A growing number of scholars and activists have addressed sex tourism in Latin America, and particularly in the Caribbean region. As a segment of tourism that, for better or worse, appears to be expanding and here to stay, the subject in itself warrants serious attention. Moreover, close examination of the commodification of sexual services to meet tourist demand can reveal much about gender, race and cultural identity in transnational contexts.
As Erica Williams shows well in Sex Tourism in Bahia, Brazil is an important setting for research on the subject as it has long been a destination for racialised and sexualised tourism. In the city of Salvador, the site of her anthropological research, the majority Afro-Brazilian population and its cultural heritage are one strong attraction for visitors. Another is the exoticised Baianas, often mulatas, who are an icon of the region and a magnet for tourists seeking intimate encounters with women they perceive as marked by difference.
While Williams takes a broad and inclusive approach to sex tourism and wishes to avoid heteronormative assumptions about desires, she focuses mainly on male tourists and female sex workers. Nonetheless, she identifies some male sex workers who identify as heterosexual yet are sought out by gay male tourists, and lesbian sex workers who have foreign male clients and boyfriends. The overall theme that Williams employs of ‘ambiguous entanglements’ is a useful one as it complicates any easy understanding of those participating in sexual exchanges in tourism.
Also complicating the analysis of sex tourism is the frequent conflating of sex work and sex trafficking. Feminist activists have rather fiercely debated issues of consent and coercion in commodified sexual exchanges, with some viewing any paid sexual services as non-consensual, as they often involve women in an economically vulnerable condition. While this group would seek to abolish such sexual exchanges, others argue for respecting the decisions of sex workers and for supporting their efforts to organise for better working conditions. Williams, like most anthropologists recently conducting research on sex tourism and sex work, takes the latter view in favour of recognising the agency of those offering sexual services.
Indeed, her work builds upon such research and deepens it by offering a sustained consideration of the complexities of race as well as gender in the Brazilian context. The narratives that drive this ethnographic work were gathered from sex workers, NGO activists, sex tourists and others connected to the sex tourism scene in Salvador. Williams offers ample evidence of the ways in which Afro-Brazilian bodies are commodified and consumed, often sought after yet just as often fetching a lower return than white Brazilian bodies. At times, Williams herself was an unwitting research instrument, as she discovered that as an African American she was mistaken for being Afro-Brazilian, and a sex worker at that.
The book opens by introducing the ‘touristscape’ of Salvador, and advances ‘an intersectional, transnational, black feminist approach to sex tourism that is deeply influenced by feminist anthropology, queer studies, and activist anthropology’ (p. 9). The seven principal chapters of the book examine the city spaces of historic centre and coastline where sex tourism is commonly found; the problematic notions of ‘black hypersexuality’ and ‘racial democracy’ that undergird sex tourism in Brazil; the class dimensions of working-class male tourists finding a place where they can experience their privilege and be treated as ‘kings’; the organised activity of sex workers seeking full citizenship rights; and the moral panics of organisations and a wider society that fear that any Brazilian woman pursuing a transnational relationship may be coerced and trafficked.
In her conclusions, Williams suggests that her work ‘presents a different viewpoint from how sex tourism is usually discussed – in terms of victims and oppressors’ (p. 163). This is true if the point of comparison is the broad public discourse around sex tourism. However, if the reference point is anthropological and feminist scholarship, I would note that Williams's argument largely derives from building on the work of others she admires. Those works are liberally cited and generally concur in identifying the agency of sex workers, whether they have brief encounters or longer-term relationships with tourists. Such scholarship does not vilify either sex workers or tourists for what they engage in freely.
What I find most compelling in Williams's book is her rich use of many stories of those she got to know and interviewed in Salvador. These serve to structure her ethnography and to carry her argument. At times I would have liked to have fuller narratives of individuals, as well as deeper contextual material, but over all this work is an engaging account that provides an original case study, joining a select group of other ethnographic works on sex tourism in Latin America and the Caribbean. I have already assigned it for a course on gender and tourism, and my students found it to be fascinating reading that provoked lively discussion. For my part, I have found the work to be a persuasive and important contribution to knowledge in the overlapping fields of gender studies, tourism studies and cultural anthropology.
