Labouring porn studies

Abstract

This essay explores the political economy of both doing and studying pornography. The article suggests that a critical labour studies lens can enrich porn scholarship, but also that porn work can tell us volumes about the nature of labour under late capitalism. Resisting the suggestion popular among anti-porn feminists that anti-capitalist and anti-pornography critique are mutually constitutive, I suggest that a political economic analysis of porn based in Marxist principles requires that we take porn seriously as work, recognize that workers both know their own conditions and are best equipped to address them, and attend to the laboured dynamics of the interview process itself.

Keywords:

• labour
• research ethics
• sex work
• adult film
• feminism

Notes

1. See Smith and Attwood (2013) for a critique of anti-porn feminist approaches to research and rhetoric.

2. This pool is so selective, in fact, that Linda Lovelace (re-imagined as exploited by porn and not the abusive partner she describes) is overwhelmingly the only actual worker evoked by anti-porn feminists. See MacKinnon (1988, 128), Dworkin (1989, xvi), and Jeffreys (2009, 69).