Notes from the Sex Worker Left: Lumpen Theory is forthcoming from Duke University Press in fall 2025.
In dressing rooms and shared cab rides home, mutual aid collectives and reading groups, sex workers are theorizing how to live otherwise. Notes from the Sex Worker Left highlights unruly thinkers at the cutting-edge of radical political theory. Drawing on interviews with sex workers as well as their political and creative writings, the book assembles an archive of radical thought on the trappings of respectability, the failures of work, and the role of everyday resistance in collective, militant struggle. Notes from the Sex Worker Left grounds its analysis in the perspective of the lumpenproletariat—the mutinous, precarious, and often criminalized counterpart to the respectable working class. Lumpen theorists use their position on the margins to imagine futures that welcome everyone for whom the usual solutions will not satisfy. The nuclear family, the wage relation, and the gendered racial capitalist state will have to go.