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Keerim Kim completed Assignment 10

In her essay, Amelia Cabezas focuses on the sexual industry of Carribbean region, especially Cuba and Dominican Republic. She starts off her essay by explaining the historical background of each country, as how sex became tied into their economic and social processes. According to the article, more than 500 years, sexual labor of women in the region was justified. As becoming one of the prominent regions of tourism, both Cuba and Dominican Republic developed their sexual identities in different sectors. Sex industry became their biggest social and economic outcomes, so there were strong links between tourism and sex. Some critiques argue that people of sex tourism is a form of victimization. Cabezas introduces specific terms as jineterismo, jineteras, sanky pankys, pingueroes, etc. Those gendered terms indicate the region’s mass tourism linked to sex trades. Tourist-oriented prostitution gave opportunities to such people to seek for love, money, romance and even marriage or migration after. Cabezas also argues that there are racial, class, gendered backgrounds behind. There were occupational segregation between races, and physical characteristics of sex workers mattered. Someone with lighter skin and with socioeconomic class was not considered as sex worker or sex tourist. Therefore, the exact criteria of definition are very ambiguous and vague. In both countries, prostitution is not illegal but the state had been suggesting such groups of women as ‘dangerous’ of suspect. Women in more privileged conditions didn’t get targeted, whereas women that are dark-skinned and had more connections with tourists were defined as having ‘questionable morality’ and got verbally abused, beaten, robbed and eventually put incarcerated. While Cabezas emphasizes “sexual citizenship,” she argues that sufferings of women outside the heteronormativity. Cuban women workers were seen to represent defilement of national pride, whereas male sex workers were treated as powerful extension of Cuban identity. However, Cabezas argues sexual rights for all women and full participations as citizens, not just those who are sexual outlaws.