Abstract
Both of these ethnographies, in-depth depictions of sex work niches in international scenes, draw upon longitudinal fieldwork by American graduate students who had the benefit of speaking the local language. In Tourist Attractions, Mitchell brings us into the world of Brazilian sex tourism, primarily through the bath houses of Rio de Janeiro, and secondarily in the beach town of Salvador da Bahia, where rent boys (garotos) cruise for clients. He portrays the way these young (mostly) heterosexual men manage their embodiment and performances to achieve the look and behavior desired by clients. With their bodies muscularly built and immaculately groomed and shaved, they strive to embody a hyper-masculine physique. Yet garotos’ success in the bath houses is also dependent on their affective performance, as they strive to present “tesão” (sexual arousal and interest) through near constant erections and by acting physically and emotionally desirous of their clients. This scene incorporates a complex fundamental paradox between clients’ desire to seduce butch-looking straight men, but in accomplishing their seductions, and expecting that their garotos demonstrate pleasure and reciprocate desire, clients feminize and then become disenchanted with them. Mitchell’s rich descriptions of the strategies rent boys use to navigate this contradiction is fascinating. His focus in this book is exclusively on the garotos, on their motivations, their hopes and dreams, their careers, and their disappointments. He acknowledges the political divide in the literature on sex work between the anti-prostitution feminist groups that see it as exploitation and the Marxist and later sex-radical feminists who support sex work as a voluntary choice and civil right, but avoids positioning himself in either camp.
The Brazilian sex economy is multiracial, and the nation has an ideology, like many Central and South American countries, of being nonracist. Many Brazilians identify as non-Hispanic white, yet claim that they have no preference among ethnic types in their garotos. Yet behind this rhetoric, customers in Rio express distinct preferences, with lighter-skinned boys who have Caucasian facial features generally commanding higher status, although Mitchell situates this positionality within a complex intersectionality of privilege, race, and the performance of desire. In Bahia it is the opposite, as African American tourists have come to dominate this region and they prefer the darker boys, satisfying their desires for a more authentic Afro-Brazilian cultural experience.
Yet despite Mitchell’s avowal of an intersectional perspective, he fails to adequately situate himself positionally, something he, as a young anthropologist, must do in this international, multiracial, colonialist, and multiclassed setting. He has no methods chapter or appendix, and his discussion of his research approach, entrée, relationships, and status is relegated to a brief section of seven pages early in the first chapter. Yet he reveals, in the most off-handed way, near the end of the book, that he is gay. This jolted me because of the default assumption of heteronormativity and made me feel deceived in his presentation throughout the book. His sexual orientation must have affected the way he was perceived and received by his participants, the way they thought of him as similar to or different from their potential clients, and the lens through which his research and writing is assessed by the academic audience. To assess a subjective research endeavor, readers must know the standpoint of the fieldworker and how his or her demographics, roles, and relationships affect the data gathered and analyzed. Beyond this huge failing, the book petered out, as the data became thin as the work wore on and appeared increasingly forced.
Hoang’s Dealing in Desire, winner of the 2012 ASA Dissertation Award, is a much stronger work, methodologically, empirically, epistemologically, and theoretically. A sociology graduate student of ethnic Vietnamese descent, she offers readers a fascinating glimpse into the sex industry in four distinct market niches of Ho Chi Minh City (HCMC, formerly and still colloquially known as Saigon). With data gathered over two extended trips to the field between 2006 and 2010, Hoang was able to gain entrée to four different hostess bars, eventually spending three months working in each. By refusing pay or favors, and exercising her language, cultural capital, and extreme discretion, she was able to gain a really comparative understanding of these scenes and their stratification along a hierarchy of class, ethnicity, status, and international ascendency and decline. Not only does Hoang describe these venues, how she forged a role in each, and the relationships she had with customers, other hostesses, and the mommies (madams), but she ruthlessly interrogates her epistemology, discussing how she obtained local institutional sponsorship, incorporated both deep and shallow cover, and immersed herself fully into the position while still drawing boundaries with her research subjects. By becoming a hostess, she experienced the status and stigma of this identity along with the deeply visceral consequences of the male gaze, including the emotional pressure to conform to age and bodily ideals, the extreme focus on thinness (she was often called the “ugly duckling” and the “fat” girl at the bars), the sexual objectification, and the verbal and physical submission required of hostesses in relation to their clients. Returning from the field proved disorienting, as she had to pull herself out of these embodied modalities to re-navigate the academic world.
Hoang describes four field sites catering to a diverse clientele: (a) a hidden and exclusive bar featuring wealthy local Vietnamese and other Asian businessmen where large sums of cash changed hands, prospective business partners got to know and trust each other in order to facilitate huge development projects; (b) an open but still high-status bar where Viet Kieus (ethnic Vietnamese living abroad) tried to negotiate business deals but also sought to recapture the feel of the Vietnam of old, where local women re-created the feel of the former local, submissive culture; (c) an open bar serving Western businessmen trying to put deals together who, when rejected in favor of Asian businessmen, sought refuge from the business world in the company of exotic Asian women who reinforced their sense of masculinity and dominance, and (d) a lower-status establishment featuring Western tourists, backpackers, and other types of travelers.
She was fortunate to straddle the financial crisis of 2008 and to see how the crash of Western economies, especially in relation to the East, where Asian currencies were unaffected and rose financially, repositioned these nations in relation to each other. She then describes how international economic relations played out in the interpersonal, sexual, and physical exchanges in these hostess bars. In the highest-status bar, clients preferred girls who featured a sophisticated pan-Asian look and modern demeanor, helping them forge connections in the financial world. These hostesses were most likely to undergo cosmetic surgery to build their nose bridges, narrow their nostrils, and achieve the double eyelid, while lightening their skin with expensive cosmetics and dieting so radically that they sometimes ate only one meal a day of noodles and one egg. The hostesses serving Viet Kieus enacted a postcolonial, global demeanor, stressing the material and cultural relations of desire. Male performances of masculinity and women’s embodied performances of femininity hinged on their structural location within these intersections of race, nation, class, gender, and sexuality. Women presented themselves as nostalgic cosmopolitan subjects, seeking the nose and eyelid surgeries but also chasing a range of highly expensive material goods as gifts from their clients, including cars, houses, and designer clothing and handbags. Women at the third and fourth bars were more apt to affirm Western dominance, to portray themselves as needy and ensconced in Third World rural poverty, to get breast augmentations, and to racialize their bodies to exaggerate their appearance as poor, underprivileged women by sun tanning to darken their skin.
Subsequent chapters address the behavior of mommies, the moral codes of hostess bars, the autonomy of hostesses (who were never exploited, trafficked, or forced to have sex with customers), and the career trajectories of sex workers. Geared toward an academic audience, it would nonetheless make an exciting book for students and intelligent lay readers. Its combination of ethnographic description, historical significance, elaboration of the rituals of Asian courtesanship, and connection of broad historical and economic trends with interpersonal relations and sexual performances make this a deeply enjoyable book.
Together these works add new vibrancy to the literature on the relationship between global sex work, travel, and business. We gain insight into local cultures of eroticism and the performance of masculinity/femininity within raced, classed, and internationalized settings. Although consciousness has been elevated about the pervasiveness of sex trafficking, these works remind us that consensual sex work is still an accepted part of many cultures and a route out of poverty for many, although that is problematized by the culture of consumption imbuing these scenes and the physical and emotional toll the lifestyle presents for some of their inhabitants.