GWSS 3307: Feminist Film Studies, Fall 2008

Visibility for sex workers varies as the setting for each is different. A prostitute on the road side has to be careful when to be visible or not. The phone sex worker shouldn’t reveal any personal information to maintain her invisibility whereas a strippers and dancers can try various disguises to be less identifiable.

From watching the Live Nude Girls Unite!, it is apparent the peepshow workers are concerned with keeping themselves invisible from being known of their real identity. They have to juggle between playing a “bad girl� image at the Lusty Lady Peep Show and then being a real person outside of their jobs. The paradox here is that being able to be more visible, longer duration of performance, than their peers would allow them to earn more money. The peepshow workers who perform on stage are hypervisible as they are visible from all sides. They can try different wigs, make-ups, and other makeovers to maintain certain amount of annonimity.

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Posted by dorje003 at 7:29 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Selective "seeing" and "ignoring" virtually defines questions of sex work literally and theoretically. One of the central questions of the text we encountered was the ways in which society, the feminist movement, the state, governments, and divisions between sex workers themselves selectively see or ignore questions around sex-work. This makes it virtually impossible to write an essay tackling the question of 'invisibility and visibility' and even begin to tackle the ways in which hierarchies of sight/ invisibility are enacted within different contexts(as within the film between dancers of color and white dancers, or between the peep show dancers and the women who Query's mother work with that are among the most scene for larger society and also most vulnerable and likely to be “victims� of sex work as opposed to being empowered by it). In Priscilla Alexander's piece names many areas of invisibility, (e.g society has cast the prostitute as woman--not seeing male prostitution, how rape is seen or ignored in society)

Continue reading "Round Two: Selective Visions." »

Posted by Sofia at 12:02 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

A sex worker is a person who works in the sex industry. There is a variety of jobs a sex worker could have; they may be a prostitute, stripper, peepshow worker, dominatrix, go-go dancer, escorts, etc. The nature of sex work is for the customer, viewer, to get pleasure from the worker. The difference between the levels of sex work is largely dependent on the visibility of the worker. For a phone sex operator she is completely invisible to her client, and she remains anonymous. In contrast, a sex worker who performs in a peep show has hyper-visibility. She is raised above the men, with mirrors all around her. Being in the peepshow was even described as being in a fish bowl, she is on display for all to look at. These sex workers do not have the advantage of invisibility, so they try and achieve it in other ways. For example, in the film, the women of the Lusty Lady would wear wigs, put on "disguises" (make-up), use a coy voice, and even go by alternate names to hide their identity. The majority of the women have not even told their family that they are sex workers, keeping their true identity to themselves.

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Posted by conlo027 at 1:10 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)

In the documentary, Live Girls Unite! The concept of visibility and invisibility are inextricably linked to the politics of language and expression. Throughout the film, the women of the Lusty Lady work to organize under the umbrella of the term “sex worker� for safe, non-exploitive and legal work. The problems they encounter, both in their decision to organize and on their journey, are indicative of a patriarchal dominated culture; setting the tone for the way in which the women who struggle to unionize are seen and heard. Carol Queen discusses the negative societal stigma of a female sex worker, in her work, “Feminist Thought, and Whore Stigma.� Queen points out the need for women to work together; that one of the reasons for the lack of sexual freedom lies in the discomfort with sexuality in feminist orthodoxy. She calls on women to work together in a similar way these women who recognized an injustice organized among themselves—not just for workers rights, but for the bodily agency and sexual sovereignty that sex work encompasses.
In the film, the women recognize injustice when they realize they are being hierarchically categorized by race, hair tone, and breast size. Instead of falling apart and competing for schedules, they subscribe to Queen’s view of working together. The rhetorical discomfort with female visibility is apparent when sexualized term “pussy� is used and workers are told by the male opposition that the term is offensive because they wouldn’t let their children speak that way. This infantalization of the female sex workers displays the way in which women should be seen as sexual objects, with the offensive term used for them, but politically and they must be invisible and not claim agency over such words.

Posted by J Kriegs at 12:06 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

In the article by Carol Queen she mentions the pitfalls of the stereotypes that surround sex work. In particular, there is a common belief that any women doing sex work have a “damaged history�, thus implying that in order for someone to do sex work they would have to be driven by forces deeper than will. This is obviously not the case and is really problematic for how these women are viewed by our culture. In the movie the women that were on the job stripping were “in character�. They put on a show for men that is not a depiction of who they truly are. As one of the women said in the film, they talk in a higher voice when at work, “it’s the same voice you would use to talk to an infant.� So it is clear to me that these women see this as a kind of game, or a role that they play.

