1st Edition

Sexuality, Women, and Tourism Cross-border desires through contemporary travel

By Susan Frohlick Copyright 2013
    240 Pages 20 B/W Illustrations
    by Routledge

    240 Pages 20 B/W Illustrations
    by Routledge

    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. As an in-depth ethnographic account, the book traces the experiences of heterosexual North American and European women’s transnational encounters, and examines new sexual and social practices arising from contemporary global tourism, shifting sexual cultures both at home and abroad, consumer culture, and women’s increasing mobility. 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.

    This fascinating book, focusing on the structure of tourism and role of local culture and social organization in the shoring-up of desire, develops a unique contribution to the understanding of sex tourism. It will be of interest not only to tourism scholars, but also to those interested in sexuality, anthropology, sociology, cultural studies, women studies, gender studies, and geography.

    1. Introduction 2. Desiring Costa Rica 3. Sexuality 4. Embodiment 5. Intimacy 6. Difference 7. Erotics 8. Conclusion

    Biography

    Susan Frohlick is Associate Professor of Cultural Anthropology at the University of Manitoba, Canada.

    "The book can serve as a valuable guide for any researcher intent on interrogating patterns of behaviors and the nuanced negotiations through which dominant ideologies come to be embodied in individual and social practices. It was well worth the money and time spent on it." – Jeremy Robinett, Department of Recreation. Sport and Tourism. University of Illinois. Urbana. Illinois. USA

    "This book accomplished its stated purpose of countering sterotypes and complicating understandings of intersections betweeen relational social practices involving sexuality and intamacy, tourist women and local men... The book can serve as a valuable guide for any researcher intent on interrogating patterns of behaviors and the nuanced negotiations through which dominant ideologies come to be embodied in individual and social practices."— Jeremy Robinett, Journal of Tourism and Cultural Change

    "Frohlick's book is both theoretically sharp and a pleasure to read. This excellent contribution of our understanding of transnational sexuality and intamacy should be read (and taught) widely by anthropologists, sociologists, geographers and those interested in tourism studies, gender studies and Latin American and Caribbean studies."— Megan Rivers-Moore, Anthropologica