Exploring Platformic Torque in Secondhand Market Platform Work

Abstract This paper presents findings from an ethnographic study of online fashion reselling, an understudied form of gig work where individuals sell secondhand clothing on marketplace platforms. Unlike gig work models where labor is explicitly priced as a service, reselling embeds labor in the procurement, preparation, and sale of goods. We focus on Poshmark, a popular marketplace with 30 million US users, to examine how it mediates reseller labor within broader gendered, classed, and racialized dynamics of precarious work and fashion consumerism. Drawing on infrastructure studies, we extend the concept of torque to analyze how platforms structure reseller experiences across aesthetic, temporal, and regulatory dimensions. Through ethnographic narratives, we illustrate how Poshmark’s sociotechnical mechanisms shape experiences and aspirations of this kind of gig work. Our findings contribute to platform labor research by foregrounding intersectional pressures in marketplace platform work, expanding current understandings of gig economies beyond service work.