Forging a Space for Female Corporeal Autonomy in the Law

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Nadia G. (3L)

Prija pouted sultrily in garters and thigh-highs as she took turns lounging on the various pieces of dusty furniture littering the room. We were in the fireplace lounge in Flavelle House, a space the Faculty of Law uses to serve wine to society’s elite, or something. Only weeks prior I had shot portraits of esteemed members of the Canadian bench for Ultra Vires in this room. Justices Abella, Epstein, and Croll had  posed on the same old upholstered armchairs – albeit in less promiscuous poses.

This time we were there on our own accord. The chairs on which judicial robes had once nestled now carried Prija’s caramel-soft haunches. The trench she wore was pulled back on quick enough to dispel any potential suspicion from pesky faculty members who happened to interrupt.

You see, Prija needed photos for her new website. If you’re charging $300 an hour to help a john forget about his mediocre wife and kids, and his suicide-inducing 80-hour week – well, that toothpaste-stained mirror selfie simply wouldn’t do. I suggested to Prija that posing amidst the richness of the velvet-carpeted drawing room graced by Supreme Court judges would undoubtedly warm the lap of any potential client. “His wallet, too,” Prija winked.

Yet these photos weren’t just about reclaiming the full value of the unoffered perks of studying at a school that cost us more than $30,000 a year to attend (let me remind you this is also a school that flatly refused to offer a cent of financial assistance to letter of permission transfers like myself). No, our photographs were decidedly both a visual and conceptual protest against the denial of female sexual autonomy in legal institutions. You see, as women of colour with strong sexual wills, we were tired of stuffy old white men calling the shots about how and when and for what purpose we could offer up our bodies for consumption. Unfortunately, stuffy old white men are all too prevalent in the legal realm and beyond. Peter MacKay, whose beady eyes look as if they in constant danger of being swallowed up by the rest of his face, is one example of this species. His love child, Bill C-36, which passed into law earlier this month, is exactly the puritanical, sexist drivel we wanted to smear our menstrual blood over before burning at the stake (we’d never burn our bras, though – that shit is expensive).

The kind of patronizing ideology that drives Bill C-36 is familiar to any young woman trying to forge a space for herself in the legal profession. On a macro level, the new laws are another (futile) attempt to control the selling and buying of sex. It’s the Conservative Party’s way of continuing its fear-mongering against sex work despite Bedford. On a closer examination, however, the laws ultimately stem from plain old traditionally sexist notions about how women should and shouldn’t exercise their corporeal autonomy.

This is a message I’ve been pummelled with since beginning my legal career, both explicitly and implicitly. I’m on the brink of joining the criminal defence bar – the oldest of the old boys clubs. From day one, professional mentors and peers alike were overly preoccupied with telling me what I should and shouldn’t wear, what I should and shouldn’t be saying, what my voice should sound like when I am saying it. How could I forget that time my former employer – himself blessed with a grating, nasal whine – dragged me into his office to bleat into my face that I needed to stop “speaking like a child”. In the legal profession, people expect you to conform above all else, and this is all the more true for women. They certainly did not want my ‘sing-songy’ outspokenness tarnishing their perfectly bland firm reputations.

The profession obsesses with disavowing women their various bodily manifestations. Consider the “scandal” surrounding Justice Lori Douglas – she who dared to explore her more adventurous sexual desires like any healthy, sexually-functioning human being would. Numerous commentators focused solely on the photographs, where Justice Douglas appears in bondage gear, as “evidence” of a lack of judicial integrity. Because you know, judges don’t have sex like normal people? Because someone who is overtly sexual cannot also possess intelligence and a sharp mind?

In the Bill C-36 narrative, sex work is dirty and its participants are always unwilling “victims.” Prija scoffs as she reads this. Politicians prostitute themselves every day to get votes. Who’s really being degraded here? The language in Bill C-36 is focused on helping sex workers “exit” prostitution – a position Prija finds hilarious given how in a couple of hours, she makes what an articling student sweating on Bay St. makes in a week. If a john wanted to pay her to kick his balls in Louboutins for three hours straight, why should the law prevent him? How about helping people exit the fast food industry? Or perhaps the wrath of unpaid summer internships (read: slavery) some law students are only too familiar with? If politicians like MacKay were really concerned with classism and increasing poverty in this country (lol), there is a plethora of ways to address those problems without criminalizing how sex workers make ends meet, or you know, pay for their overpriced law degrees.

Evidently, the female body needs to stake its own claim on space within the legal system, on its own terms. No one was going to make room for us, so we went and took it for ourselves. The Faculty of Law is where unfortunate lawmakers like Peter MacKay are bred to fruition. It’s where nuanced debates about our prostitution laws are encouraged. But all of this occurs without any tangible input by the real stakeholders: sex workers themselves. By shooting Prija’s photos inside the Faculty of Law, we were forcibly injecting disparate narratives of the sex worker, and the female body more broadly, into spaces where it has been forbidden from existence. We refuse to be judged by where our hemlines fall, or don’t. We had as much right to be in that room as Justice Abella did, robed or not. We bore the label “slut” without shame.

A conservative institution like the University of Toronto’s Faculty of Law may think that a sex worker like Prija doesn’t necessarily belong on their expensive furniture. But there was a time those female judges I photographed didn’t belong either. Justice Abella was the first Jewish woman on the Supreme Court – a rebel in her own right who overcame multiple obstacles to get where she is. It certainly isn’t convenient to be outspoken about your own difference, especially sexual difference. But let me leave you with this: “Be inconvenient. Be sand, not oil in the machinery of the world.”

*The name of the author’s subject has been changed at her request. A brief bio and link to the author’s site that appeared in an earlier version have been removed.

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