Donna “Darlene” Pickett: The Deuce, Season 2, Ep.1—“Our Raison d’Etre”

There was really nothing to see. Her defect, frightening and exotic as it was, was also a theatrical failure. It needed intimacy, gossip, and the time it took for curiosity to become drama.

—Toni Morrison, Song of Solomon

What does it look like when life is so thoroughly put to work? When workers wish to protect small pieces of life from work. How do they do this?

—Heather Berg, Porn Work

Sex work is an industry filled with exoticized and sexual figures who are literate, intelligent, creative, and autonomous subjects whose leisure and labor is as queer and funky as the art and illustrations of Pedro Bell, aka Sire Lleb. Thus, I begin my engagement of Heather Berg’s Porn Work: Sex, Labor, and Late Capitalism with an image of Darlene, a fictional street-prostitute-turned-porn-star, lounging and reading Toni Morrison’s Song of Solomon (1977) as her pimp, Larry Brown, attempts to take her attention away from the book. During my pre-pandemic television watching days, I took in George Pelecanos’s and David Simon’s HBO The Deuce (2017), a television series about the development of the golden age era of pornography, despite some of the first season’s missteps with representations of black sex workers. I stuck with the series in large part because of Darlene, a character beautifully translated and rendered by one of the greatest young actresses of the twenty-first century—Dominique Fishback. Series writer David Simon lists Toni Morrison as one of his favorite authors, and the image of Darlene reading Morrison’s Song of Solomon acknowledges that both black imagination and black feminist perspectives matter in deepening representations of non-normative black women. Berg notes that “porn work reveals deep contradictions at the core of (late) capitalism” and that “a porn work lens makes for a sharper anti-capitalist feminist critique” (2–3), and thus she relies upon a queer analytical and common intersectional approach to her study of porn work and labor.

The Deuce was a fictional engagement with sex, labor, and capitalism, the subjects of Heather Berg’s scholarly monograph. Berg’s book helps to illuminate what shows about sex work, like Katori Hall’s P-Valley or The Deuce, get right in their representations of the industry and its workers. Berg’s book provides a nice balancing act between undoing the spectacle of sex work and porn as moral failure and writing it as a theatrical failure of work ethics and sexual morality. It does this, while also attending to issues of race, body size, consent, and sometimes to the intersection of LGBTQ within the industry. On route to addressing labor, economics, and the problem of work in pornographic industries, Berg’s book raised and sometimes answered questions about the labor of representing sex and sex work on screen, the evolution of pornography studies, and theories of post-work imagination.

Even as popular culture continues to take up the subject, there is still some drama to deal with in doing research on sex work, especially porn studies. Berg’s Porn Work is a labor studies book about the shifting porn industries and its workers, as well as a project about understanding porn as work and anti-work. It carefully allows workers’ knowledge and understanding about their labor to dictate the narrative direction of the text. In this way, it avoids redundant stigmatization of some sociological research on sex work and its subjects. As Berg’s appendix explains, her mixed methods of humanistic lens via social science data collection shows this is not simply important to us as readers, but to the concerns about methodological interventions that have occurred over the last decade with regards to porn studies. The arduous labor of research and writing about sex work has become abundantly clear over the last five years. There are years of labor and intimate practices of connection involved in getting it right. As Berg’s introduction explains, the level of trust between workers and scholarly researchers is tenuous given past representations of workers in previous scholarly work (both anti-porn, pro-porn, and sex-positive scholarship). And then there are the studies that insist upon a feminist ethics of understanding the workers as producing the knowledge and the scholars as providing a narrative about the various modes and tensions within quotidian knowledge production.

Mireille Miller Young’s A Taste of Brown Sugar: Black Women in Pornography certainly established a clear Pilate-like precedent for black and brown women in the porn industry with its extensive archive and interviews of women who worke before and behind the camera, notably attending to issues of representation and labor practices. In addition, a decade after Kathi Weeks’s The Problem with Work: Feminism, Marxism, Antiwork Politics, and Postwork Imaginaries, and in the throes of global pandemic that has highlighted the problem with work, the necessity of more attention to labor politics and intersectionality in the industry continues. Berg’s bork demonstrates how twenty-first-century sex workers are moving away from late twentieth-century arguments for the legitimacy of their labor to interrogating the very notion of work. Berg’s work is in conversation with the likes of Mireille Miller Young’s A Taste of Brown Sugar, as well as Elizabeth Bernstein’s Temporarily Yours, Tristian Taormino’s The Feminist Porn Book, and Siobhan Brooks Unequal Desires for the ways in which it moves beyond researching and studying porn as text (20). It also engages feminist Marxist scholarship by the likes of Melinda Chateauvert’s Sex Workers Unite, Melissa Grant’s Playing the Whore, Annelise Orleck’s We Are All Fast Food Workers Now, and Gibson-Graham’s The End of Capitalism. Moreover, there are clear moments of theoretical meditation and innovation akin to Jennifer Nash’s The Black Body in Ecstasy when porn as text or representation is taken up. I am speaking now about the bracketed sections at the end of each chapter that become a way for Berg to not simply summarize her findings, but to provide meditation on how both imagination and porn work can intervene on straight economy.

