12.1: Introduction
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- Heather Berg & Constance Penley
- University of California Press
In this chapter, we examine the conditions of precarity in porn work, situating those conditions in the context of a changing industry and a political economic moment in which uncertainty is the most stable feature. Though we can link precarious conditions to their social contexts, we do not suggest that such conditions are inevitable or historically neutral. As Chuck Kleinhans insists, “Precarity is not a necessary result of [global political economic] changes. Rather, it is a deliberate policy and aspect of neoliberalism in its relation to the labor force.” 1 Porn workers’ precarity emerges out of an industry struggling in the wake of global recession, rampant piracy, and a hostile legal environment, but precaritizing policies are not a necessary response to these socio-political conditions. Instead, deliberate policies make porn workers precarious—policies ranging from independent contractor laws that excuse employers from labor regulations and proscribe union organizing, to formal and informal anti–sex worker codes that render sex workers especially vulnerable to both state and employer abuse, and of course, the mundane but not inevitable rules of the wage relation under capital.
We are equally interested in creative precarity—the resourceful ways porn workers resist, navigate, and exploit the precarity they confront. We suggest that taking seriously these forms of resistance can deepen our understanding of precarious labor in creative fields and in the world of work more broadly. Why? Because the conditions of precarity that appear to be recent historical developments in other industries have long shaped porn work. The “new gig economy [emphasis added],” brought on by “massive changes that have generated the expansion of precarious employment,” is not, for instance, so new for porn workers, who have long pursued diversified income streams to get by. 2 The adult film industry is not exceptional, then, but it may be predictive. Workers’ struggles there speak to the conditions that increasingly characterize labor in the current political economy, and we are well served to pay attention to the strategies they deploy in confronting them.
We must begin by mapping the adult film industry, because so little is known about it, and what is thought to be known—such as the oft-repeated claim that it is a $10–12 billion industry—turns out to be completely made up though almost never challenged. The establishment of porn studies as a scholarly discipline— with the inauguration of the journal Porn Studies in 2013, the growing number of university courses offered and dissertations undertaken, the availability of more archives and collections for historical research, and the efforts of academics and industry professionals to engage in productive conversations about the current and future shape of the industry—helps make this mapping possible. The Feminist Porn Book: The Politics of Producing Pleasure is the first collection, for example, to bring together writings by feminists in the adult industry and essays by feminist porn scholars. 3 But even as space opens up for academic discussions of pornography, the casualization of the professoriate and the erosion of the academic freedom ensured by tenure bring their own precarity to researching controversial areas such as the adult industry.