Caribbean Pleasure Industry: Tourism, Sexuality, and AIDS in the Dominican Republic
Caribbean Pleasure Industry: Tourism, Sexuality, and AIDS in the Dominican Republic Books
Product Description
In recent years, the economy of the Caribbean has become nearly absolutely dependent on international tourism. And today one of the chief ways that foreign visitors there seek pleasure is through prostitution. Even as much has been written on the female sex workers who service these tourists, Caribbean Pleasure Industry shifts the focus onto the men. Drawing on his groundbreaking ethnographic research in the Dominican Republic, Mark Padilla discovers a complex world where the global political and economic impact of tourism has led to shifting sexual identities, growing economic pressures, and new challenges for HIV prevention. In fluid prose, Padilla analyzes men who have sex with male tourists, yet identify themselves as “normal” heterosexual men and struggle to maintain this status within their relationships with wives and girlfriends. Padilla’s exceptional ability to describe the experiences of these men will interest anthropologists, but his examination of bisexuality and tourism as much-neglected factors in the HIV/AIDS epidemic makes this book essential to anyone concerned with health and sexuality in the Caribbean or beyond.
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Most studies of sex tourism focus on female sex workers with foreign male clients. Even some studies look at men caught up in sex work with foreign women. This book tries to fill in a gap by discussing Dominican men who sell sex to foreign male tourists. This book tries to break a rigid hetero/homo dichotomy by showing the many men who engage in hustling but with no desire for other males.
There is a rare but brilliant anthology called “Caribbean Masculinities” and the author’s contribution is reprinted here. Really, I hope this book is a sign that the author got tenure somewhere. The info in this book is similar to another study about “pingueros” in Cuba. Those who saw the French-language film “Vers le Sur” may also delight in this.
The book NEVER mentions “the down-low” and this is understandable as the study takes place outside the United States. Nevertheless, for those interested in reading about Black men who get busy with men on the hush-hush, they’ll want to read this book. The interviewees here never suggest that kicking it with men means they don’t have women at home and desire women all the time. There’s a lot of “don’t question, don’t tell” here too. Relatives of these men don’t question how men who are penniless on Friday afternoon can now pay the rent on Monday morning. There’s also machismo here where women are conditioned not to question their male partners and these male sex workers can lie about getting with women when they are really selling to men.
Let me mention the most vital comment to me in this book: “[The Zona Colonial] also stands as the most vivid symbol of what has been described as a kind of Dominican “hispanophilia”–an exaggerated identification with all things of Spanish origin, and a real-time denial (and repression) of the African cultural influences on contemporary Dominican society” (81). A whole mess of books and word-of-mouth mention how Dominicans go out of their ways to downplay or deny being Black. Even as the author brings this up only once, I really wish he would have spoken about race more. He dances nearly it as many people in that nation do. A student may possibly write an awesome paper comparing this book and “What’s Like Got to Do with It?” and they will note how the latter is explicit about Blackness when the former plays into the denial.
Sometimes the book felt long-winded. But, this was not another anthropological text in which a novelist just recalls, “First I did this, then I did that.” This was an informative book about Black bisexuality in a transnational context.
Rating: 4 / 5