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Hello Hello!

Constintina

Hi!  I am thrilled to be blogging here at Feministe for the next two weeks.  I’m honored and grateful to have this platform from which to communicate with such a large and engaged audience.  I hope at least some of you will find my posts interesting, and that we’ll have some constructive conversation.

A little about me:  I’m a white cisgendered, able-bodied, bi/queer woman in a long term, very happy relationship with a white cis man.  The massive wave of general societal approval that greeted this relationship has been kind of disorienting for me, having never been in such a situation before.  The privileges that come with my heterocoupledom are something I think about a lot.

I live in Brooklyn and work as a freelance writer, but the vast majority of my income comes from a combination of childcare and phone sex.  I have done the latter professionally off and on (mostly on, often full time,) for close to a decade.  No, I don’t do the two things at the same time.  The connections between sex work and domestic work are also something I think about a lot, particularly the ways that workers in both industries are marginalized and the obstacles they face in agitating and organizing for their rights.

I’m a sometimes activist.  I’m Jewish, and a lot of the activism I do involves opposing the Israeli occupation of Palestine, so I’ll probably address that as well.

I have a blog called Pretending is a fun game.

Some of my interests are: eating, cooking, making videos, film, music,  sleeping in, making things look interesting, music, pop culture criticism, gory movies, semi-masochistic enjoyment of musicals, critical examination of Joss Whedon’s oeuvre, fighting the pathologizing of oppressed peoples, analyzing capitalism and other irrational oppressive belief systems, maybe smashing the state, ducks, robot ducks…

I’m guessing that my comment policy will be pretty close to the way things are generally handled on Feministe.  Please understand that my work schedule is such that I often am away from my computer all day, so if your comment is in moderation limbo for a while, I apologize in advance.  I will get to it when I can.

10 thoughts on Hello Hello!

  1. I remember reading a collection of essays called Global Woman in which the connection between domestic work and sex work was made pretty explicit. Ironically, as women have escaped a lot of oppression in the First World, they have had to import women mostly from the Third World to fulfill a lot of the roles formerly filled by the oppressed wife of yesteryear. So there is some dissonance between the victories of Western feminism and the exploitation of Third World women’s labor. Maybe this doesn’t apply precisely to your situation, as you’re not a Third World woman, but the book did have a lot of information to chew on. Some of the essays are dryer than others but I’d still recommend it!

    1. Is it the book edited by Barbara Ehrenreich and Arlie Russell Hochschild? I haven’t read it, but it certainly sounds up my alley.

  2. Good to have you! Hope we’ll manage to have some good conversations about Israel/Palestine and, er, musicals. 🙂 (I specify those because those are some of the places where our areas of (relative) expertise overlap, not because they are more interesting.)

  4. I would love to read your thoughts about the connections between sex work and domestic labor, both in the broader terms of the global “care chains” as the commenter above already touched on, and the way these connections have played out for you personally.

  7. Thank you all so much! sex work and domestic labor connections, Israel/Palestine, and musicals: duly noted!

  8. Welcome, Constintina. I’m looking forward to reading more about the connections between sex work and domestic labor.

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