In the digital age, OnlyFans is suggested to be a new form of sexual empowerment, financial autonomy and social agency for Black women working as strippers, backup dancers and video models, particularly those ancillaries to the rap music industry. Through interviews and participant observation, I examine the everyday labor of Black women who work as sexually explicit content creators on OnlyFans while also building a public persona as artists in Hip-Hop culture. Findings suggested that despite financial opportunities, respondents felt ambivalent by the monetization opportunities afforded by this digital space. Even so, respondents enjoyed the affordances of promoting their OnlyFans content on social media to gain digital clout - a form of Hip-Hop influenced cultural capital that follows the logic of likes, followers, and re-shares of one’s social media content. Ultimately, this study introduces insights on the evolution of Hip-Hop culture’s relationship with sex work, digital Black feminism and the attention economy.

Within a history of moral politics, cultural, social and legal boundaries continue to differentiate between sex work and other types of feminized care labor (Duffy, 2016) and art production on platforms. Even though these have always been contested boundaries, the rise in participation in online sex platforms due to the popularization of OnlyFans has offered an opening for researchers, and content creators, to redefine the boundaries of where sex work begins and ends. In this paper, we explore the experiences of non binary and queer tattoo artist and Instagram influencer Jamie Avakian. Our investigation in this paper focusses on how some young influencers are making content about bodies across Instagram and OnlyFans, and we ask whether blurring the boundaries between cross platform created ‘body content’ is a safe and positive political strategy for creators?

Through a digital ethnographic approach, the authors conducted a private and Instagram Live interview with the participant as part of a five-year ethnographic study. The findings in this paper contribute to a discussion around how sex workers balance visibility and surveillance risks, as well as recent research on content creators as political producers, which engage in cultural and feminized care labor, as well as art work. The analysis in this paper explores how Jamie narrate’s their trajectory and corresponding labor practices within white-western cultural boundaries on sex work/art work/content creation and platform mediated moderation. We argue that the production of body content on platforms needs to be seen as a socially significant, creative labor practice.

This paper addresses the everyday strategies designed by Brazilian erotic content creators to contest the platform authority over their working conditions, questioning the rationale of such oppositional actions and their meaning for antagonisms online. Scholarly literature has highlighted the multifarious ways platform workers have made use of the digital to resist platform power over their working conditions. However, those studies overlook modes of opposition developed by workers in marginalised and frequently stigmatised labour, as is the case of platform-based sex work. This paper aims to fill this gap. The discussed results rely on an ongoing ethnography in the Brazilian erotic content creation landscape and 16 in-depth interviews with cisgender and transgender workers. The sole Brazilian patronage platform, Privacy, was observed as the tactics developed by erotic creators are employed there. Sex labourers employ two tactics to antagonise the platform politics of visibility: "drops" and "shout-for-shout." They consist of recommending the handles of fellow workers on the Privacy feed several times a day and a week, using a scheme of one-to-one or one-to-many recommendations. The idea is to create a big spam on the feed, thus overcoming Privacy's recommending system. Although drops and shout-for-shout intend to be oppositional acts, they also comprise the commercial interests of creators, being set up as deeply ambivalent strategies. The argument thus states that sex workers in Brazil make use of a "circumstantial antagonism", wherein online oppositional practices are highly ambivalent and constantly switch from resistance to survival to co-optation.

Online creators need their content to be ‘seen’; visibility on platforms can provide financial, social, and representational benefits. A lot of vital research has been done on how creators try to enhance their visibility on platforms and struggle with the threat of invisibility. But, especially for marginalised creators, platformised visibility is not without risks. This paper attends to these risks and creators' tactical use of (in)visibility to manage these. Drawing on 27 interviews with creators - online sex workers, LGBTQ+ activists, sex educators - we outline the harms of hypervisibility and users’ tactics for strategic invisibility. These interviews showcase how hegemonic norms hyper- and invisibilise marginalised groups, and how these dynamics are reproduced and institutionalised on platforms. We find that marginalised creators face serious risks from their platformised hypervisibility, not just their invisibilisation. Yet within the structures of platforms these creators still find ways to manage these risks and engage with strategic invisibility. Tactics of resistance exist across groups of marginalised creators. As such, our analysis shows the need to not just gain insight into how creators maximise visibility, but also into how they seek particular types of visibility, as well as strategic invisibility.

Creators on the online platform OnlyFans must navigate the precarious intersection of privacy and publicity to succeed financially. The historic position of sex work as a hidden economy and the recent notoriety of OnlyFans as synonymous with digital sex work in the popular press has shaped conditions so that OnlyFans creators must use unique communication practices online to remain safe and make money. We conducted a rhetorical analysis of OnlyFans creators posting about their work on the popular social media site TikTok and found that creators engage in platform-specific social steganography, utilize platform affordances, and reference other platforms to maintain their precarious position as public figures who work in a gray area of the contemporary gig economy. These practices of “hiding in plain sight” provide important insight into how OnlyFans creators navigate the publicity/privacy paradox inherent to conducting illegal labor in the digital sphere.