Full Description
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.
Contents
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
