Selling Pleasure, Teaching Pleasure: Frontline Service Work in Adult Retail

Abstract

This dissertation examines how frontline workers in adult retail establishments—commonly referred to as "sex shops"—make meaning of their labor in a stigmatized industry at the intersection of commerce and sexuality education. Drawing on 21 in-depth interviews with workers and analysis of over 1,000 job reviews written by frontline adult retail workers, I explore how workers navigate the conditions of adult retail labor while framing their work as educational, healing, pleasurable, and purposeful. This research contributes to the sociology of work by analyzing how service workers in “spicy retail” mobilize their identities and experiences to perform emotional labor under conditions of stigma and precarity. Across four analytic chapters, I trace how workers enter adult retail through pathways shaped by sexual subcultures, biographical experiences, financial instability, and identity. On the job, identity is also “working,” and participants’ narratives reveal that they are leveraging their gender, sexuality, trauma histories, and neurodivergence in customer service interactions. Finally, I analyze how workers find meaning in their labor by framing it as a low-barrier form of public health, a site of personal and collective healing, and a space where joy, humor, and pleasure coalesce. In foregrounding the voices of frontline workers, this dissertation expands scholarship on sexualized labor and emotional labor. By showing how workers make sense of their labor in terms of care, I show that adult retail work—and sex industry labor such as this—is not just worthy of sociological attention—it is a key site for understanding how workers strive for meaning in the contemporary occupational landscape in the United States.