Image credit @AussieRachel_
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.
Winner: 2022 CLR James Best Book for Academic or General Audiences Award, Working-Class Studies Association
For press inquiries, please contact UNC Press or heatherberg[at]wustl.edu.
Reviews:
“Sex Work as (Anti)Work: on Heather Berg’s Porn Work,” Scott Stern at the Los Angeles Review of Books
“Porno Dialectics at Work,” Whitney Strub at The New Labor Forum
“Porn Work,” Angela Jones at Gender & Society
“Pornography’s Contradictions,” Joseph Fischel at The Boston Review
“Valuing the Work that Makes All Other Work Possible,” Sara Matthiesen at Spectre
“Porn Work: Sex, Labor, and Late Capitalism,” Angela Jones at Gender & Society
“Porn Work: Sex, Labor, and Late Capitalism,” Meg Weeks at Sexualities
“Porn Work: Sex, Labor, and Late Capitalism,” Don Juan DeMarko at XCritic
“Porn Work: Sex, Labor, and Late Capitalism,” Lisa Sigel at Journal of Women’s History
“Porn Work: Sex, Labor, and Late Capitalism,” Emmerson L.R. Barrett at Feminist Formations
“How (and How Not) to Study Porn,” Kathleen Lubey at Journal of Literary History