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The Embodiment of Tourism among Bisexually-Behaving Dominican Male Sex Workers

  • Original Paper: Black and Latino Male Bisexualities Special Section
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Abstract

While theories of “structure” and social inequality have increasingly informed global health efforts for HIV prevention—with growing recognition of the linkages between large-scale political and economic factors in the distribution and impact of the HIV/AIDS epidemic—there is still little theorization of precisely how structural factors shape the very bodies and sexualities of specific populations and groups. In order to extend the theoretical understanding of these macro-micro linkages, this article examines how the growth of the tourism industry in the Dominican Republic has produced sexual practices and identities that reflect both the influence of large-scale structural processes and the resistant responses of local individuals. Drawing on social science theories of political economy, embodiment, and authenticity, I argue that an understanding of patterns of sexuality and HIV risk in the region requires analysis of how political-economic transformations related to tourism intersect with the individual experiences and practices of sexuality on the ground. The analysis draws on long-term ethnographic research with bisexually behaving male sex workers in two cities in the Dominican Republic, including participant observation, in-depth interviews, focus groups, and surveys. By examining the global and local values placed on these men’s bodies and the ways sex workers use their bodies to broker tourists’ pleasure, we may better understand how the large-scale structures of the tourism industry are linked to the specific meanings and practices of sexuality.

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Notes

  1. All proper names used in this article are pseudonyms. All specific place names have been changed, except when referencing larger geographical areas or barrios.

  2. “Prieto” is a Dominican race term that is often employed disparagingly to refer to darker-skinned persons or those with more pronounced Afro-Caribbean features (Howard, 2001).

  3. “Looking for life,” or buscándose la vida, is a local phrase in the Dominican Republic often used by sex workers to describe how they make a living. It connotes the ad hoc and flexible income-generation activities in which informally employed sex workers engage.

  4. Gerardo’s use of maricón here implies more than sexual preference, since it suggests that the man was highly effeminate and obviously maricón.

  5. While no minors were included in the study, many older interviewees reflected on their own adolescent involvement in sex work, and also mentioned the particularly vulnerable circumstances endured by the large number of “palomos” (a term used for child prostitutes) in the Dominican Republic.

  6. Elsewhere, I have extensively described the elaborate use of “stigma management techniques” among Dominican male sex workers (Padilla et al., in press). Many sex workers also described styles of sexual communication that have been interpreted as patterns of “sexual silence” in Latin American sexual cultures (Carrillo, 2002; Díaz, 1998). This system of sexual silence functions as a means by which homosexually behaving men and their family members conspire to avoid open discussions about stigmatized sexual behaviors, and to engage in other kinds of subtle, indirect, and ambiguous forms of sexual communication.

  7. Elsewhere, I have reported preliminary evidence to suggest that sex workers’ perceptions of risk were quite low (Padilla, 2007a), but no data exist as yet to determine whether men professing a certain understanding of their masculinity are either more or less likely to engage in HIV risk behaviors, or what role, if any, is played by perception of risk in these potentially causal linkages.

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  1. Department of Health Behavior and Health Education, School of Public Health, University of Michigan, 109 Observatory, Room #M3820, Ann Arbor, MI, 48109, USA

    Mark B. Padilla

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Padilla, M.B. The Embodiment of Tourism among Bisexually-Behaving Dominican Male Sex Workers. Arch Sex Behav 37, 783–793 (2008). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10508-008-9358-5

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