Daze Jefferies: an overflown chorus

International Sex Worker Pride Day is a global celebration of sex workers, created to highlight the diversity of their stories and experiences, and the value they bring to their communities. Sex work remains a deeply stigmatized topic, and sex workers are still fighting for respect, dignity, and basic human rights. International Sex Worker Pride Day is a time to challenge those stigmas, stereotypes, and misconceptions.

Daze Jefferies, an artist, writer, and educator, challenges those notions every day. Her multi-disciplinary work – all of which manages to be both haunting and hopeful, powerful and tender, raw and whimsical – challenges traditional histories while exploring themes of queerness, transness, and sex work. Her writing can be found in a number of publications and collections, and her art has been displayed in a number of galleries, from The Rooms to Montreal’s Galerie de L’UQAM. And now the Craft Council Gallery of Newfoundland & Labrador.

As she prepared for her latest exhibition, Jefferies graciously made the time to answer some questions. 

Is it correct that you’re from Bay of Exploits? Can you tell me a little bit about growing up there and how that shaped your identity and your work?

Yes, I’m a bay gay. This is why water has always been a maternal presence in my work. The Bay of Exploits is a beautiful archipelago, and those islands and islets are full of life. They have also been affected by violence and loss. For me, there has always been an unfathomable nature to this place, and the water has taught me everything about impermanence and return. Growing up queer and trans in a rural community gave me so much time to dream about the life I desired and the work needed to get there. I think this is why I try to balance the given narrative of queer isolation in rural or coastal places with openness and possibility, and it’s also why I have a special relationship with objects at the landwash – an archival abundance that changes with the tides, a space of continual transition and exchange.

As my trans sister Violet Drake always reminds me, there’s a loving queer practice in reclaiming what many people consider to be detritus or discarded matter from the sea. When I return home now, I have a different responsibility to this place. The water has offered so many treasures that have immeasurably shaped my art, poetry, and theory. These different fragments – textiles, nylon hosiery, driftwood, whore’s eggs [sea urchins], plastics, nets, flora, and more – help me tell alternative stories about rural queer, trans, and sex worker lives that materials and documents in colonial archives never could. These fragments are absolutely a part of my chosen family, and they have also shown me how precious chance encounters can be.

Who or what were some of your earliest influences?

My nan, Louise, has been a huge influence and role model in my life. She just turned 88 in August – my favourite number, two infinity knots. I spent a lot of my childhood with my grandparents, and in so many of my memories Nan is sitting at the kitchen table making quilts and dolls and crafts. She would also make wooden folk art and décor with my pop. I’ve definitely inherited the labour of art from her, and in some recent work we’ve been collaborating on a series of drawings – mostly flowers and fishy bodies. She also gave me my first keyboard and shaped my love for music. A true rural matriarch, my guiding light.

Of course, I’ve always loved mermaids and sea creatures like many other young trans girls. I was always with the water as a child. I had just turned 12 when my town got high-speed internet access in 2006, and this drastically influenced how I came to terms with my gender journey, as well as both the kind of worldmaking I could imagine and the connections I could form with other queer youth. I was introduced to all kinds of music and writing, and developing my creative practice became a refuge as an unapologetically gender-non-conforming teenager. I was a Tumblr kid who listened to Anohni, Kate Bush, and Joanna Newsom. Their voices and their forms of feminist and mythic storytelling have stayed with me and transformed my creative language. 

Reflecting on my own childhood and coming of age, I also think a lot about what kinds of lived experiences and escapes might have been possible in other generations, which has influenced my allurement to and engagements with the past.

What initially drew you to artistic and/or academic work? And how do your artistic and academic works speak to each other?

I moved to St. John’s for my undergraduate education, and I quickly fell in love with gender studies and folklore. Finding queer and feminist role models as a young trans woman, and being touched by a world of queer and trans art and writing, set me on this path. Feminist theory gave me a language I had been longing for, and learning about genders, sexualities, histories, and intergenerational connections filled me. 

