Diving Deep with Dr. Mireille Miller-Young

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   Dr. Mireille Website Donate to our work  ⁠YAS Work Instagram⁠ ⁠YAS Work BlueSky⁠ ⁠YAS Work Twitter⁠ ⁠YAS Work Youtube YASStore.Shop