Abstract
In the context of a system in which cis men's pleasure has been prioritized and pleasure has been presumed to operate within a strict gender binary, this ethnographic study asks what spaces and practices of queer pleasure have emerged in Mexico City. This article examines settings in which sexual pleasure is pursued, purchased, and weaponized, that is to say, valued in different ways. It first examines sex hotels and other spaces that, although historically part of a cisheteropatriarchal infrastructure, have increasingly allowed for a wider scope of persons to purchase pleasure as a commodity. Second, it focuses on the critical pleasure activism of Latin American transfeministas, including educational spaces such as squirting workshops, showing how, for some activists and artists, centering pleasure and the erotic is a space of countersexual world making that makes pleasure a communal value. Bringing together queer and anthropological approaches to value and money, this article queers neoliberal uses and abuses of the value(s) of pleasure.