Lust, Labor, & Legitimacy: Visibility and Precarity in Platformed Sex Work

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.