What work does “work” do in sex work? Or, for Heather Berg's book Porn Work: Sex, Labor, and Late Capitalism, the question is more specifically, What work does work do in porn work? For Berg, “every porn scene is a record of people at work” (1). But calling it work is only the beginning of the story. Berg's “porn work lens” reminds readers that work is itself a site of struggle, exploitation, creativity, and negotiation. Berg shows us that porn work both is and isn't like other work and that porn work has much to tell us about the conditions and contradictions of labor in late capitalism.
Berg's intervention begins where other scholarship on sex work has left off. In the context of feminist sex wars around pornography and prostitution, the term sex work was an intervention in the terms of the debate, intended to radically shift the discourses...
