Flexi(nse)curity in adult webcamming: Romanian women’s experiences selling digital sex services under platform capitalism

Abstract

The global sex industry has undergone a tremendous transformation, and many different forms of commercial sex have emerged with the growth of digital media. The advent of ‘platform work’ in diverse fields, including sex work, has affected digital workers’ experiences dramatically. Combining insights from literature on labour platforms’ proliferation with online sex work that entails new forms of exploitation, this paper introduces the concept of flexi(nse)curity to describe the tension between work arrangements and insecurity narrated by Romanian women working as webcam models. In doing so, the article places webcammers’ narratives in the structural and cultural context dominated by neoliberal post-socialist reforms and strong religious interference in both State affairs and people’s private lives. Alongside the relevance of country scale, in which cultural and structural features shape the size and challenges of adult webcamming, our article examines how place-bound insecurity is narrated in online discussions as a multi-faceted and multi-layered experience co-produced through the intersection of online platforms and material spaces where webcammers perform (i.e., models’ home bedrooms and webcam studios). Challenging the popular view of webcamming as autonomous and flexible work, this paper reveals sex workers’ vulnerabilities by applying a feminist geographical lens to webcammers’ narratives from an online discussion forum. The findings suggest that there are diverse flexi(nse)curity patterns that are contingent on the intricacies of platform capitalism and emerging work arrangements in online sex work marked by an upsurge in webcam studios in which webcam models occupy a vulnerable position in asymmetric staff power relations.

KEYWORDS:

• Adult webcamming
• flexi(nse)curity
• gender
• labour platform
• online sex work
• Romania
• webcam studio

Acknowledgement

Authors are thankful to three anonymous journal reviewers for their valuable comments. Oana Petcu is also thanked for her helpful feed-back on earlier draft of the manuscript as well as for her support with English translation of excerpts from Romanian forum discussions. Also, we thank Mihai Preoteasa for his valuable technical help in data scraping.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Additional information

Funding

First author acknowledges the support by Hasso Plattner Excellence Research Grant (LBUS-HPI-ERG-2020-05), financed by the Knowledge Transfer Center of the Lucian Blaga University of Sibiu.

Notes on contributors

Ionela Vlase

Ionela Vlase holds a PhD in Sociology (University of Neuchâtel, Switzerland) and currently works in the Sociology Department of the “Lucian Blaga” University of Sibiu, Romania. Her main research interests concern migration, gender, sex work, migration, and social inequalities. She is the author of articles published in academic journals like European Societies, European Journal of Women’s Studies, Ethnic and Racial Studies, Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies.

Ana Maria Preoteasa

Ana Maria Preoteasa, Ph.D. in Sociology (University of Bucharest, Romania), is a senior researcher with the Research Institute for Quality of Life, Romanian Academy. She studies the multiple facets of precarious employment and the strategies to improve the quality of life through work (career change, platform work and lifelong learning). Her research results are published in books and articles in academic journals as European Societies, Journal of Balkan and Near Eastern Studies, or Southeast European and Black Sea Studies.