Have You Ever Heard of Surplus Value? The Hard Work of Representing Sex Work

Prostitutes, whores, strippers and sex workers have been muses, the objects of desire in art and representation, in many cultures and time periods. They have also been silenced and objectified as polysemes on which social anxieties about sexuality, gender, race, class, immigration and the nature of the nation have been projected. The concept of the whore gaze provides a theoretical framework for considering how sex workers observe, critique, perform and create representations of themselves that transcend this discrimination. In this chapter the author dialogues with the whore gaze and working-class studies to consider the performative installations, film and media created globally by artist collectives such as Debby Doesn’t Do It for Free, the Black Sex Worker Collective and others. The ongoing creation of a globally accepted “sex worker” subject as worker, as opposed to the criminalised lumpenproletariat and all that entails regressively, is transgressive and important to rights-based social movements. This identity may also obscure some important community differences between, for example, labourers and independent business owners. This chapter teases out the distinct facets of working-class sex worker cultural creation and documents the hard work still yet to be done to represent sex work as work.