Teemu
Helenius
Doctoral Researcher, English, Classics and Multilingual Translation Studies
Doctoral research topic: We are content creators!? - Affordances-in-practice in the digital labor of online sex work(ers)

Contact

Areas of expertise

social media platforms
digital patronage platforms
social media communication
platform affordances
multimodal discourse
visual communication
sex work
online sex work
digital labor
content creator labor
online ethnography
TikTok
OnlyFans

Biography

I am a doctoral researcher in the Department of English at the Faculty of Humanities. I completed my bachelor's and master's thesis in the same Department. During master's level studies I started to focus on multimodal discourse in the context of social media communication which resulted in a master's thesis on the construction of authenticity in social media influencer content on Instagram (2021). I have since continued research in the context of social media and content creators in my doctoral thesis project, which has been ongoing since the start of 2023. The present research project has further moved my research interests towards the use of platforms and their affordances in digital labor contexts. I have thus expanded the theoretical bases of my research towards media studies, internet research, gender studies, and sociology. Simultaneously, I am now using a combination of methods in online ethnography, interviews, and multimodal discourse analysis to adress the intersection of content creation labor, platforms, and multimodal language use more comprehensively.

Research

My doctoral research project examines the use of social media platforms (esp. TikTok) and digital patronage platforms (esp. OnlyFans) in the digital content creator labor of online sex work(ers). Ethnography, interviews, and multimodal discourse analysis methods are used to examine how content creators interpret, interact with, and use platform features, functions and affordances as an integral part of their working practices. Special attention is paid to the content creation practices in terms of visual and multimodal communication as part of the labor. The contested position of sexual content and platform dependency of online sex workers requires adaptation and innovation on content creator strategies and platform use. Examining online sex worker practices then explicates how platforms are used and could be used in the future, and how the roles of platforms in digital labor are negotiated by workers. This approach presumes that online sex work must be considered as a specialized and legitimate strand of content creation based digital labor.

The thesis project aims to expand understanding of how platforms and their affordances are used in practice, how the practices and work in digital labor are impacted by digital patronage, how sexual expressions online can or cannot be made and circulated, and most notably how online sex workers’ digital labor takes shape. The ethnographic and interview-based methods emphasize online sex workers as the experts of their own digital labor and accommodate the vulnerabilities of sex workers on platforms and in societies. The contributions of this research project aid researchers, sex workers and their advocacy groups and unions, and policymakers by providing nuanced understandings of platform use in content creation based digital labor and the work of sex work, while challenging risk-centric views of sex and sexuality on social media to help alleviate the stigmatization of sex work in digital domains.



Publications

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