The Fetishism of Flesh: Anora (2024), Prostitution, and the Liberal Mirage of Empowerment
Year: 2025
Type: article
Abstract: Introduction In Sean Baker’s Anora, we do not merely witness a reworking of Pretty Woman; we encounter the culmination of late capitalist desire wrapped in the sheen of emancipatory delusion. The titular character is not simply a sex worker navigating the American dreamscape — she is the perfect object of liberal fantasy: commodified, transactional, and therefore “empowered.” The glorification of prostitution as work — “just another job” — epitomizes what Louis Althusser called “interpellation” (Althusser, 1971): the internalization of one’s exploitation as freedom. To sell oneself becomes not only a necessity but a virtue, a career, a dream. The ideological thrust of Anora is nothing short of perverse. This is not to condemn the film’s director — Baker’s oeuvre, from Tangerine to The Florida Project, consistently foregrounds the underside of American prosperity. Rather, the problem lies with the critical misreadings of such works, which regurgitate neoliberal talking points under the guise of leftist analysis. “Prostitution is labor,” they insist. “Anora is working class.” Nonsense. As Silvia Federici reminds us, capitalist society functions by invisibilizing reproductive and affective labor while commodifying the female body (Federici, 2004). In the libidinal economy of Anora, sex is not intimacy — it is transaction, and this transaction is celebrated, aestheticized, and eventually fetishized. To understand the cultural logic behind Anora, we must first situate it within the wider economy of spectacle. Guy Debord’s (1967) concept of the “society of the spectacle” was never more relevant than now. Here, the prostitute becomes a brand, a self-made woman, a hustler. She is no longer a victim of systemic precarity but a CEO of her own body. That the working poor must sell their flesh — organs, ova, sex — is no longer seen as an indictment of capitalism, but as its triumph. Capital has successfully converted degradation into aspiration.
Author: Panasiuk, Mariia
Language: English
Topic: Gender and Feminist Studies
Subfield: Gender Studies
Field: Social Sciences
Domain: Social Sciences
Open Access status: green
OpenAlex ID: W6911888355
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