Butterfly: Sex Workers’ Political Advocacy and Anti-Asian Hatred in the Colonial Americas - Leah Erwin
BUTTERFLY: THE COLLECTIVE
Historical Origins
In 2014, the support network Butterfly was founded by Elene Lam to support migrant sex workers, and Asian migrant sex workers in particular.¹ The support group was formed and developed by sex workers, for sex workers, in an effort to address the unique challenges they face working in Canada as a result of their gender, ethnicity, and migrant status.² Lam and other sex workers in Toronto were dissatisfied with the legal, health, advocacy, and community resources made available to Asian and migrant sex workers in the region. As Canada in the last few decades has moved forward with criminalizing sex work and women who work in the industry, Asian migrants often find themselves at risk of both incarceration and deportation in the name of abolishing sex work rather than regulating it as a credible industry.³
Founder Eugene Lam emigrated to Canada from Hong Kong and has been an activist in migrant sex workers’ rights long before Butterfly was created - she continuously criticized the strategies of deportation officials in Canada, who used criminalization applied to migrant sex workers as a form of control and method of removal from the country.⁴ Dissatisfied with the absence or suppression of migrant sex workers’ voices in broader sex workers’ rights movement — which largely leads to conversations about abolition rather than protections for workers — Lam and other migrant sex workers formed Butterfly as a support and advocacy network to address the intersectionality of their experience. Butterfly incorporates resources for the shared barriers Asian and Migrant sex workers face because of their legal status, language, and race.⁵
The organization works to facilitate healthcare services, relationship and capacity building for advocacy, and legal protection for its members.⁶ They create outreach strategies specifically to incorporate and advocate for the lived experiences of individuals at the intersection of migrant status, ethnicity, and sex work industry. This often involves developing community events, marches, or workshops that promote legal, health, and safety protections for their members.⁷ The organization also conducts research that specifically analyzes the negative impact of law enforcement on its members — both because of their migrant status, the criminalization of their industry, and oftentimes because of the stereotypes associated with their Asian identity.⁸
This advocacy also extends against anti-trafficking or abolitionist groups, which Butterfly also objects to on the local level because is threatens both the economic livelihood and financial independence of its members. Butterfly argues that this form of advocacy reduces Asian and Migrant sex workers to passive subjects, “meek” victims of more powerful exploitation.⁹ With the overall goal of the autonomy and security of Asian and migrant sex workers — in their jobs, in their homes, from customers, from police, from the law — Butterfly rejects this stereotype through active, engaged, continuous advocacy in the legal, healthcare, and law enforcement spaces.
In large part, this organization arose out of this intersection of a broader colonial logic, a convergence of policies designed to exploit and subjugate people of color in Canada. Anti-trafficking initiatives are largely rationalized in Canada through anti-Asian rhetoric — legislators create a moral imperative to “save” Asian sex workers and “protect” transient migrant populations more likely to engage in sex work.¹⁰ In doing so, anti-trafficking supporters and NGO’s often subscribe to an abolitionist viewpoint of sex work: that it should be criminalized and made illegal in its totality. Under this framework, safety for sex workers looks like a lack of sex work at all, rather than just a regulation and state-sponsored insurance for the safety of sex workers.¹¹
However, in organizing against the industry altogether, abolitionists often distort the realities of the sex work profession for Asian and migrant sex workers.¹² There are cases of coercion, of course, but in large part the truer sense of coercion according to Butterfly is a western, pro-white and Anti-Asian, capitalist society. To criminalize sex work under this colonial society and framework is to remove Asian and migrant sex workers from their means of economic stability, independence, and safety. Instead, Butterfly seeks to create policy and cultural shifts that protect Asian and Migrant sex workers and the work they do through long-term goals like legal rights, access to healthcare and legitimate labor organizing, reducing the stigma towards sex workers in Canadian society, and mitigating eliminating racism in the profession.¹³
RESISTANCE TO THE COLONIAL PROJECT
Active and subtle political resistances to the colonial project are centered in Butterfly’s work. In advocating along a broader logic of legal protection and racial justice, Butterfly’s members and Asian and Migrant sex workers more generally reject the racism inherent in the anti-trafficking, abolitionist movements of Canada. “Because they think Asian [means] weak, vulnerable, they have no brain, and then they are vulnerable, waiting for rescue,” Lam explains in an interview. “…When the Asian identity integrates with the sex worker identity, it is so easy to use the racism in the people’s minds, that they are weak, cannot make decisions for themselves, they are so passive.¹⁴” Butterfly’s strategy of resistance actively rejects this narrative and colonial logic.
