Neoliberal discourses of emancipation promise individual freedom, including in the realm of sexuality. Yet this freedom increasingly reveals itself as a paradox of emancipation, in which apparent autonomy remains bound to market mechanisms and longstanding power relations, including sexual readiness. Particularly in the context of sex work, ambivalences, politicizations of sexuality, and polarizations emerge: while one perspective highlights women’s empowerment, agency, and economic independence through sex work, other stances emphasize precarity and exploitation in a market that commodifies female bodies under the label of liberalization and emancipation.

OnlyFans exemplifies the fusion of platform capitalism and parasocial intimacy, where performers do not merely offer sexual content but build and monetize relational needs through parasocial relationship dynamics, grounding a billion-dollar industry. Beyond narratives of OnlyFans as either a site of liberalization or a space of exploitation, there remains a lack of empirical insight into performers' self-presentations, depicted self-concepts, and narratives. On Instagram, OnlyFans performers aim to build audiences they hope to transfer to their subscription platform profiles by creating general content such as comedy, travel, lifestyle, beauty advice, and fitness, as well as content that explicitly reflects on their status in society, personal motivation, experiences, and profession. For this contribution, 8 Instagram profiles of OnlyFans performers (>1 million followers) are analyzed using hermeneutic analysis, aiming to understand the mechanisms of parasocial intimacy and the role of feminist narratives in contemporary forms of online sexwork.

The findings are contextualized in relation to mechanisms of parasocial relationships, neoliberal modes of (self-)subjectivation, and the state of relational values that make parasocial intimacy so effective. Finally, the findings are discussed in light of the paradox of emancipation and the possible effects of spreading novel symbolic narratives about sex work in the mainstream (e.g., winning in neoliberalism and above men), as well as the meanings of related ideas of empowerment, feminism, and liberation.