
stories and ensuring confidentiality to the best of our ability. To address the first point,
we established and maintained open communication with participants before, during,
and after the oral history interview. This required that we developed relationships with
current and former sex workers in Worcester before beginning the oral history project.
Our experience with the End Demand campaign before conducting interviews gave us
insight in to the realities of the struggles of former and current sex workers and allowed
us to relate to participants more easily. The connections we made with these women
attending rehabilitation meetings also made former sex workers more comfortable
around us. They saw that other current and former sex workers accepted our presence,
deemed us safe, and were willing to share private and personal information in front of
us.
We took care not to judge women based on the stories they shared with us and
demonstrated empathy and compassion during the oral history interviews. We

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recognized our position as co-creators of their stories and did not want to appear
emotionally distant from participants given the emotional nature of many of the stories.
Alison Jaggar (1997) establishes emotion as a “critical aspect of knowledge seeking”
and argues that emotions should be validated in the research process (Hesse-Biber 2014:
22). Our decision to emotionally engage with participants rejects positivism’s superficial
distinction between what is rational and what is emotional. Further, it supports feminist
approaches to research relationships that argue by “establishing a relationship of
mutuality between researcher and subject of research through self-revelation and
emotional support” one can “produce better data and richer understanding” (Sprague and
Kobrynowicz 2006: 32). Thus, our emotional availability not only made women more
comfortable sharing their stories, but allowed us to acknowledge our role as emotive
participants and co-creators of the oral history archive.
We also understood our responsibility in protecting women’s identities and
overseeing the dissemination and publication of their stories. Before the interviews
began, we told women that they could stop the interview at anytime and had complete
control over which aspects of their narrative would be publicized. At the end of the
interview and editing process, we ensured that only the material narrators wished to be
shared publicly would be made available to the public. 8
Principle 4: The necessity of allowing the narrator to review the edited version.
As explained above, we made all versions of the oral history transcript available
to participants. The second version of their transcript presented at the second meeting
contained only minor edits and participants could reject these edits or expand upon them.
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We submitted the audio recordings to Professor Marianne Sarkis, who deleted them.

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It was important to hold the editing meeting at least one week after our initial interview
to allow women adequate time to reflect upon what they had shared before revising or
“editing” their stories. In each case, women had an active role in editing the final
transcription for publication by adding parts to their story for clarification, choosing their
own pseudonyms, and taking out elements of the story that they either did not feel
comfortable sharing or felt were no longer relevant. Narrators both edited and took an
active role in shaping their stories.
Oral history as Feminist Scholarship
I draw from sixteen stories from four different women (Adore, Laura, Hija del Sol,
and Tina) for this thesis, which collectively form an online archive. My analysis of this
archive concerns the way sex workers transmit knowledge about their lives through
storytelling. As I am invested in feminist practice, I use oral history as a way to acknowledge
marginalized epistemologies or ways of knowing.
To contextualize my work and methodology, I next discuss feminist contributions to
research paradigms, examining how oral histories may reveal alternative ways of making
meaning and framing oral history as a feminist research methodology particularly important
in sex work research and activism. According to Hesse-Biber et.al (2004), feminist
scholarship is “built on the premise of challenging hierarchal modes of creating and
distributing knowledge” (3). Although there exists no one feminist paradigm, feminist-
informed research questions traditional concepts and theories and proposes new methods of
inquiry (Westmarland 2001). These theories counter what feminist scholars have deemed an
uncritical attachment to positivist epistemology in social science research. Sprague and
Kobrynow (2006) refer to positivist epistemology as a “focus on objectivity. Positivism

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assumes that truth comes from eliminating the role of subjective judgments and
interpretations…. Subjectivity is (thus) an obstacle to knowledge“ (26). Social science
research based on positivist epistemology emphasizes the importance of uncovering
objective, generalizable truths. This positivist paradigm has dominated social science
research since the first half of the twentieth century (Guba and Lincoln 1994). Despite its
popularity, however, it has met resistance from feminist scholars who have argued that
positivist research is not the “objective, unbiased, apolitical process it represents itself to be”
(Sprague and Kobrynoqicz 2006: 26).
Feminist epistemologists and researchers such as Donna Haraway and Sandra
Harding establish “feminist objectivity” as an alternative to positivist objectivity. That is,
they establish that all knowledge is “situated” and emphasize experience (or experiential
knowledge) as a serious mode of inquiry (Hesse-Biber 2004). Rather than a positivist
paradigm, feminist research does not frame subjectivity or emotions as impeding the research
process. Instead, experiential or situated knowledge maintains the importance of
contextualizing knowledge as produced by individuals with particular subjectivities.
From this, several theories emerged in feminist scholarship, which uphold the
epistemic legitimacy and importance of women’s knowledge and experience. Feminist
standpoint theory, for example, is based on the idea that an individual’s lived experiences and
material conditions shape their understanding of the world (Hesse-Biber 2014). This theory
goes a step further, however, in privileging the knowledge of marginalized communities. For
feminist standpoint theorists, the structurally oppressed possess more nuanced
understandings of social realities given their subordination (ibid). They follow the Hegelian
and Marxist tradition of “double vision” in arguing that marginalized communities are

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“required to understand practices of oppression, to understand both oppressed and oppressor;
but, this epistemic bipolarity is neither required of, nor available to, the dominant” (Bowell
2011). Here, marginalized communities possess epistemic authority because they possess
knowledge both about dominant narratives or constructions of knowledge and their own.
Oral histories aid in this feminist project by exposing and privileging subjugated
knowledges. Oral histories are thus used to reveal “the ways that the narrator attributes
meanings to experiences” (Yow 2005: 9). As Anderson, et al (1987) states, “when women
speak for themselves, they reveal hidden realities. New experiences and new perspectives
emerge that challenge the “truths” of official accounts and cast doubt upon established
theories” (104). My use and analysis of oral histories is thus a challenge to how knowledge is
traditionally produced in social science research and acknowledges the authority of sex
workers speaking on various aspects of sex work.
The use of oral histories is particularly important for feminists working with sex
workers given the ways in which sex workers’ voices are undermined on a global scale. Anti-
trafficking advocates especially have been criticized as controlling sociopolitical discourse
and setting the agenda for activism about sex work. For example, the Sex Worker Open
University criticized the Feminism in London conference, held in December 2014, for not
including any working sex workers in a panel about sex work during the conference. In a
blog post for the conference’s website, they state:
“For Feminism in London to include current sex workers on a panel about sex work
should be non-negotiable, both in terms of the necessity of hearing the insights that
only current sex workers can bring and in terms of simple justice, the logic being
that the people who are most affected by any given issue should play a significant
role in conversations about it. Listening to the voices of those most affected is basic
feminist praxis. A sex work panel without any current sex workers violates that
obvious precept. “(Sex Worker Open University qtd. in Massey)

