Mobile orientations: An autoethnography of Tunisian professional boyfriends

Introduction

‘In my life I have two things. The first is my mother. The second is Europe. If this year I am not going to Europe I’ll kill myself.’ That’s how the filmed interview with Ahmed began, on the rooftop terrace of the apartment he had rented to perform love for Ivana, his female tourist client at the time. I was quite surprised by this inception. Ahmed was a very assertive and vital 21-year-old man. He had not given me the impression of being desperate. Far from it. He was one of the charismatic leaders of the Tourist Shop Boys, a phrase I invented to refer to a group of young men working on commission for a tourist souvenir shop at the entrance of the medina of Sousse. The intimate space of the filmed interview and our relationship of trust gave Ahmed the opportunity to reveal something else about himself. That afternoon, by letting himself bare in front of me he wanted to show me the commodified terms of his intimate labour and the affective and embodied means of production powering it.

The situation was quite awkward. Ivana, the 30-year-old Czech female tourist Karim was working with at the time, was talking to her friend just a few metres away. The terrace was adjacent to the flat and her 5-year-old daughter was playing around us. Neither spoke English much and the terrace was huge. We sat at the other end of it, Karim facing the fading sun. After I finished positioning the camera he took his top off, saying jokingly ‘sweet boy, good boy, 100% American style!’ – a self-advertising courting routine he used to attract potential tourist girlfriends. It produced the desired effect, or rather the desiring affect required; female tourists started smiling and stopped walking by. Ahmed knew exactly how to mobilize beauty according to the racialized and sexualized canons affecting the tourist intimate economy he was working in (Rivers Moore, 2013). By strategically performing his looks to attract tourists, he was working in his favour the geopolitical, racialized and sexualized terms of the colonial (and postcolonial) desire powering the Tunisian tourist sex industry (Young, 1995).

Methodology

My first Tunisian holiday became the first of three different periods of observation of the average duration of three weeks, that took place between 2003 and 2005, in between which I kept regularly in touch via telephone, email and MSN messenger with Ahmed and Bilal, a 19 year old friend of Karim who was also working as a Tourist Shop Boy. Although they were the two main protagonists of my ethnographic observation in Sousse, this included conversations and observations with at least 15 more young men, whom I met through the Tourist Shop Boys and during my life as a participant observer in Sousse’s tourist intimate economy. The sensuous and affective atmosphere permeating the intimate industry prompted me to take visual as well as written ethnographic notes, which I subsequently edited into a short experimental documentary that ended up being named ‘Mother Europe’.

As my subjectivity became a central methodological tool within my research on the relationship between migration and the global sex industry I decided to write this article in the format of an autoethnography: a writing and research approach that systematically explores the personal experience of the researcher to understand and analyse wider social, cultural and political meanings and understandings (Ellis and Bochner, 2006). More specifically, following Denshire and Lee (2013: 11) I operationalize autoethnography as a strategic assemblage of modes of representation (interviews, ethnographic observation, documentary filmmaking) in order to ‘foreground, through juxtaposing multiple accounts one against the other, an uneasy, unstable relationship between the writer and the self she writes about.’ The article will also analyse the ways in which stylistic and editing choices emerged and evolved in the context of my ethnographic filmmaking in relation to ongoing post-fieldwork reflections. Coherently with its autoethnographic approach, the article will be structured mainly around the narrative unfolding of the encounters, relationships and events through which knowledge happened and developed in the field, rather than through thematic sections and subsections.

