Abstract
Emergent research on the platform economy shows how race and gender oppression shape economic roles and virtual marketplaces enabled by digital technologies. While digital platforms promise economic self-determination, they also reinforce inequalities through algorithmic bias, platform policies, and precarious work conditions, particularly for women of color. This study asks: In what ways does platform-dependent entrepreneurship reflect the intersectional stratification resulting from the dual racialized sexualization and feminization of body work? Centering Black exotic dancers, this article examines how they use Instagram for self-branding and market-making in pursuit of entrepreneurial opportunities. Analyzing user-generated content from 73 Black exotic dancers in the southeastern United States, this study explores how “erotic influencers” extend their work beyond strip clubs to connect marginalized consumers and proprietors. Their profiles facilitate an intraracial online network where they advertise Black cultural products and services in beauty, fashion, and rap music. These findings illustrate how these women navigate a racial enclave economy on Instagram to construct new economic roles shaped by platform constraints and racialized erotic capital. To conclude, this article argues that erotic influencers are key market actors, linking formal and informal Black economic activities while contending with racial capitalism’s structural constraints in a digital society.
Keywords
@Iam_DMV_Dior is a “strippreneur” 1 with 7,200 followers on Instagram. Her profile biography states, “D.C. Native. Curvy goddess, peach emoji, darkest skin-tone queen emoji. Model. Entertainer @folliesdmv, C.E.O. of @HairbyDMVDior. DMs for business only.” A Brown-skinned Black woman, she uses her profile to display the work she does across various settings. In one video, she twerks to rap music on stage in the strip club as several Black male onlookers sip their beers nearby. With her ring lamp and smartphone, @Iam_DMV_Dior turns her apartment into a makeshift salon and studio to produce videos of herself styling Black women’s hair into braids or silk presses. Her captions resemble those of an influencer’s posts: “Link in bio!” for a wig install tutorial video to promote her hair extension website or “$5 drinks all night!” with a sexy image on a strip club flyer. @Iam_DMV_Dior’s narrative shows that economic activities mediated by online social networking applications like Instagram highlight the connection among race, gender, and labor stratification in the evolving platform economy.
The “platform economy” has fundamentally transformed labor relations and market structures, emergent from digital platforms such as Instagram, Uber, and Amazon that function as sociotechnical intermediaries to organize economic activities (Kenney and Zysman 2016; Liang, Aroles, and Brandl 2022). It facilitates new economic roles like “platform-dependent entrepreneurs” who sell goods or services through platforms, and “digital influencers” who promote products or services from brands to their followers (Christin and Lu 2023; Cutolo and Kenney 2019; Kenney and Zysman 2016; Zysman and Kenney 2020). Yet, the extent to which these economic opportunities reinforce existing hierarchies remains a matter of ongoing sociological inquiry (Cottom 2020). As André Brock (2020) asserts, “all information technologies—are socially and culturally shaped” (p. 44) through race, gender, and class, among sociocultural factors. Platform capitalism embeds existing societal hierarchies into platform-mediated exchanges through racialized and gendered labor stratification (Christin and Lu 2023; Cottom 2020; van Doorn 2017). Thus, for Black people, the labor conditions of the platform economy are simultaneously shaped by race, underscoring the convergence of platform capitalism and what Cedric Robinson (1983 [2000]) calls “racial capitalism” (Christin and Lu 2023; Cottom 2020).
This study analyzes erotic labor to understand the role of race and gender in platform capitalism, focusing on platform-dependent entrepreneurship on Instagram among Black exotic dancers between 2017 and 2018. Carol Ann Leigh (1997 [2013]) coined “sex work” to confront the stigma and ostracism associated with the mainstream feminist framing of individuals earning wages through sexualized transactions as “prostitutes.” However, while “sex work” typically describes sexual commerce associated with “waged/legally sanctioned labor” (babylon and Berg 2021, 632), “erotic labor” describes a broader range of performances, exchanges, or services. This labor involves both physical and emotional aspects, extending to informal, often unpaid activities (babylon and Berg 2021; Chapkis 1997). While sex work includes exotic dance, I investigate their erotic labor as it relates to exotic dancers’ social media usage.
I center women working in strip clubs in the southeastern United States due to how Jim Crow segregation and anti-vice zoning shape the legacy of its geography and economy (Bayor 1996; Ingham 2003; Logan 2017). For instance, in the early twentieth century, Decatur Street was Atlanta’s premier Black leisure space, where working-class people enjoyed blues music in jook joints, often located in Black-owned stores’ basements (Hunter 1997; Judson 2003). Similarly, Memphis’ Beale Street, D.C.’s U Street, and Baltimore’s East Baltimore Street reflect how Jim Crow and anti-vice legislation situated Black businesses in proximity to red light districts (Hemphill 2020; Ingham 2003). However, in these spaces, Black women, who otherwise worked as domestics in White households, found alternative forms of labor as dancers, singers, or sex workers (Carby 1998; Davis 1998; Hunter 1997). Contemporary Black leisure spaces like Magic City, a strip club less than a mile from Decatur Street, are still located in these districts today due to limited Black mobility. Thus, even while today’s Black leisure cultural laborers and entrepreneurs aim to use social media to increase their reach, their work is nonetheless impacted by each city’s twentieth-century past.
This article aims to enhance sociological perspectives on race, gender, and labor stratification by investigating Black women’s erotic labor in the platform economy. Through analyzing Instagram content including images, videos, and captions, I found that Black exotic dancers pursue personal enterprises within the beauty, fashion, rap music, and adult entertainment industries. In this way, they create the role of erotic influencer: proprietors who use social media platforms to promote body-related services and products, often constrained by racialized sexualization and feminization (Cohen and Wolkowitz 2018; Kang 2013). Building on Black feminist scholarship on Black women’s erotic labor (Brooks 2010; Cruz 2016; Jones 2020; Miller-Young 2014; Nash 2014, 2017), this article demonstrates how digital platforms offer opportunities for varied or specialized entrepreneurial pursuits for Black exotic dancers, albeit generally along a gendered color line. Ultimately, I show how gendered and racial labor stratification influences Internet-mediated labor relations via “racialized erotic capital”—a social hierarchy (de)valuing sexual appeal based on bodily traits associated with race and gender (Brooks 2010; Green 2008).
