ABSTRACT
This chapter explores how the identity of the adult industry is constructed through its relationship with the 'mainstream' peer industries, and where its deviant identity is accepted and invoked rather than contested through recruitment. In examining the relationship, it begins by exploring how adult companies interact with the traditionally conservative financial sector. The chapter highlights how complex the process of 'mainstreaming' is, and by association, the nuances of the stigmatized identity of different members of the industry. As several industry members actively rejected the tropes, arguing instead for more professional and 'mainstream' behaviour means of overcoming stigma. Stigma has shaped the institution and regulation that bound the industry's practices such as alternate payment processors, regulations, obscenity law also the nature of the practices themselves. Stigma can be seen as something to be shaken off through some process of 'mainstreaming', which allows actors to be seen as socially legitimate, changing their patterns of behaviour but not their core offering.
