In a small city in the Pacific coast of Mexico there is a red-light district where a group of sex workers, separated from the rest of the town by trash containers, offer their services to local men. The women present themselves both materially and symbolically as regulatory agents of a male sexuality understood as overflowing and insatiable and which, were it not for them, would threaten a social order founded in the family. Drawing from interviews with sex workers and municipal authorities, this article discusses the ways in which a sexgender system produces local borders which are both geographical and subjective: periphery and control, body and intimacy, and the boundaries of humanity and heterosexuality.
sex workers; heterosexuality; body; power; Mexico