What do porn workers think about their changing labour conditions? How has the encroachment of the gig economy introduced new precarities as well as additional possibilities for resistance and ‘hacking’? What can we learn from porn workers about consent, pleasure and tedium?

Following the publication of her most recent work, ‘Porn Work: Sex, Labor, and Late Capitalism’ (University of North Carolina Press, 2021), Heather Berg spoke to Helen Hester, in a wide-ranging discussion of the book’s key themes.

Helen Hester: Hi Heather, thanks for speaking to the Feminist Futures Programme. I thought it would make sense to begin by giving Autonomy’s readers a general sense of the book, and of where you situate it in relation to existing discussions. You note that ‘sexuality studies work on porn and other sex work often turns away from their materiality’, while labour scholarship has ‘strenuously avoided critical engagement with porn and other sex work’. Where, then, would you position the project within the academic, activist, and policy-making landscape?

Heather Berg: I hoped the project would help porn scholars think differently about the porn work process – “after the image,” as you’ve written elsewhere – but I’m most interested in how porn workers’ strategies are instructive beyond porn studies. They can (and I think should) shift how labor scholars talk about gigification, the boundaries between life and labor, and the politics of class. And I think sex worker analysis has a lot to teach sexuality studies more broadly about consent, pleasure, and identity.  

In terms of situating the project in an activist landscape, it makes me really happy when sex worker activists say they feel seen in reading the book. I don’t think it offers sex workers anything they don’t already know; I’m just happy if it gives a sense of being in community. I also love to hear from civilian (non-sex working) readers who see their own workplace frustrations reflected in the book and take inspiration from porn workers’ analyses and strategies for intervening. As for policy-making: I think that bad policy is part of a concerted enclosure movement rather than misunderstanding on most policy-makers’ part. I don’t think my book will convince agents of the capitalist state to do better (they already know that they’re causing sex working people harm–that’s the point), but it might convince some everyday people that our tactics shouldn’t focus on earnest appeals to the state. I do think policy-makers can be forced to shift course, but that will come from bottom up pressure, not more data.

Helen Hester: The book makes a real contribution in terms of bringing together the insights of such a wide range of people; you interview 81 people from the industry! How did the project come about? I’m particularly interested in how you balanced the importance of centring workers’ perspectives with the task of subjecting those perspectives to critical scrutiny, and how you set about negotiating any differences between workers’ viewpoints.

Heather Berg: I started this project planning to write a labor ethnography about the porn industry. I wanted to know what the workday looked like, how modeling releases were structured, how workers negotiated hierarchy on the set shop floor, and how they organized collectively. I found all that, but also found the project reshaped by workers’ refusal to fit their performance into the category ‘work’ or their interventions into the traditional categories of labor organizing. What I love about ethnography is the ways it can ruin all our plans, leaving something messier and more interesting in their wake! 

That gets me to the next part of your question, about balancing the centring of workers’ perspectives with critique. For me, there’s no antagonism here: taking workers at their word requires engaging them in comradely critique and also exposing myself to the same. I approached each interview transcript as a document of labor theorizing, where the comradely way to engage is to take people’s ideas so seriously that we don’t smooth over conflict or contradiction. A dialectical frame became crucial here, as it made it possible for me to highlight contradiction as the meat of the story rather than evidence of false consciousness or a wrinkle to be smoothed over.

Helen Hester: I think that’s such an important point. You write in your introduction that you want to advance the ‘sustained critique to which interviewees, as experts, are entitled’, and I really think you succeed in that. But also, epistemic deference (as Olúfémi O. Táíwò calls it) becomes less and less available or achievable when one is directly engaging with such a wide range of voices – many of which are not entirely in agreement. One cannot simply “pass the mic” to sex workers in this situation, because one must also confront and acknowledge the variations, divergences, and nuances in people’s positions. This involves, to a certain extent, assessing and adjudicating between viewpoints on the basis of one’s own political commitments. Taking a stance, in other words, is part and parcel of the process of respecting your interviewees as experts. 

As your comments above suggest, however, this isn’t a one way process. It’s clear in the book that your own viewpoints were challenged and modified over the course of the project. How did the interviews shift your perspective on porn work? What was the transformational content of the project for you?

