Madison Zack-Wu
Madison Zack-Wu is one of the members of Strippers Are Workers (SAW), an organization founded in 2018 by a group of adult dancers whose mission is to create dancer-first environments within strip clubs, and raise awareness of and support against predatory conditions that currently exist within these clubs.
SAW’s efforts resulted in the recent Strippers’ Bill of Rights, which was signed by Gov. Jay Inslee on March 25.
The Northwest Asian Weekly’s Carolyn Bick sat down with Zack-Wu to talk with the 25-year-old about her experiences as a stripper and how they have informed her work in the sphere of state policy.
1. How did you get into the dancing subset of sex work?
I was self-supporting, living on my own at 18. I was also a high school dropout. I left high school when I was 14, and I had been bouncing in and out of high school credit programs. And by the time I was 18, you know, I needed a job and I also was like, “I probably need to go to college.”
I had come from kind of an adverse background and home and so I was dealing with mental illness. So, mental illness, high school dropout, living on my own—all those things—very few options for making enough money, let alone work 40 hours a week to go to school. So stripping felt like the most rational and accessible choice for me.
2. Going forward in the article, just because I do want to be sensitive to it, do you prefer it to be called adult dancing? Stripping? Dancing?
Any of it’s cool with me. I’m a big fan of resistance through taking back language. So I’m very comfortable with the word “stripper.”
3. I would like to ask you about your own experiences that led you to essentially say, “Enough is enough.”
I think I had already been developing some sort of intersectional lens and questioning the world and my place in it being a high school dropout, kind of understanding the factors that usually go into dropping out of high school and being a person of color and woman and—well, girl, back then, certainly. Those were the things I was starting to question, and dabble in advocacy and volunteering. And then at the same time in the club, I had never really been taught how to feel confident in myself, and how to feel into my body and to communicate my needs and boundaries. And, of course, in order to communicate your needs and boundaries, you have to feel your body and there’s just all these things that go with it. That wasn’t a skill that I had. I was also working with managers who benefited from me being exploited.
I had these managers who profited from me being exploited, or even experiencing violence in the club. And so there was a lot of victim blaming, and there was a lot of kind of just being thrown in to swim you know, with the sharks. If something went wrong, there was this messaging that, one I had to look out for myself; two, it was my fault; three, I had to, in the future, navigate things differently. There was no one really looking out for me and my best interest—and, in fact, if they could get away with perpetuating that violence or that exploitation, they would.
I certainly had a lot of those experiences. And, at the same time, that’s not to say that … there weren’t really good parts of the job, that there weren’t good customers, that I wasn’t able to go to school and go to therapy and all these things. So, it was growing-up process of really coming to terms with the direct, personal, one-on-one experience of what it’s like to be me in this body, with these customers … and also what it’s like to be me with these managers on this very micro level—but then also realizing that, “Man, there’s stuff going on here.”
I remember, really early on, realizing, “If we had alcohol, we would definitely have security.” My club didn’t have one security guard. And there’s just things like that, that I started noticing. And then, of course, as I continued to grow up, realizing the really, really broad ways that capitalism, and patriarchy, and white supremacy play into all those things. So, it was scalable, and it started with me just being another young dancer in the club, trying to get by.
4. I think that you bring up a really good point, because I think that people assume that bouncers are security.
There’s so many different types of security. And, to me, I think, the most important security is social and cultural attitudes. If we, as we are here—especially in Washington—are stigmatized, and society’s telling folks that we’re a subclass of people, and therefore, it’s okay to harm us, then that harm will continue to be done. … The safety really comes from how other humans view us as humans—or not.
5. You touched on something that I actually wanted to get into later, but maybe I’ll do it now. I was genuinely curious: When you started to approach legislators with this very serious concern, did you find yourself objectified?
Yes. Unsurprisingly, I’ve had a couple run-ins with men in the Legislature that I was like, “That felt sexualized.” But that, to me, feels very just part of the life that we live in right now—where a woman, in any sort of way—being a feminine person really—in any sort of way—that just happens. And then being an out sex worker, sometimes people don’t see past that.
I think the more interesting version of prejudice would be the one coming primarily from women who do have that attitude of, “Oh, you and this group and all these other people—you’re all just strippers, and you’re pitiful and silly and naive, and really, you don’t know what you need, and you’re not credible. And so, while you tell us that you’ve experienced these things, and you have solutions to them, because those solutions don’t align with our values, we’re just going to assume that that’s because you’re dumb strippers.”
That was pervasive. That was incredibly pervasive.
It’s that vibe of those old-school white feminists who got a little bit of power. And they were like, “Okay, don’t [mess] up this power that we’ve gotten, and so be good. And also, we’re really scared of the world, and don’t know how to control things like objectification. So, we’re going to try to control it by controlling you.”
They come from a time and place where still subjugating people is necessary. There is a marked generational difference. It was very apparent. … There were older generation legislators who were supportive. But the ones who were not supportive and tended to have bias and prejudice were all older. I can’t think of anyone in the younger generation who was biased.
