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Women at Work: Sex Tourism in Sosua, the Dominican Republic
There is a new sex tourist destination on the global sexual landscape: Sosua, the Dominican Republic. A beach town on the north coast, Sosua has emerged as a place of fantasy for white European male sex tourists desiring sex for money with Afro-Caribbean women. But European men are not the only ones who seek to fulfill fantasies in Sosua. Dominican sex workers also arrive in Sosua with fantasies: fantasies of economic mobility, visas to Europe, and maybe even romance. For them, Sosua and its tourists represent an escape: these women migrate from throughout the Dominican Republic with dreams of European men "rescuing" them from a lifetime of foreclosed opportunities and poverty. 1 Yet, even though more and more women and girls migrate to Sosua everyday, most leave Sosua with little more than they had when they first arrived. This article explores this paradoxical feature of sex tourism in Sosua, and examines why women continue to flock to Sosua and how they make the most of their time while there. The image of Sosua as a tourist enclave is essential to understanding why Dominican women--most of whom have never sold sex before--decide, as they describe, "to give it a try" in this transnational space of money and desire.
It should come as little surprise that Dominican sex workers' financial responsibilities as female heads of household inform their decision to enter sex work. However, I argue that these women choose the sex trade specifically in Sosua not just as a survival strategy, but also as an advancement strategy. Most studies on the sex trade emphasize women's economic desperation. Sex work for them is a last ditch effort to make ends meet. From this perspective, women who pursue sex work do so because they have, in a profound sense, no other choice. But Sosua is different. Women see Sosua's sex trade, and relationships with foreign clients, as a fast track to economic success--a way not just to solve short-term economic problems, but to change their lives (and their families' lives) in the long-term. Thus, by migrating to Sosua, a transnational space, these women are engaged in an economic strategy that is simultaneously very familiar and something altogether new....