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Jennifer Tyburczy

Sex Toys after NAFTA: Transnational Class Politics, Erotic


Consumerism, and the Economy of Female Pleasure in
Mexico City

A fter six months of conducting participant observation and interviews


with Mexico Citys sex industry leaders, I was able to tag along with
saleswoman Fabiola to one of her sex toy parties, this one a despedida
de soltera (bachelorette party) with what she described as la crema y nata
de la sociedad mexicana (the cream of the crop of Mexican society) in
the well-to-do Mexico City neighborhood of Lomas de Tecamachalco.
Fabiola described this Mexico City subdivision as una zona exclusiva de
ricos (an exclusive zone for the rich). Indeed, Lomas Tecamalchalco is
one of many lomas (hills) developments that were created in the 1950s
but that have in recent years, along with malls, supermarkets, cinemas, and
private schools, come to be associated with exclusivity, the insularity of
Mexicos privileged classes, and the gentrification and class segregation of
Mexico Citys built environment in the age of free market ideology (Gil-
bert 2007, 1719; Sanchez Prado 2014, 161).
This article focuses on the rising upper middle and upper class of
twenty- and thirty-something women in Mexico City and on how examin-
ing the consumer practices of elite Mexican women reveals the contours
and intersections of pleasure-seeking (as an embodied, vernacular perfor-
mance) and neoliberalism (as a macroeconomic philosophy dependent on
global connectivity). Foreign imports of luxury goods have recently found
a thriving market in Mexico: in 2012 luxury consumerism rose by 75 per-
cent and is widely regarded as booming with the steady growth of for-
eign business investment in these sectors throughout the republic but par-
ticularly in Mexico City (Ortega 2012), which Ignacio M. Sanchez Prado
(2014) has described as an effective signifier of neoliberal modernization
(148). As the front cover of the Revista del Consumider (Consumer review)
(fig. 1) suggests, women are being hailed into performances of consum-
erism through a celebration of both their financial capital and their cul-
tural capital in Mexicos diversifying marketplace. While iPhones, Louis

The author wishes to thank Anahi Russo Garrido, Lucia Sa, Daniela Rossell, Manuel
Gutierrez Silva, the various interlocutors cited in this article, and the two anonymous Signs
readers.

[Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society 2016, vol. 42, no. 1]
2016 by The University of Chicago. All rights reserved. 0097-9740/2016/4201-0007$10.00

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Figure 1 Mujeres al Poder (women in power), March 2013 issue of Revista del Con-
sumider, published by Mexicos Federal Attorneys Office of Consumers. A color version of
this figure is available online.

Vuitton bags, Chanel perfumes, Cartier watches, and Mercedes Benzes


have become necessary props in the public performance of wealth and
elitism for these Mexico City women, so too have sex toys become crucial
instruments in the embodiment of cosmopolitan sexual identities marked
by raced and classed hierarchies of perceived whiteness and privilege.

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Indeed, Mexican womens sexuality has become a central focus in the


intense political struggle to redefine Mexico as a secular state and an eco-
nomic player on the global stage (Amuchastegui et al. 2010; Parrini and
Amuchastegui 2012). In this article, I aim to disentangle some of the nar-
ratives that sex advertisers sell to Mexican women and that women sell to
themselves. I therefore consider the sexual consumption of the goods that
flooded the Mexican market in the wake of the North American Free Trade
Agreement (NAFTA) and how this consumption has come to define wom-
ens sexuality according to the logic of the neoliberal marketplace.
According to a 2013 report from Mexicos National Institute of Sta-
tistics and Geography (Instituto Nacional de Estadstica y Geografa, or
INEGI), 1.7 percent (or 1,340,000 people) of the countrys inhabitants
make up Mexicos elite class (Animal Poltico 2013). Between 1992 and
2000, most Mexican households saw their incomes stagnate or fall with
the implementation of NAFTA, the 1994 tequila crisis, and multiple re-
cessions, but Mexicos privileged elite experienced income growth in the
double digits (Flannery 2013). In another study titled Mexico: A Mid-
dle Class Society, economist Luis de la Calle and political scientist Luis
Rubio argue that consumption patterns reveal a steady trend toward ur-
banization and upward mobility (de la Calle and Rubio 2012), even while
other reports, especially those that take into account the everyday lives of
middle-class Mexicans, testify to the ongoing precarity felt by those who
inhabit or aspire to the always fluctuating composition of the middle class
(Walker 2013). Whichever interpretation prevails, NAFTA and the subse-
quent opening of the retail sector have been cited as among the most im-
portant factors in the rise of the middle class and the emergence of multi-
billionaires, perhaps most famous among them the telecommunications
tycoon Carlos Slim. Claiming class status in Mexico, especially middle-class
status, often depends more on perception and performance than economic
footing, with consumption habits central to elite self-definition (Cahn 2008,
44041, 447).
While much emphasis has been placed on studying those populations
for whom NAFTA has failed, I focus on those whom NAFTA has argu-
ably benefited to ask two principal questions: Has NAFTA influenced the
construction of elite women as sexual subjects in Mexico City? And if so,
how does examining this construction help us to understand the ways in
which capitalist processes and practices produce and manufacture erotic
identities among national elites? At the same time, and much as Jennifer
Bair encourages feminist economists to do, this articles also recognizes
the importance of global capitalism as a macrostructure that mobilizes
gender but simultaneously appreciates that multiple forms of social dif-

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ference in addition to gender can shape production arrangements and that


