Lumpen Theory: Notes from the Sex Worker Left

Heather Berg
Gender Studies and Labor Studies
UC Los Angeles

Lumpen Theory: Notes from the Sex Worker Left centers on sex worker radicals’ expansive demands for futures beyond the wage, the nuclear family, and the state. Engaging sex worker cultural production and community-based theorizing, the manuscript argues that Left sex workers’ close encounters with racial capitalism, state violence, and sexual politics inform distinctive forms of anti-capitalist critique. Sex worker radicals take critical distance from the norms they find themselves outside of—respectable work, sexual respectability, and the expectation of full citizenship under a protective state—and show how harsh conditions can generate critique as much as they do injury.

Image Credit: Rioters and Petroleuses Firing Public Buildings in Paris during the Paris Commune, 1906. Unknown artist.