This article examines how mutual aid efforts between sex work activists and disability activists straddled the tension between respectability politics and subversive work to invigorate feminist disability justice in Argentina.
I specifically focus on a Instagram Live conversation titled "Putas y Discas" to elucidate how public debates during a pandemic and in the digital age contribute to the conceptualization of 'access intimacy,' a term introduced by disability activist Mia Mingus. I attended the event as a user taking notes and paying attention to how labor rights, disability justice, and online censorship converge in the Global South to strengthen the solidarity between sex work and disability activists, featuring digital platforms as a potential arena to uphold access intimacy.
The juncture of sex work and disability activisms in Argentina informs notions of interdependency more broadly and reconfigures the relationships between vulnerability and resistance, especially in the pandemic context. A more inclusive politics of desire can also identify the labor of sex workers as communal care and consider how the more revolutionary aspects of sex work can inform the broader politics of labor.
In the form of access intimacy, sex work activism and disability activists contest the malfunctioning healthcare system that bypasses sexuality as integral health, displaying the vitality of collectives and the possibilities for digital activism.
Sex worker and activist Georgina Orellano was 23 years old when she was approached on the street by a middle-aged woman. Instead of asking her to leave the corner, as Georgina assumed she would, she shyly asked to discuss a personal matter. Despite stares from the other tables, the woman began crying and said, "I do not know what I am doing here with you. She was not, and took a roundabout way of telling Georgina about her situation. At home, in discussions with her husband, the existence of their son's sexual desires was not up for debate.
