Migrant men on OnlyFans: masculinity, precarity, and erotic entrepreneurship in the digital gig economy

Recent research on OnlyFans creators has focused largely on women, leaving men’s participation comparatively underexamined. This conceptual article adopts an interdisciplinary lens to explore what migrant men’s engagement with OnlyFans may mean for them. We consider how the platform opens spaces for migrant men to commodify their bodies and generate income, often by mobilizing racialized and gendered stereotypes whereby such eroticized performances contribute to the reproduction of gender and sexuality norms. Empowerment framings of digitized sex work may risk obscuring the structural inequalities, emotional labour, and/or exploitation that shape platform labour. Rather than adopting empowerment versus exploitation dichotomies, we conceptualize OnlyFans as a site of contested autonomy for migrant men where their masculinities are refashioned through a mix of entrepreneurship, erotic self-branding, and the logics of platform capitalism. We call for deeper engagement with the gendered dimensions of migrancy – particularly migrant masculinities – in research on digitized sex work.