Gender, Race and Class

Gender/Race/Class: An Anti-Capitalist Feminist Event was confirmed to take place at Tindlemanor, which houses a number of different women’s groups including Imkaan. Imkaan had agreed to book Tindlemanor for us and offered to pay half of the cost. We wanted to hold the event outside of the usual higher education spaces and were pleased that this venue allowed us to make links with Imkaan, an organisation which provides support for Asian women experiencing domestic violence. We also invited Imkaan to speak at a workshop on ‘challenging domestic violence’ as part of the event.

Imkaan cancelled our longstanding booking at extremely short notice because they felt they could not support an event that – in their words – ‘glamourised prostitution’. We assume that this referred to a single workshop entitled ‘Sex Trafficking: Myths, Morals and Migrants’ which was billed as approaching this issue from a ‘labour, migration and gender perspective’ and discussing ‘why feminists need to fight for sex workers rights.’ We do not think that such a workshop in any way seeks to glamourise prostitution and we were also saddened that their opposition to this single session meant that they also had to block the 15 other scheduled workshops on issues ranging from domestic and sexual violence, to union activism, to community organizing to feminist history.

We have no wish to generate any further hostility around the cancellation of our venue, but we draw attention to it because we think that it points to an important political issue. Namely, the way the issue of sex work is being used to divide the women’s movement. Sex work is an important question for feminists to debate right now, with the Crime and Policing Bill due to receive its third reading in parliament very shortly. There is disagreement among feminists as to whether the proposals to further criminalise the sex industry contained in this Bill will protect sex workers from exploitation or in fact make them more vulnerable by driving the industry underground. There is also wider disagreement over whether sex workers should be allowed to organize to fight their exploitation themselves.

Those of us involved in Gender/Race/Class hold a range of views on sex work, but we all oppose further criminalization of women who sell sex and support their right to organize as workers. In this we may well differ from members of Imkaan. But we have a question for Imkaan and for all feminists to which we would very much like to hear an answer: Do you really think that our position on sex work ought to be the deciding issue as to whether it is possible to work together with other feminists? Should disagreement on sex work mean that we cannot work together on the many struggles we have in common? Does support for sex workers’ rights place us beyond the pale of the feminist movement, making us enemies whom you would rather obstruct than support as sisters?

We think that the answer to this question is ‘No!’ And we also know that many people agree with us in our desire to open up space within the feminist movement to discuss our differences constructively, without resorting to exclusionary and divisive behavior which in the end will only benefit our enemies.