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By not including former and current sex workers in their activism and scholarship,
some feminists fail to acknowledge a range of sex workers’ experiences and opinions and
thus contribute to establishing polarizing and homogenizing views on sex work. While there
are many aspects of this debate, I summarize two main positions to demonstrate the
polarization of feminist discourse. First, the oppression paradigm claims that prostitution is
“a quintessential expression of patriarchal gender relations” (Weitzer 2009 214). In contrast,
the empowerment paradigm is in direct opposition to this understanding and “focuses on the
ways in which sexual commerce qualifies as work, involves human agency, and may be
potentially empowering for workers” (ibid 215). While the former considers sex work human
trafficking and advocates for the complete eradication of prostitution, the latter upholds the
importance of legalizing sex work in reducing stigma and harm.
While some former sex workers do work within these frameworks as activists and
organizers, this politicized binary does not allow for accounts that detract from or
compromise political messages. Kessler (2005) argues that in order to understand the full
range of the implications sex work has on the lives of women, it is crucial to include the
voices of women themselves. This approach does not ascribe preconceived notions of sex
workers as either agents or victims. Abrams (2005) also cautions researchers and social
service practitioners from employing a simplistic understanding of sex workers. She argues
that “to depict women as shaped by pervasive male sexual coercion was to tell a partial and
potentially injurious story” (1995: 305). With this, depictions of sex workers as sexually
subordinate disregard those sex workers who feel that their work is a legitimate way of
earning income. At the same time, however, it is equally problematic to dismiss that some
sex workers consider themselves “victims” or “survivors” of patriarchal culture and capitalist

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economies. While political messages that equate sex work with sex trafficking may
undermine the voices of sex workers who advocate for the legalization of the trade, silencing
those that experience sex work as triggering and inherently damaging is also debasing.
My analysis of sex workers’ narratives does not attempt to resolve these political
tensions. Rather, it upholds the value of oral history in revealing and appreciating alternative
ways of knowing and experiencing the world. I discuss these two paradigms to show how the
failure to incorporate the voices of sex workers has lead to a homogenization of sex worker
experience and identity in feminist discourse. By establishing a collaborative research project
with former sex workers themselves and privileging their voices without the imposition of a
political agenda, I escaped the confines of these partisan tensions and reveal more nuanced
understandings of sex workers’ knowledge and experiences through oral history research.
By localizing my analysis, I am able to examine how particular socio-economic conditions
inform the individual experiences of sex workers in Worcester without establishing
overarching political claims.
Oral history research opens up new areas of inquiry. This practice is particularly
important in research about sex work given the politicized agendas of many researchers,
public officials, and activists working on and writing about sex work. In my analysis of these
oral histories, I base my work on three key ideas provided by feminist standpoint theorists
and feminist researchers. That is: 1) knowledge is socially situated, 2) sex workers posses
particular insights due to their marginalized or “othered” social positioning and, lastly, 3)
research about sex workers must privilege the perspectives and knowledges of sex workers
themselves. These assumptions guide my analysis as I explore sex workers’ epistemic
authority and transmission of knowledge through storytelling

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Chapter 3: Survivor Epistemology
In this chapter I explore how oral histories offer insight as to how individuals remain
“attached” to traumatic pasts. I posit former sex workers’ narratives as evidence of the
epistemological and ontological implications of sexual trauma. Here, I argue that experiences
of sexual trauma continue to shape women’s knowledges and worldviews even after they
have “left” sex work. In keeping with a feminist approach to epistemology, I maintain that
these attachments should not be narrowly framed as psychological morbidity but as ways of
constructing knowledge in relation to personal experience.
Trauma Theory
The four women involved in this oral history project each identified as survivors of
sexual trauma and spoke of the ways these experiences continue to shape their everyday
lives. Although they incorporate the language of trauma in their narratives, former sex
workers’ accounts reveal a disjuncture between trauma’s popular theorization and how it is
personally experienced and recalled. According to the American Psychological Association,
trauma is “an emotional response to a terrible event like an accident, rape, or natural disaster”
(2015). Since the 1980s, psychologists have emphasized the fear induced by trauma and the
pathology associated to that fear and the majority of psychological research on trauma
emphasizes the diagnosis of posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD) (DePrince and Freyd
2002). The classification of PTSD as an anxiety disorder reflects the assumption that fear is
the base of all PTSD responses. This historical emphasis on fear as associated with trauma
maintains the importance of “introducing corrective emotional information” in reducing
symptoms and “healing” survivors (ibid 72).

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More contemporary theoretical approaches to trauma offer betrayal as another
“motivating reaction in traumatic responses” (ibid 73). Freyd (1996) originally established
betrayal trauma theory to explain the effect of trauma on memory failure. She explains that it
can be purposeful or strategic for survivors to “forget” or remain unaware of abuse when
they are emotionally or materially dependent on their perpetrator. “Forgetting” the
experience and knowledge of a traumatic event, therefore, can be strategic depending on the
social relationship between survivor and perpetrator (DePrince and Freyd 2002). Another
popular theory about trauma that has gained wide recognition in the United States is the
shattered assumptions theory, established by Janoff-Bulman in 1992. Shattered assumptions
theory asserts that trauma “shatters” three basic assumptions “neuro-typical” individuals hold
about themselves and the world around them. The first fundamental assumption is that the
‘world’ around us is inherently good and that all people are sincere despite negative
behavior. The second assumption is that a person’s behavior influences what happens to
them (ie: good things happen to good people). The third assumption postulates the self as
inherently worthy and valuable (Janoff-Bulman 1992). According to Janoff-Bulman, these
assumptions serve as the root of our wellbeing and give our lives meaning. Roch and
Newman establish a fourth assumption that explicitly connects Janoff-Bulman’s theory and
betrayal trauma theory. This fourth assumption, that people are inherently trustworthy, is
shattered when trusted individuals are abusive (DePrince and Freyd 2002). Following this
logic, survivors lose their ability to maintain these assumptions in the aftermath of trauma
and thus suffer from ontological damage.
Shattered assumption theory and betrayal theory gained traction in mainstream
psychology in the latter half of the 1990s (Feldman and Kaal 2013). These theories recognize

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how trauma affects one’s beliefs and worldviews beyond a fear-based paradigm, marking a
shift from trauma as an emotional response to an acknowledgment of trauma’s effect on
survivors’ cognition. Here, betrayal theory and shattered assumption theory emphasize
survivors’ ontologies as fundamentally disturbed. In order to “heal” from trauma, therefore,
survivors must fully restore a “normative” worldview (ibid). Many psychologists and
researchers uphold this theory in analyzing trauma’s affect on individual worldviews and in
their development of rehabilitation practices. This work about trauma (sexual and otherwise)
emphasizes the importance of “healing” or “curing” the individual (Underwood 2007;
DePrince, 2002). Betrayal trauma theory and shattered assumptions theory thus uphold the
importance of “returning” to a life before trauma and working towards reconstructing a
worldview unscathed by experience.
Feminist Responses to Trauma Discourse
Feminist scholars caution incorporating such theories of trauma into sex work
research. Indeed, there already exists substantial literature emphasizing trauma’s negative
affect on sex workers’ mental health (Ross, Farley, and Schartz, 2003; Cooper, Kennedy, and
Yulle, 2001). This is not to argue that studies focused on sex workers’ experiences of trauma
are not beneficial. On the contrary, these studies are necessary in crafting treatment
programs and for advocating for safer working conditions for sex workers. However, sex
work researchers must also address feminist scholars’ warnings that these applications can be
limiting and reductive. More specifically, they argue that the betrayal trauma theory,
emphasis on PTSD research, and shattered assumptions theory do not adequately challenge
the presumed relationship between fear and trauma and fail to incorporate a feminist
epistemology. A closer look at the ways women speak of their own traumatic experiences