these forms of difference can be enrolled into regimes of capital accumu-
lation in various ways (Bair 2010, 209). I therefore position the flow of
sexual goods across national borders as a dynamic multidirectional process
that creates diverse erotic positionalities, some of which nominally operate
under the new banner of sexual liberation but virtually all of which trade
in old paradigms of raced, sexed, and gendered power hierarchies. Much
as Lynn Comella (2013) holds out hope for feminist reconfigurations of
the hegemonic sex industry, I too look beyond text to context, and I hope
to add to Comellas work through an examination of shifting transnational
contexts, in search of what Laura Gutierrez (2010, 170) and Jose Esteban
Munoz (1999, 195) have called queer worldmaking, performances that
transform, resist, or transgress established cultural patterns. This is not to
say that there are no resistant or unsettling performances occurring in Mex-
ico and especially Mexico City today, but my intent here is mobilize a multi-
directional approach to neoliberal capitalism in post-NAFTA Mexico to
show how free trade and gendered, raced, and classed power hierarchies
are mutually constitutive.
NAFTA acts as an analytic pivot point to explore the pleasures and
dangers of what it means to identify as a cosmopolitan sexual subject in
Mexico City today. At the intersection of sexuality and free trade, macro-
economic policies influence everyday rituals of sex and sexuality to create
repetitive scenes wherein elite women discuss and enact a limited range
of intelligible local sexual identifications. These scenes of sexual consump-
tion reveal the hidden contradictions of the sexual liberation rhetoric
through which these goods are desired and sold, what Ann Snitow, Chris-
tine Stansell, and Sharon Thompson (1983) call the powers of desire
embedded a paradoxical capitalist logic that simultaneously expands and
contracts pleasures, especially for women. Instead, at the localized inter-
stices of the transnational circuits through which sex toys move, what is
gained for the women I discuss is the cultural capital of rhetorically claim-
ing a modern cosmopolitan identity composed of a set of rigidly defined
class practices whereby local citizens become cosmopolitan when they act,
dress, and consume within the codes of the global neoliberal marketplace.
In what follows, I situate the opening ethnographic vignette within an
account of Mexicos turn to free trade and neoliberalism after the socio-
economic collapse of 1982 and how this turn is tied to the unique ways
in which neoliberal narratives of self, agency, and social relationships have
blended with the discourses of deeply rooted conservative movements on
the one hand, and with progressive forces that have reshaped public nar-
ratives of sex and intimacy in Mexico City on the other. I then turn to

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Daniela Rossells controversial 2002 photography project Ricas y Famosas


1994 2001 (The rich and famous) to study the ways in which her series
provides otherwise unattainable access to how elite women blend con-
servative, progressive, and globalized narratives of consumption in their
highly guarded domestic spaces. Following this visual culture analysis,
I visit the sex boutique chain Erotika to contemplate how and in what
ways imported sexual goods are marketed toward wealthy, young Mexi-
can women. These instances show how the visual, rhetorical, and archi-
tectural influences of furnishing homes, retail spaces, and the megalopolis
of Mexico City with limitless possibilities for erotic consumerism never-
theless fail to facilitate social and civic spaces with real opportunities for
feminine and female-identified pleasures. To close, I contemplate the role
of the sex toy factory in China to argue that the economy of female plea-
sure in Mexico City unfolds within a transnational landscape that increas-
ingly pits the self-fashioned identity of the woman who consumes in the
neoliberal marketplace against the coerced identification of the feminized
laborer who produces for the sex industry.

Sexing neoliberalism
It was December 1, 2012, the same day that Enrique Pena Nieto took
the oath of the office as president of Mexico, and the Institutional Revo-
lutionary Party (Partido Revolucionario Institucional, or PRI) once again
gained control of the countrys most powerful political position after only
a twelve-year hiatus during which the National Action Party (Partido Ac-
cion Nacional, or PAN) held court under the two sexenios (six-year terms)
of Vicente Fox and Felipe Calderon. En route to the despedida de soltera
at the stately home of a family who had directly benefitted from the neo-
liberal agendas of both the PAN and the PRI, Fabiola gave the taxi driver
directions as he zigzagged in and out of the seemingly endless traffic on
Paseo de la Reforma, a wide avenue that runs diagonally across the heart of
Mexico City. In the calmer moments, I asked Fabiola about the group of
women we were about to meet and how she started this freelance work
two years earlier. She described the women as profesionistas (profes-
sionals) who are married or about to be married to wealthy empresarios
(businessmen). One woman, for whom Fabiola had recently organized a
similar sex toy/bachelorette party, had called her on behalf of her friend,
whose grand home we were now approaching. She explained that these
women represent an entitled, powerful class that are nevertheless llenas
de miedos, dudas, y prejucios (full of fears, doubts, and prejudices) about
sex and uncomfortable entering a sex store in broad daylight; hence the
house call. In a later interview, Fabiola explained that while the husbands

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and fiances of these women make massive profits, and while these women
are collectively grouped by association with their male partners as part of
the elite class, each individual womans monthly wage earnings might barely
cover the cost of one toy de moda, or fashionable sex toy (see fig. 2).
Fabiola told me that the commission-based income she makes at these
events largely finances her sisters college education. She also spoke of
the anxiety she sometimes feels before these parties. She was born and
raised in one of Mexico Citys barrios bravos (fierce neighborhoods), where
NAFTA has had the most devastating influence on the informal markets
that dominate local economies. Her customers, by contrast, live in the ritzy
Mexico City neighborhoods of Polanco, Santa Fe, and Lomas de Chapul-
tepec. She told me that she often disidentifies with the women she sells to
and juxtaposed her working-class background against the fresa (snobbish)
damas (ladies) who are her principal clientele.
As we pulled up to the well-fortified manor in Lomas de Tecamachalco,
Fabiola asked the taxi driver if he might return to pick us up in a few hours
as we knew no available taxis would pass by in this isolated neighborhood.
Upon entering, the hostess and her posse of well-coiffed women ushered
us into the main foyer where four large tables had been set up with the new
props of Mexican bachelorette soirees: penis pins, penis necklaces, penis
lollipops in assorted colors, sushi rolls and Asian-style salads, cinnamon
rolls and cold cuts, tea sandwiches, Coca-Cola and rum for Cuba libres,
vodka and cranberry juice for Cape Cods, and one industrial-sized bottle
of Cazadores tequila, which was meant not to be shot or sipped but blown
from one womans mouth into anothers through a penis-shaped straw.
Having attended bachelorette parties in the States, the scene struck me as
familiar: the raunch factor was less; no t-shirts with lollipops that the bride-
to-be would later wear in public so that men she didnt know could suck
them off her body, a tiara instead of a veil, nothing too big or too eye-
catching or too provocative for the guest of honor, who was the most
modestly dressed of the group. As Fabiola chatted with the guests, I made
myself useful and set up the table, trying to imitate the manner in which I
had seen sexual goods displayed in Erotika, the largest grossing sex bou-
tique in Mexico and Fabiolas institutional home where, at the time of the
party, she worked as the training coordinator.
With the Christmas season upon us, the year-round decor intermixed
with seasonal adornments: poinsettias, nativity scenes, and wreaths with
pastoral paintings, Virgen de Guadalupe images, and a large collection of
Mammy and Sambo figurines. Soon the hostess of the party gave us the
go-ahead, and Fabiola stood up to begin her sex sales performance. To my
surprise she began her talk with the topic of infidelity. She cited a very high

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Figure 2 Despedida de Soltera, Mexico City, 2012. Photo taken by author. A color version of this figure is available online.

