Love in the Age of Globalized Sex Work, Secrets, and Depression

Abstract

During the 2006 to 2007 season, the Dominican tourist board ran an ad, “The Inexhaustible Republic of Colors,” shown on airlines and Internet sites (such as YouTube) throughout the global north. The ad opens with a shadow image of what viewers initially believe to be a semi-clothed woman’s body reflected in the sand. When the camera tightens to a close-up, it reveals a preteen girl who picks up a conch shell through which we will hear the sounds of her island. Through music and images the ad narrates the “inexhaustibility” of the Dominican Republic’s “natural resources”: from its various land and seascapes, its numerous cultural activities, and its racially diverse national bodies—all of which are available for the consuming tourist. In the last frame, this young local girl gives the shell to a little (blond haired, blue-eyed) white tourist girl, symbolically inviting her to consume the island republic. This ad, produced by the national tourist board, raises a postcolonial set of questions about how state managers make use of existing visual protocols to compete in the global marketplace. It subtly draws upon popular representations of the Dominican Republic as the Caribbean paradise for sex tourism, an understanding driven by racialized and sexualized image of the light-skinned mulatta, as the dominant object of heterosexual male desire. This construction, Kamala Kempadoo argues, positions Dominican women as light-skinned, hot Latinas “specially trained and groomed to provide sexual pleasure to men and thus being particularly suited to sex work.”¹

Ultimately, it does not matter what consumption possibilities the media depict and how much individuals fantasize about them: living out fantasies means having access to required resources, particularly the right passport. Otherwise, citizenship trumps transnational desires every time

—Denise Brennan, What’s Love Got to Do with It?

An emphasis on the sexual agency of women should not lead to a prematurely romanticized portrayal of resistance and in the process foreclose a discussion of the very real constraints that sex workers face in their daily lives, both on as well as off the job

—Red Thread, quoted in Kamala Kempadoo, Sun, Sex and Gold They had a special on women who sleep through depression. They want to die, but they don’t have the courage to go that far. They said depression is anger turned inward … Olivia never shows anger. She always holds it in, stuffing it inside to the deepest corners

—Angie Cruz, Soledad