Continue reading "Thats a lot to ask!" »

Posted by Revolutionary at 11:38 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

In the film, Live Nude Girls Unite!, and in the readings by Carol Queen (Sex Radical Politics, Sex-Positive Feminist Thought and Whore Stigma) and Jill Nagle's introduction to Whores and Other Feminists, I am able to apply the concept of "visibility" to understand some of the struggles and injustices sex workes face. Visibility is a major part of sex workers existance because of the nature of the work. There is a performer, the sex worker, and the viewer, the paying customer. The benefits and losses vary depending on what kind of work and who is involved. As Nagle describes the binary of women's sexual roles (good girls/bad girls) renders sex workes (bad girls) visible and all other women who conform to sexual norms (good girls) invisible. In this case, the visibility is not beneficiary because there are only steroetypes at play, without challenge or blurring of boundaries. The good girl maintains her virtue, which is important to be a good girl, and the bad girl exhists unaximned. This stereotype insinuates that all sex workers are women, which is problematic too because there are many other types of people involved. This invisibility of nonnormative sex workers, as discussed by Queen, creates dangerous work conditions that are potentially violent and abusive because they go on unexamined. Queen discusses, as the film illustrates I believe, that if people (feminists) want to actually help sex workers, instead of just wanting the sex industry to disappear which creates horrible -invisible- situations for the sex workes, then they should work on creating a sex-positive mentality amongst the public. This would be a way to improve conditions of sex workers by not denying their exhistance, and realizing that they have a choice in the career they choose. In finding justice in the sex industry for its workes, visibility is key. The film shows how successful the women were when they picketed and shouted chants outside the theater. They made their voices heard in the long struggle for unionization. Visibility is a delicate issue for sex workers because their very work depends on the performer/viewer binary, improvements for their work conditions and they way they are treated need visibility to call to attention their problems, but stereotypes are so easily reinforced and heteronormativity is so easily reinforced by high, mainstream visibility created by mainstream media.

Posted by AJ at 11:33 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

The stigma attached to the world of sex work is deeply rooted, dividing even the most hardcore feminists. Within our society, sex workers are continuously ignored and made to feel invisible, despite the physical visibility which their job entails. Yet, as we have seen in "Live Nude Girls Unite!" and in the readings, there are different levels of visibility in the field of sex work. Obviously the location of sex work affects the notion of visibility. The job of phone sex operator allows for complete invisibility for the worker, where stripping on a stage does not. "Live Nude Girls Unite!" showed both the benefits and disadvantages of becoming visible within their field. The more active they became, the more rights they received, however this often led to a disconnect with their families. Many of them felt shame and chose to keep their occupation a secret. The identity of the sex worker also influences their visibility. Non-white women were given less time in the Lusty Lady, illustrating how employers control visibility and Carol Queen's article even mentioned how male sex workers are completely ignored.

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Posted by allora at 11:30 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

In both the readings and in Julia Query’s film “Live Nude Girls Unite!� notions of visibility with regard to sex workers are treated within the context of woman’s right to an oppositional viewpoint on sex work and the rights of those involved to greater visibility as a means of destigmatizing the industry. In her introduction to “Whores and Other Feminists� Jill Nagle addresses how post 1980 too often sex worker’s voices are left out of the debate on sex work and feminism. In the “good girl/bad girl� dichotomy of feminism which resulted, sex worker’s visibility as empowered feminists making the choice to participate in the industry is marginalized. It would seems since that time, feminist sex workers have worked tirelessly to gain visibility in the public space to challenge the notion that sex work is inherently victimizing and degrading. Conferences such as “Challenging Our Images� in 1985, the numerous writings of feminist sex workers and feminist documentary film makers all work to create the visibility needed for their cause. Invisibility, as the writings of activists suggest, would only marginalize sex workers further.

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Posted by kafka at 11:25 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

It can be dangerous for sex workers to be visible for various reasons. For one, there is a negative stigma attached to sex workers, so many sex workers try to hide their career in the sex industry from their loved ones. As we learned in the film, being a sex worker is not always meant to be “fun� or even liberating. It may strictly be a means of bringing money in. Sex workers may also want to stay out of the public eye as much as possible in order to keep existing/potential jobs that are not involved in the sex industry (like the woman in the film who worked in both the sex industry and social work).

A prostitute, for example, can be visible and invisible at the same time when trying to find customers; if she is too visible, she will end up in jail, but if she is not visible enough, she will not get any work. Alexander talks about laws where simply loitering is enough reason to believe that a woman is prostituting (if she had been arrested for prostitution in the past).