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percentage of married Mexican men who are unfaithful to show the bride-
to-be and all the married or soon-to-be married women how important it
was to keep the sexual spice in a relationship if they wanted to avoid what
she painted as an almost inevitable future as a jilted woman. Some women
nervously responded with pues, bueno (well, ok), especially the hostess,
who had only recently been married. Others nodded knowingly. Fabiola
transitioned into how Mexican culture, especially Mexican women, deny
their own pleasure, using food consumption as a case in point. In food, in
sex, in everything, she described Mexican feminine experience as repri-
mida (repressed).
As Fabiola discussed each item, I passed around the lubricants, the vi-
brators, the handcuffs, the kegel exercise balls, massage oil candles, erotic
dice, and clitoral stimulants. Toward the end of her speech, she told them
about G-spot amplification, an expensive new medical intervention de-
veloped in Brazil that enlarges the G-spot through a vaginal injection of
human-engineered collagen, not to increase pleasure but to improve the
chances that a woman and her male partner would simply be able to find
the spot at all. In all, Fabiola sold about $500 US dollars worth of mer-
chandise: three sets of erotic dice, one high-end We-Vibe vibrator, one
cock ring, two secretive compact vibrators, and one set of vibrating gold
kegel balls. The young blonde woman who bought the kegel balls stressed
that she was buying the product for back massage purposes and not to
exercise her pelvic floor muscles, as the product is intended. Throughout
the party, this same woman was also very vocal about the problems she
was having with her boyfriend. Perhaps these toys will entice him to come
home earlier, she ruminated out loud, or perhaps it would be a fitting
punishment to pleasure herself with the toys rather than with his body.
Any phallic-shaped merchandise was expressly avoided because, as another
guest told me and as most of the women agreed, any mention of such
items in the presence of their boyfriends or husbands would elicit the retort
no soy puto (Im not a faggot). This repeated phrase implies not just their
partners liberal use of homophobic language to assert their penetrative
sexual roles but denies women the erotic positionality of sexual topness
that some toys (with the appropriate strap-on) can offer (Parrini and Amu-
chastegui 2012, 2930).
While Fabiola was handling the credit card payments, a noteworthy
marker of the womens elite class credentials, the partygoers approached
the table of toys to speak to me about their intended use value. A ques-
tion about the purpose of the toy cleaner got us into a conversation about
which lubricants should be used with which condoms, which materials
could be boiled and which could not, and what products and materials

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would be best for single-partner use or with multiple partners. While Fa-
biola stressed infidelity in her talk, she never mentioned how to protect
oneself and ones partner in the case of polyamorous practices, consen-
sual or otherwise. I was talking to one woman about the large pores of the
vibrator made of super-soft vixskin and how this material would not be
the best choice if used with more than one partner, when she quickly re-
sponded, cutting me off, Eso nunca pasa en Mexico (That never happens in
Mexico).
When the women at the bachelorette party pulled their credit cards out
of their Louis Vuitton purses, they participated in the construction of a
certain class of consumer through the epistemology of sexuality. They also
played an indispensable role in this global network of sexual consumerism:
they heeded the neoliberal call to be pleasure-seeking subjects. But whom,
ultimately, does this new neoliberal sex order serve? Is it sexually agential
to use a sex toy to punish a wayward lover? Do G-spot amplification in-
jections medicalize orgasms, or worse, invent new female diseases that
require treatment and surgical interventions? Why is it okay to talk about
male infidelity but not the possibility of a woman taking multiple part-
ners for her pleasure? Eso nunca pasa en Mexico. How does this seemingly
simple statement contain within it the unstable status of this supposed
newfound sexual freedom? The contradictions of sexual consumption that
I encountered at the despedida de soltera revealed that women purchased
sex toys less for their pleasure and more as, first, new marital apparatuses
that might dissuade the men in their lives from cheating on them and,
second, as possessions that, whether used or not for their intended pur-
poses, served to confirm their participation in an imagined class of trans-
national sexual subjects. Ultimately, the party revealed that these women
remained discursively caught between two socially conservative institu-
tions: the durability of older forms of sexuality and the patriarchy of the
sex industry.
The production of desire, sexual identities, and discourse about what
it means to be sexually cosmopolitan lies at the heart of multiple global
processes (Rofel 2007, 1). The sale of sex toys at the despedida de soltera
crystalizes one moment in the transnational flow of sexual goods, a dy-
namic, multidirectional process that can create new erotic subjects consti-
tuted by the selling of a twenty-first century version of sexual liberation
steeped in raced, sexed, and gendered hierarchies of power with long his-
tories of circulation and institutionalization.1 As Lisa Rofel has discovered

1
In spite of this caution, I celebrate feminist and queer approaches to the sex industry
that can transform, resist, or transgress established cultural patterns, and I acknowledge the

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in China, Mexico too is a nation-state in the process of remaking itself


in order to participate not only in the postCold World order but also as
the least powerful player in the neoliberal project known as North Amer-
ican integration.2 One facet of this reinvention, as the sex toy party shows,
is the commodification of a new consumer demand for sexual goods that
are packaged in imported discourses of modernity and marketed with ur-
gent appeals to the durable domestic problems of female sexuality.
This burgeoning economy of female pleasure forged between Mexican
women and foreign-made and distributed things began on January 1, 1994,
when NAFTA went into effect under President Carlos Salinas de Gortari,
who famously proclaimed that the free trade agreement would catapult
Mexico into the so-called first world. To understand Mexicos unique ver-
sion of neoliberalism, however, we must return to 1982 and the begin-
ning of Miguel de la Madrids presidency and the dramatic privatization of
formerly state-owned industries such as telecommunications. Prior to 1982,
Mexicos economy could be described as economic nationalism, with a stress
on the primacy of the state (in Mexicos case under the seventy-year-long
rule of the PRI), national security, and military power (Gilpin 1987, 31).
In the case of Mexico, however, this so-called protectionist stance also
allowed for a powerful Left with socialist and collective aims; commu-
nist sympathies, for example with Cuba; and a critical mass of citizens who
pushed back against what they saw as the PRIs failure to deliver on the
promises of the Mexican Revolution. Since 1982, the massive privatization
of government enterprises, according to economist Marco Antonio Gon-
zalez Gomez, did not create a more egalitarian society, but it did help to
consolidate a small middle class and an even smaller class of billionaires
(2009, 5055). While the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and
Development (OECD) reports that the Gini coefficient, a standard mea-
sure of income inequality, for all its member countries has steadily risen
in the last two decades, meaning that the household incomes of the top
10 percent grew faster than those of the poorest 10 percent, the ratio for

subversive performances occurring in Mexico or Mexico City today. Indeed, what the women
at the bachelorette party say about sexual goods can differ markedly from what they do with
those goods once they leave the party. I concentrate on the verbal and visual rhetoric of
privileged populations to show how intertwining, transnational systems of representation,
production, distribution, and consumption of sex toys under late capitalist globalization
foreclose the public performance of feminine pleasure, even for NAFTAs winners.
2
In 2002, the Trilateral Commission published three papers on the asymmetry of the
North American Integration and reported that the smaller Mexican economy relies on the
US market for nearly 90 percent of their exports (see Hakim and Litan 2002).

