Online sex workers’ absence from gig economy discourse: The politics of seeing in the neoliberal sexual agenda

Abstract

The invisibility of online sex workers in gig economy discourse over the last decade taps into the historic absence of women from public spheres of debate. Despite this erasure, ‘camgirls’ are the original gig economy workers, with online sexual markets dating back to 1980s. By adapting feminist analysis of the male gaze, I offer workerist inquiry into the politics of seeing. This draws much needed attention to the experience of both women and ideological power in class composition analysis. To account for the absence of women from gig economy research and definitions, the focus of this article is on the gendered and feminised dynamics of invisibility. Specificity of the top-down function of ideology offers more detailed theoretical understanding of the political tensions between invisibility and visibility in the sex industry. This shifts the methods of workers’ inquiry to a more level focus on both top-down and bottom-up dynamics of class struggle. I argue the neoliberal sexual agenda controls a politics of seeing with three dominant gazes: the carceral gaze, the paternal gaze and the algorithmic gaze. Where the gaze is directed has a significant impact on the {un}freedom and {in}visibility of neoliberal subjects in the sex industry. However, class composition analysis from-below exposes a radical politics of visibility and freedom. Sex workers struggle tirelessly to be seen and creatively recentre the value of pleasure in the human experience. These struggles are critical given the United Kingdom’s current drive towards criminalisation. FOSTA-SESTA and the Online Safety Act 2023 will continue to make sexual services difficult to market and sell safely online. This has violent consequences for the lives and freedoms of this extremely marginalised population.

Introduction

Online sex work is increasingly recognised as gig economy labour. This follows the lead of sex work and digital labour scholars like Van Doorn and Velthuis (2018), Jones (2020) and Jarrett (2022). However, their general absence, and complete dismissal from definitions over the last decade, continues to offer useful feminist analysis. This feminised service sector is traditionally excluded from labour statistics and mainstream labour politics (Rand, 2019). Moreover, there’s a general lack of digital labour studies regarding women (James, 2022). Yet, cleaning and care services are more widespread than delivery and transport, despite their invisibility in political and trade union forums (Dazzi, 2019). The embalm of the male gig worker is embedded not just in popular rhetoric but government policy. The UK’s 2017 Mathew Taylor review claimed gig workers are ‘more likely to be male’, while an Royal Society of Arts report found 69% of gig works are male in Britain, without accounting for online sex work (O’Connor, 2017; Rand, 2019: 42–44). Such disappearance of the substantial cultural and economic relevance of this sector offers important insight into the politics of seeing established by the neoliberal sexual agenda.

Online Performers (OPs) sell sexual services online, including livestream ‘camming’, alongside photos, clips and customised content (Jones, 2020: 12). I adopt the more inclusive title OP, instead of camgirls, following Sex Workers’ Union representative Harper Thornhill. Invisibility often extends to platform owners, so there’s a lack of transparent data on the revenue camming generates. However, it’s undoubtedly a multi-billion-dollar industry. The August 2023 annual report filed by OnlyFans parent company, Fenix International Limited, revealed a Gross Site volume of US$5.55 billion, with a platform share revenue of US$1.09 billion (Ivancie, 2023). Platforms extract infrastructure rents from services, with cuts ranging from 20% to 66% (Srnicek, 2021). Despite extensive online visibility, OPs’ absence from discourse could stem from the discreet nature of this work. Platforms like Uber or Deliveroo emerged with media fanfare about market disruption and substantial venture capital investment. Dazzi (2019) poses this theory for the lack of attention paid to domestic services, highlighting the intimate nature of such work. But this misses the fact that domestic services are largely performed by women, and even when women are central to a narrative they are somehow still pushed into the background. Indeed, sex work is completely absent in Dazzi’s thorough report of the gig economy’s diverse sectors.

This issue has a long history. Karl Marx failed to adequately address the role of women for the development of capitalism. As Federici (2018: 469) argues, gender issues have a peripheral role in Capital, with an account that is descriptive rather than analytic, at times arising as moralistic remarks about factory work generating promiscuity, neglect of maternal duties and degradation of women’s ‘moral character’. In Volumes 1, 2, 3 of Capital a word search for ‘men’ returns 1344 results, whereas the word ‘women’ returns just 6 (Marx, 2020). Where ‘women’ does appear it’s always attached to ‘and children’, which infantilises and equates women’s status with that of a feeble child (Marx, 2020: 83). This ties into Federici’s (2018) argument that women are often constructed as victims in Capital, rather than agents of resistance or struggle. Sex workers, too, face a gaze which subjects them to binary victim/deviant categories, reflecting a historic, paternal yearning for virgins and whores.

While primarily a theoretical intervention, this article is based on multi-method PhD fieldwork, including critical discourse analysis of policy documents, video diaries, participant observation of adult-services platforms and sex worker events, alongside numerous in-depth interviews with OPs and members of the Sex Workers’ Union UK (SWU) between July 2022 and July 2023. SWU was instrumental in providing access to representatives and unionised participants. I developed an ethnographic relationship with Harper Thornhill, following the co-research methods of workers’ inquiry. Over the course of a year, I closely followed Harper’s work with SWU, which led to collaborative activist efforts including co-presenting at a conference, co-authoring an article and co-organising a conference to present evidence about the harms of criminalisation to Ofcom. My case study approach also included observation of several sex worker organisations alongside SWU, such as the cabaret show Sexquisite and the socialist cooperative Cybertease.

First, the gig economies origins will be explored, including myths, realities and an alternative story. This is followed by my contribution to workerist theory and class composition analysis (CCA), including a more expansive examination of capital’s ideological struggles from-above. This enables CCA of the neoliberal sexual agenda which controls a politics of seeing with three dominant gazes: the carceral gaze, the paternal gaze and the algorithmic gaze. Where the gaze is directed has a significant impact on the {un}freedom and {in}visibility of neoliberal subjects in the sex industry. Finally, I explore how CCA from-below exposes a radical counter-politics of visibility and freedom. Sex workers not only struggle tirelessly to be seen but produce artistic performance which recentres the value of pleasure in the human experience.

