Author ORCID Identifier

https://orcid.org/0009-0001-6033-5238

Date Available

5-14-2025

Year of Publication

2025

Document Type

Master's Thesis

Degree Name

Master of Arts (MA)

College

Arts and Sciences

Department/School/Program

Geography

Faculty

Matthew W. Wilson

Faculty

Matthew Zook

Faculty

Shui-yin Sharon Yam

Abstract

This thesis examines the labor of platformed sex workers, positioning their experiences as a site for understanding the entanglement of multiple intersecting economies. Through qualitative interviews, it explores how sex workers navigate platform infrastructures, manage audience engagement, and contend with visibility as both an economic necessity and a site of risk. Drawing on theories of emotional labor, visibility labor, and platform governance, the project highlights how sex work on digital platforms is shaped by overlapping systems of economic extraction, technological constraint, and cultural regulation. Platformed sex work emerges here as a layered and context-specific practice—embedded within creator ecologies, attraction economies, and infrastructural regimes. By attending to the affective, logistical, and infrastructural demands of this work, this thesis reveals how platformed sex workers develop contingent, strategic, and often improvisational practices within an environment structured by algorithmic control, moral governance, and precarity.

Digital Object Identifier (DOI)

https://doi.org/10.13023/etd.2025.91

Funding Information

Research was supported by funding from the Barnhart-Withington and Block Fund

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