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Despite a large body of research exploring the obstacles sex workers face due to their occupational stigma, little research focuses on how their stigmatized paid work influences their navigation of unpaid care, especially in the context of the COVID-19 pandemic. My dissertation examines the narrated and photographic experiences of womxn in Canada who identify as both mothers and sex workers and asks: how do these womxn navigate and negotiate the daily work of unwaged social reproduction and paid work in stigmatized and precarious conditions? This dissertation is informed by feminist methodologies, visual methodologies, and contributes to literatures on stigma, sex work stigma, social reproduction, unpaid care work, mothering, and working motherhood. Fourteen participants in this qualitative project engaged in autophotography, capturing their daily routines and surroundings to provide visual insight into their daily lives. Then each participant attended a photo elicitation interview to discuss the meanings, experiences, and feelings being conveyed in their selected photographs. My findings illuminate that sex work stigma operates contextually, influencing these mothers’ engagement with and disclosure of their stigmatized paid work, their families’ experiences with courtesy stigma, and the structural barriers they face as sex working mothers. This dissertation also explores participants’ engagement with mothering practices, crediting their ability to be good, empathetic mothers because of their experiences navigating stigmatic occupations and their transferrable skills as sex workers. Womxn’s choices to navigate sex work and mothering are acknowledged as being both calculated and meaningful— granting sex workers financial security, flexible working hours, and unique opportunities to invest time into themselves and their families. To uphold the aims of producing accessible research, these images were displayed in public fundraising exhibits, relying on participant observation and anonymous feedback to further assess the project’s ability to co-produce destigmatizing and empathetic knowledges—by, with and for sex workers. All funds raised from these exhibits were donated to various sex worker grassroots organizations in Canada to assist in funding their ongoing mutual aid efforts and to ensure this research possess tangible benefits for sex workers themselves.
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Despite a large body of research exploring the experiences of working mothers today, there is little literature focusing on mothers who take part in stigmatized and unconventional forms of paid labour. Taking up this line of inquiry, my MA thesis project explores both micro and macro-level understandings of the narrated experiences of four women in Canada, who are both mothers and exotic dancers, with the overarching question: ‘how do these women navigate and negotiate their socially constructed identities and practices as both mothers and sex workers?’. This thesis is informed by feminist methodologies and a broad array of literatures on social reproduction, social surveillance of mothering practices, the intensification of mothering, women working in the sex industry, and occupational stigma of exotic dancing. My research consisted of four semi-structured phone interviews with women in Canada (all in the province of Ontario) who have (either currently or in the past) navigated both roles of mothering and stripping simultaneously. Through my interviews, I explored how the women in my study negotiated the work of social reproduction, the forms of support they had access to, and the barriers they have faced. My findings illuminate that due to limited access to affordable services in Canada, the mothers I interviewed rely on informal assistance from their key supports to provide necessary care work that the mothers could not fulfill due to the responsibilities of their paid work. Mothers also stress the necessity of managing their occupational stigma to comply with dominant ideologies of maternal caregiving by constructing personal communities and adopting techniques of secrecy and trust in order to enhance their ability to combine paid work and unpaid care. Overall my MA thesis offers insight into experiences, supports, and constraints that women face as they navigate the demands of paid labour, domestic work and unpaid caregiving in stigmatized and precarious conditions.
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- Thesis (2)
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Between 2000 and 2026
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Between 2010 and 2019
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- 2019 (1)
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Between 2020 and 2026
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- 2024 (1)
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Between 2010 and 2019
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