Race, Gender, And Erotic Labor In A Digital Society
Platform capitalism exacerbates societal power asymmetries. Corporate ownership gives owners sole control over data and user interactions on their platforms, which often enables bias in visibility and access among their user bases (Cottom 2020; Cutolo and Kenney 2019; van Doorn 2017). As a result, workers in precarious industries face instability and constrained agency when participating in the platform economy (Swords, Laing, and Cook 2021; van Doorn 2017), disproportionately affecting people of color or marginalized genders. For instance, new media scholars assert social networking sites (SNSs) contribute to the racialized feminization of Internet-mediated labor, from YouTube beauty gurus to Instagram fashionistas (Childs 2022; Drenten, Gurrieri, and Tyler 2019; Duffy and Hund 2015, 2019; Lawson 2020). Furthermore, Western technoculture perpetuates racial stratification through a dominant ideology of technological proficiency as attributed to White middle-class men while undermining Black people as technologically deficient through a “digital divide” (Brock 2020; Noble 2018). These dynamics are evident in the influencer industry’s preference for “blackfishing” White models over Black women in beauty and fashion (Stevens 2021; W. Thompson 2018), and the exploitation of African workers as moderators or data annotators in AI and social media (Le Ludec, Cornet, and Casilli 2023; Wamai et al. 2023).
Erotic laborers face such marginalization online, partly due to how the features, algorithms, and content moderation policies of mobile Internet applications like Instagram reinforce social stratification and support discrimination (Blunt et al., n.d.; Blunt and Wolf, n.d.; Jones 2015, 2020; Moorman and Harrison 2016; Swords et al. 2021). To navigate these tensions, some erotic laborers have resorted to “promotional labor” (Schieber 2018), bundling together complementary forms of work to improve their wages and social status. I analyze Black women’s promotional labor to show how technological progress within sexual commerce has both exacerbated inequalities for them and facilitated greater agency over their labor.
Prior research suggests that constructs of “erotic capital” that use physical markers of race, gender, and sexuality to uphold White supremacy (Brooks 2010; Green 2008) contribute to the devaluation of Black women’s erotic labor. Black women working in the “desire industries” face colorism and misogynoir (Bailey 2021; Brooks 2010; Jones 2020), including over-policing and stereotyping, which shapes how they navigate the digitalization of eroticism (Cruz 2016; Jones 2015; Miller-Young 2014). For instance, Black women escorts take more risk mitigation measures on platforms like Backpage.com than other groups (Moorman and Harrison 2016), yet also play into racial fetishization with advertisements using terminology such as “ebony” or “big booty” (Marcotte and Garcia 2017). Siobhan Brooks (2010) found that strip clubs both hypersexualize and erase Black exotic dancers on their websites. Their advertisements reinforce a “racialized erotic capital” that devalues exotic dancers of color due to societal perceptions about beauty and desirability based on race, class, sexuality, gender, and ethnicity (Brooks 2010; Green 2008). Similarly, in a sociological study of erotic camming, Angela Jones (2020) determined that racial stratification shaped this form of feminized, Internet-mediated labor. On erotic camming websites, Black women models, especially those with darker skin or textured hair, earn less and have lower ranking profiles than White women and other women of color.
This devaluation results in part from how controlling images, which constitute “the ideological dimension of U.S. Black women’s oppression” (Collins 2000, 5), shape Internet technology design and usage. These ideologies of race, gender, and sexuality assign Black women roles like the servile mammy and hypersexual Jezebel to justify social hierarchies and the exploitation of their labor (Collins 2000, 2004). Contemporary digital media widely circulate modernized portrayals of the Jezebel, depicting Black women as “hoochies,” or “freaks,” such as in hip hop music videos or pornography (Collins 2004; Miller-Young 2014; Ross and Coleman 2011). Amplification of such imagery reflects “algorithmic oppression” in which online tools like search engines misrepresent Black women and girls, particularly by associating them with sexually explicit content (Noble 2018).
Yet, US Black women also cultivate their erotic practices within “spaces of pleasure, such as strip clubs, pole studios and burlesque troupes, influenced by hip-hop culture” (Cunningham 2018, 64). Thus, several Black feminist scholars analyze Black women’s erotic agency, rather than solely focus on their racialized sexual exploitation (Brooks 2010; Collins 2004; Cruz 2016; Jones 2015; Miller-Young 2014; Nash 2014). Jennifer Christine Nash (2014, 2017) criticizes the “archive of pain” in Black feminist scholarship on sexuality and calls for more analyses that address Black women’s pleasure-seeking in an oppressive society. Her analysis of racialized pornography interprets Black women’s performances as indicative of “ambivalent pleasures” that negotiate controlling images of hypersexuality to pursue erotic agency, pleasure, and rebellion despite systemic oppression (Nash 2017). Such a critique therefore portends potential pleasures to explore in platform-dependent entrepreneurship for Black exotic dancers, even as the mutual constitution of racialized, gendered, and sexualized oppression shapes their labor.
