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.
Reviews the books "Economies of Desire: Sex and Tourism in Cuba and the Dominican Republic," by Amalia L. Cabezas and "The Industrial Vagina: The Political Economy of the Global Sex Trade," by Sheila Jeffreys.
African American Research Center, Library, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
Notes:
294 p., 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.
African American Research Center, Library, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
Notes:
218 p., Based on ten years of research, Economies of Desire is the first ethnographic study to examine the erotic underpinnings of transnational tourism. It offers startling insights into the commingling of sex, intimacy, and market forces in Cuba and the Dominican Republic, two nations where tourism has had widespread effects. In her multi-layered analyses, Amalia Cabezas reconceptualizes our understandings of informal economies (particularly "affective economies"), "sex workers," and "sexual tourism," and she helps us appreciate how money, sex and love are intertwined within the structure of globalizing capitalism.
Focuses on American and European tourist women in a transnational town in Atlantic Costa Rica renown for its intimate "vibe" and independent eco-oriented tourist development, where they grappled with the unexpected monetary aspects of intimate relations with Caribbean-Costa Rican men.
