This chapter draws on an interview-based field survey to analyze camgirls’ professional engagement drivers and professional learning curves. We show that women start sex camming for economic reasons and that those who work long-term in sex camming have specific skills they can sell in the business. Camgirls invest their time, bodies, and feelings in the hope of making a living from sex camming. As hardened professionals, they learn to give the impression of being “true amateurs,” presenting their shows as a sideline and forging intimate relationships with their viewers. The sex-camming economy is based on commodifying everyday life as its clients imagine it.
colorism (Jones, 2015). Some studies, however, point up the activity's subversive aspect (Knight, 2000). By considering sexcamming from the angle of identity construction, this research shows how broadcasting erotic shows can give women a way to regain control over their bodies and their sexuality (White, 2003;Senft, 2008;Nayar, 2017). Although close attention should be paid to the risks and opportunities of sexcamming for women, it is important not to lose sight of the activity's socioeconomic dimension. Like all the new forms of online sex work, sexcamming should be viewed as one of the aspects of platform capitalism run on a workforce -generally flexible, underpaid and feminized (van Doorn, 2017) -competing for work. This chapter analyzes women's professional engagement in the sexcamming economy. From this point of view, our work echoes the study by N. van Doorn and OlavVelthuis (2018) on how sex models devise strategies to give meaning to what they do and cope with uncertain market mechanisms. In our case, we study camgirls' professional engagement logics through the lens of amateurism (Nayar, 2017). Like the logics described by Brooke Erin Duffy in the world of fashion blogging (Duffy, 2015), the sexcamming economy is based on a "myth". To attract viewers, the sexcamming platforms claim that the sex models are not professionals and that they broadcast shows for fun, from their own homes and in their free time. Our survey reveals, however, that camgirls take their work very seriously. The women interviewed are generally full-time camgirls and sexcamming is their main (or only) source of income.Unlike most of the other cases in this book, the camgirls' line of work therefore equates less with the marketization of everyday life than with a commodification of so-called everyday life, as its clients imagine it to be. In what circumstances do certain women decide to start broadcasting sexual content on the Internet? Once in the business, how to they learn how
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