Part 1: origins and realities

A literature search for the gig economy’s origins offers competing discourses. Some identify its birth in the 2007–2009 financial crisis, as Silicon Valley tech entrepreneurs marketed Uber as the neoliberal antidote to economic instability (Devinatz, 2019; Vallas and Schor, 2020). Others describe this erosion of the employment contract as an old pattern within capitalism (De Ruyter and Brown, 2019; Kalleberg, 2018; Ostoj, 2021). Indeed, for Srnicek (2017: 49) ‘the lean platform model is an old and low-tech one’. Outsourcing of labour and piece-wages reflect much broader trends; early 20th-century ‘day laborers’ exemplified the prevailing precarity of the time; the 1970s saw contracting work gain prominence, championed by corporate giants like Nike; and the 1990s accelerated worker disposability as freelance and agency work flourished (Srnicek, 2017). Evidently the gig economy emerged from a long capitalist history which seeks to erode the safety net of employment. However, these summations of the gig economy’s origins miss one fundamental precursor.

The dominant sex work platform in the United Kingdom, AdultWork, was established in the 1990s (Hardy and Barbagallo, 2021). Seemingly ‘novel’ work transformations of platformisation were unfolding at least two decades before Uber emerged (Hardy and Barbagallo, 2021). Indeed, prostitution markets developed online before AdultWork, in the 1980s, as adult-services began advertising online (Hardy and Barbagallo, 2021). Hardy and Barbagallo (2021) argue platform labour scholars have much to learn from the sex industry given precarity has always been characteristic of feminised work. The first camming platform, Live Jasmine, was founded in Hungary in 2001 as webcams delivered new opportunities for profit. AdultWork and Live Jasmine foregrounded key characteristics of this sector: zero-hour contracts, self-employment status, digital surveillance, oversaturation of labour, searchable service lists and rating systems (Hardy and Barbagallo, 2021). Evidently, the gig economy existed before 2007, despite frequent academic claims like ‘platform-mediated gig work’ is ‘only a decade old’ emerging with ‘the great recession’ (Vallas and Schor, 2020: 274). As Srnicek (2017) argues, gig economy platforms are not novel tech start-ups but capitalist companies with deeply rooted capitalist characteristics.

Senft (2008) associates OP origins with social networking sites like LiveJournal, YouTube, MySpace and Facebook, as new forms of identity and community began emerging. Senft argues women were frustrated by the narrow roles available to them in popular culture. Do-it-yourself and confession culture offered a remedy, and OPs were the first to put it to the test. ‘Camgirls’, Senft (2008: 8) writes, ‘served as ‘‘beta testers’’ for a range of techniques that have been taken up at a global level on video sharing sites like YouTube, and social networking sites like Facebook’. They were pioneers of the self as a brand. Indeed, OPs did not just foreground the gig economy, they pre-empted the influencer culture which holds such economic weight today. Camming can facilitate ‘micro-celebrity’ as models adopt ‘theatrical authenticity, self-branding and celebrity’ to publicise their labour (Senft, 2008: 25/116). Like influencers, popular OPs sign brand deals to promote products. 2009 is credited with the emergence of YouTube stars, arguably following a path worn by sex workers who were some of the first to turn the camera inwardly and breathe life into the digital subject (Schwemmer and Ziewiecki, 2018). Camming therefore offers an interesting hybrid of gig economy and influencer labour that distinguishes them from other service workers – and perhaps confuses distinctions of the gig economy. Indeed, OPs are much more than erotic labourers on which the gig economy model was first tested. They have helped shape the Internet.

Part 2: theoretical framework

The erasure of OPs within labour frameworks calls for analysis rooted within the ideological frameworks which maintain the material and social relations of the capitalist system. My study draws needed attention to the experience of women in current workerist analysis. The methods of workers’ inquiry arose from the autonomist Marxist writing of Italian ‘operaismo’. These theorists articulated how class struggle emerges from the material relations of production and reproduction (Negri, 1979; Tronti, 2019). This enabled class composition analysis (CCA) of how technical composition (processes of labour, management, division and non-cooperation within production) influences the leap into political composition (collective forms of self-organisation and mobilisation within and outside trade unions) (Pitts, 2022).

However, foundational workerist Mario Tronti (2019) suggested capital’s domination would increasingly extend through market-mediated social relations beyond the factory walls. This influenced the feminist wing of workerism, who developed CCA to recentre the role of social reproduction in struggles. This focused analysis on more hidden domains like the home and community structures, including the networks of women and housewives which supported 20th-century industrial labour struggles (Dalla Costa and James, 1971; Federici, 1975). The workerist publication Notes from Below (NFB) has more explicitly specified social reproduction as an essential third element of CCA – social composition (Notes from Below Editors, 2018). This exposes how struggles emerge outside of technical composition, in relation to ‘state-provided social services, migration and borders’ (Notes from Below Editors, 2018). While NFB enriches workerism, more detailed analysis of the interplay between ideology and class composition is absent.

Social composition examines the impact of neoliberal policies on community structures and social divisions, but capital’s power extends through sophisticated mechanisms across various superstructures – including culture (Tronti, 2020). Early workerism dismissed ideology as a capitalist construction, leading to a narrow focus on production relations. By 1974, workerists recognised that technical composition is intertwined with culture and ideology (Mohandesi, 2013). This shifted analysis beyond exclusive emphasis on production struggles. While identifying neoliberalism as the dominant ideology is straightforward, understanding its extensive reach across the economy, state, culture and subjective experience poses a more intricate challenge. Accordingly, specificity of the top-down function of ideology offers more detailed theoretical understanding of the political tensions between {in}visibility and {un}freedom in the sex industry. Such understanding shifts the methods of workers’ inquiry to a more level focus on both top-down and bottom-up dynamics of class struggle.

Much like workers, capital has its own composition and ideological battle for dominance across the cultural, political and economic terrain. These sophisticated mechanisms of ‘self-defence’ ensure capital’s enduring influence (Tronti, 2020). Ideology binds these terrains together, which can be shaped top-down or bottom-up by the working class. The interaction between class composition and the capitalist terrains offers insight into the multi-layered dimensions which maintain/upset the hegemonic order. The politics of seeing shift between these different terrains, ensuring the neoliberal sexual agenda (NSA) dominates perceptions of sex work. By adapting feminist analysis of the male gaze, I offer workerist understanding of how this both excludes sex workers from gig economy discourse and shapes their identity as a distinct class.