The participant observation of Ahmed’s everyday life will be the main red thread of this article, which will present an autoethnographic account of young men working as ‘professional boyfriends’ in the tourist intimate industry in Sousse. The term ‘professional boyfriend’ draws from Heidi Hoefinger’s work (2011) on the plurality of emotional and economic relations through which ‘professional girlfriends’ working in the tourist sex industry in Cambodia participate in the mobilities, lifestyles and socio-economic inequalities engendered by globalized neoliberalism. Building on her work, I will introduce the term ‘professional fiancé’ to focus on the way Tourist Shop Boys produced performances of love that aimed primarily to obtain access to international mobility through marriage. Following Boris and Parreñas (2011), I will analyse how their aspiration to become male spouses shapes the material, affective, psychological, and embodied dimensions characterizing their ‘intimate labour’. Against the automatic extension of the assumed structural exploitation of local women producing such labour to their male colleagues (Sanchez Taylor, 2006), I will show how Tunisian professional boyfriends try to navigate in their favour the commodified terms of successful selfhood engendered by the global onset of the neoliberal ontology.

Ahmed and the Tourist Shop Boys

The first time I saw Ahmed he was trying to send tourists the right hooking code as they were passing in front of the shop. The hooking had to happen fast, as the flocks of tourists only stayed in the sensuous catchment area of the shop for about a minute. It took place in the ‘affective atmosphere’ of the medina, which is characterized by transactionality and connectedness (Anderson, 2009). From a post-human perspective, affect has been seen as a strategic concept to understand the ‘pre-personal’ way in which energy and other intensities can orient bodies, objects and subjects bypassing socially embedded emotions and subjectivities (Massoumi, 2002). However, the supposed ‘subjectless’ nature of affect has been successfully problematized by underlining how the transmission of such intensities can only work by being reinscribed within and between subjects through ‘affective practices’ that are socially rooted (Wetherell, 2013). It is in the context of socially embedded practices within which affect ‘makes sense’ that the concept will be used in this article.

I began fieldwork by going to the shop and drinking tea at the adjacent café almost every day after the beach and rapidly became acquainted with most of the group. There was a lot of empty time, particularly during the day, to talk and be together. I was intrigued about their selling techniques and about their assemblage of ‘hip’ sportswear; a form of ‘conspicuous consumption’ (Veblen, 1899) expressing their aspiration to globalized and commodified youth lifestyles. Nothing extraordinary. The usual corporate retail suspects making up the wardrobe of the average global teenager, but at an unusually high concentration. Virtually each item of clothing was ‘hip’ and Ahmed was particularly excessive within that repertoire – 100% American style indeed. Looking at him all geared up while flirting with the tourists transiting in front of the shop I was reminded of Michael Taussig's notion of mimesis as a sensuous capacity to ‘copy, imitate, make models, explore difference, yield into and become Other’ (1993: 233).

Taussig’s analysis of the way in which western images, goods and symbols enter the cosmology of previously separate cultures is useful to understand how young migrants become a version of themselves endowed with new powers and ways of being by participating in globalized and commodified youth material culture. By referring to the notion of becoming I emphasize the way the work of post-humanist French philosophers Deleuze and Guattari offers opportunities to address the affective, material and corporeal dimensions and the everyday affective practices through which young people’s gendered and sexed subjectivities emerge. By wearing Adidas vests and Nike trainers the Tourist Shop Boys were ‘becoming young’ according to new commodified and globalized youth lifestyles, which they accessed by working in the tourist intimate industry and by migrating.

‘If I work as a mechanic, after a day’s work I go home, have a shower and sleep’, Ahmed told me once. ‘But after my work at the shop, I go to hotels, nice cafes, to drink something nice … I like it more. I don’t like going to bed at 8 p.m.’. Performing love to tourists was not about survival. Their day job at the shop and the sacrifices made by their parents guarantee that. Through their intimate labour professional boyfriends complement and supersede the aspirations to social mobility of their parents, who had migrated from the interior to the more affluent coastal areas in the 1960s. By living with tourists and by participating in the intimate economy and material culture surrounding tourism young men enter liminal’ tourist ‘third spaces’ where they can inhabit the individualized subjectivities and commodified lifestyles they aspire to, while supporting their families according to their traditional roles of male sons (Law, 2000: 44).

