Sex after NAFTA: Crossing Borders and the Economy of Intimacy

Sex after NAFTA traces the influence of free trade policies and ideologies on everyday practices of intimacy and argues that NAFTA, as a transnational device of capitalism, has dramatically changed how intimacy is constructed and experienced in the United States and Mexico in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, what Tyburczy calls “the economy of intimacy.” Through the examination of select cultural artifacts from her research in Mexico City, this contribution aims to demonstrate how the mechanisms of “free trade” are delicately interwoven with the transnational history of sex and sexuality in the Americas. While binational relations are the focal point, the objective is to goes beyond the U.S./Mexico border to uncover how ideas and values travel and under what circumstances transformations in the embodied experiences of gender, race, and sexuality occur on the ground in the Americas.