Performing visibility under algorithmic inconvenience: queer digital labour, platform capitalism, and Indian porn on X

This article examines the precarious digital labour of Indian queer porn performers on X (formerly Twitter), analysing how the platform's algorithm simultaneously enables the visibility of queer sexuality and monetizes performers' free labour. Drawing on content and thematic analysis of 10 performer accounts belonging to gay men and trans women of Indian origin, we analyse 100 posts, 100 captions and 200 audience comments. The comments fall into three categories: requests for sexual contact or specific acts, expressions of appreciation and derogatory remarks. Together they reveal how X extracts affective labour from performers while failing to protect marginalized creators. Using Berlant's concept of in/convenience, Preciado's pharmacopornographic capitalism and Shannon Bell's framework of gender terrorism and anti-pornographic labour, we argue that this content meets Bell's first two conditions for anti-pornographic practice, resisting hegemonic gender scripts and foregrounding heterogeneous erotic grammars, but consistently fails her third: that pornographic labour be non-alienated and self-directed. The article situates this analysis within emerging scholarship on South Asian porn cultures and platform capitalism in the Global South.