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Keynote Address: Reproductive Rights Under Siege: Responding to the Anti-Choice Agenda Conference. University of Michigan Law School. March 5, 2004
It is great to be here with a new generation that is advocating for reproductive rights and responding to the extraordinary anti-choice agenda we currently face. I am not going to talk about that agenda directly tonight because I know that you know it. You know about the judicial appointments, you know about the parental consent laws, you know about the denial of funding for low-income women, you know about the global gag rule.Prostitution and Male Supremacy
The assumptions of academia can barely begin to imagine the reality of life for women in prostitution. Academic life is premised on the notion that there is a tomorrow and a next day and a next day; or that someone can come inside from the cold for time to study; or that there is some kind of discourse of ideas and a year of freedom in which you can have disagreements that will not cost you your life. These are premises that those who are students here or who teach here act on every day. They are antithetical to the lives of women who are in prostitution or who have been in prostitution.Prostitution and Civil Rights
The gap between the promise of civil rights and the real lives of prostitutes is an abyss which swallows up prostituted women.' To speak of prostitution and civil rights in one breath moves the two into one world, at once exposing and narrowing the distance between them.Male Sexuality: Why Ownership is Sexy
What I want to address is what I call the eroticism of owning. We have a lot of circumstantial evidence that this eroticism exists. For instance, based on the testimony of women who are or have been sexually owned in marriage, taken in rape, and/or sexually used for a fee in prostitution, it appears that for many men, possession is a principal part of their sexual behavior. Many men can scarcely discern any erotic feelings that are not associated with owning someone else's body.Prostitution: Where Racism & Sexism Intersect
Black women find themselves in a unique and extremely difficult position in our society. They are forced to deal with the oppression that arises from being Black in a white-supremacist culture and the oppression that arises from being female in a male-supremacist culture. In order to examine the experience of being Black and female, this paper attempts to describe that very difficult, tight space where Black women attempt to survive-that space where racism and sexism intersect.Strategies of Connection: Prostitution and Feminist Politics
A feminist political approach to prostitution must begin from these strengths and be tested against the standards set by them. I want to address how taking each of these strengths seriously can create sustained resistance against prostitution.Prostitution is Cruelty and Abuse to Women and Children
Each day I rise to take up the truly good fight to stop the harm to women in prostitution. I long for complete liberation of all oppressed peoples. I passionately believe that the work I do to end prostitution is revolutionary. No one deserves to be used and abused, and that is the universal experience of prostituted women and children. It is also revolutionary work because my freedom as a woman is meaningless so long as some of us can be bought and sold. The giant sex industry grinds on, exploiting and enslaving women, while sexual liberals are well-paid by that industry to mock us with shallow concepts-concepts premised on never having heard the cries or experienced the terror of the victims of this monstrous institution.