Heather Berg

Situating the feminized labor of porn performance in the context of neoliberal political economy, this interdisciplinary dissertation investigates labor politics, working conditions, and worker resistance in the US adult film industry. It draws from fieldwork and interviews with industry workers and management to explore how porn work is organized, distributed, and remunerated. Like so many jobs in today’s economy, porn work is overwhelmingly independently contracted and unprotected by labor regulation. At the same time, it offers for some workers a more creative and better-paid alternative to the other jobs on offer. The project investigates the creative strategies workers develop—ranging from individual efforts to resist precarity to formal and informal collective action—as they seek to navigate labor under late capitalism.