manipulation, sadness and pain, while remaindering her as an other, an anomaly to the
progressivism of immigrant labor movement represented by Maya? Indeed, may we not
imagine a new subjectivity who fuses the binary construct of Maya and Rosa into one: a
female immigrant who, given a dismal range of working options (among which are
working as a domestic maid, apparel seamstress, farm worker, janitor, or at the
MacDonald’s), consciously chooses prostitution as her temporary occupation which
offers her a relatively higher pay and flexible schedule, and following Maya’s social
activism, is politically involved in pushing for the decriminalization of prostitution as a
conscious rights-seeking sex worker?
In fact, across the globe, this prototype of conscious rights-seeking sex workers
who negotiate with male domination and desire is beginning to take shape (even if still
distributed unevenly), as more and more historically subordinate and stigmatized brothel
workers, street prostitutes, escorts, call-girls, strippers, pornography actresses, exotic
dancers, phone sex operators, peep show workers, window prostitutes, massage parlor
masseurs, S/M dominatrixes, and sex educators are coming out to assert the legitimation
of sex work by proclaiming: “Outlaw Poverty, Not Prostitutes,” and “It’s a Business
Doing Pleasure With You.”
Saying this is not to claim that there is a universal profile of sex worker that can
adequately represent the diverse range of experiences of every man and woman, white
and black, Latino and Asian, gay and lesbian, transgendered and transsexual, straight and
S/M practitioner, native and migrant, educated and non-educated, middle-class and
working-class subject working in the sex trade in the industrialized North and the
underdeveloped South. For example, migrant sex workers of Third World origin are
usually unable to attain the higher degree of economic independence and sexual agency
4
Convention