Black feminist scholarship on Black women’s erotic labor also indicates they exhibit agency as digital technology users in sectors such as pornography (Brooks 2010; Cruz 2016; Miller-Young 2014). While Siobhan Brooks (2010) found that online advertisements for men’s strip clubs erased or devalued Black women, Black lesbian dancers blogged to foster a community that promoted alternative erotic capital. Through historical analysis of Black women in adult films, Mireille Miller-Young (2014) found that Black women use the Internet to produce and distribute sexual media that countered racist caricatures in pornography. By practicing “illicit eroticism,” Black women “confront and manipulate discourses about their sexual deviance” (Miller-Young 2014, 16) in pornography to not only profit financially, but also empower themselves and other Black women. Like Jennifer Christine Nash’s (2017) “ambivalent pleasures,” illicit eroticism addresses how Black women doing erotic labor craft spaces that center their pleasure and reclaim autonomy over their bodies. Finally, Ariane Cruz (2016) conceptualizes “racial-sexual alterity” to highlight “the imbrication—the mutually constitutive nature—of racialization and sexualization in the construction of black femininity” (p. 33). Cruz’s study of Internet pornography, particularly the interracial BDSM genre, indicates that Black women performers can upend notions of sexual deviance to instead embody “pleasure, power, and agency” (p. 34). Collectively, these findings indicate the digitalization of erotic labor encompasses both agentive and oppressive aspects for Black women.
Building on this scholarship, I turn the focus of Black feminist studies of eroticism online to Instagram, due to the ways the platform facilitates branding, sales, and portfolios for entrepreneurs (Duffy and Hund 2015, 2019; Kenney and Zysman 2016; Marwick 2015). How might the algorithms and aesthetics of Instagram that shape economic activities on the platform both reproduce racial hierarchies and enable Black women to reframe their desires? How might acting as entrepreneurs on this platform enable them to challenge or reinforce controlling images, subverting racialized sexualization for material and personal agency? This study’s findings answers such questions to reveal how platform capitalism modernizes and reinforces the racial-sexual exploitation of Black women’s work, particularly in the U.S. South (Hunter 1997; Wingfield 2008).
Data And Methods
This analysis aims to understand the Internet phenomenon of erotic influencers through the observation, interpretation, and analysis of online communications and digital practices of Black exotic dancers on Instagram. While the broader project includes maps of strip clubs and online questionnaires completed by dancers, this article focuses on findings derived from nonparticipant observation and content analysis. Focusing on public Instagram profiles, over nine months in 2017 and 2018, I recorded daily observations and documented self-presentations of interest in field notes. I then further encoded these notes with meaning by classifying the dancers’ economic roles for erotic labor and entrepreneurship using criteria I defined after observation (Singleton and Straits 2010; Williams 2008). In addition, I collected digital media files including images, videos, and stories generated on these user profiles. Each profile includes a biography section, URL, and photo grid; image and video uploads as posts displayed on the photo grid or stories displayed on the home tab; captions for posts of video or imagery shown in the photo grid; text overlay on stories; hashtags in captions or as text overlay in stories; usernames; tagging of other account usernames in captions or as text overlay on posts and stories; geotagging on posts or stories; and comments to other users on their posts. 2
Sample Description
I initially aimed for a sample size of 33 dancers from each metropolitan region, but Instagram modified the quality of its Application Programming Interface (API) data the during collection phase. I obtained 31,339 digital media files from a non-probability sample of 73 dancers: 30 from Atlanta, 25 from D.C., and 18 from Memphis. My focus on these three metropolitan areas, Black women, and exotic dancing sheds light on the usage of Internet platforms for profit from an understudied socioeconomic group and region. In addition, Black entrepreneurs, who have historically served an intraracial consumer base due to segregation and prejudice (Harvey 2005; Ingham 2003; Inman and Grant 2005), benefit from these cities’ large Black populations. According to the 2016 American Community Survey (ACS), 37.7 percent of Atlanta, 46.4 percent of D.C., and 64.4 percent of Memphis are Black. However, these cities have different economies, which may also affect Black entrepreneurs. Memphis had a median family income of $38, 826 in 2016, Atlanta $53, 843, and D.C. $75, 506, according to the ACS. This variation in population and income therefore warrants a multisited strategy, given each area has a separate but interconnected history of Black displacement into intraracial residential, commercial, and recreational zones (Bayor 1996; Hall 1983; Logan 2017).
Data Collection and Procedure
To compile a list of strip clubs in each city, I applied my experience as a previous resident and conversed with colleagues and peers in Memphis, Atlanta, and D.C. I also searched Google Maps for strip clubs in each city, yielding 46 strip club names across the three cities. I then created a new email address to create a public Instagram profile on my iPhone that included a link to a webpage about the study. I proceeded to the nonparticipant observation stage of this study by using Instagram’s search tools to find pictures and videos at each listed strip club. First, I looked for strip club usernames on venue-related accounts. Second, I searched for user-generated content geotagged with the venue’s name. Finally, I looked for strip club names as hashtags to see user-generated media with them in the description of an image or video on a profile. This search not only identified exotic dancers and strip club venues, but also related industries like promoters, bartenders, and exotic apparel designers, which I verified by reading each profile’s biography. For the purposes of this article, I primarily analyze content from exotic dancers.
While some women self-identified as Black on their profiles, my choice to locate strip clubs before dancers exploited the racial segregation in the industry (Brooks 2010; Trautner 2005). In addition, I found that exotic dancers identified themselves using a locker room selfie and mentioned the strip club by geotagging, captioning, or tagging the username. So, I considered the profile a potential case if the user (1) used the location, hashtag, or username features of Instagram in a caption of an image or video of herself at a strip club; (2) posted a picture of herself with a caption that named the city before the phrase ‘strippers’; or (3) had their username tagged in the caption, superimposed text on the image, or as a hashtag in venue or promoter posts. I downloaded each user’s digital media using Instagram-scraper and used Picodash.com to export metadata for each user account as a CSV file. This metadata included the username of each account, the URL for each image as seen on Instagram in a web browser; the date of the post in GMT, the frequency of likes for each image, the text of the caption including emoji; the frequency of comments, the identification number name, latitude, and longitude of each location as tagged by the user, and the user’s full name as entered by the user.