Continue reading "Sex Work" »

Posted by Bute0023 at 10:41 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

In the documentary Live Nude Girls Unite, the question of visibility is deeply rooted. Even though the sex workers sell and market the visibility of their body, there are limits to this exchange which were addressed in the film. Just because they make their body available to their audience or clients it doesn’t mean that they merge their private and public. Visibility in the public is very different than visibility in the private. This is one of the most important and detrimental aspects that I want to discuss about In/visibility.
When the issue of the two way mirror came up that caused some of the sex workers to find images of them on the internet without their permission the visibility of their body became a concern since it now moved to an area that wasn’t controlled by them. This was an issue because the dancers weren’t able to manage the separation between the private and public at that point.
After the dancers decided to fight their management for better working conditions their private and public life started merging by far more. Suddenly the visibility of their private life was very important to their public life(jobs). One of the strippers showed her son at the rally and even introduced him to one of the frequent clients. It is interesting that as a union that was striking they were working with the visibility of their real life and their private by far more than they ever connected to the job usually. Even though a lot of the girls were proud of their jobs and believed that it was worth fighting for, many tried to hide their occupation from their family and relatives.
It is interesting that when the sex workers wanted to pursue normal standards or just better working standards they were ridiculed for it. Since working in the industry is perceived as wrong in the first place, society many times believes that there shouldn’t be a standard set. The socially constructed idea that sex work must be dangerous and must be degrading makes it easy for management to use these low standards and keep them in place. The hyper visibility of the negative stereotypes prevents many sex workers to fight against the conditions. This is why I felt that the workers had to make their private life visible and show that they weren’t crack whores living on the street but rather mothers, students, and daughters that paid rent and supported a normal life.

Posted by Nami at 10:28 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Throughout both the articles and the film, the most prevalent concept is that of woman's relationship to sex. In the article by Priscilla Alexander, she raises the idea of sexual equality - that as long as women feel fear or shame as attached to sex, they cannot attain equality. Additionally, the idea of being lesser is connected to this idea of visibility. Sex workers are culturally shamed because of their involvement in the industry, and many individuals who work within the sex industry, making visibility have destructive or negative impacts on their lives. I found that this was an especially telling idea when considering it in terms of the film. Throughout Live Nude Girls Unite!, there was a precarious balance between the desire for visibility - because through visibility, respect can be gained - and the neccessary invisibility to survive their personal lives. In the case of the women at the Lusty Lady, the workers are caught between knowing that they deserve rights and protection and the neccessary nature of protecting their work identity from their familes and from those who might harm them. It is in this way that they are simultaneously visible and invisible, having to conceal their hypervisible identities from the rest of the world while they perform these constructions of desire to survive.

Continue reading "Visible Bodies, Invisible Identities" »

Posted by allison at 9:55 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Being seen and unseen is different in the lives of sex workers than in non sex workers, because society has labeled them as morally depraved and therefore they risk much more in being visible than do non sex workers. For example, at least since the writing of the Torah (as in the Alexander reading) prostitutes have been classified by patriarchal society as bad and required that they be separated from non prostitute women. In today’s society there are codes of dress that distinguish and separate sex workers from non sex workers. Prostitutes that walk the streets are very visible. In the Sex Wars reading they mentioned that just dressing like a hooker or walking around by yourself was risky because of the way law enforcement will perceive you, because of the binary of sex worker women and non sex worker women. In the “Whores and Other Feminists� reading it said that ‘whores are the dykes of the nineties� in that it is accepted that they should be excluded, which informs the idea of visibility for sex workers.

Continue reading "Shining the Light on the Facets of Sex Workers" »

Posted by CrazyOldMaurice at 9:43 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

In/visibility is a difficult factor that sex workers have yet been able to control for themselves. In the documentary Live Nude Girls Unite!, visibility is the issue at hand that they are fighting for. As sex workers they wish to be able to be visible as legitimate employees and be able to have the same rights as employees of other fields. They form a union and battle with their employer to sign a contract. This contract would give them visibility and therefore agency. In/visibility in the lives of sex workers is a very broad topic. It includes one-way windows in peep shows to the exclusion of the entire field of sex workers when discussing sex work itself. Jill Nagle discusses the topic of the invisibility of sex workers especially in feminism. She first discusses how “the voices of feminist sex workers themselves have been garingly absent in such discussions� (1). These discussions are around the topic of sex work. She uses the article “Roundtable on Pornography� that was published in Ms. Magazine as an example. Sex workers have been invisible and given no agency in the work of feminism because “excluding sex workers from feminist discussions seemed reasonable� because their agendas seemed to be the exact opposite of feminists but as Nagle states “the reality is more complex� (4). In/visibility in the field of sex work is a very difficult topic to understand. As in every aspect of this culture there are binaries that even sex workers feel the need to fall under. Nagle describes two, “good girl/bad girl� and “lesbian/heterosexual.� If the sex worker does not fall into either of these then she/he feels even more invisible to the world because taking on too many identities that do not fit into these binaries creates no place for them in our culture. It is also difficult for sex workers to fight for visibility or invisibility because while working some sex workers put on such a costume or take on a different identity as to not be visible to their clients but still wish to be visible as employees to gain agency. And although they want to be “invisible� to their clients by creating a new identity, some do not want to be put behind one-way windows, like in the documentary, because this puts them into a position that creates even less agency. Sex workers fight in/visibility on several fronts from their in/visibility to their clients to the visibility to their employers and also to feminism.