The NSA selects which citizens can be made {in}visible and {un}free (Cruz, 2018; Hindess, 2001; LeBaron, 2015: 4). This replicates the neoliberal drive for freedom of the market, which tends to empower a minority elite while exacerbating inequality and division, over the mass-freedom of humanity. Several scholars explore the neoliberal continuum of freedom and unfreedom. Segal (2006) discusses how neo-paternalism penalises those not working for capital with morality discourses of unfreedom. LeBaron (2015) observes how neoliberal deregulation pulls informal reproductive labour markets into capital’s circuits, forming a ‘continuum of unfreedom’. Marxist scholar Cruz (2018) extends this framework, positing that unfree and free (sexual) labour exists along a continuum of capitalist relations. Cruz criticises criminalisation from anti-trafficking efforts, emphasising the need for bottom-up struggles which redefine labour freedom. {Un}freedom is both critical to the class composition of OPs and definitive of their class position, by shaping their generally precarious and stigmatised socioeconomic status.

I draw primarily on Barry Hindess’ (2001) arguments about unfreedom and Elibeth Bernstein’s (2007: 137) important discussion of ‘carceral feminism’. Hindess (2001) notes that socially deviant identities are subjected to liberal governance, with criminalised individuals experiencing severe constraints due to absent or punitive state intervention. This reflects a shift within modernity towards the politicisation of three citizenship categories: (1) hopeless cases are dismissed as products of uncivilised culture; (2) subjects of improvement identifies deviant members whose bad habits can be broken; and (3) ethos of welfare categorises deserving recipients (Hindess, 2001). Sex workers are pulled interchangeably between these categories, depending on which gaze they’re under.

Bernstein (2007) outlines consequences of the NSA, which attributes social problems to individuals, favours criminal justice over welfare and empowers the privileged. This propels anti-trafficking efforts using carceral approaches, masking capitalism’s role in conditioning slavery, wage slavery and entry into informal labour markets. I advance understanding of the NSA by breaking it down into different subjectivities within a scopic regime across the capitalist terrains. This exposes a politics of seeing with three dominant gazes: the carceral, paternal and algorithmic gaze. Where this gaze is directed has a significant impact on the {un}freedom and {in}visibility of neoliberal subjects in the sex industry.

Part 3: class composition from-above

The carceral gaze

Bernstein (2007) links the NSA to 1990s concerns about ‘modern slavery’, which united conservative evangelicals, Democrats, Republicans and mainstream feminists to fight trafficking by abolishing commercial sex. The carceral gaze emerged from the feminist and religious organisations driving this movement – a politics of seeing which saw the expanding ‘sex-saturated’ culture as harmful to women and traditional gender roles (Bernstein, 2007: 140). Such activists identified slavery in criminal markets outside capital’s control. This logic presents capitalism, and its free but moral markets, as the only antidote to exploitation. Abolitionists sought to address neoliberal harms by shifting responsibility from structural factors to individual, deviant men (Bernstein, 2007: 144). For abolitionists, sexual labour can never be consensual; sex workers are victims and decriminalisation will only empower traffickers (Comte, 2014). By viewing commercial sex as fundamentally organised by men through international crime networks, this disregards sex worker agency.

The carceral gaze sees the unfreedom of the sex industry as essential to protecting the freedom of women and children. This is specifically situated in the feminist activism of anti-sex work advocacy organisations on the cultural terrain. In the United Kingdom, prominent campaigners include CEASE, Not Buying It and Nordic Model Now! Such organisations draw on a different subjectivity and motivational force to the paternal gaze. Rather than being driven by inattention, political posturing or desire to regulate the feminised body, carceral feminism arises from legitimate rage against misogynistic violence. Men who buy sex are therefore viewed through the historic pain of women’s oppression. However, the carceral gaze narrowly defines sexuality through this same lens, overlooking sex worker autonomy and non-violent consumption. This is explicitly why sex work is often equated with sex trafficking, casting the seller as perpetual victim and the buyer as barbaric oppressor. Indeed, it’s perhaps no coincidence that conflation of sex work with slavery arose in the Victorian era, the same period in which feminist activism gained a foothold in the suffragettes. Victim discourses about the female prostitute/white slave justified state-sanctioned medical and carceral repression during this time (Smith, 2020).

Hedges (2024: 97) calls for redefinition of misandry as ‘felt anger, hostility or fear towards the patriarchal social order and its valorisation and/or expression in misogynistic and machismo behaviour’. The carceral gaze is rooted in this generational trauma born from centuries of gendered violence and enslavement. This is evident in the discourse of anti-sex work organisations. For instance, Nordic Model Now! (n.d.) declares ‘Prostitution was invented when men seized control & started the system of male supremacy known as patriarchy. . . Women will never have equality while prostitution is acceptable’. This erases any reality in which such work is chosen by women to provide for themselves independently of men. Moreover, this knotty feminist rage cannot separate punishing the patriarchy from legitimate forms of harm reduction. While advocating for the Nordic Model, a policy approach which criminalises buyers rather than sellers of sex, Nordic Model Now! (n.d.) makes the following statement: ‘Buying human beings for sex is harmful, exploitative and can never be safe. We need to reduce the demand that drives sex trafficking’. There is again no separation between sex work and a completely non-autonomous form of sexual exploitation. They also state ‘Decriminalising prostitution increases human trafficking’ (Nordic Model Now! n.d.). However, decriminalisation would allow for a more transparent labour market regulated by the state.

The carceral filters top-down through the cultural terrain via academia, advocacy efforts and cultural dialogue. In turn, the lobbying of anti-sex work organisations shapes policy approaches on the political terrain. This process introduced criminalisation of demand in the ‘Nordic Model’, originating in Sweden in 1999, which penalises third parties and buyers (Ellison, 2016). Tethered to neoliberal ideology, this approach mirrors freedom/unfreedom in both discourse and legislation. While consumers and third parties are categorised as unfree, sex workers are (somewhat) free to sell sex, though they can’t entirely evade the carceral gaze. This has a significant impact on all three elements of class composition. Research suggests the Nordic model jeopardises safety, amplifies policing, stigma and institutional control over sex worker bodies, fostering ‘de facto’ criminalisation (Vuolajärvi, 2022). Ethical third parties, such as friends, colleagues, brothels and even online platforms, can provide safer work environments for sexual services.

