Sex, Romance and the Carnivalesque between Female Tourists and Caribbean Men

Dr Doris Weichselbaumer

Holiday liaisons between Western women and Caribbean males with no formal employment have typically been considered to represent either ‘romance tourism’ or ‘sex tourism’ due to the frequent material benefits for the men. Both concepts are problematic as ‘romance tourism’ draws on essentialist notions of gender where women are inconceivable as full sexual agents, while ‚sex tourism’ usually denies any agency to the local men. In this seminar Dr Weichselbaumer offers a different reading of these liaisons. The carnivalesque (Bakhtin 1968) describes a temporary liberation of the established order and daily (work) routine that is so crucial in holiday making. During holiday tourists become liminal subjects who can escape the conventional order and engage in bodily excess. The concept of the carnivalesque seems useful not only because of the apparent suspension of the traditional order that takes place when white, Western, middle class women are dating poor, uneducated, black males, but also because it allows to transgress the dichotomy of sex tourism and romance that is particularly blurry in this context. Furthermore, carnival has been considered as potentially subversive, as it leads to an inversion of hierarchies, but also as conservative, since a temporary transgression is often followed by a return to an order that is thereby strengthened. Indeed, the narratives of some women travellers suggest that their engagements with social and racial ‘Others’ remain temporary with little effect to the racial discourses they draw on, while others appear to transgress social and racial borders more substantially without falling into racial Othering.

Bio

Doris Weichselbaumer is currently a visiting researcher at SOAS from Linz, Austria, where she is Associate Professor at the Department of Economics as well as at the Department of Women’s and Gender Studies. Her main research field is feminist economics where she has published in particular on economic effects of sex, gender and sexual orientation. She currently conducts a major interdisciplinary project on constructions of race and gender as well as economic transactions in the interaction between foreign women and Caribbean men.

Organiser: Bloomsbury Gender Network and the Centre for Gender Studies (SOAS)

Contact email: N.S.Al-Ali@soas.ac.uk