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Max Morris, "Not Sex Work: Queer Intimacy, Post-identity, and Incidental Encounters in the Digital Era" (Routledge, 2025)
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Max Morris
Welcome to the New Books Network
- [02:40]
Rinbeith
welcome back to the New Books Network Human Rights Channel. I'm Rinbeith, your Host I here today with Max Morris to discuss Not Sex Work, Queer Intimacy, Post Identity, and incidental encounters in the digital area. Welcome to the show.
- [02:55]
Max Morris
Thank you so much for having me.
- [02:57]
Rinbeith
So the first question that I love to ask people is, how did you come to this project?
- [03:03]
Max Morris
So the origin of this book was in my doctoral research, and it draws largely on interviews I did as a student. But the title of my PhD thesis was rather different. So the original title was actually the Incidental Sex Worker, later refined to Incidental Sex Work. But what I realized from doing these interviews was that that was an example of me imposing a label, creating a label that the participants in my study didn't feel represented them or reflected their experiences. So that's the main reason why the title of the book has updated that by focusing on Not Sex Work. And obviously the kind of negative framing of that title draws inspiration from other queer theorists who have used similar kind of ways of framing their research. For example, Lee Edelman's no Future, Jane Ward's Not Gay, and perhaps most influentially, Jack Halberstam's the Queer Art of Failure, which emphasizes kind of how identities are often constructed through the lens of neoliberal success or failure. And so I use that as a kind of way to think through what it means to be a sex worker or to use labels like sex work, or, as in the case of the young men who I interviewed, not using those labels at all for a range of complicated and overlapping reasons.
- [04:28]
Rinbeith
So I say this as well to folks that I interview is that I am an absolute methods nerd. Trained qualitatively, self taught quantitatively, and I love to hear about how people do research. I know you're a sociologist. Most of my training is in anthropology, social anthropology. And I'm really curious if you can tell us a little bit more about how you went about conducting your research for this book and what that research process looked like. And part of why I'm asking, I mean, I ask everyone this, right? But I'm asking you specifically because I found, I found it really fascinating and wonderful how this book linked methods with the theoretical orientations of the project itself, including how you wrote about recruitment.
- [05:16]
Max Morris
Yeah. So in very simple terms, the study is based on in depth qualitative interviews that I did with 50 gay, bi and queer young men who had agreed to sell sex online, but neither advertised nor identified as being sex workers. So the question that that begs is how on earth do you find a sample of people who don't identify with a particular label? And so the way that I Did that was by traveling to major cities across England and Wales. And this included London, Manchester, Liverpool, Birmingham, Newcastle, Southampton, Bristol and Cardiff. And I used one of the digital apps, one of the online platforms where I assumed that these kinds of encounters were being arranged, which was Grindr. And I created a research profile on Grindr and basically sent out 3,000 recruitment messages in those cities. Kind of a scattergun approach. Like, I'm kind of guessing that there may be this population out there not been studied empirically before. So it was a bit of a gamble for our whole PhD project. But amazingly I had a huge number of people respond. So it was a nearly 50% response rate to an initial question. Hi, I'm a researcher looking into people's experiences of being paid for sex. Have you ever been offered money? Have you ever said yes? And so from that, around 14.6% of the responses I got said yes, that they had been paid for sex at least once. And the majority of them had done so in ways that were non professional. So not professional escorting, not producing professional pornography like through a studio. So more amateur, casual, informal arrangements. And that was exactly what the study was focusing on. And so in a sense, this kind of incidental survey of incidental sex work showed that this was a practice that was happening a lot more commonly, perhaps, than researchers might have assumed before. And then through that, I was able to then get in touch with Most of these 50 young men who I ended up interviewing. And you asked how I connect methods with theory. And so of course, I think it's really important to say that the study and the book is, is kind of situated within what I describe as a queer, socialist feminist lens. So I'm drawing on kind of reflexive feminist approaches to doing qualitative interviewing, thinking about the similarities and differences between myself as a researcher and the young men who I interviewed. And then particularly perhaps from the queer studies perspective, drawing on a kind of discursive analysis of the way that language was used by these young men, that doesn't necessarily map onto the dominant research paradigm within sex work studies, which is known as the social and economic model. So while this study doesn't neatly map onto the social and economic model, I do draw very heavily on it, particularly the kind of Marxist feminist underpinnings