However, adult-services platforms still grapple with misogynistic violence, a reality fundamentally shaped by the neoliberal push for this labour market to remain informal and unfree. This (somewhat) free sex worker/unfree deviant consumer expression of the carceral gaze is frequently articulated by radical feminist Julie Bindel (2017):

. . . the sex trade is the elevation of the free market economy over the female body . . . A genuine human rights approach would {adopt} the abolitionist {Nordic} model . . . Framing blanket decriminalisation . . . as a ‘human rights’ issue for prostituted women is saying that there exists a sub-group of women who are only good for being used as masturbatory aids for men, and therefore need to be disease free, accessible and compliant . . . Why is the left in favour of the free market only when it is women’s bodies being bought and sold?

Bindel inaccurately invokes free market discourse to justify her position. Free market neoliberalism uses deregulation to shift markets beyond state control, enabling operations without checks and balances. This allows economic actors to reduce state power, evade taxes, destabilise the economy and prioritise profits over secure employment (Srnicek, 2017). Decriminalisation does not propose complete deregulation of sex work but advocates for regulations which prioritise workers’ rights and ethical consumption practices. Contrary to Bindel’s supposition, the Nordic model ensures that sex work remains within the deregulated and free market idealogue of neoliberalism as an undervalued, informal labour market – or in her words a ‘sub-group of women’. This rationale exposes technical composition to greater violence, marginalisation and institutionalised stigma (Comte, 2014; Cruz, 2018; Vuolajärvi, 2022). By endorsing the Nordic Model, Bindel is, in effect, advocating for free market capitalism. This reproduces the NSA; first, by ignoring sex workers’ struggle for decriminalisation; and second, by subjecting particular markets/individuals to freedom and others to unfreedom.

The UK’s Online Safety Act 2023 (OSA) is realising this agenda by making platforms liable for advertising of full-service (prostitution) and sex trafficking and identifying pornography as a ‘priority’ danger. This legislation is partially driven by anti-sex work organisations like CEASE, Nordic Model Now! and Not Buying It (2023), who’s active social media advocacy represents just one pillar of their lobbying efforts. The OSA responds to growing concerns about the threat of pornography to children and adults. Tiidenberg and van der Nagel (2020) explain how moral panics spread rapidly through the mass media during substantial periods of change and uncertainty. Such uncertainty is undoubtedly embedded into the current cost of living crisis driven by Covid-19 and geopolitical conflicts. Moral panics are usually accompanied by concerns that technology is responsible for rising criminal behaviours – rather than the general violence, exploitation and misery produced by the capitalist system.

Tiidenberg and van der Nagel (2020: 32) say sex panics generate a multitude of fears raging from ‘“unprecedented” sexualization of children to “epidemic levels” of abortion, teen pregnancies, masturbation, or sexually transmitted disease (STD) outbreaks, linking the above to pornography . . . in mystical and illogical ways’. Moral panic has historically silenced sex worker oppression. In the Victorian era, such panics accompanied narratives holding sex workers responsible for disease (Smith, 2020). This sector still elicits powerful responses of disgust due to associations with bodily degradation, dirt, poison, disease contamination and death (Smith and Mac, 2018). Indeed, Bindel’s horror about a prostituted ‘sub-group of women’ exposes a deep repulsion within the carceral gaze.

The association of disgust with the overtly sexed feminised body is bound by complex socio-cultural legacies. Shame is a hangover of religious institution, with both women and men historically taught that sex is wrong, dirty and sinful. Smith (2020) suggests the carceral gaze intensified during the 16th century as the Protestant Reformation and early modern capitalism unfolded. Moral panics increasingly blamed sex workers for social disorder and disease. Smith (2020: 48) explains sexual labour was sinful ‘precisely because it was un-protestant’. This illustrates how the NSA draws on problematic ideological frameworks. Subsequently, the historic shaming of sexuality continues to haunt the feminist psyche. In this sense, the carceral gaze holds up a mirror to the explicitly gendered and fraught relationship with sex established by the church.

The paternal gaze

Recent Conservative leadership exposes the hypocrisy of sex panics, both in the OSA and modern slavery agenda’s attack on freedoms and labour rights (Robinson, 2015). Concerns about white (sex worker) slaves have become more pronounced under a government supporting free-market neoliberalism and routine criminalisation of sex workers. For instance, in 2017 the Metropolitan Police arrested a woman on immigration charges after she reported her rape, a common threat for migrant sex workers dealing with police (Smith and Mac, 2018). This demonstrates how the NSA troubles social composition, by establishing a carceral state which polices rather than protects. Moreover, it underscores Bernstein’s (2007) argument that this agenda separates the roots of exploitation from the corporate and political institutions driving it. Sex panics ensure political actors remain disinterested in policy approaches that enhance sex worker freedoms, as such a stance may be politically unappealing. Instead, the NSA drives policy towards the Nordic model despite substantial evidence against it (Comte, 2014; Vuolajärvi, 2022). The politics of seeing are therefore characterised by blindness to empirical evidence and paternalistic inclination to categorise victim/deviant subjects of governance and citizenship.

Neoliberalism establishes the means for necessary paternalistic control, determining autonomous agents capable of managing their affairs (Hindess, 2001). While sex workers can choose to work, their technical composition is limited to isolated environments like digital platforms or their homes (outside illegal brothels), effectively reducing their autonomy. The term paternalism signifies implicit social hierarchies within patriarchal cultures, where the male head of families is deemed ‘responsible for the welfare of subordinates and dependents’ (Thompson, n.d.). This reflects what Bernstein (2007: 144) terms ‘symbolic . . . male-headship’. Subsequently, the ‘masculinist institutions’ of big business, the state and the police assume the role of supposed allies and saviours of sex workers and trafficking victims (Bernstein, 2007). In so doing, the paternal gaze imparts regimes of care through misogynistic paradigms of violence on the political terrain.

Authoritarian means are therefore legitimised as a vehicle for the autonomous capacities of deviant populations (Hindess, 2001). Paternalism also echoes stereotypical constructions of fatherhood concerned with daughters’ sexual behaviour. This is still an entrenched cultural stereotype. On YouTube a pattern emerges of the paternal guardian of sexuality. This is evident in several viral videos. When a young girl tells her father she wants a boyfriend he says: ‘You’re not going to get a boyfriend, you’re going to be a nun, you’re going to work for Jesus’ (Daily Mail, 2016). A second video depicts a father making his daughter recite ‘I will not have any boyfriends’, while in another a man tells his three-year-old daughter she can have a male friend, but she cannot call him her boyfriend (AVF Mobile, 2015; The Whartons, 2018). These tropes are drawn from an antiquated patriarchal history – with young boys escaping such viral discourses online.