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specifically in the context of sex work reveal more feminist possibilities for approaching
trauma discourse.
In laying the groundwork for a “feminist trauma theory” Emma Tsersis (2013)
criticizes contemporary trauma theory as “no longer centered on feminist values and
intentions, having becoming preoccupied with medically oriented issues concerning
diagnosis and standardized treatment” (156). Further, she argues that an emphasis on
dysfunction “seems incongruent with feminist goals of empowering women and resisting
pathologizing understandings of their experiences” (ibid 158). Karyn L. Freedman (2006)
also criticizes trauma discourse as problematic and centers much of her critique on the
establishment of the shattered worldview theory.9
She describes how epistemologists
“routinely dismiss trauma- informed beliefs as irrational” (9). She argues that survivors’
worldviews are characterized as “emotional” responses and not based in “reason” (10). A
survivor’s knowledge and worldview are thus regarded as “emotional states” lacking
“epistemological legitimacy”(10). Freedman (2006) argues that a feminist approach to
psychic trauma must instead emphasize “the epistemological significance of the kinds of
beliefs that grow out of traumatic experiences” (1). In responding to the aforementioned
interpretations of psychological trauma, Freedman (2006) upholds the importance of
recognizing the validity of survivors’ beliefs about the world as informed by personal
experience. She also argues that just because survivors may attribute emotions to these
experiences does not mean their responses lack cognitive value.
In light of these theoretical arguments, I offer oral history data as a way of accessing
survivors’ knowledges without pathologizing their responses to trauma. Cathy Caruth
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9
The shattered worldview theory refers to the ontological disturbances purported by the shattered assumptions
theory.

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upholds the importance of “listen(ing) to trauma beyond its pathology” in acknowledging the
“force and truth of the reality that trauma survivors face and quite often try to transmit to us”
(1995:1). Oral histories expose and situate these realities and survivors’ knowledges. This
method works toward a feminist epistemology because it does not disregard survivors’
worldviews as dysfunctional but rather as legitimate responses to traumatic experiences. In
the context of sex work, this acceptance and appreciation of alternative worldviews is crucial.
It allows those who work with sex workers to consider how trauma discourse may
inadvertently perpetuate stigma against sex workers in its emphasis on survivors’
vulnerabilities and emotionality. It is thus essential that sex work researchers and advocates
incorporate a feminist approach to trauma theory by listening to former and sex workers
without immediately imposing theories of psychiatric disability.
Emotions Beyond Fear and Betrayal
Former sex workers’ oral histories demonstrated how survivors might associate
trauma with a range of emotions outside of the betrayal-fear paradigm. In some cases,
women framed their traumatic experiences as stories of pride and survival by emphasizing
their unique abilities to negotiate precarious situations. These particular stories speak to sex
workers’ resiliency and recognition of their handling of trauma as significant triumphs. Tina
shares an experience in a story called “Without Consent”,
“I remember the rule was never to get into a car with two guys. Never. But when
you’re out there and your pimp says you can’t come home until you have a quota
and it’s dead out there because police have made arrests or it’s just a dead night
and you’re out there and its cold, you make desperate decisions. And I remember
one night two guys pulled up and I made one get in the back seat and I sat there. I
thought that doing that I would have some control over it. I’m in the passenger seat,
I tell the guy where to go. He goes everywhere I go. I had a place behind a gas
station; it was like a little ally behind the gas station over behind a homeless shelter.
We go there and I’m going to do one and then the other and just get the money up
front. I’m here and this guy wants a blowjob. I go down on him and when I come up

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the other guy has a gun right to my fucking head. Right to my fucking head. And I’m
in this dark alley and I mean talk about fight or flight. I don’t know what I have or
where it came from but I have the ability to really think on my feet, really, really
quickly with situations like this. I’ve always been able to manage to get out of the
situation and sometimes even fuck them up more than they thought they were gonna
fuck me up. I’ve just always been able to land, just by the grace of god.” (Tina,
Without Consent) 10
Tina recalls how “desperate” circumstances forced her to confront particularly
precarious situations. While Tina was not physically injured in this particular example, her
experience constitutes trauma given the intent of her “clients” to physically assault/coerce
her. Despite the traumatic nature of this experience, Tina emphasizes her agency in being
able to “escape”. She also relates this experience to other times in her life that she was able to
“control” the circumstances of her assault. Tina upholds her ability to “really think on my
(her) feet” as essential in “managing” situations and speaks openly about her experience
turning the tables on her offenders. Although she maintained that this incident was
distressing, she also recognized the potential for a worse outcome. Further, while Tina cannot
prevent traumatic situations from happening altogether, she maintains her ability to defend
herself at least in part. She even indicates that she has caused her abusers physical or
emotional harm by stating that she sometimes “fuck(s) them up more that they thought they
were gonna fuck me (her) up”. Her story is distinct from a fear-betrayal emotive paradigm in
that she associates feelings of fortunateness and pride with her traumatic experience. It also
challenges certain components of the shattered assumptions theory given that Tina did not
perceive herself as entirely “helpless”.
Laura provides another story in which she recognizes her role in protecting and
defending herself. Like Tina, Laura emphasizes the unique knowledge or “skills” she posses
in order to negotiate precarious situations. In a story called “Locks”, Laura states
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“I got in a lot of cars. Before I got in, I checked out the whole situation and
arrangement of the car. Obviously if I got in a car and the gentleman hits the knob
for the button (lock) to go down, I would carefully and sneakily put the button back
up with my hand and be very aware of what was going on. I was super paranoid of
people who pressed the lock so I wouldn’t take them far. I took them nearby under a
shady tree and that was that. So if the guy was a nutcase I could get out and run and
get help or whatever. That was one of my things that kept me safe.
Another thing I did to prevent arguments was to get the money first. You explain
what you’re going to do. What he wants. There are things I would never say. I
would never say, “What are you going to spend?”. I would never say “It’s 20 for a
blow job”. You could get a nut in the car who would spend 80 for a hand-job or a
quickie or whatever. That was another way for me to double hustle.
If a guy gave me trouble, I would walk back to where I worked or home, but
usually I didn’t have any problems. I was pretty lucky with that. I did a lot of things
to keep myself safe because I knew there were a lot of drunk wackos out there
especially after 2. Even today, I don’t want the lock in my car down. I always tell
people I’m in the car with not to lock my door. I know it’s just stupid stuff from
1976, but I can’t allow myself to be locked in a car. I’ll put a seatbelt on but don’t
put my lock down. It’s like it all got mixed up in my brain.” (Laura, “Locks”) 11
Laura acknowledges that she maintains old habits due to her sex worker past. She
describes these habits as survival strategies and, like Tina, recalls that she had some agency
in controlling her situations. Not only does her story invoke pride, but it also reveals some of
the unique knowledges sex workers possess. While some may consider Laura’s worldview
“paranoid”, her responses to situations with clients were a legitimate necessity. Laura does
not allow herself to be locked in a car because this was a survival skill she maintained during
her time as a sex worker. Her, she could not afford to assume benevolence on the part of
clients due to the nature of her work. This survival tactic was clearly crucial to Laura as she
navigated life as a sex worker and kept herself safe from potentially threatening clients.
Laura’s narrative reveals that her identity as a sex worker gave her insight into client
behavior and that she used this knowledge to keep herself safe in dangerous situations. It also
shows that Laura recognizes that she possessed unique knowledge that she used to keep
herself safe.
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Appreciating the knowledge sex workers create about the world not only in light of
traumatic experience but as a way to control or manage particularly precarious situations
prevents us from merely thinking of sex workers as helpless victims. As particularly
susceptible to violent crime and assault, sex workers often create their own strategies for
protection without the support of institutional authorities. Sex workers thus possess
considerable information about how to navigate client relationships as a survival strategy.
Their acknowledgement of these skills reveals how survivors may associate a range of
emotions with trauma depending on individual experiences.
Emotionality and Cognition
Survivors’ narratives offer epistemological and ontological alternatives to normative
conceptions of “correct” logic. Their alternative worldviews and behaviors defy certain
standards of what is “appropriate and therefore sane”, thereby challenging the presumed
distinction between emotionality and reason (Kretschmar 2007: 2). That is, while former sex
workers may be emotionally wounded, physic attachments to trauma do not necessarily
compromise former sex workers’ cognition and ability to transmit knowledge. On the
contrary, former sex workers, as survivors of sexual assault, are able to communicate insight
into realities that many of us have not even begun to consider.
A survivor’s response to stimuli may be different from the responses of an individual
who has not experienced trauma. These behaviors or reactions are normally in response to
“triggers” or “something that sets off a memory or flashback transporting the person back to
the event of his/her original trauma” (Sexual Assault Center 2008). In a story called “Post
Traumatic Growth and Reclaiming Space”, Hija del Sol describes how she establishes coping
mechanisms in managing triggers. She says,

