Max Morris, "Not Sex Work: Queer Intimacy, Post-identity, and Incidental Encounters in the Digital Era" (Routledge, 2025)
About this episode
Max Morris discusses their book exploring the intersections of queer intimacy, digital platforms, and sex work.
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…
People in this episode
Guest: Max Morris
Topics covered
- queer intimacy
- digital platforms
- sex work
- feminist theory
- gender and sexuality
- economic relationships
Keywords
- queer research
- incidental sex work
- intimacy
- digital era
- gender identity
- sexual services
- feminist methodologies
Mentioned in this episode
Organizations: Oxford Brookes University, Université Laval, Routledge
Books & works: Not Sex Work: Queer Intimacy, Post-identity, and Incidental Encounters in the Digital Era
More episodes of New Books in Gender
- Jewish Anarchist Women 1920–1950: The Politics of Sexuality
- Julia Bowes, "Every Man's Home a Castle: Parental Rights and the Makings of Modern Conservatism" (Princeton UP, 2026)
- Angela Dimitrakaki, "Feminism. Art. Capitalism" (Pluto Press, 2026)
- Elena Foulis, "Embodied Encuentros: Oral History Archives of Latina/o/e Experiences" (Ohio State UP, 2026)
- Rugged Individualism
- Vanda Krefft, "Expect Great Things!: How the Katharine Gibbs School Revolutionized the American Workplace for Women" (Algonquin Books, 2026)
Explore listener stats, chart rankings, contacts and more on the New Books in Gender podcast page.