Negotiating One’s Place in Public Space through Squatting: The Activist Trajectory of a Female Sex Workers’ Collective in the Raval Neighborhood, Barcelona
In response to the municipality’s punitive strategies, sex workers from the Raval neighborhood, located in the highly touristic old city, formed a collective in 2006 still active today. The collective’s purpose is to fight against institutional attempts to exclude the practice of prostitution from public spaces (Motterle, 2018). These women’ activist trajectories are remarkable for the diversity of the repertoires of action they use, the evolution of the recognition of their protest by municipal actors, and the longevity of their mobilization, especially given the limited resources with which they initially began their protest.
Drawing on a reflection on citizenship, this presentation focuses on a particular mode of collective action used by these sex workers: the practice of squatting alongside other local residents (Isin, 2008 ; Dadusc, 2019).
An ethnographic study conducted in squats in the Raval neighborhood, complemented by archival analysis and participatory methods involving the collective's sex workers, shows how these women find in these illegally occupied spaces an opportunity to express themselves, to value their skills, and to build alliances with local actors despite the criminalization of their presence in the city. In their repertoire of action, squatting emerges as a tool to negotiate their social recognition both as political subjects and as citizens. I will demonstrate that sex workers’ involvement in squats contributed to their progressive integration into municipal decision-making processes concerning prostitution, from which they were initially excluded, and to legitimate their presence in public space.