Suchergebnisse

Contents -- Acknowledgments -- Introduction -- 1. The Commerce of Sex in Costa Rica -- Part I. Sex, Class, and Consumption -- 2. Almighty Gringos and the Relational Economy of Sex Tourism -- 3. Selling Sex, Selling Care: Affective Labor in the Tourism Sector -- 4. Motherhood, Consumption, and the Purchase of Respectability -- Part II. Regulating Sex in the Age of Neoliberalism -- 5. The State and the Sex Industry -- 6. Good for the State, Bad for the Nation: Race, Space, and Migration -- Conclusion: Getting Ahead in Gringo Gulch -- Methodological Appendix -- Notes -- References -- Index

The story of sex tourism in the Gringo Gulch neighborhood of San José, Costa Rica could be easily cast as the exploitation of poor local women by privileged North American men--men who are in a position to take advantage of the vast geopolitical inequalities that make Latin American women into suppliers of low-cost sexual labor. But in Gringo Gulch, Megan Rivers-Moore tells a more nuanced story, demonstrating that all the actors intimately entangled in the sex tourism industry--sex workers, sex tourists, and the state--use it as a strategy for getting ahead. Rivers-Moore situates her ethnography at the intersections of gender, race, class, and national dimensions in the sex industry. Instead of casting sex workers as hapless victims and sex tourists as neoimperialist racists, she reveals each group as involved in a complicated process of class mobility that must be situated within the sale and purchase of leisure and sex. These interactions operate within an almost entirely unregulated but highly competitive market beyond the reach of the state--bringing a distinctly neoliberal cast to the market. Throughout the book, Rivers-Moore introduces us to remarkable characters--Susan, a mother of two who doesn't regret her career of sex work; Barry, a teacher and father of two from Virginia who travels to Costa Rica to escape his loveless, sexless marriage; Nancy, a legal assistant in the Department of Labor who is shocked to find out that prostitution is legal and still unregulated. Gringo Gulch is a fascinating and groundbreaking look at sex tourism, Latin America, and the neoliberal state.

This article considers the role of beauty in Costa Rican sex work. In the context of sex tourism, beauty operates as affective labour performed by sex workers, labour that is mediated by deeply contradictory understandings of race and nation. Theorising beauty as a form of affective labour means thinking about beauty as value, as something that circulates, can be exchanged and is ultimately relational. While Costa Rica's national mythology has long focused on claims to white origins, sex tourists identify local women's 'exoticism' and non-whiteness as particularly appealing. Commercial sex does not simply depend on an imperial male gaze, but rather requires us to consider how particular national mythologies about race are linked to ideals of attractiveness in complex ways. I also explore how women experience and manage their sexual attractiveness to foreign tourists in their daily lives and work.

La incorporación social y económica de las poblaciones migrantes es posiblemente uno de los mayores desafíos que enfrentan los Estados modernos. La controversia de esta incorporación se vuelve especialmente tangible en los mercados laborales y, de interés para este capítulo, en las políticas de bienestar. No es coincidencia que en elecciones recientes, en países como Estados Unidos (Trump), el Reino Unido (Brexit), España (Rajoy), Francia (Le Pen), los Países Bajos (Wilders y Baudet) y Alemania (Gauland), la creciente popularidad de los partidos populistas de derecha y los sentimientos antinmigrantes se basen en gran medida en el debate sobre los derechos sociales de las personas migrantes y su acceso a los servicios sociales. De manera similar, en los países latinoamericanos que reciben más migrantes, la migración se ha convertido en un tema cada vez más politizado. Por ejemplo, durante el período previo a las elecciones de Costa Rica en 2018, la elección de Donald Trump en los EE.UU. fue como "música para los oídos" para las campañas políticas de la derecha (Gatica, 2017, p. 72). ; UCR::Vicerrectoría de Investigación::Unidades de Investigación::Ciencias Sociales::Instituto de Investigaciones Sociales (IIS)