Overview
- Provides a comprehensive analysis of the most important areas of interaction between virtual modes of productivity and contemporary digital sexuality
- Demonstrates that contemporary digital pornography has fundamentally changed the presentation of a labouring body
- Uncovers a number of major new findings for the first time: the labour of visibility, the relationship between contemporary queer sexuality and precarious creative industry work online, and the refiguring of BDSM as an expression of capitalist hegemony
Part of the book series: Dynamics of Virtual Work (DVW)
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Table of contents (8 chapters)
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Digital Labour and the Porn User
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Material Labour and Contemporary Pornography
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Pornography and Anti-Capitalism
Keywords
About this book
This book is a timely and innovative exploration of the vital relationship between sex and capitalism in the digital age. It provides a lively, provocative analysis of how specifically digital forms of capitalist accumulation and labour shape and discipline the contemporary sexual body. Rebecca Saunders focuses on pornography in order to investigate the impact of digital forms of capitalism on contemporary sexuality and reveals the centrality of pornography to the digital attention economy, affective economics, the information economy, the creative industries and neoliberalism.
Saunders uncovers a fundamental shift in the aesthetics and meaning of pornographic film, from a genre concerned with representing sexual pleasure to one that has become focused on representing sex as labour. Contemporary pornographic film is therefore read as a sign and symptom of how digital forms of capitalism regulate the twenty-firstcentury sexual body through digital interfaces and technologies. Bodies of Work analyses major porn studios, dominant streaming platforms, significant directors and performers and queer and alternative pornographies, and presents new and significant concepts such as sexual datafication, the labour of visibility and interventionist pornography. Discussing pornographic film, sexuality, digital culture, labour and capitalism, this book will be of interest to students and scholars across gender studies, media and cultural studies, digital humanities and economics.
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Authors and Affiliations
About the author
Rebecca Saunders is Senior Lecturer in Digital Media and Communications at the University of Huddersfield, UK.
Bibliographic Information
Book Title: Bodies of Work
Book Subtitle: The Labour of Sex in the Digital Age
Authors: Rebecca Saunders
Series Title: Dynamics of Virtual Work
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-49016-4
Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan Cham
eBook Packages: Social Sciences, Social Sciences (R0)
Copyright Information: The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s) 2020
Hardcover ISBN: 978-3-030-49015-7Published: 23 September 2020
Softcover ISBN: 978-3-030-49018-8Published: 24 September 2021
eBook ISBN: 978-3-030-49016-4Published: 22 September 2020
Series ISSN: 2947-9290
Series E-ISSN: 2947-9304
Edition Number: 1
Number of Pages: VIII, 328
Topics: Organizational Studies, Economic Sociology, Sociology of Work, Media Sociology, Sociology of the Body, Social Sciences, general, Gender Studies