Santiago's cafés con piernas: Coffee with a splash of sexy

Abstract

Throughout history, iterations of gendered and non-gendered eating and drinking establishments have featured somewhere in the public sphere. This article explores an atypical coffee shop—the café con piernas—that exists in a variety of urban spaces, predominantly in Santiago, Chile. What could be considered ‘adult-themed’ or classified in most Western countries as restricted premises, these alcohol-free venues tout a combination of coffee and erotic ambience designed to promote and facilitate sexual frisson between client and waitress. Research presented here identifies geographies of the cafés con piernas in Santiago as cultural markers in the city's landscape and offers a complex typology defined by subtle nuances dictated by their geographical locations. Cutting across three domains of a city's sexscape—the urban, suburban and (sub)urban—the cafés con piernas reveal site-specific characteristics that are provocative, exploitative, exclusionary, homogeneously masculine, culturally significant, and yet often unnoticed remnants of Santiago's historical political past. These findings present an original classification of adult entertainment premises in a city's urban and (sub)urban sexscape.