of thinking through erotic labor, thinking through sex work as a form of work, but also considering the gendered dimensions of that. And of course, we know from feminist theorizing over many decades that there are all kinds of labor work that don't get recognised as such, particularly women's work, particularly domestic work and reproductive labour and sexual labour. So I'm kind of using that framework to situate a study that's not necessarily about work, but that still is really valuable for thinking through, okay, well, if it's not work, then what is it? Is it just sex? Is it just a part of wider hookup culture among younger queer people? Is, is it a part of the digital era that we live in where sexuality is more visible and maybe more normalized than it has been in the past? But then also I propose at the end of the book that maybe we also need to kind of not replace the social and economic model because it's really important for advocating for the rights of sex workers, just as with other forms of workers rights movements, but also maybe complementing it with a sexual and erotic model, one that considers the more playful, more, more fun and more spontaneous elements of people who are connecting online. And again, my participants often the way that they described their paid sexual encounters was very, very similar to the way that they described their unpaid sexual encounters. So framing it kind of through a narrow lens of social and economic, or particularly the economic kind of labor studies lens might be limiting. So does that answer your question?
- [10:09]
Rinbeith
Question? Yes. It also is a wonderful segue into the next question that I have, which is that I really appreciate how you are really trying to situate your work and your reader. You're speaking to a lot of different fields, different disciplines, different area studies. And you have throughout this book, I mean, there, your, your participants have, you know, ambivalences about the term and a lot of rejection about the term. But you also talk about, you know, how to define sex work. And so I'm curious if you can offer a way that you are understanding the term of sex work and what this term means or does. Because I think, I think that for many who are sort of outside of these conversations, they might not understand that, you know, it's, it's very contested and that people have a lot of, a lot of different feelings about the use of the word.
- [11:09]
Max Morris
Yeah, I think that's a really important point to draw out. And so, as you know, the book does begin by kind of defining terms in a very blunt and straightforward way. You know, like, what is sex, what is work? And what is sex work? So, yeah, so I think that's kind of, I try to begin with those basics, like what do these terms mean? How are they contested by different groups and how do they apply more or less to different social groups? In particularly digital era, where we have a growing range of different online platforms where people represent themselves. And so we're seeing kind of alongside that an expansion of different labels and identities. And maybe that's kind of another way of thinking about the study is that it's sort of situated within a postmodern or a post identity frame of. Frame of understanding. And as you say, perhaps particularly within feminist discourse and debates, there's lots of tension around what this word sex work means. So I get start at the basics and say, well, what is sex? And again, actually studying sex work itself throws up all kinds of interesting questions. So, you know, for example, is selling your, you know, underwear online sex work? Right. There's potentially no direct interaction there, but we might think of it as being erotic or a fetish, or it might be a form of kink. And so there's lots of ways of engaging in things that are thought of as sexual and erotic, but that are not the petronormative, CIS normative kind of expectation of penetrative intercourse. And that's perhaps particularly true for my participants, who were obviously queer young men. But even there, maybe I'm imposing a label, right? At least one of my participants, when I caught up with him, was non binary, so no longer identified as a man. So again, it raises all these questions about how we label and identify. And of course, feminist scholars have highlighted that we can't talk about sex and gender separately. We need to understand it as a sex, gender, sexuality system that is kind of co reproducing. So that's the kind of defining sex bit, or not defining it because it's complicated. And then in terms of work, again, within feminist debates and discussions around sex work, of course, one of the dominant framings is from the sex worker, exclusionary, radical feminist or swerve point of view, which suggests that all sex work is inherently degrading and exploitative of particularly women. And so of course, the people who I interviewed don't necessarily align with that construction, partly because they were mostly young men, also because they didn't view their experiences as being exploitative or extractive in most cases, in some, perhaps, but not universally. And of course, the key issue here, and perhaps where the socialist framing or the Marxist framing becomes most useful, is, yes, okay, sex work can be explosive, yes, it can be extracted, but so can all forms of work, all forms of labour. So to single out erotic labour, to single out sex work as being uniquely extractive, uniquely exploitative, kind of misses