The paternal gaze defines what’s immoral and deserving of intervention, producing a gendered politics of {in}visibility on the political terrain. Such governance emerged as modern capitalism reimagined citizenship through scientific reasoning, ‘rationality and moral autonomy’ (Hindess, 2001: 98). Foucault located man as an ‘ambiguous epistemological position’ in his supposition of man as ‘an object of knowledge and a subject that knows’ (Hindess, 2001). This reflects the progressive shift to science as church and state began to fracture. During this transition, the figure of man was constituted by the qualities of rationality and moral autonomy. Swaine (2016) identifies this as an essential characteristic of paternalism, which tends to view the female victim as a subject of little knowledge or expertise, while the superior male protector is granted authority, imperative to act and assumed expertise.

In the Victorian era, victim discourses transformed sex workers into ‘objectified subjects’ studied by new academic fields like public health and anthropology (Smith, 2020: 66). Social initiatives aimed to transform the prostitute into a productive, if not reproductive, citizen (Smith, 2020). This allowed the bourgeois to reclaim sex workers as servants. This reflects a warring politics of seeing, identifying both hopeless cases to be ostracised or subjects of improvement as victims of slavery. Hence, sex worker deviance exists historically on a shifting continuum, enabling state actors to control their {in}visibility and {un}freedom. Before online sex markets emerged, workers were deviant both due to growing morality discourses and because they operated within reproductive markets independent of capitalism. This replicates the neoliberal ideology of ‘desirable’ market freedom over undesirable markets outside capital’s control, such as the drugs trade (Hindess, 2001: 97). Markets, like people, can be free while others must remain an unfree source of profit.

The figure of man is not just an epistemic or cultural paradigm but a political construct (Hindess, 2001). Hindess alludes to gender but ignores how this construction, particularly in the Victorian era, was juxtaposed by deconstruction of women’s sexual autonomy (Smith, 2020). If man was constituted by reason, rationality, and autonomy, then woman was man’s opposite. The figure of woman is irrational, unreasonable, uneducated, unfree and undeserving of autonomy. If ‘man is essentially free’, even if this freedom is difficult to achieve, then woman is essentially unfree (Hindess, 2001: 99). Women’s issues are also not worthy of scientific reasoning. In this context, the feminised sex worker – generally considered a woman – is corrupted by bad culture and needs reassimilation by rational man. These attitudes persist, both in paternal treatment of sex workers and their invisibility in policy, media and academic discourse.

James (2022) identified less than 1% of 7-million gig economy articles were female-centred. The ‘varieties of platform labour’ is at best approached with a dash of female nuance to earlier masculinist studies, or at worst women are treated as ‘separate sociological debate best left to feminist scholars’ (James, 2022). This is demonstrable in the range of feminist studies which identifies OP labour as gig work (Jarrett, 2022; Jones, 2020; Stegeman, 2024; Tiidenberg and Van Der Nagel, 2020). In conversation, a male digital labour scholar raised a valid concern that the largely female online sex industry might reject interviews with men. Indeed, discussions about technical composition include experiences of misogynistic abuse that may be difficult to discuss with a male researcher. Subjectivity matters to this community and thus requires careful consideration. However, OP invisibility cannot solely be attributed to this.

While the ‘male gaze’ relates to ideas of spectatorship and objectification within media representation, it can be repurposed to examine how women’s issues are addressed, framed and ignored through ‘the figure of man’ (Hindess, 2001). Mulvey (1975) coined this term to describe representations of women in film from a heterosexual male perspective. This has often been applied analytically to porn as a vehicle for male pleasure (Lieb, 2015; Tehranian, 2018). However, the male gaze can be re-examined as an instrument of inattention. Four important themes are evident. First, the male gaze produces man as spectator and therefore influences what is – and therefore isn’t – looked at. Who gets to look, and in which social group looking is concentrated, can exacerbate the gender gap. Second, the male gaze reproduces the central role of the male protagonist. The figure of man also produces seemingly objective reasoning over what issues are important (Hindess, 2001). This could lead to inaccurate characterisations of essentially male experiences, like gig work.

Third, there is violence in the male gaze. Mulvey (1975: 13) writes: ‘the female figure poses a deeper problem . . . her lack of a penis, implying a threat of castration and hence unpleasure’. Women are often depicted in dangerous situations from which they need to be saved by men. Violence is hence a fantasy and material consequence of the male gaze. Finally, the male gaze is unconscious. Mulvey indicates the process of unconscious looking is forged through the ‘dominant order’ of patriarchy. Hindess’s (2001) account shows how ideology shapes subjectivity, giving rise to unconscious bias. Indeed, the paternal logics of saving women from the sex industry is rooted in an ideological frame which views itself as moral. But the governance of unfreedom is saturated with violence, as state inaction can have extremely harmful consequences (Hindess, 2001).

Systems of dominance are also built with conscious intent. LeBaron (2015: 2) emphasises that feminist political economy analysis of unfree labour must confront ‘deepening biases in macro-economic policy and shifting gender and racial orders’. The paternal gaze consciously embeds sex workers into this gendered system of governance. This creates deeply rooted sociolegal, cultural and political norms that fail to define sexual labour as legitimate work (Rand, 2019). Subsequently, this feminised form of ‘bad’ work is ignored due to the ‘structural embeddedness of stigma’, reflected in government claims about gig workers essentially male character (Rand, 2019: 42–44). Feminised work is often ignored and devalued, as Marxist feminists infamously argued about domestic labour (Federici, 1975). This drives desire to eradicate sex workers entirely, evident in a recent parliamentary discussion where Lord Bird declared: ‘I look forward to the day when we do not have sex workers’ to which Lord Sharpe responded, ‘I suspect that we will never get rid of it entirely, which is of course regrettable’ (UK Parliament, 2023). The paternal gaze conceals this agenda through a politics of seeing which looks away.

This reflects a fundamental tension within neoliberal politics. Freedom is moralised into a ‘double meaning’ of work (Segal, 2006: 333). The ‘new paternalist’ state actors claim those who fail or do not participate in work are not genuinely free and must undergo re-socialisation (Segal, 2006: 334). Freedom thus requires efficiency, while failure indicates an inability to be free. Sex work is more excessively troubled by this double meaning of freedom/unfreedom; they are failures because they lack morality, they fail to work because their labour is not considered work and they fail to be efficient because sex work reflects motivation to operate outside capitalist control – even within competitive online markets flexibility and autonomy are key drivers. Technology offers novel tools to further this agenda.

