$QUEAL: DISABLED WHORE STORIES is Ali’s PHD dissertation research project.

The goal of this arts-based research project was to build and strengthen online community care networks amongcurrent and former sex workers who identify as chronically ill and/or disabled on Vancouver Island. Together with her collaborators Ali built a creative resource (zine) that will be shared within wider sex worker care networks across Vancouver Island that includes an arts-based workshop guide and a collection of art (poetry, comics, collage, etc). The resource focusses on care and resistance to sex work stigma and ableism and hard copies will be available for purchase on this website soon. A PDF version will also be free for all sex workers and sex worker support organizations.

Ali was inspired to do this project as a person living with a disability and a former full service sex worker as she was fortunate to experience the positive impacts of networks of care created “by us, for us” in her community. Sex working and disabled/chronically-ill communities provide incredible support to one another and harness creative power in wild and wonderful ways. Her belief was that through creating and sharing their art and arts-based workshop guides, chronically-ill and disabled sex workers could strengthen these already existing support systems and potentially educate the broader public as well.

Disabled sex workers are everywhere as evidenced by The By Us, For Us (BUFU) report which surveyed more than 200 sex workers in the context of the global COVID-19 pandemic and the criminalization of sex work, and set against backgrounds of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission, a national inquiry into Murdered and Missing Indigenous Women and Girls (MMIWG), and a public health overdose crisis.  Machat et al. found that 73% of sex workers surveyed were living with disabilities.