At the end of March, Madison Zack-Wu and her fellow dancers enjoyed a legislative victory: the Strippers Bill of Rights had been signed into state law.
Zack-Wu, the campaign manager of Strippers Are Workers (SAW) — a dancer-led advocacy group fighting for the rights of strippers across the state of Washington — and her fellow organizers had gone into the 2024 legislative session with a list of policy goals they hoped to accomplish. “We knew what we might lose, and we came out of it better than we expected,” Zack-Wu said last week at a panel event sponsored by Pro-Choice Washington. “We didn’t make a lot of sacrifices, and we’re very grateful.”
To celebrate their hard-fought victory, SAW held a dance party at a Seattle club where they danced to house music and received free permanent tattoos they picked from a sheet of available designs, including sparkly Pleasers (the brand of platform heel most strippers dance in), bras with stars and stylized text reading “slut,” “XOXO” and “$$$.”
But a little more than a month later, the celebrations have ended because the work is not done — SAW organizers are already talking about future goals. It’s an ambitious list that includes rolling back strict zoning laws that prevent new clubs from opening; pushing for more dancer-owned, queer-owned and BIPOC-owned clubs; and working toward the full decriminalization of stripping and sex work.
But after news broke that Liliya Guyvoronsky — a dancer in the Seattle area — was allegedly murdered by a former Bothell City Council Member, the organization realized there was even more work to be done. Zack-Wu mourned the tragic loss of Guyvoronsky and implored members and allies of SAW to let it fuel their work in the upcoming year. In addition to its previous goals, SAW will start lobbying Seattle council members to vote down a potential proposal that could recriminalize prostitution and loitering in the city (which was decriminalized in 2020).
At the Pro-Choice WA event on May 2, Zack-Wu spoke about Guyvoronsky’s death, linking it to the need she sees for increased protections of bodily autonomy in sex work. “Bodily autonomy to me is self-determination, autonomy and agency,” she said. “The right to make choices in your labor, your right to say no, your right to say yes, your ability to access resources, education and information in order to make the best decisions for yourself.”
She said protecting the rights of strippers and sex workers to make decisions about their own labor without fear of being arrested, assaulted or murdered should be a priority for all movements that fight for bodily autonomy and workers’ rights. Zack-Wu said the root of laws that lead to violence in sex work is the stigma that is attached to the profession.
“This week, a dancer in Seattle was murdered by a customer, and violence like that happens because of stigma, which creates criminalization,” Zack-Wu said, speaking of Guyvoronsky’s killing. “We cannot work safely without ending these things.”
Building a coalition for change
“What do strippers and trans rights have to do with abortion?” Sami Alloy, Interim Director of Pro-Choice WA, asked the crowd that had gathered on May 2 to hear Zack-Wu and two other panelists, Jaelynn Scott of the Lavender Rights Project and Adrianna Suluai of UTOPIA Washington.
Speaking to a crowd of about 50 people, which included Washington State Representative Nicole Macri (D-43) and Sharon Tomiko-Santos (D-37), Alloy answered her own question: “They have everything to do with each other. Our movements and our communities and our lives are intersectional and are impacted by these intersecting attacks on our human rights. We are being targeted by the same movements that are increasingly merging into one anti-trans, anti-abortion, anti-human rights movement.”
Some of the recent victories of movements Alloy called “anti-humanist” include the fall of Roe v. Wade, the ever-growing slate of anti-transgender laws passed across the country and more locally, the passage of the Parent’s Bill of Rights.
Alloy said the work the various organizations were doing, and conversations they were creating, were a direct response to increased mobilization and coalition building coming from the right.
“Our opponents are getting increasingly good at working together and consolidating and working in tandem as one, and yet our feminist movement has not successfully done that,” she said. “We have continued to work in a silo fashion to silo our issues and to miss opportunities to work across coalitions with each other.”
Zack-Wu and the other panelists agreed, but Zack-Wu said there was hope in SAW’s joint work with the queer community to push the state to get rid of a lewd conduct law that was being disproportionately used to punish queer people and sex workers alike.
“I hope to see SAW and all of our organizations just continue to do this work that is so important, and also this coalition building,” Zack-Wu said. “Let’s not break our community anymore.”
