This is the tenth post in the Succession IV: Queering the Environment – “Queer Joy” series. This series, edited by Jessica DeWitt, Tina Adcock, and Sarah York-Bertram, invites contributors to build off of scholarship and lived knowledge that envisions queer joy as a way of knowing and being in relation with the environment and more-than-human beings.

Whorephobia describes the stereotypes, stigma, and marginalization that sex workers encounter. It is ubiquitous and results in the criminalization, structural and physical violence, and discrimination that sex workers face. Sex workers are the target of whorephobia but experience it to varying degrees, depending on the type(s) of sex work they are engaged in and other intersecting, marginalized identities. However, whorephobia affects even non-sex workers. The associated disdain for or fear and hatred of sex work/ers leads to a social distancing from sex work/ers. The separation between sex worker and non-sex worker is pervasive. It can even be seen in the governance and regulation of spaces and places in which sex work exists via federal legislation and municipal bylaws. No one wants to be (called) a whore, let alone exist in close proximity to one – socially or physically.

While research that focuses on the manifestation of whorephobia has its place, I do not believe it can be truly transformational. I believe that there are limits to what can be advanced and achieved through research concerning a marginalized or stigmatized community or topic that takes a viewpoint that is focused on the negative. I contend that the only way for liberation and justice to be achieved is to move outside of or look beyond the injustice(s) through destabilizing the very ground(s) it/they operate on. Destabilizing whorephobia can do this.

In consideration of what makes sex work/ers “other,” I turn to queer theory, since sex work exists outside of the confines of heteronormativity. Despite the erasure of sex workers from queer communities and activism, the sex worker and queer communities share overlapping histories, and there remains an opportunity for allyship.¹ It is in this space of overlap that I find queer joy. Joy is “a radical and transformative force that can challenge the status quo, dismantle oppressive systems, and forge new paths toward a more just society.”² Expanding the concept of queer joy, and advancing epistemologies of sex work, I propose the related concept of sex worker joy.

“Like queer joy, sex worker joy is not confined to one set experience or source and is intersectional.”

I posit that sex worker joy is a queer joy, but it is also a joy unique to sex workers. It doesn’t discriminate according to the type of sex work or how it is derived or from where; like queer joy, sex worker joy is not confined to one set experience or source and is intersectional.³ Similar to queer joy, sex worker joy is grounded in Audre Lorde’s theory of the erotic that transgresses the sexual and “expands our capacity to feel alive, capable, and connected to others in a way that queerly subverts hegemonic discourse and structure.”⁴ Furthermore, sex worker joy responds to sociologist Angela Jones’ call for a sociological theory of pleasure that is not only limited to sexual pleasure and that

asks scholars to focus on the ways in which social forces, social institutions, and culture construct hegemonic discourses, which regulate experiences of pleasure; contextualize pleasure and account for space and location in shaping experiences of pleasure; and examine the complex ways in which hierarchal social systems and individual subjectivities influence people’s access to and experiences of pleasure.⁵

Thus, while sex work is inherently sexual, sex worker joy is not. Sex worker joy renounces the “joy deficit” in sociological research as described by JJ Wright and Casey Burkholder in their introduction to the series “Mobilising Queer Joy: Establishing Queer Joy Studies.”⁶ It also defies the expansive landscape of damage-centred research on sex work more broadly.⁷ Sex worker joy stands in staunch opposition to whorephobia.

Sex worker joy is a queer joy because sex work resists and subverts heteronormativity.⁸ It is in how sex work distinctly resists and subverts heteronormativity, however, that distinguishes sex worker joy from queer joy. Heteronormativity is comprised of more than just compulsory heterosexuality and functions in the interests of reproduction and capital.⁹ It is based on what Halberstam calls “the life schedule,” which leaves little room for pleasure-for-pleasure’s sake and the erotic and which I deem, with Angela Jones, a “sacrifice of pleasure.”¹⁰ Jones reasons that the “sacrifice of pleasure provides structure and order to society and its institutions, yet the sacrifice of pleasure is embedded with power, and in this process, human freedoms are limited, and these moralistic structures subjugate people.”¹¹

“The spaces that sex workers create and facilitate are sites, or even environments, of sexual pleasure.”

Sex work, on the other hand, is based on and revolves around sexual pleasure. It is what is bought and sold, after all. Whether it is sex work based online, in the strip club or dungeon, or full-service sex work (escorting/companionship), sexual pleasure, in any and all its forms, is at the centre of sex work, corporeally and affectively.¹² Thus, the spaces that sex workers create and facilitate are sites, or even environments, of sexual pleasure. They can also be queer spaces, even when it might not appear so.¹³ Hence, studying and locating pleasure in sex work is incredibly promising because not only queer joy, but also sex worker joy can be found in this space. The intentional creation and facilitation of these spaces actively resist the sacrifice of pleasure that heteronormativity sets up.