Posted by Faith Kolstad at 9:23 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

I observed that visibility and invisibility manifests itself differently in the lives of sex workers. I also think that invisibility and visibility differs depending on the type of sex work performed.
Phone sex operators are physically invidible to their clients. This absence of physical presence allows the woman to be who she wants to be the the given time without worry of feeling exploited and victimized.A woman's views can also influence wether she is present or absent at the time of her work. Her feminist views can make her more presence and powerful. A woman is able to shine throuh expression and sexuality and if she lacks the cabablity or esteem to communicate her opinions and strength, she is absent emotionally and mentally during her performance. According to the Sex Radical Politics, Sex Positive Feminst Thought, and Whore Stigma, "when meeting with a client the presence or absence of respect has much to do with how sex postive the person is and the person's self respect of sexual shame." If a woman experiences sexual shame and devalues the beauty of her body her respect for herself and others will be absent. On the other hand, If a person is open in their sexuality

Continue reading "Live Nude Girls Unite" »

Posted by hendr324 at 8:30 AM | Permalink | Comments (1)

I would like to center my discussion around a thought from the Priscilla Alexander’s article. She states that women will not be equal to men, until women stop worrying about being raped or labeled as a whore. This is difficult to overcome because women are punished when they initiate sex on the street, and they are poorly supported when denying sex. Women also must constantly be aware of the way they act, dress, and communicate; for they could easily be mistaken as something they are not, mentions Priscilla. I see this paranoia as a form of invisibility. Sex-work, for the most part, is considered inappropriate and hidden from discussion in public (outside of the sex-work setting). Being categorized as a whore or showgirl is looked down on in the American society, and not taken seriously as a career. In Live Nude Girls Unite!, the women discuss how customers will ask them what their “real� profession is. They proudly answer, “A stripper!�, while they are in the strip club and performing . When the women are outside of the strip club, and not with their stripper friends, they appear slightly hesitant and ashamed to discuss their career choice.

Continue reading "Live Nude Girls Unite!" »

Posted by kerli006 at 8:14 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

The life of sex workers are mostly visible when they are in the spotlight, i.e. on stage, or performing their sex work, but they are only seen by those who want to watch them. For example those that come into the strip club and pay money to watch girls dance. Any other time they are invisible to the world because their job is not a “respected� job, so who cares. The sex worker can be visible and invisible at the same time, for example, when the ladies were protesting and asked everyone to honk, only the males that were alone honked, not when they were with their “wives�. This is extremely important in that, it can be assumed that women, especially feminists would stick together, support other women. Actually, the men supported these women because they were the clients; they received their “sex� from these women and are not ready to give that up. “They deny us the right to signal an interest in sex, initiate sex, or agree to have sex if we set economic terms for it� (Alexander) This quote caught my eye in that because these women that are denied what they do shows that there is no benefit to being seen or not,

Continue reading "In/visible" »

Posted by Abbie Weeks at 8:08 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Women who are sex workers are for the most part in control of how they are seen and when. Times in which this is not the case may involve women who are coerced into sex work, as the readings addressed. Since sex workers are able to control this, they can be visible and invisible simultaneously. They are able to be visible to consumers but they only show the physical parts of themselves that they want to. They are able to keep what they want to themselves. This is done various ways, but often through costumes and makeup. In the beginning of the video we saw the girls getting ready for their peep show and putting on their masks of makeup. It really is just like they are actors in a show. One girl mentioned how she disconnected herself from the acts by thinking about different things while she performed. In this way the girls are able to keep their personal selves invisible while still be visible physically to the customers. The level of this visibility is different with different forms of sex work. Prostitutes are going to give much more of themselves to consumers than the girls in the peep show who were in

Continue reading "In/visibility for sex workers" »

Posted by Jolene Lewis at 1:59 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

It is difficult to comment on an issue as observers because we can’t form opinions based on actual experience, we can only infer what those experiences might be like. As a person outside of the sphere of sex work and the associated issues, I find myself forming unfair opinions about the people who choose (or are forced into) sex work much like the people who make laws that govern prostitution. Priscilla Alexander writes in Feminism, Sex Workers, and Human Rights about how the laws passed to govern prostitution became more oppressive as men began to take over city states almost 4,000 years ago and have gotten progressively worse over time. The point Alexander makes is that sex workers don’t speak for themselves – they are spoken for. Often the people doing the talking are the people who aren’t affected by the issue and those people who should be the focus become invisible. In Live Nude Girls Unite!, the workers at the Lusty Lady took a stand against their owners because they were being poorly treated and made their voices known by protesting and unionizing.

