Prurient Nature: Sex Work and Ethics at the Margins of Finance
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 business executives, the chapter provides the grounds for the concept of “prurient nature” as a way of understanding how notions of ethical impurity become naturalized, and in turn, how adult workers are interpolated as criminal due to their positioning on the margins of finance and the state. Chapter 2 focuses on a particular site within content negotiations between adult merchants and payment processors: the (post-mortem) determination of consent. The chapter brings together the notion of ‘manufacturing consent’ with feminist debates about sexual consent and argues that the two need to be thought through together. While chapter 1 shows how rules about the adult industry have shifted from financial and legal risks to ethical concerns, chapter 2 argues that payment processors’ integral role in negotiating risk has had profound effects on shaping the content of pornography. The second half of the dissertation uses present-day engagement with an adult industry-centered blockchain company to look towards the future of payment, the possibility of economic freedom for adult workers and the pre-determined foreclosure of such opportunities. In chapter 3, I introduce the concept of adult industry cryptocurrency as an alternative transactional tool for sex workers and argue that a dialectic of trust/distrust is integral to the creation of the margins of finance through the forced precarity of capitalism and its demands for faithful constituents. The final chapter, chapter 4, follows the introduction of a payment processor built specifically for sex workers on the blockchain, to the sex work community. The chapter connects cryptocurrency’s emphasis on ‘self-custody’ with feminist and sex worker activist notions of ‘bodily autonomy.’ As a renewed argument for the right to privacy (as a kind of transactional value) emerges from feminists following the repeal of Roe v. Wade, the chapter explores the transactional values offered by sex workers as a blueprint for more general arguments for bodily autonomy. The conclusion, “Unlikely Bedfellows: Revisited” introduces an emergent alliance between pornography, guns, and oil industries in the fight for ‘fair banking legislation.’ Focusing on fieldwork from a lobbying trip to DC, the conclusion reframes the element of surprise in the term “unlikely bedfellows” to one of empirical analysis, offering an interpretative frame that views paradoxical, even seemingly antithetical, alliances as part and parcel of our contemporary political economic situation through the construction of interests around and against sexual expression.
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
City University of New York - Graduate Center
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