Berg’s book should also be noted as important to film studies outside of porn studies. Hollywood has reckoned with its industry-wide sexual violence off screen and on, inadvertently acknowledging that its ineptitude and patriarchal training in filming sex scenes has made possible incidents of exploitation during on-screen filming of sex scenes. Berg’s work demonstrates how illicit cultural economies of pornography have been thinking through these issues out of necessity (legality and legitimacy), long before the current Hollywood hiring of intimacy coordinators. Her attention to consent, agency, and feeling with regard to performance labor is amazingly useful for the research areas of consent as a social construction in gender and sexuality studies. Just as legal scholarship, activist work, and theoretical discourse intervened on problematic outdated discourses in rape and sexual violence cases, research on kink and BDSM had already been challenging static and falsely historical and universalist notions of consent. Berg’s work becomes important to highlighting the different genealogies of consent discourse, what social practices and institutions they are attached to, as well as what hierarchies are produced within them. With discussion of concepts such as consent to particular labor of a job (38) or enthusiastic consent (60), analysis of porn workers’ understanding that consent and desire are not the same, and parsing out the two in chapter 1, is important for labor studies and performance studies inquiries into sexual performance outside of porn. An implied narrative of moral superiority in Hollywood studios led to an underdevelopment of consciousness of how it was handling the shooting of sex scenes. Interviewees provide Berg with affective information about how performance, connecting or cultivated detachment (47), is much different that the responses we get from many Hollywood actors and actresses who downplay or pretend that business is business (no affective labor) when asked about love scenes or kissing-scene peers. These responses (47) illustrate that porn workers figured out systemic protocols that legitimate filmmakers did not feel obligated to do. The consciousness of these contemporary sex workers about shooting sex may have been culled from previous conditions of exploitation and capitalism, but the radical consciousness about filming sex is something that must be shared if sex on screen in Hollywood and independent filmmaking in the United States is ever to be something other than a feigned pretense of being better and morally superior to porn. In addition to the voices and strategies of feminist and queer porn directors, studies such as Berg’s should be used to better theorize nudity, sex, and eroticism between directors, actors, and crew members.

In chapter 2, centered on performing authenticity and inauthenticity, Berg does a remarkable job of assessing the significance of affective labor in porn work and then using it to innovate discussions of representation, race, and embodiment on screen. By introducing affective labor, readers can glean the real impact of stereotypical images of Western beauty and body norms for marginalized groups. Berg details how resistance to white heteronormative dominant narratives of authenticity, or performances of inauthenticity with regards to race porn, BBW porn, and trans and queer porn shifts from time to time based on politics, genre, or film companies. Berg’s attention to the contradiction and tensions of conveying authentic blackness, lesbianism, or fatness as both a sign of identity politics, professionalism, or monetary opportunities, makes it difficult to reduce the pleasure and labor of such performance to a surface-level articulation of agency. For example, complications of agency and autonomy rise for several performers in these genres. Hierarchies from the “real” and straight world dictate the market for these performances, and who becomes valued even if the authentic performance devalues. Likewise, that refusal of the aesthetics that mimic or cultivate notions of authentic exoticization shifts based on the affective or physical labor being compensated.

With all of this interesting and rigorous scholarship, I do wish there had been better nuancing in the brief attention to queer and trans pornography threaded throughout the book. Although, this seems to be a problem for porn studies as a field in general. Chapters 4 and 5 are why I am struck by Berg’s attention to overwhelmingly straight porn work and industries. Specifically, the title of chapter 4, “I’m Kind of Always Working, but It’s Also Almost Always Really Fun: Porn and the Boundaries between Life and Work,” emphasizes why gradation would be useful. It’s not that Berg ignores LGBTQ porn and its workers, it’s that there are missed opportunities to do more than representationally include them. Because of chapter 4’s focus on calling marketing, activism, preparation, and rest “work,” I do think the author might have done more to bring in a queering of these reflections. That is, how might deepening these questions about trans and gender nonconforming bodies, or disabled bodies and crip performances, have provided a more radical engagement with questions of porn and the boundaries between leisure, life, and work. I think here of C. Riley Snorton’s useful work on “collateral genealogies” and double meaning of “restive,” alongside Matt Richardson’s work on trans porn star Ajita Wilson. I know the author has written about queer sex work elsewhere, but I am curious as to why the discussion isn’t developed at opportune times in this work, especially in these two chapters. What about the minutiae of rest work for varied and less homogenous grouping of sex workers, as well as the dangers and risks (health, surveillance, criminality) of certain bodies in and outside of the industry in chapter 4. Also, Sophie Pezzuto and Lynn Comella’s special TSQ issue on trans pornography, in which discussion of trans pornography outside the United States intervenes on the colonial foundations of porn studies in the United States. I also wonder why earlier discussions about satellite sex work industries are not later connected in chapter 5 to concerns of settler colonialism raised by someone like Kamala Kempadoo. Even if Berg wants to insist that the concern is about domestic labor, chapter 5 has global implications for US territories, seldom disconnected from these industries, specifically for the ways in which migration, aid, digital porn, and international policies are informed by settler colonial sexuality of which domestic porn industries sustain and maintain. Is this something the author could take up in regard to methods, data collection, personal interviews, and future projects on theories of sex work? I hope so given Berg’s deeply moving but ambivalent statement that “leftist do a lot of guessing about whether sex work will exist in the future . . . the better answer is that we will not know until we get there” (185).

Fuck Work: The Colonial State Must Pay

Suddenly, like an elephant who has just found his anger and lifts his trunk over the heads of the little men who want his teeth or his hide or his flesh or her amazing strength, Pilate trumpeted for the sky itself to hear, “And she was loved!”

—Toni Morrison, Song of Solomon

A regulatory system premised on artificial boundaries between private life and public work does an especially poor job of making sense of subjects who are sometimes workers, sometimes contractors, sometimes bosses, and sometimes (or at the very same time) sexual subjects. . . . Organizers, scholars, and policy makers of straight work are well served to pay attention to how porn workers fashion policy demands.

