KONFERENZ: FANTASIES THAT MATTER. IMAGES OF SEXWORK IN MEDIA AND ART.

Alice Schwarzer’s call to ban prostitution has prompted an animated discussion in the German media. Beyond the moral and political questions of how to handle sex work, it has also become very clear that the debate is dominated by projections, fantasies and myths. There is little reliable information available on sex work because this business remains highly stigmatised and sex workers themselves rarely participate in the public representation of their profession. Collaborating with Missy Magazine, the International Summer Festival is hosting a conference at which academics, sex workers, artists and media professionals will engage in lectures, discussions and performances to examine the images of sex work that continue to dominate the discussion. What does this picture say about what society makes of sex work, about its relationship to working women, sexuality and sexual morality, gender, migration and poverty?

Programme:

[Fri] 08.08.

18:00 OPENING and BOSOM BALLET (Annie Sprinkle) /// p1 After a brief opening speech from the two conference hosts Margarita Tsomou (Cultural researcher/Missy Magazine) and Eike Wittrock (Theatre expert/International Summer Festival) Annie Sprinkle will present BOSOM BALLET (Brüste-Ballett) – one of her legendary performances – providing a festive opening to the conference.

18:15 IMAGE_WHORE_IMAGE. THE POLITICS OF LOOKING AND LOOKING BACK Lecture by Antke Engel /// p1 Antke Engel, Director of the Institute for Queer Theory (Hamburg/Berlin), opens the conference with a lecture on artistic images of sex work, and considers the politics of representation in the interplay between public image and self image. Engel is a freelance academic in the field of feminist and queer theory and has been highly influential in shaping the field of queer gender and sexuality research since the 1990s – in a German-speaking context as well as on the international stage.

19:30 COLLATERAL DAMAGE
Mithu Sanyal in conversation with Carol Leigh AKA Scarlot Harlot
Carol Leigh AKA Scarlot Harlot is one of the most internationally important figures in the sex worker movement, and not just because she coined the term ‘sex work’. She is seen as one of the ‘mothers’ of the sex worker movement, she is an author, sex educator, producer and film maker, has written various publications, has founded many festivals and is now directing the San Francisco Sex Worker Film and Video Festival.
During the conference, clips from her new documentary film COLLATERAL DAMAGE: SEX WORKERS AND THE ANTI-TRAFFICKING CAMPAIGNS will be shown continuously as part of an installation. She will discuss her work on the film with award-winning journalist Mithu Sanyal, the author of a book on the cultural history of female genitalia, ‘Vulva - Die Enthüllung des unsichtbaren Geschlechts’ (‘Vulva – The Unveiling of the Invisible Gender’) (Wagenbach Verlag, 2013), which has been translated into many languages.

22:00

MACHO DANCER Performance by Eisa Jocson (PHL/B) /// p1 For her solo piece, MACHO DANCER, visual artist and choreographer Eisa Jocson has appropriated a form of erotic dance that is mainly practiced in Filipino gay bars. Young men move around to power ballads and soft rock in a hyper-stylised form of masculinity, their hips slowly gyrating and presenting their muscles. In the transfer to their (womanly) bodies, the gender lines become blurred and the mechanics of this economic physical performance become visible.

[Sat] 09.08.

11:00 PROSTITUTION PRISM REFLECTIONS: FROM FACT TO FANTASY Lecture by Gail Pheterson (F) /// p1 Gail Pheterson’s book ‘Huren-Stigma’ (‘The Whore Stigma’) was first published in 1986 and has now become an internationally renowned definitive work. With this book she achieved an essential contribution to the feminist debate on female sex workers. The author of this classic on stigma has since become famous around the world for her publications on prostitution – she is a lecturer and researcher at the Centre de recherches sociologiques et politiques in Paris CRESPPA-UMR 7217, CNRS and the Université Paris 8 and will lecture on the theses of her latest book Le prisme de la prostitution (Paris, L’Harmattan, 2001).

