Work, Rights, and Resistance: Queer and Feminist Views on Sex Work in Europe

When Anora, a film depicting the life of a Brooklyn sex worker, was awarded the Palme d'Or at Cannes and subsequently an Academy Award in 2025, sex work -simultaneously commodified and celebrated through mainstream artistic acclaim -attracted the attention of global audiences.Lauded for its emotional complexity and apparent realism, the film nonetheless reignited longstanding debates about representation, authorship, and exclusion.Whose story was being told, by whom, and to what end?While Anora was praised for offering an empathic reading of sex work, sex workers themselves were largely absent from the public discourse surrounding a cultural product that claimed to speak for them, as they so often are, even when the topic is their own lives (Karandikar et al. 2024).Moreover, the film's Western gaze, which portrays not only Eastern European sex workers but also third parties as naive, boorish, or primitive, helped perpetuate existing hierarchical divisions between East and West (Krivonos, Diatlova 2020;O'Brien 2018).This wave of visibility took place against the backdrop of a rapidly changing global landscape.The Covid-19 pandemic accelerated a boom in online erotic labour, diversifying the field and making it more accessible to new social groups, while simultaneously introducing new forms of precarisation, exploitation, and marginalisation (Yu, Nelson, McBride 2020;Pezzutto 2024;Benoit, Unsworth 2022).The platformisation of sex work opened up new income streams via subscription-based services and streaming platforms, yet it also intensified dependence on opaque algorithms,