Anthology Film Archives

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WOMEN, WORKERS, AND WHORES ON FILM

April 4 – April 10

April 4-10, 2025

Guest-programmed by Ayanna Dozier, this series gathers together movies from the late 20th century and early 21st century – many of them made by sex workers – to present an alternative collection of narrative and experimental moving-image works that resist the same old tired ethics around sex work commonly found in independent and mainstream films. The series features films that examine the love life of a whore, the socio-political climate of sex work, the camaraderie between working girls, and the fantasies of a worker. The inclusion of experimental and short films reveals that, more often than not, the more ambitious stories of sex work – the ones that deal with its stickiness, excess, pleasure, and ambivalence – exist outside of wide distribution channels and take risks both formally and narratively.

The majority of films presented in “Women, Workers, and Whores on Film” are made by or in collaboration with someone who has worked in the sex industry, but some – such as A NEW LOVE IN TOKYO and HOUSE OF TOLERANCE – are not. Their inclusion reveals that films that break the script on sex work do not have to come from a sex worker but can be produced by anyone deeply interested in the possibilities that emerge from sexual labor, rather than weaponizing the topic to demean or belittle their characters.

The title, “Women, Workers, and Whores on Film” reflects the changing terms used to describe sex work and speaks to the variety of films featured here. The protagonists of some of the films use “whore” to describe their labor; others are simply workers in a sex industry; while yet others represent women taking back their sexual labor from a political system that demands it for free. Critically, I use the word “whore” because it reflects the social reality of sex workers who are stigmatized and criminalized for their labor, and it is a term I use in solidarity with myself and other people in the sex industry. While sex worker is a more “palatable” descriptor to a wide audience, as the late Carol Leigh (the Scarlet Harlot) argued, it also reinforces the idea that one’s humanity must be tied to their love of being a “worker,” which historically has rarely benefitted whores who are often shut out of labor organizing spaces because of their sexual labor.

“Women, Workers, and Whores on Film” aims to open us to different, complicated visual images of sex workers than we are often exposed to in mainstream narrative film.

“Women, Workers, and Whores on Film” is guest-programmed by Ayanna Dozier, and co-presented with Screen Slate. The introduction and film descriptions are by Ayanna Dozier.

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