Professional Documents
Culture Documents
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
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.
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
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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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
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
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).
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).
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 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
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-
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)
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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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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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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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
q2. AU: Please cite Cornella 2000 in text or omit the reference.