Sex Work: Erotic Labor in the 21st Century
At Peepshow Media, we know that our sex work community is full of talented people with a lot to say! Here is an opportunity to share your experience and wisdom in this upcoming volume on erotic labor in the 21st Century. Abstracts due January 15, 2021. Please consider contributing.
Under consideration with NYU Press
Editors: Bernadette Barton, Barb Brents, and Angela Jones
In the 21st century, sex work encompasses a wide array of temporary, professional, informal, formal, and entrepreneurial forms of work. Despite popular media reducing sex work to “prostitution,” commercial sex markets vary widely and include camming, full-service sex work in a range of contexts, (e.g., street-based, brothel work, and escorts), hostessing, phone sex, pornography, pro-dommes, stripping, sugar relationship, and other forms of individual sexual entrepreneurship. Due to rapidly changing technologies, growing inequalities, and precarious employment, people’s experiences of the sex trades have changed. All this speaks to the need for a holistic, context-based volume to understand today’s varied commercial sex-based services.
Sex Work is split into two sections—Basics and New Directions—and features the voices of sex workers, sex worker advocates, researchers, experts, and activists. The Basics section will introduce readers to the key dimensions of the sex industry. We invite you to submit your writingon the sex industry for consideration for the New Directions section of this volume. Your contribution should be short, readable, and appropriate for a student and lay audience. Submissions can cover any major sector of sex work, including new and emerging forms of individual entrepreneurship such as content production and findoming on social media and other sites. While not a sex work sector, we also welcome submissions on sex trafficking.
We accept first-person accounts and research that explore a wide range of themes, including but not limited to: immigration/migration, the gig economy, new forms of digital sex work, BDSM, changes related to online pornography, sex trafficking, raunch culture, the rescue industry, faith-based interventions in sex work and the national and transnational impact of SESTA/FOSTA and other legislation as well as writing about market organization and commercial sex economies.
Sex workers often discuss the importance of examining what they colloquially call the “whorearachy,” a stratification system within the sex industry that privileges certain forms of sex work over others. We seek essays that examine how worker subjectivity and social position in the whorearchy affect consent, risks, access to resources, autonomy, and pleasure. Finally, we are especially interested in work centering underrepresented groups such as Black, Indigenous, and other people of color; transfeminine, transmasculine, and non-binary people; LGBTQIA+ sex workers; people with disabilities; and workers outside of the US.
Please submit a 250-500 word abstract and 150-word author biography by 1/15/21 to b.barton@moreheadstate.edu, barb.brents@unlv.edu, and jonesa@farmingdale.edu. The editors will review abstracts and invite full manuscripts for consideration by 6/15/21. Full manuscripts should not exceed 5000 words. An invitation to submit a full manuscript does not guarantee acceptance. If you have questions, please email any of the editors.
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