Sex workers may not experience the same (if any) sexual pleasure as clients/customers. However, while sex worker joy is not necessarily sexual, it is erotic.¹⁴ Sex worker joy can therefore result from or encompass other pleasurable aspects beyond the sexual services and labour performed by workers. The care that goes into curating a safe and comfortable environment for clients/customers, the opportunity to educate or have discussions from a sex-positive and harm reduction viewpoint, or learning about and enacting one’s own sexual boundaries can all be sources of sex worker joy. Furthermore, sex worker joy can originate from the waged work/income itself. It is through sex work’s disruption of compulsory monogamy, the mononormativity of heteronormativity, and the public/private divide that the commodification of intimacy and monetization of sexual, erotic and/or emotional labour comes into being.¹⁵

Make no mistake, though. Sex worker joy is neither pro-capitalist nor pro-work. After all, part of what makes it queer and a source of joy is in its anti-work politics.¹⁶ Anti-work politics are inherently anti-capitalist and challenge the Protestant work ethic. In “‘Sex Work Is Star Shaped’: Antiwork Politics and the Value of Embodied Knowledge,” long-time sex worker and sex work scholar-activist Vanessa Carlise explains how “[they] use antiwork politics to describe an exit from the coercion of a work ethic that ‘renders subjects supremely functional for capitalist purposes.’… Antiwork includes both resistance to overworking to meet basic survival needs and resistance to a coercive culture that places differential moral value on people via their conformity to a strict, ableist work ethic.”¹⁷ Therefore, sex worker joy can be located in how sex work has the potential to allow people to survive under capitalism and/or escape the demands of the Protestant work ethic through the flexibility of sex work and the wages garnered from it. I postulate this may be of particular significance for sex workers who are unable to meet the demands capitalism places on “straight” work or “civvie” jobs; who otherwise face employment discrimination; and/or who do not adhere to respectability politics. People may turn to sex work because of ableism, transphobia, classism, and/or other kinds of prejudice, in other words, and then find that this work brings its own particular kind of joy.

“As queer joy ‘…empowers people’s capacities to undermine oppressive ruling orders and frees up our imaginations to dream of more caring and connected, less violent and divisive worlds,’ so, too, does sex worker joy.”

I believe it is vital for any discussion pertaining to sex work to emphasize the need for decriminalization. So, in closing, I want to make it clear that sex work’s anti-work politics does not negate or oppose the necessity for decriminalization and sex workers’ rights nor delegitimize the labour of sex work – quite the opposite, in fact. Peyton Bond writes that “there are ‘moments of real potential’ to make space for the refusal of (the institution of) work when we place less emphasis on ideas of assimilation into normative work and instead use the language of ‘work’ as a base from which to move forward.”¹⁸ Such moments offer an opportunity for us to reimagine what work is and can be. Thus, just as queer joy “…empowers people’s capacities to undermine oppressive ruling orders and frees up our imaginations to dream of more caring and connected, less violent and divisive worlds,” so, too, does sex worker joy.¹⁹

Feature Image: A red umbrella, the internationally recognized symbol for sex workers’ rights, being carried at night. The umbrella is illuminated by city lights and is set in front of an otherwise dark and out of focus background. Credit: Gabriel Santiago, n.d.

