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Assignment 10

In her article Between Love and Money: Sex, Tourism, and Citizenship, Amelia Cabezas utilizes her fieldwork with women who have participated in the sex trade in the Dominican Republic and Cuba to help define sexual citizenship within these Caribbean countries. Women (and men) practice what she calls “sex tourism”, basically a form of prostitution in which they rely on relationships with tourists from other countries to earn a living. (Often, Cubans and Dominicans seek other opportunities besides money: gifts, travel, and even marriage and migration.) Cabezas describes how these countries’ economic and social moralities have almost circled around sexual practices, a labor force that has generated much capital for their lower-class citizens. How the Cuban and Dominican Republic governments perceive citizenship is based upon heteronormative ideologies, which include hierarchies of gender, class and skin color. Gendered sexual practices affect nationalist pride; where women hurt the country’s pride by “eroding patriarchy” and men influence a powerful national identity.

Ironically, the legal systems pertaining to prostitution and selling one’s sexual practices are not explicitly laid out. Even so, the states have drawn lines between prostitution and a “sex worker”, and they regulate heterosexual activity in heavy tourist areas. These regulations are often based on class and color. In Cuba, where prostitution is not illegal, women are criminalized and often put through rehabilitation for merely walking the streets alone at night and therefore being a “threat” to societal normality. What is most ironic, however, is that while heterosexual women and their heteronormative sexual behaviors are condemned by the state, women’s sexual rights have not even been established in the legal system. According to Hubbard, not having sexual rights and rights over their bodies makes women “partial citizens”. Further, through the state (in both Cuba and the DR), promiscuous sexual acts by nonheteronormative women are not legally recognized at all. There are no legal ways of disciplining these women – no rehabilitation, no mass incriminations. Cabezas argues that without recognition of the citizenship of all women in “sex tourism”, there is no way to challenge the mechanisms that are used to police and discipline women in Cuba and the Dominican Republic.