... worker has been rhetorically deployed to trouble the boundaries between productive, unproductive, and reproductive work. More recently, the prostitute imaginary has shaped accounts of contemporary service work: in particular, the figure of the sex worker has been used to metaphorize the intimate affects...

...Vanessa Carlisle This article interrogates the common sex worker rights’ slogan “sex work is real work,” a claim that yokes sex worker struggles to labor struggles worldwide. This article argues that US-based sex worker rights activism, which relies on the labor rights framework to confront stigma...

...Heather Berg Heather Berg Reading Sex Work: An Introduction it s true, sometimes I have to get extremely drunk but it isn t like poor me, in a strapless sequin dress it s just these people are all too stupid to have all this money Rachel Rabbit White, Porn Carnival (2019) Sex work is tedious...

...Svati P. Shah In the wake of the twinned specters of authoritarianism and antidemocratic governance that the COVID-19 pandemic lockdowns in India have both exacerbated and facilitated, the author argues that scholarship on sex work deployed through a critique of labor will be pressed to rethink its...

...Julian Kevon Glover This article investigates sex work among Black transgender women in Chicago’s ballroom scene, drawing on ethnographic data to argue that Black transwomen engage in sex work as a practice of self-investment undergirded by an epistemological shift regarding the centrality...

...Kate Hardy; Camille Barbagallo An increasing amount of sex work in the United Kingdom is now digitally mediated, as workers and clients identify each other, agree prices and services, undertake security checks, and often make payment through various platforms and websites. Existing accounts...

...femi babylon; Heather Berg In this interview, femi babylon elaborates a proheaux womanist theory of erotic labor as at once work and antiwork. “Sex work is work” speaks to the realities of erotic labor as a survival strategy and illuminates the connections among erotic labor and other forms of gig...

... movements have sought to change public debates about commercial sex, vis-à-vis an antistereotype strategy that reimagined the sex worker as a sex-positive feminist, distinguished less by her critical politics of pleasure and more by the implication that she freely chooses and finds happiness in her work...

... a comparative approach by studying performances of masculinity in heterosexual and homosexual commercial sex venues in Rio de Janeiro. The authors argue that masculine performances not only are about homosocial male bonding between clients but also are aspirational performances in which actors must work within...

... and the state of liberal identity politics for gay men in the United States. Avoiding subjective and psychological approaches to viral sex, this essay addresses viral sex in terms of the political economy of liberalism and biopower, featuring a discussion of Michel Foucault's late work on homosexuality and its...

... men, but one that is rigorously attentive both to questions of subjectivity and to the inadequacy of gender as a coherent analytic. [email protected] Copyright © 2023 by Duke University Press 2023 sex work political economy feminist theory Among the populace of plentiful...

... Press . Weeks Kathi . 2011 . The Problem with Work: Feminism, Marxism, Antiwork Politics, and Postwork Imaginaries . Durham, NC : Duke University Press . AGAINST the DAY Ben Trott Same-Sex Marriage and the Queer Politics of Dissensus...

... about sex, work, and social struggle. She is the author of Porn Work: Sex, Labor, and Late Capitalism (2021). Her recent essays include Sex Work after the Future (2020), Left of #MeToo (2020), and Porn Work, Independent Contractor Misclassification, and the Limits of the Law (2021). She...

... : a materialist analysis of gender hierarchy premised on the conviction that sex difference is not the foundation of gender but is, rather, its effect. I aim not only to give Delphy's work the benefit of a sympathetic reading but also to demonstrate how such a reading participates in contesting two...

... taxes of $100 or more on prostitutes and others involved in the business (see Leovy 1866).2 The heart of New Orleans’s legal sex trade was in the back of the French Quarter along one street in particu- lar, Burgundy Street, where all three women lived and worked during this period, at times even...

... excerpts from The Second Sex as she worked to its completion, making publicly available her preliminary conclusions on the analysis of the woman as other from 1948 until 1949, when the full-length text was published.5 Though Beauvoir’s question of alterity seems to clearly echo in Black Skin, White...

.... My argument concludes with a discussion of caste, stigma, and abjection through the lens of sex work, circling back to the queer hermeneutics of caste capitalism, and the ways in which this implicates questions surrounding processual hierarchies of the category of the human. In the following section...

... racial order. Thus, if we talk about the labor market transformations of the long 1970s solely in terms of a meteoric rise in low-wage service work or casualized work, we risk neglecting the fact that prior to neoliberalism, informalized, privatized, or criminalized low-wage service work such as sex work...

... and Critical Theory, at Northwestern University. They are the author, most recently, of the books Black Trans Feminism and Cistem Failure: Essays on Blackness and Cisgender , both published with Duke University Press in 2022. Heather Berg writes about sex, work, and social struggle. Her first book...

... Studies (SKOK) and the Global Research Programme on Inequality (GRIP) at the University of Bergen. Their work has appeared in a range of scholarly journals, including Gender and History , Cultural Dynamics and Antipode . Their first book, Street Corner Secrets: Sex, Work and Migration in the City...