Platform sex work: Examining the labour process within online sex work

Whilst the gig economy has received widespread media attention, the logics and practices that underpin it - notably the centrality of digital platforms as the infrastructure through which actors meet and where power is exercised - are spreading out into areas of our economy, shaping the lives of workers in ways that has been largely left out of broader debates within digital labour studies.

This research project seeks to address this literature gap, looking at digital labour platforms involved in the mediation of digital sex work, defined as forms of sex work 'organized by online platforms acting as intermediaries between workers and their employers and clients' (Huws , et al., 2018 p.115 in Rand, 2020). Specifically, I will look at the relationship between firms and workers and the role the platform plays as the nexus of the socio-technical practices and rules through which power and agency is exercised within the labour process.

The research mainly adopts Labour Process Theory (LPT) to analyse practices of managerialism and organisation as they are enacted by sex work platforms. The application of LPT has been employed widely within the study of ICTs to the workplace (Wood, 2020; Kellogg, et al., 2020; Woodcock, 2016), the gig economy (Gandini, 2019; Cant, 2020) and other forms of digital labour (O'Meara, 2019).

I intend to combine LPT with an intersectional analysis (Crenshaw, 1989; Atewologun, 2018; Rodriguez et al. 2016), looking at the way in which workers are impacted by the various matrices of power, e.g. gender, class, race and others, in addition to capital-labour relations.

The aim of the study is to improve our understanding of the material conditions of an emerging area of our economy, characterised by poor working conditions (Mac & Smith, 2018), and help counter the existing invisibility of this area from broader digital labour debates. In addition, it can help us to examine 'the Uberisation of all work' the way in which the logic of the gig economy is spreading out into a broad array of economic sectors, taking on new forms and playing out in new ways.

As a means to critically engage with my positionality, the student proposes to employ semi-structured interviews and diary studies to the study of how the labour process is enacted upon workers, informed by qualitative research in feminist studies that recognises sex workers as the experts of their own lives.