the point. So that's the kind of approach I take to defining work. And again, it's not like presenting a kind of utopian liberal vision of sex workers being like wonderful and gratifying for everybody. And indeed, this is what most sex workers, many sex workers, professional sex workers, say as well. Right. It's like, it's like a job. Like many others, it's got shit parts, but also sometimes some good parts too. And ultimately we can't consider work without also considering the wider socioeconomic context of it. Right. Within a capitalist system, our labour relations are contentious. People get exploited, people get discriminated against at work. And so again, we need to think of it through that more expansive way of understanding labor and then bringing those two together. Thinking about sex work. Of course, as I said earlier, my book uses the title not sex work. So maybe this whole discussion is like a red herring because the people I spoke to don't think of themselves as workers and they don't think of themselves as sex workers. They were doing something for them that was experimental. It was in many cases playful. It was described through the language of dating and hooking up much more commonly than through kind of more familiar language in relation to labour studies. And so for that reason, that's why I say it maybe sits adjacent to, but not necessarily as a part of, the dominant social and economic model of sex work.
- [15:51]
Rinbeith
So I have two follow up questions on that. The first, I'll let you answer them one at a time. The first is if you can explain to listeners a little bit about why or maybe how is a better way of framing this, Participants didn't see themselves as sex workers. I was really taken by the themes that you teased out in that, in that chapter, thinking about the frequency of it, the professionalization or this idea of not soliciting. Yeah, it was really striking to me, the responses that you got from participants there.
- [16:35]
Max Morris
Yeah, I mean, if you don't mind, can I quote one of my participants? Because this is something I do across the book as I used participant quotes as epigrams at the start of each chapter because I felt that the way that these young men spoke about themselves really kind of illustrated the point. And so one of my favorite quotes which I use in chapter one is from a participant who again critiqued my imposition of a label onto his behaviors, which again was kind of what got me thinking and reframing the study for the book. So he said, incidental sex worker is a term you could use, but as I don't see this as a regular part of my life, I don't see any need to give it a name. Just like you wouldn't give a name for somebody who did people's hair every now and again, you wouldn't call yourself an incidental hairdresser. It's just a thing that you do. So the real kind of key message that came out from this participant and many others was that the kind of the irregularity of what they were doing was an important feature of why it was not sex work. Similarly, the scale of income. So the amount of money that they made, they didn't think it was kind of. It didn't warrant a label. But then there were also more complicated reasons as well. So, for example, they didn't want to be associated with the stigma and the stereotypes associated with sex work, not least perhaps because they were young men, but also because there was some concern around the double stigma or the double deviance of being both gay, bi and queer young people and also being associated with sex work. So it's kind of a complicated range of reasons why they distance themselves from that label. But I think ultimately that quote I just shared with you highlights the point that there's something interesting going on here around labeling and identity politics more broadly. So all of us have professional identities, right? I describe myself as a sociologist or a university lecturer and many people take pride in their job titles. But it's a kind of form of labeling and identification that we also have certain stereotypes and associations with. And that's also true of, for example, rights based movements such as the LGBTQ rights movement. Right? And so one of the big kind of philosophical or political questions I'm asking in the book is, how do you have a women's rights movement without a fixed and stable identity of women? How do you have an LGBTQ rights movement without stable fixed identities of what it means to be lesbian, gay, bisexual, queer, trans, et cetera? And then the question I pose, particularly towards the end of the book, which I'm not sure if I ever fully answer, but we might return to, that is, how do you have a sex workers rights movement without a fixed and stable identity around which to organise? And so again, I think it's something important for policymakers to think about and to consider is like, if there are these groups or individuals who are engaging in behaviours that are kind of unrecognized, unseen, have been ignored by traditional research and indeed legislation, how might those people be helped or harmed by the broader framing of kind of rights and identity based rights? And are there limitations to such an identitarian approach to protecting, for example, human rights or labor rights, workers rights? So, yeah, so there's kind of some interesting questions going on there around what this process of not identifying and not labeling oneself mean for those of us who are invested in these social movements.
