Book Launch: Not Sex Work - Queer Intimacy, Post-identity, and Incidental Encounters in the Digital Era

Join Dr Max Morris for an event to celebrate the publication of Not Sex Work - Queer Intimacy, Post-identity, and Incidental Encounters in the Digital Era (Routledge, 2025), in collaboration with the Oxford Sociology Network and the Centre for Law, Criminology and Social Justice Research.

This book explores the parallel histories and intersecting politics of LGBTQ+ people and sex workers, including the role of digital media in shaping the experiences of both in the early twenty-first century. Drawing on the first empirical study with gay, bisexual, and queer young men who agreed to sell sex online without advertising or identifying as sex workers, it examines what the term ‘incidental sex work’ means.

Adopting queer methods and feminist theories to explore how definitions of ‘sex’ and ‘work’ have become increasingly unstable in the digital era, it considers how casual, occasional, and unprofessional forms of sex work are arranged on different platforms, from Grindr to OnlyFans.

This book will appeal to students and researchers studying sex work and social media across a wide range of fields, and will be useful for campaigners, policymakers, and healthcare practitioners interested in the implications of incidental sex work.

Biography

Dr Max Morris is a Senior Lecturer in Criminology and Sociology at the School of Law and Social Sciences at Oxford Brookes University.

Their research interests include the criminalisation of HIV, declining homophobia in educational settings, media representations of gender and sexual minorities, and incidental sex work in the digital age. They draw on creative methods and queer theory to understand the role of law and society in constructing identities.