EVENTS
UH Q+mmunity’s No Saviors, No Prisons: Sex Workers Speak! – 106
April 15 @ 4:30 pm – 8:30 pm
This community event will feature four panelists with experience in the sex trades, tabling from local organizations, free food, and fun!
Social work’s relationship with people in the sex trades overwhelmingly endangers, incarcerates, and controls those we claim to support. The profession routinely neglects the perspectives of sex workers, leading to practices that violate our ethical standards of social justice, self-determination, and the dignity and worth of the person.
No Saviors, No Prisons: Sex Workers Speak! urges us to join liberatory work by and with people in the sex trades as part of the larger abolitionist movement. As the criminalization of sex work is one of many ways the state targets those who are BIPOC, trans, queer, immigrant, and houseless, decriminalization is necessary in the struggle to liberate all people from the conditions of white supremacy, cisheteropatriarchy, capitalism, and imperialism.
Join us to challenge carceral social work practices and imagine social work that strives alongside sex workers toward liberation.
Speakers:
Emi Koyama is a multi-issue social justice activist and writer synthesizing feminist, Asian, survivor, dyke, queer, sex worker, intersex, genderqueer, and crip politics, as these factors, while not a complete descriptor of who she is, all impacted her life. Emi is currently the Coordinatrix of the Coalition for Rights & Safety for People in the Sex Trade (www.rightsandsafety.org) and a co-founder of Aileen’s, a peer-led community organizing and hospitality space for women working along the Pac Highway in south King County, Washington.
Christen coco Valentine is originally from Detroit, Michigan but resides in Houston, Texas. I am an entrepreneur. I also work in a nonprofit by helping trans people get health insurance and other things that they need. I am an activist for my community. I am your sister, I am your mother, I am your friend. I am your ear to talk to. I am a living example of overcoming adversity and making the best out of nothing.
Rusty H is a Two Spirit community organizer and founder of Harm Redux Houston, a sex worker-run harm reduction and mutual aid group that prioritizes services for BIPOC sex workers and Black trans women.
Nina Mayers is a sex worker advocate, educator, core organizer of Harm Redux Houston, and founder of Houston Community Fridges.
Moderated by Jessica Zeigler, MSW student at the UH Graduate College of Social Work.
Fiscal Sponsor: UH Q+mmunity
Co-Sponsors include UH GCSW, New Moon Fund, Houston DSA, Lilith Fund, and UH Health & Wellness
Contact nosaviorsnoprisons@gmail.com for more information.
