Choreographic leadership and audience mobilization as resistance: digital sex work after the Social Media Safety Act

Abstract

Digital media platforms’ incessant deplatforming have encouraged sex workers across the globe to organize novel forms of resistance and (re)construct defensive identities, embracing and resisting the dominating forces of patriarchalism and sexual fetishization to affirm control over their labor, their bodies, and their place in society. Sex workers’ content and fostered digital environments function to condense their globally dispersed constituencies into a common subjectivity, forming counterpublics to move against the restrictive hierarchies of “dominant publics” and give voice to the forms of sexual and gendered identity silenced across mainstream media. To sustain resistance against relentless legislative precarity and corporate disavowal—most recently exemplified by the passing of the draconian Social Media Safety Act in the United States—sex workers use a uniquely digital form of choreography to mobilize their disparate audiences across mercurial media platforms, websites, and services, taking on the role of “soft leaders” or “choreographers” to foster a symbolic construction of emotional space in which their audiences may congregate regardless of the movements of moderation or deplatforming their expressions of individuality and sexuality may have to endure across (inter)national legislative contexts. This digital process of mobilization is a performative and sustained form of labor.