Using the online practices of sex workers as a focal point, this project examines how the public/private dichotomy is governed and complicated within Social Networking Sites (SNS). It concentrates in particular on Facebook and FetLife, arguing that the former functions as a normative public and the latter as a counterpublic due, in part, to the differing regulations each site implements regarding sex work. The project centers on a qualitative study of the rhetorical strategies online sex workers use to self-identify and self-advocate, as well as the tactics they employ to maintain privacy and avoid the phenomenon of “context collapse.” Through the results of this study, I discuss the theoretical and practical implications of end user cyber security tactics, considering the scholarship on digital surveillance and privacy. In addressing these strategies, it underscores the importance of privacy specifically for vulnerable populations of digital publics.
Keyword: sex work
Every Little Thing He Does: Entrepreneurship and Appropriation in the Magic Mike Series
This essay analyses the theatricalized performance of stripping in the popular films Magic Mike (2013; dir. Steven Soderbergh) and its sequel, Magic Mike XXL (2015; dir. Gregory Jacobs). Following a critical dance studies approach that attends to the intersection of body and gesture with socio-political, historical, and economic structures, I suggest theatricalized sexual labour in these films reveals the racial exclusions from the ideology of entrepreneurship. Considering the appropriation of black aesthetics in Magic Mike XXL’s performances of striptease, the film seeks to evaporate the spectre of race, that is, the way the white fantasy of the entrepreneurial subject is supported by the appropriation of racialized and especially black labour.
Coerced Performances? Trafficking, Sex Work, and Consent
Since the millennium, there has been a growing global awareness about the business of human trafficking as it has exponentially expanded in relation to the neoliberal economic climate, the vast displacement of people through wars and conflict, and the growth of tourism and e-commerce. Because theatre and performance studies work through an epistemology of embodied…
Mediations around an Alternative Concept of “Work”: Re-imagining the Bodies of Survivors of Trafficking
When I was rescued by the police and put in a shelter home, I felt angry. I did not know any other work. Before, I just had to lend my body and the work got done. I got paid, without having done anything (Poolish jokhon amake uddhar kore Shelter home e dilo, khoob raag hoechhilo.…