The Neoliberal Subject in the Commercialized World of Sexuality of the Internet: A Critical Analysis on OnlyFans

Abstract

ABSTRACT This study examines how female content creators on OnlyFans make sense of their bodies and sexualized labor within the broader context of platform‐based sexual economies. Taking Foucauldian theories of neoliberal subjectivation as its central theoretical framework, the study investigates how creators constitute themselves as autonomous and entrepreneurial subjects while managing and monetizing their sexualized bodies. The study is based on asynchronous written interviews conducted with 16 female OnlyFans content creators and analyzed through inductive content analysis. The findings are organized around four aggregate dimensions: commodification of the body and individual sovereignty, perceptions of gender roles, perceptions of exploitation and self‐exploitation, and sex work and identity. Although many participants framed their content production through the language of bodily autonomy, control, empowerment, and entrepreneurial self‐management, these accounts also revealed how market logic and gendered structures shape the ways sexualized bodies are understood, displayed, and monetized. In this context, the article proposes the concept of self‐sexism to describe the active, voluntary, and economically incentivized reproduction of objectifying norms through one's own embodied and digital labor. The study thereby advances existing accounts of the neoliberal subject by showing how conscious agency can become a mechanism through which gendered objectification is actively reproduced and converted into economic value.