Carisa R Showden

In Aotearoa New Zealand, social and ethical responsibilities to work towards decolonization are shaped by the principles set out in legislation aimed at honouring Te Tiriti o Waitangi (The Treaty of Waitangi). Our study with young settler activists in Aotearoa working on a range of social issues aimed to find out how these activists thought about and worked toward enacting these responsibilities. We found that most settler activists were hesitant to speak on behalf of Māori or in ways that centre Indigenous needs and experiences because they felt unsure of how to do so in a respectful way. Many settler activists suggested they met their decolonizing responsibilities if they included Māori members in their group or collaborated with Māori groups, but others put forth additional strategies. Overall, though, activists’ sense of ‘taking responsibility’ seemed to depend on Māori guidance and, if none was available, settler activists were often paralyzed. Yet Māori are not always able or ...

The chapter works to unpack the specificity in New Zealand feminisms, noting how contemporary feminisms here respond to a decriminalized sex work regime, a specific history of colonialism and its effects, the contributions of the New Zealand Prostitutes’ Collective to shaping state and grassroots feminisms, the country’s size and location, and the sometimes uneasy interplay between mana wāhine Māori and Pākehā (European settler) feminist praxis. Today mana wāhine Māori, ‘state feminism’ and ‘Pākehā feminism’ are well-positioned to generate an intersectional approach to sex work politics, though this intersectional potential is yet to be fully realised. This is due in part to the individualized nature of some feminist movements at the expense of a materialist feminist lens focused on macro- and meso-level forces that structure social reproduction. In short, decriminalisation changed the discourse around sex work without producing the necessary attendant structural challenge to gender as a material and social formation. What is needed is a feminist praxis that is simultaneously anti-poverty, anti-racism, and pro-sexual egalitarianism.

IntroductionWith the passage of the Prostitution Reform Act (PRA) in 2003, Aotearoa/New Zealand became the first country in the world to decriminalise prostitution.1 This law recognised the right to consensual sex work and the need to protect those engaged in it, and in so doing resisted conflating sex work with sex trafficking. Lawmakers cited gender equality, human rights, labour rights, and public health as their primary motivations for passing the bill; indeed, it was seen as part of the country's long tradition of promoting citizens' well-being, a tradition increasingly situated within contemporary human rights discourse. However, in 2015, Aotearoa/New Zealand yielded to pressure from the United States to change its legal definition of trafficking to conform to international norms that often blur distinctions between prostitution and trafficking. This move has nudged Aotearoa/New Zealand closer to the prostitution neo-abolitionist position that sex work is ipso facto vi...

Indigenous young people in Canada who trade sex frequently move locations as part of their survival tactics in negotiating the myriad vulnerabilities they face. Both Canadian law and social activists label all such mobility “trafficking”, which conceals the ways in which Indigenous youth are forced by structural factors beyond their control to be mobile to survive. Two politically opposed frameworks have been offered for understanding sex trading by Indigenous youth. While each explains some vulnerabilities faced by these young people, both overlook others. We posit mobility and sex trading as strategic responses to the material and ideological conditions faced by Indigenous young people, but strategic responses rooted in vulnerability and rife with exploitation. Ultimately, we argue that mobility is a response to vulnerability rather than its source.

... to make a different argument, that the relationship between cultural intervention (eg, Queer as Folk ... change isn't linear cause and effect, then they need to specify what the nature of ... Once third-wave feminists get more explicit about where, when, and how certain cultural activities ...

In this article, I examine the seemingly incompatible epistemologies of sex offered by dominance (‘governance’) feminism and queer theory. While these bodies of work, especially when applied to US legal and political activity on prostitution, are commonly viewed as divergent sparring partners, I propose a ‘convergence’ of the two in the form of a revived and enhanced sex-positive feminism. If dominance feminism is the ‘theory of no’ to heterosexuality’s male gender power, and if queer theory is the ‘theory of yes’ to the defiant possibilities of sex, sex-positive feminism is a ‘theory of maybe’: it examines practices of gender and sexuality in multiple contexts to find the ways in which heterosexuality can sometimes reify, and other times resist, the transfer of eroticised dominance and submission to political practices of patriarchy. After tracing the split between feminism and queer theory and arguing for a ‘sex-positive queer feminism’, I use the example of prostitution to consid...

