Dr Zahra Stardust is my academic idol and an all-around legend: a socio-legal scholar working at the intersections of sexuality, technology, law and social justice, Zahra is also a stripper from the early days of Australian pole, a former pole dance instructor, porn performer, director and activist building a career in intimacy education alongside academia. In short, Zahra is a beacon of light and a massive inspiration for anyone researching around sex from a sex and sex-worker positive perspective. I have had the honour of receiving an advance copy of her new book, Indie Porn, which I will review here while also interviewing her about her life straddling academia, pole dance and sex work.
About Zahra Stardust
Dr Zahra Stardust is a post-doctoral research fellow at the Queensland University of Technology and an Affiliate of the Berkman Klein Center for Internet and Society at Harvard Law School. She is a sexualities scholar working at the intersections of sex tech, sexual surveillance, sexual rights and the law. She has spent 15 years working in policy, advocacy, legal and research roles within community organisations, NGOs and UN bodies on sex worker rights, HIV treatment and prevention, and LGBTIQA+ health.
If you work in the field of internet studies, platform governance and digital sex work, it’s impossible not to come across Zahra’s work, since she has written some of the most iconic and vital academic and journalistic articles about Big Tech’s stigma against sex workers. One of my favourites pieces she co-wrote with the Decoding Stigma collective centres around what tech can learn from sex workers, and it can be found here. She’s also the lead author of the Sex Positive Social Media Manifesto (which you may remember from a previous blog post), an essential resource to build a better internet and the tool that can arm anyone to find responses to the “won’t somebody think of the children” comeback in discussions around platform governance.
Because this is my blog and not a research paper or a piece for a news outlet, and because I’m interviewing someone truly revolutionary, I’ve decided to move away from my usual interview formats – interwoven quotes or Q&As, with traditional narratives – and to go off-piste to really reflect everything Zahra has to say. Because of this, you will see me hopping from histories of pole and sex work to platform governance, from interview to book review, with long, un-edited quotes to reflect Zahra’s powerful answers.
Like it or not, I make the rules here.
Zahra’s life as a stripper and pole dance instructor
I am still Blogger On Pole, so I just had to ask Zahra about her pole and stripping journey before we get into the nitty-gritty of platform governance and the book review. She tells me she took up pole upon meeting the iconic Bobbi, the Australian pole dancer and stripper who has been widely credited as responsible for creating the first pole school Down Under, and the creator of the competition of all competitions, Miss Pole Dance Australia.
“I remember watching Bobbi and Jamilla Deville perform the 1am show at Dancers Cabaret in Kings Cross in Sydney and I couldn’t believe my eyes!” Zahra says. Before she had opened the first Sydney Pole School, which later became the iconic Bobbi’s Pole studio, Bobbi would come into the clubs during the daytime to teach the dancers how to pole. “She made it look so effortless and I remember I couldn’t even get upside down!” Zahra adds.
Zahra became hooked during her first pole classes at Bobbi’s, and started doing amateur competitions shortly after. Here, she met Suzie Q, a former Miss Nude Australia who invited her to come and teach at her studio. Over the next decade she taught at Suzie Q Pole Studio, Madonna’s gym Hard Candy, and Sky Sirens.
“Pole was my life,” Zahra says. “I competed in national comps and in 2009 I won doubles in the Australian Pole Dance Championships. I taught workshops at Lu Ngata’s studio in Tokyo, was a judge at Miss Pole Dance Bavaria, and performed at Sexpo in Australia and Erotica Expo in Aotearoa.” Her favourite tricks were the Jackknife, the Iron X and the knee hang.
“Stripping was my whole life for about 15 years,” Zahra says. “I started in clubs but I’m not a natural hustler, so I moved to buck’s parties (stag nights), driving around doing strip-o-grams – that was my bread and butter.” She has performed on stages, in garages, hotels, brothels, dungeons, living rooms, pool tables.”
