My paper explores tensions between and within feminist studies and queer studies in the MENA, by surveying, and then complicating, recent ethnographic and historical production on remunerated sexualities. Feminist studies have a history of tension with prostitutional practices. Gender oriented historians of MENA often reproduce the normative visions anchored in feminist histories of activism for the abolition of regulated prostitution and situations of forced sexual labor often labelled “traffic”. These histories tend to be written through particular archives, which negatively moralize sex work, notably those of heteronormative European institutions historically charged with the surveillance and criminalization of sex work: medicine and the police. Some feminist scholars move away from these tropes, to highlight elements of choice in sex work, and women’s right to choose and not be stigmatized for their choice of work. Scholars intent on queering MENA studies have emphasized the importance of attending to non-heteronormative sexualities as part of the remunerative spectrum. The affect of this body of work contrasts with the polarized militant feminist narratives, highlighting the value of diversity, and the emancipatory potential of transgression. I will complement but also challenge these visions through my own historical ethnographic exploration of remunerative and concubinal sexualities in Algeria, Morocco, Syria and Lebanon during the first half of the twentieth centuries. I argue that the framing and segregation of sex work as prostitution by colonial authorities attempted to displace earlier and widely normalized practices of cohabitation and service, which fit into a complex local landscape of patronage, mobility and servitude. I investigate the role that accusations of whoredom played in moralizing women’s sexual liasons and the access they secured to resources, exploring the work done by prostitution defined as accusation rather than profession. I rely on colonial archives, memoirs and fieldwork, and set my work in conversation with the scholarship of feminist ethnographers working on questions of nonmarital sexualities and the production of love and desire against normative expectations in contemporary Egypt and Morocco.