Youth activism has been a defining feature of Aotearoa's recent political landscape. Amidst these unsettling political times haunted by climate change, colonisation, ongoing inequality and the upheaval of the pandemic, the political actions of young New Zealanders are a source of inspiration, challenge and renewal. Fierce Hope opens the doors on six influential activist groups: ActionStation, Generation Zero (Auckland), InsideOUT, JustSpeak, Protect Ihumātao, and Thursdays in Black (Auckland). Participants from these groups, through interviews, explain vividly what future they want for our country and how we can get there. They address an array of urgent issues, from indigenous rights to the justice system and imprisonment; from climate change to gender and sexual inequalities. In their voices we hear hope, anger, despair and anxiety – emotions which inform and galvanise activism. A connecting thread is how people within these different groups collectively negotiate their vision...

In Aotearoa New Zealand, social and ethical responsibilities to work towards decolonization are shaped by the principles set out in legislation aimed at honouring Te Tiriti o Waitangi (The Treaty of Waitangi). Our study with young settler activists in Aotearoa working on a range of social issues aimed to find out how these activists thought about and worked toward enacting these responsibilities. We found that most settler activists were hesitant to speak on behalf of Māori or in ways that centre Indigenous needs and experiences because they felt unsure of how to do so in a respectful way. Many settler activists suggested they met their decolonizing responsibilities if they included Māori members in their group or collaborated with Māori groups, but others put forth additional strategies. Overall, though, activists’ sense of ‘taking responsibility’ seemed to depend on Māori guidance and, if none was available, settler activists were often paralyzed. Yet Māori are not always able or willing to guide the process; still settlers must act. This imperative is our stepping off point to explore settler activists’ articulations of their responsibilities. Based on our participants’ fluid and complex thinking about and doing decolonizing work, we propose a ‘continuum of engagement’ to explore what creates possibilities for settler activists to take responsibility and action in ways that work toward decolonization but are not dependent on Māori to guide every step.

Addressing past and present injustices in order to create more just futures is the central premise of most social movements. How activists conceptualise and relate to time affects1 how they articulate their vision, the actions they take and how they imagine intergenerational justice. Two social movements for change are emblematic of different relationships with time: the struggle to resolve and repair past injustices against Indigenous peoples and the struggle to avert environmental disaster, which haunt the future of the planet. We report ethnographic research (interviews and participant observation) with young activists in these two social movements in New Zealand: Protect Ihumātao seeks to protect Indigenous land from a housing development, and Generation Zero is lobbying for a zero-carbon future. We argue that analysing activists’ articulations and sensations of time is fundamental to understanding the ways they see themselves in relation to other generations, their ethical imperatives for action and beliefs about how best to achieve social change. Protect Ihumātao participants spoke of time as though past, present and future were intertwined and attributed their responsibility to protect the land to past and future generations. Generation Zero participants spoke of time as a linear trajectory to a climate-altered future, often laying blame for the current crises on previous generations and attributing the responsibility for averting the crisis to younger generations. How activists conceptualise time and generational relations therefore has consequences for the attribution of responsibility for creating social change. Understanding and learning about temporal diversity across social movements is instructive for expanding our thinking about intergenerational responsibility which might inform ways of living more respectfully with the planet.

This chapter works to unpack the specificity in New Zealand feminisms, noting how contemporary feminisms here respond to a decriminalized sex work regime, a specific  history of colonialism and its effects, the contributions of the New Zealand Prostitutes’ Collective to shaping state and grassroots feminisms, the country’s size and location, and the sometimes uneasy interplay between mana wāhine Māori and Pākehā (European settler) feminist praxis. Today mana wāhine Māori, ‘state feminism’ and ‘Pākehā feminism’ are well-positioned to generate an intersectional approach to sex work politics, though this intersectional potential is yet to be fully realised. This is due in part to the individualized nature of some feminist movements at the expense of a materialist feminist lens focused on macro- and meso-level forces that structure social reproduction. In short, decriminalisation changed the discourse around sex work without producing the necessary attendant structural challenge to gender as a material and social formation. What is needed is a feminist praxis that is simultaneously anti-poverty, anti-racism, and pro-sexual egalitarianism.

