Moral market compliance: How a logic of activism is used to ‘fem wash’ market violence against women in the user-generated pornography market

Abstract

In turning to the user-generated pornography market and its mainstreaming sexual violence against women, this paper looks to uncover why women are increasingly participating as self-producing content creators. Specifically, we ask how the institutional logics perspective can help uncover more disguised market dynamics encouraging and coercing women to (re)produce their own abuse through self-produced pornographic content creation. With an institutional logics analysis of archival data from five user-generated pornography websites, our findings uncover how social logics act to disguise market logics. We show that a logic of activism is mobilised through two prominent feminist, social justice imperatives of: (i) the representation of diversity and (ii) appeals to environmentalism, which function together to construct a compliant and duty-bound imperative for women’s content creation. In doing so, this paper introduces a concept of moral market compliance: a dark market dynamic that functions to fem wash and (re)produce market violence against women.