Love what you do (and it'll become increasingly difficult to agitate for workplace rights): Sex, work, and rejecting the empowerment discourse

Abstract

Taking as its point of inquiry movements in sex work activism which frame sex work as work, this chapter considers the implications of a resistance to discourses of ‘empowerment’. An ‘empowerment’ discourse gained prominence through the late 1990s and 2000s as a means to justify sex work as legitimate and deserving of respect. However, this discourse has been weaponised against sex workers who experience exploitation, or other poor working conditions. Resisting the insistence that sex work must be pleasurable in order to be real work is implicitly a resistance to neoliberal and particularly postfeminist pressures to display an appropriate affective engagement in one’s work. Rather than a politics which aims for incremental acceptance for those already closest to inclusion, it demands that the work be taken seriously regardless of how, where, and by whom it is carried out. Speaking to the interplay of themes about the personal and political, this chapter argues that in this context a refusal to engage with discussions of pleasure may, counterintuitively, sometimes be subversive.