Porn Work

256 pp., 6.125 x 9.25, 1 table, appends., notes, index

Paperback ISBN: 978-1-4696-6192-6
Published: April 2021
Hardcover ISBN: 978-1-4696-6191-9
Published: April 2021

Paperback Available April 2021, but pre-order your copy today!

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Every porn scene is a record of people at work. But on-camera labor is only the beginning of the story. Porn Work takes readers behind the scenes to explore what porn performers think of their work and how they intervene to hack it. Blending extensive fieldwork with feminist and antiwork theorizing, Porn Work details entrepreneurial labor on the boundaries between pleasure and tedium. Rejecting any notion that sex work is an aberration from straight work, it reveals porn workers' creative strategies as prophetic of a working landscape in crisis. In the end, it looks to what porn has to tell us about what's wrong with work, and what it might look like to build something better.

About the Author

Heather Berg is assistant professor of women, gender, and sexuality studies at Washington University in St. Louis.
For more information about Heather Berg, visit the Author Page.

Reviews

"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