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

Every porn scene is a record of people at work. But on-camera labor is only the beginning of the story. Part labor history, part ethnography illuminating the lives of the performers who work in the medium, Porn Work takes readers behind the scenes to explore what porn performers think of their work and how they intervene to hack it. It tells a story of crafty workers, faltering managers, and shifting solidarities. 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.

Every porn scene is a record of people at work. But on-camera labor is only the beginning of the story. Part labor history, part ethnography illuminating the lives of the performers who work in the medium, Porn Work takes readers behind the scenes to explore what porn performers think of their work and how they intervene to hack it. It tells a story of crafty workers, faltering managers, and shifting solidarities. 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.