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9781478034230 Academic Inspection Copy

Notes from the Sex Worker Left

Lumpen Theory
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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.
"Heather Berg exposes layers of state violence that exceed class warfare, centering the collective, ongoing forms of survival, insurgency, and multi-modal praxis emanating from sex worker radicals. In these pages, you will encounter the constant emergence of a truly ungovernable 'lumpen formation' that poses a vibrant, creative, necessary threat to the normalized oppressiveness of a collapsing social order. This book will indelibly change your thinking." -- Dylan Rodriguez, Distinguished Professor, University of California at Riverside "Notes from the Sex Worker Left traces a leading edge of radical theory. Beyond racial capitalism, beyond the state and beyond the family, sex workers are naming and pursuing the revolutionary horizon. This book is the thinking we all urgently need for our collective survival and liberation."--M. E. O'Brien, author of Family Abolition: Capitalism and the Communizing of Care
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