Indigenous young people in Canada who trade sex frequently move locations as part of their survival tactics in negotiating the myriad vulnerabilities they face. Both Canadian law and social activists label all such mobility “trafficking,” which conceals the ways in which Indigenous youth are forced by structural factors beyond their control to be mobile in order to survive. Two politically opposed frameworks have been offered for understanding sex trading by Indigenous youth. While each explains some vulnerabilities faced by these young people, both overlook others. We posit mobility and sex trading as strategic responses to the material and ideological conditions faced by Indigenous young people, but strategic responses rooted in vulnerability and rife with exploitation. Ultimately, we argue that mobility is a response to vulnerability rather than its source.

On 4 September 2018, the University of Auckland hosted a hui on preventing and responding to sexual assault and harassment on university campuses. The hui was organised by the Australian and New Zealand Student Services Association (ANZSSA), and included speakers from the University of Sydney and Universities Australia. The speakers outlined new initiatives recently launched across the tertiary sector in Australia. After explaining the ‘Respect. Now. Always.’ and ‘Safer Communities’ initiatives, this report considers lessons the Aotearoa New Zealand tertiary sector could learn from them. This report was prepared with the written assistance and approval of Renee Hamilton (Policy Director for Safety and Wellbeing, Universities Australia), Amber Colhoun (Project Manager for Student Support Services, University of Sydney), and Jordi Austin (Director of Student Support Services, University of Sydney).

Sex work has long sparked debates among feminists, from the sex wars of the 1980s to their reinvigoration in the early 2000s when public and political attention to sex trafficking escalated in the US and internationally. Currently, in the United States and large parts of Western Europe, the dominant policy narrative about sex work is in fact a story of sex trafficking (Kempadoo 2005; Johnston, Friedman, and Sobel 2015). This story involves a young, innocent (and frequently) white girl who is tricked and trapped by a (predatory, older, often black or brown) man into a life of sexual slavery. In the end, the girl must be rescued and the man must be punished (Chuang 2010; Musto 2016; Bernstein 2012). With its adherence to certain gender tropes (e.g. women are sexually passive and imperilled); its convergence with radical feminist commitments, in particular to ending violence against women; and its individualising focus, this story has had important effects on public policy, as local, state, and national governments have devoted millions of dollars to fight sex trafficking (Weitzer 2011, 2015; US Department of State 2013). However, the relatively low numbers of victims rescued and traffickers prosecuted raises questions about the accuracy of this narrative, the utility of prevailing U.S. criminal justice interventions, and, more broadly, the methods by which scholars study sex work, particularly among young people (Lutnick 2016).

Our goal in this chapter is to explore how feminist research may both contribute to and potentially correct this ongoing disconnect between narratives, policies, and outcomes. To accomplish this, we reflect on our recent comprehensive narrative analysis of 128 academic studies conducted since 2000 about young people who trade sex in North America (Showden and Majic 2018). In that book, we seek to understand the prominence and validity of the dominant narrative by examining what researchers know about young people’s experiences of domestic minor sex trafficking and how we, as academics, have come to know it. We critically reflect on feminist research on prostitution and sex trafficking to argue for an intersectional approach that maintains fidelity to central feminist concerns about both resisting essentialising narratives and ending sexual and gender based violence and exploitation.  In so doing, we connect current debates in research on sex trafficking with core second-wave radical feminist concerns, specifically feminist theorist and activist Charlotte Bunch’s (1979) clarion call to feminist praxis. Bunch argued that such praxis requires feminists to consciously question the root of our fear of making certain arguments, encouraging feminist researchers to rethink our assumptions and how they shape our perspective on politics.

