How sex workers and activists engage in non-capitalist care practices to manage precarity, stigma, and criminalization

In Sex Worker Solidarity, Lauren Levitt argues that because of their marginalized status, which makes them outsiders in legal, labor, medical, and social networks, sex workers inevitably care for one another in distinct ways that are outside of traditional material and emotional support structures. Through participant observation and interviews with sex workers and sex worker activists at the Sex Workers Outreach Project Los Angeles (SWOP-LA) and Dungeon X, a large commercial dungeon in New York City, Levitt illustrates how sex workers create forms of value for one another that go beyond the value they create for bosses and clients, providing a model for broader social change in the face of increasing wealth inequality.

Drawing on Marxist and women of color feminisms and queer theory, Levitt reveals how sex workers’ non-biological kinship structures enable them to circulate both material resources and knowledge according to a moral economy distinct from capitalism’s economy of competition, cementing bonds between workers. Ultimately, Sex Worker Solidarity illustrates the limits and possibilities of extending the informal networks of care emerging in sex work workplaces to a broader group of people through sex worker organizing, and shows how other informal workers can resist capitalist exploitation through alternative forms of labor organizing.