Data Analysis
My nonparticipant observation via Instagram’s user interface included looking at Instagram photographs, videos, captions, and comments. I also viewed each user’s Instagram story, though due to this feature’s 24-hour ephemerality, I could only download videos of stories as they were posted at time of data collection. This data-driven approach involved identifying trends in how dancers drew on aesthetics and setting to alter their online self-presentation in ways that indicated their various roles as erotic influencers. In addition, I classified each depicted economic role to inform the content analysis I completed using NVivo and Microsoft Excel. I documented five broad categories of how each dancer used Instagram for influencer marketing and entrepreneurship, which I describe in the results and discussion section. I counted categories of economic role per user since I cannot assume that the frequency of digital media for an economic role equally conveys its salience for each user (Singleton and Straits 2010).
Ethical Considerations
In the absence of consistent methods, arguments have emerged over the ethics of digital data collection and analysis (Clark et al. 2018). Some scholars and university institutional review boards believe researchers can collect and analyze publicly available Internet user data without informed consent (Golder et al. 2017; Zimmer 2010). Other academics advise against exploiting Internet users, especially marginalized ones, who are inexperienced with scholarly and journalistic research methods (franzke et al. 2020; Zimmer and Kinder-Kurlanda 2017). Due to these ethical concerns, the Association of Internet Researchers (AoIR) has published guidelines that include allowing people the opportunity to drop out of a research or anonymity despite social media publicness (franzke et al. 2020).
I follow the AoIR’s framework and Jason Farman (2012), who argues for mutual visibility between Internet users and researchers, discouraging anonymity and gathering data without respondents’ awareness. During nonparticipant observation, I linked to my Instagram profile on the project profile, defined the study’s aim in the biography area, and linked to a homepage about the project on my personal website. I also contacted each dancer I followed by direct message, introducing myself, briefly explaining the project, and inviting them to participate in the project through a separate online questionnaire. In this article, I detail each user case in words rather than images to safeguard each user’s anonymity and ensure each user’s “right to be forgotten” (franzke et al. 2020, Zimmer and Kinder-Kurlanda 2017). Some dancers have deleted their profiles or scrubbed references to exotic dance from them, implying a departure from sex work. For this reason, I also use pseudonymous usernames and prefer to frame findings in broad categories in addition to solo narratives.
Platform-Dependent Entrepreneurship Among Black Exotic Dancers On Instagram
The findings in Table 1 show that 79 percent of these 73 dancers adopted five tactics as erotic influencers, blending common practices with other strategies more specific to erotic labor. Much of this platform labor involved promoting products and services tied to beauty, fashion, and industries rooted in Black cultural markets, such as hip-hop modeling.
Categories of self-branding as influencers or entrepreneurs among Black exotic dancers (N = 73).
Note. Dancers may appear in more than one category; however, each individual dancer is counted only once within each category.
Through interactive modeling portfolios, dancers used their Instagram profile to curate a showcase of their professional and personal aesthetic endeavors as models. Dancers also used their Instagram profile as a catalog, advertising self-owned products and services particularly in beauty and fashion. They also promoted on behalf of other entrepreneurs through intracultural influencer marketing, acting as digital ambassadors for brands and businesses typically owned by other Black people. Sometimes this advertising involved digital billboards: flyers or videos of themselves dancing to promote strip club or rap music events, two cultural phenomena which often overlapped in the Black South. Finally, a few Instagram profiles functioned like advertisements for virtual peep shows, offering access to sexually explicit content or services through platforms external to Instagram, like OnlyFans. Each role illustrates how Black women navigate a platform economy that reinforces racial capitalism by commodifying and constraining their erotic labor through systemic anti-Blackness and gendered hierarchies.
Modeling Portfolios: A Showcase of Black Aesthetic Labor
Over half of the dancers (53 percent) posted photos of themselves posing for photographers for their personal or the photographer’s portfolio. These photographers, most of whom were Black men, displayed these images in digital and print magazines that catered to a Black male clientele of rap music fans. Interactive modeling portfolios reveal the imposition of turn of the century beauty standards for Black women into the domain of digital media as a type of platform labor. Through this practice, erotic influencers leverage Instagram’s multimodality to capitalize on the desirability of voluptuous bodies within the visual culture of hip-hop media.
@MEMDancer01, a Memphis-based dancer with over 33,000 followers, illustrates how erotic influencers use their Instagram profiles to create an interactive digital modeling portfolio. Her stage name, an alias based on a southern Black American name, and sparkling wine made in France, doubles as her Instagram username, a common practice among erotic influencers. Her biography section lacks identifying information, though it includes a URL to a website where she sells hair extensions. One photograph posted on this dancer’s Instagram grid presents her modeling for an “urban independent (men’s) magazine” managed by a northeastern-based DJ. She stares directly into the camera, standing tall in stilettos and a burgundy lace bodysuit that accentuates her waist to emphasize the hourglass figure so valued among hip-hop models (Miller-Young 2008; Ross and Coleman 2011). Indeed, the reddish fabric against her brown skin conjures the phrase “body like a coke bottle,” a common refrain in hip-hop choruses and lyrics praising women with large breasts, bottom, and yet narrow waist. @MEMDancer01 captions this photo “FACE!!!!” to confidently uplift the aesthetic labor that went into meeting the beauty standard, which includes long wavy hair extensions, manicured eyebrows, eye makeup, eyelash extensions, lip gloss, and other cosmetics. Beyond posing, @MEMDancer01 does digital marketing by naming the photographer and magazine in her post’s caption. After the magazine released its print edition, she posted her photo and interview to her profile and promoted the release party at a New York City strip club for Black and Latinx clients in the caption, which included the magazine owner’s, celebrities’, dancers’, DJs’, and nightlife producers’ usernames.