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“I’m working really hard on my wellness. This time at the support group I finally
feel like I have some real tools to manage the symptoms and the flashbacks. The
flashbacks are the worst, especially because so many things have occurred in the
apartment I live in. I can’t afford to move. I’ve been in the same apartment for so
many years that bad things have happened in every room. I could just lie in bed and
remember being harmed. So one of the things that I learned through support group
over the last couple months, now that my son moved out, is to reclaim my room. I
repainted it and I put new fabrics and new furniture inside. It’s my room. It’s my
space. It’s my sanctuary. Even when I have company for sex at my house I don’t use
that room. It needs to be a memory-free room.
It’s one of my ways of managing trauma, especially when it comes to sex. I need a
bed that I can go to that doesn’t have anything attached to it. I find that very useful.
There are nights that I lay in bed, my primary bed, and I can’t stay there. Just
because I’ll be remembering being sexually assaulted in my own bed. I’ve been
really trying hard to change all that. Change the memories in my house, rearrange
the furniture, paint the rooms, whatever I can. It’s because of the support group that
I’ve started being able to do all those things.
I didn’t even think I was going to get this far in the group. I didn’t really know what
to expect but I got what I came for. I wasn’t even going to go for the second round
(of therapy) until I realized that I still wanted to do more and feel even better.
That’s really what I want to say about my journey. I’ve really been committed to
being well. It’s been a very long journey to try and reconcile the past and try and
heal from the sexual trauma.” (Hija del Sol, “Post-Traumatic Growth and
Reclaiming Space”)12
Hija del Sol has come to know her apartment as dangerous given her traumatic
experiences in that space and describes her apartment as triggering. Her inability to move
because of her financial situation keeps her physically contained in a place that induces
flashbacks. Although she associates her apartment with negative emotions due to experience,
she is able to work around these feelings and develop alternative strategies for herself. While
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12
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she remembers being physically assaulted in the room and is disturbed by these memories,
Hija del Sol does not describe worrying that she is in immediate danger. The way she feels
about the space, thus, does not imply that she truly believes her home to be unsafe.
Other former sex workers also discussed how they reconcile their emotional reactions to
trauma in creating knowledge about the world. In her story entitled “I Remember”, Adore
shares how she reconciles this dissonance by establishing an alternative worldview after
trauma.
“I remember the first time I got in the car, the guy pulled down his pants and it
smelled. It stunk. I puked. The fun and games were over. The more my addiction
grew, the more the pain I experienced. The more cars I had to jump in and out of.
I remember one night I got into this car with this guy. He seemed to be very nice
and then all of a sudden he put a knife to my throat. He told me not to move. And he
made me do things to him. And right there at that point, I thought that I was going
to lose my life because he had the knife pressing upside my throat. All of a sudden I
was screaming. I was crying. I was saying please don’t hurt me. And so he said to
me, “You like this? You like what you do?” There was so much anger that I heard in
that man’s voice that I never thought I was gonna make it out of that car, but finally
he let me go. I was so glad.
And sometimes I ask myself. Why did my life go in that direction? I have had men
use me. Take everything that I had. Even in relationships. And its very hurtful. Very
painful. You ask yourself, why. And then sometimes you even tell yourself, like, this
is as good as it gets. It doesn’t get any better. This is the way I’m supposed to be.
Nobody loves and cares about me anyway so why should I care about myself but all
of those are lies we tell ourselves. I guess we all go through our own journeys and
our own pain. I think that’s it.” (“I Remember”, Adore) 13
Although Adore recognizes that her experiences have altered the way she sees the
world, she reports some agency in establishing her worldview. She is able to reconcile her
impulse to believe that nobody cares for her and that life “doesn’t get any better” as “lies”
she tells herself. Freedman (2006) describes this internal conflict as cognitive dissonance.
She describes cognitive dissonances, as developed by Leon Festinger, as “the state of
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discomfort that accompanies this sort of inconsistency within an individual belief set” (111).
After a traumatic event, individuals must reconcile conflicting cognitions and emotions,
resulting in internal dissonance. Adore’s narrative perfectly encapsulates this struggle as she
describes integrating her beliefs. Laura and Hija del Sol’s stories also address these
conceptions of internal dissonance. For example, Laura identifies that while she intellectually
understands there is no longer a need to prevent herself from being locked in a car she
impulsively maintains the habit due to her past experiences. Hija del Sol also describes
“reconciling the past” in managing her emotional responses to triggering stimuli by altering
the ascetic of her home.
Adore, Hija del Sol, and Tina each describe what Freedman (2006) identifies as “the
two sides of the aftermath of psychic trauma” (109). While they may suffer from emotional
disturbances, each of these women’s stories reveal that they do possess valuable information
about the world around them. In exploring the significance of these emotional injuries on
survivors’ cognition, Freedman cites her experience as a survivor of rape to highlight the
ability of survivors to distinguish between cognitive and emotional responses. She describes
that although she may still have an “exaggerated startle response” to certain stimuli like a car
slamming or book dropping, her response is “devoid of cognitive content” (109). She also
uses this logic to explain how people can truly believe that the world is unsafe for women
without living in a perpetual state of fear. It is important to recognize this distinction because
it prevents us from deeming former sex workers’ knowledges and claims as deceivingly
emotive and unreliable.
Oral history data provides a more complete understanding of the relationship former sex
workers have with trauma. While former sex workers involved in this study may be

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emotionally wounded, they are by no means debilitated or void of agency. Their experiences
of trauma do not render them unable to act or speak authoritatively about their own
experiences. By listening to former sex workers’ experiences beyond their pathology, we can
begin to appreciate former sex workers not merely as victims but as survivors with unique
insights.