The algorithmic gaze

Graham (2010: 217) describes the ‘algorithmic gaze’ within the context of new military technologies as a violent fantasy of economic and political actors to establish sentient robot warriors. This reflects a pattern within Orientalist visual culture to render Arab cities intrinsically devious and deserving of the penetrative gaze of Western geopolitical power. This dehumanising freedom of the West is contrasted by the unfree ‘lives, deaths and citizenship’ of these nations (Graham, 2010: 218). The visibility of the algorithmic gaze is therefore characterised by an oppressive, contradictory politics of {in}visibility:

. . . the algorithmic gaze of Western military techno-science and the immersed, voyeuristic gaze of the video game player, paradoxically . . . bring with them . . . geopolitics of differential exposure and (in)visibility . . . Graham (2010: 218)

This exposes a violent politics of seeing rooted in the gamified surveillance of military and commercial industry. Algorithms may be inhuman, but they reflect the subjectivity of the human actors that build them. Accordingly, the carceral and paternal politics of the NSA get sucked into the circuits of capital on the economic terrain. Kotliar (2020) draws an explicit connection between the algorithmic and colonial gaze – as big data becomes the new raw resource for colonial appropriation. Algorithms are programmed to see, depict and understand ‘the Other’. This affects users’ freedom, liberty and autonomy. Algorithms thus offer novel ways of seeing while simultaneously reflecting old power relations which categorise {un}freedom of racialised, gendered and deviant populations.

The algorithmic gaze is also characterised by failure ‘to see’ or ‘capture’ inherently situational or social meanings (Parvin, 2019: 6). Despite claims ‘to reason’ made by producers of algorithms, their oppressive inadequacy emerges through deeper interrogation (Parvin, 2019: 8). Similarly, Newlands (2021: 732) discusses how the ‘algorithmic gaze’ allows economic actors to establish systems of surveillance which dictate visibility. The gaze of technology is therefore a social relation which reflects the material conditions of neoliberal ideology. This establishes divisive governance of the digital public sphere.

Recent porn studies research illustratres how economic actors control sex worker visibility (Paasonen, 2015; Paasonen et al., 2019). Intense visibility of porn faces a paradox of invisibility, threatened by cultural erasure as bad content (Paasonen, 2015). Technology thus polices the NSA by limiting porn on social media and app markets (Paasonen, 2015: 560). This prompted development of filtering software like Google’s SafeSearch in 2009 to block pornographic content (Monea, 2023). Economic actors now function as cultural gatekeepers, shaping power dynamics between platforms and users. Initiatives like SafeSearch predate punitive measures against platforms hosting pornography, such as America’s 2018 FOSTA-SESTA bill, which holds platforms accountable for sex trafficking. The OSA similarly targets pornography as an online harm, incentivising social media and fintech platforms to further exclude sex workers, who rely on these infrastructures for safe advertising and payments.

Technical composition is increasingly threatened by such carceral governance and content moderation. Social media platforms continue to erase and/or make sex worker content less visible, a practice known as shadowbanning (Are, 2022). Algorithms search for nudity and references to sex work. This enables a tangible experience of invisibility, in which the deactivation of an OP effectively murders their digital double. This is indicative of the violence imbued into the algorithmic gaze, a process which affords ubiquitous surveillance to the politics of seeing. Shadowbanning polices the agency of sex workers while ignoring misogynistic abuse, which continues to flourish (Are, 2020). Despite illegal behaviours like image-based sexual violence, where content is shared without consent, abusive consumers are not subjected to surveillance on adult-services platforms. The algorithmic gaze also reaffirms the class system, given the sexualised content of social media influencers does not face the same {in}visibility and {un}freedom. This creates uneven experiences of technical and social composition within the creator sector.

Porn is often disregarded as an important element of culture (Paasonen and Saarenmaa, 2023). There is a tendency to exclude films/videos classified as porn in public archives which enables a ‘a cleansing of sorts’ (Paasonen and Saarenmaa, 2023: 337). This is connected to the development of ‘highbrow and lowbrow culture’ which creates systems of value (Paasonen and Saarenmaa, 2023). Sex work is therefore not just bad work, as Rand (2019) importantly shows, but bad culture. Paasonen et al. (2019) show how the hashtag ‘Not Safe For Work’ – #NSFW – is used to tag and regulate sexual content. This creates a politics of seeing which marks sex and sexuality through a tempting but dangerous gaze.

First, classification and boundary work tags ‘unsafe’ content like porn which limit its searchability (Paasonen et al., 2019). This tag can then be used to completely ban all adult content following content policy shifts. Platforms like Tumblr weaponised #NSFW to eject sex workers despite their considerable role in the popularisation of this site. Content is screened by users, who police the unfreedom of sex workers alongside algorithms. Second, #NSFW is an engagement device which conflates sex and pornography with risk and therefore constructs a barrier against inappropriate communication. Third, #NSFW is a framing device used to define the governance of sexuality on social media. The management of content like online porn creates social hierarchies and divisions which limits the autonomy and careers of individuals engaged with commercial sex in explicit and sometimes violent ways.

By marking sex as deviant and dangerous, platforms further isolate and put sex workers at risk of unsafe labour practices. Despite being early adopters of new technology, sex workers thus find themselves discarded by platforms which benefit from their labour until it becomes commercially risky (Hardy and Barbagallo, 2021). This can remove OPs from important networks of support and economic participation. Moreover, the female body is subjected to harsher surveillance and content moderation – with imagery of male nipples allowed while female nipples are banned. My research participants suggested the algorithmic gaze is also moralistically motivated, as fintech platforms’ terms and conditions guard against ‘immoral’ use. The politics of seeing shape such definitions and code binary categories into filtering systems. This engenders a salacious yet oppressive algorithmic gaze, echoing the violent paternalism embedded in the NSA.

OPs also shared how adult-services platforms actively participate in this process of classifying, dividing and excluding. The algorithmic gaze categorises and racializes OPs, while adhering to pornography regulations that control expressions of female sexuality. Search lists favour white-cis women conforming to beauty norms. The algorithmic gaze therefore empowers platforms to grant freedom to desirable performers. This aligns with Hindess’ argument that desirable freedom is critical to the liberal governance of states and markets (Hindess, 2001). Moreover, this context is supported by the carceral gaze, which ensures sex work remains informal and unregulated. The social composition of OPs is often determined by reproductive needs related to mental health, disability, or dependent others. When access is threatened, so are their lives, bodies and support networks.

