Instagram vixens: the racialized sexual scripts of erotic labor online

Abstract

ABSTRACT Despite growing interest in the ways information and communication technologies shape labor, few studies have accounted for the racialized sexualization of erotic labor. This study examines how Black women exotic dancers deploy racialized sexual scripts in the content they generate on the mobile social networking application Instagram. As erotic influencers, these women engage in multifaceted and multimodal erotic self-presentations both within and beyond the strip club. This article presents data from a digital ethnography of 73 Black female exotic dancers located in the southeastern United States, as well as a content analysis of the digital media files they created on Instagram. The findings suggest four distinct sexual scripts that these Instagram users perform: virtual cover girl, erotic professional, boudoir baddie, and assets model. Findings demonstrate Black women use smartphone and social networking technological features to create presentations of femininity, desirability, and sensuality that simultaneously subvert and adhere to the controlling images that define Western ideologies on race and sexuality. Ultimately, this article argues for the need to account for the social and cultural contexts in which the affordances of networked communication technologies that permeate contemporary erotic labor operate.