Heather Berg: Yes! “Nothing about us without us” gets tricky when we get serious about how messy that “us” is. And I do think that claiming to “pass the mic,” as you say, can be a kind of cop out – a way to avoid taking a stance. I tried to be transparent about the commitments I came with and those porn workers offered up on their own terms. Some of the workers quoted in the book identify as anti-capitalists, for example, but others have critiques of the wage that I read through the lens of my own anti-capitalism. I don’t think it’s a stretch to say that there’s anti-capitalist content in the ubiquitous sense that it sucks to have a boss, but I wanted to be careful not to pretend that everyone who expressed that was an incipient Marxist. 

Ultimately, the commitments I came with were also what opened me up to shifts in perspective. I came to the process with Autonomist Marxist attachments, and those made it necessary to pay attention to capital’s reactivity to workers’ interventions. But one of the primary points of crisis–a thing capital was reacting to–was porn workers’ refusal to remain stuck in the position of worker. So, I had to shift my thinking about class struggle to accommodate the reality that most porn workers aren’t, and don’t want to be, just workers. 

Elsewhere, my commitments to taking workers at their word when they identify the coordinates of workplace struggle forced me to adjust my thinking on pleasure at work. I came to understand pleasure as a working condition, which is a departure from the “this is about work, not sex” line I’d come with (something that still dominates a lot of thinking on the sex worker left). Porn workers also pushed me to a deep cynicism about the potential of the state, and of trade unions that win state recognition by playing by its rules, to redress harm. I left the project less convinced that social democratic politics will be how we win, and more committed to a politics of hacking, mutual aid, and sabotage.

Helen Hester: Paul B. Preciado claims that ‘in every period of history, a certain type of work or worker defines the form of production that is characteristic of the particular economy’. Would you agree with his assertion that it is sex work that defines our current moment, and that the porn performer represents the ‘paradigmagtic body’?

Heather Berg: Some readers have interpreted me that way, and I don’t totally disagree. I do think that civilians should pay attention to porn workers’ strategies because civilian working conditions are headed that way–more precarity, blurrier boundaries between work and life, an eroded regulatory landscape. Sex workers also warn that they are canaries in the coal mine of surveillance policy–here’s another place in which the condition of the sex worker will more and more come to define the conditions of our current moment. But I also argue that porn workers are exceptional in the clarity of their class analysis and in their strategies for refusing the wage (or at least trying to) and for thinking beyond the state. My sense is that arguments for the sex worker as defining our moment focus on her precarity rather than her capacity for creative misuse. I’m most interested in both sides of that dialectic.

Helen Hester: Throughout the book, you are careful to acknowledge both the similarities and the differences between porn work and other kinds of work. I think it comes through very clearly in your writing that, while porn work is not exceptional, it is nevertheless specific, and brings with it particularities that influence workers’ experiences (including their attempts to reform and/or resist it). Could you say a little bit about how you situate porn work in relation to wider cultures of work? In what circumstances do you think it is politically helpful to stress continuities over discontinuities, and vice versa?

Heather Berg: This is such a great question! I think highlighting the continuities between porn and other work is crucial for nurturing solidarities among workers, and for thinking about what tactics might translate from one community to another. I want more civilian workers to think about what porn workers’ sense that waged work is “making money off me,” as one performer put it, means for them. Likewise, civilians should see themselves as implicated in sex workers’ struggles over access to safer workplaces; strategies for organizing outside of traditional trade union models; and demands for freedom from discrimination in banking, housing, employment, and so on. I’m not interested in legitimizing porn work or trying to use respectability politics to convince whorephobic readers that it’s good or normal work, but I do hope the book makes clear that porn workers’ struggles aren’t exceptional. Whatever outsiders find disquieting about porn is also a problem in unpaid sex and non-sex work. Where the discontinuities become most stark is, again, in the moments that porn workers’ analysis about these conditions is sharper than many straight workers. 

