Queer Traffic: Sex, Panic, Free Trade

"Queer Traffic brings the critical language from queer studies and studies of sex work to look at the forms of free exchange imagined in the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA). Focusing on trade between the US and Mexico, Jennifer Tyburczy traces free trade's erotic investments in hetero- and homonormativity, racial capitalism, markets of dispossession, and neocolonialism. Tyburczy argues that paying attention to sex in the flows of free trade makes visible the ways that free trade regards some objects as assimilable into global capitalism while disciplining the movement of capitalism's indigestible objects-such as vibrators and dildos-with charges of "obscenity," "terrorism," and "trafficking." Throughout the book, Tyburczy shows how these flows invent new categories of "obscene" objecthood and "illegal" personhood as well as new modes of surveillance and control that arise to protect normative trade from queer traffic"--