Not Your Rescue Project: Migrant Sex Workers Fighting for Justice

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Product Details
Price
$21.95  $20.41
Publisher
Haymarket Books
Publish Date
Pages
288
Dimensions
5.5 X 8.5 X 0.64 inches | 0.81 pounds
Language
English
Type
Paperback
EAN/UPC
9798888900864

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About the Author

Elene Lam is an activist, artist, community organizer, educator, and human rights defender. She has fought for sex worker, migrant, gender, labor, and racial justice for over twenty years, She is the founder of Butterfly (Asian and Migrant Sex Workers Support Network) and the cofounder of Migrant Sex Workers Project. She has used diverse and innovative approaches to advocate social justice for migrant sex workers, such as leadership building and community mobilization. She holds a master's of law and master's of social work. She is a PhD candidate at McMaster University (School of Social Work) and is studying the harm of the anti-trafficking movement. She was awarded the Constance E. Hamilton Award for Women's Equality by the City of Toronto.
Chanelle Gallant is an author, activist, and movement strategist who has worked in the areas of sexuality and criminalization for over two decades. Her writing has appeared in dozens of publications, most recently the New York Times' best-seller Pleasure Activism, Beyond Survival, and Defund, Disarm, Dismantle, and her work has been discussed in the Washington Post, the Advocate, Esquire, Vice, and every national media outlet in Canada. Chanelle is on the national board for Showing Up For Racial Justice and has helped to found or support numerous sex worker organizations. She has an MA in sociology and was a Lambda Literary Fellow.
Harsha Walia is the award-winning author of Undoing Border Imperialism (2013) and Border and Rule (2021). Trained in the law, she is a community organizer and campaigner in migrant justice, anticapitalist, feminist, and anti-imperialist movements, including No One Is Illegal and Women's Memorial March Committee.
Robyn Maynard is an award-winning Black feminist scholar-activist based in Toronto and the author of Policing Black Lives: State Violence in Canada from Slavery to the Present and co-author of Rehearsals for Living. She is an assistant professor at the University of Toronto and her writings on policing, feminism, abolition, and Black liberation are taught widely across North America and Europe.

Reviews

"Not Your Rescue Project opens up long overdue space for migrant sex workers-who are routinely spoken about, spoken for, and spoken over in service of expanding and entrenching carceral approaches to violence-to speak for themselves. What their experiences and visions make clear is that borders, criminalization, policing, and punishment are the culprits, not the cure, furthering violence and coercion in every sector of the economy, including the sex trades, rather than preventing or interrupting it. The authors' call is clear: migrant sex workers are the experts in their own experiences, they demand simultaneous recognition of their agency and of the intersecting structures of violence that shape their lives, and their leadership is essential to our movements. Required reading for everyone who cares about trafficking, labor rights, and racial, gender, migrant, and economic justice."
-Andrea J. Ritchie, author of Invisible No More: Police Violence Against Black Women and Women of Color

"Not Your Rescue Project is a powerful indictment of the violence and injustice that Global South migrant sex workers face under the banners of rescue and saviourism. It offers forthright and compelling documentation of the struggles and humanity of such migrants who live and work in Canada and the US, while providing a searing critique of anti-prostitution, victim-centered approaches, including the anti-human trafficking industry. This is a much-needed book that brings significant depth to a growing trend in global sex worker rights research-a crucial call to action for students, researchers, and activists concerned with migrant, sexuality, and feminist and global worker justice and rights."
-Kamala Kempadoo, Professor Emerita, Social Science, York University

"You will never be the same after reading, studying, teaching, and sharing Not Your Rescue Project. Curating personalized interludes, historical analysis, and grassroots movement archiving, this book is a masterpiece composition of survival, self-defense, and liberationist testimonial strategies. Migrant sex workers are truth-tellers, solidarity organizers, community builders, and grounded critical practitioners who are permanently reshaping abolitionist, anti-imperialist, anti-violence, radical feminist, and various other streams of 'left' mobilization. Simultaneously creative, generous, and graceful in its layered invitations to engage in the complex challenges of 'joint struggle, ' this foundational text calls on every justice-oriented community to engage with the incomparable radicalism of migrant sex worker praxis."
-Dylan Rodríguez, scholar, teacher, movement collaborator, and Distinguished Professor at the University of California, Riverside

"Not Your Rescue Project exposes the right-wing 'rescue' fraud perpetrated by the sex work prohibitionists and their carceral allies by centering the lived experience of migrant sex workers organizing for their own liberation. It is essential reading for anyone interested in pushing back against those who mobilize state violence in the guise of helping vulnerable workers."
-Alex Vitale, author of The End of Policing

"Intellectually trenchant, emotionally affecting, and deeply needed, Not Your Rescue Project is absolutely essential reading for anyone involved in social justice, labor activism, human rights, migrant justice, and sex education. For far too long, misconceptions, racism, anti-sex work stigma, and blatant opportunism have shaped legislation and policy on sex work to the severe detriment of those with the most to lose. Elene Lam and Chanelle Gallant set the record straight with powerful analysis and storytelling drawn from many years of solidarity and advocacy work with migrant sex workers, exposing the exploitation and outright deception perpetrated by the so-called anti-human trafficking