Sun, Sex, and Gold: Tourism and Sex Work in the Caribbean

Product Description

With tourism accounting for approximately thirty percent of the Caribbean’s GDP and twenty-four percent of employment, a link between the sex trade and the tourism industry has gained recent attention. Shifts in global production, an increase of disposable income for pleasure and recreation, and a desire by North Americans and Europeans for an experience of ‘exotic’ cultures, are often claimed to be the cause. This volume explores the connections between the global economy and sex work, focusing on the experiences and views of women, men, and children who sell sex. Apart from attention to sex tourism in Cuba, the Dominican Republic, Barbados, and Jamaica, the book also examines sex work in the gold mining industry in the hinterlands of Suriname and Guyana, and in the entertainment sector in Belize and the Dutch Antilles. It presents new insights into the Caribbean sex trade and provides proposals and strategies for addressing the situation in the twenty-first century.

Review

A pathbreaking critical examination of sex tourism in the Caribbean . . . casts the Caribbean sex trade within global contexts of inequality and power that reveals as much about our own desires and distorted concepts of gender, sexuality, and race as about the sex workers themselves. — Helen Safa, professor emerita of anthropology and Latin American studies at the University of Florida

We hear male tourists’ fantasies about desire and control, we hear women from Cuba, Jamaica, Guyana, Curacao and the Dominican Republic strategize, hope, and detail abuses they endure. . . . A smart, nuanced look at how globalization is being racially sexualized. — Cynthia Enloe, author of Maneuvers: The International Politics of Militarizing Women’s Lives

An intriguing and insightful contribution to international and Caribbean feminist scholarship and political economy.
Sun, Sex, and Gold goes to the root of some of the most fundamental and highly complex intersections of international capitalism and sexual intimacy and identity. . . . A major contribution toward understanding ourselves as gendered and sexual beings in the context of our colonial and post(neo)-colonial reality. — Centre for Gender and Development Studies, The University of the West Indies, Rhoda Reddock, Centre for Gender and Development Studies, The University of the West Indies

An important new contribution to on-going debates about the sources and meanings of sex work globally. . . . Most notedly, presents new research on relatively underexplored territory: The presence of women as sex (and romance) tourists, and men as sex workers. — Deborah Brock, Department of Sociology, Brock University

By taking on the Caribbean,
Sun Sex, and Gold forces North Americans to look more closely at the ubiquitous selling of brown women’s bodies in the promotion of those islands as the ultimate pleasure spot for tired, repressed Americans. . . . Original ethnographic studies of sex-workers and their clients, with plenty of eye-opening quotes from workers and clients themselves. . . . Contains urgent and thought-provoking material that deserves a wide audience. — Sonia Shaw ―
The Progressive

In this fascinating and compelling collection, tourism and sex work are presented, almost, as slave narratives of the current era. . . . In these accounts emerge snippets of the possibilities contained in sexualized and racialized encounters for the reconfiguration of power. — Percy C. Hintzen, chair, African American Studies, University of California, Berkeley

About the Author

Kamala Kempadoo is a sociologist and assistant professor of women’s studies at the University of Colorado-Boulder. She directed a regional Caribbean research project on tourism and the sex trade, and is editor of Global Sex Workers: Rights, Resistance and Redefinition.