Not your rescue project: Migrant sex workers fighting for justice

Join us for a panel on the book Not your Rescue Project: Migrant Sex workers fighting for justice. 

A landmark abolitionist primer on migration, sex work, policing, and the “anti-trafficking industry”—and a powerful argument about who is really leading the way toward justice: migrant sex workers themselves.

Chanelle Gallant and Dr. Elene Lam will join us in person for a conversation with Niloofar Golkar, postdoctoral researcher at Concordia's Social Justice Centre.

The event will be hybrid: in person at the SHIFT Centre and online on zoom

Registration (free): Register here for in-person or online

About the book 

In this impassioned corrective to decades of misguided, carceral approaches to migration and sex work, long-time organizers Chanelle Gallant and Elene Lam deftly expose the harms of criminalization in the name of “anti-trafficking” and lift up migrant sex workers’ organizing in the US, Canada, and elsewhere. In doing so, they make the compelling case that the only effective response to the needs of migrant sex workers must be led by migrants in the sex trade, as they fight for rights, safety, and autonomy.

Gallant and Lam illustrate how this movement is taking aim at the root causes of violence and abuse: the white supremacist securitization of borders, the criminalization of both migration and sex work, the patriarchial devaluation of women’s labor, and forced displacement due to climate disaster, war, and poverty—all fueled by racial capitalism.

An indispensable exploration of the relationship between migration and sex work—and the underlying societal conditions they reflect—Not Your Rescue Project is a thorough indictment of the anti-trafficking industry as an engine of criminalization and state violence, and an instructive account of the emancipatory politics already being practiced by migrant sex workers in their organizing. Throughout, Gallant and Lam place migrant sex workers at the center of struggles against border imperialism, carceral states, and capitalism—dispelling a range of poisonous myths and paving the way for deeper alliances across movements with the shared goal of dismantling and abolishing carceralism in all its forms.

About the speakers

Chanelle Gallant is an abolitionist feminist who has been fighting to free women’s sexuality from criminalization for over 25 years. She is a writer, thinker, frontline organizer and the co-author of Not Your Rescue Project: Migrant Sex Workers Fighting for Justice. Chanelle has contributed to dozens of influential publications including Pleasure Activism and Abolish Social Work (As We Know It). She has spoken everywhere from the London School of Economics to Princeton and is currently a visiting Activist-Scholar at the Centre for Feminist Research at York University, Toronto.

Dr. Elene Lam is the founder of Butterfly (Asian and Migrant Sex Workers Support Network). She is an Assistant Professor at York University and an activist-scholar who brings nearly 30 years of transnational grassroots organizing experience into her academic work and pedagogy. Her research and teaching draw on decolonizing, arts-based, and innovative approaches to knowledge transfer and social change. With her transnational activist work spanning from East and Southeast Asia, Australia and Canada, Elene is committed to an interdisciplinary approach to integrate theory into practice. The commitment has guided her extensive work with diverse and marginalized communities to advance racial, migrant, gender, labour, sex worker and disability justice, and to challenge carceral and anti-trafficking systems. Her research supports community-led, transformative justice approaches for social and policy change. She holds a Master of Law in Human Rights, a Graduate Diploma in Gender Studies, and a PhD in Social Work. Her work is committed to building a platform for marginalized communities to transform society. Her research contextualizes their lived realities within multiple scales and layers of oppression, whereby community leadership can create space and opportunity to effect structural change and transform society. She is the co-author of Not Your Rescue Project: Migrant Sex Workers Fighting for Justice. 

Co-sponsored by the Simone de Beauvoir Institute, the Center for Feminist Research CFR at York University and Concordia's Social Justice Centre.