Prurient Nature: Sex Work and Ethics at the Margins of Finance
type: CreativeWork
description: This dissertation is an ethnographic and semiotic examination of the relationship between payment processing, transactional technologies, and the US adult industry. Based on twenty-four months of fieldwork in Los Angeles, Las Vegas, Miami, and Washington D.C., the dissertation demonstrates that transactional infrastructures, including payment processors, credit card systems, financial institutions like banks, as well as novel technologies like cryptocurrency, have become a key site for an ongoing ethical war around the politics of sex and sex work in the United States. On one hand, ethical fears around sex work have become qualifications for economic exclusion by financial institutions and private corporations through the concepts of reputational risk and prurient nature. On the other, sex workers have begun to influence and shape nascent financial tools, such as cryptocurrency, by articulating specific transactional needs based on their experiences of financial discrimination. By bringing into conversation ethnographic studies of sex work, studies of capitalism, finance and money, and work on technology, surveillance and privacy, the dissertation focuses on the semiotic work of financial exclusion in the context of transactional sex as emblematic of the contradictions under present-day capitalism and their punitive consequences. The first half of the dissertation (Chapters 1 & 2) looks at rules and negotiations about payment, as government intervention was slowly replaced with payment processor mediation over the past twenty years. Chapter 1 argues that financial negotiations around adult businesses have always been undergirded by ethical fears around sex work and shows how considerations for inclusion have increasingly moved from financial qualifications (risk of fraud) to the notion of reputational risk, or contagion by association. Using documents from the early 2010s to the current era and interviews with both payment processor representatives and adult busines…
abstract: This dissertation is an ethnographic and semiotic examination of the relationship between payment processing, transactional technologies, and the US adult industry. Based on twenty-four months of fieldwork in Los Angeles, Las Vegas, Miami, and Washington D.C., the dissertation demonstrates that transactional infrastructures, including payment processors, credit card systems, financial institutions like banks, as well as novel technologies like cryptocurrency, have become a key site for an ongoing ethical war around the politics of sex and sex work in the United States. On one hand, ethical fears around sex work have become qualifications for economic exclusion by financial institutions and private corporations through the concepts of reputational risk and prurient nature. On the other, sex workers have begun to influence and shape nascent financial tools, such as cryptocurrency, by articulating specific transactional needs based on their experiences of financial discrimination. By bringing into conversation ethnographic studies of sex work, studies of capitalism, finance and money, and work on technology, surveillance and privacy, the dissertation focuses on the semiotic work of financial exclusion in the context of transactional sex as emblematic of the contradictions under present-day capitalism and their punitive consequences. The first half of the dissertation (Chapters 1 & 2) looks at rules and negotiations about payment, as government intervention was slowly replaced with payment processor mediation over the past twenty years. Chapter 1 argues that financial negotiations around adult businesses have always been undergirded by ethical fears around sex work and shows how considerations for inclusion have increasingly moved from financial qualifications (risk of fraud) to the notion of reputational risk, or contagion by association. Using documents from the early 2010s to the current era and interviews with both payment processor representatives and adult busines…
author: Padgett, Esra S
keywords: Communication Technology and New Media, Feminist, Gender, and Sexuality Studies, Finance, Linguistic Anthropology, Social and Cultural Anthropology, sex work, cryptocurrency, risk, consent, obscenity, trust, United States, pornography
date published: 2024-09-01T07:00:00Z
date modified: 2026-07-24T02:00:26Z
provider: City University of New York - Graduate Center
publisher: Networked Digital Library of Theses and Dissertations
type: WebPage
source organization: The Graduate School and University Center of The City University of New York