Another fantastic Duke University Press publication that we have recently indexed at Southwest Humanities is Jennifer Tyburczy’s Queer Traffic: Sex, Panic, Free Trade is being published today (Oct. 28, 2025). In Queer Traffic, Tyburczy maps how queer, trans, and otherwise “dissident” sexual lives cross borders—both literally and metaphorically—in the era of NAFTA and its aftermath. She examines how policies, trade laws, and cultural norms have tried to regulate, repress, or pathologize sexual expression and exchange across the US–Mexico–Canada zone, and how people respond. The book looks at all kinds of “traffic”: people, images, sex work, pornographies, street cultures, activism, and dance. Through case studies over several decades, it shows how trade agreements and neoliberal capitalism intersect with racialization, intellectual property law, heteronormativity, and policing, shaping both panic and possibility for sexual lives that defy conventional norms. Tyburczy chronicles repression but also investigates the tactics and artistic practices people use to circumvent or push back against restrictions—how artists, activists, and communities build circuits of exchange (of erotic life, expression, knowledge) that subvert structural economic and legal logics. Queer Traffic becomes a story of movement: of desire, bodies, laws, markets, shame, resistance, and pleasure, all weaving together in complex ways across borders. Queer Traffic is a powerful intervention bridging sexuality, economics, and border politics. This book ultimately helps us see how sexual lives (and anxieties) are deeply entangled in trade agreements and global capitalism—and also how resistance, desire, and creativity carve out space in spite of (and sometimes through) those structures. Essential for scholars and readers of queer theory/studies, gender and sexuality studies, theater and performance studies, and transnational border studies. For more information, please see the publisher’s website here.
SOUTHWEST HUMANITIES 