The criminalization of sex work is situated in and crucial to a broader colonial history — it doesn’t exist solely in the Canadian context, or in the United States context.¹⁵ Sex work for the women of Butterfly is an act of active resistance against imperialism and colonialism that criminalizes their means of economic and political independence. If anything, Asian and migrant sex workers are the survivors of racism and sexism in support of the colonial project, not the “victims” of consensual sex as a means of employment.¹⁶ By first delegating through political legislation specific “acceptable” industries — including sex work — and then criminalizing that work once an established independence has been created, the colonial state simultaneously exploits sex workers of color and reinforces their constructed racial hierarchy with a kind of “racialized moral panic.¹⁷” In this way, Butterfly also represents resistance and solidarity against the racist police state that is also crucial to the success of the colonial project. “Migrant sex workers are often the target of law enforcement and surveillance and they are being arrested, deported, and detained in the name of getting rescued,” Lam points out. In this way, we see that much of Butterfly’s resistance is seen in the abolition of police surveillance and force rather than the abolition of their work itself.
Similarly, many of Butterfly’s members identify as women and face an intersectional form of exploitation and marginalization because of their work, migrant status, race, and womanhood. Sex work has also been associated with the female identity, and has been simultaneously commodified and vilified for the purpose of upholding patriarchy as well as coloniality.¹⁸ In this broader colonial, patriarchal logic, oppression comes in the form of exploitation — in the primary commodification of women’s bodies, the simultaneous policy-backed slut-shaming that encourages violence and stigmatization of said women, and the broader marginalization of sex work as an industry that must work in the liminal edges of society without state-sanctioned protection.
Additionally, Butterfly creates an intentional space for empowerment of intersectional identities by leading capacity-building and educational workshops that highlight the political potential of a person because of their migrant status, ethnicity, and woman-hood — not in spite of it.¹⁹ The movement — which is predominantly made up of women-identifying migrant sex workers — is able to empower one another both in community-building for its members and in capacity-building within a broader community of sex workers who are unaffiliated with Butterfly.²⁰ This solidarity extends to sex workers who don’t identify as Asian or migrant, as can be seen with Butterfly’s longstanding partnerships with Maggie’s, the Canadian Alliance for Sex Work Law Reform, and Strut; it extends to migrants or other people of color who do not work in the sex industry, as can be seen with their shared campaigns via No One is Illegal and their solidarity campaigns with Black Lives Matter on social media; and as can be seen in their Butterfly Voices campaign, their solidarity also extends across language and constructed borders.²¹
In rejecting the abolitionist strategy of many white-led sex work activists, Butterfly aims to re-solidify a narrative that is realistic about their industry — both its inherent dangers for sex workers because of the racism and sexism foundational to Canada’s creation (and the U.S., and England, etc., etc.) and its potential for creating independence, agency, and autonomy for Asian and migrant sex workers in the midst of this colonial project. This potential of sex work is championed by Butterfly, and in doing so they resist the stigma and marginalization they are exposed to by the colonial power. This is a crucial act of resistance with real political implications, because eliminating that stigma is key to mitigating the extreme rates of violence and exploitation sex workers are susceptible to — not from their individual customers, but by the broader colonial structures and the police states they perpetuate. Their narrative is a key and invaluable example of autonomy, community-led advocacy, and resistance that aims to not only change the law but the colonial logic inherent in the exploitation of sex workers.
Accompanying this analysis is a visual project depicting the colonial logic at work in Canada’s anti-Asian racism throughout history, as well as art and quotes from members of Butterfly who identify as Asian and/or migrant sex workers around the world.
¹ NSWP: Global Network of Sex Work Projects, 2015.
² Butterfly. “About Us,” n.d.
³ NSWP: Global Network of Sex Work Projects, 2015.
⁴ Ibid.
⁵ Ibid.
⁶ Butterfly. “Activities,” n.d.
⁷ Butterfly. “About Us,” n.d.
⁸ Butterfly. “Arrest and Detention,” March 2015.
⁹ NSWP: Global Network of Sex Work Projects, 2015.
¹⁰ Ibid.
¹¹ CAP International. “Meet the Coalition,” n.d. .
¹² NSWP: Global Network of Sex Work Projects, 2015.
¹³ Butterfly. “About Us,” n.d.
¹⁴ NSWP: Global Network of Sex Work Projects, 2015.
¹⁵ Bryder, Linda. “Sex, Race, and Colonialism: An Historiographical Review.”
¹⁶ Ibid.
¹⁷ St. Denis, Jen. “Sex Worker Advocates Launch New Challenge to Prostitution Laws.”
¹⁸ Arthur, Joyce. “Patriarchal Values Dominate the Sex Work Debate.”
¹⁹ Butterfly. “Activities,” n.d.
²⁰ “Butterfly Voices: Collecting Stories of Migrant Sex Workers around the World,” May 12, 2015.
²¹ Ibid; Butterfly. “Partner Organizations,” n.d.; “Butterflycsw.” Instagram (social media), March 10, 2021.