Sex Tourism And The Postcolonial Encounter

Illustrated by revealing interviews with women and men in the tourist resorts in the Sinai, Egypt, this book is ostensibly about western women who sleep with 'native' men while on holiday. Broadening the scope of issues involved, it examines the link between these holiday romances and a much wider romanticism of place and people - of the landscapes of paradise, deserts and the lure of the Bedouin sheikh - that are used to sell these destinations. It argues that the romantic stereotyping and deliberate positioning of 'Third World' resorts as places that somehow exist outside of the modernities the women come from is inextricably bound up in the relationships. Similarly, for the local man the tourist resort is perceived as a place other than his own cultural space and time and represents a modernity that is otherwise only found in the 'West'. The relationships that ensue can therefore only occur because the tourist resort acts as an intermediate space. In analyzing the interaction of these men and women within the context of modernity, the book provides insights into gender issues to do with globalization, travel and sexuality, as well as opening up the debate on sex tourism and showing this to be a lot more ambiguous and complicated than it might at first appear.

Illustrated by revealing interviews with women and men in the tourist resorts in the Sinai, Egypt, this book is ostensibly about western women who sleep with 'native' men while on holiday. Broadening the scope of issues involved, it examines the link between these holiday romances and a much wider romanticism of place and people - of the landscapes of paradise, deserts and the lure of the Bedouin sheikh - that are used to sell these destinations. It argues that the romantic stereotyping and deliberate positioning of 'Third World' resorts as places that somehow exist outside of the modernities the women come from is inextricably bound up in the relationships. Similarly, for the local man the tourist resort is perceived as a place other than his own cultural space and time and represents a modernity that is otherwise only found in the 'West'. The relationships that ensue can therefore only occur because the tourist resort acts as an intermediate space. In analyzing the interaction of these men and women within the context of modernity, the book provides insights into gender issues to do with globalization, travel and sexuality, as well as opening up the debate on sex tourism and showing this to be a lot more ambiguous and complicated than it might at first appear.

For nearly a decade, Brazil has surpassed Thailand as the world's premier sex tourism destination. As the first full-length ethnography of sex tourism in Brazil, this pioneering study treats sex tourism as a complex and multidimensional phenomenon that involves a range of activities and erotic connections, from sex work to romantic transnational relationships. Erica Lorraine Williams explores sex tourism in the Brazilian state of Bahia from the perspectives of foreign tourists, tourism industry workers, sex workers who engage in liaisons with foreigners, and Afro-Brazilian men and women who contend with foreigners' stereotypical assumptions about their licentiousness. She shows how the Bahian state strategically exploits the touristic desire for exotic culture by appropriating an eroticized blackness and commodifying the Afro-Brazilian culture in order to sell Bahia to foreign travelers.

This book encompasses the diversity and complexity of sex in tourism, incorporating the light, dark and shades of grey in between. It brings together work and ideas from a diverse array of researchers from around the world and examines the affects and effects of diverse sexual encounters in tourism, romance tourism, sex tourism and sexual exploitation in tourism – including the sexual exploitation of children in travel and tourism, and sexual harassment. Sex in tourism has arguably been an understudied area of research relative to the central roles that sex plays within tourism experiences. This volume explores the complexity and nuanced nature of sex in tourism in more detail. It will be of interest to students and researchers of tourism impacts, tourist behaviour, hospitality management, destination management and development.

This book is the first to focus on why and how foreign Western women engage in cross-border sexual and intimate relations as tourists travelling, or temporarily dwelling, in a Central American country. The book combines descriptions of women's travels and sexual relations across racial and class boundaries with feminism, postcolonial theory, and poststructuralist theories of gender and sexuality, to show how tourism as a wide range and set of desires serves as a central shaping force in the formation of women's sexual subjectivities in contemporary life in postindustrial capitalism. In doing so it offers new insights into how tourist women express heterosexuality shaped by gender, race, class, and identities.

Arguing for a retrieval of the landmark work, God's Fierce Whimsy, the author establishes the critical importance of this volume for the construction of a dialogic theological method. Finally, the author constructively engages various developments in feminist theologies and postcolonial theories.

In Gender and Sexuality in Kenyan Societies: Centering the Human and the Humane in Critical Studies, edited by Besi Brillian Muhonja and Babacar M’Baye, contributors explore the application of ubuntu/utu responsive perspectives and methods to critical studies. Through the lens of ubuntu/utu, the contributors to this Kenya-focused volume draw from the diverse fields of postcolonial studies, literary studies, history, anthropology, sociology, political science, environmental studies, media studies, and development studies, among others, to demonstrate the urgency and necessity of humane scholarship/research in gender and queer studies. By centering decolonial approaches and the human and humane, concentrating on subjects and identities that have been largely neglected in national and scholarly debates, the chapters are subversive, complex, and inclusive. They advance within Kenyan studies themes and elements of alternative, non-binary, variant, and non-heteronormative gender identities, sexualities, and voices, as well as approaches to doing knowledge. Underscoring the timeliness of such a text is evidence rendered in sections of the collection highlighting the significance of ubuntu/utu-centric scholarship. Challenging the erasure of the human in academic works, the chapters in this volume look inward and locate the voices and experiences of Kenyan peoples as the pivotal locus of analysis and epistemological derivation.

“Shed[s] light on the romantic, psychosexual and psychosocial, and economic entanglements that tie German tourists to their Kenyan hosts.” —Daily Nation Diani, a coastal town on the Indian Ocean, is significantly defined by a large European presence that has spurred economic development and is also supported by close relationships between Kenyans and European immigrants and tourists. Nina Berman looks carefully at the repercussions that these economic and social interactions have brought to life on the Kenyan coast. She explores what happens when poorer and less powerful members of a community are forced to give way to profit-based real estate development, what it means when most of Diani’s schools and water resources are supplied by funds from immigrants, and what the impact of mixed marriages is on notions of kinship and belonging as well as the economy. This unique story about a small Kenyan town also recounts a wider tale of opportunity, oppression, resilience, exploitation, domination, and accommodation in a world of economic, political, and social change. “In this richly detailed book, Nina Berman tracks the influx of thousands of German-speaking tourists and residents, especially in the 1990s, and the making of a distinctive Kenyan-European cultural enclave in the coastal community of Diani as many of these visitors choose to extend their stay as long-term residents.” —Ann Biersteker, author of Masomo ya Kisasa: Contemporary Readings in Swahili “An informative and thought-provoking work that deserves to be read by scholars of Kenya and those interested in globalized structures of gentrification, north-south humanitarian assistance, and love and romance in Africa.” —African Studies Quarterly