Talking Porn Work with Heather Berg

Yesterday I had such a good time discussing Heather Berg’s fantastic new book Porn Work: Sex, Labor and Late Capitalism on Zoom, hosted by NYU’s Tamiment Library.

The book is an ethnography of porn performers, directors, producers and crew that mines their experiences and perspectives to offer a nuanced, layered, illuminated analysis of work, and collective efforts to escape the ravages of work under capitalism. As a Marxist feminist, Berg gives us a dialectical materialist study that nonetheless modifies conventional definitions of class, labor and struggle. She takes seriously the role of pleasure and creativity as well as the mundane miseries of porn and other work. Drawing on feminist and anti-work theorists like Kathi Weeks, Sylvia Frederici and Mariarosa Dalla Costa, and queer theorists including José Muñoz, Rod Ferguson and LaMonda Horton Stallings, Berg generates a capacious conceptual and theoretical frame for thinking about porn and about work.

Here’s the Zoom recording. It’s an hour long. Enjoy…..