The Logics of Good Exposure: Empowerment, Whore Stigma, and Free Labor in SuicideGirls' Social Network Porn

My dissertation examines the obscuring of models' labor on SuicideGirls.com, an "alternative" social network porn site. In the early 2000s, a moral panic arose about porn's widespread diffusion in North American culture. Just as these claims of "pornification" reached a critical mass, a different narrative emerged. I found in media accounts and in personal conversations an interest in the potential for a new kind of "alternative" porn. SuicideGirls was the most visible of these websites. The site became known for empowering its models by providing these women with a platform to express themselves as "authentic" subjects. While many feminists have argued that sex work has the potential to be empowering, what is novel about SuicideGirls is the way the site came to be perceived as actively producing porn that empowers women, in spite of site management's claims that SuicideGirls was not a porn site, but rather one that showcased pin-up imagery.;This positioning attracted considerable media attention and no small share of controversy. While early accounts were often glowing, the tenor of media coverage shifted dramatically in 2005, when some thirty SuicideGirls models departed the site and went to the press to publicize their issues with sexual harassment, pay scale, and contractual disputes over ownership of their images, as well as the site's censorship of their complaints.;My dissertation arises directly from these labor complaints. My analysis positions the site in relation to both pro-sex and anti-porn feminisms, as well as to emerging scholarship on new media labor practices, in order to articulate how SuicideGirls framed its models' participation as something other than work. I position my work in relation to recent scholarship that attempts to critically examine and engage with these arguments about appropriate feminine sexuality and online labor, with the hope that my contribution to these debates will be directly applicable to "real world" situations such as the working conditions of SuicideGirls models.