NOT YOUR RESCUE PROJECT: Migrant Sex Workers Fighting for Justice, a book to confront good but blind people with Reality

NOT YOUR RESCUE PROJECT: Migrant Sex Workers Fighting for Justice
CHANELLE GALLANT & ELENE LAM (foreword Harsha Walia; afterword Robyn Maynard)
Haymarket Books (non-affiliate Bookshop.org link)
$9.99 ebook, available now

Rating: 4* of five

The Publisher Says: 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.

In this impassioned corrective to decades of misguided, carceral approaches to migration, sex work, and human trafficking, 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 across North America and Europe. In doing so, they make the compelling case that the only effective response to both human trafficking and 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, sex work, and trafficking—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.

I RECEIVED A DRC FROM THE PUBLISHER VIA EDELWEISS+. THANK YOU.

My Review: "Impassioned" is code for "making assertions of your self-evident correctness while bashing their benighted foolishness." This book is impassioned.

I agree with it.

White saviors never save anyone or anything but their own sense of superiority. See the multitudes of debunked "charities" and crowdfunding scams and the like over the decades. Capitalism needs scary monsters, or else how will it convince you to keep paying huge money to them so they'll keep you "safe." High-control systems need enemies to keep you afraid of what will happen if you dare not to believe them. The intersection of those things is usually called "fascism."

The voices of those opposed to the fascistic, moralistic response to the "problem" of women immigrating to the US are worth attending to. These voices belong to people with an established base in the migrant communities most affected by this spurious "moral panic." They do not deny that the trafficking of females of all ages for sexual abuse exists, only that this is the real focus of most of those claiming to want to combat it.

The authors are people who have spent decades on the ground, investing time and energy into *real* moral crusades in aid of the actual people impacted by the actual criminals. That group includes some...many...of those loudest in calling for carceral solutions to the "problem" of immigration.

I found their message much in line with my sense of how the situation really is. I don't necessarily think the hectoring tone of the read will make converts. Nor will the outrage in their words (honest and well-founded in their real-world experiences it may be and is) do more for those not sure what the fuss is about than a blander tone might have.

I think those who genuinely believe in personal autonomy and actual liberty will accept their strongly worded and rooted-in-experience message with slightly revolted by the facts surprise. I hope some few of y'all will be moved to action in your own communities by the read.

RECLAIMING TWO-SPIRITS: Sexuality, Spiritual Renewal & Sovereignty in Native America

RECLAIMING TWO-SPIRITS: Sexuality, Spiritual Renewal & Sovereignty in Native America
GREGORY D. SMITHERS (foreword by Raven E. Heavy Runner)
Beacon Press
$29.95 hardcover, available now

Listen to The American Scholar "Smarty Pants" podcast for an interview with the author!

Rating: 5* of five

The Publisher Says: A sweeping history of Indigenous traditions of gender, sexuality, and resistance that reveals how, despite centuries of colonialism, Two-Spirit people are reclaiming their place in Native nations.

Reclaiming Two-Spirits decolonizes the history of gender and sexuality in Native North America. It honors the generations of Indigenous people who had the foresight to take essential aspects of their cultural life and spiritual beliefs underground in order to save them.

Before 1492, hundreds of Indigenous communities across North America included people who identified as neither male nor female, but both. They went by aakíí’skassi, miati, okitcitakwe or one of hundreds of other tribally specific identities. After European colonizers invaded Indian Country, centuries of violence and systematic persecution followed, imperiling the existence of people who today call themselves Two-Spirits, an umbrella term denoting feminine and masculine qualities in one person.

Drawing on written sources, archaeological evidence, art, and oral storytelling, Reclaiming Two-Spirits spans the centuries from Spanish invasion to the present, tracing massacres and inquisitions and revealing how the authors of colonialism’s written archives used language to both denigrate and erase Two-Spirit people from history. But as Gregory Smithers shows, the colonizers failed—and Indigenous resistance is core to this story. Reclaiming Two-Spirits amplifies their voices, reconnecting their history to Native nations in the 21st century.

I RECEIVED A DRC FROM THE PUBLISHER VIA EDELWEISS+. THANK YOU.

My Review: Start here, from the author's Prologue:

Why was this new terminology needed?...Answering this question requires us to dig deeper; it is therefore one of the main focal points of this book. It requires a reexamination of colonialism's ongoing destructiveness and its different forms of violence—disease, physical acts of war and genocide, the cultural destructiveness caused by boarding scools, and the corrosive impact of corporations and capitalism on Indigenous communities. In spite of five centuries of colonialism, it is still possible for Two-Spirit people to reclaim their traditions, identities, roles and their sacred status. For other Native people the term "Two-Spirit" is a starting point for telling new stories.