12:00 BREAD AND ROSES: RETHINKING SEXUAL AND ECONOMIC JUSTICE Lecture by Nikita Dhawan and María do Mar Castro Varela, followed by a conversation with Luzenir Caixeta, maiz (AUT) /// p1 Nikita Dhawan is a junior professor of Political Science, specialising in Gender and Postcolonial Studies at the Goethe University in Frankfurt, in the framework of the excellence cluster ‘The formation of normative orders’. Maria do Mar Castro Varela is a professor at the Alice Salomon University of Applied Sciences in Berlin. They are both among the most innovative female thinkers on the intersectional interweaving of migration and feminism in German speaking countries. Together they will talk on the issue of representation of migrant sex work. This will be followed by a conversation with Dr. Luzenir Caixeta, co-founder and co-ordinator of a field of research of maiz (Autonomous Centre by and for Migrants, Austria), which is relevant for her work with migrant sex workers across Austria.

14:30 DISQUALIFIED: WHY SEX WORKERS SUFFER SOCIAL DEATH Lecture by Laura María Agustín /// p1 ‘Naked Anthropoplogist’ Laura María Agustín is working on undocumented migration, human trafficking and the sex industry, and with her influential book, ‘Sex at the Margins: Migration, Labour Markets and the Rescue Industry’ (Zed Books 2007) she has introduced new arguments in the international debate on the role of NGOs and aid organisations in the sex industry.

16:00 ZOOM IN: PROSTITUTION/POLITICS HAMBURG Discussion with Ulrike Lembke (HH), Undine de Rivière (HH) and Gerhard Schlagheck (HH) /// p1 The panel will engage with the specific situation in Hamburg – the ‘City of Whores’ – as well as taking up the debate on the German prostitution law. Ulrike Lembke is a Junior Professor for Public Law and Legal Gender Studies at Hamburg University. Among other topics she should examine the question of how established law reflects social relationships, i.e. why something is deemed lawful or not. Undine de Rivière is a sex worker in Hamburg, a spokeswoman for the Professional Association for Erotic and Sexual Services and a pioneering member of the ‘Hamburg Prostitution Advisory’. Gerhard Schlagheck is a social worker and street worker with the ‘Basis Project’, the only shelter for male prostitutes in Hamburg. The two of them should specifically speak about their disputes with the legal situation in Hamburg.

18:00 WATCH ME WORK Performance by Liad Hussein Kantorowicz with Maria Mitsopoulou and Idan Sagiv Richter /// k4 Liad Hussein Kantoworicz is a performer (UDK M.A. SODA), sex worker, author, queer activist and founder of the first union for sex workers in the Middle East. Furthermore she works for an Israeli erotic chat website, on which the clients pay by the minute for intimate conversations and personal live performances. In the performance WATCH ME WORK she provides a real time insight into this cyber sex work and offers different perspectives to her simultaneously intimate and highly theatrical performance.

20:30 MY LIFE AS A METAMORPHOSEXUAL WHORE. ALWAYS RECREATING MY SEX WORKER SELF Performance by Annie Sprinkle (USA), with Beth Stephens and guests /// p1 A legendary porn star, artist and sex work activist from the very beginning, Annie Sprinkle is coming back to Hamburg for one of her lecture performances. Sprinkle is one of the most famous representatives of sex-positive feminism and an icon of sexual enlightenment in the USA and beyond. She has researched sexuality practically and theoretically, from the holy to the profane. Her work on the mutual emancipation of women and sex workers has great relevance both internationally and historically. Her performance, ‘Post Porn Modernist’ has toured more than 19 countries and has become one of the most important interventions in the sex war within the feminist movement of the 1980s in the USA. At the Summer Festival she will use videos, photographs, mini performances and a ritual of holy eco-whores to report on her eventful life and her political activities, which currently concentrate on love, relationships, breast cancer, ageing and the intersection of ecology and sexuality – sexecology.

[Sun] 10.08.

12:00 SELF REPRESENTATION: SEX WORK AND ART WORK Closing discussion with Liad Hussein Kantorowicz, Coralie Trinh Thi, Eisa Jocson, Annie Sprinkle and Carol Leigh AKA Scarlot Harlot //// p1 The final panel of the conference brings together the participating media professionals and artists in order to reflect on particular strategies of self-representation in the interplay between self-image and public image.