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Chapter 4: Precarity as Embodied
The previous chapter examined how traumatic experiences influence survivors’
production of knowledge and alternative worldviews. In this chapter I focus on how former
sex workers communicate their knowledge and experiences as “marked” or “othered” In
keeping with feminist standpoint theory, I argue that marked or marginalized communities
possess unique knowledge about those in positions of power. More specifically, former sex
workers’ oral histories reveal the consequences of power relations between policing authority
and sex workers. Constructions of sex workers as “deviant” and “harmful” inform the way
sex workers experience their lives as discriminately devalued and policed. I will use their
oral histories to explore how these policing measures (as informed by processes of
“othering”) contribute to women’s experience of insecurity.
Studies on sex work often seek to address how sex workers experience high rates of
economic or psychological instability, with those researchers imposing discrete categories of
analysis. For example, research tends to emphasize sex workers’ high rates of sexually
transmitted infection to illustrate sex workers’ comparative health insecurity (Centers for
Disease Control and Prevention 2013; Ramakrishnan et al. 2012; Campbell 1991). The
literature also focuses on sex workers’ relationship with substance abuse and experiences of
childhood sexual trauma and their effect on sex workers’ emotional wellbeing (Surrat et al.
2004; Nadon et al.1998). Such studies seek a “mental health morbidity” among sex workers
in determining women’s reasons for entering and remaining in sex work (Pandiyan et al.
2012). The relationship between housing insecurity and sex work also garners attention as
increasing sex worker vulnerability (Duff et.al. 2011; Campbell and O’Neil 2006).

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Such studies can be helpful in making generalizable claims about the insecurity of sex
workers. Permitting female sex workers to define precarity for themselves, however, lifts the
limits of typical categorical insecurities such as “health” and “housing” as the only types of
insecurities that sex workers face. Oral history data provides a more holistic approach to
understanding precarity as embedded in social relationships. That is, former sex workers’
experiences of markedness give them particular insights of precarity as produced through
power relations they experience in everyday life.
Constructions of Markedness
Local articles published in Worcester newspapers about prostitution reveal the extent
to which sex workers are marked as social outliers. One article, published in September
2013, describes prostitution as a “chronic problem” and upholds the integrity of police trying
to improve the quality of life by “cracking down” on prostitution (Bird 2013). This article,
entitled “ Prostitution, Drugs Raise Concerns over Student Safety in Main South”, also
emphasizes the effect of prostitution on local students and includes the enraged voices of
parents who fear their children’s exposure to sex work (Bird 2013). Another article from
April 2012 encapsulates the perspectives of local community members and business owners
with the reporter quoting one local man as saying, “I think this community is strong, and it is
really hard to live here because we get the problems. I think it has been a dumping ground for
destitute people. Send them to Main South type of thing. That kind of pushes against the
work that the community has done” (Croteau 2012). Worcester Police Chief Gary Gemme
echoed these sentiments in a 2014 press release when he stated, “The Worcester Police
Department is committed to directing resources to address the visible presence of illegal sex
for a fee activity that negatively impacts the quality of life in our neighborhoods” (Gemme

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qtd. in Corcoran 2014). These discourses mark sex workers as threats to entire communities
and render their bodies unwelcome.
The way sex workers are “othered” and publicly admonished for their work
influences how communities and individuals value the lives of sex workers and the way
police monitor and discipline their behavior. While social and political institutions are
intended to reduce or protect against precarity14
(Butler 2009), they too discipline sex
workers as transgressive bodies in order to maintain public order. Here, sex workers
experience precarity as bodies that must be expunged in order to maintain a community’s
integrity. Former sex workers’ narratives reveal how they experienced this policing as
discriminatory and a threat to their personal safety and freedoms. The women recall
surveillance and policing as traumatic and isolating. Their narratives also emphasize their
experience as discriminately disciplined and subjugated bodies and emphasize the gender
disparities in arrest rates for female sex workers. Their stories suggest that male clients are
not marked in a way that female sex workers are despite their mutual participation in illicit
sex. Although sex work involves both a buyer and seller, the public is most likely to
complain about the presence of female sex workers. Captain William Collins of the
Springfield Police Department confirms: “They’re (the women) more visible to the general
public” and more often the focus of community disdain” (Collins qtd. in McKim and Bottari
2014). The bodies of female sex workers, marked by their social transgressions, are
disciplined accordingly.
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14
For this analysis, I rely on Butler’s understanding of precarity as the “politically induced
condition of maximized vulnerability and exposure for populations expose to arbitrary state
violence and other forms of aggression that are not enacted by states and against which states
do not offer adequate protection” (2009:2).

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Adore expresses her frustration of the tendency of police officers to arrest women
rather than men. In a piece entitled, “To The Men”, she states:
“There should be a law. The same law they have for women should also apply to
men. How could the woman perform the act if the man doesn’t stop and allow them
to? They pick us up, we don’t pick them up. But it’s the woman who gets in trouble
for it and not the man. He just gets a slap on the hand and then can go ahead on
and pick up the next one.” (Adore, “To The Men”)
National, statewide, and local statistics support Adore’s claims of discriminatory
policing measures. Rosemarie Tong (1971) argues that historical gender divides in arrest
rates date as far back as 1974 when the 756 of the 768 arrests for heterosexual prostitution in
the United Sates were women (119). The UCR reports that 69 percent of those arrested for
prostitution related charges in 2011 were women (Pollock 2014: 51). In Massachusetts, 70
percent of the 920 prostitution-related arrests made in 2013 were women. (McKim and
Bottari 2014). Many activists argue against this practice, stating that these policing styles
reflect inherent biases in the police force and further victimize female sex workers. A report
filed by the Massachusetts Interagency Human Trafficking Police Task Force (2013) upheld
the importance of focusing policing efforts on arresting men by establishing the Demand
Reduction Subcommittee headed by Attorney General Martha Coakely. A report submitted
by the task force asserts, “Evidence suggests that combating demand reduces sex trafficking
and other forms of prostitution. There is a growing recognition, especially among law
enforcement, that tackling demand is a strategic, preventative approach to sex trafficking.
Arresting prostituted women and trafficked girls is inefficient at best, and leads to re-
victimization at worst” (ibid: 32).
This trend has received particular attention in Worcester where police officers arrest
more prostitutes than any other city in Massachusetts. Despite Worcester Police Chief Gary

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Gemme’s public declarations of “ongoing efforts to reduce both the supply and demand side
of the illegal sex for a fee transactions”, more female sex workers are arrested than male
Johns in Worcester (Gemme qtd. in Cocoran, 2014). In 2013, only 14 men were arrested for
prostitution related charges in Worcester compared to 157 women (McKim and Bottari,
2014). While gendered arrest rates for prostitution-related offenses are nothing new in the
city, the divide is growing at an alarming rate. As Worcester increases its efforts to combat
prostitution, state records show that the arrests of women nearly doubled from 2012 to 2013
while arrests of men in that same period were cut in half (McKim and Bottari 2014).
Police often arrest female sex workers during sting operations where police posing as
potential clients are able to arrest large numbers of women in a short amount of time. Local
newspapers publicize the sting operations carried out by the Worcester Police Department,
making public the names of the women arrested for prostitution-related arrests. For sex
workers, this record can bring disgrace and shame. In her story, “ Choosing“, Tina describes
feeling humiliated by her arrest:
“I got my name in the paper and my parents and everybody was devastated.
They put it all in the paper. I stayed the night in jail and I remember coming
out of court and seeing my mother’s face and I just knew when I got out I
didn’t want to keep doing that to my family.” (Tina, Choosing)
Public official and advocates in Worcester identify discriminatory laws as one reason
women are arrested at higher rates than men. For example, according to the Worcester
Police Department, it is more difficult to arrest men using sting operations (McKim and
Bottari 2014). This is because it can be difficult to find female police officers willing to
participate as a decoy due to perceived risk from potentially violent Johns. Another factor
contributing to the discriminate arrest rates are laws that make it easier for police to arrest
women rather than men on the street. For example, police officers in Worcester can simply