Many, if not most, languages in the world do not use gendered pronouns. The existence of them, their mere presence, requires duality: like "she" can't exist without "he". Or so we are told in our language classes. The mere notion, like the current drive to accept and use broadly the singular "they", is causing such a huge amount of angst in those whose world is dualistic, almost Manichean, in its foundations. I tremble (with repressed laughter) contemplating these poor souls (yes, I mean "poor" as in "impoverished") even conceptualizing a world like that inhabited by Diné people with its five human genders! Something we in the so-called Western world can learn from Two-Spirit people is that the male-female gender (not biological sex, in other words) binary is not a natural but a historical invention. And even the biological sex binary isn't anything like as absolute as we're taught in US schools.

Which is something I want to mention to my majority-white readership of all sexual natures: This is a book about Native/Indigenous/First Nations sexual and gender natures and it does not center (in any positive way) our settler/Euro/Judeo-Christian/Muslim world view. It is not meant to. It was not designed to. And that needs to be okay with you before you consider whether you're the audience for this richly textured, information-dense read. Do not go into the book thinking you're going to get spoon-fed some lightly seasoned apologia or even apology for "our" (in quotes because I, too, feel alienated from that culture in its broader outlines) actions towards the first inhabitants of this continent. The identity "Two Spirit," very much centered in this study, is not without contested and resisted facets. There are elders (people my exact chronological age!) who regard this new, "pan-Indigene" term with some caution. Many are the pitfalls on any newly blazed trail. The language of Two-Spiritedness is, like identities always will be, evolving. That being said, I trust you to decide what you want to do next.

I encourage you to read this book because it doesn't center you, or your concerns. It isn't fiction so it isn't here to amuse; it's serious and scholarly, and while it's not obscurantist in writing style, it's not novelistic either.

In a certain way, that's a shame. It's a wide-netted story that begs for a whole corpus of films, books, plays. The story of the American Indian AIDS Institute would serve as a kind of corrective to the damaging myth of "Patient Zero" that gay journalist Randy Shilts blew up into a cultural touchstone with his And the Band Played On bestseller-cum-film; something that muddles facts with homophobic stereotypes and racist myths. We need the stories of Barbara Cameron and Randy Burns, correctives to the anthropological Arabic-language-based and offensive term "berdache" for Two-Spirit people; we need them to reach a wide audience, and it's usually fiction that does that best. I think Catawba Nation queer activist and artist DeLesslin George-Warren, quoted by Smithers, said it best: "History is not a listing of facts, it's a mythology with citations." No matter that I call history "factual" it is, and of necessity must be, his-story, a story for all its pretensions to scientific rigor.

The fact is I can holler at you all day long and even beg real fancy for you to pay attention to people unlike you, doubly unlike you straight readers. I wish I had the powers of persuasion to make the read sound as fascinating as I found it. It wasn't written by a Native American/Indigenous person. Instead, Author Smithers is Australian, straight, and a scholar; he has, with those Othered-from-Two-Spirit foundations, built a book about Otherness that is culturally sensitive, pluralistic in its aims and outlook, and a finely crafted pleasure to read.

ACE, a trenchant book on the experience of living in a hypersexualized culture without being of it

ACE: What Asexuality Reveals About Desire, Society, and the Meaning of Sex
ANGELA CHEN
Beacon Press
$14.95 trade paper, available now

Rating: 4* of five

Support Isaac! watch Heartstopper season 2 and read along on his journey into asexuality/aromantic selfhood.

The Publisher Says: An engaging exploration of what it means to be asexual in a world that’s obsessed with sexual attraction, and what the ace perspective can teach all of us about desire and identity.

What exactly is sexual attraction and what is it like to go through life not experiencing it? What does asexuality reveal about gender roles, about romance and consent, and the pressures of society? This accessible examination of asexuality shows that the issues that aces face—confusion around sexual activity, the intersection of sexuality and identity, navigating different needs in relationships—are the same conflicts that nearly all of us will experience. Through a blend of reporting, cultural criticism, and memoir, Ace addresses the misconceptions around the “A” of LGBTQIA and invites everyone to rethink pleasure and intimacy.

Journalist Angela Chen creates her path to understanding her own asexuality with the perspectives of a diverse group of asexual people. Vulnerable and honest, these stories include a woman who had blood tests done because she was convinced that “not wanting sex” was a sign of serious illness, and a man who grew up in a religious household and did everything “right,” only to realize after marriage that his experience of sexuality had never been the same as that of others. Disabled aces, aces of color, gender-nonconforming aces, and aces who both do and don’t want romantic relationships all share their experiences navigating a society in which a lack of sexual attraction is considered abnormal. Chen’s careful cultural analysis explores how societal norms limit understanding of sex and relationships and celebrates the breadth of sexuality and queerness.