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Mexico, at 27 to 1, is the highest of any OECD country (as a benchmark,


the ratio in the United States is 14 to 1) (OECD 2011). To return to the
INEGI report I cited earlier, for every upper-class person in Mexico there
are forty-nine in the lower class (Animal Poltico 2013). And yet in recent
years, foreign business groups and economic pundits like Thomas Fried-
man have consistently depicted Mexico as a country that has overcome
the socioeconomic turbulence of 1982 and is on the verge of a huge take-
off in consumer spending, especially for luxury goods and other nones-
sential items, among them sex toys (Friedman 2013; Muniz and Chias
2015).
Elite narratives of sexual cosmopolitanism depend on Mexicos turn
to neoliberalism after the socioeconomic collapse of 1982 and the incul-
cation of what President de la Madrid called apertura (opening) into social
and cultural fields beyond the economy (Walker 2013, 147). Apertura is
a phrase I often heard repeated in my conversations with diverse popula-
tions in Mexico City to make rhetorical claims to cosmopolitanism through
cultural practices and discourses of identity politics while also referring to
the institutionalization of neoliberal tenets such as privatization, foreign
investment, and free markets. But as Rosemary Hennessy points out in
Profit and Pleasure, New knowledges and new forms of identity are pro-
voked by capitalisms progressive impulses. Capitalism is progressive in the
sense that it breaks down oppressive and at times brutally constraining
traditional social structures and ways of life (2000, 29). Arguably, grow-
ing private sectors and market reform as consequences of globalization in
Mexico match the apertura of sexual discourse and public performances
of sexual identity, with diverse cultural and political implications at local
and national levels. As Hennessy is careful to point out, many needs and
desires are not assimilable within late capitalism, a global division of labor
more intensely transnational than prior capitalist structures in that net-
works of industrial and service formations have replaced the nation-state
as the center. Feminine pleasure, for its own sake, constitutes one of these
hard-to-assimilate elements within the everyday reality of apertura.
In late capitalism, as we have seen in Mexico in the post-NAFTA years,
particularly given the US demand for cheap goods and given Mexicos
relationship with China, new technologies have accelerated the speed and
dispersed the space of production to unprecedented levels. The rate, speed,
and transnational diffusion of goods under late capitalism and the impact
of this diffusion on migration, telecommunications, and local economies
have resulted in a twenty-first-century perverse implantation, to riff on
Michel Foucaults (1978) term, wherein new sexual identities and their
attendant sex acts proliferate at an accelerated and almost feverish rate to

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cohere in complex juxtapositions that go far beyond normal and per-


verse. Since the early 1990s, transnational sexuality scholars have iden-
tified the expansion of new homosexual and transgender identities and
cultures in both Western and non-Western societies as a significant in-
stance of cultural globalization.3 While these identities and communities
are crucial to the larger project from which this article is drawn, global
and local market processes have also greatly influenced the generation of
multiple heterosexualities in Mexico. Tracking these influences shows
twenty-first-century Mexican heterosexual formations to be anything but
stable and static. Rather, they are shifting and ever-changing, not along
the lines of a too-easy hybridity that harmoniously integrates neoliberal
notions of so-called modernity with the so-called developing world but
rather through diverse individual, communal, and intercultural experiences
that occur within a global imagined community motivated, in the case of
my interlocutors, just as much by progressive social movements for sex-
ual rights such as LGBTQ (in Mexico LGBTTTI, or lesbian, gay, bisex- q1
ual, transsexual, transgender, transvestite, intersexual) and womens repro-
ductive rights as by transnational class aspirations marketed through the
commercialization of sex. For the transnational circulation of sex toys in
post-NAFTA Mexico, as for the gay tourism industry examined by trans-
national sexuality scholar Lionel Cantu (2002), the social construction of
new sexual identities in Mexico is often directly linked to capitalist devel-
opment and the globalized ties between Mexico and the United States,
an apertura that has expanded spaces of commodification with the dual
effect of creating sites of sexual liberation and exploitation.
Indeed, the current moment in Mexican sexuality is a confusing time
of diverse sexual vocabularies and cultural blendings in which Mexicans
negotiate new ideas about sexuality that mainly come from the Internet
and from popular culture items rooted in Europe, the United States, and
South Americaideas whose messages that are sometimes incompatible
with local, regional, and national notions about traditional Mexican val-
ues or an understanding of how things used to be (Carrillo 2002, 16).
Additionally, Jennifer Hirsch (2003) has shown how migration changed
sex for women from a reproductive and womanly duty to provide their
husbands with pleasure and children to a recreational activity that includes
family planning and erotic desires. From what I have seen, these devel-

3
See Blackwood and Wieringa (1999), Povinelli and Chauncey (1999), Cantu (2002,
2009), Cruz-Malave and Manalansan (2002), Luibheid (2002), Hirsch (2003), Manalansan
(2003), Luibheid and Cantu (2005), and Howe and Rigi (2009).

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opments are intensified due to the sheer number of people residing in


Mexico City and the diverse assemblage of cultures and subcultures, sex-
ual or otherwise, that develop among and between them. They are also
exacerbated by the situation of arguably progressive ideas about sex and
sexuality that are bound to notions of sexual cosmopolitanism created by
neoliberal ideology. For the specific class of women in Mexico City that I
discuss here, what it means to be heterosexual is a transnational concept,
but one in which women are expected to perform imported ideas about
modern sexuality while maintaining some vague connection to the vary-
ing ideas about what constitutes traditional Mexican values. I now turn to
a photography series by artist Daniela Rossell that captures how privileged
Mexican women perform sexual cosmopolitanism through neoliberal ide-
ology in the insular and highly guarded space of the home to show how
conservative notions of gender and race continue to dominate the limited
social identity of female heterosexuality in twenty-first-century Mexico City,
the beacon of both neoliberal modernization and politically progressive
thought in the republic.

