Motherhood, Artmaking, and MILF-DOM
On the erotics of art making and child rearing
This public studio visit between Lena Chen, Maxine Holloway, and Kim Ye was recorded live at Stanford University on March, 12 2024.
As artists and parents with experience with sex work, the three brought discussions typically relegated to the private sphere into the academic institution. Topics range from the relationship between porn and culture, digital spectatorship, MILF-dom and feminism, maternity as a form of labor, and their relationships to desire.
Lena Chen is an artist, scholar, writer, and PhD student in Performance Studies at UC Berkeley. An internationally exhibiting artist, she co-created OnlyBans, a digital game about sex work and surveillance which received Mozilla Foundation’s Creative Media Award. Her work engages with feminist performance art, Asian womanhood, reproductive labor, and technology.
Maxine Holloway is a sex worker, advocate, and artist. She navigates themes of desire, labor, milf culture, commodification, and Mommy archetypes in her work. Her pornography performances have earned AVN nominations, an XBIZ and Feminist Porn Award, and showcased in film festivals globally. Maxine’s SOMArts curatorial residency led to the ‘We’re Still Working – The Art of Sex Work’ exhibition. As co-director of Bay Area Workers Support (BAWS), she provides resources and mutual aid to local sex workers.
Kim Ye is a Chinese American artist, writer, and organizer whose research-based practice engages gendered constructions of power, and the entanglement between public space and private desire. Working professionally as a dominatrix since 2011, Ye has been on the board of Sex Workers Outreach Project Los Angeles since 2019. She was a Mellon Arts Fellow at Stanford University’s Center for Comparative Studies in Race and Ethnicity in 2023-2024.
