Porn Work: Heather Berg
Porn Work: Heather Berg
Porn Work: Sex, Labor and Late Capitalism
A book talk featuring Dr. Heather Berg
Wednesday, April 20, 2022
4:00 - 5:30 pm
"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. It tells a story of crafty workers, faltering managers, and shifting solidarities.
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."
Heather Berg writes about sex, work, and social struggle. Her first book, Porn Work (UNC Press, 2021), explores workers' strategies for navigating--and subverting--precarity. Her current project is an intellectual history of the sex worker left. Heather's writing appears in the journals Feminist Studies, Signs, South Atlantic Quarterly, and others. She is assistant professor of Women, Gender, and Sexuality Studies at Washington University in St. Louis.
This is a virtual event and registration is required. You can RSVP at ter.ps/BergApr20.