Event details

Webcam expo events are industry-wide gatherings that focus on the business and economic components of the pornography webcam industry.

In this talk, I analyze the annual Latin American Livecam Expo (LALExpo) event held in Colombia, founded in 2014. LALExpo is advertised as the most exclusive webcam industry event in Latin America, tailored to studio companies looking to grow their business.

Through ethnography, content analysis, and semi-structured interviews with event attendees, I examine how models, studios, and industry executives navigate industry-wide events in Latin America. I demonstrate the unique ways that LALExpo and its organizers, who are business moguls selling courses on entrepreneurship, actively work to legitimize the webcam industry in Colombia through collaboration with government officials.

The webcam expo spans five days and consists of various conference-style panels addressing pressing issues within the webcam studio industry, such as:

Increased regulation by the Colombian government,
Mental health concerns for models,
Building a skillset to support successful models
How to run a successful studio
This industry-sponsored event provides a distinct opportunity to understand how various unspoken tensions between studios, government officials, and models are deprioritized in favor of legitimizing the industry.

While research on the webcam industry has emphasized opportunities for pleasure, I shed light on the importance of analyzing the power dynamics within porn production in Colombia and how they differ from independent porn production in the U.S., particularly due to conditions of economic vulnerability affected by U.S. intervention.

In this talk, I argue that given the increasing ascension of the webcam industry in Colombia and the growing economic opportunities it provides for investors and studio management teams, LALExpo has become a public performance emphasizing teamwork between models and executives in the face of growing regulation.

I pose the following questions:

How does LALExpo use its platform to create a sense of unity within the industry in Colombia?
Why are narratives of unity central to its mission?