As the coronavirus crisis worsened, a series of news stories documented "panic buying" on grocery staples, including bread, yeast, and flour. News outlets began reporting what I had already concluded based on my own social media: in response, many people had started baking bread. Baking specialty bread, like sourdough, is a time-consuming process, which pre-COVID-19 was a leisure activity for some. Baking bread during isolation is an activity whose purposes are threefold: providing sustenance; filling newly available leisure time; and offering a way to demonstrate one's skill and activities on social media. I consider the sudden attention given to this niche area of cooking, and the ways that bread-making-as-identity is already being disputed online, with attempts to frame an increased interest in what is, ultimately, successful completion of domestic labor, as a threat to 'authentic' interest in specialty bread as culinary capital.

Media depictions of sex work and workers are a key site where perceptions of the sex industry are established and contested, particularly for audiences who may have little to no direct interaction with it otherwise. The presence of an advertorial framing or function of news media coverage of the sex industry has been identified in previous work. This article analyses news media coverage in New Zealand post-decriminalisation to consider how advertorial frames are used to construct indoor low-volume sex work as acceptable, and identify the conditions which are attached to this acceptability. The advertorial frames often emphasise the respectability and/or desirability of the clientele, potentially indicating to male readers that they may be a client-type man. Simultaneously, this construction of clients as desirable is used to underpin a discourse of authentic pleasure on the part of the workers. These narratives obscure the sexual and emotional labour involved in low-volume sex work, stripping it of its status as work, and positioning work-sex as akin to non-transactional sexual contact. Such renderings often draw meaning and legitimacy by shifting existing stereotypes about the sex industry as dangerous or damaging to other workers: typically those who charge less for their services or who are perceived to see more clients. This article concludes that the establishment of one kind of sex work as more acceptable at the expense of other sectors of the industry may serve to further entrench existing inequalities among people who work in the sex industry.

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<p>In 2003 New Zealand passed the Prostitution Reform Act, decriminalising sex work and associated activities. This thesis examines news media representations of sex work and workers from 2010 to 2016 to determine how these texts construct sex work in a post-decriminalisation environment. The key questions this thesis considers are: which sex workers are presented by journalists as acceptable, and what conditions are attached to that acceptability? Using media studies frameworks to analyse the texts, this thesis demonstrates that in a decrimininalised environment the media plays a regulatory role, with the power to dictate what modes of sex work are acceptable largely shifting away from the courts. In the absence of a debate about the il/legality of sex work, a different kind of binaristic construction emerges, frequently related to public visibility or invisibility.  This thesis uses discourse analysis techniques to examine texts relating to three key media events: the repeated attempts legally restrict where street sex workers could work in South Auckland, texts about migrant sex workers around the time of the Rugby World Cup, and texts about independent or agency-based sex workers. My methodology involved examining the texts to establish who was situated as an expert through discourse representation, what words were used to describe sex workers and their jobs, and then discerning what narratives recurred in the texts about each event.  My analysis indicates that in a decriminalised environment news media representations of sex work afford acceptability to those who are less affected by structural oppressions: predominantly young, white, cisgendered, middle or upper-class women who see few clients and work indoors. However, for workers who fall outside these bounds news reports continue to reproduce existing sex work stigma. I highlight how racism and transmisogyny frequently play into news representations of sex work, even under a framework of decriminalisation, in ways that serve to avoid acknowledging the work of (some) sex workers as legitimate labour, and how transmisogyny is used in attempts to exert and justify bodily control over sex workers. By considering how these representations function to undermine the legitimacy of the work, this thesis demonstrates the ways news media functions as a site at which stigma about sex work is produced, reinforced, or validated for a non-sex working audience.  Additionally, this thesis argues that the ways acceptable sex work is produced are predicated on agency and independent workers’ performance of choice and enjoyment, requiring the actual labour involved in sex work to be obscured or minimised. This obfuscation of the “work” of sex work makes it more difficult to advocate for improved employment rights and conditions, which is heightened due to the advertorial function of some news media texts. Furthermore, the ways in which sex workers’ narratives are constructed is also indicative of which workers are or are not acceptable: only certain workers are permitted to speak for themselves, and frequently only when their accounts are supported by other, non-sex working, voices.  This thesis therefore concludes that while news media represents some limited forms of sex work as acceptable, the ways in which this is discursively achieved restrict the ability of workers to self-advocate. Furthermore, even workers represented as acceptable are in a precarious position, with this acceptability being mediated by their ability or willingness to adhere to specific, heteronormatively mediated, identity categories, and to inhabit a specific enthusiasm in their voiced feelings about their work.</p>