Furnishing (hetero)sexualities in Mexico City


Speaking from experience as a daughter of the Mexican political and cul-
tural elite, Rossell says: Wealthy women in Mexico are prisoners of their
houses, style, and excess. Most of them live in the salon. They really want
to look American, like what you see on TV, and they go to a lot of work
to accomplish that. Its a kind of hell (in Strozzina 2010). The homes of
rich Mexican women, such as those at the despedida de soltera, are virtu-
ally inaccessible to outsiders. Rossells photography series, Ricas y Famosas
1994 2001 (the rich and famous), goes inside the towering iron gates and
past the heavily armed security guards to show how elite Mexican women
have furnished their homes and fashioned their bodies with imported
luxury goods within the first seven years after NAFTA went into effect.
Like my analysis of the bachelorette party, her series visualizes the con-
tradictory effects of neoliberal capitalism on elite womens sexuality. What
it does not visualize is the extent to which women may be bombarded by
imported luxury goods but kept from sexual education, alternative forms
of birth control, access to abortion outside of Mexico City, and the free-
dom to talk publicly or even semipublicly about sex and sexuality. I view
her series as ethnophotography that blurs the backstage/frontstage per-
formance binary, to draw from Erving Goffmans (1959) work, through
the presentation of everyday privileged Mexican life that occurred in pri-
vate, interior spaces without an audience but where these women obvi-

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ously set the scene, seized on recognizable conventions, and knew they
were being watched to perform a twenty-first-century version of Mexican
female heterosexuality.
Rossells subjectsoften friends or relatives of her own affluent and
powerful PRI family who volunteered to be photographedcarefully chose
how to present themselves to the camera. Coupling society portraiture and
performance, Rossells sitters unabashedly embrace their lavish domestic
surroundings, signaling their nouveau riche status. In their ornate and over-
protective environments, which often resemble childrens rooms, fairy-tale
scenarios, or natural history museums, the Barbie-like ways in which the
women stylize their self-presentation render them objects of desire: just an-
other garish house decoration or an expensive luxury good to be bought,
traded, and sold, or in the case of Mexico Citys culture of secuestro expres
(express kidnapping), ransomed.
Take, for instance, Paulina with Lion (fig. 3) in which the socialite
granddaughter of Mexican President Gustavo Daz Ordaz poses provoc-
atively, her foot upon a stuffed lions head, tennis racket in hand, and a
Moschino-designed shirt that reads Peep Show! $1.00. With that come-
hither look on her face, she has learned all too well the choreography
and look of the pornographic actress and the table dance, a post-NAFTA
phenomenon that, I am told, has largely replaced the more political and
satirical cabaret culture that Laura Gutierrez writes about in Performing
Mexicanidad (2010). Or consider Inge and Her Mother Ema side-by-side
with Medusa (figs. 4 and 5). In both images, women assume the space of
their homes and are surrounded by what have become the stock decora-
tions of the wealthy Mexican household: in one, the racist black figurines
I also saw at the despedida de soltera; in the other, the commodification
of rural and collective-identity-based indigenous cultures as suitable for
home decor but incompatible with neoliberalisms emphasis on the indi-
vidual. In all of these photos, sexualized femininity and the femininized
space of the home are portrayed as things that do not necessarily belong
to these women; rather, they show how their intimate and erotic lives have
also become explicitly commodified, assigned value, advertised, commer-
cialized, packaged, and consumed. More importantly, they reveal how ra-
cialized heterosexuality has been central to neoliberalisms transnational
project. The long history of racism against indigenous peoples and the re-
fusal of blackness in who is included in nationalist myths of mexicanidad
(Mexicanness) and mestisaje (cultural and racial hybridity) recede to the
background to become mere foils for Rossells sitters, with their racial iden-
tifications of blanco (white), morena clara (fair-complexioned brunette), or

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Figure 3 Daniela Rossell, Untitled (Ricas y Famosas) Paulina and Lion, 1999, C-print, 50  60 inches, Courtesy of the artist and Greene Naftali, New York.
A color version of this figure is available online.

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05/31/2016 4:37AM
Figure 4 Daniela Rossell, Untitled (Ricas y Famosas) Inge and Her Mother Ema, 2000, C-print, 50  60 inches. Courtesy of the artist and Greene Naftali, New
York. A color version of this figure is available online.
S I G N S Autumn 2016 y 17

Figure 5 Daniela Rossell, Untitled (Ricas y Famosas) Medusa, 1999, C-print, 50  60


inches. Courtesy of the artist and Greene Naftali, New York. A color version of this figure is
available online.

guera (blonde).4 The imbrication of local racist populism with elite agendas
stands out in the visual rhetoric of the photographs, which when displayed

4
Writing about womens queer communities in Mexico City, Anahi Russo Garrido
(2009, 37) has shown how it is not coincidental that identification with cosmopolitan sub-

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18 y Tyburczy

in a series do not simply evidence the primacy of race in the economy of


female pleasure but through repetition produce the very effects that they
name and describe. Perhaps it was the performative effect of these photo-
graphs on art gallery spectators that elicited such strong responses from
the portrait sitters, some of whom threatened Rossell with lawsuits and
violence after viewing them.5
When photographing her subjects, it seemed to Rossell that they had
meticulously studied and memorized these roles . . . that say in detail what
they were expected to do, how they were expected to stand, and to per-
form for a camera. And they seemed to be roles that were already writ-
ten by someone else and for no one in particular. There was a feeling of
this is going on, whether Im here or not (SFMOMA 2012). What is
going on is the embodiment of the aesthetic and sexualized values of
consumer culture and how those values depend upon the construction of
a sexualized feminine identity and the stereotype of racially inferior others.
How the work is to be received by the viewer, however, is ultimately un-
clear. Ricas y Famosas shows how the culturally specific gender and race
performances enacted by these women intersect with class-based perfor-
mances that depend upon localized consumption and dominant narratives
of Mexican culture as well as globalized consumer culture and its idealized
projections of sexualized femininity. But like the story of the despedida de
soltera, Rossells photos can also be viewed as comments on Mexican socio-
political conditions and the fetishization of wealthy women as objects of
the male gaze, or as camped-up performances where the women take plea-
sure in citing the well-known tropes of commodified femininity.
The women who attended the despedida de soltera and the women who
participated in Ricas y Famosas embody the neoliberalized post-NAFTA
condition of sexuality for upper-middle- and upper-class women in Mexico
City. They indicate the emergence of a new stratum of female consumer
defined through economic circumstances, transnational media, and the ac-
crual of imported material things. Specifically, my ethnographic account,

jecthood, e.g., claiming a gay or lesbian identity, becomes possible precisely at the same time
that the concept of mestisaje is being relinquished as a binding nationalist myth of racial and
ethnic mexicanidad.
5
The identities of the participants in Ricas y Famosas were intended to be anonymous,
but outrage grew when newspapers identified some of Rossells sitters as the children of PRI
politicians. Some of the photographed reportedly threatened to sue the artist after seeing
the work and hearing their homes described as vast kitsch palaces in book reviews (e.g.,
McInnes 2004). Rossell received threatening messages and emails, was called a traitor and a
self-loather, and has since kept a low profile. At one point she sent an actress to perform as
her at book signings (Thompson 2002)