I really started to take my academic and artistic voice seriously in 2014, which is when I developed a professional art practice, began medical transition, and became a sex worker. I devoted my attention to the margins and I wanted to find out what shaped trans and sex worker lives here. I learned early on that more traditional forms of archival and community-based research could not fully grapple with the specific effects of violence, stigma, loss, resistance, and outmigration that have been dominant throughout our histories. I was able to further explore this in my graduate studies, but it was a very difficult time in my life and much of my work was marked by grief. There was a lot of soul searching, and even though I was living it (as other trans women will always understand), I was not prepared to encounter the violence that foremothers had also experienced. So it took me some time to figure out how to confront and do justice to these realities while seeking a lineage of persistence and unruliness. I also had to learn to understand that historical absence wasn’t always an intentional form of erasure, but it was often a strategic choice in order to reach for a desired life.

Working with oral histories and research-creation (artistic practice as critical knowledge) became a way to get closer to the emotional and embodied labour of these realities. The archival record showed me that trans girls and women from Newfoundland and Labrador were writers, designers, showgirls, drag performers, sex workers, dreamers, and they wanted more. They reached for their aliveness and many of them departed far too soon. There is so much short-lived desire and creative expression in transfeminine and sex worker histories. Their stories might often be brief and fragmented to us, but their survival was an art. This lineage was clear to me, and things fell into place.

Artistic practice was a guide and a release because it was already the labour of our foremothers. It has been really healing work to re-story the archival record by exploring counter-narratives, dreams, and hopes while also staying with the lived realities of love and loss that have echoed through our communities. It has taken years of collaboration, mentorship, and support to get here, and I am so, so grateful for this journey.

Sex work is a major theme in a lot of your works, and you’ve been very open about your experience with sex work. What made you decide to be so forthcoming? How has that impacted your life and/or your work?

Sex work has been a trans lifeway across generations, and I have refused to let stigma and shame repress my voice, work, and advocacy. I also learned from the leadership and movement-building of trans women like Mirha-Soleil Ross, Monica Forrester, Jamie-Lee Hamilton, Morgan M Page, and Jelena Vermillion, who have helped guide the fight for sex worker justice in so-called Canada. I believe that fostering a culture of consent and a sex-positive feminist movement requires the resistance of sex workers’ labour and expertise.

Sex work, or what many people might simply call survival or transactional work, has shaped decades of trans community life in this province due to familial rejection, employment discrimination, and barriers to gender-affirming care. These are social and political failures that most significantly affect trans youth and trans women. The law creates precariousness and risk. We have so little protections, and chosen family is essential. I know that as we continue to advocate for sex worker justice – towards decriminalization and choice, and against exploitation and violence – the voices and experiences of sex workers in this province can be further recognized and honoured on their own complex terms. SHOP and D.A.T.E. are doing great work and have been guiding us there.

The practice that I have cultivated over 12 years has made me a more secure and knowing person. At this point, there is a special form of interdependence and selective intimacy that I’ve worked hard to sustain. I never romanticize the realities of sex work, especially for trans women, but I always emphasize the self-determination and tenacity of sex workers. We know everything about persistence and truth. If I could be a trans sex worker in every lifetime, let me live honestly and let me be cunt.

During your research, you discovered that archives don’t tell a full story about the lives of trans women and sex workers. But instead of seeing that as an unfortunate thing, you chose to interpret it differently – perhaps as evidence of empowerment, and space for us to speculate and imagine. I really love that. Can you tell me more about how you got there, or why you chose to interpret your findings that way?

Sex workers are spirited and powerful, but we are also communities of people whose lived realities have been affected by criminalization, racial inequalities, sexual violence, class differences, and an often very fine line between choice and compromise. 

Johanna Cole and Madeleine Mant’s historical research about Newfoundland sex workers really situates these realities in time, and Laura Winters’ interview-based research has shown us how the weight of stigma has affected sex worker visibility and community building in this place. While sex worker organizing at the institutional level has been established here for 13 years – which has completely reshaped our social and political landscape for the better – I believe that solidarity among sex workers extends far into the past. I have never needed the legitimacy of an archival document to believe in informal and covert relationships shared between sex workers. That is so far removed from our kinship, especially on the streets and strolls. Our survival and resistance has always looked different in rural places and small cities because of close-knit social ties and methods of evasion.

