Featured on Café Con Chisme
Listen here for a conversation with Seb and Yay Ferrada of Café Con Chisme on the complexities of sex work.
Jan 30, 20221 min read
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The Political Economy of Latina Sexualities
Publications
“Spicy Mami, Hot Tamale”: Cardi B and sex worker consciousness
Abstract
This article explores Belcaliz Almanzar, popularly known as Cardi B, and her identity as a former sex worker and Black Latina. I join Omaris Z. Zamora [2022]. “Before Bodak Yellow and beyond the Post–soul.” The Black Scholar 52 (1): 53–63), who argues that Cardi B's identity as a Black Latina invites us into a “trance” – an Afro–diasporic framework that references an altered consciousness where new modes of thinking and being emerge. In this article, I make two central claims. First, Cardi's intersecting identities give her unique access to “seeing” social relations of labor and racial categorization. Her simultaneous identities position her to publicize transgressions of race and labor categorizations loudly and to occupy a sex worker's consciousness. Second, I analyze Cardi's public fight with Peter Gunz at the 2016 Love & Hip Hop: New York reunion.
Why are all the webcam models Colombian? Nation, racialized femininity, and sexual economies
Abstract
This chapter examines the rapid growth of Colombia’s webcam industry as a lens for understanding the intersections of global capitalism, racialized gender, and sexual economies. Drawing on virtual ethnography and platform analysis, it argues that the prominence of Colombian webcam models is not incidental but rooted in longstanding U.S.–Latin American trade relations that produce economic vulnerability while simultaneously generating desire for “The Latina Body.” I introduce the concept of global mediated desire to theorize how imperialist economic expansion and the hypersexualization of Latina identities operate together, transforming racialized femininity into a marketable resource. Focusing on webcam studios as key infrastructures, the chapter shows how these spaces actively construct, discipline, and export a particular image of Latina sexuality aligned with cisheteronormative and anti-Black ideals. Ultimately, the chapter positions the Colombian webcam industry as a critical site for understanding how sexual labor stabilizes national economies under neoliberal conditions while reproducing global hierarchies of race, gender, and desire.
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