Esra Soraya Padgett

Prurient Nature 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 book 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 book 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.