—Heather Berg, Porn Work

As season 2 of The Deuce concluded, I was certain that Simon’s earlier inclusion of the Morrison reference in episode 1 of season 2 was meant to signal that Darlene was Pilate recognizing her inner strength and Larry was Milkman unable to tap into a love of self. The last episode of season 2, “Inside the Pretend,” confirms this thesis when Darlene leaves Larry and tells him, “You should’ve never let me see you act, Larry. Pimp is a role; so is whore.” The series may or may not be making a morality judgement about sexual labor as it depicts Darlene walking away from street life and sex work into the straight world and its workforce, but certainly the recognition viewers can take from Darlene’s character is her proclamation about the blurring of work, labor, and imagination in all the straight and pornographic industries. The Deuce was adept at writing the exploitation within different types of sex work, but it notably requires something more to adequately engage the state. What happens when Darlene, a black woman, makes the personal decision to leave sex work for straight work? The series briefly attends to this when she returns in the last season, needing help from the white feminist Abby because her criminal record, the criminalization of sex work, is keeping her from obtaining her nursing license. Notably, the ending of the series is unable to resolve the real public labor and dilemma of its sentimental representation of Darlene’s journey. To participate in late capitalism is to accept the state’s ethics about any type of work.

As the series had been demonstrating with its representation of the hierarchies of and within sex work and labor, the intersection of street prostitution with porn acting was necessitated by policy, technology, and culture. What Berg’s study clarifies in thinking through this future is that regardless of these hierarchies, it is inevitably, covertly, and conveniently bound to straight industries of late capitalism. The final chapter of Berg’s Porn Work attempts to address what to do with the state, and it is a chapter that becomes the greatest evidence of why when looking beyond aesthetics and representation, we are far from being a post-porn or post-work society. Berg insists we learn from the illicit economies and its subjects and say, “Fuck jobs.” Doing this requires something less white and colonial to signal an attempt to reckon with creativity and affect in these industries as they intersect with nation, race, class, and gender, as well as confront a state that manufactures the ethics of necessity for every pleasurable, creative, and leisure activity to be in service to its expansion and growth. I appreciate how often Berg’s book returns to this premise and offers readers the chance to meditate on it.

It isn’t our recent increased porn consumption globally as a result of the COVID-19 pandemic that makes Heather Berg’s Porn Work: Sex, Labor, and Late Capitalism feel so prescient. It is, rather, the way the book inspires readers to—in a moment when we are already doing so—think more deeply about work—what we put into it, what we get out of it, what it takes from us, what it creates, and what it destroys. Whether or not we are part of the mass of clicks recently responsible for such elevated porn consumption, Porn Work can cast light on the many contradictions we navigate as working people in late capitalism.

Berg begins the book with a fundamental divide that haunts the text: that between porn work and other work, what she calls “straight jobs.” The tension between porn work as just another kind of (non-sex) work versus porn work being definitively different as a mode of sex work is a pulse throbbing throughout the book. It is an uneasy dialectic right from the start and it becomes more fraught as we read the many examples—personal narratives of “porno dialectics”—from porn workers articulating the myriad ways that their work is and is not distinct from straight work, yet how they sought out porn work and continue doing it because they often firmly believe in the former.1 If workers imagine porn work as distinct from “straight work,” just as they articulate the many ways it operates as straight work, can we think about porn work as definitively queer work? If so, how, and why? What constitutes queer work (in relation to “straight work”) here? What is queer, both newly and always already, about porn work?

Nevertheless, it is clear in Berg’s political economy of sex work, that “contradiction rules”—from the slippery split between straight work and porn work that anchors the book, to the late twentieth-century digital turn in pornography that allowed workers to attain entry in new ways and gain control over production while shifting profits from producers to global distributers, and increasing competition, piracy, and internet censorship, to engender the demise of the porn industry as we once knew it (11). Our present-day twenty-first-century landscape where tube sites reign, pirated porn prevails, and larger performer pools combined with fewer contracts and many other factors channel workers into a volatile and “hyper mobile gig economy” is the backdrop for Porn Work (2, 14). In this turbulent terrain, Berg shows how workers struggle yet continuously invent creative strategies to intervene. Such enterprise in the face of precarity is another emphatic textual tempo of Porn Work.

While Berg documents the multifaceted precarity of porn work from workers’ lack of ownership over their work, to myriad challenges with managerial power and other class struggles, to racial and gender discrimination, to rapidly transforming working conditions, she highlights the possibility in this precarity, i.e., precarity as a headspring of inventiveness, alternative action, and entrepreneurship. For example, porn workers carve out income-generating work in porn’s various satellite industries such as direct-to-consumer platforms and camming, work as paid escorts and dancers, use paid scenes for advertisement, and more generally hustle in porn’s gig economy. To be clear, Berg avoids “romanticizing resistance,” reluctant to even use the word, preferring instead “struggle” because of the ways that it suggests enterprise and does not imply “reactivity” (4, 6). Porn like other forms of waged work is, as Berg makes clear, anchored in “fundamental dynamics of exploitation and extraction” which workers often reproduce as they attempt to evade (9). Such dynamics are not mitigated by, but rather often stoked by pleasure.

