In Queer Traffic, Jennifer Tyburczy traces how sexual dissidents across the Mexico-Canada-US borderlands transport the objects and experiences that nourish their sexual and social lives. She situates the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) as a pivot point in the formation of panics aimed at stamping out these outlaw sex practices. Highlighting NAFTA's erotic investments in hetero- and homonormativity, racial capitalism, markets of dispossession, and neocolonialism, Tyburczy directly engages with art, activism, and archives to revisit the struggles of people who invented circuits of sexual exchange through four decades of violence and criminalization. In conversing with actors from bureaucrats to pornographers and in studying choreographies, social movements, and street vocabularies, she examines an array of tactics that undermine the market logics of trade law and policy. Dreaming of other forms of living that go beyond mere survival, Queer Traffic guides us through the renegade pathways that circumvent the seemingly endless reach of free-trade capitalism toward other routes to pleasure.
Jennifer Tyburczy is Associate Professor of Feminist Studies at the University of California, Santa Barbara, and author of Sex Museums: The Politics and Performance of Display.
List of Illustrations ix List of Abbreviations xiii Preface. NAFTA's Bottoms: An Opening xv Introduction. Sex on the Move 1 1. Porn Pirates 41 The Free Eating Agreement 71 2. Importing Degradation 79 When the States Says "No One Likes Fat Girls" 120 3. Sex, Drugs, and Intellectual Property Law 129 Exhuming the Chupacabras 161 4. Dancing Punta on NAFTA Time 171 NAFTA's Funeral 199 Epilogue. Why Queer Traffic(k) Now? 208 Acknowledgments 213 Notes 219 References 239 Index 261
"Thinking how sex functions as a form of trade while tracking its relationship to a host of objects, ideas, and policies across the hemisphere, Jennifer Tyburczy offers new approaches to sexuality studies through a materialist understanding of neoliberalism that accounts for the affective currents that flow across borders. With dazzling wit, self-effacing humor, and suggestive and unexpected theoretical moves, Tyburczy makes us think about sexualized power relations in new ways." - Juana Maria Rodriguez, author of Puta Life: Seeing Latinas, Working Sex "The idea that sex can help us understand free trade is hugely provoking. Complicating and queering the concept of trade, Queer Traffic pushes conversations about excessive modes of capitalism and so-called excessive modes of representing, marketing, selling, moving, and consuming sex. This urgent book makes an important intervention in queer studies, American studies, and Mexican studies." - Laura G. Gutierrez, author of Performing Mexicanidad: Vendidas y Cabareteras on the Transnational Stage
