About this event
This event is presented in partnership with our friends at The New Republic.
Panelists include:
Heather Berg writes about sex, work, and social struggle. Her book Porn Work: Sex, Labor, and Late Capitalism takes readers behind the scenes to explore what porn performers think of their work and how they intervene to hack it. It tells a story of crafty workers, faltering managers, and shifting solidarities. Her second project, “Sex Workers Against Work,” is an intellectual history of the sex worker left. It engages anti-capitalist sex workers’ critiques of straight work, unpaid sex, and state violence and explores their experiments with alternatives. She is currently an Assistant Professor of Women, Gender, and Sexuality Studies at Washington University.
Sarah Jaffe is a Type Media Center Fellow and an independent journalist covering the politics of power, from the workplace to the streets. She is also the cohost, with Michelle Chen, of Dissent magazine’s Belabored podcast, as well as a columnist at The Progressive and New Labor Forum. Her latest book, Work Won’t Love You Back: How Devotion to Our Jobs Keeps Us Exploited, Exhausted, and Alone, is a deeply-reported examination of why “doing what you love” is a recipe for exploitation, creating a new tyranny of work in which we cheerily acquiesce to doing jobs that take over our lives.
Gabriel Winant is a historian of the social structures of inequality in modern American capitalism and an Assistant Professor of US History and the College at the University of Chicago. His book, The Next Shift: The Fall of Manufacturing and the Rise of Health Care in Rust Belt America investigates the rise of the “service economy” in the aftermath of manufacturing and locates the origins of today’s social inequality in America’s postwar political economy. Using Pittsburgh as a case study, the book shows how deindustrialization triggered the ascent of the care economy and stamped it with the inequalities produced by the New Deal state’s hierarchies of race and gender.