With Love, and Labour

— We are naming the work to refuse respect for the work altogether.

In With Love, and Labour, which comprises a single poem-essay, Chelsea Hart offers a political economic account of sex work as work. This claim is not meant to reify work, for sex work is work and all work sucks, as she writes, citing a collective slogan of workers against work. Hart writes not just a theory of the labour of sex work but also a poem of the different ways that lineage — the passing of knowledge and the transmission of agency — can be read across the history of sex work and between generations of workers. Hart’s articulation of lineage emphasises the ambivalence of collectivity and solidarity forged under the sign of work: a labour of love, where love is synonymous with refusal.