VIVIAN WENLI LIN

4. REMAINING ANONYMOUS

Using Participatory Arts-Based Methods with Migrant Women Workers in the Age of the Smartphone

OBJECTIVES

Background: Voices of Women Media Communities of Turkish, Moroccan, Surinamese, Indonesian, and Chinese immigrants who are considered, officially, allochtoon—born in another country or having a parent from another country—have long settled in the Netherlands. Pooja Pant, a Nepalese media activist, and I were curious about their experience of becoming Dutch since we had both just arrived to live and work in Amsterdam so we co-founded Voices of Women (VOW) Media in 2007 and we partnered with various community-based organizations working in the area of migrant women’s rights1 to run participatory media workshops. In 2012, we decided to expand this work to East Asia and South Asia out of a personal desire to establish connections to the countries of our parents. Through these partnerships and over the following nine years we worked closely with women sex workers who see themselves as being invisible in society as a whole but visible to the public. In their lacking opportunity and access to resources, they are often discussed by those in power who make decisions, such as politicians, the media, or policy makers, but are not included in the discussion. To use the words of Srilatha Batliwala, in this work VOW Media explores women’s empowerment as part of “both a process and the result of that process” (1994, p. 130). In a collaborative and non-hierarchical setting we engage with communities of migrant women using participatory arts-based methodologies, including cellphilms, in order to create audiovisual media works that highlight their life stories. We prompt participants with questions such as: What were your experiences of migration, and what were the struggles and obstacles you encountered along the way? What did you have to leave behind, and did you find what you were looking for? Our aim is to encourage the empowerment of migrant women by having them participate fully in the storytelling process both creatively and technically, and by honoring the stories they produce. The result of this process is a “counter-cinema” (Johnston, 1973, p. 31) that can challenge negative portrayals of women marginalized in mainstream media through the expression of these

K. MacEntee et al. (Eds.), What’s a Cellphilm? 67–83. © 2016 Sense Publishers. All rights reserved. V. W. Lin alternative voices, and call to account those who contribute to social stigmatization, with its harmful consequences for these women. In this chapter I look at case studies based on the project, A Day In Her Life, a participatory media workshop with migrant sex workers in Amsterdam in 2010 and 2012, and in Hong Kong in 2014, who face a great deal of discrimination because of their gender identity, ethnicity, socio-economic status, and profession. The work we did in each of these locales was based on a curriculum I co-developed with Geraldine Chung and Ann Poochareon in a 2004 project, Fortunes for Cookies, during which teenage girls from New York City’s Chinatowns created self-portrait videos to challenge and counteract the negative portrayals of Asian women in Hollywood. The core of this curriculum was updated to cater to the specific needs of the Netherlands and Hong Kong communities and to reflect the increased accessibility of online social media and cellphone technology. In order to assess the significance of integrating this technology into the curriculum, I bring together a theoretical framework from the fields of documentary film, cine-feminism, and participatory action research. I analyze the various ways in which media created at project sites offers alternative perspectives on the lives and labor of marginalized women, and I reflect on the ways in which cellphone technology and cellphilming contributed to and challenged their narrative expression.

SEX WORK

Sex workers are marginalized as a result of the stigmatization of those women thought of as whores and, in many countries, the profession is criminalized (Delacoste & Alexander, 1987). Although sex workers are stigmatized as public women who sell their private lives out of monetary greed, the Sophie Day study suggests that sex workers are aware of their place in society and that many are able to manipulate the system so as to save money, start families, run their own businesses, or eventually leave the trade. Day refers to sex workers as “migrants ‘at home’” (2007, p. 207, emphasis added) who are able to search for opportunity by leaving their past lives behind. According to Radio Netherlands Worldwide, there are local Dutch women participating in the sex industry, but waves of migration that saw different groups enter the Netherlands for sex work, from Thailand in the 1970s, Latin America in the 1980s, and Eastern Europe in the late 1990s and 2000s (2009) changed the demographics of the Red Light District. In addition, the Netherlands experienced two waves of labor migration concurrently. The first wave, beginning in the 1960s, involved the arrival of Turkish and Moroccan laborers and the second consisted of migrants from Eastern Europe, Africa, and Latin America (Gutiérrez-Rodríguez, 2010). These parallel waves of sex workers and laborers not only changed how local people felt about and behaved towards sex workers but they also contributed to racial discrimination and hostility towards migrant laborers. Anti-immigration sentiment in Europe is creating difficult working environments for migrant women seeking economic opportunity in the region. The Coalition

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