My appreciation for the discontinuities also grew over the course of my research. I came to the project wanting to focus on the unexceptional piece. But it became crucial to highlight that many people seek out porn work as a way to refuse straight jobs. To pretend that porn is just like other work covers over that refusal. I think it also (and again, this was my tendency before porn workers educated me out of it) misunderstands that sexual pleasure is uniquely politically charged for some people. I came in so allergic to sex positivity that I missed this initially. And finally, I no longer worry so much about playing into SWERF hands by acknowledging that sexuality is more vulnerable for some people some of the time. I’ve become less interested in crafting arguments to insulate from SWERF appropriation and more interested in ignoring their bad faith analysis so we can get to the real story.

Helen Hester: The question of continuities and discontinuities is one I come back to time and time again, in a variety of contexts, because it really boils down to ‘how do we build solidarity?’ Solidarity, by its very nature, implies difference. As Jeremy Gilbert puts it, ‘relations of solidarity are never based on the assumption of a shared or unitary identity. They work across differences without trying to suppress them, and they make those differences productive.’ But he also acknowledges that solidarity is necessarily limited in scope, because ‘relations of solidarity are always expressions of shared interests’. Solidarity assumes difference, but it also requires some form of sharing. It makes as little sense to position solidarity as unbounded and all-encompassing as it does to extend it to the self-identical (we do not typically claim to be either in solidarity with absolutely everyone or in solidarity with ourselves!). 

Distance and proximity, difference and identity, are all brought into play in the living practice of solidarity building, and that requires really thinking about where there’s commonality – the sharing of interests, of status, and of ground – and where there are particularities or divergences. Your book references the feminist group Precarias a la Deriva at one point, and this is something they try to reckon with; in what sense can the situations of, for example, creative freelancers and sex workers, be said to be comparable? Is it possible to build solidarity around loose, general, or abstract similarities, even if the kinds of work at stake are often very different? To what extent is it possible to work together across differences of position and privilege? These are not easy questions to answer, which is precisely why I keep asking them!

Heather Berg: Yes, the sticky questions are the ones most worth asking! That Precarias a la Deriva piece invites us to “recognize singularities, make alliances, and comprehend difference”, and I think this is exactly the alchemy that makes solidarity possible. I’ve learned a lot about what this looks like in practice from the daily work of labor organizing, where asking people what they’re pissed off about is a sure way to build connection. The creative freelancer and the sex worker you mention might feel kinship around critiques of tedium, allergy to a boss’ direct control, and frustrations with a state apparatus that forces us to choose between (nominal) security and (precarious) autonomy. We can do real work from that space, without erasing the specificity of criminalization and whorephobia. 

Helen Hester: I suppose the other side of this relates to the exceptionality (or otherwise) of the sex in (this kind of) sex work – and indeed, your answer above references the fact that some people’s concerns about porn reflect anxieties not just about remunerated work, but about unremunerated sex as well. In the book, you discuss how communication and consent are managed differently in the context of adult entertainment, precisely because the sex involved is understood by those concerned as work. However, you understand the intersection of work, sex, and consent in quite a different way than would many anti-sex work feminists. Could you talk a little bit about your approach?

Heather Berg: The most striking thing for me here is the ways porn workers push back against enthusiastic consent as the framework for evaluating ethical sex. I write about enthusiastic consent as an implicitly whorephobic framework. I really believe that if a frame doesn’t work for sex workers, it doesn’t work for women and queers–incompatibility with sex workers’ lives betrays a fundamental rot. The idea that the only good reason to have sex is ‘pure desire’ covers over the power dynamics that shape (paid or unpaid) sex more generally, and it makes it impossible to talk about boring sex, sex that’s uncomfortable but still gets you what you need (rent money, companionship, new shoes, and so on), or sex that’s playful and silly rather than erotically transcendant. Porn workers open up the possibility that strategic calculations might be a better way to think about consent. What makes sex “worth it”? That’s a confrontation with anti-sex worker feminisms that (ironically) share with clients and managers the idea that money is a bad reason to have sex.

