Register on Eventbrite: https://porn_work.eventbrite.com

Join us for a conversation with Heather Berg, author of Porn Work, and Professor Lisa Duggan.

About the Book

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 Speakers

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 writing appears in the journals Feminist Studies, Signs, South Atlantic Quarterly, and others. Heather is assistant professor of Women, Gender, and Sexuality Studies at Washington University in St. Louis.

Lisa Duggan is a journalist, activist, and Professor of Social & Cultural Analysis at New York University. She is author most recently of Mean Girl: Ayn Rand and Neoliberal Greed as well of Sapphic Slashers: Sex, Sensationalism and American Modernity, and Twilight of Equality? Neoliberalism, Cultural Politics and the Attack on Democracy. She is co-author with Nan Hunter of Sex Wars: Sexual Dissent and Political Culture, and co-editor with Lauren Berlant of Our Monica, Ourselves: The Clinton Affair and National Interest.

This event is sponsored by the Tamiment Library & Robert F. Wagner Labor Archives and LaborArts.

It will be presented in zoom. Live closed captioning will be available.