Summer Institute: Sex Work as Resistance
Date: Wednesdays, July 16-30, 2025
Time: 6:00pm - 9:00pm ET
Location: Online
Cost: Sliding scale, $25-$250
Register: https://www.eventbrite.com/e/summer-institute-sex-work-as-resistance-tickets-1374784991919?aff=oddtdtcreator
How do women and queer people use sex work to resist racial capitalism, colonial borders, and heteropatriarchal marriage?
Globally, the majority of sex workers are either poor, working class, migrant, disabled or LGBTQ.
Sex work is their survival but more than that, it is their defiance. It is a way that migrant women disobey travel bans that bar them from entry to the global north or force them into backbreaking jobs in the farms and factories. It is a way that trans women refuse to stay in their assigned gender and fund their lives, their healthcare and their community’s survival. It is a way that single mothers (cis and trans) can afford to form their own families and support their children, without a husband’s income.
This isn’t girlboss feminism. The Sex Work as Resistance Summer Institute flips the narrative of exploitation to highlight how cisgender and transgender women and queer people strategically leverage sexuality to gain access to money, mobility and bodily autonomy that is out of reach for marginalized people. It is about how sex workers boldly insist on controlling their lives and bodies, in the face of hyper-criminalization, border surveillance, discrimination and cultural dehumanization that frames them as a threat to Western nations and families. Sometimes they are! And in this seminar, we celebrate that.
Over the course of three weeks, participants will learn about sex workers and explore some of the ways that marginalized women and LGBTQ people use sex work to resist social and economic domination and exploitation and how the carceral state tries to stop them through criminalization, discrimination and stigma. The sessions are organized into three themes: movement, marriage and money.
About the Instructor
Chanelle Gallant is an activist-scholar who has spent over two decades organizing within movements for racial justice and sex workers’ rights. Her work spans scholarly research, public writing, strategic advising, and frontline organizing. Chanelle is the co-author of Not Your Rescue Project: Migrant Sex Workers Fighting for Justice (with Elene Lam) and she has contributed to influential collections such as Pleasure Activism and Abolish Social Work (As We Know It).
Fee Structure
$25 CAD Scholarship Rate (for sex workers and low/unwaged)
$100 CAD Living Wage Rate (this covers the real costs of the seminar)
$250 CAD Solidarity Rate (supports scholarship participants)
For US participants, your rates will vary according to your bank's exchange rate but will be roughly $17-20 USD (Scholarship rate), $72-74 USD (Living Wage Rate), or $180-182 USD or higher (Solidarity Rate)