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S I G N S Autumn 2016 y 19

side by side with Ricas y Famosas, chronicles the influence of neoliberal


economic policies on the forging of a feminine Mexican elite and how the
signing of NAFTA simultaneously redefined Mexicos relationship with
US economic models and with American models of beauty and sexuality.
Based in racialized stereotypes, these models pit white Mexican women as
aesthetic ideals against indigenous-inspired dolls and black figurines. These
decorations act as temporal contrasts: the sitter is marked as cosmopolitan
only through a juxtaposition with the pastoral depictions of indigeneity
and antique black figurines of Americana memorabilia, which are posi-
tioned to indicate a denial of coeval status to the subjects referenced by these
decorations.
The racialized dynamic enacted at the party and depicted in the pho-
tographs highlights the danger of the neoliberalisms paradoxical expan-
sion and contraction of pleasures and dangers. If white, wealthy Mexican
women are constrained by the parameters of how and in whose service they
can experience or even speak about their pleasure in private and semi-
private spaces, indigenous women are confined to the role of poor and
marginalized victims in post-NAFTA Mexico or as nostalgic, romanticized
backdrops of first-world subjectivity whereas blackness is either negated
and rarely acknowledged or made visible only to epitomize an imagina-
tive geography of first-worldness that imitates the racist iconography of
the US antique market. Bringing the background into the foreground of
analysis shows how bourgeois class aspirations and white privilege create
the context for feminine sexual pleasure. The circulation of mostly Anglo-
distributed adult novelty goods sold through sex boutiques such as Erotika,
to which I will now turn, also plays an indispensable role in the racialized
economy of female pleasure in Mexico Citys urban landscape.

The rise of the (male-owned) sex boutique in Mexico City


Fabiola, the sex toy salewoman previously introduced, is one of many
Mexicans who work with large-scale distributors in the vast business
enterprise that Peter Cahn (2008) calls multi-level marketing, whereby
direct sellers rely on comission-based sales through face-to-face interac-
tions to make a living wage when employment is scarce, which is certainly
the case for many in Mexico City. As Cahn notes, however, scarce employ-
ment does not sufficiently explain the popularity of these jobs. Instead, this
phenomenon evidences the extent to which neoliberalism as an ideology
not just a set of global economic reforms entailing the rejection of collec-
tive and state-owned enterprise, the promotion of a market economy, and
a gradual but steady move toward privatizationsuffuses everyday life

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20 y Tyburczy

with the logic of the neoliberal solutions [Mexico has] pursued since the
1980s (430). That such jobs are available and in demand, both by dis-
tributors and potential sellers, shows the ways in which Mexican citizens,
and specifically Mexican women, increasingly feel bound by the limited
social identities embodied by Mexicos privileged classes in urban areas
like Mexico City and driven by consumption narratives of self-making and
social relationships that have transformed what it means to be a citizen and
who has access to citizenship in the age of NAFTA. It is not just economic
dynamics that define this paradigm but also, as Nestor Garca Canclini has
argued, the social practices of Mexican cultural elites that since NAFTA
have been integrated into international markets and circuits of valua-
tion (2001, 30). The global sex industry is one such market and valuation
circuit that confers upon those who have the capital to participate in it not
(necessarily) personal enjoyment or erotic pleasure but rather the coveted
status of a sexually liberated citizen and a cosmopolitan subjects.
Therefore, when Fabiola arrives at these house parties with her suit-
case full of sex toys, she is not only selling sex objects; she is also selling a
lifestyle, what she calls high lifestyle sex. High lifestyle sex could not exist
without the transnational commodification of sex toys, among other adult
novelty goods in post-NAFTA Mexico. As part of a local privatized market
economy, purveyors such as the Erotika Love Store enterprise, specifically
advertise to women with disposable incomes so as to capitalize on what they
see as a prime and untried market for sexual consumption. With twenty-
seven locations, all decorated in the same three shades of pink, Erotika
reflects what Lawrence Herzog has described as the impact of free trade on
the built urban environment as a global cultural landscape (Herzog 1992).
In this way purveyors such as Erotika on a large scale and Fabiola on a small
scale participate within a local economy that seizes upon the global sex in-
dustry initiative to hail women with means into sexual consumerism. Erotika
thus participates in the forging of a globalized class of cosmopolitan female
sexual subjects that uses sex toys as props with which to participate in trans-
national scenes of sexual first-worldness (see fig. 6).
According to Lin Degang, council member of the China Sexology As-
sociation and chief executive of an online retailer of sex toys with pro-
duction based in China, a country that supplies 70 percent of global sex
products, Within five years, sex toys will be a common commodity for
everyday use. They will be a key element of a fashionable lifestyle (in
Reuters 2012). In Mexico City, that time has arrived. The economy of
female pleasure part of a transnational network within which sexuality is
commodified and sold, sometimes as indigenous and local, sometimes as a
foreign import, and sometimes as a distinctly modern hybrid of transnational

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Figure 6 Erotika Love Store on Amberes Street, Zona Rosa, Mexico City. Photography taken by author. A color version of this figure is available online.

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22 y Tyburczy

mixing. This transnationalization of female pleasure can trouble the bor-


ders between the local and the global, allowing us to envision new forms
of sexual agency and subjectivity, but it can also create import-export dy-
namics that trade in some of the most patriarchal forms of capitalism and
the sex industry. Mexican women, like Mexico as a feminized country in
the global imaginary, are seen as untapped markets ready for the penetra-
tion of foreign investment.
After NAFTA, diverse sexual goods flooded the Mexican market. Pre-
viously impossible businesses such as sex shops emerged and have come to
play pivotal roles in making and unmaking the transnational terrain of nor-
mative female sexual consumption. As part of the larger importation and
distribution company WHAM!, Erotika Love Store is the number-one sexual
tastemaker in Mexico City due to its clever commodification of sex educa-
tion and its capitalization on what were previously the neglected niche mar-
kets of women and gay men. During an interview, former sex store owner
Abril shared her experience working with WHAM!: In 2005, WHAM!
was the only importer of sex toys in Mexico, the only one. So if you wanted
to open a sex shop, you could only buy from WHAM!. No other options.
They had monopolized the market. Today, there are various shops, but
WHAM! continues to control the market, because Erotika is a monster.
Their toy warehouse is located in Xola, and its almost 2,000 square meters of
warehouse. Its amazing! And all vibrators arranged, arranged, arranged, and
rows and rows and rows of them.6
Abril is one of only two women I know of who has held a position of
leadership in the Mexico City sex retail market (the other notable excep-
tion being Alejandra Pineda of Condonera Coyoacan) who has sold erotic
merchandise from her own retail location and not through house sales
like Fabiola. She went on to tell me that almost all of the products that
WHAM! sells to sex shop retailers are made in China and distributed by
the United States. In Mexico, the importation taxes imposed by NAFTA
are factored into the price that Erotika charges to sex shop and house sale
entrepreneurs alike, and due to complicated paperwork and an infamous
bureaucratic process in Mexico City, WHAM! became the only (for many

