Red Canary Song is a grassroots organization of Asian and migrant sex workers and massage workers, organizing transnationally, whose work is in the tradition of sex worker mutual aid. It centers base-building with migrant massage workers through a labor rights, migrant justice, and prison industrial complex-abolitionist framework, ➝.
As a result, prostitution charges and discriminatory licensure barriers are no longer employed as tactics to arrest massage workers.
Frantz Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks (Grove Press, 1952).
Inspired by Mahdi Sabbagh, “Renewing Solidarity” in Their Borders, Our World: Building New Solidarities with Palestine (Haymarket Books, 2024), 15.
Red Canary Song and Lisa, “Lisa Interview,” trans. Jo Z, Yale Paprika! 8, no. 3 (December 2, 2022), ➝.
Chong Gu, “韧 (rèn),” Thresholds 52 (2024): 38-49.
The “pursuit, performance, and representation of domesticity as a site of citizenship” connects the home to “belonging.” Stephen Vider, The Queerness of Home: Gender, Sexuality & the Politic of Domesticity after World War II (Chicago University Press, 2021), 16.
Gu, “韧 (rèn).”
bell hooks, “Choosing the Margin as a Space of Radical Openness,” Framework: The Journal of Cinema and Media 36 (1989): 19-20.
Patricia Buckley Ebrey, The Inner Quarters: Marriage and the Lives of Chinese Women in the Sung Period (University of California Press, 1993), 52.
Christina Sharpe, In the Wake: On Blackness and Being (Duke University Press, 2016), 10.
Unpublished Oral History from RCS Archive.
Wilfred Chan, “‘The Police See Us as Disposable’: What Life’s Really like in New York’s Maligned ‘Red Light District,’” The Guardian, August 3, 2023, ➝.
adrienne maree brown, Pleasure Activism: The Politics of Feeling Good (AK Press, 2019).
hooks, “Choosing the Margins as a Space of Radical Openness,” 15.