ABSTRACT
Yet the creation of a marketable fantasy is not simply a one-way process of ‘performing’ for the tourist for profit, but also can involve the establishment of longterm intimate relationships described by both participants as ‘love’ or ‘affection’, and occasionally leading to marriage or sustained relational commitments. Thus, the rapid shift to a tourism-based economy not only affects the material conditions of society, but reverberates in the most basic ways people experience relational and sexual intimacy. Perhaps more provocatively, it affects how individuals use and understand their bodies and body parts, which is one of the primary arguments of this chapter. The intention of much of my work in the Dominican Republic has been to understand how political-economic changes related to the intensification of the Caribbean tourism industry and other neoliberal development policies have influenced the enactment of local sexualities. In an attempt to investigate this linkage ethnographically, I have focused most of my research on the sexual exchanges between local Dominican men and foreign gay tourists, which are much more common than the literature on ‘beach boys’ in the Caribbean would imply, but which present social and emotional challenges for these men. As I argue in this chapter, the engagements with gay foreigners can lead to embodied moments of inter-and intrapersonal tension in which the material, cultural and emotional investments of sex workers and clients must be worked out and negotiated in the symbolically charged uses of genitals and orifices. In this chapter, I consider bodies and body parts as key sites for the analysis of the embodiment of tourism, and seek to use men’s narratives of sexual encounters with tourists to examine how practices of sexuality are embedded in wider material and symbolic contexts. As a medical anthropologist also working in HIV prevention, this approach is critical to understanding linkages between tourism and HIV. In the Caribbean, a growing body of evidence suggests that the tourism industry is associated with the emergence of local HIV epidemics and shapes vulnerabilities among those who work in tourism settings.1 While some suggestive epidemiological evidence suggests a correlation between tourism dependence and HIV prevalence throughout the Caribbean, there is no research by which to specify or describe the mechanisms through which this association may or may not occur. Therefore, a critical question for HIV research in the region is: How might the structure of the tourism industry as it is embodied and experienced influence HIV-related vulnerabilities for specific individuals and groups? Answering this question requires ethnographic research that examines the contextualised, embedded nature of sexual practices in tourism areas.
