Bourgeois,"Race, Space, and Prostitution: The Making of Settler Colonial Canada"

Robyn Bourgeois of Brock University has published "Race, Space, and Prostitution: The Making of Settler Colonial Canada" in Race, Gender, and Law: A Tribute to the Scholarship of Sherene Razack - Canadian Journal of Women and the Law, 30.3, 2018.

This article examines the fundamental role that prostitution has played in securing settler colonial domination over Indigenous peoples and lands in the historical and ongoing making of the Canadian nation-state. Using the theoretical and methodological framework developed by critical anti-racist feminist scholar Sherene Razack, this article offers a spatial analysis tracing how prostitution has been deployed, repeatedly and in distinctly racialized and gendered ways, to secure settler colonial domination in Canada. This analysis focuses on four key examples: (1) early settlement in British Columbia; (2) the Indian Act; (3) the Pass System; and, more recently, (4) Vancouver's Missing Women. It also focuses on how these settler colonial deployments of prostitution contributed (and, in some ways, continue to contribute) not only to violence against Indigenous women and girls but also to the justification, legitimation, and erasure of this violence and, thus, its normalization within settler colonial society.