“I remember a customer once calling our doubles XXX act ‘adult Cirque du Soleil’,” she jokes, adding that one of her best life skills from stripping is that she is “excellent at getting dressed and undressed at rapid speed, after getting changed for so many years behind bars, in toilet cubicles and in broom closets.” Still, even OGs have had pole accidents, and Zahra has had her fair share. She says:
“I’ve fallen on my head straight out of a Static V whilst nude at a swingers club, I’ve tripped over on stage in the first minute of the show in 7 inch heels up on the showgirl contract in Darwin, I’ve had labia grazes and bruises everywhere you can imagine, and somehow I can never remember which direction to undo the locking nut on an X-Pole when I’ve travelled to gigs with my portable pole. But honestly, my best memories of pole are backstage and in the classroom, in that candid, supportive environment with all the other dancers.”
Dr Zahra Stardust
Now, Zahra has largely stopped pole dancing because of burnout from teaching. “I went through a deep depressive period where I just couldn’t physically or emotionally be in front of people anymore,” she says. “I was doing too many extrovert activities – stripping, porn, teaching, public speaking, running for parliament for the Australian Sex Party, and too much of my energy was going out instead of in.”
Like me, she’s an introvert at heart and teaching people requires too much energy! She hasn’t really retired though: “I kept coming back to the work opportunistically – once a stripper, always a stripper! I couldn’t bear the thought of losing something that was such a core part of my identity.”
Zahra has now moved further into circus because she loves flying: “I remember thinking it was so weird to do something involving so many clothes! I did trapeze, lyra and adagio – they are so complementary to pole.”
About pole dancing, Zahra says:
“Honestly, I just think it’s important to see the world periodically from upside down. I am doing a lot of academic work at the moment, which is hard on the body, and I constantly dream of dancing. I miss being so in tune with my body, the incredible strength that pole gives you. I miss the calluses! The pole will always feel like home for me. I spent so many years on it, and it is etched deep in my muscle memory.”
Dr Zahra Stardust
Indie Porn review
When Zahra’s publicist got in touch about giving me an advance copy of Indie Porn, her new book about how independent porn producers navigate criminal laws, risk-averse platforms, discriminatory algorithms, and rampant piracy coming out in October 2024, I didn’t need to think twice. I knew and was a fan of her work, but I didn’t yet know how truly ground-breaking, field-defining and revolutionary the book would be.
Indie Porn was a long time coming, Zahra says:
“The seeds were planted a long time ago! I wrote my Master’s thesis on striptease, and my PhD was on queer and feminist pornographies, and both drew from my experiences in the sex industry and interviews with my peers. I was making porn well before I started this research, so I just kept doing it, and wrote about it.”
Dr Zahra Stardust
Like Zahra, Indie Porn is many things at once: it’s a personal diary chronicling changes in the global sex industry and its digital trade; it’s a scathing account of governments and their moral panic-led interventions into the lives of sex workers; it’s a testimony of porn producers’ and sex workers’ resistance to offline and online stigma; it’s a critique of the marketing strategies and respectability politics even the most progressive performers are forced to adopt to survive; it’s a crash course in truly inclusive research methodology; it’s probably the only book where you will find stories about leading fisting workshops only a few pages away from crucial discussions around platform governance.
“I wanted the porn set to be a way into bigger conversations about platform governance, surveillance capitalism, respectability politics, etc. And the fisting workshop we did was so much fun, I couldn’t not write about it!” Zahra says. By writing through personal stories which may be confronting for a vanilla audience, she could use her experience as “a really useful vehicle for porn literacy and live sex education”: “I think sex workers have so many good stories, and our workplaces are where the theory happens. It makes its way to academia eventually (through extraction or theft), but theory originates from culture and community first.”
Too many things about Indie Porn stayed with me for me to be able to mention them, and the frantically underlined, neon pages of my copy are living proof of just how much I am going to use this book towards my work. But if I were to mention just a few of my favourite passages, it all comes down to four things: living and breathing research ethics; the personal is academic; critiquing the status quo – even when looking inward; and the power of content.
Living and breathing research ethics
In Indie Porn, Zahra doesn’t only analyse policies and salient moments in the regulation of adult, sex positive or pornographic material: she conducts an auto-pornographic ethnography of her own experiences of sex work while also interviewing sex workers across different fields, paid either through research grants or her own sex work. “I paid people mostly out of my own pocket, and I paid them in cash,” Zahra tells me.
“I got some modest funding from the university, which I spent mostly on transcription, and it wasn’t enough to cover what people were worth in terms of their time, expertise or lost income. So often research pays in tiny gift vouchers that won’t even cover people’s groceries, and it’s highly offensive,” she adds, mirroring some of the discussions Dr Lilith Brouwers, Hanne Stegeman and Dr Max Morris recently had at the Global Digital Intimacies conference surrounding the difficulty of paying sex working participants through official university channels.
“The participants are literally the most valuable part of the whole process – we wouldn’t have anything without them,” Zahra says. “I wrote a justification for the ethics committee, which they accepted, but there were no other avenues for funding. I was doing lots of stripping at the time, and I used to keep cash in my boots, so I just gave people $150 for a 60-90 minute interview.”
This way, Zahra embraced social movements’ mantra of “nothing about us without us” – a staple of the fight for sex workers’ rights, while also recognising different starting points, life experiences and privileges that make the “us” among sex workers heterogeneous. This may seem like a given, but too much of academia places the academic as an expert outsider looking into communities from above, while Zahra’s approach instead gives the power back to affected communities, who got to feedback on her research.
The personal is academic
Indie Porn is a seamless blend of personal anecdotes from different stages of Zahra’s experiences of sex work and activism with her sharp, experience and participant-driven analysis of the system of online and offline porn governance. Because of this, the book is both stronger and more accessible and entertaining even for a non-academic audience, meaning you don’t need to be an internet expert to read it or enjoy it. This was not accidental, Zahra says:
“I really love creative writing, and I feel like sometimes academic traditions sap all the joy and emotion out of the text, so I was adamant that I wanted to write something that was entertaining and engaging. I love autoethnography for that reason – I love hearing other people’s stories, connecting intimate details with broader political frameworks.”
Dr Zahra Stardust
Even more importantly, this emphasis on narrating through a personal lens while maintaining academic rigour proves that being deeply immersed in the communities you research is not only possible – it’s actually an asset to access them and understand them. It’s an inspiration for us all and definitely for me, and hopefully a crucial building block to broadening the academic field to scholars inside the sex industry, or scholars who show their bodies.
For Zahra, this hasn’t been without its challenges: while she had a supportive supervision team, she still came across whorephobia during her candidacy. “One semester, a student’s dad called the Dean of the law school to complain that a ‘porn star was teaching criminology’. The university told me they were seeking legal advice about whether they could hire current sex workers,” she says. She adds:
“Another time, I had colleagues announce loudly in the corridors that they had watched my porn. I shared an office that was just a few doors down from a vehement anti-sex work advocate. Later, a social commentator published an article arguing that I should have never received a scholarship because my subject was so putrid.
Unfortunately, I know lots of sex workers who have fared far worse, and I am actually working on another book about that now, called Academy of Whores. It’s an edited anthology featuring sex workers writing about their experiences on campus, in both research and teaching. The premise is to imagine what academia could look like if it was built on the values and insights of sex workers.”
Dr Zahra Stardust
Stigma and its effects permeate the book, and the personal lens allows Zahra to really hone in on how sex workers are affected by it, but also on how they fight it. In reporting performer Gala Vanting’s notion of ‘Your stigma, your labour’ – or the idea that the loved ones stigmatising sex workers should be the ones doing the work to remain in their lives – Indie Porn makes important steps towards interrogating how we can over-haul systemic stigma. Zahra says:
“I was in a relationship previously where my work was constantly seen as a problem. In public it was fine; in private it was unrelenting drama. I remember searching desperately for resources for partners of sex workers to help them understand that sex work is work, and to offer guidance on how to unpack their fears and jealousy. But in reality, there’s only so much work you can do if people aren’t willing to unpack their own stigma or work through their own issues.
Sex work stigma is real, and it is responsible for a raft of awful consequences, from discrimination and substandard care to violence, murder and lack of justice. I think the issue is how do we unravel whore stigma, so that it doesn’t present in relationships in these ways. And this is something bigger than just decriminalisation because whorephobia is tangled up in a whole lot of other things – policing, misogyny, capitalism, etc. So on an individual level there is a process of unlearning that has to be done, but on a structural level there is systemic change that needs to happen.“
Dr Zahra Stardust
Some of Indie Porn‘s most touching passages are about experiences of motherhood in connection with work in the sex industry: coupled with reflections about participants becoming estranged from their families due to stigma attached to becoming sex workers, Zahra writes that she and many other workers feel they will be better parents because – and not in spite of – of their experience in the industry and their rejection of shame. I have no interest in becoming a mother, but was deeply inspired by how sex work, which is often viewed as anything but helpful to someone’s life, is actually conceptualised here as a rejection of shame that can help people grow healthier children. Bet the “won’t somebody think of the children” brigade would have a fit reading this.
I felt like Zahra’s thoughts on this chapter are so important and inspiring that they need to be included in full below:
“It was so amazing to be able to include the pregnancy porn scene at the end of the book! I always looked up to these incredible porn stars like Jet Setting Jasmine, Belladonna and Madison Young who performed well into their pregnancies. It was a career dream of mine to make pregnancy porn, and after many years of IVF it actually happened.
It has been an absolute privilege to become a mum, especially at this time in the world where so many Palestinian mothers are having their precious babies, their entire families and their dreams stolen from them.
When I was looking into fostering, I was so afraid of whether I would be seen as a fit parent. The family policing system is a violent system responsible for so much trauma and theft, especially for Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander communities, and parents who are drug users, sex workers or living with mental health issues.
I know so many incredible sex worker parents who have instilled really valuable life lessons in their children, including body confidence, communication skills, boundary awareness, health information, queer politics and a sense of justice. In cultivating our chosen family, we anointed a sex-worker, scholar-activist sexologist as our baby’s grandmother (we did our PhDs together and she has just released her first book, Slutdom!).
Our children are the future, and I feel so invested in building a more just and equitable sexual society and leaving the world a better place for our next generations.“
Dr Zahra Stardust
Critiquing the status quo
Just like Zahra’s papers, her book provides crucial arguments against the privatisation of platforms, which “has brought problems for moderation in terms of platform transparency and accountability,” allowing Big Tech to act like companies and to govern conservatively to preserve their image and their earnings.
Hot off the press! We write how financial discrimination against sex workers results from whorephobia, racial capitalism & carceral politics. Thanks to my brilliant co-authors@MissBluntNYC @stabriella @MissLoreleiLee @KateDAdamo@rachelkuo @CUNYLawReview https://t.co/1e6o1eneE6 pic.twitter.com/abwJ1dQRkP
— Dr Zahra Stardust (@ZahraStardust) February 23, 2023
Zahra says:
“Large platforms continue to deplatform, demonetise and demote sexual content on the basis of reputational risk and ‘brand safety,’ or amplify and suppress content according to white supremacist hierarchies. Having said that, governments do not necessarily have a better track record on sex! Through their classification, criminal and customs legislation, through frameworks of obscenity and indecency and in their ‘justice’ and policing institutions, they have a long legacy of poor sexual ethics.
While platforms are not nation states, many are still corporations with responsibilities to protect human rights, including sexual rights. Both platforms and governments need to adhere to basic human rights standards, including rights to non-discrimination, bodily integrity, sexual health, sexual expression, privacy, freedom from violence, and the rights to information, education and participation.
