Sun, Sex, and Gold
Tourism and Sex Work in the Caribbean
Contributions by Jessica Tomiko Anders, Christel Antonius-Smits, Amalia L. Cabezas, Shirley Campbell, Julia O'Connell Davidson, Nadine Fernandez, Ranya Ghuma, Jacqueline Martis, Laura Mayorga, Cynthia Mellon, Patricia Mohammed, Beverley Mullings, Althea Perkins, Joan Phillips, A Kathleen Ragsdale, Jacqueline Sanchez Taylor, Pilar Velasquez Edited by Kamala Kempadoo
Publication date:
03 November 1999Length of book:
368 pagesPublisher
Rowman & Littlefield PublishersISBN-13: 9780847695164
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.
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.