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arrest any women they see publicly soliciting sex (ibid). On the other hand, sex buyers or
Johns need to actively discuss the exchange of money for sex in order to be arrested for
soliciting sex (ibid). Advocates from the Main South End Demand Working Group argue that
the police are not holding men and women equally accountable for their involvement in the
sex trade due to these laws and biases. Professor Sarkis, a professor at Clark University and
advisor to the “Sex Work and Storytelling” oral history project”, states “The laws aren’t
working. They don’t allow the police to arrest Johns at a higher rate” (ibid).
Although advocates and community organizers in Worcester do pay attention to these
discriminate arrest rates and call for more arrests of johns, they do not critically examine the
affect of gendered surveillance and punishment on the personal lives of sex workers. When
the aforementioned statistics and one-liners are run as human interest and advocacy stories,
sex workers are not able to escape their markedness as victim-criminals and their narratives
are only valuable insofar as they advance anti-trafficking political projects. An analysis of
the relationship between police officers and sex workers from the perspective of sex workers
is crucial and supports feminist standpoint theory insofar that it acknowledge sex workers’
epistemic intimate knowledge of discriminate policing practices. The oral histories in the
“Sex Work and Storytelling” archive are unique in that they reveal consequences of these
policing measures.
Surveillance and Discipline
Adore shares her opinion of these processes of policing and discipline. In an excerpt
from her piece “To the Men”, she states:
“I have had cops pull me over so many times. Sometimes they pull over and say
“what are you doing here? Oh let me check and see if you have a warrant.” And
then if I have a warrant, they say, “okay let’s go because you were in the wrong
area.” They could see me getting in the car with a guy. And then the next thing you

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know, there are sirens ringing. They say, “What’s his name? Do you know his
name? If you don’t know his name, why are you in the car with him? You’re under
arrest.”
It seems like they just wait. They wait. They sit back and they wait and they see you
make a wrong move and that’s it.” (Adore, “To The Men”)
Adore explains feeling overwhelmed by the presence of police officers in public
space. She describes surveillance as harassment and feels directly targeted by police. The
mere presence of police thus becomes fraught with tension as female sex workers experience
police surveillance as invasive and harmful. Female sex workers are keenly aware of their
markedness in public space where their movements are scrutinized by an unmarked moral
safeguard. While police officers cannot be present “everywhere”, their authority is
omnipresent, as lawbreakers perceive themselves as being constantly “watched”. This story
reveals how female sex workers consider their bodies as under assault by the state authorities
that monitor their behavior and daily lives.
In a piece called “I Remember”, Adore shares details of an arrest after a particularly
traumatic experience with a potential client.
“There was this one other time. This guy couldn’t talk and I thought, Oh this is
gonna be easy. He took me down this alley and put handcuffs on me. And he had a
gun. Once again, I don’t know how I got out of that one. But I can remember he
stripped me of all my clothes and he left me there still with handcuffs on. When he
finished, he left. Fortunately, the cops came by. I got arrested for prostitution, but at
least I got out of the handcuffs. They didn’t do anything to the guy because they
couldn’t catch him.” (Adore, “I Remember”)
Although Adore was raped by her potential client and was not paid for this ‘sex’, she
was still arrested for prostitution. Adore’s identity and markedness as a sex worker ultimately
shaped the way police responded to her assault and she was punished punitively despite her
victimization. Adore does not know if she was arrested for prostitution or for attempting to

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prostitute herself. One may defend the latter as legitimate cause of arrest given that Adore
expected compensation for her sexual performance. Here, one could also argue that the
police felt the need to uphold the illegality of her intent despite her assault. Regardless of
how a reader might try to “make sense” of this story in defense of the police’s actions, it is
clear that police use their discretion in dealing with both criminals and survivors. In this case,
the police chose to see Adore as a criminal rather than a victim of assault.
Laura shares her experience as a disciplined body in her piece “Ball and Chain”
where she exposes the trauma of life in prison. The following is an excerpt from her
narrative:
“It was the summer of ‘76 and my pimp and I were in Atlanta, Georgia. There were
all sorts of things going on at that time up and down the strip. Before I hit the street,
the two of us went to the bails bondsmen and my man paid him $500 just in case
anything happened to me. This money was supposed to get me out right away. This
was on a Friday and I actually ended up getting arrested the next night on Saturday.
The whole scene was horrendous. They threw me in a van with a couple of the girls.
And we got out at the jailhouse and they take us out. There are three of us and I’m
on the end. They were chaining our legs together and that was fine. And then they
put a ball and chain on my right leg and I thought to myself, “this is what you see
on popeye”.
This cant be real. This is 1976. But that shit was real. It was real.
So I dragged the ball for quite a ways and then I get inside the jail and they’re
processing me and doing my paperwork. I tried to call the bails bondsmen because I
didn’t know anyone else in the city and I didn’t have my man’s number. After I
made the call and got no answer, they put me in a cage that had showers. The stuff
coming down from the showers was like disinfectant. I later found out it was to kill
the lice in case I had lice. And then a guy came in with this additional can. This
enormous can that reminded me of a huge watering can they used to spray flowers.
They sprayed me again and again. All over my head and my face and my hair. I had
to keep it there for five minutes before I could rinse it off. It was burning my eyes
and my skin. It was one of the most horrible experiences I had. Finally, I rinsed off
and that was that. Then, they took me to my room. My cell. It was a long walk there
with my ball and chain attached to me. There were bunk-beds in my cell. There are
two girls. One on the top bunk and one on the bottom bunk and a girl on the floor.
And so there was no room for me. They gave me the mat and I had to put my mat
under the bed and I slept under the bunk bed on the mat. I couldn’t believe it.

