Global Motivations to Cam
Global Motivations to Cam
Challenging Alienation and Recapturing Pleasure in Work
This chapter explores the motivations for selling sex online. A desire to earn decent wages motivates workers to become cam models. The social conditions that create these economic urgencies are vital for understanding their choice to cam. Context conditions the costs of the resources we need to survive, and our identities and social positioning in various overlapping systems of oppression shape our access to those resources. Cam performers are not engaged in a political struggle to overthrow capitalist labor. They are capitalists. However, their work does have the potential to crack capitalism and the various systems of oppression that cause people unbearable pain. Cam workers’ performances challenge systems of oppression designed to deprive women, people of color, trans and genderqueer folks, and people with disabilities a public space in which to live, work, and find joy. Performers publicly disrupt acceptable modes of sexuality and pleasure every day. Even though camming will never deliver Marxist liberation to workers, the camming industry is a new alternative mode of labor in which workers seek to reconcile work with dignity and pleasure. Work sucks, and cam performers, like so many workers, want to escape alienation and lead pleasurable lives.
Keywords: alienation, Marxism, pleasure, dignity, crack capitalism
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