REVIEW article
Front. Sociol.
Sec. Media Governance and the Public Sphere
Algorithmic governance and the illusion of autonomy: Feminist critiques of sexualized commodification in the platform economy
Provisionally accepted
- 1Escuela Profesional de Ingeniería Ambiental, Facultad de Ingeniería, Universidad Privada del Norte, Cajamarca, Peru
- 2Universidad Privada del Norte, Trujillo, Peru
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Digital platforms have profoundly redefined sexual economies by embedding intimacy, embodiment, and desire within the data-driven logic of platform capitalism, thereby recoding historical hierarchies of gender, race, and class as narratives of empowerment. This study theorizes how infrastructures such as OnlyFans reorganize sexual commodification through algorithmic governance, soft coercion, and epistemic vulnerability. Grounded in feminist political economy, critical data studies, and digital labor theory, the analysis constructs an interdisciplinary framework that exposes how platform architectures function as extraction systems that monetize affective intimacy, externalize economic and psychological risk, and perpetuate structural inequalities while masking exploitation behind discourses of autonomy. The findings reveal that algorithmic systems actively shape visibility, desirability, and performative agency, transforming apparent self-determination into dependence mediated by technological design. These results suggest that consent and empowerment within digital sexual economies are not indicators of freedom but mechanisms through which exploitation is naturalized. The study thus reinterprets autonomy as a structurally contingent condition and advances a feminist digital justice framework grounded in transparency, collective agency, and the ethical reconfiguration of technological infrastructures to confront the coercive architectures of platform capitalism.
Keywords: digital sexual economies, Platform capitalism, feminist theory, Algorithmic governance, Soft coercion
Received: 19 Aug 2025; Accepted: 27 Nov 2025.
Copyright: © 2025 Aguirre-Lanegra and Ramos-Zaga. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY). The use, distribution or reproduction in other forums is permitted, provided the original author(s) or licensor are credited and that the original publication in this journal is cited, in accordance with accepted academic practice. No use, distribution or reproduction is permitted which does not comply with these terms.
* Correspondence: Andherson Aguirre-Lanegra
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