This is not only an enforcement problem but a resource problem, because some platforms have more wealth than entire nation states and breach these obligations frequently with impunity. For me, one goal is therefore to break up media monopolies and build an online ecosystem where indie platforms can thrive, sex-related business can access financial infrastructure, and sex workers can run their own co-operatives.“
Dr Zahra Stardust
Yet, while her critiques of Big Tech here are sharp and on-point, it’s perhaps harder to look inward and to see how stigma makes sex workers themselves react in their marketing – but she doesn’t shy away from from doing it nonetheless. Some of the book’s most interesting yet challenging pages are about how the categorisations of “indie” and “fair trade” porn should not be used as a means to pit independent producers against mainstream porn, but as an approach to change current working practices. Otherwise, these labels become nothing more than marketing tactics, producing new aesthetics to sell – just like mainstream porn was accused of doing.
To effectively write these critiques, Zahra once again uses multiple methodologies, including her personal experience of shooting with Suicide Girls, who for her are “similar to so many ‘amateur’ sites that trade on an illusion of authenticity when really, they just reflect the fantasies of the producer.” She tells me:
“On other sites, I’ve been told, ‘Don’t wear too much make up, don’t talk about politics, belly button rings are not allowed, you can’t shoot if you have shaving rash, etc.’ It’s a carefully curated construction of a home girl aesthetic, and it often extracts more labour power from people because they are required to do more prep (make-up, wardrobe, sourcing location, filming, etc) and are imagined to be natural exhibitionists who want to perform freely for love, not money.”
Dr Zahra Stardust
These discussions questioning indie porn’s idea of authenticity are relevant outside porn too: they are a staple of creator economy research, showing the similarities between different aspects of creator labour, and they affect the pole dance industry and its increasingly carefully curated Instagram aesthetic too. Additionally, they add further nuance to ideas of what authenticity really means in porn:
“There are performers reframing what authenticity means to them, not as some true essence or natural original or aesthetic code, but something else. Maybe they find pleasure in camp performance, in stunt sex, in colour coordination, or maybe they love clown porn and that is genuine and authentic to their interests on the day of shooting. Porn has so many genres – from comedy to horror – and authentic pleasure can be found in so many places! This has been a big contribution from porn performers over the last decade – troubling this concept of authenticity.”
Dr Zahra Stardust
The power of content
While addressing issues surrounding labour, governance, politics and inequalities, Indie Porn somehow also manages to truly highlight the transformative power that independent pornography can have not just on porn as an industry, but on sex as a whole. This is where the power of porn as content truly lies.
“I had lots of interesting discussions about orgasms during my research!” Zahra says, adding that many feminist producers are moving away from orgasm-centric scenes, locating pleasure in different parts of the body, or trying to broaden representations of how orgasms look, sound and happen (including non-genital orgasms). However, this push for a less performed and more authentic porn can have its challenges: “Then there are pro-am sites that believe they can differentiate between authentic and inauthentic orgasms, and hire staff to try and guess which is which, effectively acting as orgasm gatekeepers.”
This is where the book gets really powerful, critiquing practices born out of potentally good intentions that nonetheless risk creating an ‘us vs them’ dynamic via the marketing of independent film-making against mainstream porn. “It was really important to me not to throw mainstream porn ‘under the bus’ in this book,” Zahra says. She adds:
“Sometimes discussions about feminist, ethical or alternative porn is driven by a politics of ‘repudiation’ – we are not that. As a result, sometimes these narratives construct an image of the mainstream that reproduces porn stigma and perpetuates binaries like real/fake, good/bad.
It can end up painting a quite femmephobic and transphobic imaginary of what ‘good porn’ looks like, one that is based on white middle class aesthetics more so than production/distribution ethics. This gets dangerous in the territory of lobbying and law reform, because the risk is that only representations of vanilla, able-bodied, coupled, cis-heteronormative sex becomes legal and other representations become criminalised.”
