Whose Quality of Life? Exploring Migrant Massage/Sex Workers’ Practice and Vision for Safety and Solidarity
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cho-choyh-mcp-dusp-2026-thesis.pdf
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8.42 MB
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f192563f5784411355a8925f6ab5481e
Author(s)
Cho, Yeonhoo
Advisor(s)
Huntley, Eric Robsky
Date Issued
May 2026
Publisher
Massachusetts Institute of Technology
Abstract
This thesis explores the “quality of life” rhetoric in New York City as it pertains to the targeted policing of migrant massage/sex workers and unlicensed street vendors on the Roosevelt Avenue commercial corridor. Called Operation Restore Roosevelt since October 2024, an interagency coordination such as between police and Department of Buildings (DOB) use vacate orders to shut down migrant-run massage parlors. As sex workers’ voices continue to be sanctioned, the heavily militarized terrain of the corridor remains largely misrepresented. Coincidentally, just blocks away, the city rezoned a public lot, granting leases for venture capital projects. This thesis asks: Whose desires have been mobilized as neighborhoods in Queens undergo a process of social cleansing? I engage in mixed methods that combine 1) semi-structured interviews with nine migrant massage/sex workers, 2) spatial analysis of police arrests and DOB violations, and 3) close reading of media, press releases, internal city records, and the casino’s proposals. Drawing from Du Bois’s articulation of human incalculability and agency, Anzaldúa’s la facultad, Tuck and Yang’s desire-based research, and praxis of local organizers, I argue that migrant massage/sex workers diagnose the city’s contradictory policing regime. They exercise self-determination and mutual care in their journeys of migration and labor and develop a possibility of solidarity across culture and language within the migrant working class. Workers propose a more inclusive anti-harm approach as an alternative to the anti-vice approach held by some residents of Queens and demand decriminalization and protection of their labor. I call for continued knowledge co-production everywhere, that reimagines equitable urban planning by amplifying those excluded in the “quality of life” debates.
MIT Department
Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Department of Urban Studies and Planning
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