Sex Work in Popular Culture


Book Description

Sex Work in Popular Culture delves into provocative movies, TV shows, and documentaries about sex work produced in the last fifteen years – a period of debate and change around the meaning of sex work in North American society. From Oscar-winning films to viral YouTube videos, and from indie documentaries to hit series – many of which are made by women – the book reveals how sex work is being recognized as real work and an issue of human rights. Lauren Kirshner shares how popular culture has responded by producing the dynamic new figure of a sex worker who challenges tropes and promotes understanding of the key issues shaping sex work. The book draws on labour and feminist theory, film history, current news, and popular culture, all within the context of neoliberal capitalism and the rise of transactional intimate labour. Kirshner takes us from erotic dance clubs to porn sets, illuminating the professional lives of erotic dancers, massage parlour workers, webcam models, call girls, sex surrogates, and porn performers. Probing how progressive popular culture challenges stereotypes, Sex Work in Popular Culture tells the story of sex work as labour and how the screen can show us the world’s oldest profession in a new light.




Stripping, Sex, and Popular Culture


Book Description

At the heart of Stripping, Sex, and Popular Culture lies a very personal story, of author Catherine Roach's response to the decision of her life-long best friend to become an exotic dancer. Catherine and Marie grew up together in Canada and moved to the USA to enroll in PhD programs at prestigious universities. For various reasons, Marie left her program and instead chose to work as a stripper. The author, at first troubled and yet fascinated by her friend's decision, follows Marie's journey into the world of stripping as an observer and analyst. She finds that this world raises complex questions about gender, sexuality, fantasy, feminism, and even spirituality. Moving from first hand interviews with dancers and others, the book broadens into a provocative and accessible examination of the current popularity of "striptease culture," with sex-saturated media imagery, thongs gone mainstream, and stripper aerobics at your local gym. Stripping, Sex, and Popular Culture scrutinizes the naked truth of a lucrative industry whose norms are increasingly at the center of contemporary society. A PDF version of this book is available for free in open access via the OAPEN Library platform, www.oapen.org




The Routledge Handbook of Male Sex Work, Culture, and Society


Book Description

Panoramic and provocative in its scope, this handbook is the definitive guide to contemporary issues associated with male sex work and a must read for those who study masculinities, male sexuality, sexual health, and sexual cultures. This groundbreaking volume will have a powerful impact on our understanding of this challenging, elusive subject. While the internet has brought the previously hidden worlds of male sex work more starkly into public view, academic research has often remained locked into descriptions of male sex workers and their clients as perverse. Drawing from a variety of regions, the chapters provide insights into the historical, popular cultural, social, and economic aspects of sex work, as well as demographic patterns, health outcomes, and policy issues. This approach shifts thought on male sex work from a hidden "social problem" to a publicly acknowledged "social phenomenon." The book challenges myths and reconceptualizes male sex work as a discrete field. Importantly, it provides a vehicle for the voices of male sex workers and new and established scholars. This richly detailed, humane, and innovative collection retrieves male sex work from silence and invisibility on the one hand and its association with scandal and stigma on the other. The findings within have profound implications for how governments approach public health and regulation of the sex industry and for how society can make sense of the complexities of human sexualities. A compelling scholarly read and a major contribution to a commercial sector that is often neglected in policy debates on sex work, this handbook will be of great interest to scholars of criminology, sociology, gender studies, and cultural studies and all those interested in male sex work.




Sex Work and Sex Workers


Book Description

Sexuality & Culture serves as a compelling forum for the analysis of ethical, cultural, psychological, social, and political issues related to sexual relationships and sexual behavior. These issues include, but are not limited to: sexual consent and sexual responsibility; sexual harassment and freedom of speech and association; sexual privacy; censorship and pornography; impact of film/literature on sexual relationships; and university and governmental regulation of intimate relationships. In this volume, theoretical essays, research reports, and book reviews examine the topics of prostitution, pornography, and other forms of commercialization of sexuality. Contributions include: "Twelve Step Feminism Makes Sex Workers Sick" by Kari Kerum; "Sex, Beach Boys and Female Tourists in the Caribbean" by Klaus de Albuquerque; "Reframing 'Eve' in the AIDS Era: The Pursuit of Legitimacy by New Zealand Sex Workers" by Bronwen Lichtenstein; "Long-Term Consumption of X-Rated Materials and Attitudes toward Women among Australian Consumers of X-Rated Videos" by Roberto Hugh Potter; "Invisible Man: A Queer Critique of Feminist Anti-Pornography Theory" by Jody Norton; and "Theorizing Prostitution: The Question of Agency" by Melanie Simmons. Also included are reviews of Live Sex Acts: Women Performing Erotic Labor by Wendy Chapkis; New Sexual Agendas edited by Lynne Segal. In addition, Daphne Patai reviews Real Live New Girl: Chronicles of a Sex-Positive Culture by Carol Queen; Nina Hartley reviews Three in Love; Jo Doezema reviews Trafficking in Women; Valerie Jenness reviews Feminist Accused of Sexual Harassment by Jane Gallop; and Warren Farrell reviews the film In the Company of Men. This volume will be of interest to sociologists, psychologists, legal analysts, and policymakers.




