Originally published on Brill.com 6/13/2025
In: Journal of Femininities
Author: Lauren Robinson Levitt
Abstract
Digital zine-making allows sex workers to share their thoughts, feelings, and experiences from their own perspectives and in their own voices. These zines allow marginalized sex workers, including sex-working femmes, to represent themselves on their own terms. Through textual and visual analysis of 35 digital perzines, or personal zines, this article shows how global feminine sex workers push back against their oppression. For example, feminine-presenting sex workers – regardless of gender identity – from the United States, the United Kingdom, Canada, and Germany resist both femmephobia and whorephobia through memoirs, fiction, poetry, comics, and interviews. Digital zines also highlight the perspectives of migrant, queer, and transfeminine sex workers, as well feminine sex workers of color, showing how femmephobia and whorephobia intersect with other systems of oppression.