The geographical imaginaries of sex tourism: Gender Campus

The geographical imaginaries of sex tourism

This paper deals with the geographical imaginaries of sex tourists. According to the place, these imaginaries may either eroticize or de‐eroticize local bodies, encounters and landscapes. Male Western sex tourists argue they are frustrated with the women they can meet in their own country, where the emancipation of women has challenged their gendered privileges. They turn to exotic places (which often belong to the former colonial Empires) for female bodies that they fantasize as more erotic and on which they can (still) exercise their white male power, to fulfill their sexual desires. The exotic landscape is in itself aphrodisiac, not only for the sex tourist but for any tourist. This calls for a reconsideration of the classical definition of sex tourism. The geographical imaginaries of sex tourists are similar to those of any tourist. Female and homosexual sex tourists’ imaginaries are somewhat different, but nevertheless rely on the same (neo)colonial base.