Notes

1. Lindsay Blewett and Tuulia Law, “Sex Work and Allyship: Reflections on Femme-, Bi- and Whorephobia in Queer Communities,” Feral Feminisms, no. 7 (2018): 58–65. ↩︎
2. Casey Burkholder, JJ Wright, and Melissa Keehn, “Queer Joy as Pedagogy,” Teachers College Record 127, no. 9–10 (2025): 107. ↩︎
3. JJ Wright and Casey Burkholder, “Introduction to the Special Issue ‘Mobilising Queer Joy: Establishing Queer Joy Studies,’” Sexualities 28, no. 3 (2024): 757–66. ↩︎
4. Wright and Burkholder, 759. ↩︎
5. Angela Jones, Camming: Money, Power, and Pleasure in the Sex Work Industry (NYU Press, 2020), 19. ↩︎
6. Wright and Burkholder, “‘Mobilising Queer Joy.’” ↩︎
7. Eve Tuck, “Suspending Damage: A Letter to Communities,” Harvard Educational Review 79, no. 3 (2009): 409–28. ↩︎
8. Pat Califia, Public Sex: The Culture of Radical Sex (Cleis Press, 1994); Corina McKay, “Is Sex Work Queer?” Social Alternatives 18, no. 3 (1999): 48–53; Eva Pendleton, “Love for Sale: Queering Heterosexuality,” in Whores and Other Feminists, ed. Jill Nagle (Routledge, 1997), 73–82; Carol Queen, “Sex Radical Politics, Sex-Positive Feminist Thought, and Whore Stigma,” in Whores and Other Feminists, ed. Jill Nagle (Routledge, 1997), 112–21; Gayle Rubin, “Thinking Sex: Notes for a Radical Theory of the Politics of Sexuality,” in Pleasure and Danger: Exploring Female Sexuality, ed. Carole S. Vance (Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1984), 267–319. ↩︎
9. Jack Halberstam, In a Queer Time and Place: Transgender Bodies, Subcultural Lives (NYU Press, 2005). ↩︎
10. Halberstam. ↩︎
11. Jones, Camming, 238. ↩︎
12. Jones, 19–40. ↩︎
13. Monique Huysamen, “Queering the “Straight” Line: Men’s Talk on Paying for Sex,” Journal of Gender Studies 28, no. 5 (2019): 519–30; Pendleton, “Love for Sale”; Kate W. Read, “Queering the Brothel: Identity Construction and Performance in Carson City, Nevada,” Sexualities 16, no. 3–4 (2013): 467–86; Noah Zatz, “Sex Work/Sex Act: Law, Labor, and Desire in Constructions of Prostitution,” Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society 22, no. 2 (1997): 277–308. ↩︎
14. Wright and Burkholder, “‘Mobilising Queer Joy,’” 759. ↩︎
15. Jamie Heckert, “Love without Borders? Intimacy, Identity and the State of Compulsory Monogamy,” in Understanding Non-Monogamies, ed. Meg Barker and Darren Langdridge(Routledge, 2010), 255–66; Eleanor Wilkinson, “What’s Queer About Non-Monogamy Now?”, in Understanding Non-Monogamies, ed. Meg Barker and Darren Langdridge(Routledge, 2010), 243–54; Califia, Public Sex; McKay, “Is Sex Work Queer?” ↩︎
16. femi babylon and Heather Berg, “Erotic Labor Within and Without Work: An Interview with femi babylon,” South Atlantic Quarterly 120, no. 3 (2021): 631–40; Heather Berg, “An Honest Day’s Wage for a Dishonest Day’s Work: (Re)Productivism and Refusal,” Women’s Studies Quarterly 42, no. 1/2 (2014): 161–77; Heather Berg, “Working for Love, Loving for Work: Discourses of Labor in Feminist Sex-Work Activism,” Feminist Studies 40, no. 3 (2014): 693–721; Peyton Bond, “‘You Know What, It Is the Money’: Sex Work and Anti-reproductivist Critique,” Counterfutures 15 (2024): 18–41; Vanessa Carlisle, “‘Sex Work Is Star Shaped’: Antiwork Politics and the Value of Embodied Knowledge,” South Atlantic Quarterly 120, no. 3 (2021): 573–90; LaMonda Horton-Stallings, Funk the Erotic: Transaesthetics and Black Sexual Cultures (University of Illinois Press, 2015). ↩︎
17. Carlisle, “‘Sex Work Is Star Shaped,’” 584. ↩︎
18. Berg, “Honest Day’s Wage”; Bond, “‘It Is the Money’”; babylon and Berg, “Erotic Labor Within and Without Work”; Bond, “‘It Is the Money,’” 28. ↩︎
19. Wright and Burkholder, “‘Mobilising Queer Joy,’” 760. ↩︎

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Georgina Gifford

Georgina Gifford (they/she) is PhD Candidate in the Department of Gender, Sexuality and Women’s Studies at Western University in London, Ontario, Canada. They’re an interdisciplinary, emerging scholar active within different social justice communities and have research interests that span the topics of sex work; housing and homelessness; political economy; body politics; the social determinants of health; neoliberalism; governance; queer theory; and critical research methodologies. Dedicated and committed to anti-oppressive pedagogy and philosophies, they are always seeking new opportunities to learn and expand in their practice. Georgina is passionate about knowledge mobilization/translation; and equity, diversity, inclusion and decolonization (EDID) strategic planning; and policy. They have consulted both in academia and not-for-profit organizations and are available for consultations and training/workshops in the private and public sectors.

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• Sex Worker Joy - June 27, 2026