What's love got to do with it? : transnational desires and sex tourism in the Dominican Republic
Author(s)
Bibliographic Information
What's love got to do with it? : transnational desires and sex tourism in the Dominican Republic
（Latin America otherwise）
Duke University Press, 2004
- : cloth
- : pbk
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Note
Bibliography: p. [249]-272
Includes index
Description and Table of Contents
Description
In locations around the world, sex tourism is a booming business. What's Love Got to Do with It? is an in-depth examination of the motivations of workers, clients, and others connected to the sex tourism business in Sosua, a town on the northern coast of the Dominican Republic. Denise Brennan considers why Dominican and Haitian women move to Sosua to pursue sex work and describes how sex tourists, primarily Europeans, come to Sosua to buy sex cheaply and live out racialized fantasies. For the sex workers, Brennan explains, the sex trade is more than a means of survival-it is an advancement strategy that hinges on their successful "performance" of love. Many of these women seek to turn a commercialized sexual transaction into a long-term relationship that could lead to marriage, migration, and a way out of poverty. Illuminating the complex world of Sosua's sex business in rich detail, Brennan draws on extensive interviews not only with sex workers and clients, but also with others who facilitate and benefit from the sex trade. She weaves these voices into an analysis of Dominican economic and migration histories to consider the opportunities-or lack thereof-available to poor Dominican women. She shows how these women, local actors caught in a web of global economic relations, try to take advantage of the foreign men who are in Sosua to take advantage of them. Through her detailed study of the lives and working conditions of the women in Sosua's sex trade, Brennan raises important questions about women's power, control, and opportunities in a globalized economy.
Table of Contents
About the Series ix
Acknowledgments
xi
Introduction: Elena and Jurgen 1
I. The Town
1. Sosua: A Transnational Tow 13
2. Imagining and Experiencing Sosua
51
II. The Transnational Plan: Looking Beyond Dominican Borders
3. Performing Love 91
III. The Sex Trade
4. Sosua's Sex Workers: Their Families and Working Lives 119
5. Advancement Strategies in Sosua's Sex Trade
154
IV. Plan Accomplished: Getting Beyond Dominican Borders
6. Transnational Disappointments: Living in Europe 185
Conclusion: Changes in Sex Workers' Lives, Sosua, and Its Sex Trade 207
Notes 221
Glossary
245
Bibliography 249
Index 273
by "Nielsen BookData"