6
Personal interview with Abril, Mexico City, 2013. All translations from Spanish to En-
glish are my own. The original Spanish transcription reads: WHAM! en 2005 era la unica
importadora de juguetes en Mexico, la unica, entonces si tu queras poner una sex shop al
unico que le podas comprar era a WHAM!, no a otro, ellos tenan acaparado el mercado . . .
[hoy en da] ya hay varias [shops], pero WHAM! sigue acaparando el mercado, porque es un
monstruo Erotika. . . . Su bodega de juguetes esta en Xola, es casi 2000 metros cuadrados de
una bodega as impresionante y los vibradores formados, formados, formados, y son pasillos y
pasillos, y pasillos, y pasillos.

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S I G N S Autumn 2016 y 23

years) legal purveyor of such goods in Mexico. And the taxes were steep:
15 percent in added value tax for each toy and then 10 percent per toy
on top of that. WHAM! also requires that sex shop owners initially make
a minimum purchase of 20,000 pesos worth of merchandise (around
$1,300 US dollars at the March 2015 exchange rate) and then at least
5,000 pesos (approximately $325 US dollars) for every subsequent pur-
chase. As Abril maintains, and I would concur, Erotika thus held an al-
most complete monopoly on the importation and distribution market of
sex toys in Mexico.
Before NAFTA, sex shops were clandestine and informal businesses.
According to WHAM! CEO Fernando Macas, who with partner in love
and business Uriel Valdez owns several franchises such as the Spanglish-
inspired La Cupcakera, only men would dare to knock on the door to
enter these often unmarked locales whose whereabouts travelled by word
of mouth alone. In 1994, the year NAFTA went into effect and at a time
when there were no legal retailers where Mexicans could buy what Fer-
nando refers to as productos de manera personal (personal products), he
and Uriel went through the then-emerging cross-border channels and
discovered that there were no restrictions on importing and selling these
products in Mexico. While there were no restrictions on the transport and
sale of erotic inventory in 1994, and while Erotika has been a presence in
Mexico City for the past nineteen years, many Mexicans still believe, like
Fernando and Uriel once did, that to sell or purchase sex toys is to traffic
in illegal contraband. For this reason, Fernando told me, It was decided
to handle the concept in a more approachable way, more pink, more open,
more accessible to women, because it was discovered that women, married
or single, are the ones who consume the most.7 Ten years into its exis-
tence, with the belief that women consume more when it comes to sex
toys and the like, Erotika hired Spanish designer Carlos Daz to reinvent el
look of the stores, which at the time numbered only three and were pri-
marily frequented by heterosexual men, foreign women, and a few Mex-
ican women who were escorted by their male partners. Mexican women
never entered alone.
Dazs vision for the overhaul of the shops facade and interior decor
included a drastic change in its color theme to three particular shades of
pink. The current three-shades-of-pink version of Erotika made its debut

7
Personal interview with Fernando Macas, Mexico City, 2013. The original Spanish
reads: Se decidio manejar un concepto mas amigable, mas rosa, mas relajado, mas iluminado,
mas abierto, mas expuesto a la mujer, porque se descubrio que la mujer es la que mas consume
el producto, digo ya en estadsticas la mujer, ya sea casada o soltera, es la que mas consume.

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24 y Tyburczy

in Mexico Citys Plaza de las Galeras, an exclusive elite and family-oriented


commercial complex where women and girls would enter the store drawn
by the allure of pink (with many of them thinking that they were entering
a store dedicated to Barbie or Hello Kitty). Erotikas landslide success with
women grew out of its exterior and interior design change as well as the
contemporaneous rise in the popularity of Internet surfing, which opened
the minds, as Fabiola, using the rhetoric of apertura, told me in an inter-
view. This occurred not only among members of the younger generation
but also among those whom she views as the more conservative senora sec-
tor. When I asked Fabiola about the influence of NAFTA on Erotika as a
business, she answered matter-of-factly: I believe that without NAFTA
Erotika would not have been able to exist, that is, they wouldnt have been
able to import that quantity and variety of things, I dont know, 80 percent
of the products that are imported.8 Nine years ago, lingerie was the most
lucrative of sale items; today, expensive vibrators and bondage equipment,
following the Fifty Shades of Grey effect in Mexico, count as some of the
most sought-after items by women. Erotikas owners now call their stores
sex boutiques, arguing that the term sex shop is no longer in style, as it
references an illicit period in the transnational history of such stores.
The transnational flow of goods and ideas in post-NAFTA Mexico
profoundly influenced how Erotika presents itself within the cityscape.
Erotikas public face is a transnational pastiche inspired by Japanese manga
for its logo, display logics for staging merchandise such as one would
encounter in US sex shops like Good Vibrations, and Spanish and Polish
visual artists and designers. Fernando and Uriel sought to tropicalizar
(make tropical) the Erotika experience, an aesthetic strategy that sensually
transmits calidez (warmth), a structure of feeling that they identify as in-
tegral to Mexican identity. And with twenty-seven locations strategically
positioned so that one is never a far walk from any metrobus or subway
stop, Erotika is fast obtaining a Starbucks effect, albeit a tropicalized one,
on Mexico Citys cultural landscape.
As one walks the streets of Mexico City, one can not help but encoun-
ter, more than once in the gay neighborhood of Zona Rosa, one of Ero-
tikas big warm pink shops. As Mexican women with disposable income
traverse the city, they are constantly engaged in choices about whether to
patronize these NAFTA-stocked erotic spaces and what sorts of intimate

8
Personal interview with Fabiola, Mexico City, 2012. The original Spanish reads: Yo
creo que sin el Tratado de Libre Comercio hubiera sido inexistente, o sea no hubieran podido
importar tantas cosas . . . no se el 80% de los productos que son importados.

