Organizing for Sex Workers' Rights in Montreal

Francine Tremblay teaches at Concordia University.

By documenting the history of Stella, a sex worker-run health collective in Montreal, Dr. Francine Tremblay offers a deeply researched and reflective study of sex workers' efforts to empower their peers and advocate for their rights under conditions of constraint. In addition to providing a rich history of Montreal's sex industry and related policies and legal challenges in Canada, her book highlights the inherent tensions activists navigate when they balance government funding with the promotion of activist goals, and it illuminates how emotions and culture shape broader struggles for labor rights, sexual freedom, and gender equality.--Samantha Majic, Associate Professor in Political Science, City University of New York Historically grounded in time and place, Tremblay uses social movement theory and a mobilization framework, to guide us through the struggles of Stella, an association by and for sex workers. These struggles include learning to live comfortably with people across diverse realities and managing years of intense public scrutiny regarding HIV/AIDS, drug use, and violence. All while resisting the conflation of prostitution with human trafficking. The attentive reader will learn much about grappling with the challenges of mobilizing sex workers--and other similarly marginalized groups--in our current socio-legal environment.--Frances M. Shaver, Concordia University Organizing for Sex Workers' Rights in Montreal is an innovative and distinctive addition to our limited understanding of mobilizing sex workers in their communities and beyond. Focused on the emergence and development of one of Canada's first modern sex workers' rights organizations, Stella, the book engages in an honest and earnest analysis of the struggle to recognize sex workers as equal citizens, a struggle that cannot be untangled from structural factors, including social class, stigma and discrimination. No one to date has offered such a contribution, and this makes Tremblay's book a ground-breaking addition to the field.--Cecilia Benoit, University of Victoria, Canada