Porn Work

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.

"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

“Heather Berg enables the reader to understand and engage in a topic area that is rarely discussed to such a full extent, and which seemingly carries a lot of stigma and segregation. . . . [A]n excellent read.”—Criminal Law & Criminal Justice Books