Critically Berg reveals how porn workers recognize pleasure itself as a vital labor and negotiate the demands of authenticity that inform it. Like so much in Porn Work, pleasure is steeped in its own dialectics: genuine pleasure makes porn work gratifying, but it is simultaneously a demand—and even a “managerial tool”— that makes the work harder; pleasure is real and performed, authentic and artificial (87, 92). Yet it is also wedded to the core dialectic (straight work / porn work) that besets the book; although pleasure is something that ostensibly sets porn work apart from straight work (while us non-porn workers experience pleasure at work, it is often not titillation), it is work in and of itself that often encourages and enables a more extractive and exploitative labor (81). Here, I wanted to know more about the many conflicts and contradictions of pleasure—challenges to the performance of pleasure and its multifaceted labor—such as the unspeakable pleasures that racially- and gender-marginalized performers might experience in the “politically troubling tropes” that populate mainstream porn work (85). How, for example, do black women porn workers—who, as Berg notes, struggle against numerous forms of industry racism and discrimination like lower pay, limited casting opportunities, highly fetishized roles, and the deep demands of pornography’s fantastic spectacle of racial-sexual authenticity—navigate the performance of pleasure and negotiate the fraught experience of pleasure itself (inextricable from its performance)? How do they resist these pleasures even as they capitulate to them and meet their various performative demands? What do workers make of this type of porn work—this deeply racialized and gendered psychosomatic labor? And more generally, how do porn’s demands for authentic pleasure collide with its demand for authentic race? If “authenticity is something one works at,” how do we work for authentic pleasure at the same time that we work for authentic race, and how do we learn this type of work (94)? Pleasure is indeed a “working condition” in pornography, but it is deeply wedded to the working condition of race (91).

Impressively, Berg interviews more than eighty performers, managers, and crew members and thankfully resists an etiology of the porn worker—something evident in her methodology, specifically the language of her questions and type she asks in her interviews. She refrains from asking “why” workers got into porn and instead asks “how,” a lexical shift that seeks to reject a re-pathologizing of sex work and the timeworn assumptions that one’s entrance into it was a result of economic desperation, coercion, addiction, abuse, or a veritable cocktail of social and individual ills. Another way Berg dispels such notions is by “approaching interviewees as the experts” and centering their words and experiences (24). In this way the book reads as a corrective to the often illusory and insidious narratives perpetuated by what she calls “anti-sex worker feminists” and their preoccupation with porn’s purported harm—material and symbolic—and analogous myths circulating within our collective imaginary that sex workers lack power, are unhappy, passive, desperate, dissatisfied, unintelligent, and utterly vulnerable (201). So if the line Berg sketches between “straight” work and porn work is seemingly smudgeable, sketched with a soft graphite pencil rather than a fine-point sharpie, Porn Work will leave readers with the indelible impression that porn is hard work—both a lot of work and a lot of different types of work—and that porn workers are people making us come, but more importantly making, and often very creatively, a living. Such recognition might generate if not more respect for, then a more nuanced understanding of porn’s hardworking performers and perhaps more appreciation for the work it takes to make the seven-minute scene we often impulsively steal on any number of hardcore porn tube sites.

Still, I wanted a more explicit statement on Berg’s stance, more on the politics grounding her “anti-capitalist feminist critique” that is indebted to not just Marxist Feminism but Black Feminist and Queer-of-Color Critique (3, 7). There is, as Berg acknowledges “something rather perverse about being party to a system that devalues work in order to write about work,” and this perversity deserves more contemplation. So how does Berg reconcile the many contradictions of such an anti-capitalist critique of such a fervently capitalist “industry”? Or even further, what would and could porn look like in this envisaged anti-capitalist or post-capitalist future? What would the work of porn be here, in terms of both production and consumption—aspects of porn work that are of course thickly entwined despite Berg’s critical choice to center the former. Just as scholars have evidenced how pornography came into being with and is inextricable from the archive as both a physical and ideological institution, so too have they demonstrated the inseparability of pornography from capitalism.2 , I wanted more about the futurity of pornography in an anti-capitalist imagining and what work—other than feminist and anti-work theorizing—it might take to get to this anti-work future.

Porn Work is a welcome addition to the field of porn studies that, as Berg acknowledges, often focuses—in both anti-porn and pro-porn feminist thought—more on pornography as representation and performance, i.e., “as a text” and not so much as work (2, 18). It critically recounts the experience of porn workers from the perspective of the workers themselves and in doing so, seeks to return porn to “the conditions of its production” (19). This is a vital move. It addresses a scholarly void in seeking to bridge the disciplinary gap between labor studies—which avoids porn—and porn studies—which, as Berg asserts, tends to turn away from labor in a more materialist sense (19). More importantly though, it humanizes porn workers who have long become emblems—visible yet invisible—in highly polarized scholarly feminist debates about porn. Still there are certain aspects and types of porn work that called for more visibility in the book: the often even more tedious, mundane, and overlooked labor of pornography like lighting, sound, location work, and more—aspects that are subsumed under production but that still warranted more attention. Similarly, the work of technology and porn workers’ vital labor alongside this work—e.g., programming, coding, use of software, malware, and fraud evasion, and the increasing power of AI algorithms is a site ripe for further analysis. Nevertheless, focusing on porn as work and less as text, Berg argues, is a political move that illuminates worker autonomy and resistance (again what she calls struggle) (21).

To return to where I started, in a prolonged moment when working conditions worldwide are continuing to profoundly transform as a result of the COVID-19 pandemic—let alone the “moment of profound capitalist crisis” Berg notes that were already inhabiting—Porn Work is an especially relevant and read (185). I am not (and neither does Berg seem to be) touting the similarities between porn work and academic work (porn work is “straight” work after all, Berg contends), but referring to how, in academic work, we are enmeshed in many of the same obstacles and contradictions as those Berg identifies in porn work, and how porn work’s reflection on academic work has become more vivid as a result of the pandemic and ensuing virtual work shift. For many of us this move was less of a leap and more of a not-so-gentle push, without a parachute, landing gear, or map, out of a moving aircraft into uncharted and seemingly hostile territory. But one that we made and had to make for the work. Post-push (not post-pandemic), many of us also still find ourselves somewhere in that fall, air rushing past us so quickly it’s difficult to breathe, horizons slipping, landing zone still out of sight. Exhausted by the ride and weary of the view, we are aware of the devastating toll this plunge has had on women and people of color workers in particular, and how the pandemic has stoked myriad preexisting financial and social inequalities in academia with respect to race and gender.