- [20:19]
Rinbeith
So my second question. Second question. The second follow up to your wonderful points around this, around not. Not sex workers as well as not sex work is what you call the play economy. And I found this really compelling because to me, it seemed like a really helpful way to theorize a little bit about what you were describing in a way that didn't. That didn't prescribe certain kinds of identity labels. There's a lot of ambivalences embedded in that, I guess. Yeah. So could you explain a bit about how you understand the play economy and how this gets at some of the fuzziness, the lack of binaries that you saw in your work?
- [21:18]
Max Morris
Sure. Thank you for drawing attention to what I hope is one of the more original contributions of the. Really. I mean, I only begin sketching a model of what the play economy might look like as a kind of theoretical framework for understanding these types of informal, casual behaviours that still involve money and still involve an exchange of money. And really, this conceptualization of play economy emerged from these conversations that I was having. So, rather than identifying as workers and rather than describing their behaviours as sex work, as I suggested earlier, most of the time the way it was framed was through language such as fun or being a thrill, or through the more usual language of hooking up. And in some contexts, they even described these encounters as being a form of kink. So, like experimenting with sex work as a kink, does the exchange of money for sex create a different power dynamic in that encounter, which might actually enhance the experience or make it something that they wanted to try out, even if it was just once, twice or a handful of times. So I take that notion and suggest that maybe one of the limitations of the social and economic model of sex work is that it's neglecting the more playful aspects of sexuality, whether money is involved or not. And again, given that many times the participants compared their paid encounters with their unpaid, casual encounters arranged through Grindr and through other hookup apps and platforms, sort of suggested that there's maybe something missing in our maybe economically reductive analysis. So by combining play with the economy, I felt it was perhaps a useful way to start thinking about how digital technologies have transformed our society and transformed our economy. And, of course, this plays into that familiar notion of, well, what is the opposite of work? Right. So given that the book's title is not sex work, what is not work? Well, Many people say that play is the opposite of work. There's that famous quote from the Shining, all work and no play makes Jack a dull boy. And we have all these kinds of cultural distinctions between work and play. Play is something that's fun, it's enjoyable, it's usually not something we're compelled to do. And that seemed much more appropriate to the narratives of these participants than describing it through the lens of work. And so that begs the question, what makes something work rather than play or vice versa? And what these young men said to me was that it was a combination of the amount of effort put in, the scale of income, the regularity, and whether it was something that they identified with. So this really mapped onto the kind of major themes that run throughout the book. And it's actually an idea that I'm hoping to develop further. But I know that you're going to ask me about future projects at the end, so I'll save that maybe.
- [24:35]
Rinbeith
So this again give me a wonderful segue to another question that I had, which was the role of the digital and thinking about digital infrastructures. So sex at a distance isn't necessarily new. I'm thinking of very, very old school personals and the newspaper stuff, but also things like call lines. But those you speak with clearly have a very different relationship to media infrastructure. So I'm thinking about things like subscription services, like OnlyFans as well as social media. I was really surprised actually by the role of social media in this. So yeah, could you speak a little bit to how this is a big question, but how digital platforms really shape the play economy or shape the experiences of those you spoke with?
