What's Love Got To Do With It?

What’s Love Got To Do With It? offers an in-depth look into the lives of women who are trying to navigate the sex trade in Sosua. Coming from the stance of an ethnography, this book not only allows for an intricate look into the workings of the sex trade in the Dominican Republic, but it also allows for a more intimate look into the lives of sex workers. This is an important approach since sex is often times a subject that is tabooed; making sex work into a subject that is academically undervalued and overlooked. This ethnography allows for a happy medium in which Brennan take a critical look at the sex trade while also accounting for the limited scope of her research pool. Though this book focuses on the ‘hows’ and ‘whys’ of the modern day Sosua sex trade, for me there was the looming question of how race, gender, and class led these women into these positions.

Within the sex trade there is often a lack of autonomy for women that the sexscape in Sosua seems to challenge. Women who practice sex work in Sosua are not only able to set their own rates and times, but they are also not accounting to a middle man in order to manage the financial aspects of their work. This creates an environment where independent sex workers are able to pick and choose their potential customers without the fears and constraints that may come from having a pimp, or chulo. As shown by Brennan, it is almost impossible to map out the desires of others. Even through an intimate lens, the reasons for many of these women being in the sex trade can often be linked to wanting personal autonomy, mobility, financial security, and (perhaps most importantly) the potential to improve their own lives, and sometimes the lives of their children, in the future. Considering that Sosua is a tourist spot with many foreign tourists, the potential for sex workers to make more money and other opportunities both socially and economically increases dramatically. The potential for independent economic stability and social mobility are both goals that can seem elusive to women, but for many women of color in post-colonial contexts this is made nigh impossible due to the continual objectification of women of color.  

This objectification can be readily seen through the ways in which men who intend to become or who have been sex tourists talk about the women both within the sex trade and outside of it. These men view the sex trade market as a place in which they can gain acceptance for and of their racialized and eroticized views of women of color. Unsatisfied with their inability to exact control over the women around them, they have deluded themselves with the fantasy that the women in these ‘developing’ countries will be more welcoming and agreeable. This is an opinion that extends beyond the Caribbean. During a language course I took in China, I overheard and witnessed such talk about the women there. The bulk of these comments came from a man who pretty much went everywhere with a sense of entitlement and lack of respect for those around him. Reading about the sex tourists and the various Internet comments made about women in the Dominican Republic, I couldn’t help but be reminded of him.

It seemed that a lot of the men who are sex tourists wanting a more stable or permanent relationship with the sex workers they met also wanted a more 'traditional' set up in terms of gender relations and roles. So while women do have more autonomy with their conduction of business, they are also being subjugated to filling gender roles they may not agree with or desire. These manifestations of power struggles in sex industries are restricted to the Dominican Republic. Though there was a distinction in motive drawn between European males who travel to the Dominican Republic for sex and Japanese men who attend hostess clubs, this desire to show dominance and wealth seems to actually be shared. 

Many women within the sex trade do not identify themselves as prostitutes and often make distinctions between themselves and other sex workers based on stated or perceived reasons for being in the sex trade. Many also state that they don’t want the same life as they have had for their children. This distinction and the desire for different opportunities for their children really highlights the fact that this work is not seen a permanent position for most of these women. This work is seen as a way to another life or as a point of transition from one goal to the next. I was left wondering what these women do after sex work. Is there a stigma that surrounds sex work in the Dominican Republic? More so, once they have aged out of the sex trade industry, what jobs are available to women who were in the sex trade?