Reading along, I contemplated my own recent work experience. It is one of struggle within privilege, definitively marked by the uneasy yet unrelenting impulse to say, as Berg does, “fuck jobs,” when one knows one is fortunate to have a job, let alone be alive (183). But it is also one of acute tedium and increased extraction as the seemingly never-existent boundaries between academic work and “life” dissolved even further, student and institutional demands for our labor (sometimes free) increased dramatically, the mythos and mixed blessings of work-from-home and virtual “flexibility” collided, and the physical and psychic grooming required to perform on screen for our sundry virtual audiences and their appetite for authenticity and entertainment were thrown into relief. These are working conditions porn workers have long deftly navigated. But beyond this unsettling time, Porn Work highlights questions already circulating the landscape of academic working conditions such as: how have we, like porn workers, created various hacks and side hustles to survive, thrive, and support ourselves and our loved ones in academia? How do we work simultaneously as institutional employees and independent contractors? How do we organize collectively and simultaneously adopt “best practices” and polices that fuck our colleagues, staff members, students, communities, and environment? How do we brand and rebrand ourselves alongside and against that of our institutions? What parts of our labor are undervalued and what parts are overvalued? How do we creatively navigate increasing institutional precarity, in its many forms? And, hearkening back to my previous discussion of pleasure: what are the perks and pitfalls of professional pleasure—how do we access it, even at a time when pleasure is part guilty privilege, part pipe dream, and all desideratum. How have we as workers been able to perhaps more easily “steal everyday pleasures” (24), just as quotidian joys are more effortlessly purloined from us by the work? Porn work is work that we can and must learn from.

For the past fifteen years, I have taught a course called “Sex, Money, and Power,” a queerly-bent, ethnographically-centered Marxist feminist take on intimate economies. We start with the intersectional histories of social reproduction and domestic labor and end with multiple forms of sex work, with the queer critique of marriage as the central hinge—all the while stressing the ways that the “economic” shows up in the purportedly private sphere and the way “sex,” rather than contained within that private sphere, acts as a central motor of value, accumulation, and extraction. Basically, it’s a semester-long critique of the fallacy of the structuring bifurcations of public/private, economic/intimate, for money / for free, and all the rest.

When I first started teaching this course, most students proclaimed themselves “sex positive” feminists—in part because they were (reasonably enough) very eager not to be “sex negative.” Yet when pressed beyond these poles, confronted with decades of radical, Black, feminist, Marxist structural critique demanding a more complex reckoning with historical intersections of sex, money, and power, they often sought comfort in a kind of (neo)liberal choice “feminism,” with its familiar narratives of agency and empowerment. And of course, this iteration of lean-in, consumer/entrepreneurial feminism is the one that has gone mainstream—it might even be preferable to what Heather Berg rightly calls “anti-sex-worker” feminism (read that “feminism” in scare quotes) which has, in collusion with the state, consolidated ever more punishing forms of carcerality for the past twenty-five years. These two poles—negative/anti-sex-worker and positive/pro-sex—have seemed to many the only possibilities for feminists after the “sex wars” (even as the actual debates between feminists in the 1970s bear little resemblance to these caricatured positions, and even as sex/porn work scholarship challenges simplified depictions of sex workers as “either hapless victims or free market agents” [22–23]). After all, sex positive feminism decisively “won the academic ‘sex wars'” (19; TERF resurgence notwithstanding).

As I was reflecting on this history in light of Heather Berg’s Porn Work, I began to think about this fragile if prescriptive “sex positivity” as a defensive attachment1—a stance that reacts with suspicion to any form of critique (including the social critique that both Berg and I are partial to), because critique always risks being read as or appropriated by anti-sex feminism. This risk can trap those of us committed to feminist sex politics in a repetitive defense, where we revive, in the name of banishing, the calcified story of the sex wars, even as this story obscures more than it might reveal about a politics adequate to today’s sex (and work) industry.

And so one of my favorite things about Berg’s sharp, intellectually-satisfying Porn Work is that it simply refuses a defensive position. Porn Work is a refreshingly critical book. And although there are many aspects of Porn Work that connect to my own and others’ scholarship, I center this essay on my affective response to Porn Work: the relief I felt reading something other than the tired retread of sex war politics. Berg returns a displaced Marxist critique to feminist sex politics2 by centering the voices and perspectives of the workers themselves—and thus produces a reading that is resolutely anti-capitalist, rather than pro-sex.

I.

Berg terms her critical method “porno dialectics” (4). Rather than the “romance of resistance” (with apologies to Lila Abu-Lughod), Berg insists on the term “struggle,” asking us to think about the struggle of porn workers with, within, and against the conditions of their employment. Porn, like all forms of capitalism, extracts profit from the laboring bodies of its workers by keeping wages low, expanding the working day, and weaponizing racism, white supremacy, and patriarchal gendered body norms to devalue workers’ labor. Against these forms of exploitation, porn workers struggle to improve their working conditions and autonomy in ways that are particular to the industry (e.g., provision of the right lube on set) and, through this particularity, part of the larger struggle of all workers in today’s late capitalist, gig economy.

