Porn Work

“[A] breathtaking work of scholarship—the product of 81 interviews Berg conducted with performers, managers, and crew members, the interviewees ranging in age from 21 to 70—that challenges preconceived notions and tidy assumptions on every page.”—Los Angeles Review of Books

“A deeply researched book examining the nuances of labor within the adult industry.”—Jezebel

“[Berg] hones in on how porn work is both exceptional but excruciatingly ordinary, the most insecure of gig economies but also rife with possibilities for appropriating the means of production (at this point, just 'your body, a smartphone, a web connection' ) . . . emblematizing the ways porn workers 'hack their industries' to imagine life without work, or at least with a lot less of it.”—Boston Review

“[It] is a testament to Porn Work’s intellectual vibrancy that we finish the book wanting more. . . . [A] magnificent, incisive book that offers not analysis from on high but rather scholarship forged in solidarity and committed to new and better politics.”—New Labor Forum

“Theoretically sophisticated, elegantly written, and rigorously even-handed in [the] treatment of her subjects . . . Berg depicts her eighty-plus interviewees as complex subjects with a variety of motivations, calculations, and desires laboring in a very particular corner of the contemporary professional landscape.”—Sexualities

“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. . . . [A] must-read for those interested in porn studies, sex work, and sexuality more generally.”—Labor

“At once impressively rigorous and immensely readable, Porn Work explores the complexities of sex work in the United States today. This rich and timely study of the creative strategies sex workers have used to navigate precarious forms of labor is an absolute must-read for students of political economy and the contemporary struggles within and against work.” — Kathi Weeks, author of The Problem with Work: Feminism, Marxism, Antiwork Politics, and Postwork Imaginaries

“This book asks what it means to call porn 'work,' and what it means that the feminism at the vanguard of this framing of pornography often forgets that work itself is a site of struggle and exploitation. Berg offers a 'porn work lens' that allows readers to rethink pleasure, labor, sex, and precarity, developing an anticapitalist feminist critique of work that centers struggle and workers' voices and experiences.” — Jennifer C. Nash, author of The Black Body in Ecstasy: Reading Race, Reading Pornography

“Heather Berg’s Porn Work powerfully shows that it’s not necessary to defend porn as 'good work' for it to be real work. Berg is bringing porn studies into the postwork future of sex work politics.” — Melissa Gira Grant, author of Playing the Whore: The Work of Sex Work and staff writer at The New Republic