Sex work in sites of tourism brings forth issues of more than race, gender, class and nationality when trying to have a conversation about transnational feminism, but further shows how multifaceted systems of power, authority, and privilege are in their impact on all levels of daily life. Often times we separate the concepts of gender and sexuality, placing them on another rung of identity hierarchy. Buy placing gender and sexuality in conversation with each other as well as power allows us to have a conversation around exploitation and agency.

While reading this book, I was confronted with my own perception of sex work. Not in the sense of condemning women in that field but seeing it as a form of labor exploitation by the international community. For some reason, it just never clicked before. We can talk about how women in sex work are exploited in both their personal lives sexually, but we don’t talk about how women are exploited by the system and how the globe continues to exploit women and particular countries by eroticizing them for foreign consumption (and honestly I don’t know if consumption is the correct term because these are people we are talking about-both men and women-but the way they are seen is as a prop for someone’s personal use). Yet, there is still this sense of agency that allows these women to obtain mobility.

But these negotiations are a strategy of survival and advancement for these women because of how the world simply sees them. The women in Sosua are racialized and sexualized by not only the politics within the country as well as the globe. Pratt states, “ Studies that have pursued these questions find that transmigratory practices are usually not individual choices but influenced by the division of labor and power within households, which are often negotiated along the lines of gender, age, and relationships among other members of the household” (160).

Sex work is a form a labor and when looking at all the politics-within boarders, outside boarders- blur so many lines and connections that it makes tracing identity and place a much more complicated concept within transnational feminism. But I also thinks that is what makes it so much more fascinating. These complex lines of connection and difference, particular in places of “paradise” like Sosua makes one recognize their position in their world, the privilege to leave and go as one pleases at the expense of someone else’s livelihood.