Considers the role of beauty in Costa Rican sex work. While Costa Rica's national mythology has long focused on claims to white origins, sex tourists identify local women's ‘exoticism’ and non-whiteness as particularly appealing. Explores how women experience and manage their sexual attractiveness to foreign tourists in their daily lives and work.
Discusses feminist theorizing of beauty and its intersection with the notion of race in Latin America and the Caribbean including Mexico, Brazil and Colombia.
Focuses on the performativity of Black beauty shame as it transforms or intensifies the meanings of parts of the body in Jamaica and its UK diaspora. Uses extracts from interviews with UK Jamaican heritage women. The women’s critique of the shaming event shows that shame is undone through dis-identification as speakers draw on alternative beauty discourses to produce new beauty subjectivities.