Helen Hester: This is an issue that Katherine Angel talks about in her recent book ‘Tomorrow Sex Will Be Good Again’, too – the limits of consent as the culturally dominant paradigm for assessing what constitutes “good” sex. Do you think there’s a broader attitudinal shift of some kind happening here? And if so, how much of this might be attributed to the influence of sex worker activism? I’m struck by the fact that texts such as Melissa Gira Grant’s ‘Playing the Whore’ and Juno Mac and Molly Smith’s ‘Revolting Prostitutes’ offer a very clear way out of reductive “sex-positive” vs. “SWERF/ anti-pornography” debates precisely as a result of the ways in which they foreground labour conditions and workers’ rights.

Heather Berg: I do think there’s a broader shift, and totally agree that it’s (often in unacknowledged ways) indebted to sex workers’ interventions. Civilian consent theorists have a tendancy to cite sex workers as an object lesson for why frameworks like enthusiastic consent don’t work, rather than as the theoretical foundation of the critique.

Helen Hester: I was struck by two distinct currents in your depiction of workers’ resistance to porn work – the first, somewhat individualized, and the second more overtly collective. While you are keen to stress that these tendencies are not necessarily in opposition (and I agree with you), I think there might be something to be gained by considering each in turn. You talk about ‘crafty strategies’ – things like the identification of contractual loopholes, the shrewd handling of bosses, and so on. I wondered if you had any favorite examples of workplace craftiness that emerged from your interviews, and also – more generally – what this idea of craft and being crafty meant to you? What role (if any) do you think craftyness can play in systemic change?

Heather Berg: First, I just want to say that I don’t think these crafty strategies are individualized. It takes a lot of information sharing, community building, and collective infrapolitical maneuvering to hack a modeling contract, for example. Part of what I wanted to do in the book is blur the boundary labor studies usually assumes between individual and collective, formal and informal. Of course, not all readers buy this! A lot of my comrades in more traditional labor movements were hankering for more stories of collectivity that look like trade union organizing. That just isn’t a priority for the vast majority of the workers I interviewed (and those I continue to be in community with). I turned toward craftiness to make sense of the tactics they take up instead. 

As for favorite examples of craftiness, one is the contract a performer showed me, where she’d nicknamed each new clause after the performer whose previous hacks inspired the addendum. I love this visualization of managers as always playing catch up–an Autonomism for our times! 

The most striking set of tactics center on performers’ efforts to subvert the rules of the waged scene (where producers hold copyright and draw all profit). Performers talk about using scenes as “marketing tools” for their direct-to-consumer hustles in webcam work, self-produced scenes, escorting, and so on. This turns on its head the idea of the scene as a site of labor exploitation. It is that, but performers take things from it in excess of what the wage relationship intends. This reduces their dependence on managers in material ways. We know these strategies make a difference systemically–they’ve changed the landscape of the industry. That’s why managers hate them so much! In the book, I quote managers who are raging at workers’ creative workarounds, talking about how they’ve made it impossible to make a living through traditional directing and producing. Good old boy managers resent that workers don’t have to play by their rules. I’m teaching a class on refusal right now and one of my students put this so well – it’s like in a video game; if you keep running into the bad guys, you know you’re going the right way. To be clear, I don’t think those good old boy producers are more the bad guys than any employer in straight work.

Helen Hester: The other current you identify is perhaps more obviously collective in its orientation – mutual aid, information sharing, unionising. Could you talk a little bit about workplace organising and collective action in the adult entertainment industry? How is this pursued and what forms does it take (or has it taken)? What are the barriers and disincentives to unionization in this context, and how would you describe the relationship between informal and formal approaches to worker resistance?

Heather Berg: The mutual aid and information sharing porn workers undertake is really impressive. I think straight workers have a lot to learn about how to keep communities alive in the face of severe state neglect. One striking example is the kind of information sharing we saw in the early days of the pandemic. Everyone moved online, and people with experience on various platforms took immense amounts of time to educate newcomers about how to navigate the work. This was even as those markets were glutted–veterans had every reason to want to keep newcomers out, but they prioritized community care instead. Of course, this helps everyone in the long run, making it harder for platforms and customers to take advantage of an information vacuum. 

