Heather Berg writes about work, sex, and social struggle. Her 2021 book, Porn Work, explores workers’ creative strategies for surviving (and sometimes thriving) in an industry in crisis. Winner of the Working-Class Studies Association’s C.L.R. James “best book” award, it locates porn workers as experts on the politics of precarity. Her current book project, Lumpen Theory: Notes from the Sex Worker Left, engages anti-capitalist sex workers’ political thought on the family, class, the state, and violence. Berg is the editor of the South Atlantic Quarterly special issue “Reading Sex Work.” Her writing on sexual labor, gig work, and feminist political economy appears in Signs, WSQ, Feminist Studies, and Critical Historical Studies, among others. A graduate of UC-Santa Barbara’s Feminist Studies PhD program, she is assistant professor of Women, Gender, and Sexuality Studies at Washington University in St. Louis.
Talk Title: Sex Workers, Against Work
Description: “Sex Workers, Against Work” surveys Berg’s research on sex workers’ struggles for labor justice now and a world beyond work in the future. The talk moves from porn workers’ interventions on the set shop floor to anti-capitalist sex workers’ critical encounters with the civilian labor Left.
RSVP: https://forms.office.com/r/qPxD1tqBE0
Event Location: In-Person + Zoom
Public Talk: 4-5:30pm
In-Person: Labor Studies Speaker Series events will take place at the Public Affairs Building 4320. Coffee and water will be served.
Join Zoom Meeting
https://ucla.zoom.us/j/
Meeting ID: 923 3748 5806
Passcode: 805113
