The Weekly Read for April 20, 2024, is “‘If You’re Going to Be Beautiful, You Better Be Dangerous’: Sex Worker Community Defense” by Heather Berg. The article appears in “Feminists Confront State Violence” a recent issue of Radical History Review.
Read this article for free through May 18, 2024.
Buy this special issue and use coupon code SAVE30 for a 30% discount.
Abstract
Refusing both sex workers’ state-produced vulnerability to violence and the state’s monopoly on protection, sex worker radicals articulate community defense as a practice of care. Grounded in interviews with thinkers of the sex worker Left and in sex workers’ cultural production, this article explores sex worker community defense with an eye to its relationship to past struggles and contributions to future ones. Chief among those is the abolitionist struggle for a world beyond prisons and policing. Sex worker abolitionists identify a tension between a vision of transformative justice that rejects violence and the understanding that transformation might not come without injury to those who do violence on behalf of the state. Sex worker abolitionists seek resources for navigating this tactical ambivalence in Black radical, decolonial, and queer and feminist traditions. Many wonder if building new worlds will require a transitional program of militant community defense, even retribution.
For more than forty-five years, Radical History Review has stood at the point where rigorous historical scholarship and active political engagement converge. The journal is edited by a collective of historians with diverse backgrounds, research interests, and professional perspectives. Articles in RHR address issues of gender, race, sexuality, imperialism, and class, stretching the boundaries of historical analysis to explore Western and non-Western histories. RHR includes sections devoted to public history and the art of teaching as well as reviews of a wide range of media—from books to television and from websites to museum exhibitions—thus celebrating the vast potential for historical learning in the twenty-first century.
The Weekly Read is a weekly feature in which we highlight articles, books, and chapters that are freely available online. You’ll be able to find a link to the selection here on the blog as well as on our social media channels. Enjoy The Weekly Read, and check back next week for something new to read for free.
Duke University Press News 