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While (sometimes) centering talk about or around sexuality, psychoanalysis, as a field, has historically kept its distance from those in the sex work industry. While sex workers’ accounts could enrich psychoanalytic understandings, instead, as in the larger psychopolitical sphere, their narratives are often silenced or disavowed through a mythologization and pathologization of their labor.
As a parallel to Avgi Saketopoulou's keynote talk on the “ruse of repair,” I present an interview segment from my ongoing project on sex workers’ somatic knowledges. Sex workers inspired the Marquis de Sade's libertines, the characters who espoused his political philosophies and narrated the tales of novels such as 120 Days of Sodom. Today, sex worker activists not only embody the ethics of Saketopoulou's “exigent sadists” in organizing against systemic oppression but also provide important care labor in organizing efforts against the ongoing violence on Gaza and beyond. Through conducting interviews with a psychoanalytic methodology, my hope has been that the quiet listening of analytic practice might serve to uplift liberatory praxis as an alternative to the kinds of weaponized silences that drown out speech.
While I had conceptualized questions for this project around the sense of touch and sex workers’ experiences of trauma in individuals, responses to open-ended questions and prompts went beyond this initial intention. The excerpts here are from an interview with Ashley Ramos, a Puerto Rican and Honduran American sex worker, artist, and activist based out of Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. Ashley spoke about the sense of vision/sight and collective trauma. In a parallel to institutions that have attempted to shut down conversations about Palestine, Ashley expressed fears and frustrations of people “shutting their eyes to Palestine.” She paints portraits and shares videos of children and families living in Palestine under occupation on social media. “You have to keep pushing,” she tel