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The issue of intimate spheres has become an international matter. The erotic and the exotic are intertwined in ways that make intimate desires and fantasies become important elements in the global flows of economic and human capital. This can be found in the market spaces of sexual-economic transactions involving Western tourists on vacation in the Global South. In the developing world, research has tended to focus on prostitution in which women and children (are coerced to) offer men sex for money (Truong, 1990; Bales, 2003). However, there has been a recent shift to focusing more broadly on the complex nexus between cash, sex and gender. Lately scholars have argued for the need to think about sex-money trades as more diffused and complicated matters than is normally acknowledged in the sex work literature. Julia O'Connell Davidson and Jacqueline Sanchez Taylor consider, for instance, 'the phenomenon by which local and migrant women, men, and children enter into fairly open-ended relationships with tourists in the hope of securing some material benefits (including gifts, meals, clothing, cash, and opportunities to migrate to affluent countries) to be as much part of sex tourism as the phenomenon of brothel or street prostitution in tourist areas' (2005: 83).
One phenomenon in this diffused geography is women's sex tourism--or what is sometimes called romance tourism. This primarily covers Western women travelling to developing countries in Africa and Latin America in search of love, sex and romance. The economic-affective relations between white Western women and often younger black men in Third World zones have received increasing attention, both amongst academics and in popular discourses. Academic work, movies and press coverage tend to revolve around the similarities to and/or differences from men's sex tourism, and attempt to pin down the features and consequences of women's sexual involvement with much poorer men in holiday resorts. Since the mid-1990s a group of scholars have used the phenomenon to argue that women can be as exploitive as men given the opportunity. These researchers have persisted in defining the relations as 'women's sex tourism' to emphasise the similarities to men's consumption of sex (Kempadoo, 2001; Sanchez Taylor, 2006). Others have claimed that women's search for sex and love in exchange for material goods differs from men's sex tourism...