Hosted by The Mark S. Bonham Centre for Sexual Diversity Studies
Join us for a joint book launch spotlighting new work by University of Toronto Faculty of Law Professor Brenda Cossman and Washington University in St. Louis Professor Heather Berg followed by a conversation moderated by Rebecca Wanzo, Chair and Professor of Women, Gender, and Sexuality Studies, Washington University in St. Louis.
Cossman’s The New Sex Wars: Sexual Harm in the #MeToo Era (New York University Press, 2021) revisits the sex wars of the 1970s and ’80s and examines their influence on how we think about sexual harm now. From the ’70s to today, Cossman examines tensions between the need for recognition and protection under the law, and the colossal and ongoing failure of that law to redress historic injustice. By circumventing law altogether, #MeToo has led us to question whether justice can be served outside of the courtroom. The New Sex Wars explores what can been learned from these debates, how we have been denied our anger, and where to begin to make law work.
Berg’s Porn Work: Sex, Labor, and Late Capitalism (University of North Carolina Press, 2021) takes readers behind the scenes to explore what porn performers think of their work and how they intervene to hack it. Blending extensive fieldwork with feminist and antiwork theorizing, Porn Work details entrepreneurial labor on the boundaries between pleasure and tedium. Rejecting any notion that sex work is an aberration from straight work, it reveals porn workers' creative strategies as prophetic of a working landscape in crisis. In the end, it looks to what porn has to tell us about what's wrong with work, and what it might look like to build something better.
