Between Love and Money: Sex, Tourism, and Citizenship in Cuba and the Dominican Republic

Abstract

This article also contributes to this growing body of literature on tourism and work in the Caribbean. For one all of the studies thus far have focused primarily on relationships that are spatially discernible and public. These encounters attract attention because they are highly public and involve participants from different racial-ethnic and class backgrounds. Generally most studies have examined relations between otherwise un-employed freelance or beach boys in tourist centers. They overlook on-the-job tourism workers as participants in the trade. Yet these workers are accessible and in constant and intimate contact with tourists. By analyzing relations between hotel workers and guests I argue in this study that the prevalent social-labor realities underscore the need for a more complex analytical framework to account for the fluid arrangements taking place between hosts and guests. Furthermore most studies have assumed in advance to know who is a and what counts as work. Although the literature has begun to challenge studies that narrowly define tourism as solely involving monetary exchange the category of has remained unexamined and immutable within tourism research. If we account for spatial factors and assumptions based on race sexuality and class the sex worker category loses its stable meaning. In this study I propose a more complicated approach that accounts for the provisional practices and identities that constitute sexual markets and that envelop understandings of labor and as more a matter of continua than a hard and fast definition. (excerpt)