Tunisia is a strategic case study for the study of the emergence of intimate forms of labour as tourism has impacted very forcefully on the socio-economic and cultural dimensions of people’s lives. The active state-sponsored development of mass tourism since the 1960s has been a major axis of modernization in Tunisia, which has exacerbated the socio-economic differential between the coastal areas and the interior. By moving from the interior of the country to informal settlement areas at the periphery of Sousse the parents of the Tourist Shop Boys had already responded to the ‘differentiated mobilities’ – the unequal access to connectedness, flows and movements – that had been instituted by tourism-led modernization since the 1960s (Massey, 1994). Most of them still worked at the lower-skilled levels of the tourist industry, as cleaners, porters, gardeners. Others, like Ahmed’s father, were working in the tourist-led construction business. By moving to Sousse they were able to support their families. However, the earnings coming from the ‘modern’ labour of parents could not even compare with the those resulting from the ‘late modern’ intimate labour of their sons, whose livelihoods were embedded in the globalization of the neoliberal service economy and its ‘commodification of intimacy’, a phrase referring to the ways in which ‘intimacy or intimate relations can be treated, understood and thought of as if they entered the market’ (Constable, 2009).

Fucking tourirists: Doing intimate labour

‘Our job? I guess we are businessmen’ – said Bilal, the youngest member of the group in front of the camera. He sat next to Ahmed on the balcony of the tourist villa I rented in the beachside outskirts of Sousse. I had invited them both for a joint video interview for the documentary I decided to make. ‘Businessmen? No way! We are sellers!’ – objected Ahmed. By refusing to describe himself as businessman Ahmed was trying to avoid the stigma associated with the practice of bezness. The Tunisian term bezness results from the merging of the French verb for ‘fucking’ – baiser – with the word ‘business’. It is currently used to stigmatize young men sleeping with tourists for financial and other gains.

The Tourist Shop Boys responded to this negative stigmatization by producing a countering stereotype of cheap and sex-oriented tourists: Tourirists. ‘There are no tourists here in Sousse. Only fucking tourirists. 5 million people come to Tunisia each year, looking for sex and sunshine. They don't do any shopping. They buy nothing’ Ahmed once told me. ‘What’s the difference between tourists and tourirists?’ I had to ask. ‘Real tourists spend money. They go to the restaurant, buy stuff. They give. Tourirists are cheap. They stay in their all-inclusive hotels and are only interested in sex. They come here for the Tunisian banana. We call them tourirists because to us they are like terrorists; they destroy everything for us’. That’s how ‘Fucking Tourirists’ became the working title of the second movie of my Sex Work Trilogy². The title was inspired by Glen Bowman’s seminal essay on the relations between Palestinian men and foreign female tourists and on the way they inverted the geopolitical and symbolic relations of power between themselves and western men by fucking ‘their’ women (Bowman, 1989). I thought that the appropriation of the Islamophobic terrorist stereotype to strike back at the impact of ‘cheap’ and ‘sex-focused’ tourism from the global north was a forceful way to counter the stigma associated to bezness in Tunisia.

In the first version of the film, I superimposed my tourist videos of Sousse’s medina and beaches on a faded version – to protect his identity – of Ahmed’s video interview. In doing so I wanted to capture the way his narrative self-representation was embedded within the commodified material and intimate environment of the tourist industry. ‘I sell everything tourists wants!’ he told me half jokingly one day, with a cheeky grin hinting more at his evening job than at his day job at the tourist shop. But it is the more intimate and desperate reappraisal of the commodified relational territory Ahmed was rooted in that captured my attention as our relationship developed. On the balcony that night, when he let himself bare in front of me, Ahmed’s seductive buoyancy in the face of his peers had gone. As the sun set on the Sousse medina, Ahmed let me know about the intimate-economic pressure he was under.