Continue reading "Speaking without voices" »

Posted by joh02629 at 10:50 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Street prostitutes might be physically most visible and occupy public space (street) as opposed to a confined space of theatre, brothel, or peep show. At the same time they are often most invisible in terms of social visibility. They are at the bottom of the sex worker social status hierarchy. The hierarchies of stigmatization, privilege and power/lessness among sex workers are somewhat addressed in Nagle’s Introduction and other readings. Although racism was partially addressed in the film, it was talked about in terms of management and workplace relationships and not in terms of racial hierarchies among sex workers. Potentially productive conversations about the contradictions, dangers, and issues of privilege in the sex workers’ world could have been explored in the subplot of the filmmaker and her mother’s relationship, but did not. It rather became personalized and overly focused on generation as main marker of difference. What does it mean that Query’s mother invests her life into helping street prostitutes which in the film briefly represented as voiceless/invisible/non-white, as opposed to largely college-educated, subculturalist sex-workers that even if poor and/or marginalized in some ways, posses social capital, are part of communities and networks that constitute certain amount of power.

Continue reading "hierarchies of stigmatization" »

Posted by Arnoldas at 10:15 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)

Sex workers may exist in mainstream society as both visible and invisible. The sex industry as a whole is continually dismissed by traditional sex-negative feminists. In Carol Queen’s article, she mentions that lawmakers and police officers are only concerned with the criminalization of prostitution, rather than the safety of prostitutes themselves. Priscilla Alexander states that many lawmakers don’t consider forced sex with a prostitute rape. These victims are inherently invisible. In the film Live Nude Girls Unite!, however, the strippers were extremely visible. But they had control over when they were seen, how they appeared and for whom they danced. This is why the men videotaping the peep show caused such an uproar among the dancers. They were losing power over who could see them dance and for what price. The girls featured in this documentary also went to great lengths to hide their true identity. Wigs, gaudy make-up, high boots and aliases transform a Jewish mother of three into a blonde go-go dancer. One dancer described her job as a “weird pajama party.� Ironically, who these women truly are becomes invisible as they become more visible before men. The male customers, on the other hand, can be as visible as they desire. Phone sex encounters allow anonymity for both parties, while peep shows provide dark booths for men to view dancers from behind tinted glass. The dancers complained when the glass was removed and private rooms were installed for customers. This allowed more access to the dancers than they wanted. Escort services and soliciting prostitutes provide a more visible role for men. The main point to be made is that like any occupation and any human being, these sex workers deserve rights. Their experiences, whether good or bad, need to be visible in our society.

Posted by herma216 at 10:04 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

I now realize that the issue of sex work is not so black and white. As Jill Nagle discusses, sex workers often are not given a voice. They are spoken for. Sex workers have not been visible in the debate. One interesting aspect is the life that the sex workers have at work (work usually meaning public) is actually very private in the sense that their work gives them a disguise, a different name and a different character; whereas, in their private lives many sex workers have to hide what they do for a living. The sex workers only became visible as being part of a profession once the media recognized the union work. It is also interesting to consider the power that the viewer has. The media, the viewer at the peep and strip show, etc. The media has power over whether or not the sex workers struggle is legitimate and the viewer in the peep show has power when she/he cannot be seen.

Continue reading "Visibility and the public/private" »

Posted by Alias at 9:40 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Within the context of sex work the idea of invisible and visible is constantly changing between the worker, the client, and the management. In the film Live Nude Girls Unite! the girls, although very visible to the client, were very invisible to the management, who seemed to ignore the women’s needs and safety. Sex workers are also invisible to those who do not participate within the business and those who are not clients. They are merely part of society that many choose to forget about. Their rights as citizens/employees/human beings are often ignored by the authorities and the law. As Priscilla Alexander writes in Feminism, Sex Workers, and Human Rights “The laws reinforce age-old conventions regarding female display and behavior� (85, italics theirs), keeping the idea that women are only allowed to be sexual when committed and married to a man, and either blaming or victimizing any other form of women being sexual. They often disregard women’s needs, such as often times when prostitution is legal and they pay taxes they are denied benefits and do not try to improve occupational safety or working conditions (Alexander, 90). Like the women in the movie while working they become both visible and invisible, the client sees them, but only sees them for their body and not as an actual person.