- [25:37]
Max Morris
Thank you. It's a really good question, a big question, but an important one to this study. And again, thinking about what does it mean to live in or work in a play economy? And again, I think something I do towards the end of the book is draw those parallels between other forms of playoffs work, or indeed not work. So like, you know, we see new identity labels attached to new professions in the digital era. For example, someone can now be a professional content creator or influencer. But at the same time, many people engage in like filming videos of themselves, taking photos of themselves in a way that is not considered labor or kind of traditional economic practice. So that slippage between what counts as work and what doesn't count as work, I think has become more visible and more obvious in the digital era. And particularly when we look at the platforms that remain the most popular, particularly among younger people, they all have a visual dimension to them. So things like Instagram, TikTok, YouTube, these remain among the most popular social media platforms. So there's something kind of uniquely visual, I think, about online jobs, but also online forms of play that many of us increasingly engage in and is increasingly a part of our day to day lives, both obviously good and bad elements to that. I'm no stranger to doom scrolling, but for the young men who I interviewed, there was also an interesting overlap here with new platforms emerging like OnlyFans. So what is the difference between being a content creator or an influencer on YouTube versus OnlyFans where the content that's being produced might be more sexual in nature. And so I should have mentioned this when you asked about my research methods. But to update the study for the book from my original PhD research, I did a handful of longitudinal interviews with some of the participants who had stayed in touch with me. And a couple of them had quite a bit of success on OnlyFans through creating videos, through showing images of themselves, so engaging in more indirect forms of not sex work, I guess. And I was really interested to catch up with them because when I did the original study, actually I think OnlyFans had only just emerged on the scene. So again, one of the key factors in doing digital research is that new technologies are emerging all the time. And you jump back in time five years ago and hardly anyone was using TikTok, right? Go back five years earlier and people were using different platforms in different spaces. So it's a very rapidly evolving area in which to be doing research, which makes it quite tricky. But that's why I thought doing these follow up interviews was really valuable because I was like, okay, okay, so that's interesting. A couple of you have had quite big success, made quite a lot of money. This is very, very different from making cash in hand, maybe a few hundred pounds once or twice, versus regularly producing content for thousands of fans or subscribers. Some participants made enough from this to pay off their mortgages and make quite significant amounts of money. They were the exception. But what was interesting about those follow up interviews was I asked the same question again, like, okay, so now that you've been doing this more regularly, would you consider it work? Would you consider it a profession? And the answer remained no. And the reason why it remained no was because for one of the participants at least, he was making OnlyFans content with his boyfriend. So he said, look, these are just videos we would have filmed anyway for ourselves. Now I can share them online and make a bunch of money really easily. But it didn't fit into that stereotypical notion of what sex work looks like and is, even though they were engaging in it more regularly. So again, highlights the complexity of how do we define sex work in the first place? Are we including indirect forms of sex work, like filming videos many times that won't involve anyone else? Right. It could be self produced, self made, but it's certainly very distinctive from more traditional forms of pornography production where, as another participant said, you have to sign a contract with a studio, they have the right to your image. Now he's been able to take over more control and more ownership of the content that he's producing and who's seeing it, and indeed his anonymity. He was able to hide his face in the videos, so there were some considerations there around will this affect my future employability or my reputation? So all of that kind of control and agency has been arguably expanded in the digital era, particularly through those new platforms that have emerged. But it's still usefully for my project, at least that I didn't have to change the title again, was still framed as not being a form of work in the kind of conventional sense.
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Rinbeith
first 3 months only, then full price plan options available, taxes and fees extra. See full terms@mintmobile.com, so something that gets some space in this really wonderful book is different ways of thinking about risk. And one, I really appreciated how you were thinking through risk, that you were thinking through this idea of risk alongside the people you're interviewing, that it is not this moral panic, sexuality kind of risk, but thinking through risk in some very practical ways, but in, in a bunch of different directions. So one being, you know, risks on digital platforms of, of, of harassment, of, of doxxing, of stalking, or even just of, of people crossing boundaries. But you're also writing this in the context of, of queer sex, right? Where there is, there are considerations around different kinds of viruses too, right? HIV and Covid also form some aspects of risk in this. So yeah, I'm curious if you can speak a little bit to how you were thinking about risk in this or what you understood those you spoke with, how those you spoke with understood risk. Just because I found it really refreshing, again, sort of this refusal of a binary here.
