Sex Work is Alienated Labor

Had a great discussion today with Mike & Sarahtopz about street harassment and sex work. Here’s a few notes [1] towards synthesizing a marxist view of sex work:

1. Sex work is a form of exploited, alienated labor under capitalism.

- Sex workers sell their labor power and not their bodies. Under capitalism, our bodies are consumed by capital quite literally, but Marx argues we do not sell our bodies, we sell our ability to labor to the capitalist. When women or others do sex work, they are selling their ability to labor, i.e. to make someone cum, to give someone pleasure or arousal, to be someone’s shoulder to cry on or their emotional outlet, etc. In exchange for money or other commodities, a sex workers’ body becomes the tool they use to carry out the labor of pleasure. The vagina and mouth are no less tools of labor than are the head and hands (which are usually associated with male labor). Further, they are tools that are consciously honed and developed by sex workers in order to produce an improved or competitive product. [2] To say that waged workers sell their labor but sex workers sell their bodies is to make a false distinction based on a false premise: that one is a legitimate or acceptable form of exploitation while the other is not.

Brother to Brother: queer voices from the Harlem Renaissance

I recently watched Brother to Brother, a partly fictional/partly true story about a radical queer artist circle within the Harlem Renaissance that called themselves the Niggerati. It was a surprisingly good film that attempts to introduce an important tendency from the 1920s to a younger audience today. I for one did not know much about the figures depicted in the film before watching it.

Well-known artists like Langston Hughes and Zora Neal Hurston were in this milieu, as well as lesser known artists like Wallace Thurman and Richard Bruce Nugent. The circle lived together in a sort of black artist’s commune in Harlem that was composed of a younger, bohemian crowd. The film focuses on their production of one issue of what seemed to have been a promising journal called Fire!! (production ceased due to a lack of funds).