Continue reading "Visibility vs. Invisiblity within Sex Work" »

Posted by lars2805 at 8:54 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Live Nude Girls Unite really brought to life the concepts of visibility and invisibility in sex work. One of the readings talks about the “good girl, bad girl� binary and how in reality we should think more in terms of a continuum, creating space for alternate kinds of sexuality. Because the binary exists, those who “publicly wear the label� allow others to be invisible, and perpetuates the notion that there are only 2 types of women. The women in Live Nude Girls Unite challenge this view by changing the way in which they are visible.

Continue reading "Simultaneously Visible and Invisible" »

Posted by happyfeet at 8:36 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

An essential element in discussing sex work is choice. As Jill Nagle pointed out, choice defines how we approach sex work, and most anti-sex feminists have ignored choice in sex work entirely. To them, it is only done through an act of desperation and nothing more. For the sex workers that do choose to enter that line of work, they are also choosing to be visible, and (in the case of dancers/peep show workers,etc.) to be hypervisible. Many times, it is those that have chosen to enter sex work that are most vocal about their experiences, making those who lacked that privilege of choice essentially invisible. Perhaps they are threatened with violence or embarrassment. Either way, such women should not be ignored in a sex-positive discussion.

Continue reading "Visibility and Sex Work" »

Posted by seitz057 at 8:35 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

"Live Nude Girls Unite!" did a great job of breaking many stereotypes and cliches when it came to the kind of women that do sex work for a living. We were able to see smart, sophisticated, and strong minded women doing something that is looked down upon by many. Most of the depictions of women who strip in the movies or television portray them as sleazy, low-life, down in the dumps type ladies, but this film showed us that there is all different types of women who do sex work. For all of these women though, whether they liked it or not, the issue of visibility came up. Because of what they all did for work, they were basically all living double lives. One life was out in public among you and I, the other life was on stage. I believe that this had to be extremely hard for some of these women.

Continue reading "Live Nude Girls Unite!" »

Posted by keilh004 at 8:22 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Sex work has the ability to render people visible and invisible at the same time. When the dancers in the film went on stage, they were highly visible. However, they don lots of make-up so they are unrecognizable. They are visible but have no identity.

This is the case with all sex work, not just the peep show workers shown in the video. Priscilla Alexander notes the history of sex workers, how the “wise women� of Sumerian days were housed separately, how prostitutes in medieval France wore clothing distinguishing themselves from the “acceptable� population. These measures make sex workers extremely visible to society, but they are also invisible in that no one knows who these women are. Their only identity is that of prostitute/whore.

Continue reading "Visible Strangers" »

Posted by Katie Green at 8:09 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Some women the sex work industry needs the money to support their children and debts, some need money for bad addictions and others enjoy the job and find it to be a stress reliever. I think that the women on Live Nude Girls Unite are much different than prostitutes and strippers who are not behind glass. The role of the employer in all cases should focus on the protection of their employees. It baffles me that they would rather have a sick girl on stage than one than does not have the same breast size or hair color. In every sex work situation, I think that they all have grievances with race discrimination. It depends where the club is located and who their main consumers are that decide which kind of women they like the most. The role of the employer is really just to keep the audience happy and the show the best it can be.

Being invisible occurs right as they get on stage with their make up on, wigs in place and new names. They use the attire to cover their real identity and slip into their new identity. Like Jill Nagle explains, these women, along with all women, do not want to be known as “whores� or even be mistaken as “whores.� Being invisible to the customers, general public and even their family gives them a way to live a normal life. A sex worker can be visible on stage through their body’s actions but hide behind a costume and altered voice to make them invisible. Location really emphasizes whether the dancer wants to be hyper visible. Some clubs have posters of them on the outside, for everyone going by to see. You can choose to be hyper visible or not. Priscilla Alexander emphasizes that hypervisibilty occurs from the “origins of civilization.� I think that the dancers who wish to be visible are the ones that do it for the fame and who treat sex work as their main focus. They benefit by becoming very popular on stage and make a lot of money. The others who want to be invisible benefit by having their privacy and other life. They just want to make money and hopefully have a good time.

These women are clearly smart and driven to go and fight their bosses for equal rights. Management wants them to think of the job as “fun.� But they do not want that, most of them need the job, not want it. They like the industry and they know a lot about it and believe that they can do a much better job than their managers. Which I agree!

Posted by lemme021 at 6:51 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

I think that the extent to how visible the worker is really depends on the type of sex work they do. For me a highly visible sex worker is someone who prostitutes themself or some other form of media where the individual person is actually for sale like pornography. On the other side I think that jobs like phone sex operators where you are not visible at all is the other end of the spectrum. Doing the kind of work that the women do in the film is pretty conservative when it comes to being visible. I say this because although they are on a stage dancing the only people who sees them are the consumers and the other dancers. Also, it sounded to me like not many of their families even knew what they did so in a way it was like they were trying to hide their work. Being seen can be very beneficial but I think it is highly correlated with how sexy a person is or perfoms. I also think that it is why many of the girls wear wigs and elaborate makeup so they can hide any imperfections they may have in order to please the consumers, which are generally males, in order to make more money. One thing I found surprising about the film is that one of the managers was a women. I pictured some guy just sitting back drinking cognac and when she came out it was a little bit of a shock because I thought she would be fighting for the women and not trying to oppress them.