‘I don’t have a father anymore’ – he continued – ‘he spends 2,000 … 3,000 … 4,000 dinars playing cards every night. If my mother asks me to do something, I’ll do it. But I will not do anything my father asks. I do nothing for him.’ I guessed he lost his father the moment he had to pay for his gambling debts, but I did not know what to say. So I said nothing. Ahmed continued. ‘My mother wants me to stay in Tunisia. She needs everything. She needs me; she needs money. Only I give money for my family.’ ‘What happens if you are not able to give money?’ I asked. ‘They tell me to leave. I don’t care because I have lots of friends and girlfriends, Tunisian girlfriends … I have a Tunisian girlfriend and she gives me money everyday. Because she loves me very much.’ It was the first time he talked about her and that he mentioned love outside of the context of his work as professional boyfriend. I was intrigued about his straightforward association of love and money, so I tried to find out more about it.

‘Do you love your Tunisian girlfriend?’ I asked him. His answer made me understand how deeply the economic pressures he was under had pervaded his intimate world. ‘No, I don’t love anybody. Not even myself. I love only one thing, my mother. She is something special for me. I live now with tourists without this (he points to his heart). It’s now with my mother. She keeps it clean for me. Everything I do is for my mother, Ahmed said. He still had a faint smile on his face but the tone of his voice was affecting us both with deep sadness. He continued: ‘in the last month I could not give anything to my family. We have arguments all the time because of this. I spent 135,000 dinars … For this work …’ He looked away at the flat. To make sure he could not be heard. He continued: ‘… for these 20 days. 65,000 dinars for the flat, then for the food, the drinks, everything. You need to do all this if you want it to work. The plan. But the day I get the papers, I will stop all of this. I will leave her and go, directly’, he said with a shine in his eyes, his voice now lightening up.

‘How does the plan work?’ I asked. Ahmed explained that in order to be seen as a ‘good man’ he had to give the European woman a good ‘impression of love’. Being a ‘good man’ meant being able to provide a credible performance of a viable (and marriable) breadwinner. This included paying for the flat and the food while she was visiting, going to work during the day, strategically refusing gifts and ‘going Dutch’ with money in order to perform love in accordance to the separation between the economic and the intimate dimensions characterizing their tourist partners’ cultural constructions of romantic love (Hoefinger, 2011).

‘You have to introduce her to your family’, Ahmed added. ‘I took her home to meet my mother last week, but she refused to talk to her. My mother does not want me to do this. Ivana is not the first tourist I bring home like this, you know …’ But the key activity for a successful ‘impression of love’ is the abundant provision of sex, which was presented as an indispensable trust-building device by all the Tourist Shop Boys. In exchange, what they get is the possibility of having fun and sex in the tourist intimate economy, money transfers to sustain them during the quieter winter months, and a marriage visa, when their love performances are particularly successful. ‘If you want Europe, you have to fuck her everyday. Everyday. That way she’ll know you love her. If you don’t, you are in trouble. I don’t like fucking every day. It’s too much, but it’s important. If you want Europe you have to fuck Europe, and a lot!!’ We laughed, but we had both been affected by his sadness. I could feel it in his voice. Under the weight of so much pressure, so many economic conditions posed to being loved and respected.

While writing about Ahmed’s life trajectory a posteriori, I reflect on Elizabeth Bernstein’s analysis of the way bounded experiences of intimacy, recreational sex and authenticity, such as the so-called ‘girlfriend experience’, are being negotiated in the postindustrial global north, where they emerge within the onset of the service economy (2007: 4–7). Were Ahmed and Ivana involved in a more unequal and transnational version of the dynamics explored in Bernstein’s scholarly work? Was he providing Ivana with an analogous ‘boyfriend experience’? A part of me thought so. That Ahmed was involved in a local declination of these same globalized late modern dynamics. More specifically, he provided his female tourist partners with a strategic ‘fiancé experience’: a bounded performance of love that potentially enabled him to access social and international mobility through marriage. I also thought that most of his female tourist partners implicitly decided to frame this bounded intimate experience through the repertoire of romantic love and marriage to avoid the stigma associated with older women from the global north desiring younger men from the global south (Frohlick, 2009). I was encouraged to think so by the many suspicions I had been witnessing in women’s questionings and by the many times I had seen their understandable doubts set aside by them in the name of ‘love’.