Part 4: class composition from-below

The politics of visibility

The class composition of OPs demonstrates how workers confront the politics of seeing. This struggle shapes their identity as a distinct class. Research into resistance across sectors like Uber, Deliveroo, Amazon Mechanical Turk, RideHail and FindWork, as well as remote African gig workers, is extensive (Allen-Robertson, 2017; Anwar and Graham, 2020; Aslam and Woodcock, 2020; Cameron and Rahman, 2022; Cant, 2019). Jarrett (2022) acknowledges OPs as gig workers, highlighting networked community and resistance via online forums and warning systems for abusive clients. However, Jarrett’s discussion of union organisation does not include OPs, reflecting limited studies in this area – a gap my fieldwork addresses.

Sex workers have long resisted criminalisation: medieval European brothel workers striked against poor conditions; 15th-century Bavarian prostitutes challenged sinful perceptions of their labour; in 1859, a London prostitute opposed moral judgements by the police; and in 1917, 200 San Francisco prostitutes protested against brothel closures (Smith and Mac, 2018). The NSA continues to enforce carceral solutions and dismantle sex-worker aid organisations, ignoring the harms of anti-trafficking laws (Smith and Mac, 2018). Sex workers persist in demanding rights and protections, creating a radical, bottom-up politics of visibility within class composition.

Technical composition

The politics of visibility within technical composition is largely expressed through resistance to the algorithmic gaze. Adult-services platforms control visibility for profit, social media platforms shadowban content and fintech platforms blacklist OPs. Sex workers are aware that more visibility means better income and traffic into their webcam pages. They leverage algorithms for their own gain, including several hacks to push themselves to the top of search-lists, boost their rating on platforms and drive more traffic. These emerging tactics demonstrate that the algorithmic gaze is dynamically negotiated and resisted. In addition, OPs share tactics to resist invisibility, as social media platforms categorise them as deviant and unfree. In this case, algorithms are evaded through a variety of tactics which disguise identity. This includes a counter-politics of hashtag and content manipulation to conceal nudity and sex work references. This enables OPs to evade the violent exclusion of the algorithmic gaze.

Social composition

Sex workers have historically forged ‘communities of mutual aid’ (Smith and Mac, 2018). Today, this develops through web forums, social media and offline networking events like CamCon (Jones, 2020). My fieldwork corroborates these findings, with WhatsApp groups and online forums facilitating networked solidarity. This challenges the isolation and division of the NSA. This is a common finding in workerist studies (Aslam and Woodcock, 2020; Cant, 2019). Organisations like National Ugly Mugs have developed digital warning systems to blacklist the phone numbers of abusive consumers. In the absence of state intervention under the NSA, these networks are critical. OPs also repurpose their technical composition, sending warnings through social media to further guard against misogynistic violence. They draw on these networks to support each other in times of economic precarity. When one participant struggled to pay the deposit for a flat, sex worker communities offered to chip in. Networked solidarity therefore builds the foundation for class formation, which can be repurposed for political composition.

Political composition

The individualised struggle against technical composition, alongside networked solidarity within social composition, facilitates grassroots organisation. Sex workers mobilise without trade unions but also experience broader collectivisation through sex-worker-led organisations like Sex Workers’ Union (SWU). This is raising sex worker visibility in politics and the media. SWU successfully blocked parliament from closing strip clubs. Indeed, attempts to erase sex workers is an inherent part of their politicisation. The politics of seeing thus construct OPs as a class with a collective oppositional agenda. SWU achieves this by unifying workers from different sectors. While SWU provided access for fieldwork, gaining trust is difficult due to the carceral gaze within academia. This reflects tense negotiation between voices seeking to end commercial sex and those striving to improve labour rights. It’s crucial to acknowledge which voices get attention in this context. Sex worker-led organisations must drive the conversation. Building trust with this community and clarifying how academia can reciprocally contribute to lived experiences is critical.

Sex workers are also engaged in an international project of visibility, aligning with findings on international coalitions of gig workers (Gawer and Srnicek, 2021). Networks in the sex industry are more established due to a longer history of precarity and resistance. The European Sex Workers’ Alliance (ESWA) dates back to 2002 and represents 100 + organisations in 30 countries. Indeed, it’s around the time ESWA began organising that Bernstein (2007) identified carceral feminism. In December 2023, I co-presented with SWU online representative, Harper Thornhill, at the ESWA conference in Brussels. We emphasised the need for ethical labour standards in platform regulation, challenging stigmatising legislation and exploitative gig economy logics. Ethical co-research that amplifies sex workers’ voices and benefits participants was stressed by ESWA. The organisers also arranged a meeting at the European Parliament, where they communicated the extensive physical and mental harms caused by government inaction. The conference drew sex workers and researchers across Europe, including both offline/online service providers in a powerful, transnational solidary network.

Sex workers resist the NSA through political performance. Sexquisite is a UK-based cabaret show run by OPs, which platforms sex worker artists ranging from pole dance and burlesque to political poetry and music. I conducted participant observation and interviewed the founder of Sexquisite, and its host, April Fiasco, who’s also an OP. Sexquisite often begins shows with a call to arms, advertising street protests, marches or educating about the harms of criminalisation – including the Online Safety Act. Sexquisite also collaborates with sex worker artists and industry performers to create theatre shows which challenge the algorithmic gaze. This includes critique of shadowbanning and #NSFW. Interviews exposed how Sexquisite is deeply informed by a politics of visibility which ensures sex workers are seen, heard and valued both in their unique expressions of erotic and political performance and their use of the cultural sphere to educate the public. This is evident in the following statements:

Florence: We’re putting sex workers on stage. . . rather than hiding it. The bigger we build a community, it’s like we’re all together, it’s like we’re an army, like you can’t take us all down. Sex workers have been ashamed, stigmatised and criminalised for centuries, and it’s like this war against women, so that’s political.

April: Sexquisite is inherently political, just existing, having a show where all the performers are sex workers and we’re celebrating them. . . it brings us to the forefront, and it gives us a stage where we’re like. . . we’re here, we exist and we’re not defined by what we do for a job.

