Camming

Angela Jones is Professor of Women, Gender, and Sexuality Studies at Stony Brook University. They are the author of Camming: Money, Power, and Pleasure in the Sex Work Industry and co-author of Black Lives Matter: A Reference Book.

Angela Jones's Camming offers a roller-coaster ride through the often and, according to mainstream norms, necessarily hidden world of online erotic performances and relationships, camera-guided sex work, and the joys and downsides of its many professional possibilities ... Jones's book provides a lens through which we can witness what happens on both sides of cameras in the (online) sex industries as well as contemplate our taken-for-granted norms and biases about sexualities, as triggers of both consumption and discrimination or exclusion (e.g., via criminalization). (American Journal of Sociology) Camming signifies a brilliant sociological analysis of race, ethnicity, class, nationality, gender, and sexuality while providing a detailed portrait of how cam models earn money and gain power and pleasure in the adult webcam industry. (Teaching Sociology) Sex work and desire are complicated issues for a technologically mediated society. In Camming, Jones documents how pleasure is refracted through social structures that reproduce inequality, but also how pleasure and sex work may 'crack' capitalism by resisting alienation and other forms of inequality. (Men and Masculinities) A thorough examination of the online sex-work industry and a theoretical treatise about pleasure, a topic long neglected in sociology [...] As quarantines resulting from the recent coronavirus pandemic have temporarily shut down most physical sex-work venues, Jones's analysis of online sex work is an even more timely contribution to the field. (Choice) Camming is an important study that offers an innovative paradigm for examining not only sex work but other intimate industries. (Social Forces) Finally, a smart and profoundly feminist analysis of the webcamming industry. Readers get an inside look at what is worth celebrating about the emergence of erotic camming—namely that it is a relatively safe, often pleasurable, and accessible source of income during a time of tremendous global economic disparity. Angela Jones also shows us the ways that camming remains subject to broader social, political, and economic forces, such as racial hierarchies of desirability and transphobia/fetishization. This is a fascinating and deeply ethical and de-stigmatizing account of an understudied form of sex work. Sociology has never been this sexy! - Jane Ward, author of Not Gay: Sex Between Straight White Men A groundbreaking book by the leading expert on the erotic webcam industry. Jones illuminates key structural features of the business as well as the lived experiences of the performers. She shows that commercial webcamming is not only profitable but also safe and quite pleasurable for most of those engaged in this kind of sex work. - Ronald Weitzer, author of Legalizing Prostitution: From Illicit Vice to Lawful Business This book lies at the intersection of feminist legal and psychology. It provides a serious and honest appraisal of the sex work industry as it manifests in camming, which is the live videocam performance of sex to a remote paid audience. The analysis here challenges contemporary regulatory ideas that sex work should be criminalized and that the law, at least in the way it is currently focused, should regulate this emerging industry. - David Schultz (Criminal Law and Criminal Justice Books)