The historical record of the 20th century forecloses every possibility for local sex workers to be fully heard and acknowledged on their own terms. There was a moral panic over “white slavery” at the turn of the century, and rural families were warned not to send their daughters away into service work because they would end up leading lives of infamy. Street and brothel workers in St. John’s, as well as women in rural communities, were so heavily criminalized, pathologized, and blamed for venereal disease during the ‘30s and ‘40s. There were thousands of American soldiers stationed across Newfoundland at this time. The women weren’t the problem – that was militarism and patriarchal violence. The whorearchy revealed itself in the ‘60s when many visiting burlesque performers were adored by large audiences, while street workers continued to be marginalized and cast aside.

The local feminist movement was incredibly sex worker exclusionary throughout the ‘70s and ‘80s. Then came more police stings and bad research projects in the ‘90s that further stigmatized all workers as exploited people. Trans women’s visibility throughout the second half of the 20th century is marked by absence and struggle, primarily because of outmigration to access care and build community. Sex work has always been a part of trans women’s lives and culture. For the women who stayed and laboured to live their truth, much has been left unsaid.

Why would generations of local sex workers and trans women have ever wanted any of their survival strategies, or their practices of mothering and mentorship, to be documented and misrepresented by the general public? What reasons did they have to trust anyone with that knowledge? 

Our mobilizing and our interpersonal relationships are both so different now, but there are forms of intergenerational resistance that have withstood decades of struggle. They aren’t always openly communicated, but in chance encounters, they are felt in return. Honouring these realities and finding ways to keep choice firmly in the hands of trans women and sex workers shapes all of my thinking and making. 

Without sex work law reform and institutional changes, the relationship between justice, visibility, secrecy, and pride will continue to be complicated, and a diversity of sex worker perspectives will not be heard. This is also why art and storytelling are needed in our movement. They express the often unsayable and they give us something to believe in.

It’s especially significant to talk to you in the lead-up to Sex Worker Pride Day, because you’ve played an important role in shaping knowledge about trans women and sex workers in this province. To me, a huge part of sex worker pride is, first of all, recognizing their existence and their integral role throughout history, but also hearing their stories. And a lot of sex workers, especially of the past, couldn’t tell their stories. Do you feel you’re telling their stories for them?

Most of what we know about sex workers throughout Newfoundland and Labrador’s history has been against their own will. We’re talking about a brutally criminalized and degraded form of care work that has kept generations of young, poor, and racialized women, queer, and trans folks alive. Sex workers are sacred and messy and fierce. 

Everyone in my chosen family of sex workers feels differently about their labour. Some are fully committed to the fight for recognition, some have been visible and are exhausted by it, and many cannot and do not want to be visible. There is too much at risk, and it serves a simple purpose – it’s a means to an end. This doesn’t mean that they are ashamed of their work, it just means that they don’t want to be further stigmatized and that it isn’t safe to be out and loud right now. 

There can be a quiet pride when you’re holding a stack of cash in your hand, or having your heel on the neck of a man who really deserves it, or practicing a peaceful aftercare routine to feel untroubled and good in your body, or treating your friends and loved ones to a nice dinner, or being able to support community fundraisers, or giving back to other workers and performers. Quiet pride is the inner work of being at peace with your journey.

As an artist, writer, and educator who is visible, I try to do my best to honour sex worker survival in its complexity. There are ongoing collaborations and commitments in the present, but I have also felt like my work is formed in collaboration with trans women and sex workers from the past as well. I searched for them and committed myself to our connection across time, and I have lived with their often fleeting presence. Many of the dolls barely left a trace as they reached for what they desired. Most sex workers are unnamed or anonymized, and they are only described as young women or girls. I think about them all the time, I write to and for them, and I hold them as close as I can. Many came from rural areas and ended up in St. John’s. A lot of them endured hardships and a lot of them probably made the most of their circumstances. What I know about them has been gained from a few sentences in newspaper articles or their personals ads – sometimes government records, sometimes doctor’s letters. What I know about others has been gained from gossip and rumour. As a child, I heard about women in my rural community who were only ever called prostitutes, and of course I was captivated by their resistance. Some parts of our journeys are similar, and sometimes I wish they weren’t so different. 