- [33:38]
Max Morris
Thanks. Yeah, so I think theorizing around risk is really important in relation to understanding so many aspects of our lives, our health, our gender, our sexuality, et cetera, et cetera. So it would be kind of difficult to avoid thinking about and talking about risk to some extent in this study. And of course, kind of that dominant framing of sex work as being a risky business or a risky form of work is central to that kind of gender trope about who performs sex work, how it's experienced, and indeed why the criminal law might view it as being a relevant area for intervention and prevention, which is a view that I reject in the book. But in relation to these participants in particular, I think, as you highlight, it's really difficult, if not impossible, to think about queer identities without also considering, for example, the role of HIV AIDS in how homophobia has been constructed historically, how moral panics about gay, bi and queer men have been a part of our culture for many, many decades, and also how there's a cultural lag in understanding. Right. We've had highly effective methods of treatment and prevention for HIV since 1997, and we are increasingly knowing that transmission of HIV is now impossible when somebody's on treatment. But of course, that requires people to have access to healthcare. So even though we have these medical technologies in this totally transformed environment, without changing social and cultural attitudes, as well as economic policy and health policy, that's not necessarily going to be realized for the world, for example. So, yeah, I mean, there was some discussion with the participants around, like, safer sex practices, what that means in the era of U equals U, which stands for undetectable, equals untransmittable, as I mentioned a moment ago, but also other risks too. Like, I think most of the research literature about online sex work, as you noted, now highlights that online sex work is largely understood as being safer. Right. Much of it happens without any direct interactions. So if you're Webcamming or creating OnlyFans content, there's zero risk of someone reaching through the screen and physically assaulting you. So many people have noted that online sex work is much safer generally as a practice, but it brings new risks along with it as well, as you mentioned, the threat of online harassment, doxing, being outed, like, all of these things bring new ways to analyze and understand sex work and erotic labor, but also our online sexual selves more generally. Right. So as I mentioned earlier, maybe one of the reasons why these young men didn't identify as sex workers is that they wanted to avoid the stigma of both homophobia and horphobia being applied to them. But again, when we think about outing, people can be outed in a whole range of different ways. And again, this speaks to the centrality of queer theorists like Eve Sedgwick, epistemology of the closet. You can only have a process of outing if there is this metaphor of the closet that people are concealing something about their identities that they don't want to be exposed. But that in itself brings all kinds of epistemological and theoretical considerations. And again, as you said, I attempt to, in the book in various places, kind of think through risk in a more complicated way by kind of looking at those kinds of queer and feminist ways of theorizing sexuality, gender, and also pandemics like HIV and COVID 19. And I think, interestingly in terms of COVID 19, this isn't necessarily my area of specialism. But quite a few of the participants commented on the fact that their practices changed in that context. Right. For a few years we were all in lockdown and away from each other. And we saw digital spaces and digital platforms becoming increasingly important for remaining connected with one another, but also for experiencing and experimenting with pleasure, desire and sexuality. So a few of the participants who I caught up with in those follow up interviews said how COVID 19 completely transformed their sexuality because they suddenly started exploring all kinds of fantasies and desires in a way that they hadn't before. And so, yeah, these big global events, whether it's pandemics or economic downturns, they have an influence on our behaviour, our identity, our sexuality, and so many other features of our lived experience. So, yeah, way too much to cover in one book, but definitely an important theme. And yeah, how we theorize risk in modernity or in postmodernity, I think is going to remain an important question to keep thinking about.
- [38:42]
Rinbeith
There is something that I found. So again, I love this book. I will say it again. Something I found really fascinating in terms of thinking about categories and roles and identities and intimacies, was when you spoke to your interlocutors, to your interviewees, about how they understood certain kinds of roles, I guess, amidst this, and to be sort of more specific, how cash and the exchange of money shaped things. So I wasn't as surprised, but I was really compelled by the understandings of masculinity and femininity and gender and how that was understood in different ways through this exchange of money. But also age as something. And as you noted, it's very under theorized that this experience of age and ageism on platforms and how the exchange of cash is part of that. Anyway, I was hoping that you could speak a little bit to waving my arms around and channeling Marx, but how the exchange of money shapes identities amidst sexual intimacies in the context again of exchanging money.
