Max Morris, "Not Sex Work: Queer Intimacy, Post-identity, and Incidental Encounters in the Digital Era" (Routledge, 2025)

Max Morris's Not Sex Work: Queer Intimacy, Post-identity, and Incidental Encounters in the Digital Era (Routledge, 2025) brings together feminist theory, media studies, and queer research methodologies to offer new, compelling insight the relationships between money, digital platforms, and sex. Through longstanding engagement with gay, queer, and bisexual men who do not describe themselves as sex workers and who exchange sex or sexual services for money through digital platforms, Morris highlights how ‘incidental sex work’ problematizes commonly-held assumptions of both work and intimacy. By starting from the position of unsettling what sex work might be, Morris holds space for ambivalences about labour, risk, and sex itself—destabilizing binaries found within both research and policy work. Not Sex Work's attention to how economics and intimacy shapes identity offers important analyses of not only what we might understand sex work to be, but also how digital platforms shape and reshape understandings of gender and sexuality. Max Morris is a Senior Lecturer in Criminology and Sociology at Oxford Brookes University. Using creative and feminist methodologies, their research focuses on gender, sexuality, HIV, digital platforms, and sex work. Rine Vieth is an FRQ Postdoctoral Fellow at Université Laval. They are currently studying how anti-gender mobilization shapes migration policy, particularly in regards to asylum determinations in the UK and Canada. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices