'You Know What, It Is the Money’: Sex Work and Anti-reproductivist Critique

Abstract

What if the inability to refuse care work is baked into the very category of care?’ asks Heather Berg. This article draws from Berg’s ‘reproductivism’ to argue that people who labour on the margins of capitalist society articulate crucial critiques of and resistance to the system of work. Berg’s arguments are brought together with 2020 interviews with indoor sex workers in Aotearoa New Zealand, where sex work was decriminalised in 2003. This article argues that those who reject straight work in favour of work that might
broadly be better compensated and more flexible, yet remains stigmatised and marginalised, produce a critical standpoint from which to resist and eventually refuse work within a capitalist society, particularly the work of social reproduction.