- [40:10]
Max Morris
Yeah, so I think that's a really great point to draw out from the book because obviously we're thinking about identity and post identity, but in this discussion so far, we've kind of limited ourselves to the main themes of the book, which are sex, work and LGBTQ identity and where those overlap. But as you say, there's also gendered, racialized, classed dimensions to that. And particularly prominently in this research, ageism and age differences. Because while I was interviewing younger men, most of the people who were paying them for sex were significantly older. Not in all cases, but there was definitely an age disparity, but there was also a wealth disparity. They were typically kind of richer older men who had the disposable income, whereas I think around half of my participants were students at the time of their first interviews, and many described themselves as being poor students and having a need for income. So as well as being a form of play, there were also those economic as well as aged and other kind of differences between the people who they were meeting online, who were offering them money. But it also, I think, speaks to another reason why studying, studying sex work is so useful for understanding identity construction, perhaps most importantly, through the role of pornography. Right. So if we consider pornography as a form of sex work, that's maybe different from direct forms, but still involves the exchange of money for sex, it also is a form of media production and consumption. And so it shapes like, what does it mean to label yourself according to all of the different categories that we have, for example, on a platform like Grindr? And again, it's also worth noting that even between the time that I did the first interviews and the second interviews, even the landscape on Grindr has changed. So we're seeing more women on Grindr and more straight men, perhaps, unsurprisingly, but we're also seeing a range of identities, trans, non, binary, gender fluid as well as sexualities, pansexual down low, people who might even identify as a side who's not interested in penetrative sex. So this kind of growing range of identities has become available even on this one platform just in the last few years. But what I think is interesting is how apps like Grindr really encourage their users to identify themselves with a whole range of different labels. So for example, you can be a top, bottom or verse. Is that a behavior or is it an identity? You could be like a sub, a drum or a switch, right? So you could belong to any number of so called Grinder tribes. You could be a twink or a jock or a bear or a daddy or an otter. I remember when I gave, I did a book launch at the University of Oxford, and when I was reading out these lists of different things that one could be on Grindr, I noted there's something almost zoological about this, right? You can be a pig or a pup or a bear or an otter, take your choice, right? And it says something about the tendency towards labeling within modernity, right? There's almost something scientific about this idea of which camp do you belong to? And the idea that does it have to be fixed like a permanent part of your identity? But so many of these identities, going back to my earlier point, are constructed by pornographic representations. I mean, of course, there are wider cultural representations too, that draw on these labels, but many of them will become more familiar to people through the kinds of erotic content that they see represented through pornography as a form of sex work. So in a sense, you can't fully appreciate or understand LGBTQ identities without also thinking a bit about sex work and thinking a bit about pornography and how it plays a role in that construction of social identity and even the notion of there being a fixity to it. As well, of course, as these apps, you know, suggesting that you, you have to pick from a drop down menu and once you've chosen, that's like how the world will see you. Or at least going back to your question, how the world will see you for a particular time. Because of course people are now familiar with the concept of twink death, something that I am sadly experiencing, which is that you can only be a twink if you are of a particular age, right? You have to be under a certain age. It's completely arbitrary who picks the year, who picks the age. But there's something there about youthfulness being associated with desirability, also sometimes being associated with femininity, also with race. There's sex work research, for example, by Trevin Logan, who highlighted that black male sex workers who characterize themselves as being dominant on escorting websites could charge more money. And so too could Asian men who describe themselves as being submissive. And of course, who is erased in that construction of race and sexuality and identity? It's white people who are, who are kind of cast as neutral. So there's that really fascinating intersection of age, race, gender, sexual role and positioning that I suppose all of us have to navigate to some extent on these platforms, but also in our kind of social identities and roles more broadly.
- [45:46]
Rinbeith
Thank you so much for that really wonderful answer. And for those who are very much not on the call, I definitely had myself muted. I've never been able to discuss twink death during an interview before, and this just brought me such delight. Anyway, to take a bit of a pivot when you new ends again, this really wonderful book you write, and I realize that reading your own words back to you is a little awkward, so bear with me. You write, I may not have been able to fully answer my own question about what and who counts as a sex worker, but failing to answer that question is itself a form of parenthetical queer success if it gets people to reconsider their stereotypical assumptions about sex, work and play in the digital era. So I'm thinking back to some of the points you made around rights and some of the ambivalences as well around rights that you note in this book, around respectability politics around, quote, unquote, good and bad gays, and quote, unquote good and bad sex workers. And I'm wondering what you might think about one of the successes of this book being that you did not answer this question, that this question is in a way unanswerable, and that this speaks to some really big questions about rights and the realization of rights amidst neoliberal logic. So, yeah, I was curious if you could just, in our last few minutes together, speak a little bit to, to how you are thinking about the realization of rights, whether you're thinking more theoretically or more concretely with the impacts of certain kinds of legislation.