Mobile orientations

‘I have got to get out of here. Europe … or finish. Finish everything’, Ahmed told me on the balcony of the apartment he rented in order to be with Ivana. His migration to Europe was an existential necessity to become who he was. This stance was shared by the other Tourist Shop Boys. Most of them had attempted to reach Italy several times and considered themselves as harragas, a term coming from the Arabic verb harga, meaning ‘to burn’, which refers to young men burning their papers and more generally ‘burning’, that is, yearning, for Europe. Prevailing media and policymaking representations of harragas obfuscate the rationalities and agencies involved in their decision to migrate by focusing on the images of the numerous dead victims caused by the ruthless enforcement of EU borders across the Mediterranean (Nair, 2007). However, Ahmed and the other Tourist Shop Boys saw themselves both as rational risk-takers and brave entrepreneurs. Just like with many other harragas, they felt that staying home would have been equivalent to a social suicide in the face of the impossibility ‘to belong in what is experienced and described as an unjust social order’ (Pandolfo, 2007: 333). By framing themselves as sellers (i.e. economic entrepreneurs) the Tourist Shop Boys were also presenting themselves according to hegemonic neoliberal models of masculinity, which are supposed to be informed by a sense of agency based on rational risk-taking (Marques, 2010).

To understand the agencies and rationalities of the Tourist Shop Boys it is important to contextualize them within the geopolitical, socio-economic and cultural transformations framing the emergence of their migratory subjectivities. These transformations are characterized by the late modern convergence of post-industrialism, globalization, individualization and commodification, which exerted a formidable pressure on established authorities and their socio-economic anchoring. As a result, a growing number of young people and children are subjectified as responsible for the economic and moral survival of their families. This means that their sense of agency is predicated on being able to support their families, who are no longer able to control them and support them as before. The globalization of western consumerist youth culture was involved in the emergence of new individualized and commodified lifestyles in late-modern times. Accessing migration and conspicuous consumption has become a marker of successful selfhood and is endowed with existential and subjectifying qualities (Chu, 2013). The neoliberal ‘social ontology’ monitors individuals according to their success as conspicuous consumers (Winnubst, 2012: 86), which means that people’s sense of self are sanctioned by owning and performing ‘obligatory paraphernalia’ (Bauman, 2004: 84), including access to international mobility, for peers, family and oneself.

To account for the role of materiality and mobility in the emergence of the migratory subjectivities and agencies analysed here, I follow Phillips’ reappraisal of Deleuze and Guattari’s original notion of agencement, which I translate as ‘agencing’, rather than assemblage, to convey its original reference to a heterogeneous and dynamic arrangement enabling a specific experience of becoming (Phillips, 2006). I also refer to Sara Ahmed’s phenomenological notion of ‘orientations’ as specific socio-cultural alignments of objects, narratives, bodies, gender/sex roles and mobilities becoming ‘the space for action of specific subjectivities’ (Ahmed, 2006). In order to allow an adequately complex analysis of migrants’ understandings and experiences of agency, I introduce my own concept of ‘mobile orientations’ referring to how migrants inhabit a desired subjectivity by entering the arrangements of objects, mobilities, discourses and affective practices ‘agencing’ it i.e. providing it with agency. At the centre of the concept of mobile orientations is the awareness that there is no agency preceding the agencing arrangement or vice versa. Rather, mobile orientations are heterogeneous arrangements emerging socially as the agencing context for migratory subjectivities. They are arranged by agencing decisions responding to the socio-economic transformations introduced by the global onset of neoliberal late modernity.

