Existing research on digital sex work has focused on ‘platformization’, examining how platform architecture and technological affordances like algorithms, categorisation regimes and visibility metrics shape and govern the working conditions of digital sex work. On the other hand, digital media and cultural scholars have analysed the labour practices and discursive logics of everyday social media influencers and content creators. However, there is limited research on the subjectivities of digital sex workers, and the cultural discourses they draw on to frame their experiences. This thesis investigates the labour practices and subjectivities of 20 UK based women and non-binary people selling sexual content and intimate experiences on digital platforms (including but not limited to OnlyFans). It employs innovative ‘workplace go-along’ interviews and a working history timeline exercise, informed by a poststructuralist approach and thematic discourse analysis.
Bringing together two disparate sets of literature, this thesis argues that digital sex workers operate as ‘stigmatised social media influencers’ who are both subject to normative influencer practices and demands of self-branding, commodifying authenticity and building affective relationships with online audiences, while also being discriminated against by platforms and society due to pervasive sex work stigma. As such, digital sex workers face specific tensions and challenges which other social media influencers, and in-person sex workers do not have to navigate.
The thesis proposes a novel typology based on three ideal ‘types’ of digital sex workers: sex workers, income boosters and digital content creators. Each type is characterised based on how digital sex work figures in their overall livelihoods, which is productive of distinct motivations, labour practices and identities. Analysis draws on this typology to demonstrate how each ‘type’ mobilises different strategies and refers to different discourses to negotiate boundaries between work and life, labour and pleasure, and authenticity and performance. This thesis makes visible the diverse experiences and subjectivities of digital sex workers, complicating existing theorisations of a ‘neoliberal-worker subject’ that has dominated in literature on creative platform work and social media influencers. Rather, digital sex workers draw on a wide range of multiple, contradictory and competing discourses relating to sex work, labour, celebrity and digital culture to make sense of their practices
