Naked bookishness: reading on OnlyFans during the Covid-19 pandemic

During the pandemic, “shelfies,” BookTok, and Bookstagram posts proliferated, and many book clubs moved online. In this article, I analyze one specific pandemic site of “bookishness” – an OnlyFans book club. Set up in the first weeks of lockdown by a group of sex workers, the Naked Quarantine Book Club offered a safer form of sex work at a time when human contact could be life-threatening. Reading, the founders believed, was accessible and would allow them to offer forms of intimacy without having to make porn. In this virtual space, readers read books of all sorts, and their videos range from reading-to-camera to voice over narration, with the performers being naked or scantily clad. Based on close analysis of the digital site as well as my interview with US co-founder Jocelyn Mae, this article explores how the online reading club created complex forms of bookish connection. The readers’ video recordings position books as both fetishized object and advert, promising intimacy and connection to those who subscribe to the performer's page. They accentuate and complicate the haptic pleasures associated with reading: the viewer is distanced from the tactile pleasures of the book object, but they are, instead, invited to enjoy the reader, reading scene, voice, and text. Books and reading, this site underscores, are part of many people's sexual and intimate fantasies. The NQBC deviates from, and even rubs up against, the more conservative orientations of book clubs and social reading and reviewing practices often examined by scholars of contemporary reading and book use. Significantly, however, many performers complicate the straightforward sexual dimension of the club, choosing to read not erotica but politics, philosophy, critical race theory, which points to the importance of bookish and intellectual seduction as well as – or more than – mere spectacle. The club, then, projects forms of what Pressman describes as bookish “proximity, interiority, authenticity”, with reading scene, reader image, and reading style creating a complex sense of connection and intimacy. Such bookishness, I will show, offers performers a way to critique forms of objectification, and viewers at once a “turn on” and a more personal form of connection at a time when connection was largely curtailed. Rather than enjoying the solace of reading alone, as many did during lockdown, viewers here found forms of intimacy by watching and listening to others read and enjoy books – of being read to and invited into a personal, albeit mediated, naked reading encounter.