This book focusses on why and how foreign Western women engage in cross-border sexual and intimate relations as tourists travelling in a Central American country. The book traces the experiences of heterosexual North American and European women's transnational encounters, and examines new sexual and social practices arising from contemporary global tourism, shifting sexual cultures both at home and abroad, consumer culture, and women's increasing mobility.
Sexual spaces, normally inhabited by (mostly) female sex workers, are understood as masculine spaces, and positioned for and around male consumers. However, red light zones and public sex performances in both Thailand and Holland are being explored and visually consumed by female tourists in significant numbers. Their presence in red light districts and sexual venues is at odds with the ways in which sexual spaces have normally been positioned. Woman and Sex Tourism Landscapes explores female tourists' interactions with highly sexualized spaces and places in two very different contexts: the Netherlands and Thailand. Addressing this incongruence, this text explores the ways in which these spaces are constructed, and examines the different relations that govern the management of, and female tourist interactions with these liminal,sexual zones. Ethnographic data collected in both countries suggests that far from being male-centred spaces, the red light districts and associated sexual entertainment venues are very much open to female tourists. Drawing on this research the author argues that some women are indeed interested in exploring sexualized zones, challenging assumptions about women’s involvements with sexual space. Thinking specifically about the visual nature of women's sexualized experiences, the analysis draws on a range of different theoretical understandings that address power, privilege, and the gaze. An important contribution to a range of debates, this book will appeal to students and researchers in tourism, geography, sociology, gender studies and cultural theory.
For nearly a decade, Brazil has surpassed Thailand as the world's premier sex tourism destination. As the first full-length ethnography of sex tourism in Brazil, this pioneering study treats sex tourism as a complex and multidimensional phenomenon that involves a range of activities and erotic connections, from sex work to romantic transnational relationships. Erica Lorraine Williams explores sex tourism in the Brazilian state of Bahia from the perspectives of foreign tourists, tourism industry workers, sex workers who engage in liaisons with foreigners, and Afro-Brazilian men and women who contend with foreigners' stereotypical assumptions about their licentiousness. She shows how the Bahian state strategically exploits the touristic desire for exotic culture by appropriating an eroticized blackness and commodifying the Afro-Brazilian culture in order to sell Bahia to foreign travelers.
While contemporary popular discourses dismiss gender and feminism as passe, patriarchy and sexism continue to limit human possibilities around the globe. This collection of studies seeks to advance feminist and gender tourism studies with its focus on embodiment.
In the city of Natal in northeastern Brazil, several local women negotiate the terms of their intimate relationships with foreign tourists, or gringos, in a situation often referred to as "sex tourism." These women have different experiences, but they share a similar desire to "escape" the social conditions of their lives in Brazil. Based on original ethnographic research and presented in graphic form, Gringo Love explores the hopes, dreams, and realities of these women against a backdrop of deep social inequality and increasing state surveillance leading up to the 2014 World Cup and 2016 Olympic Games. It touches on important contemporary issues, including sexual economics, transnational mobility, romantic imaginaries, gender representation, race and inequality, and visual methods. The graphic story is accompanied by analysis and contextual discussion, which encourage readers to engage with the narrative and expand their understanding of the broader social issues therein.
This book is the first to focus on why and how foreign Western women engage in cross-border sexual and intimate relations as tourists travelling, or temporarily dwelling, in a Central American country. The book combines descriptions of women's travels and sexual relations across racial and class boundaries with feminism, postcolonial theory, and poststructuralist theories of gender and sexuality, to show how tourism as a wide range and set of desires serves as a central shaping force in the formation of women's sexual subjectivities in contemporary life in postindustrial capitalism. In doing so it offers new insights into how tourist women express heterosexuality shaped by gender, race, class, and identities.
In recent years, the economy of the Caribbean has become almost completely dependent on international tourism. And today one of the chief ways that foreign visitors there seek pleasure is through prostitution. While much has been written on the female sex workers who service these tourists, Caribbean Pleasure Industry shifts the focus onto the men. Drawing on his groundbreaking ethnographic research in the Dominican Republic, Mark Padilla discovers a complex world where the global political and economic impact of tourism has led to shifting sexual identities, growing economic pressures, and new challenges for HIV prevention. In fluid prose, Padilla analyzes men who have sex with male tourists, yet identify themselves as “normal” heterosexual men and struggle to maintain this status within their relationships with wives and girlfriends. Padilla’s exceptional ability to describe the experiences of these men will interest anthropologists, but his examination of bisexuality and tourism as much-neglected factors in the HIV/AIDS epidemic makes this book essential to anyone concerned with health and sexuality in the Caribbean or beyond.
Illustrated by interviews with women and men in the tourist resorts in the Sinai, Egypt, this book opens up the debate surrounding sex tourism by examining the way in which holiday romances between western women and 'native' men are linked to a much wider romanticism of place and people, which is used to sell these destinations. The work provides insights into gender issues to do with globalization, travel and sexuality.
Sex Tourism examines the issues which emerge from sex worker-client interactions and from tourists visiting 'sex destinations'. It is a comprehensive summary of past research by academics and original primary and secondary research by the authors and has examples from Asia, Australasia and the USA. The authors have generated new models to show different dimensions of sex tourism, which normalise at least some components of the sex industry, and represent a new way of looking at sex tourism by challenging the preconceived perceptions that some people have of sex tourism or confirm the impression of others. Sex Tourism looks at issues of importance to those working in tourism, women's studies, gender studies and social change.
This new introduction to the sociology of gender and sexuality provides fresh insight into our rapidly changing attitudes towards sex and our understanding of masculine and feminine identities, relating the study of gender and sexuality to recent research and theory, and wider social concerns throughout the world.
