“Very little but a lot.” Solidarity within the sex workers' community in Poland during the COVID‐19 pandemic

Agata Dziuban, Martyna Możdrzeń and Anna Ratecka

Gender, Work and Organization, 2021, vol. 28, issue S2, 366-377

Abstract: This article is an account of the struggle of the sex workers' community in Poland during the COVID‐19 pandemic. It unfolds as a dialog between three members of Sex Work Polska, a sex worker‐led activist and advocacy collective in Poland. While positioned as researchers, activists, and/or sex workers, we transgress the boundaries between academia and activism, permitting a grassroots insight into the crisis situation of the sex workers' community. This method enables us to present the embodied experience of community solidarity in crisis. We recall our thoughts and emotions from the moment of lockdown and our response to the pandemic by organizing an Emergency Fund to support sex workers. We reflect on how the pandemic evoked solidarity, the conditionality of institutionalized support, and our resistance to it. In capturing our experiences, we also show how the pandemic exposed the pre‐existing vulnerabilities of sex workers, their invisibility as a community in crisis, and their overvisibility as subjects of punitive measures. Our collective work and discussion allowed for engagement in feminist knowledge production, but also constituted a community care process.

Date: 2021
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