Labouring porn studies

This essay explores the political economy of both doing and studying pornography. The article suggests that a critical labour studies lens can enrich porn scholarship, but also that porn work can tell us volumes about the nature of labour under late capitalism. Resisting the suggestion popular among anti-porn feminists that anti-capitalist and anti-pornography critique are mutually constitutive, I suggest that a political economic analysis of porn based in Marxist principles requires that we take porn seriously as work, recognize that workers both know their own conditions and are best equipped to address them, and attend to the laboured dynamics of the interview process itself.