To unpack our argument, we contextualize our study of young people  who trade sex within the broader feminist-ideological debates that frame this research and explain how we arrived at our proposed intersectional approach to, and understanding of, research about young people who trade sex. The model we developed encourages reflexivity in the process of research design; consideration of the impact of data collection and analysis on current knowledge and future research; and the use of more robust data to offer policy recommendations that do not generate further harms against sex workers. We advocate for an intersectional approach because it allows us to capture experiences and needs currently missing from much research and policy for youth who trade sex. Over the past 30 years, intersectionality has become a critical tool in generating more inclusive social science research, and it is well-suited to policymaking for social justice. This usefulness rests on intersectionality’s insistence on foregrounding differences while aiming to circumvent the “oppression Olympics” by maintaining that axes of oppression and identities are interactive rather than additive. Its usefulness also stems from its capaciousness, as it serves as both a method and an interpretative framework while being firmly rooted in feminist praxis fighting domination through counter-hegemonic and transformative knowledge production (Bilge 2013).

At any given time, multiple and potentially conflicting discourses are circulating in public policy debates. This article uses critical discourse analysis to examine why and how the discourses about the prevalence, causes, and remedies for exploitation in sex work that won the day in the Prostitution Reform Act 2003 debates in Aotearoa/New Zealand have been
reinterpreted and reordered in recent debates on trafficking provisions (Section 98D) in the Crimes Amendment Act 2015. Gender equity and human rights were successfully married to a social welfare and harm-minimisation approach in the Prostitution Reform Act debates, whereas they were tied more closely to a law-and-order framework in the latest revisions to Aotearoa/New Zealand’s anti-trafficking policies. This paper argues that the influence of the United States in interpreting and enforcing international anti-trafficking treaties – particularly the ‘Palermo Protocol’ – has facilitated shifts in Aotearoa/New Zealand’s domestic policy and
provided leverage to discursive framings that were less successful when prostitution reform was debated at the turn of the twenty-first century.

The phrase “feminist sex wars” refers to debates among feminists about ways in which both sexual orientation and sexual practices can contribute to either domination or liberation. Although the sex wars over lesbianism in the feminist movement have been largely resolved, arguments over pornography, prostitution, and sexual practices such as BDSM are still fairly active. Contemporary feminist sex wars are being waged most fiercely between abolitionist, anti-pornography feminists and so-called “pro-sex” or “sex-positive” feminists, who are often aligned with queer theorists and third-wave feminists. These groups disagree about whether sexual practices are separate from sexual identities, and about the relationship between prostitution, pornography, and human trafficking.

In this article, I examine the seemingly incompatible epistemologies of sex offered by dominance (‘governance’) feminism and queer theory. While these bodies of work, especially when applied to US legal and political activity on prostitution, are commonly viewed as divergent sparring partners, I propose a ‘convergence’ of the two in the form of a revived and enhanced sex-positive feminism. If dominance feminism is the ‘theory of no’ to heterosexuality’s male gender power, and if queer theory is the ‘theory of yes’ to the defiant possibilities of sex, sex-positive feminism is a ‘theory of maybe’: it examines practices of gender and sexuality in multiple contexts to find the ways in which heterosexuality can sometimes reify, and other times resist, the transfer of eroticised dominance and submission to political practices of patriarchy. After tracing the split between feminism and queer theory and arguing for a ‘sex-positive queer feminism’, I use the example of prostitution to consider some theoretical and practical implications of this shift in feminist lenses.

Women’s agency: Is it a matter of an individual’s capacity for autonomy? Or of the social conditions that facilitate freedom? Combining theoretical and empirical perspectives, Carisa R. Showden investigates what exactly makes an agent and how that agency influences the ways women make inherently sensitive and difficult choices—specifically in instances of domestic violence, assisted reproduction, and sex work.

In Showden’s analysis, women’s agency emerges as an individual and social construct, rooted in concrete experience, complex and changing over time. She traces the development and deployment of agency, illustrating how it plays out in the messy workings of imperfect lives. In a series of case studies, she considers women within situations of intimate partner violence, reproductive decision making, and sex work such as prostitution and pornography. Each narrative offers insight into how women articulate their self-understanding and political needs in relation to the pressures they confront.

Showden’s understanding of women’s agency ultimately leads her to review possible policy and legal interventions that could improve the conditions within which agency develops and that could positively enhance women’s ability to increase and exercise their political and personal options.