What's Love Got to Do With It? and other questions

The readings for this week, Denise Brennan's What's Love Got To Do With It? and Pratt/Yeoh's "Transnational (Counter) Topographies," offer several interesting interrogations into the possibilities–and limitations–of the transnational. Brennan's book, which studies the tourism and sex tourism industries in Sosúa, Dominican Republic, takes into its purview the "inequality in sex worker's lives and their creative responses to them...[as] local agents caught in a web of global economic relations, [who] try to take advantage (to the extent that they can) of the men–and their citizenship–who are in Sosúa to take advantage of them" (24). Throughout her extensive investigations into the relationships of these women, Brennan continually attempts to trace the machinations of power in, through, and between sex workers and their clienteles. Rather convincingly, Brennan shows through the interactions of these migrant sex workers and their foreign clients that the nation is "constructed through borders...both stretched beyond the nation and consolidated within, in both instances calling up and playing upon transnational connections and the production of national difference" (Pratt/Yeoh 162).

This stretching, which is so important to Pratt/Yeoh's conception of a transnational feminist politics, brings with it complicated issues of recognizing the positions of Sosúa in an international context, which is both blurred and re-inscribed simultaneously, and the roles that sex workers play in its global conceptualization. Brennan also attempts to show that these connections and differences are at once hyper-visible and concealed. Throughout What's Love Got To Do With It, the women who are sex workers are used as convenient and visible scapegoats within Sosúan society for a perceived tarnishing of Dominican culture (through its now-global association with sex tourism); as easy targets for abuse from local and corrupt police forces; and as viable money makers for local men who act as tígueres. Yet, these women, their individual lives and experiences, and the economic reasons for which they are drawn to the Sosúan sex trade are conspicuously rendered illegible within the social conditions in which they live, as well as in their imaginary conceptualization by foreign "sex tourists." Thus a duality emerges in which these women are both present and absent in a globalized context, drawing in foreign business for Sosúa (ostensibly valuable) yet also diminishing the reputation of the Dominican Republic globally (ostensibly detrimental).

Brennan, however, is concerned with interrupting this dual visibility/invisibility by reasserting that these women are not mere vectors of outside forces, but, rather, they are autonomous, decisive, creative, responsible, individualized, controlling, suspicious, and, importantly, conscious of their positions within a global context. It is important to remember that Brennan uses the experiences of these women to push narratives of the transnational in order to construct counter topographies by "paying close attention to the specificity of place and context" (Pratt/Yeoh 163).

More specifically, Brennan traces the continual strategies that Sosúan sex workers deploy on a quotidian basis for negotiating their positions within Sosúan (Dominican) society while trying to get fuera through sexual relationships with men (or women). All of the women that Brennan interviews are always attempting to negotiate their day to day lives while also looking towards an idyllic (and, as Brennan shows, deceiving) future of economic security in Europe. Thus, the tensions that arise from these ambiguous positionalities (both physical and temporal) create dynamic spaces in which to discuss the role of the global, the quotidian life of the erotic, the erotic life of racism, the racist tendencies of dominant power, and other pressing feminist issues. These issues, perhaps, allow us to re-map the lives, both personal and political, of these women in ways that re-center them, rather than instrumentalize them, within their own narratives.

I think also, in relation to the Pratt/Yeoh essay, there is a need to question our reliances upon the "observer" to relay the power dynamics of, as well as the conditions within, a transnational space. This is something that I believe Brennan did not accomplish in her work, and it calls into question the availability for the subaltern to speak for themselves or, rather, to be listened to through their own voices. It could have been a potential space for Brennan to allow the Sosúan sex workers to speak for themselves about their quotidian lives, rather than through her intermediary interruption and the strategic deployment of their stories; thus, "[collaborating] across worlds–despite its discomforts, messiness, and power politics–[allowing] us to make full use of situated knowledges and at the same time [creating] often unplanned opportunities to destabilize vantage points, and [improvising] different, variegated perspectives in producing and performing knowledges" (Pratt/Yeoh 164).