Notes from the Sex Worker Left: Lumpen Theory (Paperback) (ISBN-13: 9781478039150)

In dressing rooms and shared cab rides home, mutual aid collectives and reading groups, sex workers are experimenting with how to live otherwise. Notes from the Sex Worker Left highlights unruly thinkers at the cutting-edge of radical political theory. Drawing on interviews with sex workers as well as their political and creative writings, Heather Berg curates an archive of radical thought on the trappings of respectability, the failures of work, and the role of everyday resistance in collective, militant struggle. Berg grounds her analysis in the perspective of the lumpenproletariat--the mutinous, precarious, and often criminalized counterpart to the respectable working class. Lumpen theorists use their position on the margins to imagine futures that welcome everyone for whom the usual solutions are not nearly enough. The nuclear family, the wage relation, the gendered racial capitalist state: all must go. Notes from the Sex Worker Left offers tools to dismantle them.

Author: Heather Berg
ISBN-10: 1478039159
ISBN-13: 9781478039150
Publisher: Duke University Press
Language: English
Published: 10/20/2026
Pages: 206
Format: Paperback