LA Review of Books: From Sex Worker as Character to Sex Worker as Producer

A Review of Nicholas de Villier’s “Sexography: Sex Work in Documentary”: In a world that is dominated by anti-sex work bias, such an analysis is sorely needed.

Sexography (Nicholas de Villiers)In a world that is dominated by anti-sex work bias, such an analysis is sorely needed.

“IT’S DANGEROUS TO START from a perspective that people have no choices in life, because if we do that we start looking at them as victims and victims have no choice, and no voice.” So says Gabriela Silva Leite, a sex-worker activist and the founder of the Brazilian sex-worker rights NGO Davida, in the short documentary Outlaw Poverty, Not Prostitutes. In 1991, the sex-worker rights activist Carol Leigh (who coined the term “sex work”) made this film in order to document the organizing efforts of prostitutes at the 1989 World Whores’ Congress.

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Published in: Los Angeles Review of Books
By: Theresa Anasti