This is one of the ways that archival research continues to live in me. I have been changed and I have responsibilities, but I don’t feel like I’m telling anyone’s story for them, nor is this something that I want to do unless I am asked to. I write poetry and theory to make sense of the stories that cannot easily be told or resurfaced, but that also should never be ignored or suppressed. I also use poetry to overwrite violent narratives of the past and find aliveness in them. 

We haven’t had a history of visible and unrepentant sex worker activist foremothers in this province. This has finally started to change, and it changes the history we are currently living. I do love telling stories together, which is why my recent project pleasuremonger centered around the relationship between a series of archival materials and the oral histories of four trans loved ones with lived experience as sex workers. Their words were an integral part of the exhibition, and their layered voices created a gentle siren song that could not be quieted. This project was very special and taught me a lot about breaking silence while needing layers of protection and safekeeping. I also organized an intimate research room of local archival materials, documents, and publications for the public to engage with. 

There is so much necessary unlearning and relearning to honour the sex workers in our lives and communities. If other sex workers can’t be loud and proud, the rest of us have to do the work. Protect the dolls at all costs, let rural women feel all the love in the world, and tell the dommes in your life that you’re proud of them for putting men in their place.

Why is it so important to share these stories? To you, but also for the world?

There is no feminist future without sex worker justice, and sex workers are deserving of support and regard. Across so much of this province’s history, stories about sex workers only appear in criminal-legal documents and newspaper court proceedings, but there are two significant instances in 20th century literary work that offer us a different kind of worldmaking. I always come back to a 1944 poem by Irving Fogwill titled St. John’s Woman, which is about an aging sex worker plying her trade at the city’s waterfront. Fogwill compares her body to an old ship and stigmatizes her labour, but one line takes my breath away and has stayed with me for years: “With what queer overflow of lust has she been burdened?” The overflow is a manifestation of our solidarity. It means that sex worker resistance cannot be kept under control. It means that there is always a kind of holding and spilling. It means that we are fluid and that queerness is our call to action. He would be so gagged to read this.

Thirty-five years later, in her 1979 memoir of growing up on the Southside of St. John’s, Helen Fogwill Porter wrote about the sex workers she admired, completely changing the narrative of her uncle’s poem by emphasizing their beauty and will. That one small but profound act of feminist refusal gave some dignity back to the women who worked the waterfront strolls and brothels. It replenished what was overflowing, and it stood firmly at a distance from the sex-negative politics that shaped feminist activism of that time. This family of writers could have written about anything, and they chose to briefly center sex worker survival in totally contrasting ways. His disparaging words somehow offered a poetic framing of resistance, and her words of affirmation put choice and freedom in sex workers’ hands. I believe that she knew how important this was. 

We cannot change what we’ve inherited as sex workers in this province, but we also know how to make things happen and get what we want. It matters to speak back and share truth – in the streets, in intimate moments, or in art exhibitions and writing projects – every chance we get. Our voices together are what I have called an overflown chorus that echoes with defiance. Decriminalization is the only way forward, and it will completely change how sex workers are able to be heard and recognized.

How is art an act of resistance – specifically, in your work? How do you use your artwork as a form of resistance?

Art and writing are integral to social movements because they center lived experience, imagination, and possibility. Art has also been a primary vehicle for sex worker activism in this province: from burlesque performance and article features from the 1960s onwards, to visits and performances in St. John’s by Carol Leigh and Annie Sprinkle in 1998 and 2008, to performances in the grassroots theatre of Queer Uncensored (2014-2016), to the 2017 Sex Workers Speak Out exhibit co-presented by SHOP and the City of St. John’s, to the Let Us Stop Living Secret Lives photovoice project in 2018 and 2019, and more. Sex work is its own art form.

