Becky Holt
Dr. Becky Holt is an FRQSC postdoctoral fellow whose research examines digital culture and sex media, with a focus on platform studies, media theory, and gender and sexuality studies. She completed her PhD at Concordia University, where her dissertation offered the first in-depth academic analysis of Pornhub’s corporate history.
In addition to co-authoring a forthcoming book on Pornhub with Susanna Paasonen for Polity Press, Holt is developing a new project, tentatively titled (In)Visible Sex, which explores how digital technologies are reshaping the conditions under which sex, gender, and sexuality ‘show up’ in participatory culture.
Her work appears in Discourse: Journal for Theoretical Studies in Media and Culture, The Intellect Handbook of Adult Film and Media, and Flow.
digital culture and technology; adult media; gender and sexuality studies; queer theory; platform studies; digital aesthetics
PhD Film and Moving Image Studies, Concordia University, 2025
“The Boob Tube: Tracking Pornhub’s Emergence,” in The Intellect Handbook of Adult Film and
Media. Eds. Darshana Sreedhar Mini, Peter Allilunas, and Patrick Keilty (Intellect, 2026)
“‘The Wormhole,’ or YouTube’s Borderline Content Problem,” in Platforms and the Moving
Image. Eds. Philipp Dominik Keidl and Jana Zündel (Meson, 2025)
“Power and Paranoia in the Age of Pornhub,” Discourse: Journal for Theoretical Studies in Media and Culture 45:3 (2024)
“Forget Jeff Bezos. Learn the Name Danni Ashe,” Flow 29:06 (Spring 2023)
“A Porn Studies Scholar’s Plea to Journalists,” Flow 29:1 (Fall 2022).
- Fonds de recherche du Québec Postdoctoral Fellowship, 2025
- Fonds de recherche du Québec Doctoral Scholarship, 2021
- Concordia University Accelerator Award, 2021
- Concordia University Faculty of Fine Arts Fellowship, 2017