7 Books About the Intricate World of Sex Work
Representing diverse voices and perspectives from across the industry, these books explore agency, autonomy, and accountability in the context of sex work.
Coming Out Like a Porn Star edited by Jiz Lee
This second edition of the cult classic explores pressing issues like deepfakes, AI, and OnlyFans; the inequity and fetishization faced by Black, Muslim, queer, disabled, and other marginalized performers; and the everyday, ever-evolving legal injustices compromising the lives and financial security of sex workers.
(So What) If I’m a Puta? by Amara Moira
Originally published on Amara Moira’s blog of the same name, So What If I’m a Puta portrays her experiences as a trans sex worker. Brazil’s high rates of violence against trans women loom over these essays as they discuss inclusivity, feminism, safety, and self-determination.
We Too edited by Natalie West with Tina Horn
We Too features the voices of sex workers across the industry as they discuss harassment, homelessness, motherhood, toxic masculinity, and violence. The fight for agency, accountability, and justice in the sex industry is detailed in this revolutionary anthology.
$pread edited by Rachel Aimee, Eliyanna Kaiser and Audacia Ray
Originally a magazine published by and for sex workers, $pread was independently published from 2005 to 2011. This collection tells the story of $pread and its proliferation while featuring original essays, stories, and media analysis relating to the experiences of those within the industry.
Putafeminista by Monique Prada
Putafeminista is Monique Prada’s pioneering manifesto about the centrality of sex workers to feminist struggle in Brazil. Throughout the book, Prada encourages the embrace of putafeminism: a working class women’s movement that rejects whorephobia and its classist, colonial dimensions.
The Feminist Porn Book edited by Tristan Taormino, Constance Penley, Celine Parrenas Shimizu and Mireille Miller-Young
The Feminist Porn Book cultivates a feminist understanding of pornography through personal essays, manifestos, and scholarly research. This thrilling anthology updates the arguments of the porn wars of the 1980s, which sharply divided the women’s movement, and identifies pornography as a form of expression and labor in which women and racial and sexual minorities produce power and pleasure.
Enjoy Me Among My Ruins by Juniper Fitzgerald
In Enjoy Me among My Ruins, Juniper Fitzgerald draws together an experimental, kaleidoscopic archive of her experiences as a queer mother and sex worker. Interspersed with childhood letters written to Gillian Anderson, Fitzgerald’s manifesto rejects a capitalist system that demands our purity and submission over our survival.