I RECEIVED A DRC OF THIS BOOK FROM BEACON PRESS VIA EDELWEISS+. THANK YOU.

My Review: This is the most eye-opening read of 2020. "The map is not the territory" is a truism I'd stopped short of applying to sexual attraction. Behavior, yes, but not attraction, that "energy {aces} have no idea what {allos} are talking about." Attraction is an energy; I'm so deep in its gravity well, see the world so completely through its lens, that I'm blankly surprised that others don't. Author Chen continues my seventh-decade growth spurt.

Aces! Allos! Things I'd sorta-kinda heard about a while ago, maybe, but had zero context for. This is fascinating.

The ace world is not an obligation. Nobody needs to identify, nobody is trapped, nobody needs to stay forever and pledge allegiance. The words are gifts. If you know which terms to search, you know how to find others who might have something to teach.

As an old queer gent, one whose queerness goes beyond being vanilla-gay, I've been in the place of ace and aro people, being judged and branded as abnormal within a community that is itself branded as abnormal by outsiders. The principal issue is, if we are made invisible, or mainstreamed as we now call it, those of us in actual danger of our lives (in intolerant countries like Dagestan and Nigeria) do not realize there is a large and thriving world where we're simply ourselves, not monstrous or dangerous or Other:

Normal is often treated as a moral judgment, when it is often simply a statistical matter. The question of what everyone else is doing is less important than the question of what works for the two people in the actual relationship. It matters that everyone’s needs are carefully considered and respected, not that everyone is doing the same thing.
–and–
“It seems that the message is ‘we have liberated our sexuality, therefore we must now celebrate it and have as much sex as we want,’” says Jo, an ace policy worker in Australia. “Except ‘as much sex as we want’ is always lots of sex and not no sex, because then we are oppressed, or possibly repressed, and we’re either not being our true authentic selves, or we haven’t discovered this crucial side of ourselves that is our sexuality in relation to other people, or we haven’t grown up properly or awakened yet.”

I wanted lots of sex most of my life; I'm old enough now that the Urge is muted, and doesn't bedevil my every thought. I have a partner whose presence in my world is a cause for joy and celebration. He's a gift. And also mixed race, three and a half decades younger than me, and just starting what I hope will be a long and happy career as a chef. I won't be there to see his full-on selfhood; I will be in his full-on selfhood because our relationship has formed each of us as we are now. I'm a whole lot nicer with him than I was without him.

We're neither ace nor aro; we're Othered by the nature of our connection. And, like Author Chen's subject, intergenerational love is not visible or, when revealed, well thought of. He's an adult, was when we met, but there lingers about an old man and a young man the disagreeable whiff of pedophilia. People I consider dear and close friends simply clam up and/or change the subject when I talk about him, have never ever one time asked how he's doing on the front lines of the plague's workers (whom do you imagine makes the delivery food you're eating?), where if he was a she they'd be solicitous and interested.

As bitter as that sounds, the pain of it is old and familiar, as it has always been this way. It's simply a fact that Author Chen presents in a slightly different light, one that shines as bright on bedrock homophobia as it does on prejudices more visible:

Picture whiteness as a neutral backdrop, a white wall. It is easier to paint a white wall light blue than it is to paint a dark green wall light blue. The dominant media is filled with images of many types of white people; white people, for the most part, have the freedom to be anything they like. People of color need to scrub away the dark green—racial stereotypes and expectations—before determining whether we are really ace.

For white read straight; and then examine y'all's consciences.

The basic argument Author Chen makes in this deeply felt, thoroughly researched book is, to me at least, one that includes me at every level:

Relationships should always be a game of mix and match, not a puzzle that you have to perfectly snap into, or a Jenga tower that will collapse as soon as you try to wiggle one block out of place. Customizability is the best part, yet most people try so hard to make their relationship stick to its premade form, a one-size-fits-all shape. Many people don’t take advantage of their own freedom.

All the fascinating stuff about people not like me aside, I read this book to hear that phrase, the simple formulation that explains me to myself. I haven't been on Earth this long not to realize when I'm being spoken to. There is nothing whatsoever in this that is any way a threat to you, your relationship, and the life you've built. Why, then, are so many of you demonizing and rejecting people who are simply doing exactly what you're doing...finding, building, living a relationship to their authentic selves and to others?

Author Chen's words are direct and simple, her subject wildly important, and her conclusions elegantly simple. I challenge you to challenge yourself in this unpleasant moment of our shared history, with viruses and unrest and human ugliness pounding our sleepy complacent senses of self, to stretch out and incorporate more ways of being into your head and your life.

Build back better isn't, or needn't be, an empty slogan.