During the commercialization of hip-hop in the late twentieth century, Black women performers, many of whom were exotic dancers or porn stars, enacted sexual and erotic scripts as “video vixens” who displayed their bodies to bolster a male rap star’s masculinity (Balaji 2010; Johnson 2014; Ross and Coleman 2011). Print periodicals like KING and Black men often selected them as cover girls as they usually embody the “thick body ideal” valued among Black Americans, particularly in the South (Balaji 2010; Gentles-Peart 2020; Ross and Coleman 2011). Digital media has facilitated the rise of the “Instagram model,” a figure who often defies hegemonic beauty standards due to how they can gain followers and influence without commercial media (Edwards and Esposito 2018; Schrager 2016). In this context, Black exotic dancers function as “Instagram vixens,” gaining visibility with a predominantly Black audience and accessing opportunities through her connection to and value within hip-hop culture. Social institutions such as mass media shape the sexual scripts that Black exotic dancers navigate at an interpersonal level through social interactions mediated by digital platforms like Instagram (Brown 2024). As erotic influencers, Black exotic dancers therefore craft online self-presentations for their economic gain that reject, reinforce, or complicate controlling images to navigate racialized economic stratification in the platform economy.
In the United States, women dominate as workers in both aesthetic and desire industries shaped by racialized exploitation and exclusion from slavery through the Jim Crow and Civil Rights eras. Thus, the aesthetic labor in these interactive modeling portfolios reflects the ongoing commodification of Black women’s bodies as assets within an economic system historically rooted in their sexual enslavement. Feminized industries like modeling and exotic dance perpetuate racialized economic extraction via beauty standards that favor whiteness and marginalize Black femininity as undesirable (Brooks 2010; Jones 2020; Miller-Young 2014). Yet, Black women in roles such as seamstresses, beauticians, and erotic laborers have navigated their marginalization to foster financial empowerment within their communities (Harris 2016; Harvey 2005; Hunter 1997). Indeed, these exotic dancers, who often work with Black male photographers for a predominantly Black male audience, also demonstrate how Black women use social media to achieve visibility, profit, and opportunity despite this marginalization.
Products and Services Catalogs: Displaying Black Beauty and Culture
In the platform economy, the connection among industry, products, and embodiment shapes the possibilities and limitations of entrepreneurial pursuits. Consequently, racialized erotic capital limits what and to whom erotic laborers may sell their skills offline and online (Brooks 2010; Cruz 2016; Jones 2015). Thirty-six percent of dancers had Instagram profiles that promoted products and services from feminized industries like fashion, beauty, and wellness or racialized industries like rap and R&B music. These cataloguers harnessed their bodies to advertise to similarly culturally and racially situated followers, adorning themselves with wares that predominantly attracted Black women consumers. This overlap between the products and services these erotic influencers promote, and their industries highlight the racialized and gendered dynamics of embodiment and digital entrepreneurship.
@DMVDancer01, a D.C.-based dancer with 6,000 followers, shows how dancers use Instagram profiles as product and services catalogs. Her username reflects her self-identification as a businesswoman. Her biography section includes the username for the Instagram account she dedicates to this venture which involves both fashion design and graphic design. In one post on her personal profile, @DMVDancer01 displays an image of a mannequin wearing a bedazzled green bikini with superimposed text that prompts the viewer to “Order yours today.” Two days before the holiday, she posted this photo with the caption “St. Patrick’s Day Vibes.” In addition to tagging the username for her brand’s Instagram profile, @DMVDancer01 includes #swimwear and #danceoutfits, keywords likely to attract Instagram users browsing these hashtags using the explore tool.
Due to a history of discrimination and segregation from retailers across a variety of industries, Black entrepreneurs developed their own advertising apparatus, which echoes within this contemporary practice. Black businesses and service providers created their own catalogs and periodicals in the twentieth century, some of which, like Ebony, marketed fashion, beauty, and wellness products offered almost exclusively to Black women (Boyd 2000; Ingham 2003; Wingfield 2008). Advertised products included hair relaxer and other chemical straightening products, reflecting prevailing beauty ideals. Today, beauty ideals have evolved to include natural hair, wigs, extensions, and braids, illustrating the ongoing transformation of beauty norms (Robinson 2011; Rowe 2021; C. Thompson 2009). Importantly, Instagram profile catalogs resemble the posters and catalogs of hairstyles Black women salon owners display at the beauty parlor, where other Black entrepreneurs might proffer their products to receptive clientele (Harvey 2005; Wingfield 2008). Similarly, today’s Black hairstylists use Instagram, StyleSeat, and other sites to showcase their work and connect with clients. This Black hair entrepreneurship continuum shows how historical antecedents continue to shape commerce among Black women and their communities. Thus, for the erotic influencer, platform labor involves navigating racialized and gendered consumerism and commodification in the platform economy.
Intracultural Influencer Marketing: Brand Ambassadors for Black-Owned Enterprises
Over a third of dancers (36 percent) leveraged their Instagram profiles as virtual showcases for other businesses, primarily promoting Black entrepreneurs in industries like exotic fashion and rap music. Their influencer reach was constrained by their racial and gender demographics, linking mostly to adult entertainment and rap music. Thus, their self-presentation mirrors that required in strip clubs and rap video sets (Brooks 2010; Cunningham 2018; Miller-Young 2014). Nonetheless, the relevance of Black exotic dancers to these ventures explains why this network of service providers and retailers would seek them out as brand ambassadors.
