Browsing by Author "Nicholls T"

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Currying Favour with the Algorithm: Online Sex Workers’ Efforts To Satisfy Patriarchal Expectations
(Springer Nature, 2024-09-19) Palatchie B; Beban A; Nicholls T
The rise of the online sex work industry is reshaping how people conceptualise and negotiate sexual encounters across digital and offline spaces. This article analyses content from an online sex work forum (AmberCutie Forum (ACF)) to examine how online sex workers establish boundaries between their online and offline lives to manage competing expectations from their partners and viewers. Our analysis reveals a misogynistic double standard whereby workers are seen to threaten monogamous values, while viewers escape the same level of moral culpability. We argue that the cultural logics of monogamy function to delegitimise the labour involved with online sex work and increase the risk posed to online sex workers through retributive misogyny, including cyber-harassment toward sex workers. This impacts sex workers’ emotional and financial wellbeing and reinforces gendered power relations by prioritising stereotypically masculine pleasure over workers’ economic interests.
Improvising Rage
(Liminalities, 2018) Nicholls T
I keep coming back to “Strange Fruit.” I launch myself in other directions, exploring musical critiques of cultural politics through Janelle Monáe’s “Hell You Talmbout,” through Lauryn Hill’s “Black Rage.” And, seemingly inevitably, I come back to reflecting upon the song voted “one of the darkest songs you’ve ever heard” (reddit.com); one of the “Top 11 Most Depressing Songs of All Time” (spike.com); and “the first great protest song” (theguardian.com)—Billie Holiday’s anti-lynching anthem, “Strange Fruit.” I had initially intended to focus my attention only on Monáe (“Hell You Talmbout”) and Hill (“Black Rage”) in a discussion of protest songs that might be able to act as metaphorical anthems—or, act analogously to anthems—in helping to constitute a cohesive sense of group identity and a shared narrative that might articulate a collaborative project for the Black Lives Matter movement. My thinking about the role music might play in nurturing the idea that Black Lives Matter repeatedly returns to the following questions: What kind of improvisation is possible—and what kind is needed—in a social justice movement whose central demand has sometimes been framed as “I can’t breathe”? (And please, yes, do take a moment to fully appreciate the victim-blaming absurdity of a dying man’s plea being characterized as a demand—one too radical for the status quo to satisfy.1) 1 These are the last words of Eric Garner, who couldn’t breathe as he lay dying on the streets of Staten Island NY because he was being held in an illegal chokehold by a member of the New York Police Department, 17 July 2014. He was posthumously accused by the NYPD of selling loose cigarettes, allegedly depriving the state of New York of pennies in tax revenue. The officer was not indicted.
Prefigurative politics in the platform economy: online sex workers restaging collective mobilisation through informal communities of care
(Taylor and Francis Group, 2025-03-06) Palatchie B; Beban A; Nicholls T
As platform capitalist models of labour intensify, with jobs once done offline moving to online marketplaces, attention must be given to the political standing of platform workers and the constraints and possibilities of collective mobilisation. This study explores the everyday forms of resistance online sex workers undertake in private communication networks, finding that workers are strategically restaging where their collective mobilisation is occurring given the risks of public mobilisation. We discuss the value these communities have for workers and for broader understandings of prefigurative politics being undertaken within the platform economy of online sex work.