Maggie De Vries’s Missing Sarah frequents this week’s blog posts, and many of the posts related Jiwani and Young’s article “Missing and Murdered Women: Reproducing Marginality in News Discourse”. Maggie De Vries’s autobiography of Sarah gives the reader an opportunity to empathize and understand a sex worker’s life and a DTES perspective- breaking through the stigma of sex workers and DTES residents perpetuated by the media (and ourselves). There were three trends I noticed when reading the class blogs this week:
1. Blogs concerned different ways of looking at the DTES through connection, breaking through stigma, and education.
2. Blogs addressed problematic representation/social action.
3. Blogs examined the ways we attempt to understand the origins of sex workers/how society grapples with the concept.
1. News Ways of Looking at Sex Work and DTES: Connection, Breaking of Stigma and Education.
Kira writes from an educated perspective, a perspective that considers the alternative: that sex work is voluntary, that women have a say in the matter, that perhaps the occupation is enjoyable and lucrative for those that choose it. Her blog post is reminiscent of the movie, The Sessions, where the main character’s job is to allow disabled people to have sex- really changing their lives. Helen Hunt plays a relatively normal woman, a mother and a wife. Carly writes about how an instagram account allowed her to access within herself “compassion and understanding” into the world of the DTES, through humanizing photos of the residents. Sunny writes about the DTES as a community, one which, as she became more immersed in, she understood better. These three writers break through stigma through education, connection through social media, and immersion.
2. Problematic Representation/Social Action.
Stephen writes about the problematic representation of Tiffany Drew in Foresaken, arguing that her bio manifests a “fractured identity”, without allowing the reader more understanding of the nuances of her life. Patrick also critiques Foresaken, as he questions whether the biographies capture “life from the inside” as opposed to events that have social significance, such as the common sequence of: birth, drug addiction and death/disappearance. Sam writes about figures such as Trayvon Martin, or the missing women, whose media representations (missing posters, mug shots) represent them as degenerates and “asking for it”. Riley brings up monetary reconciliation for families of victims as a problematic offer of social action, raising questions such as: what amount of money could replace a loved one? Is this a result of society’s failure to investigate this women, is the government attempting to pay these families off?
3. The Ways We Understand/Grapple With Sex Work, Social Issues.
Many of the biographies in Foresaken are heavily focussed on explaining why these women ended up on the DTES, as if we need a logical reason for these women’s “degeneration”. Rafaella addresses how Maggie De Vries portrays Sarah as “vulnerable” and how this explains her entering the sex trade. Al writes about “naming the other”, and how the disenfranchised/marginalized become numbers- 4000 dead in Liberia of Ebola, while the 1 western Spanish person has their full name on display. The missing women are also grouped together, however, it is interesting that Foresaken attempts to individually name the women to give them more social respect. Al shows the way we comprehend social issues, for the marginalized, is sometimes quantified.
Works Cited:
De Vries, Sarah. Missing Sarah: A Memoir of Loss. Penguin Canada, 2008. Print.
Jiwani, Yasmin; Young, Mary- Anne. “Missing and Murdered Women: Reproducing Marginality in News Discourse”. Canadian Journal of Communication (2006): npa. Print.
Ubc blogs of Eng 474: (linked)
Al Shaibani “What’s in a Name?”
Carly Bean “Humanizing Vancouver’s Forgotten and Ignored Society”
Kira Nordhoj “The Silent Motive for Sex Work”
Patrick Connolly “The Second Life”
Rafaella Caffo “Vulnerability as her Drug”
Riley Murtha “Monetary Compensation for Families of Missing Women Insufficient”
Sam Cohn Cousineau “If They Gunned you Down, What Picture Would They Use?”
Stephen Cook “Revisiting the Portrait of Tiffany Drew”