Conference Agenda

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.

The present study intends to provide an elaborate literature review and discussion about preliminary data on adult entertainment. As a highly diversified realm of public exposure of the body, there has been historical interest in the political regulation of such activities that psychology has not adequately conceptualized beyond an assumption of marginalization or medicalization.

In particular, my focus is on strip clubs and the public production of pleasure.

The presence of exotic dancers and a variety of spaces where there is a specific expectation about how to be spectators and how to be performers, has had a profound impact over major urban environments across history in terms of the incidence of different kinds of crimes in the areas surrounding these clubs. What is left under explored is the persistent growth of such places in cities like Atlanta, Georgia, where they made a huge contribution to the city’s economic expansion.

My ongoing research project aims to investigate the fist-person account of what is pleasure in life and what is pleasure in the workplace for strip-club dancers. More specifically, I am interested in the perception of what is considered productive and unproductive in strip performances in order to see how performers inhabit the border between leisure time and work time.

In this sense, my main goal is not to detect possible past traumatic experiences with later choices of becoming an exotic dancer, even if I will discus basic demographic information in relation to gender, social class, age, sexuality, ethnicity.

This presentation will be focused on some of these aspects together with a parallel analysis of what constitutes pleasure, leisure time, productive time, and attitudes toward sexuality, on the part of attendees to strip clubs.