Content creation and gig-work in the platform economy: What contemporary sex work can teach us about the futures of digital labor

2024/07/30 by Sebastiaan Gorissen · 1 citation
Business, Management and Accounting · Social Sciences · #Digital Economy and Work Transformation #Gender, Feminism, and Media #Sharing Economy and Platforms

paper · doi:10.1080/01972243.2024.2381481

openalex publication_date 2024/07/30 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/07/28

Abstract

To come to a closer understanding of platforms’ control and normative influences over the gig-economy, in this study I focus on gig-workers laboring under extreme societal, economic, and algorithmic marginalization in a multi-billion-dollar global media industry: adult entertainers working on direct-to-consumer content creation platforms. Digital sex work problematizes accepted definitions of gig-work, because adult entertainers’ professional identities are not limited to singular platforms, because building community is fundamental, and because all dispersed professional performances cumulatively constitute content creators’ personas. Laborers across creative industries would do well to take note of how adult entertainers survive, work, and thrive in such a hostile environment.

Citations

• An Analysis of the Labor Market for Uber’s Driver-Partners in the United States
• Identity Regulation as Organizational Control: Producing the Appropriate Individual
• Affective Labor and Feminist Politics
• “Is your gig any good?” Analysing job quality in the Australian platform-based food-delivery sector
• The limits of mutual aid: Emerging forms of collectivity among app-based transport workers in Indonesia
• Algorithmic content moderation: Technical and political challenges in the automation of platform governance
• The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life

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• ‘My body, my money’: SpankChain and the intersection between sex work and cryptocurrencies imaginaries

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