Sex Work Feminicide and the Making of #SayHerName Campaign by SWEAT in South Africa

According to the most recent statistics released by the South African Police Service, a womxn is murdered every three hours in South Africa. However, the murder of sex workers in South Africa remains highly invisible. Invisibility in death is heightened by the fact that sex work is criminalised in South Africa, where the judicial and moral economy dictate the social and political existence expressed through “politics of death.” When necropolitics is deployed as a lens through which feminicide of sex workers is analysed, it becomes clear that in-betweenness sex workers occupy implies death is ever present. In this chapter, I present the work and activism that the Sex Workers Education and Advocacy Task Force (SWEAT) NGO through their #SayHerName campaign as a way of humanising sex workers, who are constantly dehumanised in the in-between space they occupy. This chapter will therefore make a contribution to a discursive engagement with politics of activism in a post-colony like South Africa, where female and transwomxn’s sex workers’ bodies are disposable.