Porno dialectics highlights the pleasures of porn work and the challenges of it, within the context of the trouble with work itself (à la Kathi Weeks). As Berg puts it at the start: “Workers exit traditional jobs in search of autonomy but often find precarity on the other side. Pleasure makes work livable but also gets us to do more of it. The authenticity we seek in sex and work can be sold off for parts, and it can also be sustaining” (2). This both/and approach enables us to hear workers’ perspectives on porn work as both a better paying, more pleasurable, and less onerous form of work in a precarious economy and also a site of embodied exploitation—not outside of workplace struggles, but part of them. It is refreshing to encounter a critique of the demand to “love what you do” in this context, or of liberal models of “enthusiastic consent” read against the nonconsensual nature of all work, or of the neoliberal responsiblization of risk mobilized through condoms and STI regulation, or of the gig/self-promotional economy where direct-to-consumer possibilities (like OnlyFans) simultaneously offer porn workers an opportunity to recapture some of their labor and undermine their collective power. By centering the perspectives of the workers themselves, Berg shifts the locus of the “politics” part of “sex politics” to a Marxist critique of work—precisely the one erased from the potted history of the sex wars.

Again, this is anti-capitalist, not sex-positive. Berg frames her critique of sex positive feminism lightly (23–24), but for me this was one of the real pleasures of the book. Jettisoning “sex positivity” as analytical horizon means that there are none of the oft-repeated tropes of the “whorerarchy” (the class stratification of empowered sexual entrepreneurs versus those consigned to survival sex trade), the celebration of art or feminist/queer porn (sub)genres (to avoid the worst of the racist, heteronormative industry), or the Weberian ethical injunction undergirding the respectability politics of the claim “sex work is work.” Of course porn work is work (duh!), but all work is bad—this is Berg’s provocation. A dialectical critique shows porn work as a site of active political contradictions: the satisfaction and exploitation of (all) work; the vulnerability and pleasure of sex (work). In short, a sex politics with class.

II.

There is a kind of briskness to the writing in Porn Work, a clarity that comes not only from Berg’s anti-capitalist politics, but also her fearlessness in presenting ideas through lived debate. Bracketing both consumers and the (over-played) textual politics of representation, Berg allows the analysis of porn workers to dominate this book. What emerges is a text that respects workers enough to show that, while they share a site of struggle, they often disagree—with each other or with Berg. The book reads like a conversation, even at times a debate, between comrades—and comrades, of course, do not always concur.

Illuminating the general through the particular; a grounded and situated critique that centers the words and perspectives of those living these contradictions—this approach resonates, for me, with anthropological, feminist, and Marxist critical methods. Perhaps it is because I am an anthropologist, but I read this book as deeply ethnographic. Berg says at the beginning and the end that hers is not a typical or traditional ethnography; it is not “holistic” or filled with thick description (one images a tome entitled Porn Stars in Their Native Habitat). For at least fifty years, much ink has been spilled over ethnography as a colonial way of knowing and/or a voyeuristic glimpse into the (sex) lives of others (what anthropologist Kath Weston critiqued as “ethnocartography” back in 1993), and rightly so. But what characterizes the feminist, queer, and decolonizing tradition I am attached to is situated, embodied theorization—precisely what Porn Work does. Ethnography is embodied research that puts one’s commitments and desires into risky relation with others. Unlike texts, those others speak back, argue, disagree—and that relation can produce something remarkable.

I think this is not (only) a methodological point, but also a political one, if one of the potentials of ethnography is to more clearly see the domain of struggle. So even beyond Berg’s eighty-one interviews and seven years of fieldwork (!),3 Porn Work is situated knowledge made in horizontal relation. Berg carefully attends to a myriad of interlocutors (porn theorists, porn workers, and those do who both); she both listens and responds. Berg is with her interlocutors, not so much self-reflexive as dialogic, comradely. Her ethnography takes the “participatory” in our paradoxical “participant observation” as an embrace of relationality—porno ethnography as horizontal political theorization.4

III.

The title for this essay comes from a webinar held last summer as part of Red May, which featured Heather Berg in conversation with Connor Habib, Cassandra Troyan, femi babylon, and Kathi Weeks. As part of a conversation about the risks of saying or writing anything that might be weaponized by anti-sex-worker feminists (by, for instance, articulating any problems within the industry), Berg told a story about one of her interlocutors, a communist sex worker who responded to Berg’s concern with the line, “Well, as Lenin said, only the truth is revolutionary.”

In one of my favorite texts from the sex wars, “What We’re Rollin’ Around in Bed With” (1981), Amber Hollibaugh and Cherrie Moraga stage a CR-conversation-argument-critique that works toward a complex working-class sex politics. They don’t shy away from risky, contradictory, embodied theorization but instead debate and discuss as a way to get to a deeper political analysis that might be adequate to their desires, their queerness, and their radical and working-class politics. I thought about Hollibaugh and Moraga’s conversation reading Berg’s book, thinking about how critique can be forged through contestation, through co-theorizing to reveal “cracks” in the system and activate new modes of struggle (and study). But I also returned to Hollibaugh and Moraga because their conversation is motivated by a palpable need, a thirst for a feminist sexual theory that moves beyond white, middle-class, hetero feminist politics, beyond what is already known or acceptable. Moraga’s last line is, “and as feminists, Amber, you and I are interested in struggle” (1981, 62).

These days, there are many of us who share that interest. Last semester, when I taught “Sex, Money, and Power,” the terrain had changed. No longer were the terms of the debate only those provided by anti-sex(-worker) feminism, so that the default sex positive rejoinder seemed the only thinkable alternative. Instead, students were eager for anti-capitalist, left, Marxist critique that returns to a radical (structural, “to the root”) reading of power. So, even as dialectical critique is always threatened by easy platitudes—the well-worn ruts of the “sex positive” defense, on one side, and the punishing stance of the “sex negative” crusaders, on the other—there are many of us thirsty for something else.

