The digital hand: How digital infrastructures reshape occupational trends, risk, and labor demands among legal commercial sex workers in the U.S.

This dissertation is a mixed methods study that examines how legal commercial sex workers from three occupational groups (content creators, cam workers, and strippers) in the U.S. adopt and implement digital platforms within their work, and how that adoption reshapes their labor. Based on 14 months of data collection between 2022 and 2023 that included a survey of 181 workers, in-depth interviews with 27 workers, and observational data that was collected during the pandemic, I contribute to the sociology of work scholarship and platform studies by arguing for the rethinking of the convergence point between labor, technology, and risk, as well as its effects on workers. Firstly, I examine workers’ labor market trends by analyzing utilization patterns of digital platforms according to workers’ occupations and demographic categories. I then explore how the aforementioned utilization patterns introduce new occupational risks for workers, how these risks are distributed among occupations, and how workers choose to manage and mitigate these risks. Lastly, I consider how workers’ engagement with digital platforms reshapes their labor processes by entrenching a rising demand for creative labor. Data analysis reveals that (1) to make a living wage, workers must branch out into several occupations within the industry which often leads to the requirement to engage in career and income “piecemealing” processes through various digital platforms, (2) that the risks brought by the utilization of digital platforms often result in workers that are stuck in a “digital limbo” where their ability to maximize income and exposure is both facilitated and constrained by their utilization of digital platforms, and (3) that the use of digital platforms and their infrastructures required workers to establish “creative routines” that revealed a rising demand to employ creative labor as part of daily work processes. Drawing on these findings I present a two-fold argument; particularly for the study of sex work, I argue for the incorporation of creative labor in the theorization of sex work and sex workers in the age of digitalization. Doing so allows us to uncover new and hidden aspects of work that are sustained by digital infrastructures and are often overlooked by focusing only on physical, emotional, and relational labor. On a broader scale, since the effects of digital infrastructures on workers’ labor requirements, processes, and risks were found to extend beyond the mediation of digital services and products, I argue for the imperativeness of foregrounding the analysis of work, occupations, and labor markets within the framework of digital infrastructures for both digitally and non-digitally mediated occupations.

Name thesis:degree_name

Ph.D.

Level thesis:degree_level

Dissertation

Discipline thesis:degree_discipline

Sociology

Grantor

University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign

Year dc:date

2025

Author dc:creator

• Shifrin, Elizabeta

Contributors dc:contributor

• Gille, Zsuzsa
• Marshall, Anna-Maria
• Ledeggard, Isak
• Brents, Barbara

• Sex work
• Digital labor
• Platform labor
• Creative labor
• Work, Organizations, occupations and work

Statement dc:rights

• Copyright 2025 Elizabeta Shifrin

Language dc:language

en, eng

Handle dc:identifier

https://hdl.handle.net/2142/129677

OAI record oai:identifier

https://www.ideals.illinois.edu/oai-pmh?verb=GetRecord&metadataPrefix=etdms&identifier=oai%3Awww.ideals.illinois.edu%3A2142%2F129677