Dr Zahra Stardust
Faculty of Creative Industries, Education & Social Justice,
School of Communication
Biography
Dr Zahra Stardust (she/her) is a queer femme writer, scholar and artist, working on the stolen lands of the Yugara and Turrbal peoples. Zahra’s work specalises in sexual media and sexual health, focusing on the politics of online sexual content moderation and the design and governance of sextech. She brings this experience to her work on social movements, resistance strategies and liberatory dreaming.
Her first book Indie Porn: Revolution, Regulation and Resistance (Duke University Press, 2024), investigated how governments and platforms forclose opportunities for more revolutionary pornographies. Her second book Sextech: A Critical Introduction is under contract with Polity Press, and explores how marginalised communities negotiate and resist colonial, capitalist and carceral logics in contemporary sextech. Her third book (forthcoming) is an anthology titled Academy of Whores: Radical Writing by Sex Workers on Campus, featuring intimate stories of sex workers navigating academic life.
With an international research portfolio spanning sex worker activism, LGBTQ+ health and HIV treatment and prevention, she has published about sexual racism, trans prison policies, policing practices, surveillance capitalism and algorithmic whorephobia. Her work has been featured in media such as The Guardian, BBC News, Huffington Post, Vice, Wired, Junkee, SBS, ABC, Triple J and New Matilda and has been cited by organisations such as UNFPA, UNAIDS and WHO.
Zahra has taught across multiple institutions in gender studies, law, social policy, criminology, sexology, politics and media studies. She holds a Bachelor of Arts, Bachelor of Law (Hons) and Masters in Gender and Cultural Studies from the University of Sydney and a PhD in Arts and Media from the University of New South Wales, during which time she undertook summer programs at the Oxford Internet Institute and the University of Amsterdam.
Prior to academia, Stardust worked in policy, advocacy, legal and research capacities with community organisations, NGOs and UN bodies on human rights and social justice projects, including with Scarlet Alliance (Australian Sex Workers Association) and ACON. After completing her legal training at the Sex Worker Legal Service (Inner City Legal Centre) and the Environmental Defenders Office (police accountability project), she was admitted as a solicitor to the Supreme Court of NSW and the High Court of Australia.
Before taking up an ongoing lectureship at the Queensland University of Technology, Zahra was a postdoctoral research fellow at the Australian Research Council Centre of Excellence for Automated Decision-Making and Society and a Fellow at the Berkman Klein Center for Internet and Society at Harvard Law School. At QUT, she is a Co-Chair of the Queer Research Group (Centre for Justice) and the Queer and Feminist Digital Media Studies group (DMRC).
Zahra is currently an Australian Research Council Discovery (Early Career Researcher) Award Fellow investigating how digital platforms can better protect sexual and reproductive rights online. She is a Co-Chair of the World Association for Sexual Health’s Sexual Rights Committee and sits on the World Health Organisation’s Sexual Health and Wellbeing Advisory Group.
A voracious learner and promiscuous collaborator, Zahra has longstanding interests in death doulaing, somatic sex education, intimacy coordination, madness, mermaiding and maximalist fashion.
Chai is the way to her heart.
Personal details
Positions
- Lecturer
Faculty of Creative Industries, Education & Social Justice,
School of Communication
Keywords
Gender and Sexuality, Critical Criminology, Queer Legal Theory, Sex Tech, Sexual Labour, Surveillance Capitalism, Collective Governance, Human Rights, Public Health, Porn studies
Research field
Cultural studies, Communication and media studies, Criminology
Field of Research code, Australian and New Zealand Standard Research Classification (ANZSRC), 2020
Qualifications
- Doctor of Philsophy (University of New South Wales)
- Master of Arts (Gender and Cultural Studies) (University of Sydney)
- Bachelor of Laws (Hons) (University of Sydney)
- Bachelor of Arts (Modern History) (University of Sydney)
- Diploma of Legal Practice (College of Law, New South Wales)
Teaching
Zahra has taught across a range of subjects and disciplines, including gender and cultural studies, law, criminology, social research, public policy, politics, sexology and sociology. Her previous courses include: Social Media and Society, Social Research and Policy, Policy and Society, The Politics of Human Rights, Introduction to Criminology, Introduction to Criminal Justice, Explaining Crime, Sex, Violence and Transgression, Sociology of Gender, Culture and Contemporary Sexology ,Theory and Practice, Criminal Laws and Civil and Criminal Procedure
Publications
- Stardust, Z., Albury, K. & Kennedy, J. (2025). 'It's not just pink, fluffy handcuffs': Criminalised communities, anti-surveillance, and hacking sextech. Crime, Media, Culture, 21(4), 508–528. https://eprints.qut.edu.au/264810
- Sunden, J., Albury, K. & Stardust, Z. (2025). Between commodified and improvisational pleasures: Uses and experiences of sextech by queer, trans, and nonbinary people in Sweden and Australia. Sexualities, 28(8), 2328–2342. https://eprints.qut.edu.au/256402
- Stardust, Z., (2024). Indie Porn: Revolution, Regulation and Resistance. Duke University Press. https://eprints.qut.edu.au/255242
- Egwuatu, C., Stardust, Z., Miller-Young, M. & Ducati, D. (2024). Curating Desire: The White Supremacist Grammar of Tagging on Pornhub. In D. Callander, P. Farvid, A. Baradaran & TA. Vance (Eds.), Sexual Racism and Social Justice: Reckoning with White Supremacy and Desire (pp. 269–295). Oxford University Press. https://eprints.qut.edu.au/251238
- Stardust, Z., Obeid, A., McKee, A. & Angus, D. (2024). Mandatory Age Verification for Pornography Access: Why it can't and won't 'save the children'. Big Data and Society, 11(2). https://eprints.qut.edu.au/248167
- Stardust, Z., Albury, K. & Kennedy, J. (2024). Sex Tech Entrepreneurs: Governing Intimate Data in Start-Up Culture. New Media and Society, 26(12), 7148–7167. https://eprints.qut.edu.au/239108
- Stardust, Z., Gillett, R. & Albury, K. (2023). Surveillance does not equal safety: Police, data and consent on dating apps. Crime, Media, Culture, 19(2), 274–295. https://eprints.qut.edu.au/233498
- Stardust, Z., Blunt, D., Garcia, G., Lee, L., D'Adamo, K. & Kuo, R. (2023). High Risk Hustling: Payment Processors, Sexual Proxies and Discrimination by Design. City University of New York Law Review, 26(1), 57–138. https://eprints.qut.edu.au/239116
- Stardust, Z., Treloar, C., Cama, E. & Kim, J. (2021). ‘I Wouldn’t Call the Cops if I was Being Bashed to Death’: Sex Work, Whore Stigma and the Criminal Legal System. International Journal for Crime, Justice and Social Democracy, 10(2). https://eprints.qut.edu.au/211569
- Blunt, D. & Stardust, Z. (2021). Automating Whorephobia: sex, technology and the violence of deplatforming: An interview with Hacking//Hustling. Porn Studies, 8(4), 350–366. https://eprints.qut.edu.au/225919
QUT ePrints
For more publications by Zahra, explore their research in QUT ePrints (our digital repository).
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A complete list of publications is available at: https://www.qut.edu.au/about/our-people/academic-profiles/zahra.stardust
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