Student Initiatives Event

Lizzie Borden | Sex/Labor

A view of the darkened room where the event was held.

Organized as a collaborative event by the student initiatives On Film and Framed: Curatorial Collective, Lizzie Borden | Sex/Labor took place from November 20 to December 10, 2024. The event included two days of film screenings and an art exhibition that brought Lizzie Borden’s influential film Working Girls (1986) into dialogue with contemporary art exploring themes of sex work.

On Film partnered with The Little Theatre, located in the heart of Rochester, to co-host a double feature of Borden’s Regrouping (1976) and Born in Flames (1983), followed by an on-campus screening of Working Girls and Antonia Crane’s recent film Lady Los Angeles (2023). The exhibition featured works by nine artists and one artist collective, garnering significant interest from both students and the public throughout its duration.

The artworks featured in Sex/Labor—made by Antonia Crane, Barbara Nitke, Chichi Castillo, Sasha Waters Freyer, Alyssa Wood, Weixin Zhuang, Katina Bitsicas, Lena Chen, Maggie Oates, David Kim, and Emily Broad—represent both the physical and emotional forms of labor that sex work entails. This labor is constituted by: exhaustion, establishing boundaries, moments of joy and play, and kinship with clients and fellow sex workers that extend beyond the nuclear family. This exhibition does not claim to fully capture all the complexities of sex as a form of labor. Rather, it proposes three things. First, that the history of sex work has a clear significance in contemporary visual culture. Second, its significance can be found in Rochester's local history. The Portable Channel Archive, managed by the Visual Studies Workshop, documents the sex industry's presence in Rochester’s downtown area in the 1970s. And third, that the sex workers’ rights movement is an urgent matter of our time that relates to larger complications in the distribution of wealth and labor in late capitalism. In a moment when many of us struggle to buy groceries and pay our bills, the decriminalization of sex work could herald a new era for understanding how we work to live.

(Exhibition Statement)
A group photo of the event coordinators.

Event Sponsors

The event was generously co-sponsored by The Little Theatre; the Humanities Project; the Graduate Program in Visual and Cultural Studies; the Susan B. Anthony Institute for Gender, Sexuality, and Women’s Studies; the Hartnett Gallery; and the Departments of Art and Arts History, Anthropology, English, Film and Media Studies, and Health Humanities and Bioethics.