Stoking the Fire
Stoking the Fire is a podcast that explores practices of wellness and spirituality from a nuanced perspective. With different guests on the show each week sharing their own experiences, we discuss practices that stoke the fire within, those that extinguish it, and the mysterious phenomena along the way. Themes include: cultural and social structures, trauma, Eastern medicine, addiction, cults, bodily autonomy, sexuality, abuses of power, feminist spirituality, the wounded masculine, the prison industrial complex, psychedelics, and more.
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Instagram: @nicoleelizaaraujo
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Stoking the Fire
The Celluloid Bordello: Depictions of sex work in film with Juliana Piccillo
Juliana Piccillo is an award-winning filmmaker, writer and sex worker rights activist. She is the producer of “I was a Teenage Prostitute” and “The Celluloid Bordello,” and was a story consultant for Sean Baker on "Red Rocket,” a Palme d’or-nominated film. As a visiting scholar at the University of Arizona for ten years, she taught film, video and television production.
In this episode, we talk about:
- Juliana’s recent documentary, “Celluloid Bordello” about depictions of sex work in film (3:12)
- The old motion picture rating system, which only allowed sex work, homosexuality, and mixed race relationships if those depicted were shown being punished (4:14)
- Nicole’s BA thesis, “Le Fille Publique: Depictions of Sex Work in 19th-Ccentury French literature” (12:32)
- How the patriarchy puts men into a box (16:57)
- Juliana’s experience as a sex worker: in her teens vs. returning in her 40’s and 50’s (30:12)
- How Juliana created an uproar by hosting a sex worker film festival while teaching at the University of Arizona and ended up on O’Reily and CNN (33:52)
- Born into Brothels: A horrible white savior complex documentary (that somehow won an Academy Award) about a sex worker community in Calcutta, India (40:54)
- How stereotypical depictions of trafficking victims satisfies the revenge-rescue fantasy in awful men. (43:34)
- What growing our own food and sex work have in common (56:48)
- Juliana-approved sex work movies (throughout- see show notes for list)
Show notes:
IG: @whoresonfilm
I was a Teenage Prostitute and The Celluloid Bordello are available on Prime, Apple TV and PinkLabel.tv.
Sex work movies that Juliana loves: Sweet Charity, Gypsy, Pretty Baby, Lizzie Borden’s Working Girls, Tangerine, Angel, Red Rocket