In terms of more traditional forms of unionizing, the truth is that the vast majority of porn performers would rather have no boss than one disciplined by collective bargaining. The book talks about this as a crisis for left labor class politics, but one I don’t think we can smooth over if we’re trying to construct a politics that reflects what working people actually want. At least in US labor law, unions have to be composed of formal employees in order to meet National Labor Relations Board rules. Performers lose more than they gain with employee status, so most turn toward other strategies. And as the industry becomes more and more dispersed–it’s not really an “industry” at all anymore–there aren’t clear targets for collective bargaining in the first place. The producers one might have organized against twenty years ago have very little power. The platforms performers have moved to are a constantly moving target. Their policies are reactive to ever changing anti-sex worker law and payment processor terms of service. So, the best formal targets are banks and policy makers, and collective action directed there doesn’t take the form of traditional union organizing. Instead, it circles back to the information sharing and mutual aid you mentioned at the top of your question. Those form the foundation of any more formal political lobbying. The relationship between the formal and the informal gets blurred here in ways that fundamentally disrupt those categories.

Helen Hester: Your comments about payment processing are really important here, I think; there’s a great interview between Zahra Stardust and Danielle Blunt of the autonomous sex worker collective Hacking//Hustling which examines some of the ways in which online community standards, terms of service, and so on are effectively ‘automating whorephobia’. The focus in Porn Work is largely on the ‘set shop floor’, as you put it, but distribution as well as production receives important consideration, precisely because it has such an impact on workers today. The internet has been a real tool for increasing worker autonomy by allowing performers to reach consumers directly, in the ways you’ve described above. But recent actions of the state are actively curtailing this and making life harder for sex workers. Could you talk a little bit about FOSTA-SESTA and EARN IT, for the benefit of readers who might not be up to speed on US legal developments, and about how laws ostensibly intended to protect people can in fact work to harm them? And could you perhaps reflect upon how sex workers and their allies are currently pushing back against this? 

Heather Berg: I’m so excited about the work Hacking//Hustling is doing, and I love that interview! I think their work is a perfect example of what labor organizing can and should look like when we no longer have a boss, as such, to target. I’m inspired by their efforts to at once do information sharing that helps sex workers navigate the current legal terrain (the hacks and hustles!) and to produce research that’s useful in fights for better policy. Their coalitional work is also an exciting answer to the solidarity question you posed above. Their “Dis/Organzing Toolkit,” by Rachel Kuo and Lorelei Lee, makes crucial connections between sex workers and others labouring in informal economies. I’ll also just direct readers to the current campaign to fight EARN IT, which is advancing through the US Senate as I write.  

By making it harder for sex workers to use the internet to advertise, screen clients for safety, and get paid, FOSTA/ SESTA and EARN IT make sex workers more dependant on third-party managers. In the porn context, that’s capitalised directors, producers, and “adult”-specific platforms and payment processors (which take a bigger cut). I think the sex worker theorist Tamara MacLeod is right that these laws are a kind of enclosure–part of a long history of policy that seeks to cut off working people’s ability to make a living outside the wage. Which is to say, I don’t read them as having been constructed with actual protection in mind; I don’t think the harm they pose is accidental. Sex workers’ campaign slogan in the fight against FOSTA/ SESTA was “let us survive,” which highlights the stakes exactly.

Helen Hester: The slogan for the UK Women’s Strike this year is ‘We Want To Live’, which is a nice complement to that. Thank you so much for your time, Heather, and for all of your work in the book. It was a pleasure to discuss these things with you.

Heather Berg writes about sex, work, and social struggle. Her first book, Porn Work (UNC Press, 2021), explores workers’ strategies for navigating–and subverting–precarity. Her writing appears in the journals Feminist Studies, Signs, South Atlantic Quarterly, and others. Heather is assistant professor of Women, Gender, and Sexuality Studies at Washington University in St. Louis.

Helen Hester leads our Feminist Futures Programme. She is Professor of Gender, Technology and Cultural Politics at the University of West London. Her research interests include technofeminism, social reproduction, and post-work politics, and she is a member of the international feminist working group Laboria Cuboniks. Her books include Xenofeminism (Polity, 2018), and After Work: The Politics of Free Time (Verso, 2021, with Nick Srnicek)