Porn Studies

The special issue invites articles and creative works that explore the political, legal, social, and cultural dimensions of Asian sex work activism across local, national, and transnational scales in off- and online spaces. We seek submissions that center trans-Asian sex work activism as a critical site for examining the intersections of geopolitical, racial, sexual, and cultural power. We use the term “Trans-Asian” not simply to denote cross-border movement within Asia, but to foreground the relational, diasporic, and geopolitical connections through which sex work activism emerges across national contexts, migration regimes, imperial histories, and digital platforms. These contributions will foreground the voices and experiences of sex workers in Asian and Asian diaspora contexts in challenging criminalization, stigmatization, and epistemic injustice, thereby deepening our understanding of sex workers’ critical role in broader social justice. Submissions may explore how sex workers in trans-Asian contexts conceptualize and articulate their visions of work, safety, rights, and justice; how they build communities of solidarity; how they engage in political claims-making and mutual aid; and how they navigate political, institutional, and social environments. Ultimately, the issue seeks to open space for reimagining sex worker subjectivities, sex work activism, and broader feminist, queer, and social justice futures.

The special issue also interrogates inequalities within transnational sex worker movements themselves, including uneven access to funding, mobility, institutional legitimacy, and leadership positions. Despite the increasingly global language of sex worker rights advocacy, organisations and activists in Asia and the Global South often confront structural disadvantages within donor economies, English-language advocacy spaces, academic publishing, and international governance forums. These inequalities shape whose labour becomes visible, whose political analyses circulate globally, and whose visions of sex worker justice become institutionalised.

In addition, the issue attends to the creative and cultural dimensions of activism, including storytelling, artistic practice, digital labor, platform-based organizing, online community-building, mutual aid, and feminist forms of worldmaking through which sex workers contest stigma, surveillance, censorship, and political erasure. We are also interested in how digital technologies simultaneously create new opportunities for income generation, visibility, political organizing, and transnational solidarity amidst intensifying forms of platform governance, algorithmic discrimination, data extraction, and state surveillance. By foregrounding activism itself as labor, the issue expands dominant understandings of work beyond market exchange and service provision. This includes the often-invisible labor of content moderation, digital safety practices, online advocacy, community management, mutual aid coordination, and knowledge production across street and venue based and digital platforms.

We welcome articles, short commentaries (1500 words) and creative work (art, poetry, visual performance, etc.) that address the following questions: