Lusty Ladies: Sex Work and Sex-Positive Politics, 1970-2013

Abstract

Lusty Ladies: Sex Work and Sex-Positive Politics, 1970-2013, offers the first historical and critical exploration of the politics of sex-positivity, through a larger cultural history of sex worker social movements in the late-20th-century United States. Using the Lusty Lady theater (a historically-significant and recently closed legal commercial sex franchise), I argue that people in the sex trade have challenged their social marginalization and criminalization and made their employment legible as work through authoring discourses of “sex-positive” feminism. Sex-positivity was instrumental in forming a new political collectivity: sex workers. Through oral history interviews with one-time employees of the franchise, archival research, and historical analysis of the cultural production of sex workers, my research demonstrates the materialist roots and world-making capacities of sex-positivity.