Sex Scenes, Television, and Disavowed Sex Work

Abstract

What counts as sex work, and what is at stake when we narrow or broaden its boundaries? Drawing on interviews with intimacy coordinators, television screenwriters, directors, and actors, this article takes television sex scenes and their contested meaning as a point of departure for engaging with current feminist debates regarding definitions of sex work. Current transformations in how TV sex scenes are being reconceptualized by women inside the entertainment industry—especially through the deployment of boundaries between the simulated and the real, the artful and the pornographic—constitute an instructive case study in the blurriness between direct and indirect forms of sex work, the complexities surrounding who gets to define what sex work is and is not, and why it matters. This study of sex scene production illuminates the ongoing conditions of sexual harassment and violation that can result from an industry’s ambivalence about, or disavowal of, its reliance on sex work. I argue for the utility of a structural feminist analysis that can embrace all of what Jill Nagle terms “practices involving the exchange of sex and/or sexually related goods or services for money” under a broad umbrella of sexual labor and that can draw on the insights and demands of feminist sex workers and labor organizers to destigmatize all forms of sex work.