It is truly survival. And it’s so hard. We live in this time and space, and all have those little bits of seeds and roots and habits of demonizing each other in one way or the other. But, of course, there’s some of us, I think, especially the younger generation, that have broader lenses on how to interrogate those habits within us and try to check them.
Intersectionality is practically a religion to me … because it’s very hard to accurately and successfully and holistically do justice without really understanding all these different variables that make up this unique mix of who a person is. That’s why feminism was very lacking for a long time. And then it started extending to Black women. And now you know, whatever wave we’re on—arguably, we’re way past the third—now it’s extending to non-binary people and queerness, and class and all this stuff.
Madison Zack-Wu
6. What are the most common misconceptions you run into when trying to explain to people that sex work is real work?
I think one of the biggest misconceptions about sex work as labor is that it’s unskilled labor.
Folks are like, “These girls need to use their brains and get real jobs,” or “There must be something like, intrinsically defective or less-than that they’re doing sex work,” or “They don’t respect themselves.” All these things. “You must be lacking in some sort of way.”
It’s just categorically incorrect. Sex work is such an oftentimes self-determined resistant and loving thing to do, because you are personalizing your work and you’re really interrogating the options that you have. You’re willing to go fringe in order to meet your own needs, despite how society feels about you. It takes so much thought, so much skill, so much communication and independence and wisdom, and sales knowledge and self-promotion, and advertising and marketing—all the things.
7. I was curious about the chosen family you’ve been able to surround yourself with. I’d love to know about them.
It’s been such a gift. I think I’ve spent most of my life feeling pretty alone.
Oftentimes going into different forms of work, or different social circles or whatever, even at the club … it was very hard for me to feel like I was around my people. Through organizing, I just feel like every day, every week, I meet more and more people, and I get to work with more and more people that just get it and I find it so easy to be in space with them. I love talking with them. There’s not that extra labor of having to justify yourself or explain yourself or even give context to the understanding of an intersectional lens. They just have that. The social justice space and a political space, the people who get it really, really get—I cannot over exaggerate how liberating that is.
My sisters and siblings in SAW—they’re just amazing. They’re so strong. I’m just blown away by what amazing people they are, and how naturally it comes to us. We have meetings at least once a month. Sometimes we’ll have really tough meetings, and we’ll do consensus-building. The grace and compassion and communication skills that they bring are just fantastic. Getting to talk with other folks doing abolition work or anti-violence, it’s so cool to be tapped into this part of the world.
8. Along the lines of abolitionist work and anti-violence work, I did want to ask: Have you, as an Asian American woman, faced racism, in addition to sexism within the club environment? And in what ways?
I certainly have. I can give you a small story. When I started, when I was 18, I had gone into a couple clubs to audition. The club that I ended up working at, the manager—he was probably a mid-50s white man—at the time was like, “What do you want your name to be?” And I said, “I don’t really care, what should it be?” And he said, “Lily. Your name will be Lily.” Which is the stripper name that every Asian girl has (laughs). And that’s been my stripper name ever since because my 50-something-year-old white manager gave it to me. So, obviously, race is explicitly a part of my stripping career from the very beginning.
Racism is very covert most of the time. That’s also harder to deal with. Have I been called slurs? Of course. And yet that is a lot easier to identify and deal with and shake off.
I’ve really only recently started doing this work to really start looking back on, “What were the insidious covert ways that race played a role?”
I worked at a very white club, very, very white. I was usually probably one of three or four dancers, at max, of color on my shift. When I was younger, I didn’t think about it very much. It wasn’t something that I worried about—just kind of normal. You move through the space and it’s your experience. So it just is.
Finally, more recently, I’ve been looking back and wondered, besides people being like, “Oh, yeah, my buddy has yellow fever. He’d love to dance with you or whatever,” how are the ways that perhaps, some of the violence that I experienced was maybe influenced by my race or the ways that maybe management expected me to perform?
I don’t know if I have tons of clarity on it. Do I have any doubt that it definitely affected me? No. It absolutely did. But because of that covert nature, it’s a little bit difficult to retroactively look back on without more space and time.
9. I wanted to end on a higher note. Because we are talking about change here, what does a dancer-first club look like in practice?
I think all of society that is human-first is created and informed by humans. In this case, a dancer-first strip club would be created, run, and informed by dancers. I guess an explicit version of that would be a dancer co-op. Lots of folks at SAW talk and dream about opening up their own co-op one day. But there’s this really high-level dream of utopian sex work. I personally believe many folks would still do sex work in a utopia where capitalism doesn’t exist, because it is an art, it is a skill that is human. So in a utopia, where capitalism and patriarchy and white supremacy doesn’t exist, then a dancer-first club would be completely based on the agency, autonomy, and free will and joy of the workers.
To scale back on that, and something perhaps a little bit more achievable: I think a co-op and I think existing in a society that doesn’t dehumanize strippers and sex workers, and [gives them] resources, more freedom and bodily autonomy and agency in their work. That’d be amazing.
And specifically in Washington, leading more diverse clubs—we need clubs that actually market to queer and young patrons, and let more nonconforming dancers work and celebrate differences. … We just need to be a little bit more human.
Readers who are interested in learning more about the needs of dancers and current conditions within the industry can read more here.