Norma Jean Almodovar, an advocate for sex worker rights, has donated a collection of her personal materials to the University of Nevada Las Vegas Libraries.
Housed in the university’s Special Collections & Archives, the Norma Jean Almodovar Papers document Almodovar’s decades of advocacy for sex worker rights, including materials from her personal life, activism, and the nonprofit she founded: the International Sex Worker Foundation for Art, Culture, and Education (ISWFACE). Founded in 1997, the nonprofit served as a resource center for sex work scholarship, as well as an artistic platform to showcase the cultural contributions of sex workers. Almodovar led ISWFACE until her retirement in 2023.
“I was always hopeful that the work of me and my organization would someday lead to changes in laws to criminalize police corruption and decriminalization of sex work,” said Almodovar. “By donating this collection to UNLV, it will be accessible to researchers and activists who will carry this work forward.”
The new archive is one of the founding collections of UNLV’s Sexual Entertainment and Economies initiative, a partnership between the university’s Special Collections & Archives and the department of interdisciplinary, gender, and ethnic studies. Barb Bents – recently retired professor of sociology, sex work scholar, and co-editor of Sex Work Today: Erotic Labor in the Twenty-First Century (NYU Press, 2024) – recognized the significance of Almodovar’s work and helped facilitate her donation.
“The Norma Jean Almodovar Papers are an extraordinary resource for students in gender and sexuality studies,” said Dr. Brents. “In addition to documenting the lived experiences of a woman who defied societal norms, the collection includes decades of material on police practices and the sex worker rights movement. It is one of the most extensive archives of its kind in the world. Having access to this kind of material allows students to engage deeply with questions of power, stigma, legal reform, and activism in ways that textbooks alone can’t offer. It brings the history of sex work and its politics to life.”