‘In the end it’s very simple. We are all in the same situation, you know?’ Ahmed explained to me on the terrace of his flat that evening. ‘We all want the same thing. We want to move to Europe in the same way as tourists come to Tunisia. To have a normal life, a car, a nice home, have holidays. The difference is that the only way for us to have that is to cross the sea for £2000. Or work with tourist women. There is nothing else for us. If you were born here you would do it too.’ Ahmed pronounced this last sentence as a matter of fact statement. He lit up a cigarette and stared away into the dark landscape behind me. I remained silent for a while, to consider the similarities between our mobile orientations. To register that by engaging in the intimate industry and by accessing international mobility he both accessed and arranged the economic, legal and material resources orienting his life towards the man he wanted to become: a ‘normal’ individualized, conspicuous and successful neoliberal consumer.

While Ahmed was smoking his cigarette, I reflected on the most agencing decisions I took in my life. I thought about the risks I took by going to London for entire summers in order to ‘live a gay life’ right in the middle of the HIV epidemics. I was not alone in this; I was part of a peer group of Italian late teenagers who were equally trying to find themselves by participating in the vibrant clubbing and musical scene of the late 1980s. Our migration to London was part of a wider ‘cultural formation’, an articulation of cultural and social practices through which we were trying to become who we were (Grossberg, 1992). Whenever we had sex, we felt that we were gambling with our lives, even through we tried to stay as safe as possible. The absence of an effective treatment against AIDS engendered an almost paralysing fear. But ‘almost’ is the key word here, because in the end we did not renounce living what we thought our life was about, and came back to London summer after summer for several years in order to live the cultural formation we were part of. I felt the grip of that fear a lot, and part of me always will. But it did not override the existential necessity to orient myself towards becoming who I thought I was then.

Conceptualizing mobile orientations as strategic agencing and decisional contexts allows a more complex analysis of migrants’ understandings and experiences of agency and vulnerability within and outside intimate industries. These are embedded within the existential priorities and needs emerging in relation to a dynamic evaluation of ‘past experiences and a desire to achieve some improvement in the future’ (Bastia and McGrath, 2011). Within this dynamic evaluation, the migrant can decide, implicitly or explicitly, to take risks and to endure exploitation and ‘unfreedom’ in order to enter the agencing of objects, narratives, mobilities and gender/sex roles through which she can inhabit a desired subjectivity (O’Connell Davidson, 2013). Whatever it takes.

Dangerous commodifications

As Ahmed continued his narration, I became worried about Ivana. Particularly after I heard more about the details of the plan. Even though I understood the complexity of Ahmed’s mobile orientations and the existential, subjectifying salience of his burning for Europe, a part of me was increasingly aware of the violence that can result from the emergence of commodified intimacies (Wilson, 2004: 99). Having made double sure that she was not listening, Ahmed lowered his voice and told me: ‘she is very sick, you know? The heart. Very bad. She has a doctor appointment in February to know if she makes the operation or not. I want to make marriage and papers before’. He had a clever grin on his face. It was September 2004. I looked at Ivana talking to her friend. They were smoking on the other side of the large terrace. Her little daughter was playing in the large space between us. Bilal kept her busy while we were talking. He was also working, with Ivana’s friend.

It was not the first time I had felt an ethical unease about Tourist Shop Boys’ performances of love to female tourists, but I had never felt the urge to intervene until then. My cultural scripts of love, while not framing it as romantically devoid of instrumentality, do not understand love and its performance as primarily motivated by it. During fieldwork I often sensed that the fact that most tourist women shared cultural scripts of romantic love as detached from economic or sexual interest exposed them to the danger of being manipulated.

