UCLA

This project examines the significance of art produced by and within sex working/trading communities, focusing on art from in the San Francisco Bay Area, Seattle, and New York City. By examining the visual and performative art, artist practices, art shows, and festivals that fund, curate, and celebrate sex worker art, this dissertation explores how sex worker cultural production functions as activism among those in sex working/trading communities, not only in its ability to disrupt harmful/incomplete narratives of the sex industry for non-sex working publics, but also its ability to cultivate relationality among sex working/trading subjects as a political project of survival, resilience, and community building. The project begins with a genealogy of the historical connection of erotic labor and art, the development of “sex worker art” as a category of artistic production emergent in the 1970s and 1980s, and its subsequent proliferation as a vital arm of contemporary transnational sex worker rights movements. Working with film short Lucid Noon, Sunset Blush, off-Broadway musical, TRINKETS and But I Am Here New York City street-mural and digital zine, I demonstrate the visual and thematic representations of relationality and community formation in significant cases of cultural production of sex working and trading communities. I contextualize these depictions of relationality among sex working and trading communities as both situated knowledges of sex working and trading communities, as well as situated imaginaries of utopian world-building. I then examine how sex worker cultural production cultivates relationality and community formation in praxis amongst sex working and trading artists, organizers, and attendees, considering in-person events, exhibitions, and festival spaces. I consider sex worker community formation through art and content sharing across digital platforms during the global COVID- 19 crisis, and heightened surveillance and policing of sex workers online post-FOSTA-SESTA, foregrounding the nature of sex worker’s art and presence in digital space as ephemeral performance art.