NMSNew Media & Society1461-44481461-7315SAGE PublicationsSage UK: London, England10.1177/146144482096245210.1177_1461444820962452ArticlesHetero-sexting as mediated intimacy work: ‘Putting something on the line’https://orcid.org/0000-0002-4841-6684AmundsenRikkeUniversity of Cambridge, UKRikke Amundsen, Department of Sociology, University of Cambridge, 16 Mill Lane, Cambridge, CB2 1SB, UK. Email: rba26@cam.ac.uk3092020241122137© The Author(s) 20202020SAGE Publicationshttps://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/This article is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 License (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/) which permits any use, reproduction and distribution of the work without further permission provided the original work is attributed as specified on the SAGE and Open Access page (https://us.sagepub.com/en-us/nam/open-access-at-sage).

This article is concerned with women’s digitally mediated practices of creating and sending private sexual images to men, here referred to as ‘hetero-sexting’. Drawing on material from individual interviews with adult British women about their experiences of hetero-sexting, the article develops an understanding of women’s hetero-sexting practices as a form of female-conducted ‘mediated intimacy work’, constituted by a constant negotiation of female risk taking and male trustworthiness. In doing so, it shows how the women relied on and made active use of the sexting-related risk of digital image abuse as a means to establish and enhance trust and, as such, stress the significance of their hetero-sexting activities as performances of intimacy. Sexting-induced vulnerability was therefore both drawn on and dismissed within the very same accounts of hetero-sexting, as it was applied as a means to perform a new form of normative femininity, namely that of the agentic intimacy worker.

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