I felt both privileged and concerned for having managed to become aware of Ahmed’s plan. I understood the subjectfiying necessity shaping his mobile orientation. I could not help thinking that his behaviour was framed by the impossible situation he was put into by the commodifying pressures exerted by his family, his aspiration to lead a ‘successful’, individualized and ‘normal' (neoliberal) life, the lack of opportunities to sustain his aspiration and his agencing decision to leave Tunisia for Europe. But I was alarmed by the consequences of the multiple forms of commodification he was under, particularly after becoming aware that the love of his parents had become conditional on producing money. The fact that he was counting on Ivana’s heart condition as an easy way out of a love visa arrangement prompted me to think that the process of intimate commodification had become dangerous. That he could no longer see Ivana as a person. I felt that she was in danger and that I should tell her what was going on without betraying my heuristic allegiance to Ahmed.

I was lucky. The opportunity came just a few days later, as we all met for coffee in the city centre. I was supposed to go back to London in a few days. Ahmed received a text about an urgent matter and he disappeared. Suddenly we were left alone. ‘Do you think Ahmed is a good man?’ – Ivana immediately asked. She obviously had her own doubts. Her English was poor, so I struggled to find words and phrases that would be clear but nuanced. ‘He is not a bad man, but life is very difficult for him. He has many problems with money. He wants to change his life. He wants to leave Tunisia. In the end it’s your decision if he is good or not for you.’ I felt a bit too enigmatic and careful. We had very little time before he’d come back. I said it almost in one breath. I was relieved. She looked pensive enough for me to think that she had heard me. I kept reassuring myself by repeating in my head that I had been as fair as I could be, given the circumstances for everyone involved. Everything I said was true. I would have lied if I told her that I believed Ahmed was a bad man. So I didn’t. I guess I had also been put in an impossible situation.

Conclusion: Mother Europe

For Ahmed and the other Tourist Shop Boys getting to Europe is not only a possibility, it is an existential necessity to become successful men according to how they have already been subjectified by the global onset of the neoliberal social ontology. That they risk their lives through dangerous sea crossings is simply a fact. However, addressing their perceived necessity to migrate only in terms of vulnerability and irrationality misses the agentic and existential resonance that the decision to go to Europe has within their mobile orientations, within their sense of self. In a parallel way, framing their decision to work in the intimate tourist industry in terms of their exploitability by older and privileged female tourists does not account for the way in which their intimate labour can challenge and even reverse these initial power relations. At the same time, framing female tourists’ involvement with professional boyfriends in terms of their exploitability by ruthless besness men does not account for the role played by their desiring subjectivities in the context of skilled love performances. The balance between agency and exploitation shaping these relationships is set by the tension between the pressures exerted by neoliberal social transformations on young men’s intimate and economic lives and the ‘cultural scripts of love’ through which female tourist understand their intimate encounters with younger men from the global south (Frohlick, 2009). By framing such encounters in romantic terms to avoid the associated stigma they can become less alert to the potentially dangerous consequences of the pressures to ‘become successful men’ their male Tunisian partners are under.

The mobile orientations of Ahmed and the other Tourist Shop Boys emerged in the context of the intimate economy surrounding the tourist industry in Sousse and in relation to their contradictory subjectification both as individualized neoliberal consumers and as main providers for their families. By performing love as professional boyfriends and fiancés for their female tourist partners they arranged the objects, connections and mobilities composing their mobile orientations towards becoming successful men for themselves, their peers and their families. Their engagement in intimate labour should not be seen as simply maintaining and reflecting socio-economic inequalities, as Boris and Parreñas (2011) observe, but as actually and successfully reversing them on their terms. Their orientation towards material exchange with tourist women is part of a traditional economy of intimacy based on filial obligation that paradoxically, to paraphrase Wilson (2004: 93), makes them inappropriate men in order to be appropriate sons. In this respect, by working as professional boyfriends and fiancés they are renegotiating the ‘modern’ internal migratory trajectories and livelihoods of their parents in a late modern globalized and individualized context characterized by the rise of service and intimate economies. On the other hand, and partially against this scenario of fluid late-modern subjectification and agency, it is important to underline how the violent forms of depersonalization that are engendered by the convergence of these dynamics can translate into equally dangerous forms of intimate labour. In highlighting the way in which intimate labour can be pushed towards exploitative dynamics I do not subscribe to the ‘hostile worlds’ perspective separating a sphere of ‘sentiment and solidarity’ from a sphere of ‘calculation and efficiency’ (Zelizer 2005, 22). On the contrary I want to underline how the inseparable coexistence of sentiment, solidarity, calculation and efficiency characterising intimate labour can sometimes become dangerously polarised into hostile dynamics by the double pressures exerted by the contradictorily commodified demands of both traditional and late modern intimate economies.