My work emerged within this lineage and has developed through a multidisciplinary practice: sculpture, textiles, poetry, drawing, performance, sound art, video, photography. First and foremost, I make art and writing for trans women and sex workers to feel acknowledged and respected. It’s a devotion and a refusal to accept less. We’ve had enough of the spectacle, and every chance to reclaim power is an act of resistance. 

A lot of my work is about re-storying and reclaiming language. For example, whore’s eggs – derogatorily named and devalued by past generations – become a symbol of sex worker kinship and life-giving. For the past two years, I’ve been creating a series of rug-hooked whore’s eggs that are a labour of love for sex worker foremothers. This hooking is also connected to our entanglement and to nets of chosen family, as my loved one Ask Wen articulated so beautifully in an oral history interview for pleasuremonger. 

As a younger trans woman, I couldn’t imagine that my voice would ever be taken seriously. There were no possibility models and no examples of trans women being celebrated in Newfoundland and Labrador. I have a responsibility now to share this work and to act in service of our freedom. This means that I’m very aware of the social and educational labour that my practice can encourage, and there is so much work and overflowing left to do.

Fogwill’s naming of this inheritance has shaped a lot of my thinking over the past few years. It was offered to us in poetry, and I would love to see local sex workers reclaiming it in new ways. The overflow is about potential and abundance. Some of my best memories volunteering at SHOP are with participants who would share their art, writing, and dreams with the group. Some of their work got published in newsletters, some of it came from a therapeutic stream of consciousness, and some of it can truly continue to make a difference. 

When sex workers are supported and valued, our creativity is limitless. Sometimes you have to fight your way forward, and sometimes you are lifted up.

I sense a lot of hope and optimism in your work. What do you hope for the future of sex work and sex workers?

It’s not always easy to be hopeful in these times, but centering resistance in this work has been a very powerful journey, and it’s what trans and sex worker communities are owed. So much of my 20s were spent in survival mode, but I didn’t stop dreaming or doing the work that nourished me spiritually. This has been true for many trans people of my generation. We have shared experiences of social change and a fierceness to reach for the lives we knew we deserved.

The representations of transness and sex work that I encountered as a rural youth did nothing to prepare me for this path that would open in my life. The least that I can do now is make earnest, layered, and playful work that is both a critical response to our lived realities and an escape from the harder moments of our being alive. Working with figures and symbols like mermaids, whore’s eggs, nets, and roses – all of which are connected to transfeminine and sex worker embodiment – is an opening into a deeper conversation about lineage, kinship, beauty, mourning, tenderness, and resistance. There’s no denying that our histories are affected by loss and struggle, but there is always already an aliveness here, and we cannot lose it.

I truly believe that we need to recenter the role of sex worker justice in feminist organizing and in queer and trans politics and advocacy. Envisioning sex worker community, bodily autonomy, labour protections, and gender affirmation requires a clear political distinction from violence and exploitation. Sex worker justice makes us think differently about gender, race, and class struggles, and we owe it to our loved ones to fight for recognition and decriminalization. Learning to challenge dominant cultural/media narratives, confronting social stigma, practicing mutual aid, writing to elected officials, and simply extending grace are everyday actions that we can all do to advocate for sex worker justice. This is what I hope for.

Of all your work, academic, artistic, or otherwise, what are you most proud of?

Everything is interconnected for me, and the work’s becoming has changed me profoundly. I am proud that I’ve stayed with the complexity and that I’ve hopefully been able to offer something memorable to this place and time. I am proud of the trans women and sex workers, past and present, whose resistance and persistence have made this work possible. I am proud that I kept my heart open, that I didn’t stop believing in my voice, and that I can be gentle with my younger self. I know my power now, and the good work comes to meet me here.

What are you working on now?

My debut full-length poetry collection oceanleaving was just published by The Porcupine’s Quill, and my exhibition holdable shadow, erodible caress is also on at the Craft Council Gallery until mid-October. I am also working on a new oral history project with queer and trans community members, and I’m dreaming up a new writing project about rural women’s labour and sexuality. It’s an exciting time for sure. That little mermaid wanting to escape into the Bay of Exploits would be so proud.

What do you hope people take away from your work?

Trans women and sex workers are truth tellers. Our touches and our presence can never be diminished.