@DMVDancer02, a DC-based dancer with 26,000 followers, shows how racialized erotic capital, most notably, the appeal associated with voluptuous backsides on Black women, serves a function in the context of influencer marketing. Her username, blending her name and race, underscores the importance of racial identity for erotic influencers in attracting followers who value race in the aesthetic distinction from other women. Her biography section indicates that she is a cover model, illustrating how Instagram profiles allow for the adoption of multiple roles (Schieber 2018). This cover model uses intracultural influencer marketing to promote a cartoonist by posting a photo of herself as a cartoon, captioned with a heart emoji and the cartoonist’s username. The original photograph shows her poolside in a bikini with her backside toward the camera. The cartoonist captures @DMVDancer02’s sultry expression but exaggerates her breasts and bottom, showing how racialized erotic capital emphasizes voluptuousness as an asset for Black women (Brooks 2010; Cunningham 2018; Gentles-Peart 2018; Miller-Young 2014).
Intracultural influencer marketing illuminates how Black women secure visibility as brand ambassadors, despite how the racialized and colorist hierarchies of feminized industries in the U.S. otherwise marginalize and devalue them. Platforms like Instagram enable brands to engage in “predatory inclusion,” incorporating marginalized creators on exploitative terms through algorithmic bias and unequal monetization (Cottom 2020). Via blackfishing, fashion and cosmetics brands co-opt racialized feminine aesthetics as they distance themselves from Black women in the flesh, exploiting their cultural production to generate profit that rarely benefits them (Childs 2022; Lawson 2020; Stevens 2021; W. Thompson 2018). Yet, within these conditions of market exclusion, erotic influencers like @DMVDancer02 facilitate a crucial node between a virtual network of Black buyers and sellers historically exploited within the broader economy. Thus, to negotiate predatory inclusion, Black participation in the platform economy requires digitalizing hubs of Black business and pleasure like Atlanta’s Decatur Street, Memphis’ Beale Street, and D.C.’s U Street.
“Come see me”: Instagram Profiles as Digital Billboards for Black Cultural Events
Less than 20 percent of dancers display flyers on their Instagram profiles promoting strip club events for which they were the headlining dancer. A practice that dates to burlesque shows (Sixth Floor Museum 2014), headlining dancers sometimes travel to perform in strip clubs outside their home cities. On Instagram, dancers double as their own event promoters, amplifying both their privileged status as featured performers and the myriad of economic activities that converge in the space of the southern Black strip club. Indeed, digital billboards normally include a dancer’s photo and name, the dress code, names of DJs or rap artists (mainly Black men), the strip club’s location, and everyone’s Instagram usernames.
@ATLDancer01, an Atlanta-based dancer with 7,200 followers, shows how erotic influencers adapt the burlesque house flyer to the Instagram grid. She posted a promotional flyer displaying herself sitting in a chair with her legs slightly apart, wearing black fishnet stockings, underwear and a crop top. To complete her aesthetic, she wears a long ponytail and plush bangs that almost shield her eyes. The flyer displays her Instagram handle, the club’s logo and address, and text announcing @ATLDancer01 headlining a Labor Day event hosted by a now-defunct men’s magazine at an Atlanta nightclub with complimentary liquor hours. In the caption, she restates the date of “the city’s greatest party,” tags a non-existent club profile, invites followers to “come see me” and other magazine models, tagging the magazine’s username. In this post, @ATLDancer01 demonstrates the complexities of erotic labor in the digital age—she simultaneously serves as the image, embodiment, and promoter of Black desirability. These digital practices are especially significant given the historical segregation of Black labor, particularly in the illicit economy, from mainstream spaces (Harris 2016; Miller-Young 2014).
Still, this self-promotion may not always align with the racialized erotic capital valued by others. In her post, @ATLDancer01 advertised the men’s magazine event with their username, but despite having seven times as many followers as her, they did not reciprocate the favor. The magazine’s Instagram profile primarily showcased light-skinned or ethnically ambiguous Black and Latina women. The flyer of @ATLDancer01, a dark-skinned Black woman, was left off altogether. This discrepancy highlights colorism in the platform economy and raises questions about the distribution of recognition and influence in a feminized and racially sexualized industry. Among erotic influencers, Black women with darker skin face the same differential treatment that encompasses not only exotic dance, pornography, and webcam modeling, but also beauty influencer marketing (Brooks 2010; Childs 2022; Jones 2020; Miller-Young 2014). Thus, dark-skinned Black women experience a devaluation of their platform labor, potentially resulting in fewer opportunities for visibility and profit compared to their lighter-skinned counterparts.
Virtual Peep Shows: Strategic Self-Presentation to Promote Pleasure
Few exotic dancers I observed adopted just one economic role on Instagram. Yet, though they all used Instagram to facilitate their entrepreneurial activities, ramifications vary based on product or service. Indeed, selling sex on social media, unlike hair or fashion, entails risks and thus demands extra care in crafting a “manufactured identity” (Sanders 2005), different from typical Instagram sales approaches. Sixteen percent of dancers used Instagram to promote erotic offerings available on other digital media platforms. Such virtual advertisements encompassed practically every feature of Instagram, such as stories, semi-ephemeral content that can be saved on their profile as highlights for later viewing. Virtual peep shows also include the dancer’s image with superimposed text that uses the phrase “link in bio” or lists usernames for other social network or mobile payment applications.
@ATLDancer02, an Atlanta-based dancer with 13,200 Instagram followers, exhibits these strategic self-presentations. Her biography section advertises “exclusive content” for audiences 21 and older, along with the URL to a website where she sells a subscription for this digital media. It includes the username for a “backup” Instagram and confirms she only has two profiles. Erotic influencers sometimes used a backup page because Instagram, emboldened by the legalities of FOSTA-SESTA 3 , penalizes sexual titillation by censoring material, restricting user access, or deleting accounts (Blunt et al., n.d.; Blunt and Wolf, n.d.). Paradoxically, this technique employs Instagram’s multiple-profile functionality, which users sometimes adopt to keep distinct online personas (van der Nagel 2017). @ATLDancer02’s profile shows her in lingerie doing sensuous poses in domestic spaces like the bedroom or kitchen and feature captions that direct followers to visit the “link in bio.” Her erotic self-presentation calls up the home as a popular setting for Internet pornography, both amateur and professional. While much of her media appear self-produced, she also posts images produced by a Black man photographer who specializes in erotic images of Black women. Thus, @ATLDancer02’s Instagram posts function as erotica ads, influencer marketing, and a modeling portfolio.