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The whole thing was so backwards. The prison system down south is insane. I was
like oh my god get me out of here. I was there for three days and finally my man got
in touch with the bails bondsman and got me out of there. He didn’t get a refund but
he did get me out of jail. We ended up going to New Orleans after that because I
said I’m not putting myself in a position to go back to jail in that kind of
environment for all the money in the world. It was crazy. It was really, really
crazy.” (Laura, “Ball and Chain”) 15
While Laura’s experience took place in 1973 in the American South, her story reveals
how prison guards viewed her body as “polluted”. Her story also reveals how she assumes
that she may be disciplined for her behavior given that she prepares herself for arrest in
paying the bails bondsman prior to her arrest. Although she is not surprised by her arrest, she
finds the prison conditions remarkable. When recalling the experience, she continuously
asserts how “unbelievable” the experience was and emphasizes the most horrific aspects of
her treatment. Laura experienced the preoccupation of disciplinary authorities to aggressively
“cleanse” incoming inmates as “one of the most horrible” she has ever had. Not only was
Laura’s body subjected to a violent and imposing cleansing, but she also endured horrific
treatment in her sleeping arrangement with shackling the penultimate form of authoritative
control over her body. Laura’s story shows the ways that sex workers recall their bodies as
restrained, subjugated, and disciplined. Her emotive retelling reveals how sex workers may
experience the control of their bodies and harsh punishment as precarity.
Sexual Violence
Sex workers’ narratives reveal how their markedness and the sociocultural context of
prostitution make them particularly vulnerable to the whims of authority figures. This does
not just occur with respect to the way authority police the bodies of sex workers but rather
how police officers may take advantage of sex workers’ vulnerability for personal pleasure.
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15
http://wordpress.clarku.edu/tellyourstory/laura/

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Men’s roles in the lives of these sex workers were marked largely as violent and coercive and
women spoke of fear, distrust, and exploitation particularly with respect to their relationship
with police officers. Herein lie more tensions between women’s personal experiences with
institutional authority and the purported goals of social and political institutions to minimize
precarity.
Laura shares her experience with a police officer who attempted to use his authority to
exploit her vulnerability and the illegal nature of her work. In a story called “Surprise”, she
describes an interaction with a police officer posing as a paying customer. She states,
“I remember one evening. It was rainy. Pouring actually. And I got in this car. The
gentleman had a sort of windbreaker on. I couldn’t really see what he was wearing.
Dark clothes. I told him to pull up the house we were going to and he pulls out his
gun and he shows me his badge and says he is the police. He says he is going to
shoot me if I don’t give him a blowjob for free. He was flipping out. He didn’t know
what to do. And then finally he unlocked his car and I got out of his car and that
was the end of that. But isn’t that insane? He wanted a freebee, whips out his badge,
pulls his gun like he’s going to shoot me. I say I ain’t afraid of guns. Shoot me! I
ain’t giving you nothing for free. Isn’t that crazy? “ (Laura, Surprise) 16
Although Laura was ultimately able to evade the police officer’s advances, her
experience of police violence and coercion is troubling and speaks to a systematic trend of
gender based police brutality in the United States.17
The Sex Work Project in New York City
(2003) reported that 30 percent of the thirty sex workers interviewed stated being threatened
with violence by police officers and 27 percent reported having experienced physical
violence by police (Thukral and Ditmore 2003). A Chicago study found that 24 percent of
street-based sex workers who had been raped were raped by a police officer (Raphael and
Shapiro, 2002). The study also reported that police officers committed roughly 20 percent of
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16
http://wordpress.clarku.edu/tellyourstory/surprise/
17
It is important to remember that Laura does not specifically state that this incident occurred
in Worcester and that this reporting of assault does not necessarily implicate the Worcester
Police Department in particular.!!

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the sexual violence reported by informants (ibid). Reporting these incidences is particularly
difficult for survivors who risk exposing their status as sex workers if they report police
abuse.
Laura’s story offers insight into the complex relationships between police and female
sex workers. Her narrative complicates the construction of police officers as unmarked
authorities and exposes how police officers’ own desires and biases may inform their
interactions with female sex workers. Laura’s story is also particularly valuable because it
had not previously existed in written form. The storytelling project allowed Laura to share
this incident without fear of retribution. It is hard to imagine that Laura would have felt
comfortable sharing this story if probed by a news reporter on the street. Reporters and
journalists have collected much of the input from sex workers in Worcester in their quest for
a ‘story’ and with little incentive to make informants comfortable in their telling of it. As
previously mentioned, female sex workers assume they are being watched or monitored at all
times. It is therefore unreasonable to assume a sex worker will honestly communicate her
experiences with or feelings about authority.
This analysis here supports standpoint theory in privileging the voices of
marginalized individuals such as sex workers in order to reveal the knowledges that they
hold. Former sex workers’ positionality as “marked” gives them epistemic authority because
they experience police in a particular, situated context many of us are not privy to. While
popular media reports construct sex workers as social deviants and traditional research
emphasizes categorical insecurities for political purpose, oral histories move beyond a
victim-criminal construction of sex work and reveal the voices of individual women situated
in particular circumstances These stories about policing and markedness reveal how some

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female sex workers experience their bodies as marked and subjected to complex systems of
policing. In this case, former sex workers’ narratives show how their personal embodiments
of markedness contribute to experiences of insecurity. Their testimonies problematize state
surveillance and challenge the presumed legitimacy of institutional authority.

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Chapter 5: Friendship and Support Networks
Sex workers’ interpersonal relationships and how women develop and maintain
support networks after leaving sex work is the topic of this chapter. Research about women
involved in sex work tends to emphasize the individual’s psychological experience in
“overcoming” sex work and trauma. These studies stress the role of traditional support
networks (rehabilitation programs and therapy) in helping women cope (Farley 1994;
Lemercinier and Houtart 1977). Sex workers’ social experiences are secondary to statistical
analysis of individual psychological distress and the impact of institutional programs on
rehabilitating women. This chapter examines how women depend on their friends as
collaborative and intimate partners. In light of these narratives, I argue that former sex
workers’ epistemic insights make them feel connected with other current and former sex
workers even after they have stopped participating in sex for pay as a result of their
experiences surviving trauma and living as “marked” bodies.
Recalling Friendship: Using Differences and Strategy
In order to understand the value women place on maintaining networks after their life
in sex work, it is crucial to understand how they recall their experiences of friendship during
their time as sex workers. In a story called “White Privilege” Tina shares how her whiteness
shaped her experience as a sex worker. She highlights how she and her friend (another sex
worker) worked cooperatively to manage their respective incomes. She states,
“When I was in the life there was a saying pimp would say. They used to say stupid
shit. This was really disgusting. I don’t even want to say it. Saying things like, “ I
rather see ten black bitches die than see a white girl cry.” They said things like that
because white girls made more money. It was no secret that I made more money
than my best friend (who was not white), so a lot of times, cause we were such good
friends, we would say, “do you want the salt and pepper team?” You know? Play it
up like that cause she was my friend. I kept her close to me. I knew it was usually me
stopping the car but she was fast walker and a fast talker. She was fast with her