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S I G N S Autumn 2016 y 25

relationships they want to forge between their bodies and the diverse sex
objects on display. In the process, a new feminine sexual identity is born:
the new Mexican woman of means who can enter a sex shop and leave it
with a bag that clearly marks her purchase, without guilt or embarrass-
ment. This new identity of the publicly sexual Mexican woman who can
willingly participate in the sexual marketplace is not, however, revelatory
of social justice but rather represents the already packaged persona of the
twenty-first-century bourgeois woman who is modern because she func-
tions as a consumer in the neoliberal sex economy.
Part of the force of free trade in Mexico is its impact on the built en-
vironment and how the amalgam of humanly created artifacts (such as the
array of erotic and gay-centric shops that dot Amberes Street in Mexico
Citys Zona Rosa neighborhood) reflect and shape the ways in which the
culture expresses itself and its values. In Mexico City, the ubiquity of Ero-
tika sex shops speaks to the prevalence of the cultural ideology of free trade
and its relationship to gender: steeped in the values of Western consum-
erism and the North Americanization of Mexico, free trade culture claims
bourgeois Mexican women not as placeholders for traditional values, as
they were positioned in colonial projects of the past, but as necessary eco-
nomic players in sexual consumerism.

Conclusion: The pleasures and dangers of transnational


production and consumption
The transnational commerce in sex toys reveals the very crux of neolib-
eralism: being the inclusion of marginal elements into the economy but not
into civic society. In Mexico, the economy of female pleasure epitomizes
what Lauren Berlant has described as a precarious late capitalist condi-
tion of dependency characterized by destabilizing scenes of productive
destructionsof resources and of lives being made and unmade accord-
ing to the dictates and whims of the market (2011, 192) or more precisely
for the Mexican context, what Sayak Valencia refers to as capitalismo gore,
the systematic, uncontrollable, and contradictory dimension of the neo-
liberal project that creates . . . radical capitalist subjects . . . and new dis-
cursive figures that define the episteme of violence (2010, 19).9 For if we
trace the social life of the sex object from its time and location of con-
sumption to the place and moment of its production, we uncover the ba-

9
In the original Spanish: La dimension sistematicamente descontrolada y contradictoria
del proyecto neoliberal que se cree . . . nuevas figuras discursivas que conforman una epis-
teme de la violencia.

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26 y Tyburczy

sic material inequality and exploitation of feminized factory labor, a global


phenomenon legitimized through the beliefs, norms, narratives, images,
and performances that typify neoliberal times and that subsume the na-
scent transnational ideology of female sexual pleasure as a human right. To
unpack the economy of female pleasure in Mexico City therefore requires
an attention to the local historical and geographical context within which
women purchase and use sex toys but also to the global circuits of produc-
tion and circulation through which these sexual instruments enter the Mex-
ican market to be available for purchase. To do so is to unravel a tale of
transnational class performances composed of G-spots, dildos, and vibra-
tors but also underpaid factory work, outsourcing to China, and Mexico in
the time of narco-moda fetishes that far surpass the drug cartels.
The performances of erotic consumption that occurred at the despedida
de soltera, in Rossells Ricas y Famosas, and in Erotika sex boutiques de-
scribe only one set of cultural shifts in the multiple and overlapping global
flows that allow these products to arrive at their points of purchase. The
sex toys produced for these upwardly mobile women come largely from
China, where even as the economy falls limp, China Times cheekily reports,
sex toy sales stand firm (China Times 2012). In Mexico, the importa-
tion and distribution of sex toys is overwhelmingly a male-run enterprise
(and gay men play a pivotal role). The new sex culture in China is likewise
spawning a generation of mostly male Chinese sex entrepreneurs who have
become indispensable suppliers to the global adult novelty industry.
In the factories, both men and women work to assemble the products
before they are shipped out to the United States and Europe, which in turn
distribute these sex objects, for an added cost, to the rest of the world, in-
cluding Latin America. For me as for Bair feminized labor organizes trans-
national production, and gender, as a set of context-specific meanings
and practices, intersects the structure of global capitalism and its systemic
logic of value extraction and capital accumulation (2010, 2045). Chinese
sex toy workers are simultaneously feminized and sexually neutered by an
industry that regards these laborers as automatons. The impact of NAFTA,
as well as Chinas entry into the World Trade Organization in 2001, has
created an economy of female pleasure in Mexico City that is unique to that
regional and national context but that also reflects a global network wherein
the transnational identity of the bourgeois woman who consumes is forged
against the often violent feminization and racialization of the laboring sub-
ject who produces.10

10
There was much talk in Mexico City in 201213 about the return of US produc-
tion to Mexico as the price of labor in China rose. In other words, another contradiction of

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S I G N S Autumn 2016 y 27

Looking at the influence of NAFTA through the rhetoric and per-


formance of sexual production and consumption illuminates the multiple
and multivalent contradictions of neoliberal capitalism in Mexico and the
transnational inequalities and differences that arise from new forms of glob-
alization. While NAFTA arguably opened Mexican culture to new ways of
speaking and performing sex and sexuality in the twenty-first century, it has
overwhelmingly resulted in reforms that, to quote one youth sex educa-
tor in nearby Cuernavaca, are theoretically good, but practically bad. They
claimed to make better, to promote education in our country, but instead
they transformed education into a commodity. Much like NAFTA, the
economic ideology of neoliberalism promotes education for profit, and
not for social change.11 Sex can be subversive of capitalisma transfor-
mative desire that incites new economic forms and social experiences, but
for the elite women of Mexico City, as for the feminized laborers in Chi-
nese sex toy factories, this is rarely the case. The market may create con-
ditions within which they can claim great cultural and financial capital, but
that same market destabilizes and unmakes their erotic capital, leaving them
only the small space between foreign models of sexual liberation, domestic
structures of patriarchal heterosexuality, and global capitalist exploitation to
enact and enjoy a commercialized version of sexual pleasure.
Department of Feminist Studies,
University of California, Santa Barbara

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2016 by The University of Chicago. All rights reserved. DOI: 10.1086/686755

Abstract

This article focuses on the rising upper middle and upper class of twenty- and thirtysomething women in Mexico City and q3
how examining the consumer practices of this privileged segment of Mexican society reveals the contours and intersections
of pleasure-seeking (as an embodied, vernacular performance) and neoliberalism (as a macroeconomic philosophy
dependent on global connectivity). The author argues that the visual, rhetorical, and architectural inuences of furnishing
homes, retail spaces, and the urban landscapes of Mexico City with limitless possibilities for erotic consumerism nev-
ertheless fail to facilitate social and civic spaces with real opportunities for feminine and female-identied pleasures.
Moreover, the economy of female pleasure in Mexico City unfolds within a transnational landscape that increasingly pits
women who consume against feminized laborers who produce sex toys in Chinese factories.

1
QUERIES TO THE AUTHOR

q1. AU: I have added bisexual and intersexual to the definition of


acronym LGBTTTI; change okay?

q2. AU: Please cite Cornella 2000 in text or omit the reference.

q3. AU: I have changed thirty-something to thirtysomething per


Merriam-Websters dictionary. Change okay?

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