Being seen is critical under a gaze which seeks to disappear their struggles, livelihoods and economic participation. Maedb Joy’s description of the need to build an army of solidarity reflects a refusal of the violent neoliberal logics of carceral feminism, paternal inattention and the algorithmic governance of sexuality. Italian workerists’ stressed that ‘refusal of work’, characterised by anti-capitalist acts of political sabotage, is critical to CCA (Dalla Costa and James, 1971; Negri, 1979). This solidarity – despite extensive isolation – and visibility – despite the dominant order of invisibility – invokes this refusal. The NSA is a global project of both state and capital. Sex workers may live under the constant threat of being ejected from the online publics they fundamentally shaped, but there is radical beauty in the political art produced by ‘power and solidarity’ in ‘the sex work community’ (Sexquisite, n.d.). These visibility politics offer important lessons about both labour struggles and cultural hegemony – OPs are simultaneously gig economy workers engaged in a struggle against criminalisation and artists’ struggling for freedom of expression.

The politics of freedom

The NSA may be shaped from-above by the political, economic and cultural terrain, but it’s also counteracted by a subjectivity from-below that repurposes its logics. This enables a politics of freedom both sculpted by, and resistant too, neoliberalism. Sex-positive feminist Angela Jones (2020) highlights this contradiction. Jones claims academics are often blind to how neoliberal ideology benefits marginalised subjects. Workers develop resilient communities of support in response to neoliberal policy, enabling resistance to government intervention. Jones (2020: 236) acknowledges camsite owners benefit disproportionately from neoliberal capitalism. However, the political choice to adopt ideologies of individual freedom can be crucial to sex workers navigating exploitative, precarious environments where state violence is normalised. This corresponds to Jones’ (2020) claim that neoliberalism drives the struggle for ‘human and sexual freedom’.

Similarly, Jarrett’s (2022) Marxist feminist framework exposes another neoliberal politics of freedom. Jarret stresses that digital labour does not meet Marx’s conditions for alienation. Marx indicated this occurs when an essential character is stamped onto the commodity, which subverts workers’ experience of production. However, Jarrett points out digital labour does not produce a fixed commodity. Instead, workers utilise personal assets, like their bodies or cars, and are thus assetisized rather than commoditised. This reflects a general drive towards financialization and asset ownership within the gig economy business model (Jarrett, 2022; Srnicek, 2017). Jarrett supports workerist discourses about refusal of the most alienated forms of work, as value is not solely defined by the enterprise that exploits it (Negri, 1979). Assetisized labour hence remains bound to ‘inalieniable aspects of the self, such as subjectivity and passion’ (Jarrett, 2022: 136). This subjectivity is crafted by the logics of neoliberal capitalism, but also enables meaningful experiences of work ‘both inside capitalism and outside its logics’ (Jarrett, 2022: 161) This nuanced analysis of neoliberal subjectivity locates the agency and cultural value of online sex work. Jarrett opens space for a politics of freedom searching for more autonomous and creative experiences of work.

This invokes anti-work discourses. Carlisle (2021) contends that anti-work frameworks can challenge rigid perspectives in anti-trafficking and labour rights organisations. Anti-work politics involves breaking free from work ethic coercion, resisting overworking and rejecting a culture that assigns moral value based on ableist paradigms (Carlisle, 2021). Carlisle suggests sex work enables anti-work calls for reduced working hours and increased freedom. This search for meaningful work outside the 9-to-5 confines of the standard employment contract arose frequently during fieldwork. Entry into sex work is influenced by a range of socioeconomic and personal factors that makes its accessibility important. OPs enjoy the creativity and performative elements of camming, alongside freedom to set their own hours. Commercial sex offers critical flexibility to manage a range of disability, mental health and care needs. As such, sex work offers reproductive benefits both to consumers and sex workers themselves. This supports important findings in other female-centred gig economy studies, which expose how uneven gender divisions of reproductive labour are a crucial driver (James, 2022).

Another finding of such research is that ‘gig work sourced online [offers] an opportunity to avoid gendered patterns prevalent in traditional workplace organisational structures’ (Churchill and Craig, 2019: 748 cited in James, 2022). I found that dominatrix OPs use their platforms to offer radical resistance to traditional, gendered conventions. This opens critical space to challenge toxic masculinity. In addition, non-binary, trans-women and queer male workers reach for feminised labour for similar reproductive motives but additionally experience validation by being celebrated for their sexual orientation or gender identity. The use of sex work to manage reproductive needs may reflect the intense inequality and shrinking welfare support driven by neoliberal ideology. However, it also shows what type of work becomes valuable to those marginalised by this system. Sex work enables individuals to express creative artistry through sexual services. Understanding the merit of this work offers an opportunity to redefine understanding of art and culture. Creativity can be expressed in many ways, including through sex. This portrays a radical politics of freedom that recentres the value of pleasure in the human experience. This is the foundation of anti-work discourses, not because sex work is not work but because it redefines the meaning of work itself.

Conclusion

By adapting feminist analysis of the male gaze, I offer workerist analysis to the politics of seeing. I examine the impact of three dominant gazes within the NSA, which shapes the {in}visibility and {un}freedom of sex workers. The carceral gaze views the unfreedom of the sex industry as essential to protecting women and children (Bernstein, 2007). This logic neglects agency, clouded by feminist rage which conflates trafficking with sex work. The paternal gaze positions itself as both saviour and regulator of sexual autonomy. Its influence over the state allows this gaze to define what’s immoral and deserving of attention. The algorithmic gaze further contributes to marginalisation. Social media and fintech platforms mark sex as deviant, isolating and endangering workers. Despite this, sex workers resist their technical composition by evading and leveraging algorithms, building networked solidarity and engaging in powerful grassroots expressions of political composition. SWU is increasingly representing OPs and engaging remarkably with sex worker visibility, while ESWA is advancing an international project. Sexquisite portrays how artistic expression can be directed towards visibility politics. This counters the top-down influence of the NSA, emphasising a subjectivity from-below that redefines work. Jarrett’s insights on inalienable labour offers nuanced understanding of neoliberal subjectivity. This highlights a radical politics of freedom within OP labour centred on pleasure and autonomy. These struggles are critical given the United Kingdom’s current drive towards criminalisation. Pornography regulations recognise sex trafficking victims but ignore consensual sex workers. The Online Safety Act 2023 will make sexual services increasingly difficult to market and sell safely online. The gaze once again disappears the protagonist of a story and chooses the object of spectatorship. In turn, sex workers are robbed of their visibility – an absence which has violent consequences.