Porn Work is part of this something else. And Berg’s book shows, a feminist sex politics that might be adequate to think both work and the work of sex in our ever-more-precarious times requires us to listen to what people know about their lives and to tell those truths—for that is the only way to find a politics adequate to transformation.

Heather Berg’s book Porn Work is a wonderful and timely contribution to research on sex work and to associated feminist debates on consent, labour, and materialism, serving as a much-needed exercise in understanding the details of real-world working conditions for actors in pornographic films, in particular. Berg offers a clear sense of how her interlocutors have navigated the rough economic waters of the gig economy and porn media, many doing so becoming producers themselves. This offers additional insight into how porn is made and how, ultimately, it both succeeds and fails as a livelihood strategy for porn workers in the United States. The successes and failures of porn to deliver security are clearly rendered as exemplary, not of porn per se, but of the economy in which we all must survive, some of us better than others. There are so many aspects of this book that bear reflection in a forum of this kind, not the least of which include the seamlessness with which we see working in porn as an aspect of navigating the gig economy. Berg is deft, for example, in describing the hours of boredom of being on a shoot via her interviewees. As one respondent jokes, the book could easily have been called “Hurry Up and Wait” (29).

While Berg’s interviews and framing critiques are wide ranging, they all significantly deal with the questions of consent and agency that will be familiar to both veterans and students of feminist debates on sexuality and gender-based power. Berg is particularly adept in using interviews with a range of porn workers to assess the historical legacies of “materialist feminism” and the American “sex wars,” and this is where I begin my engagement with the book in this essay. First, a reminder: the obscenity/sex wars were debates amongst mostly, but not exclusively, white feminists in the 1980s and 1990s over what constituted obscenity in print media, and what to do about it. These debates centered on pornography and whether the government should ban it entirely. Catherine MacKinnon and Andrea Dworkin both became famous for advocating for banning pornography altogether, arguing that pornography allows for violence against women, at times going as far as equating porn with violence against women itself. While Dworkin and MacKinnon are remembered and invoked as “radical feminists,” it bears remembering that Catherine MacKinnon also identified her position in the “sex wars” as Marxist feminism (MacKinnon 1983), a point that I will discuss further below. In my own work on sex work in India I have pointed out that, whereas the American anti-pornography, pro-censorship feminist position of the 1980s failed in its attempt to legally ban pornography, passing one city ordinance against pornography and little else besides, the anti-porn movement was enormously successful in gathering allies and building institutional infrastructure (Vance – Meese Commission ___, Shah 2012). While this support gained some traction in the context of trying, and failing, to ban pornography outright in the United States, in no small part because of its wide-ranging views on what constituted obscenity, and because of the immediate potential for its uses in censoring queer print media as well as sexually explicit straight porn, anti-porn feminism gained huge relevance when it reinvented itself as anti-trafficking feminism in the 1990s. Many of the same radical feminist ideologues who had been active in the anti-pornography campaigns, including Janice Raymond in the United States and Sheila Jeffreys in Australia, are remembered for their transphobic views inasmuch as they are known for being central to fomenting the idea that pornography was a form of violence against women in and of itself. Perhaps lesser known is that, like other prominent radical feminists of that era, they reinvented themselves as anti-prostitution advocates who gained much greater international success and discursive relevance when they struck upon conflating prostitution and trafficking, remaking themselves as vanguardist saviors of sex workers everywhere, and especially in the Global South. Raymond cofounded the Coalition Against Trafficking in Women (CATW) in the United States, which helped to mentor the first generation of anti-trafficking feminists. These women gained enormous influence in the world of international development, in part because they offered a rationale for instituting anti-migrant border controls as a means of curtailing prostitution-as-trafficking. In Berg’s entirely warranted engagement with the earlier stages of this history in the book, she makes the following categorical claim about the American feminist sex wars: “A long history of feminist and queer work critiques the pro-censorship and sexually conservative underpinnings of antiporn feminist thought. For that task I turn readers to thinkers such as Lisa Duggan and Nan Hunter, Laura Kipnis, Jennifer Nash, Gayle Rubin, and Carole Vance, who have decisively won the academic ‘sex wars,’ if not policy makers’ favor” (19, emphasis added). If we look at the efflorescence of scholarly work that takes transactional sex seriously as a site of numerous, complex negotiations of labor, affect, history, and aesthetics, then yes, the legacy of these thinkers is strong in a certain cast of academic scholarly production. At the same time, Andrea Dworkin is undergoing something of a revival, with a film about her life in the works, being made by Pratibha Parmar, with Gloria Steinem and Eve Ensler serving as some of the film’s executive producers (see https://www.mynameisandreamovie.com/). Even as college campuses struggle with sexual assaults that go unpunished and unseen, young women, seeking an explanatory framework for what is happening, are reaching for the term “rape culture,” which has somehow emerged into the discourse of anti-rape organizing on campuses without the context of its origins in Susan Brownmiller’s book Against Our Will, a foundational text of antiporn radical feminism. In a recent article, I point out that even some critical work on sex work, like my own, is now being taken up within evidentiary claims that rationalize the conflation of prostitution with human trafficking (Shah 2021). I raise these factoids less to dispute Berg’s claim of who won or lost the sex wars than to suggest that if the lasting impact of anti-censorship feminism, often mischaracterized simply as “pro-sex” feminism, has been partial, Berg’s book and other contemporary works of its ilk demand that we reassess how we have come to this juncture, and what books like Porn Work represent for the possibilities of the way forward.

