What's Love Got To Do With It?

In this book, Denise Brennan writes an ethnography about the sex tourism industry, particularly in Sosua. She offers a different look at transnational feminism through the sex tourism lens. I've always viewed the sex industry in one of two ways: either it is the exploitation of an individual or the employment one chooses, but I've never considered it as both, although that certainly is the case. I'm nearly positive that if you asked most women, they would prefer to not go into the sex industry. Yet, particularly in areas such as Sosua, sex sales and it pays.

U.S. centric movies such as Taken display the foreign terrors of the sex tourism industry. But in such a movie, the agency is taken from that person. She or he does not choose the sex industry, they are forced in it.

But are these women in Sosua not forced into the sex industry because of the lack of other options for income? If that higher paying job is sex and you have mouths to feed, rent to make and other responsibilities, it must feel forced. So then, they are exploited by the economic situation in which they live, by the men that take advantage of that situation, but also the police. They are abused by the police and forced to pay bails to get them out of jail, even if they were not participating in sex work when they were arrested. So then, it must, even more so, feel forced.

But Brennan argues against this stance (although she is not arguing that it is entirely untrue). She argues that they do, in fact, have some sense of agency. Because of the potential of European security, these women choose this labor. Not only does it provide an income, but it also gives hope to cross these borders into security, even if it is with a man that may or may not love them.

The biggest problem with this scenario is it is still exploitation, in my mind at least. These women (and some men I would assume?) have their economic and societal stances taken advantage of. Then they are given economic and societal stability, even though that stability may or may not be there permanently. But that's not the point. This exploitation is providing some type of transnational mobility. Therefore, it's exploitation on both parts. These women have agency by choosing this labor, even though they are risking pregnancy, AIDs and other types of distress in the process. They, in turn, are "exploiting" these men by using their sexual exoticism to find potential for transnational mobility, to find an "esposa." "Sexscapes," then, are dual exploitative, effecting the global economy and global mobility. This, then, blurs the lines of national borders.