Ahmed felt let down by his father, by his family, by his country, and that he had nothing to lose by leaving Tunisia. ‘I wanted to study, to work in tourism but my father said no. He wanted me to study as a mechanic. I said no, so I stopped going to school. And now look at me, I have the worst job in Tunisia’ – Ahmed said while sitting on my balcony next to Bilal. He looked away to the beach, just a hundred meters away. ‘But you get to live a version of the life you want by hanging around tourists, no? And make much more money than if you were a mechanic.’ I prompted him. ‘Yes, but to get money you must spend money. Drinks, cigarettes, going out, clothes. It’s part of work. For tourists. I told you the only way for me is Europe. Europe or nothing’ – Ahmed repeated.

The three of us remained silent for a while. Ahmed and Bilal had to go back to the city center and it was getting late. We shared a taxi into town. I hardly said a word. I was already separating. As the small villas being built for tourists paraded along the road to Sousse I kept thinking about the commodifying pressures he was under. ‘If they ask me for a finger, I give. Normal for me … I give everything to my family’ Ahmed had told me just a few days earlier while sitting on the terrace of the flat he had rented for her, for his project, for his future. I was really struck by the feeling of depersonalization and material dispossession that emerged from Ahmed’s interview. His social role as loyal son supporting his mother clashed against his aspiration to what he called ‘a normal life in Europe’.

I left Tunisia just a few days later. I was looking forward to leaving. I needed to separate from and reflect on what I experienced. Bilal sent me missed calls in the following months. I called him back, sometimes. But that stopped too after a while. Ahmed never did, it was not his style. Gradually, we lost contact. As I edited the video and interview material into the film two years later, I reflected on its focus. I removed the superimposition of Ahmed’s profile and only kept the footage of my tourist camera wandering through the medina and beaches of Sousse. I wanted the film to focus on the commodified environment framing his subjectivity and to emphasize the ambivalent tourist-researcher position I came to occupy in Tunisia. I also decided to concentrate the interview voiceover on Ahmed’s persistent and contradictory allegiance to both his mother and to Europe. On the commodifying conditions posed by both to his sense of worth and belonging. In homage to this subjectifying tension structuring his life, I decided to rename the film Mother Europe.

Epilogue

As I was revising the notes of my Tunisian fieldwork while writing this article I found a post-it with some of the Tourist Shop Boys’ numbers and I was able to trace Ahmed. He made it to Europe by instrumentally marrying a tourist whom he left on the day of the delivery of his passport. No, it was not Ivana. That plan did not work out in the end, but I had nothing to do with it. Apparently she turned up for the marriage in Tunisia but forgot to bring her divorce certificate. Just a few weeks after this ‘accident’, Ahmed met another woman with a ‘better’ passport who wanted to marry him straight away. He is now in a non-instrumental relationship and has a daughter. By working in Europe he managed to repay all of his family’s debts and to build three more floors on top of his parent’s home. Although the last floor is supposed to be for his return, he does not think he will go back and live in Tunisia. ‘You know me, I prefer Europe’ he told me when I last heard from him. So far my mobile orientation has been equally coherent and persistent. Since my late teen years I have worked and lived in several countries within and outside Europe, but I keep coming back to London.