UC Santa Barbara

Porn Work: Adult Film at the Point of Production investigates labor politics, working conditions, and worker resistance in the US adult film industry. The project draws from fieldwork and interviews with 81 industry workers and managers to explore how porn work is organized, distributed, and remunerated. I argue that porn is unexceptional—feminized, structured around deep racial hierarchies, precarious, and largely unregulated, porn work in fact typifies the conditions of labor in late capitalism. At the same time, porn work offers some workers a better-paid and more creative alternative to other jobs. This dissertation investigates the creative strategies workers develop—ranging from individual efforts to resist precarity to formal and informal collective action—as they navigate their work. Their stories teach us about authenticity, the boundaries between market and nonmarket sexuality, class, and how public policy shapes the workplace.

In framing porn work as unexceptional, I suggest that the problems porn workers confront reflect the conditions of labor in the contemporary economic moment. As wages and casting opportunities continue to decrease, the costs workers must take on simply to be eligible for work grow. Workers pay for sexually transmitted infection testing and treatment for STIs and other worker-related injuries, incur high costs in maintaining a saleable appearance, and spend significant amounts on self-marketing. Indeed, the majority of the work of porn takes place off set and off the clock, including the labors of making oneself marketable, getting ready for scenes, and resting after them. This is another area in which porn work looks a lot like other jobs in the “new economy.” As in any job, the strains of porn work are unevenly distributed. In an industry heavily stratified along racialized lines, performers of color experience drastic pay inequality, difficulty in finding agency representation, and routine microagressions from managers.

Workers resist these conditions in creative ways. In spite of multiple barriers to organizing—their independent contractor status, the itinerant nature of the work, fierce competition for castings, and etcetera—performers have for decades engaged in collective action. They have both formed worker groups modeled on union organizing and ones more focused on education and mutual support. They lobby policymakers for better regulations, push managers for improved work practices, and demand better healthcare from providers. Porn workers also resist in more subtle ways. They creatively manipulate the conditions of porn work in order to maximize earning potential, resist burnout, and otherwise exert control over their work lives. These are just some of the ways workers make porn work for them, and I argue that their resistive strategies are instructive for scholars of gender and work.