Posted by bergm154 at 6:49 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

I think sex work while not invisible has been previously avoided or otherwise viewed as bottom of the barrel. Assuming these women are down on their luck and need to be saved from the patriarchal oppression that has left them no other option. To be honest I had heard of legalized prostitution and sex workers rights but never to the extent of this feminist argument. Pornography is generally viewed by most feminists I have discussed it with and obviously in the readings as objectifying, demoralizing and abusive to to women. But as Nagle expresses in her piece the true demarcation of this is consent, that while forced prostitution or pornography is unquestionably wrong there are many women who opt into these professions for one reason or another. Alexander reiterates this in her talk of WHISPER and anti prostitution groups. These arguments remove any “agency� of the woman to possibly make this choice, which I would say is markedly sexist and representation of the internalization of the patriarchal system.

Continue reading "Et Tu Femme?" »

Posted by spiek010 at 6:08 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

I think that being a sex worker is very ignored as an actual job by society. One woman in the film discussed how some customer asked her what she did for a living, like she was just dancing for fun. It is a job that usually gets somewhat pushed under the rug or people just avoid the subject. I think that most sex workers can be considered invisible and visible at the same time. For example, everyone knows that they are there and available but they are rarely discussed in public. It seems like acknowledging their work as a “job� is not regarded at all and nobody is ever comfortable recognizing it as so, unless it’s a sex worker themselves. In my opinion I think that not being seen is a benefit for the worker and the customer. For the customer it could be better not to be seen, perhaps they are embarrassed that they are going to these places for entertainment. For the worker, I think it could be better not to be seen because seeing a customer at the location is one thing, but what would happen if they saw them out in public? The worker and customer could both benefit from not being seen as some sort of privacy policy. Perhaps by not being seen the worker and customer never have to truly expose themselves to each other. I think that if the workers are seen and they can see the customer the workers are more in control. They can change what they are doing to change the reaction of the customer. I believe that if only the worker is seen and not the customer, the customer would have control in the situation because the workers don’t know who or how many people are watching, and they also have no idea what reactions the customers have to them. No matter what type of sex job someone has, I think that they are always going to be half visible and half invisible to society.

Posted by jcareykc at 6:00 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Carol Queen notes, “Our culture carefully and narrowly circumscribes what is acceptable, much of the sexual world gets left on the wrong side of the fence.� This is fueled by the notion of visibility, invisibility, and hypervisibility. The dancers at the Lusty Lady clearly wanted to be visible to everyone not only inside the Lusty Lady, but outside as well. They started protests and rallies to gain more rights, equality between them, and to unionize. Before their protest, the dancers were physically visible, but as an actual person, their needs were invisible. They were only seen as an object with visible features—dancers were classified, scheduled, and discriminated against based on race, body size, breast size, and hair color. The type of sex work engaged in at the Lusty Lady is peep shows. The peep show room had 13 one-way windows so the customers could visibly see the dancers while being invisible to the dancers. This made the dancers more vulnerable because they couldn’t see what the customer was doing (ie videotaping, masterbating). Their rights and protections as a person were invisible.

Continue reading "Live Nude Girls Unite and Fight for Rights!" »

Posted by savor004 at 5:57 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

There have been many arguments for and against sex work in America. Before doing the readings and watching the film I had only heard the fight of anti-sex work, where people and feminists in America think that sex work and sex workers are people that allow themselves to be used in a degrading manner and are “props in the service of that desire.� However after focusing on the notion of visibility I opened my eyes to see the other side of the story and that the man looking through the one way mirror is not always the one with the control. From watching the film I saw that a sex worker can be visible and invisible at the same time. They let their bodies be shown physically but the dancer’s interior is never shown to the client. There true outward appearance is even masked by make-up, wigs, and changed voices. In the film one of the dancers even shared that mentally while performing she is thinking of other things. This is the way that sex workers find control, never fully letting the client see who they truly are. Another thing that came to my attention through the readings and the film is that different sex jobs expose women to different levels of visibility.

Continue reading "Sex Work" »

Posted by woul0006 at 5:23 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Overall, I think sex work in general is fairly invisible. Society as a whole doesn't spend much time thinking about the rights of sex workers. Anytime that is spent thinking on sex workers probably falls into the realm of opinions that revolve about the lives and actions of sex workers. This movie illustrates that fact, for too long these women, and many others shown throughout San Fransisco, have has their human rights neglected simply because the people in charge can get away with it. Julia Query realized that they needed to become visible, or even hypervisible, in society for people to take an interest.

