Race, Space, and Prostitution : The Making of Settler Colonial Canada

Authors: 
Title: 
Race, Space, and Prostitution : The Making of Settler Colonial Canada
Journal Citation: 
30(3) CANADIAN JOURNAL OF WOMEN AND THE LAW, 371-397 (2018)

This article employs Sherene Razack’s critical anti-racist feminist theoretical and methodological framework to study the role that prostitution has played in settler colonial domination of Indigenous peoples and lands past and present. Four examples are used to illustrate how prostitution has been used by settler colonial forces to perpetuate violence against Indigenous women and girls as well as justify and erase the presence of this violence in society: Early Settlement in British Columbia, the Indian Act, the Pass System, and Vancouver’s Missing Women. Prostitution is cited as a method used to secure a hierarchical societal structure that places Indigenous women and girls at the bottom through dehumanization and the elimination of self-determination. The ideology that underpins prostitution as a method of colonial domination, racism, and heteropatriarchy is identified as the same ideology that underpins the attitudes that allow this violence to continue, in a lot of cases unpunished.