- [47:38]
Max Morris
Thank you. I think, returning to the start of our conversation as I suggested, the title of my book draws inspiration from other queer theorists who have used this negative framing. And I think, like many of them, I'm trying to embrace the ambiguity that these questions raise. Like, in a sense, there is no adequate way to answer this question. There will still be some people who will read my book and will read the quotes and the narratives from participants saying, I don't identify this way and will say, but money was exchanged for sex, therefore it meets the definition if it is sex work. So people will draw different conclusions based on their own kind of metrics of categorisation and labelling. And that in some ways is unavoidable. But it goes back to that point we were discussing earlier around, how do you have rights based movements without fixed identities around which to organize? And this is true of so many social movements like civil rights, feminism, gay rights, et cetera, et cetera. But I think, like many other queer theorists, I value keeping open a space for that ambiguity and a space for that complexity and almost a willingness to not answer the question at all, like, does it really need an answer? And just by kind of asking that question, it opens up ways of maybe thinking more expansively about rights based movements, because of course, we know that there are limitations to them. And this is why I use those terms around good quote, unquote, and bad forms of being gay, being a sex worker. And of course, the biggest influence perhaps in my theorizing of this is Gayle Rubin and her model of the charm circle and outer limits of sexual normativity and respectability. And this is something we see playing out also in less theoretical and more concrete terms in terms of social movements and activism. Right. So so many sex workers have talked about and have critiqued the so called horiarchy, the idea that there is a hierarchy of better and worse forms of sex work, and Again, by challenging the stability of that label, sex work. I also hope that the research helps to destabilize and challenge the idea of there being any clear cut hierarchy of someone being a better or a worse sex worker, or a better or a worse queer subject. And that I think speaks to the broader kind of project around identity politics and thinking through what it means to be in a time of increasing post identity or identity fluidity, people might move between these different positions and be seen to do so in digital spaces.
- [50:27]
Rinbeith
So the classic New Books Network closing is to ask you what you're working on now. As I know listeners are always curious about what's next for authors we feature. So what are you working on now that not sex work is out in the world?
- [50:41]
Max Morris
Thank you for asking. So I've got three things at the moment. So the first is that I will have a chapter coming out in the SAGE Handbook of Queer Studies which draws on data from these interviews that I didn't publish in the book. And it's really relevant to the discussion we were just having about rights based movements because I asked the participants about how are they related to things like LGBTQ pride. And so I do a kind of political analysis of how sex worker rights and LGBTQ rights overlap historically and contemporarily in that chapter. Secondly, I'm also going to be presenting a more theoretical paper at the Alternative Futures and Popular Protest conference at the University of Manchester. And, and my working title for that is even shorter than the book title, which is not work. So another question that this research raises is like, okay, so if that's not sex work, then what is not work? Right? What does it mean to work or not work? And I'm going to be developing that concept of the play economy and the play society further through thinking about how can we apply insights from sex work studies to other areas of labour studies, particularly noting that kind of socialist feminist or Marxist feminist theoretical underpinning to the social and economic model. And then thirdly, also relevant to some of our discussion, I'm working on a new project which has a working title of not HIV negative. So continuing with this negative framing within queer theory, I've done a series of interviews with HIV positive people about their experiences. And again, there's so much overlap between the LGBTQ community, the sex worker rights movement and HIV and aids. And thinking about how things have transformed what is the role of stereotypes of gender and indeed of digital media for another group, that's kind of very relevant to this study. So those are the three things at the moment. And, yeah, I'm hoping that we can develop the ideas that really, I just give a bit of a sketch of in this. In this book. Thank you so much for asking.
- [52:56]
Rinbeith
Thank you so much for your time today, Max.
- [52:58]
Max Morris
My pleasure.