Brazilian Cam Girls

Brazilian Cam Girls is a documentary film about the growing global industry of female sex work via online video chats (camming) for men from rich countries. It reveals the complexity of this virtual form of prostitution in Brazil. High numbers of sexworkers are concentrated in popular tourist destinations such as Rio de Janeiro, Fortaleza and the Amazon and Pantanal.

In the documentary, we follow the life and career of Sheelu a Brazilian webcam girl. Sheelu is one of the hundreds of thousands women who have become a “camgirl”. Sheelu is a ‘camgirl,’ offering sexual services online to a global audience from her home studio. She performs various activities on webcam including strip teases and erotic massages, masturbation and simulating sexual activity. In her spare time, she scouts for new models, and works to improve her own performances.

While the rise of the cam industry has been a catalyst for sex tourism in Latin America, this form of prostitution remains controversial. Its legal status is highly debated, as are its economic and social implications. This article examines the issue of precarity of work in platformised cultural production through the eyes of cisgender women cammers. It argues that local employment and work realities, as well the positionality and positioning of platforms within such contexts are crucial to cammers’ understanding of precarity of labor. Using 15 in-depth interviews with Brazilian cammers, this research seeks to understand how webcamming is contributing to new forms of digitally-mediated work in the globalised economy.