Sex, Work and Sex Work


Book Description

Sex is much more rife in the workplace than many would think according to this fascinating and controversial new book. It argues that not only does sexuality pervade every aspect of organizations, but also that organization pervades every aspect of our sexuality. This two-way conceptualization lends the book a two-part structure, covering firstly the ways in which organizational behaviour is shaped through issues such as male managers' experience of violence, organizational constructions of sexual harassment, and professionals who work with sex offenders. The second part of the book examines how sex is organized for commercial purposes, and considers sex work as an industry which can be analyzed as any other, with important insights for normal organizing. Key features of the book include sections on: * organizing as sexual activity * connecting desire, the erotic, the abject and organization * the 'hidden' penetration of organization processes by sexuality * the 'dark side' of sex and organization and the importance of transgression * the double effect of discursive and material placing * organizing sexuality within prostitution * prostitution as a complex and varied industry. Fascinating and informative, this controversial book is a valuable source of information for postgraduates and researchers in the fields of business, management and sexuality and gender studies.




Sexography


Book Description

The turn of the twenty-first century has witnessed an eruption of nonfiction films on sex work. The first book to examine a cross-section of this diverse and transnational body of work, Sexography confronts the ethical questions raised by ethnographic documentary and interviews with sexually marginalized subjects. Nicholas de Villiers argues that carnal and cultural knowledge are inextricably entangled in ethnographic sex work documentaries. De Villiers offers a reading of cinema as a technology of truth and advances a theory of confessional and counterconfessional performance by the interviewed subject who must negotiate both loaded questions and stigma. He pays special attention to the tactical negotiation of power in these films and how cultural and geopolitical shifts have affected sex work and sex workers. Throughout, Sexography analyzes the films of a range of non–sex-worker filmmakers, including Jennie Livingston, Pier Paolo Pasolini, Shohini Ghosh, and Cui Zi’en, as well as films produced by sex workers. In addition, it identifies important parallels and intersections between queer and sex worker rights activist movements and their documentary historiography. De Villiers ultimately demonstrates how commercial sex is intertwined with culture and power. He advocates shifting our approach from scrutinizing the motives of those who sell sex to examining the motives and roles of the filmmakers and transnational audiences creating and consuming films about sex work.




Hos, Hookers, Call Girls, and Rent Boys


Book Description

The only thing the writers in this book have in common is that they've exchanged sex for money. They're PhDs and dropouts, soccer moms and jailbirds, $2,500-a-night call girls and $10 crack hos, and everything in between. This anthology lends a voice to an underrepresented population that is simultaneously reviled and worshipped.Hos, Hookers, Call Girls, and Rent Boys is a collection of short memoirs, rants, confessions, nightmares, journalism, and poetry covering life, love, work, family, and yes, sex. The editors gather pieces from the world of industrial sex, including contributions from art-porn priestess Dr. Annie Sprinkle, best-selling memoirist David Henry Sterry (Chicken: Self-Portrait of a Young Man for Rent), sex activist and musical diva Candye Kane, women and men right off the streets, girls participating in the first-ever National Summit of Commercially Sexually Exploited Youth, and Ruth Morgan Thomas, one of the organizers of the European Sex Work, Human Rights, and Migration Conference.Sex is a billion-dollar industry. Meet the real people who are its flesh and blood.




Representing "U": Popular Culture, Media, and Higher Education


Book Description

From the magazines and newspapers of the mid-1800s to movies and apps of the twenty-first century, popular culture and media in the United States provide prolific representations of higher education. This report positions artifacts of popular culture as pedagogic texts able to (mis)educate viewers and consumers regarding the purpose, values, and people of higher education. It: Discusses scholarly literature across disciplines Examines a diverse array of cross-media artifacts Reveals pedagogical messages embedded in popular culture texts to prompt thinking about the multiple ways higher education isrepresented to society through the media. Informative and engaging, higher education professionals can use the findings to intentionally challenge the (mis)educating messages about higher education through programs, policies, and perspectives. This is the 4th issue of the 40th volume of the Jossey-Bass series ASHE Higher Education Report. Each monograph is the definitive analysis of a tough higher education issue, based on thorough research of pertinent literature and institutional experiences. Topics are identified by a national survey. Noted practitioners and scholars are then commissioned to write the reports, with experts providing critical reviews of each manuscript before publication.




How to Talk About Books You Haven't Read


Book Description

In this delightfully witty, provocative book, literature professor and psychoanalyst Pierre Bayard argues that not having read a book need not be an impediment to having an interesting conversation about it. (In fact, he says, in certain situations reading the book is the worst thing you could do.) Using examples from such writers as Graham Greene, Oscar Wilde, Montaigne, and Umberto Eco, he describes the varieties of "non-reading"-from books that you've never heard of to books that you've read and forgotten-and offers advice on how to turn a sticky social situation into an occasion for creative brilliance. Practical, funny, and thought-provoking, How to Talk About Books You Haven't Read-which became a favorite of readers everywhere in the hardcover edition-is in the end a love letter to books, offering a whole new perspective on how we read and absorb them.




Protest And Popular Culture


Book Description

Since the late nineteenth century women have faced conflicting pulls on their sense of identities: while the US media tries to convince women that they are primarily consumers, women's movements have rallied that they are really, first and foremost, producers and laborers. Triece, (U. of Akron School of Communication), examines this phenomenon by comparing the self-representations of several late- nineteenth and twentieth-century women's protest movements with representations of women offered by contemporary mass media outlets. Annotation copyrighted by Book News Inc., Portland, OR