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hands. She was better at picking pockets. Those were her survival skills. She
probably brought just as much as I did home and she had more challenges. Where I
could just go and flat back (which is just legitimately doing it on my back), she
could not cause I got more money. “ (Tina, “White Privilege”) 18
Tina’s story demonstrates how race informs individual experience and the
construction of alliances among women. She begins her story by explaining that white
women made more money and were subsequently valued more than women of color by their
pimps. Tina understood that her whiteness gave her advantages and acknowledges that her
friend of color had to develop different strategies in order to make money and survive as a
sex worker based upon clients’ preferences for white women. She even says that her friend
was “better” at certain skills like pick pocketing while Tina could simply rely on her
whiteness in order to appeal to clients and make money. Although each woman possessed a
different skill set based upon the racialized biases of clientele, they worked together to ensure
equity of income. Tina felt responsible for giving her friend opportunity by “drawing in”
clients. Rooted in their friendship, both Tina and her friend understood themselves as
working together to navigate an inherently biased system. Her narrative not only speaks to
the racialized experience of sex workers, but it also reveals how women use friendship as
strategy.
Tina continues her story to explain that she and her friend also considered prejudice
in their attempts to get away with other crimes. In describing their experience stealing, Tina
states:
“We didn’t have to say these things before we went in. We didn’t have to say, “you
be the decoy and I’m gonna do it.” Society almost says that to us. We already knew,
if the other person black was gonna, they would send the store clerk or security on a
wild goose chase while I could “play my color.” I could go in and not be watched.“
(Tina, “White Privilege”)
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Here, Tina and her friend see themselves in light of how others perceive them and
negotiate this markedness in order to steal, understanding the ways in which race made them
differently vulnerable to surveillance and being caught. Tina uses the language of role-
playing to describe how she uses whiteness to her advantage. That is, Tina steals while her
friend of color acts as a decoy. She understands that she will not be watched as carefully as
her friend of color and uses her friend to distract security guards while she steals. Both Tina
and her friend subvert these racialized expectations for their mutual benefit.
Tina ends her narrative by explaining that neither she nor her friend had to “practice”
their deliberate and strategic performances. She states:
“We didn’t have to practice that. Society already told us that. We already knew that.
It was almost something you just know. When you’re in that life, you just know.
My pimp even made me dye my hair blonde. “ (Tina, “White Privilege”)
Tina and her friend did not need to have an explicit conversation about how others
perceive them in light of such racial bias. Rather, she and her friend were so intimately aware
of the ways others constructed them that they were able to use that knowledge to their
advantage without even talking about it. Du Bois refers to this compulsive process of
considering oneself in relation to how others perceive them as double consciousness. He
describes double consciousness as “a peculiar sensation, this double-consciousness, this
sense of always looking at one-self through the eyes of others, of measuring one's soul by the
tape of a world that looks on in amused contempt and pity” (1903: 9). Tina’s friend’s
experience of double consciousness was informed not only by her position as a sex worker
but also as a woman of color. The intersection of these identities complicated her experience
in a way that it did not for Tina. However, Tina also had to perceive herself in light of the
desires of clientele and the assumptions of store clerks. Although distinct, both women

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negotiated their behavior to reflect outside expectation and perception. This narrative also
upholds feminist standpoint theory in its acknowledgment that marginalized groups must
intimately understand the beliefs and worldviews of those in positions of power in order to
survive. Their stories not only reveal their own interpretation of events and experiences but
also reveal the perspectives of those in positions of power. Tina refers to this process as an
inherent part of living in society and understands this knowledge as a byproduct of
experience. Her assertion that she and her friend “didn’t have to practice that. Society already
told us that” reveals the extent to which subjugated groups must understand the ways others
perceive them in order to live their daily lives. It also reveals how individuals can use role-
playing as a way to subvert expectation and support less advantaged peers. This example of
role-playing speaks to how sex workers can change their behavior to assume or fill a social
role for their benefit given the unique knowledge they possess as marked or “othered”
individuals.
Not only did Tina discuss collaborating with other sex workers, but she also
establishes her ability to navigate street-based sex work without the protection of pimps.
Pimps felt so threatened by Tina’s independence that they forbade “their” sex workers from
befriending her. In a story entitled “Life Without a Pimp Ain’t Easy”, Tina describes:
“I was in the street and I had to renegade, renegade means without a pimp. It
was really hard to be out there. The pimps would really harass me. They
didn’t want their girls with me. If I had a girl I became friendly with and he
found her with me she might get her ass kicked because she was with me and I
could be influencing her to leave him or she got her ass kicked for not
bringing me home. That’s just how the whole life was. It was just crazy.”
(Tina, “Life Without a Pimp Ain’t Easy)
Despite women’s dependency on pimps for protection, pimps understood that the
bonds between sex workers could destabilize their own relationships to sex workers. They

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! 48
employed physical force as a way to contain sex workers and undermine the transgressive
potential of these relationships. Clearly, pimps recognized something powerful and
potentially threatening about friendship among female sex workers and worked to undermine
these alliances in order to protect their authority. While Tina does not offer details about her
relationships with women during her time “renegading”, her description of pimps’ paranoia
makes salient the power of these relationships.
Sexual Intimacies Among Self-Identified Survivors
Former sex workers’ stories also show how these women relate to one another intimately,
based upon mutual understanding and shared experience. In a story entitled, “Something
Soft: My Security Blanket”, Hija del Sol shares,
“I think that when it comes to being with (other) women, we find solace away from
the male abusive sexual relationships. I have a friend who lives here locally with a
drug dealer. She always comes to me for that comfort. Her life really sucks. It really
does. The guy she lives with says you can’t turn a hoe into a housewife. That’s what
he thinks of her. All she wants is to be the housewife so to speak. Consequently, they
don’t have sex. She gives him a blowjob. She gets crack. And she says she doesn’t
want it to be like that. And I’m like well, that’s the relationship you’re in. She will
come and want to be with me, because she’s very uncomfortable in her situation.
It’s not a loving relationship and who better to understand than another woman
whose been through that. You can find that comfort there.
My female partner that doesn’t live around here is the same way. We really find that
comfort because we can call each other and say “I got stood up on a date and this
happened and that happened and men suck and I’m gonna come see you”. I guess
I’m glad to see that as a gender we can at least hold each other down. Keep each
other moving somehow. Hold each other up.
That’s been my experience; the women that I am involved with have also had very
bad sexual experiences with men. And I also know of another lesbian couple that
have had children out of rapes and never went back to a guy ever again. Being with
another woman makes sense in my mind given the situations. And I could actually
see myself in a long-term relationship with a woman. I really could. Just because I
know it would feel safe. Even though I’ve known of abusive women, its not as
common and it wouldn’t be likely that I would connect with a woman who was

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aggressive. I’m looking for soft. Softness. “ (Tina, “Something Soft: My Security
Blanket”) 19
Hija del Sol’s narrative emphasizes shared experience as unifying. Although she does not
explicitly identify other women as current or former sex workers, Hija del Sol describes their
shared experience of sexual trauma as allowing them to relate to one another sexually and
romantically. Women do not necessarily make use of the label “sex worker” to identify with
other women; rather it is their shared experiences of sexual trauma or discrimination that
unite them. She refers to various relationships she has in her own life and those she has
observed between other women to emphasize the importance of same sex relationships in
dealing with sexual violence. This story allows us to understand the connectedness of women
from various backgrounds who identify themselves as survivors of assault or coercion. Her
narrative is a tender account of the ways women relate to one another and develop
relationships that offer them emotional support, sexual fulfillment, and romance.
Tina offers another perspective on intimate relationships after sex work in describing
her sexual and romantic relationship with a male formerly involved in sex work. In a story
entitled “Life After the Life”, Tina shares feeling understood in her marriage given their
shared prior involvement in sex work. She states,
“A part of me can fall back into being attracted into the whole lifestyle. My husband
and I can laugh and joke about it because we’ve experienced so much of it. I love
him in a way too because that I can do that. If I just had a square dude, how would I
sit and share? For me , I cant go through the pictures from this time with people
who have never been in the life. It’s something people don’t understand. My
husband and I can look at them and understand. I can’t even explain it to others.”
(Tina, “Life After the Life”) 20
Tina’s account is distinct from Hija del Sol’s discussion of intimacy among women, but
both stories maintain the importance of maintaining networks. Although Tina does not clarify
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19
http://wordpress.clarku.edu/tellyourstory/something-soft/
20
http://wordpress.clarku.edu/tellyourstory/life-after-the-life/

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