Virtual ads by erotic influencers echo the temporality of peep shows (Liepe-Levinson 2003; Miller-Young 2014), extending this erotic practice into a cyberspace context shaped by the sociolegal structure of the digital age via terms of service and content moderation (Blunt et al., n.d.; Blunt and Wolf, n.d.; Swords et al. 2021). Instagram’s terms of use permit users to classify their profiles as “Adult Entertainment Service” or “Adult Entertainment Club” businesses. However, its parent company Meta’s community standards prohibit imagery of sexual activity, “visible genitalia,” “fully nude close-ups of buttocks,” or “uncovered female nipples, ‘except in a ‘medical’ or ‘health context’” (Meta n.d.). Instagram uses both artificial intelligence and content moderation teams to evaluate whether potential violations should result in removal of the content or a ban of the user’s profile (Instagram n.d.). Given how key these body parts are for exotic dancers and other adult entertainers, erotic influencers manage these user self-presentation constraints as part of the Internet’s political economy (Blunt et al., n.d.; Swords et al. 2021). Therefore, erotic influencing requires a subtle explicitness in marketing their erotic labor such that on Instagram, stories seduce, but URLs bare all—for a fee.
The ways that erotic influencers leverage online self-presentation in virtual peepshows brings into focus several perspectives that emerge within Black feminist debates around documenting Black women’s sexual pleasures and pains. Through its prohibition on the buttocks in particular, Instagram’s terms of service target a key feature of value Black women can leverage online. Via “racial-sexual alterity” (Cruz 2016), Black women’s bodies, particularly their buttocks, have been racialized as symbols of sexual deviance, hypersexuality, and exoticism (Collins 2000, 2004, Tate 2015). This characterization has paradoxically led to both their marginalization and their commodification within desire-based industries (Brooks 2010; Miller-Young 2014; Nash 2014). Consequently, virtual peep shows reveal that SESTA-FOSTA may disrupt the livelihoods of Black women in particularly unique ways due to how racialized erotic capital and economic stratification shape their labor. Yet, Black women conducting virtual peep shows also mobilize “illicit eroticism” as a digital practice within these constraints, negotiating racialized sexuality to demonstrate their marketability and desirability as purveyors of pleasure (Miller-Young 2014). Like the strip club, virtual peep shows display Black exotic dancers as sensuous embodiments of pleasure, drawing in clientele eager to pay for the appeasement of their erotic desires (Brooks 2010). Thus, these findings also suggest social media offers a potential site for Black women to embody a “politics of pleasure” (Morgan 2015) that enables autonomy over their sexualized labor.
Discussion
This study examines how Black exotic dancers in the southeastern United States use Instagram to leverage their erotic capital into multiple entrepreneurial pursuits. These findings show that Instagram affords them opportunities for visibility and profit vis-à-vis the erotic influencer, creating Internet-mediated avenues for entrepreneurship. Still, like their physical counterparts within each southern metropolis, these digital avenues largely operate within intraracial networks. Furthermore, most dancers promoted themselves in roles related to body-related services such as hairstyling or modeling, industries historically stratified by race, with women performing most of these roles (Cohen and Wolkowitz 2018; Kang 2013; Wingfield 2008). This racialized market segmentation reflects the spatialized economic arrangement of Jim Crow in which Black labor remains largely consumed within Black economic circuits, restricting broader market access and financial mobility (Boyd 2000; Logan 2017, Robinson 1983 [2000]). Ultimately, the entrepreneurial flexibility of platform capitalism does not erase, but rather reinforces race and gender stratification (Christin and Lu 2023; Cottom 2020; van Doorn 2017). Thus, Black women’s platform labor exists in a space of ambivalence (Nash 2014, 2017), simultaneously shaped by the intersecting oppressions they seek to escape and the pleasures and possibilities they carve out within these constraints.
As erotic influencers on Instagram, these dancers embody both erotic laborers and entrepreneurs albeit in racialized, sexualized, and gendered forms of bodywork and labor. This duality hinges on their value to Black leisure culture in southeastern cities, particularly strip clubs and rap entertainment, shaped by racialized economic stratification. Over half of each dancers’ profiles functioned as interactive modeling portfolios that displayed portraits taken for outlets that catered to Black rap music fans (e.g., men’s magazines or album covers). Over one third had catalog profiles that displayed a range of products and services including apparel, hair extensions, beauty products, hairdressing, makeup artistry, cooking, rapping, singing, painting, or pole exercise instruction. Like Black beauty shops throughout the United States, these catalogs advertised Black women’s skill set within a broader feminized industry that excluded them from mainstream stores and salons (Harvey 2005; Steele 2021; Wingfield 2008). An equal percentage of profiles promoted products and services offered by other Black entrepreneurs, such as exotic wear boutiques or rap music and photography. Less frequently, these profiles functioned as digital billboards on behalf of strip clubs or other nightlife venues across the southeastern United States targeting a predominantly Black clientele. Considering the conservative sexual politics underlying Instagram’s community guidelines, further enforced by SESTA-FOSTA, dancers rare-ly offered virtual peep shows to direct followers to alternative online and in-person erotic services.
