Tagging for activist ends and strategic ephemerality: creating the Sex Work Database as an activist digital archive

"We come together as one...and hope for solidarity to live on"

“…Allard and Ferris have written about social justice and community mobilisation through participatory approaches to archiving in their Digital Archives and Marginalized Communities Project [3]. Looking more specifically at one of the archives within this project, the Sex Work Database, we can see how they centre politics: "we make no claims to objectivity; we argue instead for the necessity of complicating dominant cultural representations of sex workers; for more effective alliances with and support for the efforts of those who struggle to establish sex workers as persons worthy of dignity and respect; and the elimination of whore stigma and colonial racism that underlie the symbolic and literal marginalization of and violence against sex workers" [25]. They make clear that anti-stigma work is integral to the development of their archive, not only in their participatory approach to collecting and storing materials [3], but also how these materials are tagged and catalogued [25].…”

“…Their project they focussed on the importance of 'human values' such as the currency of witnessing, trusted relationships and the guardianship of the archives themselves. Bringing this together with the ways in which Allard and Ferris conceptualise activism in their Sex Work Database [25], we learn that it is not only the process of collection, curation, and maintenance of an archive which are important, but that the underlying justice-oriented ethos of these processes and the work and activism that surrounds the archives are integral to the work itself.…”

“…Our work sits alongside this kind of justice-oriented work, which aims to promote the development of archives that are explicitly political and antiviolent [3,25], and that place important aspects of community, activism, and justice at their core [30,31,56]. Allard and Ferris have written about social justice and community mobilisation through participatory approaches to archiving in their Digital Archives and Marginalized Communities Project [3].…”

Technologies for Social Justice

“…One example of this is the creation of a Sex Work Database in Canada. This database brings together "academic research, print and visual media, grassroots activism, and commemorative responses related to missing and murdered women and sex work" and functions as an activist archive that brings together documents produced by sex workers that deliberately assembles "an anti-colonial feminist argument that highlights marginalized voices, and embraces principles of social justice and reciprocity" [19]. Learning from this collaborative project, we see that technologies are not only built with embedded values [24], but also that these can support wider political struggles -in this case the 'tagging' of archived documents was seen as activism for sex worker rights [19].…”

“…We premise our understanding of sex work from the communities that engage in it and build on existing literatures (eg. [1,19,44]) that recognize sex work as a type of labour that should not be criminalized, but rather protected by labour and other relevant laws that promote human rights. Carol Leigh, feminist and sex worker rights activist who coined the term 'sex work' in 1987, explains that the term "acknowledges the work we do rather than defines us by our status [as a sex worker]".…”