Reading Sex Work

Book excerpt: In this special issue, contributors theorize sexual labor as both work and a site of labor resistance and transformation. Rather than critiquing sex work itself, they consider what scholars of migration, sexuality, digital labor, and service work can learn from sex workers' interventions into their own conditions, including critical insights into power and control, gendered labor, and collective organizing. They critique the introduction of respectability politics into sex worker activism; study the insights of Black trans women sex workers into labor and the pleasures it affords; and explore erotic labor as an escape from work that leads the way to an antiwork politics of refusal and community care. Contributors to this issue highlight sex workers' own production of knowledge for navigating racial capitalism, state violence, and economic precarity. Contributors. femi babylon, Camille Barbagallo, Heather Berg, Thaddeus Blanchette, Vanessa Carlisle, Julian Glover, Kate Hardy, Annie McClanahan, Gregory Mitchell, Jon-David Settell, Svati Shah, Jayne Swift