Dr Zahra Stardust
Here, too, Zahra’s thoughts really need to appear in full:
“We should remember that the divide between mainstream and indie porn is increasingly slippery. Performers and producers frequently move across spaces. As Sophie Pezzutto’s research shows, many trans women don’t perform on indie sets because the pay is too low, so they often gravitate to mainstream spaces. And then you have the model of major tube sites now, which is to outsource production to indie producers. Indie production itself is never really independent – it is relational, built on partnerships, relying on distribution infrastructure, and always in dialogue with the mainstream.
I think one problem is the slippage in terminology in the space. So in the book, I look at all these different terms for indie content – artisanal, fair trade, organic, etc. On the one hand, I really welcome these conversations, with their focus on labour conditions, wealth inequality, extraction in the global supply chain, and the environmental costs of pornography – especially we enter an era of generative AI porn, with the costs of big data processing on natural resources and stolen land.
At the same time, I think we have to be weary about ‘ethical pornography’ becoming a ‘green tick’ product with a branded rubber stamp rather than an ongoing process that requires continually revisiting how power operates. In my view, we need to focus less on what constitutes ‘good porn’ (which can mean something totally different to performers versus consumers), and more towards challenging the regulatory, economic and technical structures that shape pornography production, representation, distribution.
Many of these ethical issues are not about pornography in particular but are about work in general. For example, if governments care about labour exploitation, they could cancel student debt and offer free education, given that students often create porn to fund their tuition. If they don’t want people working just to survive, they could roll out universal healthcare, housing and food security. If they want to prevent trafficking, governments could establish safe migration pathways for migrant sex workers and end white supremacist border policies.
If governments are concerned with misogynist sexual scripts on screen, they could consider how they are cultivating misogynist cultures off-screen. To support more diverse content, they could subsidise sex-worker-owned platform co-operatives. There are lots more items on a radical porn agenda, and sometimes the demand to create ‘better porn’ is a distraction from this.“
Dr Zahra Stardust
Instead, when writing Indie Porn, Zahra was not interested in ‘good vs bad’ porn narrative, but in developing a more nuanced vocabulary for these issues to address “the labour conditions on set, whether performers had input into the marketing language, whose sexual subjectivities are foregrounded in the content, who controls the channels of distribution, etc.” For her, these political economy questions are important to understand how these representations are produced and consumed. She concludes:
“I think the starting point has to be developing porn literacy curricula that include the voices of porn performers. Porn literacy is a subset of media literacy and it should be embedded into sex education curricula. However, it’s not just young people that need porn literacy but governments and big tech too.”
Dr Zahra Stardust
What’s next for Zahra?
Apart from her new book about sex workers in the academy, Zahra is working on a book about sextech with some colleagues, focusing on its design, data and governance. Following a series of projects on sextech, including running a sextech hackathon, facilitating workshops with the Sextech School, and conducting interviews with LGBTQ sextech users and developers, Zahra and her team are now writing a ‘critical introduction to sextech,’ canvassing some of the theoretical debates in the field.
On top of this, Zahra has also been doing a project on alternative sexual content moderation, interviewing queer-led and sex worker-led platforms about how they value sexual content creators, do platform governance differently, and navigate the regulatory environment. “These folks are building new digital futures for online sexual content,” she says.
Outside academia, Zahra is constantly extending her skills in intimacy work “to study intimacy coordination and sexological bodywork – I think it’s important to take an embodied approach to this work,” she adds.
Find out more about Zahra and Indie Porn
Aside from appealing to sex workers and people in adjacent fields (sex ed, sextech, etc), Indie Porn is a an extremely insightful read for those who are interested in labour politics and the future of work, for people who care about bodily autonomy and sexual justice, criminalisation and abolition, big tech and surveillance capitalism, indie film and DIY culture. The book will also offer helpful insights and analyses to people who have experienced de-platforming and de-monetisation, and those who are thinking about the relationship between respectability politics and law reform.
You can order Indie Porn here, and find Zahra on IG here, as well as on Twitter here. Click here to also find Zahra’s research papers via Google Scholar.
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[…] and academic idol Zahra Stardust, the OG stripper, porn director and performer I interviewed last summer, told me that she loved how I have not toned down my performances since becoming more visible in […]