Challenging Crimmigration Racialising Politics Through Co-creative Filmmaking with Migrant Sex Workers

AbstractThis article analyses how co-creative filmmaking with migrant sex workers challenges the racialised politics of representation and dynamics of crimmigration framing and intervening on them as either criminals or victims. The contribution will draw on two recent films I co-created with Latinx trans women and Chinese cis women living and working in New York and Paris, where sex work is criminalised directly (in the US) or by proxy (in France). The article will also explore how co-creative filmmaking can be a decolonial attempt to challenge the lingering coloniality characterising ethnographic documentaries within the limits posed by the power asymmetries embedded in filmmaking and research, and in relation to the ethical constraints posed by the stigmatisation and criminalisation of their protagonists and co-authors.