Chichi Castillo and May May Peltier, Stone Dove, 2021.
The Whore Gaze: Understandings of Care, Labor, and Sovereignty
Curated by Elizabeth Dayton and Kim Ye
LACE Screening Room
Sunday, June 2, 2024, 2–5 pm
Philosophical Research Society
3910 Los Feliz Blvd, Los Angeles, CA 90027
Limited free parking available on site
Free admission | RSVP HERE
LACE Screening Room features a film project curated by Elizabeth Dayton and Kim Ye. Drawing on filmmaker PJ Starr and activist Sonyka Francis’s concept of the “whore gaze,” this film and video program celebrates the legacy of sex workers as visionaries who reimagine representations of care, labor, and sovereignty.
Before the films begin, guests find their seats within a space filled by Bolexxx (Red Light Green excerpt) (2023), Eva Wu’s animation of otherworldly shifting pleasures and fabulous freaks thriving in their truth. The program then presents the film Stone Dove (2021), and documentaries Odyssey is Red (2022) and Fly in Power (2023).
Stone Dove (2021) traverses topics of financial autonomy, Black Womanhood, desirability hierarchies, and artistic legacy as related to sex work. Chichi Castillo and May May Peltier’s black-and-white experimental documentary utilizes split-screen intimate vignettes and fragmented interview voiceovers to demonstrate how erotic labor informs understandings of individual and community sovereignty.
Odyssey is Red (2022), directed by Neda Chaturvedi, Ayushi Shriramwar, Tahir Ahmed Qureshis, and Naomi Fleur Jahan and produced by the Hers is Ours (HIO) collective in India, follows 20 Krantikaris (revolutionary) women on their Santiago De Compostela pilgrimage, demonstrating strategies of care that arise from those who live in intimate relation to sex work.
Fly in Power (2023), directed by Yin Q and Yoon Grace Ra, explores the work of Red Canary Song (RCS), a grassroots massage worker coalition that was formed after worker Yang Song was killed in a NYC police raid. The documentary offers powerful insights into the intersecting challenges faced by Asian migrant massage workers, complicating narratives of sex, capitalism, migration, and border control.
The films are followed by a community guest panel, “The Erotic Labor of Art, Family, and Futurity.” The panelists are Rogelio Ruckus, Kayla Tange, and Daphne Nguyen.
About the Curators
Elizabeth Dayton is a sex worker rights scholar whose research examines the significance of art as a form of activism and political project of survival, resilience, and community building for sex working and trading communities. Dayton earned her PhD. and M.A. from UCLA, and her B.A. from San Francisco State University. Drawn to sex worker art first as a fellow worker then as a researcher, Dayton took over as Festival Director of the San Francisco Bay Area Sex Worker Film and Arts Festival in 2020. After working with the late Carol Leigh and Erica Elena, Dayton produced the most recent festival in May 2023 in collaboration with sex worker organizations BAWS, Failed Films, Old Pros Media, The Carol Leigh Memorial Collective and SWOP BB & Project Prosper. This work has been supported by the Carol Leigh Memorial Estate and the Center for the Study of Women at UCLA.
Kim Ye is a Chinese American artist, writer, and organizer whose research-based practice engages gendered constructions around power, and the entanglement between public space and private desire. Working professionally as a dominatrix since 2011, Ye has been on the board of Sex Workers Outreach Project Los Angeles since 2019. She is currently a Mellon Arts Fellow at Stanford University’s Center for Comparative Studies in Race and Ethnicity, California Arts Council Creative Corps Fellow at Community Partners, and visiting faculty in the Photography & Media program at CalArts. Her work has been funded by the California Arts Council (USA), The National Endowment for the Arts (USA), The Foundation for Contemporary Art (USA), The Mellon Foundation (USA), and The Australia Council for the Arts (Australia). Ye received their MFA from UCLA, and BA from Pomona College in Claremont, California.
About the panelists
Rogelio Ruckus is a Los Angeles based trans-masculine professional dominant, kink educator and performer, interdisciplinary writer, and PhD student. His literary work centers Fetish, Sex Work, Leather, and Chicanx-party community literacies, embodied placemaking, temporal-spatial practices, and the rhetorical legacies invoked in (re)readings of “the archive”. Row’s sadomasochist performance explores concerns of trans-embodiment, Brownness, autonomy, visual ambivalence, indigeneity, violence, and memory. Invoking the visual, textile, and sensorial elements of BDSM, his work often seeks to (re)animate concealed or forgotten histories embedded in these materials and the body across time and space as they are interpolated into the same frame. When not organizing events or writing, Row additionally serves behind the scenes for Obsidian LA, Cruise LA, and as co-chair for the infamous Folsom Street to name a few.
Kayla Tange is a Los Angeles-based Korean American multidisciplinary artist. Born in South Korea and adopted by a Japanese American family, the experience of displacement is a recurring theme in her work. Her practice pendulates between literal and satirical while exploring ways of utilizing collaboration to convey feelings of longing, transforming stories of shame into a symbolic and valuable medium. She is part of diaspora collectives Hwa Records, and Chosun Family and has co-founded shows such as Sacred Wounds, Cyber Clown Girls, and Stripper Co-op, which focus on fundraising, mutual aid, and community building through erotic performance. In addition, she has co-created Private Practices, an AAPI sex worker and performance art archive at Los Angeles Contemporary Archives. Tange is also known under the stage name Coco Ono portraying archetypes and stereotypes, often in dark humor, to facilitate dialogue about identity and compensation for emotional and sexual labor.
Daphne aka EthicalDrvgs is a multidisciplinary artist most known for visual art and immersive performance art experiences. Her performance work has centered around the endurance of the divine feminine form and often features different variations of live body modifications. Her work centers the necessity of decriminalization and the advocacy of sex workers, often using visuals to show the unseen moments of the lives of sexworkers, specifically working trans girls, in order to reveal the aspects of their lives that many don’t get to see unless involved intimately.
About the LACE Screening Room
The LACE Screening Room is a moving image series organized by LACE and curated by guest curators at Philosophical Research Society while LACE’s home on Hollywood Boulevard is under renovation. Click here for more information on LACE’s gallery. Support for the LACE Screening Room is provided by the Pasadena Art Alliance.
