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Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2013, 224 pp., $95.00 (hardcover), ISBN-13: 978-0252037931; $28.00 (paperback), ISBN-13: 978-0252079443.
Referred to by some as the “Black Mecca” or “Black Rome,” Salvador da Bahia, Brazil has been a center for Afro-Brazilian cultural tourism since the end of the Brazilian military dictatorship in the mid-1980s (24). Salvador markets itself as a Black city through a celebration of Black culture and history. Whether it’s Black women baianas selling acarajé, or shirtless Black male capoeira fighters, or drummers in Salvador’s historic Black carnaval blocos, the selling of Black culture to tourists in Salvador is impossible without Black people and their bodies. Understanding the selling of Black culture through Black bodies becomes essential in analyzing how sex tourism operates in Salvador. Erica Lorraine Williams’ book Sex Tourism in Bahia: Ambiguous Entanglements deals with the intricate relationships between race and gender as it pertains to sex tourism. Williams’ study results from eighteen months of ethnographic field study done by her between 2005 and 2008. Bringing together the study of race and culture with the study of sex tourism, and drawing on other important works focusing on sex tourism throughout Latin America such as Jafari Allen’s iVenceremos?: The Erotics of Black Self-making in Cuba (2011) and Mark Padilla’s Caribbean Pleasure Industry: Tourism, Sexuality, and AIDS in the Dominican Republic (2007), her book fills in a gap in studies on sex tourism in Brazil, specifically, and globally. The book aims to understand the sex tourism market in Salvador and, as the book’s title aptly expresses, its “ambiguous entanglements” (3). Williams explains this term and its centrality to her project, saying, “Ambiguity comes into play in the context of the globalized tourism industry when sexual relations move beyond mere commercial exchanges to encompass intimate and emotional exchanges as well” (3). With an attempt to paint a picture of sex tourism in Salvador, Williams focuses on instances in which money is exchanged for sexual acts, as well as the ambiguous circumstances that define these complicated exchanges in Bahia.
In Williams’ first two chapters she maps out the geographic and historic backdrop to Salvador’s racialized sexualities and sex tourism market. Chapter one, “Geographies of Blackness,” lays out a physical geography to Salvador and its “touristscape” (23). The chapter navigates the tourist hotspots in Salvador through the understandings of caça-gringas (tourist hunters), Bahian men who strategically place themselves in tourist areas of Salvador in the hopes of “catching” a foreign woman. Through these interracial, transnational engagements, Williams shows the alternative ways in which Black Bahians seek to reap the benefits of a tourist industry that uses their bodies and culture but fails to grant monetary rewards to them. Her second chapter, “Racial Hierarchies of Desire and the Specter of Sex Tourism,” deals with the historical foundations to racialized and sexualized imaginings of women of African descent in Brazil. Utilizing advertising materials from Bahia’s tourist agency Bahiatursa and revisiting concepts imagined by Gilberto Freyre, the inventor of the mythical formulation of a Brazilian racial democracy, Williams highlights the ways in which women of African descent in Bahia, whether they are sex workers or not, are tied to an image of hypersexuality and sexual availability.
Chapters three and four outline perceptions and realities of sex tourists in Salvador. The chapter “Working-Class Kings in Paradise” walks the reader through the complex structures holding up Salvador’s sex tourism industry, and demonstrates the ways in which Italians are seen as the ultimate sex tourist. In this chapter Williams also complicates stereotypes about sex tourists by approaching sex tourists through multiple lenses of identity. For example, by examining the gay African American tourist groups that black gay Bahian tour guide Tiago organizes, Williams challenges cultural tourism that aims at solidarity but also participates in sex tourism. In the following three chapters, Williams analyzes her observations of Aprosba, an organization founded by sex workers in Bahia to combat violence and promote safer sex practices. The chapter “Aprosba: The Politics of Race Sexual Labor and Identification” uses a “transnational feminist and postcolonial framework” (98) through which to understand the activist work that Aprosba puts forth. In addition, Williams illustrates the complex political space that women of African descent occupy as well as the racial and class hierarchies within the organization. Continuing a feminist critique of the intricacies of sex tourism in Bahia, in her next chapter, “Valuing Oneself: Ambiguity, Exploration, and Cosmopolitanism,” Williams asks, “How do ambiguous entanglements in Salvador complicate understandings of how power, agency, and affect circulate transnationally?” (128). The next chapter, “Moral Panic: Sex Tourism, Trafficking, and the Limits of Transnational Mobility,” develops this analysis further and Williams analyzes the ways in which sex tourism is conflated with sex trafficking in Brazil, thereby denying the opportunities it offers Black women for transnational engagement, social mobility, and “cosmopolitanism” (144). Williams is particularly concerned with a critique that both acknowledges the power and sometimes danger at play in sex tourism in Salvador, but also illuminates the ways that sex workers assert their agency through these encounters.
Sex Tourism in Bahia is an extremely necessary intervention in the body of scholarship on sex tourism in Latin America that centers women of African descent. Even though Williams’ work focuses in on sex tourism and sex workers, it consistently emphasizes the ways in which assumed sex work and sexual availability is a key dimension of gendered racism that haunts Black women in Brazil and throughout the African diaspora. Utilizing an important Black feminist critique in the study of sex work, the book also works to “queer” our understanding of sex tourism. Williams “queers” or reframes the methodological approach to sex tourism to take us beyond the simplistic understanding of sex tourism between foreign men and “underprivileged” women to consider the fluidity and complexity of sex and desire. Although the book’s analysis focuses primarily on women and heterosexual sex, the book opens up the field for more studies on other specific kinds of sex tourism such as lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender (LGBT) sex tourism. Focusing on sex tourism in Bahia opens up the field for closer study of specific kinds of sex tourism, such as LGBT sex tourism. Toward the end of the book, Williams predicts the continuous growth of Brazil’s economy. However, following the 2016 impeachment of Brazilian president Dilma Rousseff, and downturn in the Brazilian economy since the 2013 publishing of Sex Tourism in Bahia, one wonders how this affects the lives of sex workers throughout Brazil, and especially in Bahia. Erica Williams’ book provides an important foundation to continue these questions of inquiries into sex tourism in Bahia and throughout Brazil.
