How Female Performers Experience Adult Content Webcam as a Form of Sexual Commerce

Performing adult content, sexual performances via webcam is something of an anomaly on the sex working landscape - it is entirely legal in all but a handful of countries - at a time when the rhetoric and legislation pertaining to sex work is increasingly abolitionist. This research is a study of the experiences of webcam performers that a former sex worker and performer have undertaken. It uses an ultra-realist approach to study webcamming beyond the engagement of the performer and her customers and focuses on the working environment that the hosting sites have created. This work asks the reader to consider the silence that surrounds camming. A form of corporate-owned, legitimate sex work that generates billions of dollars of profit for its largely male owners and the banking system has generated very little feminist debate. Given the almost perfect capitalist model that it follows - no workers benefits or rights, a self-training infinitely replaceable workforce - the type of feminist discourses around victimisation have been the battle cry for much campaigning, both for and against pornography and other forms of sex work, is oddly muted. This work considers how the women I interviewed entered the corporate-owned space and how they negotiate their way through it. It situates the copyright of the stream that performers produce but which the hosting sites own as a dynamic site of contestation.