No abstract

“Sugar dating” is the practice of establishing a “mutually beneficial relationship” between an older, affluent male – Sugar Daddy – and a younger, financially disempowered female – Sugar Baby. Although the figure of the “Sugar Daddy” has become commonplace in popular culture, this area of study remains largely unexplored, especially in the UK. Among the numerous websites that have mushroomed in the last decades in this country, Seeking.com stands out not only for providing an online meet-up place for Sugar Daddies and Babies, but also for serving as the matrix where the “sugar” discourse is constructed. The site functions as a discursive producer of the subject, inasmuch as Sugar Babies and Daddies are subjected and subjugated through a process of assujettissement by this kind of discursive power. Interviews conducted with four women who had recently acted as Sugar Babies showed how this discourse permeates the subjects and acts as a “technology of coercion” that works to perpetuate hegemonic notions of heterosexuality and undermines the participants” agency to refuse to engage in sexual intercourse, effectively “blurring the lines” of sexual consent.

Analysing the behaviour of key cultural actors such as social media influencers can shed some light on current social trends that underpin contemporary societies. Focusing on the case study of the influencer Chiara Ferragni, in this work I argue that her performance of domesticity and motherhood during the Italian lockdown caused by the novel coronavirus global spread can be understood as an intensification of postfeminist motherhood and domesticity; within a framework of heteronormative institutional marriage and a transnational existence affected by the construction of femininity and motherhood in Italy and in the United States, the two sociocultural milieus that Ferragni navigates. This may favour the tightening of gender roles in the midst of current and future anxieties of social annihilation. This article frames the recent global pandemic, and its attached restrictions of free movement for a large part of the world's population, as a collective trauma, bringing with it a crisis of meaning and a reconstruction of social categories. Postfeminist performances of cultural actors with large followings need to be carefully recalibrated in the light of these new constructions of meaning.