Other Weapons is a site for amassing and proliferating knowledge, stories, and positions by sex workers. It has no set place, but circulates in the form of printed zines, online pdfs, emails, stickers and wheat-pasting, and occasional public appearances. Our aim is to experiment with sex workers and our accomplices toward material strategies for our autonomy and liberation. We are for finding life outside of any given parameters, for finding ways to live, interdependently, beyond survival. Through print material, discussions, letters, poetry, film, music, and visual work, we attempt to distribute intelligence often hidden or unpublished.
We are currently looking to publish experiences of sex work that highlight the proximity to criminal and criminalized existence, and how this position can be a site of knowledge, resistance, and solidarity, by refusing the narrative of “innocence” often necessary to make us relatable, or our deaths worth counting or accounting for.
We are open to any medium, format, length, or genre, what matters most is the content and the urgency of the ideas expressed in the work.
For this round of open calls, we will address author payment with the specifics of each project. If the submission will be sold in our store upon publication, we will give the money generated beyond the cost of printing to the author directly. If it is not something that will be sold, or the author wants it to be available online for free, we will work with the author or artist to provide money based on what they need to be supported in their work. The money we are able to offer will be agreed upon and determined before we move forward with publishing. The books are yours to freely reproduce after our initial run.
At OW we generate money by selling merchandise and through the sales of publications. All the money we generate is distributed to autonomous sex worker organizing, various cashapps, bail funds, commissaries, and directly to sex workers in need. Groups we have sent money to recently include Whose Corner is it Anyway, Answer Detroit, Bimbos, Cleveland SW fund, GLITS, CDMX street worker solidarity group, Lysistrata, Black and Pink, and SWOP behind bars. As this is a rolling submission period, we will be continuously fundraising and adding to our pool of funds in an effort to always provide cash support to both contributors and other sex workers.
To get a sense of what we might be interested in, please review our archive to see titles we feel address our pressing demands and otherwise overlooked positions in sex work politics.
Please, no politicians, gatekeepers of the whore-archy, defenders of the state, cops, bosses, borders, or prisons.
We are accepting inquiries/submissions on a rolling basis, and read submissions at the end of each month. We aim to get back to you within 4 weeks.
Email owdistro@protonmail.com with pitches or completed material.