This project examines the use of these symbols both in the realms of art and entertainment, while also highlighting the concurrent marginalization of sex workers. Through the analysis of cultural representations, it seeks to understand how sexuality is portrayed and symbolized across various forms of media and art, and how these representations influence public perception and the social treatment of sex workers.

Sex work, in its various manifestations — prostitution, camming, striptease, pole dance, burlesque, BDSM, fetish, and the cinematic pornographic industry — inhabits a space marked by structures of power, appropriation, and subversion. These bodies that perform desire are simultaneously object and subject within a pleasure economy that reveals both the oppressive dynamics of capitalism and the potentials for autonomy and resistance.