Streaming beyond sex

body as centrality of senses production in OnlyFans platform

Abstract

Recently, anonymous and famous people have been making thousands of dollars a month on OnlyFans by trading sexual content and nudity. This emergence of the platform, fundamentally after the outbreak of the covid-19 pandemic, draws attention by the centrality that bodies gain in the mechanisms of commercialization and how they are constructed to be visible. In this sense, the objective is to reflect on how OnlyFans changes the logic of streaming for personalized consumption and how the body is central in the platform's production of meaning. The article unfolds into two sections: (i) platforming, surveillance and extimity, in order to understand how they are intertwined by the possibility of showing off and earning money; (ii) bodies, nudity and pedagogies that educate and constitute platform users. It's also expected that other implications for communicational studies unfold in analyzes based on OnlyFans.