The Rhetoric of Sex Work Salon: May 15
with Natalie Brewster Nguyen
5:30-7:30pm, Kore Press Institute, 325 W 2nd St, Tucson
$5 at the door, no one turned away for lack of funds. As always, it’s a potluck: bring something for the table if you can.
Natalie Nguyen will lead May’s Salon & micro-performance to explore the anti-trafficking movement from a rhetorical point of view and how co-opted language has impacted legislation endangering sex workers. Language is powerful, people! Explore the complexities of the issues and to get current on where the conversation is now.
Historically, the conversation around sex work went from a sex workers’ rights framework in the 1990s, to being co-opted by the anti-trafficking movement in the late 2000s to present. There is no such thing, in their language, as someone who engages in sex work consensually. If you are a consenting sex worker, you have “trafficked yourself.” This, at its very root is the thing that sex workers have been fighting forever. Unless sex workers are “victims,” they aren’t worth saving; and if they are “victims,” they are cautionary tales: disposable women and trans women, drug addicts, etc.
Natalie Brewster Nguyen is a professional performance and installation artist, writer, actor, mover, educator, musician and director/producer. She has been a sex worker for 20 plus years, since the age of 19. She is a Pro-Domme and Tantric practitioner and has worked in almost every adult industry. She is a certified yoga and acrobatics teacher as well as bodyworker. She teaches social justice analysis to community organizations and in the fitness world. She co-parents in an amazing collective of artists, activists and sex worker parents. She believes in non-punitive parenting and loving, adventurous, authentic accountability in community. She can be found at http:nataliebrewsternguyen.com