Continue reading "The Visibility of Sex Workers" »

Posted by luco0005 at 2:38 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

The debate between pro and anti-sex work feminists creates a division that is weakening the strength of feminism. Instead of fueling this separation we must unite and focus on the safety and wellbeing of the females working in this industry. The question must ask if it is voluntary or coerced work. In “Introduction to Whores and Other Feminists,� Jill Nagle explained that sex workers have been excluded from feminist discussions. Because of the single focus on the oppression of sex work, some feminist activism has even silenced feminist sex workers. In Live Nude Girls Unite!, females working in the sex industry spoke their minds and worked to reform feminism to include sex workers. As shown by the readings, film and lecture the debate over sex work is not black and white. One aspect to consider is visibility. Visibility depends on what type of sex work and personal preference. The women in the video showed that invisibility within visibility is possible with the use of make up and costumes. Hyper-visibility is described best in the movie. Regarding peep shows, one female described feeling like they are

Continue reading "Bridging the Division" »

Posted by Katherine Jonas at 12:42 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Notions of visibility, invisibility and hypervisibility manifest itself the lives of sex workers in ways not seen in traditional jobs. These differences in visibility occur due to the way our culture views sex. Carol Queen writes, “Our culture carefully and narrowly circumscribes what is acceptable, much of the sexual world gets left on the wrong side of the fence.� This forces many sex workers to be discreet and feel like they need to hide what they do. Many feminists are divided on the issue as well. Queen writes, “Mainstream feminism had never been entirely comfortable with sex.� In the film, Julia didn’t want her mother to know she was stripper partly because of the damage it would cause to her mother’s reputation in the public eye. Julia understood the stigma associated with sex work. Not all sex work is equally stigmatized. In the film Julia’s mother asks if she touches the men, and Julia said something like, “Of course not.� Prostitutes receive a much great stigma and have a greater need to remain invisible. Both the public and the law create this stigma. Visibility functions differently in different situations. The girls in the peep show wanted a regulated visibility...

Continue reading "Visibility" »

Posted by Da provida at 11:22 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Different types of sex work can be placed into two different categories (visible and hyper-visible). Visible sex work may include anything from a peep show worker, to a cyber sex worker, to a phone sex worker, etc. These types of sex work provide the client with intense visuals and pleasure from viewing (and listening), however nothing more. Hyper-visible sex work may include anything from an escort worker, to a strip club worker, to a prostitute. Hyper-visible sex work provides the client with much more than just visuals. It, more often than not, provides the client with intense physical contact and sex. While both of the visible and hyper-visible categories allow the worker to be seen and viewed, they also allow (or force) the worker to be invisible at the same time. This can be understood in the documentary Live Nude Girls Unite!.

Continue reading "Live Nude Girls Unite!" »

Posted by Eleanor Roosevelt at 10:07 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

I found the video to have an overall interesting quality. Going into our group discussion I wasn't able to completely connect all my thoughts and although the group talk helped, I still am not able to bring everything together. A lot of what is being said about this topic from all sides- workers, employers, outsiders, etc- just doesn't seem to fit. Some of the women say that they enjoy doing this, and some say it's for the money. I'm not sure if it were the same women saying both things or not. Either way, it is a very unique job they have and it is interesting to look at if they are truly visible or not. They are hyper visible especially during peep shows because all the vision in sort of tunneled at them. At the beginning of the movie when everyone was in the back room putting on their make up a couple of the females considered their make up a mask or a disguise. If this is the case then they are not really visible. They are just putting on a show with a shell or costume on, kind of like an actress on stage. At the same time, I feel like if someone is truly passionate about the role they play, then much of actors true personality leaks through the shell even if they try to hide themselves. So I think that these sex workers that we saw can be invisible and visible at the same time.

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Posted by leex2356 at 7:58 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

"I was born in 1968, the day before Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated. I dreamed of fighting the good fight but I never dreamed my first attempt at activism would be as a stripper." Julia Query opened the film with this statement, letting us know she wanted to be known in this world or “visible� but didn’t think it would end up the way it did. In this film, I think there are many different ways of being seen (visible) or not seen (invisible) throughout this film. Yes it depends on what type of sex work that is being taken place; like in the main type of sex work in this film; peepshows. Three of the peepshow's 13 windows were made of one-way glass; the customers could see the dancers, but the dancers couldn't see them. For years, the Lusty Lady attracted amateur pornographers who'd set up shop behind the one-way windows.

Continue reading "Visible vs Invisible" »

Posted by bues0040 at 10:59 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)