2017. Towards a Deeper Understanding of the Meaning of Male Beach Worker-Female Tourist Relationships on the Kenyan Coast (original) (raw)
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In the 1980s, Samburu men from northern Kenya began migrating to coastal tourist resorts to sell souvenirs and perform traditional dances for European tourists. Many of them engaged in transactional sex or marriages with European women attracted to the image of the exotic African young male warrior. Through relationships with European women, some Samburu men managed to rapidly accumulate wealth, becoming so-called 'young big-men'. As a way to transform their wealth into more durable forms of respectability, these men used their money to marry local women and speed up their ritual initiation into elderhood. Meanwhile, there also emerged the figure of 'beach-boy elders', men who aged before accumulating sufficient wealth. They returned to coastal tourist resorts, dressed as young warriors, and waited to find European partners. In the article, I argue that beach-boy elders and young big-men produce queer moments in the temporalities of ageing, in that they subvert normative expectations of ageing at the very same time that they seek to produce them.
Anthropology Matters, 2019
In this paper I discuss how while carrying out research among male beach workers in Kenya’s touristic South Coast region – in relation to their quest for livelihoods through sexual-economic relationships with visiting white women – I became a participant in the phenomenon I set out to study. The article’s contribution is twofold. First, I draw on my interactions with some of the men I met on-site, and in particular my encounter with ‘Weston’ – a migrant beach worker, his unexpected behaviour towards me as a pregnant emigrant Kenyan researcher, and the ambiguity and awkwardness of our exchange, to tease out and offer insights into the behaviour, practices, and gender ideologies held by male beach workers within the South Coast beaches that I qualify as liminal. Second, I bring out the emotional discomforts I faced in my interactions with some of the men with regard to flirtation; requests to assume a matchmaker role between them and western women in Europe, as well as the help offered by men whose interests I suspected were motivated by beach worker rivalry, or their wish to establish sexual-economic relationships with me. In doing so, I highlight the usefulness of engaging in reflexive analyses of one’s fieldwork experiences, interactions, and emotions for the generation of knowledge related to one’s research and research environment.
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LASA Conference , 2009
The issue of sex tourism is one that is most frequently explored as a gendered practice involving relationships between male tourists and female sex workers. By using the case of sex tourism in Jamaica, this article explores the fluidity of gender roles in an environment where foreign female tourists exchange money or material goods for sex with local males. I argue that the significance of sex tourism work is its illumination of flexible aspects of gender and culture that seem to be rather stable and fixed in the overall societal context. Female sex tourism demonstrates the performativity of men who are excluded from various sectors of society and have found a way to use masculinity, sexuality, and cultural identity in order to profit from a practice that has become commonplace in many Caribbean tourism destinations. This article situates female sex tourism in relevant literature on gender and tourism in order to examine unexplored aspects of this particular type of tourism, as well as contextualizes sex tourism in the political economic background of the Caribbean tourist destination.
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2016
Relationships between tourists and local people at tourist destinations have become vastly diversified over time. With the introduction of the phenomenon of 'romance tourism', it could be identified that relationships between female/male tourists and local men/women involve intimate and emotional bonds rather than a mere exchange of sex for money. This article explores how the sexual and intimate relationships with tourists established and changed parallel to tourism development in Hikkaduwa, Sri Lanka. Methods utilized were in-depth interviews and participant observations with both tourismrelated and non-tourism-related people in Hikkaduwa. In analyzing the tourism development process, locally based small-scale tourism establishments, and long staying tourists and their behaviors were identified as the reasons for establishing such relationships. Moreover, it became apparent that these relationships have changed over time and that the most prominent relationships at present, those involving beach boys and female tourists, are closer to the concept of romance tourism than sex tourism.
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Sociology-the Journal of The British Sociological Association, 2001
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Feminist review, 2006
This paper argues that the 'double-standard' applied to male and female tourists' sexual behaviour reflects and reproduces weaknesses in existing theoretical and commonsense understandings of gendered power, sexual exploitation, prostitution and sex tourism. It looks at how essentialist constructions of gender and heterosexuality blur understandings of sexual exploitation and victimhood and argues that racialized power should also be considered to explore the boundaries between commercial and non-commercial sex. This paper is based on ethnographic research on sexual-economic exchanges between tourist women and local men and boys in the informal tourist economy in Jamaica and the Dominican Republic. keywords sex tourism; sexual exploitation; heterosexuality; racism; gender feminist review 83 2006 (42-59) c 2006 Feminist Review. 0141-7789/06 $30 www.feminist-review.com
This (unpublished) paper focuses on the relationships between Mauritians and foreigners and questions the role of marriage scam and romance within informal encounters between tourists and Mauritians. Often tourists are blamed for their predilection of colored people, stimulated by exotic imaginaries, whereas locals are known to seduce and mislead tourists for their own purposes, whilst making their different agendas compatible with tourists. Sex tourism is a well-organized informal phenomenon that has become an increasingly important source of intercultural problems in the tourist areas of the Indian Ocean. The study moves beyond the existing stereotypes in sex tourism. It examines the narratives and intentions of both actors involved in sexual intercultural relationships in touristic areas in Mauritius. It studies how the romantic experience of a cross-cultural encounter can be negatively transformed through sex tourism imaginaries. Situated against a backdrop of orientalist notions of exoticism and eroticism, it analyses how romantic encounters provide a platform to access an advanced lifestyle and how they are used as an advancement strategy for economic development. The process of this research project was supported by Dr. Dimitris Xygalatas, the instructor of the Ethnographic Field School, organized by Aahrus University of Denmark, during July 2015 in Pointe-aux-Piments, Mauritius. Key concepts: sex tourism, romance tourism, bi-national relationships, cross-culturalism, Mauritius
FEMALE TOURISTS AND BEACH BOYS Romance or Sex Tourism
Previous studies of female tourists and beach boys in the Caribbean have defined these relationships as involving either sex or romance tourism. The objective of this study was to determine which of these definitions was more applicable to relationships in the Dominican Republic. Male and female tourists as well as beach boys and female sex workers were interviewed. Romance and sex tourism were conceptualized as the two ends of a continuum of motivations rather than as distinct categories. Although there was some gender overlap in the continuum of romance/sex motivations, more of the female tourists were located toward the romance end and more of the male tourists toward the sex end of the continuum. Keywords: female tourists, beach boys, sex tourism, romance tourism. Résumé: Les e ´tudes précédents concernant les garçons de plage et les femmes touristes dans les Antilles ont défini que ces relations ont comprise sois le tourisme de sexe ou le tourisme d'idylle. L'objectif de cette e ´tude e ´tait pour déterminer lequel de ces définitions e ´tait la plus applicable aux relations dans la République Dominicaine. Les touristes homes et femmes de même que les garçons de plage et les travailleurs de sexe femelles ont e ´té entrevues. Le tourisme d'idylle et le tourisme de sexe ont e ´té conceptualisés comme les deux fins d'un continuum de motivations plutôt que comme des categories distinctes. Bien qu'il y avait quelque recouvrement de genre dans le continuum de motivations d'idylle/sexe, généralement, plus de femmes touristes ont e ´té placé vers la fin du continuum d'idylle et plus de touristes mâles ont e ´té placé vers la fin du continuum de sexe. Mots-clés: femmes touristes, garcons de plage, tourisme de sexe, tourisme d'idylle.