On YAS Podcast, host Daisy Ducati interviews Dr. Mireille Miller-Young (UC Santa Barbara), author of A Taste for Brown Sugar: Black Women in Pornography, about researching Black women’s labor, representation, and sexual agency in adult media. Miller-Young discusses identifying in solidarity with sex workers, academic stigma and career pushback, and how sex workers cared for her during fieldwork as she sought to disrupt extractive research traditions. She explains developing a “Black feminist pornographic gaze,” critiques anti-porn feminism’s shallow analysis and alignment with criminalization, and connects policies like the Nordic model and FOSTA-SESTA to increased danger and deplatforming. The conversation also addresses racialized policing of massage parlors, censorship and surveillance in academia, and her argument that Black women navigate both exploitation and agency through “erotic sovereignty,” urging listeners to avoid stigma and center sex workers’ voices.
All the Chapters
00:00 Conference Backlash
00:39 Podcast Welcome
02:00 Pronouns Solidarity
04:34 Care From Workers
07:07 Awards And Motherhood
09:00 Research Origins
11:47 Labor Roots Story
14:48 Archive Hunt
16:31 Pornographic Gaze
20:52 Policy And Policing
23:29 FOSTA SESTA Fallout
26:23 Surveillance Creep
28:20 AI Sex Project
30:23 Academic Silencing
32:52 Fear of Wokeism
33:29 CRT and Property
34:50 Education Under Attack
36:11 News Burnout Break
36:53 Support the Podcast
37:24 Book Exploitation and Agency
37:51 Feminist Sex Wars
38:28 Queer Porn Counterculture
42:36 Respectability Backlash
48:49 Erotic Sovereignty Theory
50:04 Money Sex Fame
51:33 Sex Work History Choices
01:00:19 Stigma Media Literacy
01:03:04 Sexual Radical Future
01:05:16 Closing and Where to Find
All the links
