Street Sex: Criminalization and Censorship

Abstract

The history of prostitution is itself a history of censorship: women who work in prostitution rarely have been granted lawful access to public voice. Stigmatized and censored, sex workers are easily criminalized within a context of scapegoating for crime, disease and the disintegration of neighborhoods. When I made “Street Sex,” a 1989 grassroots film narrated by street workers in Detroit, it was my angry response to the unjust laws, predatory police, filthy jails and other hazards caused by the illegal status of women who worked some of the toughest streets in a nation where the Constitutional promise of justice and equality were simply inaccessible to them. And like the women themselves, the film was repeatedly removed and censored, although the attempt backfired when it was confiscated by anti-pornography feminists Catherine MacKinnon, Andrea Dworkin and others at the University of Michigan law school in 1992, since it was reinstalled in a raucous celebration a year later. And yet, has anything changed for street workers in Detroit in the last twenty years? Do police still use prostitution to boost arrest records? Is the pilot program, “Fresh Start,” helping women? Why was Senator Stabenow’s husband not charged or prosecuted last spring when the woman he hired for oral sex was? Why do so many murders of sex workers, including the woman who partied with the Mayor of Detroit last year, continue to go unsolved? Are police, politicians and corporate media still colluding in the silencing and scapegoating of sex workers?

Presentation will include film clips from “Street Sex” and “Censorious!”

Carol Jacobsen, MFA, BFA
University: University of Michigan, Professor, School of Art and Design, Women’s Studies, American Culture, Human Rights
Organization:Michigan Women’s Justice and Clemency Project, Director
Location: Ann Arbor, MI
Title of Presentation: Street Sex: Criminalization and Censorship