Throughout the book, Berg calls for a “materialist analysis of porn,” repeatedly showing explicitly and implicitly that we have not had such an analysis thus far. Instead, she cites Teresa Ebert’s critiques of “what she calls ‘ludic feminism’—‘a validating, affirmative, and pleasure-full cultural studies.’ A focus on pleasure, [Ebert] argues, is a ‘very class-specific inquiry,’ one that privileges ‘classes that have the relative luxury of displacing the body as a means of labor onto the body as a pleasure zone. . . . I do think this helps explain why porn studies scholarship grounded in cultural studies has so strikingly avoided questions of labor’” (92). Berg’s criticism echoes that of other feminist, queer, and trans materialist scholars of her generation, who are making similar calls for materialist critiques of sexuality and gender that must both include and exceed analytic categories conferred via liberal individualist tropes of power. Like Berg, these calls are also looking to the heterodox and autonomous Marxist traditions.

Along with the traditions of feminist and autonomous Marxism, which Berg makes good use of throughout the book, I would like to think with the appeal of racial capitalism, and what, taken together, the reinvention of interest in these forms of materialist critique might mean for the possibilities and limitations of . . . what to call it? . . . “Mainstream Marxism”? “Orthodox Marxism”? “Marxist Marxism”? or, more critically, “Imperialist Marxism”? I am referencing that version of foundationalist thinking identified with Marx and Engels that has been the object of left critique almost since its inception. The critiques I am referencing deal with Marxism’s central conceit, that hierarchies of gender and race are natural, normal, ahistorical facts that must be negotiated, and are therefore not themselves subjects of discursive production. They are there for us to find, not produced via histories of capitalism or the consolidation of “Europe” as an idea formed around the nucleus of “Christendom” and whiteness, as Cedric Robinson shows. This central conceit is apparent in early and, arguably, later Marxist feminist critiques as well, where these critiques traffic in the idea that women are, at the end of the day, part of the biological fact of binary gender. It is no surprise that the early radical feminists were advocates of carceral interventions for pornography and prostitution, while also being committed transphobes who had large blind spots on race and ethnicity. If gender is a “fact,” then so is gender-based hierarchy, ironically, because gender is “purely physical,” defined by the powerlessness of women in the face of muscular male aggression. This cannot be changed, according to this view. It can only be managed by the stronger arms of the state. If hierarchized gender is a “biological fact,” as we have been hearing recently in Western popular culture, then so too are the inherent hierarchies of racialized civilizationalism. In this milieu, it makes sense to institute a regime of carcerality globally, not “against” prostitution-as-trafficking, but “for” women and girls in the Global South, and in the West, who cannot, it seems, advocate for themselves (Shah 2021).

I see Heather Berg’s building on the work of Gayle Rubin and Carole Vance alongside that of Mireille Miller-Young’s relatively more recent interventions as a proposal for how we might build a set of critiques that align more closely with the ways in which our interlocutors working in porn and other forms of transactional sex theorize their livelihood strategies and the worlds in which survival must be waged. In other words, the citational practices in the book engage questions that have been needing to be asked for some time, of the terms of the older sex wars debates on consent/victimhood, especially in light of interventions of queer and trans feminisms, black feminisms, and Robinsonian critiques of racial capitalism. As a South Asianist engaged in cognate critiques emerging within queer and transgender South Asian feminisms and anthropology, I would add that, internationally, the space to think with rubrics like caste and what some scholars have begun to call “caste capitalism” are increasingly urgent in the face of the rising appeal of carcerality and a version of government that consolidates its power from above. In her chapter on the gig economy, Berg writes, “If so much Marxist theory assumes a working and owner class and assigns both normative weight and political potential accordingly—the bourgeoisie exploits, the working class resists that exploitation—we need better ways to talk about exploitation and resistance when these classes are not stable” (119). In light of my comment on the value of thinking with the emplacement of critical rubrics like caste, I would suggest that this critique of the “instability” of classes would also benefit from thinking with the rubric of the informal economy, which has animated the work of autonomous feminist movements in the Global South as well as that of Gramscian thinking in South Asia, via the interventions of subaltern historians and adjacent critiques (Sanyal 2013).

Some of the porn workers we meet in Berg’s book “prefer to be paid that day”—meaning they are highly paid day wage workers, without long term job security, like Herschel Savage, who, like many actors, had been highly paid in his prime but was now having trouble making a living, navigated severe post-retirement precarity. Books like this open the door to thinking with categories of analysis that seem to belong elsewhere but that are necessitated by the long-term instability being built into the privatization of the American labor market writ large. As Berg writes early on, “The conditions porn workers have long experienced are exactly those heralded as the most striking developments in this economic moment: intimate life is increasingly brought to the market; individual workers, rather than employers or the state, assume the economic and health risks of doing business; and a hypermobile gig economy is eclipsing more stable ways of working” (2). An example of where a critique of economic informality might buttress this clear perspective on what porn work can teach us about the gig economy is in juxtaposing the carceral feminist rubric of policing with a heterodox Marxist rubric of economic “exploitation.” If we apply this critique to the revival of the foremothers of carceral feminism, and their invention of the term “rape culture,” we may question whether we are not, in fact, talking about a “rape economy”? Unlike the notion of a “rape economy,” “rape culture” reifies binary gender difference and necessitates the excision of the kinds of materialist critiques that Berg and her scholarly cohort are calling for. I would submit that this is because these critiques acknowledge the reification of policing as a necessary cog in the late advanced capitalist wheel, rather than participating in the fiction that sex and intimacy are somehow untrammeled by the vagaries of the market and the sociality that it represents. A true political economy of sexuality would do just this—it would show the painstaking and historically mediated ways in which things like “sexuality” and its commoditization emerge, as well as the racialized, gender binary universe in which women feel and men earn, and in which those lines have to be constantly policed, often, but not exclusively, through violent means. In other words, “a porn work lens makes for a sharper anti-capitalist feminist critique, not just a more inclusive one” (3).