Book Chapter in The Gig Economy: Workers and Media in the Age of Convergence
Before the current hype of gig work, adult entertainers were working as independent operators on web platforms used to stream live video feeds and connect with internet users, an emerging sex industry known as cam modeling. Still, adult entertainers are often omitted from academic discourse on digital gig labor. Not only does this erasure negatively impact its workers – predominantly marginalized women – but it also makes it difficult to appreciate the scope and variations of gig work. This chapter draws upon qualitative data to examine the benefits and drawbacks of cam modeling. By exploring the convergence of sex work and the gig economy, this chapter aims to provide greater visibility for marginalized gig workers and research that may inform activism, laws, and regulations affecting the digital sex industry.
Sweetening the Deal: Dating for Compensation in the Digital Age
This paper explores the online ‘sugar dating’ phenomenon, the proliferation of websites that connect ‘sugar daddies’ and ‘sugar mamas’ with ‘sugar babies,’ in order to better understand the kinds of meanings informing and derived from the pursuit of openly commodified relationships. Qualitatively analysing discourse on a popular ‘sugar dating’ blog, I argue that ‘sugar dating’ cultivates a disposition to and through paid intimacy that differs from both romantic love and more explicit forms of sex work. Discussed along economic and emotional dimensions, blog participants embrace the economic underpinnings of their instrumental uses of intimacy, but they also invoke romantic discourses of chemistry, connection, and personal choice and the morality of economic exchange, demonstrating a refusal to see their relations as work and solely driven by market logic. These differentiations help to buffer social stigma and represent the social acceptability of instrumental intimacy as a neoliberal strategy for coping with economic and social conditions, but also make it harder to identify the labour of ‘sugar dating’ and further disenfranchise sex workers as they reinforce social distinctions in order to legitimize these relations.
Working It: The Professionalization of Amateurism in Digital Adult Entertainment
This article examines a sector of professional amateur work for women in the digital industry for adult entertainment known as “adult webcam modeling” (AWM). Through a selection of narratives, this paper explores the gendered meanings of AWM and the values women derive from their “amateur” sexual content creation. I draw particular attention to the complex union of professional and amateur roles and relations in the strategies women adopt to succeed in these spaces. On one level, they describe the technical skills and institutionalized knowledge needed to successfully perform professionalized duties of hosting and animating site users’ sexual and emotional fantasies. Still, they do not solely view their work in professional terms, highlighting the usefulness of enacting their amateurism by performing authenticity and developing ongoing friendships with site users for succeeding in this line of work. Framing this work as reliant on both “professional” and “amateur” strategies builds ambiguity into the AWM persona, which has implications for social and historical constructions of sexuality and gender. It also demands rethinking conceptual frameworks that create dualities between professional/amateur, public/private, and commercial/authentic.
You Did(n’t) Build That: Audience Reception of a Reality Television Star’s Transformation from a Real Housewife to a Real Brand
This article explores themes and issues related to the variable reception of gendered practices of self-branding in popular culture and media. By analyzing discourse on two online fan forums, it examines the ways in which audiences of Frankel’s two spinoff series, Bethenny Getting Married and Bethenny Ever After, respond to Frankel’s transformation into a branded self. What meanings does Frankel’s branded self generate? How might gendered meanings delimit the forms and valences afforded to self-branders? Attention to viewers’ negotiations of what is at stake for the self-brander suggests it is a contestable and conditional manipulation of affect, thereby denying the presumption that socially situated self-branding practices are uniformly acceptable, that concepts of success to which self-branders aspire are uniformly constructed, and that the growing historical condition of precarity under neoliberal reform is uniformly experienced and managed.