On Intimacies and Infrastructures: Sex Work and Spatial Politics

The city is constituted by overlapping networks of infrastructures and intimacies. These networks form the often-overlooked space of the everyday for many, yet for sex workers these networks have the capacity to reproduce patterns of violence and marginalization. A deep reading of Canadian sex work legislation exposes an interconnected web of power, policing, and exclusionary tactics with harmful repercussions—essentially making it illegal for sex workers to exist in either "public" or "private" spaces as defined by Western logic. Situated within sex-positive feminist discourse and an ongoing infrastructural turn across disciplines, this thesis utilizes writing and drawing methods to engages sex work as a lens through which to assess acceptable forms of intimacy within the space of the city, and to recognize numerous affective infrastructural networks that subvert dominant stigmas associated with the profession.