Working for Love, Loving for Work: Discourses of Labor in Feminist Sex-Work Activism

Abstract

Feminist Studies 40, no. 3. © 2014 by Feminist Studies, Inc. 693 Heather Berg Working for Love, Loving for Work: Discourses of Labor in Feminist Sex-Work Activism In the late 1970s, Carol Leigh (a.k.a. Scarlot Harlot) coined the term “sex work” as a means to best describe the labor she and other workers in commercial sex industries performed. Leigh hoped the term would unite workers, provide an alternative to stigmatized language, and “acknowledg [e] the work we do rather than defin[e] us by our status.”1 Thirty years later, the term “sex work” is widely used, particularly in progressive scholarship, worker-directed activism, and worker narratives. In many respects, Leigh’s hopes seem to have been realized: groundbreaking anthologies and activist undertakings inclusive of workers in various sex industries have been organized under the umbrella of “sex work,” and the term remains the standard in value-neutral language. Indeed, its uses might be too value neutral—the work that emerges from much sex-worker activist writing is not the same work of anti-capitalist critique . Instead, it is the work of free exchange between equals, the dignity of a living earned, and a heady blend of both self-sacrifice and fulfilling escape from the drudgery of a nine-to-five job. It is sometimes work that is barely work at all, but instead a performance of the innate self for which the lucky just happen to be paid. 1. Carol Leigh, “Inventing Sex Work,” in Whores and Other Feminists, ed. Jill Nagle (New York: Routledge, 1997), 203. winner of the 2013 Feminist Studies Graduate Student award 694 Heather Berg This work rhetoric offers a welcome reprieve from the anti-sex-work rhetoric in which sex workers appear as voiceless victims. It does so, however , while avoiding a sustained critique of systems of capitalist exploitation and by reproducing key facets of the peculiar rhetoric of work under late capital. Discourses of sex work, at least since white slavery’s first appearance in the public imagination, have served as a virtual repository for anxieties about sexuality and capitalism.2 We see this when, for example, anti-sex-work feminist Sheila Jeffreys condemns the contemporary pornography industry for its use of economic force in compelling performers to take hardcore scenes: “If they do not accept, then the money dries up and they are on the street once more.”3 Jeffreys’ suggestion —that tethering wages to the performance of the labor that employers demand is unique to the pornography industry—scapegoats one industry rather than engages in a critique of the problem (universal under capitalism) of what Marx called the “silent compulsion of economic relations.”4 But what emerges in much activist sex-worker writing is a counter to rhetoric like Jeffreys’ that insists that coercion (economic or otherwise) was not a factor in workers’ choices to enter commercial sexual exchange. This does very different—and more conservative—discursive work than a response reminding us that labor is coercion, but that coercion does not foreclose resilience, resistance, and pleasure. Mine is an argument, then, against sex-work exceptionalism. Commercial sex exchange is not exploitative because of anything unique to sex; it is exploitative because it is labor under capitalism.5 That sexual labor is for many a better paid, more fulfilling alternative to other forms of waged work does not unsettle this premise. Our critique of work under capitalism cannot be restricted to its most sensationally harmful forms. Such a frame invites one-dimensional narratives of Others’ 2. See Jo Doezema, “Loose Women or Lost Women? The Re-emergence of the Myth of White Slavery in Contemporary Discourses of Trafficking in Women,” Gender Issues 18, no. 1 (1999): 23–50. 3. Sheila Jeffreys, The Industrial Vagina: The Political Economy of the Global Sex Trade (London: Routledge, 2009), 78. 4. See Kathi Weeks, The Problem with Work: Feminism, Marxism, Antiwork Politics , and Postwork Imaginaries (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2011), 57. 5. See Brooke Meredith Beloso, “Sex, Work, and the Feminist Erasure of Class,” Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society 38, no. 1 (2012): 47–70; and Melissa Gira Grant, Playing the Whore: The Work of Sex Work (London and...