Notes from the Sex Worker Left: Lumpen Theory

In dressing rooms and shared cab rides home, mutual aid collectives and reading groups, sex workers are experimenting with how to live otherwise. Notes from the Sex Worker Left highlights unruly thinkers at the cutting edge of radical political theory. Drawing on interviews with sex workers as well as their political and creative writings, Heather Berg curates an archive of radical thought on the trappings of respectability, the failures of work, and the role of everyday resistance in collective militant struggle. Berg grounds her analysis in the perspective of the lumpenproletariat—the mutinous, precarious, and often criminalized counterpart to the respectable working class. Lumpen theorists use their position on the margins to imagine futures that welcome everyone for whom the usual solutions are not nearly enough. The nuclear family, the wage relation, the gendered racial capitalist state: All must go. Notes from the Sex Worker Left offers tools to dismantle them.

Heather Berg is Associate Professor of Labor Studies and Gender Studies at the University of California, Los Angeles and is the author of Porn Work: Sex, Labor, and Late Capitalism.