Revolutionizing Community Under the Red Umbrella: Intersectional Inquiry with Sex Workers on Protective Factors in Los Angeles, CA
The punitive foundation that social work is built on limits our ability to align affirming care to community members who engage in sex work. By engaging in a process of collective knowledge production, this participatory action research (PAR) contextualizes the ways in which intersecting systems of oppression are magnified within sex worker communities and explores the ways that criminalization complicates social mobility and networks of harm reduction. Through using the qualitative methods of photo-elicitation and dialogue aligned with participatory principles, this community-driven study uplifts individual and collective protections that 13 sex workers utilize to protect and care foreach other in Los Angeles, California. Drawing from the intersections of Black Feminist and Disability studies frameworks, this study’s findings identify factors influencing a stratified social hierarchy amongst sex workers, the systems of collective care that they create, and the ways that they navigate and resist the structural oppressions that are complicated by operating within a criminalized profession. This paper explores the hindrances that social work navigates by its alignment to the state as an agent of social control and its potential for engagement with criminalized communities. The implications from this study advocate for future lines of inquiry that benefits sex worker organizers and service providers in strengthening systems of care for sex workers resisting state violence.