This study’s findings indicate that Black femininity as an embodied construct of racial-sexual alterity shapes the roles platform-dependent entrepreneurs take on and the marketplaces they have access to due to racialized erotic capital (Brooks 2010; Cruz 2016). Mobile social network applications like Instagram prioritize photos and videos, placing an emphasis on the body, which suggests that a seller’s physical qualities shape their business ventures. Indeed, erotic influencers integrate aesthetic and erotic labor to advertise products and services to the intraracial and gendered niche markets that constitute their online social network. They therefore serve different consumer needs for subgroups within this demographic, such as Black men’s magazines and Black women’s hair extensions. However, this emphasis on the body can also detract from opportunities for visibility and profit, adding a tension between agency and exploitation to their Internet-mediated enterprises. For example, when exotic dancers do digital billboard work, strip clubs reduce them to commodities rather than autonomous entrepreneurs, favoring light skin dancers on their Instagram profiles. This finding supports prior research that identified how colorism shaped representations of erotic labor on webcam, pornography, and strip clubs websites (Brooks 2010; Jones 2020; Miller-Young 2014), as well as in the beauty influencer industry (Childs 2022).
Black women embodying both cultural producers and objects of consumption on the same social media application illustrate the tensions between individual agency and structural constraints in platform labor (Drenten, Gurrieri, and Tyler 2019; Duffy and Hund 2019). Furthermore, this dichotomy illuminates how prevailing cultural narratives and power dynamics around race and gender shape the platform economy. For instance, over half of dancers used their Instagram profiles as interactive modeling portfolios, curating self-branded aesthetics that generate revenue through photography, fashion, and beauty collaborations. Nevertheless, their platform labor circulates within a racialized consumption economy, where their images also serve as promotional material and commodities to benefit strip clubs and other adjacent industries more than the influencer themselves. As a result, not all Internet-enabled practices entirely subvert the racialized and gendered hierarchies that shape digital labor. The commodification of Black femininity structures their visibility, constraining their pursuit of financial autonomy through racialized constructs of desirability that surface in their aesthetic labor and erotic self-presentation.
Still, these findings also demonstrate that Black women leverage these constructs on Instagram to enact “illicit eroticism” (Miller-Young 2014) as a “boss lady,” based on self-descriptions on some profiles. For instance, women who used their profiles as catalogs or for influencer marketing created digital marketplaces that both catered to and promoted the businesses of other Black Instagram users. Their profiles facilitate virtual storefronts for multiple ventures within Black cultural industries concentrated in the southeastern United States, particularly in relation to rap music. While fewer dancers advertised virtual peep shows, the presence of such profiles indicates a continued practice of centering their pleasure online among Black women in the desire industries (Brooks 2010; Miller-Young 2014). These findings suggest that social media content disrupts theories of Black women’s sexuality that prioritize sexual exploitation, instead offering a site to analyze their sexual autonomy and erotic agency (Morgan 2015). In this way, erotic influencers function as the market women, numbers runners, and candy ladies of the digital era, all while maintaining work as exotic dancers. They therefore continue the legacy of their forebears by embodying these key roles within the economic spaces Black communities have long cultivated for themselves (Harris 2016; Wingfield 2008).
Conclusion
This article identified five economic roles erotic laborers perform on Instagram and how the racialized sexualization and feminization of body labor shapes these entrepreneurial activities. As erotic influencers, Black exotic dancers access multiple income streams by crafting an identity and an online persona to attract followers. These online networks reflect the intraracial consumer base that has historically shaped Black women’s economic opportunities, operating within what Adia Harvey Wingfield (2008) terms a “racial enclave economy.” Their labor is shaped by (1) the rap music industry and sexual commerce (Brooks 2010; Miller-Young 2014), (2) the commodification of femininity within the fashion and beauty industries (Childs 2022; Duffy and Hund 2015; Harvey 2005; Tate 2015), and (3) the importation of offline racial segregation into cyberspace via online social networks (Brock 2020; Nakamura 2002; Steele 2021).
These findings demonstrate that platform labor does not resolve racialized and gendered stratification, but rather reconfigures it in ways that constrain economic opportunities based on social positionality and embodied characteristics (Brooks 2010; Jones 2015, 2020). While digital platforms like Instagram function as sociotechnical intermediaries that reshape employment, economic value, and market competition (Cutolo and Kenney 2019; Kenney and Zysman 2016; Zysman and Kenney 2020), this study demonstrates that racialized erotic capital also fundamentally structures platform-dependent entrepreneurship. In addition, by centering the southeastern United States, this study highlights how its racialized and gendered geographies shape social stratification in the economy enabled by information and communication technologies. While Silicon Valley–based corporations seek to dominate global markets and social spheres through their digital platforms, users in marginalized communities leverage platform affordances to create “digital enclaves” (Graham 2014). Mirroring the racial enclaves of Black users’ offline environments (Bayor 1996; Harris 2016; Ingham 2003; Logan 2017; Wingfield 2008), these isolated and distinct spaces center their cultural end economic production, constructing valuable networks within these constraints (Brock 2020; Steele 2021). These enclaves thus illustrate how Black entrepreneurs rework exclusion from the mainstream digital economy to sustain intraracial exchange and visibility online.
This study lays the groundwork for further research on erotic labor in the platform economy by interrogating the entrepreneurial pursuits undertaken among marginalized workers on Instagram. While this study sheds light on Black exotic dancers in the southeastern United States, future research should explore how or if the erotic influencer manifests in other sectors of erotic labor, among non-Black women of color, and across different digital platforms. What entrepreneurial pursuits emerge in relation to pornography or escorting? How do the features of digital platforms beyond Instagram enable or constrain erotic self-presentation and entrepreneurship? How does the experience of erotic influencers compare to workers in other industries that rely on mobile social network applications? Answering such questions will further clarify how technology modernizes intersecting oppressions, offering additional insight into the promises and perils of the Internet for economic empowerment among marginalized groups.
