Published August 2024
“Lauren Kirshner heralds the arrival of a new protagonist in pop culture: the sex worker whose working conditions and labour dynamics are core to the story...Meticulously researched and incisive.”
“This beautifully written book treads new ground...A must-read for anyone interested in sex work or popular culture.”
"Provocative and compelling, this timely book offers a vital new lens for understanding sex work in the twenty-first century."
Sex Work in Popular Culture delves into provocative movies, TV shows, and documentaries about sex work produced in the last decade – a period of debate and change around the meaning of sex work in North American society.
From Oscar-winning films to viral YouTube videos, and from indie documentaries to hit series – many of which are made by women – the book reveals how sex work is being recognized as real work and an issue of human rights. Lauren Kirshner shares how popular culture has responded by producing the dynamic new figure of a sex worker who challenges tropes and promotes understanding of the key issues shaping sex work.
The book draws on labour and feminist theory, film history, current news, and popular culture, all within the context of neoliberal capitalism and the rise of transactional intimate labour. Kirshner takes us from erotic dance clubs to porn sets, illuminating the professional lives of erotic dancers, massage parlour workers, webcam models, call girls, sex surrogates, and porn performers.
Probing how progressive popular culture challenges stereotypes, Sex Work in Popular Culture tells the story of sex work as labour and how the screen can show us the world’s oldest profession in a new light.
Read about Sex Work in Popular Culture in Jacobin and on CBC.com.
Where We Have to Go
- City of Toronto Book Award Finalist
“A bittersweet coming-of-age story told with extraordinary freshness and wit...a wry and astonishing debut.”
"A sombre but playful saga of a nerdy girl’s fight for herself and her family, and highlights Kirshner as a new novelist to watch. A very strong original debut.”
“Wins the reader over with a masterful comic touch and a canny distillation of the painful experience of growing up different...evocative and compelling.”
Where We Have to Go is a luminous and sassy first novel about the last days of childhood in a family coming apart at the seams. At once wryly humorous and deeply affecting, this sparkling novel follows the irresistible Lucy Bloom as she searches for her place in the world.
When we first meet Lucy, she’s an imaginative eleven-year-old dreaming of a taste of freedom – and only beginning to grasp that all is not well between her parents. In the years that follow, Lucy’s journey to adulthood will see her question the limits of unconditional love, grow “criminally thin” as she stops eating, and discover complicated truths about what it means to be a young woman.
Among the characters we meet are Lucy’s father, Frank, a failed glamour photographer turned travel agent who’s never been out of the country; her best friend, Erin, an artist whose outspoken iconoclasm will inspire and challenge Lucy; and Crashing Wave, Frank’s lover, a former exotic dancer and the woman Lucy comes to imagine as the ideal of all that is feminine.
Through it all, the central figure in Lucy’s life remains her mother, Joy, whose larger-than-life stories and boisterous voice belie a deep disappointment. As their relationship is tested again and again, Lucy comes to understand the resilience of the bonds that tie us to the ones we love.
Set in Toronto throughout the 1990s, Where We Have to Go is a novel of self-discovery, family, and love. It introduces Lauren Kirshner as one of our most striking new voices, and reminds us that sometimes the most difficult journey is the one that takes us home.