Working Girls and Towel Swans

I’ve got two small but connected things to share with you today. The first is that a short piece I wrote on the phrase ‘working girl’ has just been published in a special issue of the Radical History Review. Writing this piece was really fun – the theme for the issue was ‘troubling terms’ and working girl struck me as the perfect phrase to explore for this topic. As I explain, I quite like this phrase – it’s direct and to the point, and also when someone calls me a working girl it makes me feel like Dolly Parton. Lots (most?) of the slang terms for sex work and sex workers are derogatory but to me ‘working girl’ doesn’t feel like one of them. It feels sort of jaunty and informal, sure, but it’s describing the work as a kind of job. Honestly, I also kind of like that it feels a tiny bit outdated and anachronistic because to me that locates the job within a clear social and cultural history, which isn’t trying to hide its roots and its recent history, and which isn’t trying to engage in a project of enforcing a whorearchy. This one is free to access for the next couple of months, so if you’d like to read the whole thing and the rest of my thoughts, head on over.

Sort-of related, I have a couple of photos in the exhibition The Mongoose and the Snake which was curated by my friend Elisabeth Pointon, and which is showing at Jhana Millers’ gallery in Te Whanganui-a-Tara Wellington for the next couple of weeks. The exhibition is so lively and vibrant and I’m stoked to be part of it.

My contribution is a couple of photos which examine and document towel swans. Towel swans are an object that have a particular association for many sex workers. Depending on where and when you worked, there’s a good chance the bed or massage table was supposed to be decorated with a towel swan, or some other kind of towel art. At a parlor I used to work at you could frequently guess who’d been in a room before you based on how the bathmat and two towels were arranged on the bed. I’ve raged before and at length about the lazy visual shorthand used for sex work (street legs) and I’m interested in what we might use as an alternative. The way I’ve set up the towel swans, against a black backdrop, is meant to mimic how we might see specimens in a museum documented. Sex work gets treated as this oddity to be gawked at so frequently, and so I like the idea of solemnly offering up a towel swan as an artifact to be examined and considered, forcing some reflection on other entrance points into thinking about the industry.