The Tricking Hour

by Irene Silt

What is a world in which work disappears?

“Time has never made any sense to me. Or rather, I am told the way I describe my experience of time does not add up. I am so disconnected from any common meter that I remain in disbelief of that sort of containment. I think this is what makes me a good whore”: so begins Irene Silt’s The Tricking Hour.

Part anti-work polemic, part sex worker’s confession, the luminous essays in The Tricking Hour envision a world organized around collective autonomy, survival, and care, instead of the compulsory exploitation of the body. Silt’s dispatches—largely composed between June 2018 and October 2019 and first published as a monthly column in New Orleans’ ANTIGRAVITY magazine—are already a cult classic in the movement for sex workers against work. Now collected in book form for the first time, with an additional essay written in 2022, The Tricking Hour is a vital account of sex, labor, and criminality in the twenty-first century.

Genres: Essays, Poetry, Sex Work, Nonfiction, Economics

80 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 2020

Reviews

[Mewa Michrowski · Rating 5 out of 5]

Fajne, czyta się jak snack

[Emer Ní Fhoghlú · Rating 5 out of 5]

I come back to The Tricking Hour time and time again. I just have pamphlet #7, bought at Decriminalised Futures at the ICA. Without the exhibition I never would have found Irene Silt and her marvellous work. I’ve never seen anyone capture the realities of SW quite like her. I come back to this one pamphlet like it is a religious text (sans dogma). The way she writes the body conjures up nights in clubs and hotel rooms behind me. The way she writes about stigma cuts to the core of discrimination against SWers in a few short pages. Beyond the communal aspect, Silt has an incredible voice. Her observations are steeped in her own body, her own life, and it’s great to read a pamphlet that is enriched by the memoir aspects.

Also, the illustrations are beautiful. I wish the collected essays had cover art done in the same vein rather than a print but I know the writer is a fan of Silvia Federici so can’t fault it on the level of continuation between Federici’s work and hers.

“What happens to my body in the strip club never stays in the strip club. The body is there before consciousness thinks it. Whoring is a constant experimentation with the deep unknown of the body. My body is in contact with other bodies, in contact with itself, moving in places deemed unconscionable and in ways it is forbidden to do so. I know the power of what a body can do.”

[Sara Gerot · Rating 5 out of 5]

This book blew me away. I had not read Irene Silt's work before, but I am so glad that I experienced this book. Especially after reading Heather Lewis's gem NOTICE. I really want to know what Lewis would have said about Silt's book. I cannot say enough about the beauty of the writing. The ideas challenged me. They were not my own, but the loveliness of the sentences drew me in and made re-examine much of my own thinking. This was sooooooo good. Though I understand these pieces came from different places, the flow was perfection.

[Maria]

"Work orders the rest of our life: our mornings, our vacations, our purchases, what we read, our care, our sex and pleasure, our home, the night."