Whoretography – The Sex Worker As Image-Maker: A critical analysis of sex workers’ self-representation in online public spaces

There has been an enduring cultural fascination and repulsion with portraits of women sex workers. The sex worker’s role as image-sitter is assumed in the public imagination and remains a steadfast part of contemporary popular culture. However, the ways in which sex workers photograph themselves remain largely unknown. The sex worker is considered an image-sitter who is never viewed in her capacity as a 21st-century image-maker. Hence, the nature of the woman sex worker self-portrait is severely under-researched.

This thesis adds to arts-based research approaches that view the self-portraits of marginalised women through an intersectional feminist and self-image framework. This thesis attempts to merge writings on representational discourses and the visual culture of sex work, relocating questions about the sex worker as image-maker to politically oppositional aesthetics of resistance and feminist self-image discourses on representation. The body of work selected for analysis adds to the literature through exploring this overarching thesis: the self-portrait of the sex worker is an artefact that has complex intersecting ideologies with multiple layers of meaning, narratives, and invisibilities, and furthermore, it is a nuanced complex object.

As the principal methods of data collection, this research conducted 32 qualitative interviews and a stylistic analysis of the various types of self-portraits extracted from 450 sex workers on the social media platforms Twitter and Instagram. The findings leveraged the theories of several feminist scholars and presented an episteme of the sex worker’s self-portrait, which can be summarised in the following five key points: aesthetics and hierarchy; language and visual literacy; meanings and influences; identity-related, economic, and political contexts; and the consequences of the sex worker self-portrait.