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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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With the expectation for mothers to participate in the paid labour market while also fulfilling unpaid responsibilities at home, working mothers are subject to “the burden of a double shift, that is, the burden of a life built exclusively on work” (51). This chapter examines the narrated and photographic experiences of 14 sex working mothers in Canada, with the overarching question: “How do these womxn navigate and negotiate the daily work of social reproduction and paid work in precarious conditions?” The chapter argues that the motivations of participants, as complexly positioned workers within capitalism, to pursue sex work are reflective of antiwork tendencies and Kathi Weeks’ proposition for a postwork society. Participants stress their occupational choice as best enabling them to negotiate some of the traditional constraints of working motherhood – granting some participants financial security, greater flexibility, fewer working hours compared to traditional full-time occupations, refusal to overwork, and/or having greater leisure time to invest in themselves and their families. In doing so, this chapter aims to expand current debates on sex work, working motherhood, and anti-capitalist ideologies.
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