Racialized Sexualities Within the Romance Tour Industry: the Influence of Affect and Emotion Upon Transnational Hierarchies of Desire Julia H
Total Page:16
File Type:pdf, Size:1020Kb
Florida International University FIU Digital Commons FIU Electronic Theses and Dissertations University Graduate School 6-24-2014 Racialized Sexualities within the Romance Tour Industry: the Influence of Affect and Emotion Upon Transnational Hierarchies of Desire Julia H. Meszaros Florida International University, [email protected] DOI: 10.25148/etd.FI14071123 Follow this and additional works at: https://digitalcommons.fiu.edu/etd Recommended Citation Meszaros, Julia H., "Racialized Sexualities within the Romance Tour Industry: the Influence of Affect and Emotion Upon Transnational Hierarchies of Desire" (2014). FIU Electronic Theses and Dissertations. 1458. https://digitalcommons.fiu.edu/etd/1458 This work is brought to you for free and open access by the University Graduate School at FIU Digital Commons. It has been accepted for inclusion in FIU Electronic Theses and Dissertations by an authorized administrator of FIU Digital Commons. For more information, please contact [email protected]. FLORIDA INTERNATIONAL UNIVERSITY Miami, Florida RACIALIZED SEXUALITIES WITHIN THE ROMANCE TOUR INDUSTRY: THE INFLUENCE OF AFFECT AND EMOTION UPON TRANSNATIONAL HIERARCHIES OF DESIRE A dissertation submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY in GLOBAL AND SOCIOCULTURAL STUDIES by Julia Meszaros 2014 To: Interim Dean Michael R. Heithaus College of Arts and Sciences This dissertation, written by Julia Meszaros, and entitled Racialized Sexualities within the Romance Tour Industry: the Influence of Affect and Emotion Upon Transnational Hierarchies of Desire, having been approved in respect to style and intellectual content, is referred to you for judgment. We have read this dissertation and recommend that it be approved. _______________________________________ Alexandra Diallo _______________________________________ Jean Rahier _______________________________________ Percy Hintzen _______________________________________ Caroline Faria _______________________________________ Vrushali Patil, Major Professor Date of Defense: June 24, 2014 The dissertation of Julia Meszaros is approved. _______________________________________ Interim Dean Michael R. Heithaus College of Arts and Sciences _______________________________________ Dean Lakshmi N. Reddi University Graduate School Florida International University, 2014 ii © Copyright 2014 by Julia Meszaros All rights reserved. iii DEDICATION I dedicate my dissertation to my supportive parents and my academic inspiration, Victoria Jean Bertics, may she rest in peace. iv ACKNOWLEDGMENTS I wish to acknowledge the unwavering support of my family, friends, colleagues, and professors, who all made the completion of this dissertation possible. Their tireless work and feedback inspired me to continue along this arduous process, and inspired me to create a work that I believe is truly a contribution to existing scholarship. I would like to extend a large amount of gratitude to my advisor and chair, Dr. Vrushali Patil, for her continuing support and feedback throughout my entire dissertation process. Dr. Patil has been an integral part of my dissertation project since its inception, and I am eternally grateful to her for helping to situate my project within a larger transnational feminist framework. I am also indebted to Dr. Caroline Faria for continually providing me with extensive feedback and a generous amount of personal support throughout the entire dissertation process. Dr. Percy Hintzen played an important role in developing my theoretical framework, and he continuously provides me with a vision of what a lifelong scholar looks like. Dr. Jean Rahier has also provided me with important insights into ethnographic fieldwork and the complex ways in which critical tourism frames my work. Dr. Alexandra Diallo has also provided me with important and integral feedback throughout my entire dissertation process. In addition to the support of my committee at FIU, I would like to thank Dr. KumKum Sangari at University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee for inspiring the choice of my topic and Dr. Michael Kimmel at the State University of New York-Stonybrook for his invaluable feedback on my project. In addition to my academic support network, I want to extend an immense amount of gratitude to the owners and employees of A Foreign Affair, who generously allowed me to observe their company’s tours in any site that I chose. I especially want to thank v John Adams for his support of my research and his belief in my objectivity as a researcher. Without the support of John and his employees, this research project would have never been completed. In addition to John, I would like to thank Katherine Orrego Jimenez, Diana Salazar, Laura Causado, Robie Jean Mante Socos, Zzel Heyrana, Natalia Komorova, and Helen Roldan-Cayanong. These employees (and former employees) of A Foreign Affair provided me with invaluable insights into the romance tour industry, as well as referred me to potential women interviewees. I want to also take a moment to extend my eternal gratitude to all of the men and women I interviewed during my fieldwork process; I cannot name them here, as I have promised to protect their anonymity. Without their participation, this project would not exist. I also want to acknowledge the generous financial support I have received throughout my entire dissertation process from Florida International University. I am especially grateful for the Doctoral Evidence Acquisition Grant and the Dissertation Year Fellowship from the University Graduate School at FIU. My transnational fieldwork in Ukraine, Colombia, and the Philippines was made possible with this generous financial support. Without the generous support of FIU as an institution, I would not have been able to undertake such an ambitious research project. In terms of personal expressions of gratitude, this dissertation would not be possible without the unwavering support of Csilla Meszaros and Attila Meszaros. vi ABSTRACT OF THE DISSERTATION RACIALIZED SEXUALITIES WITHIN THE ROMANCE TOUR INDUSTRY: THE INFLUENCE OF AFFECTS AND EMOTIONS UPON TRANSNATIONAL HIERARCHIES OF DESIRE by Julia Meszaros Florida International University, 2014 Miami, Florida Professor Vrushali Patil, Major Professor Online international introduction sites that offer romance tours to American men in search of a foreign bride are an important and rapidly growing component of the internet dating industry; the number of these agencies in the U.S. tripled from two hundred to six hundred in the past 10 years. Previous scholars have examined the so-called ‘mail order bride’ industry in order to demonstrate that the women involved are agents and not victims. Many scholars have also highlighted the importance of race in shaping American men’s desires in one particular region or country. My dissertation provides an important addition to the literature surrounding romance tourism by including participants from all three major regions associated with romance tourism: Eastern Europe, South America, and Southeast Asia. I collected the data for the dissertation by becoming a participant observer of a romance tour in Ukraine, Colombia, and the Philippines. I argue that romance tourism is an important example of the global intimate, and the ways in which globalized processes are created and sustained through everyday intimate emotions and interactions. By examining the ways in which the emotions of desire, disgust, and anxiety vii influence individual romance tour participant’s constructions of racialized hierarchies, the links between individual emotions and global systems are revealed. The concept of the global intimate challenges the hierarchy of scale that places the body, the home, and the intimate on a much lower level than the scale of the global or the national, and at the same time challenges the binary that divides the individual from the global. Through highlighting the different emotional negotiations that are constantly occurring in the romance tour industry, I highlight the important ways in which individual emotions and affects influence global processes on a large scale and vice versa. viii TABLE OF CONTENTS CHAPTER PAGE Chapter I: Introduction ........................................................................................................ 1 Why Tourism? ................................................................................................................ 3 Romance Tourism ....................................................................................................... 5 Chapter Summaries ......................................................................................................... 9 Chapter II: Theory and Methods ....................................................................................... 13 The Global Intimate ...................................................................................................... 15 Methods......................................................................................................................... 26 Global Ethnography .................................................................................................. 29 Chapter III: Colonial Genealogies and Legacies of Intimate Tourism ............................. 41 Ukraine .......................................................................................................................... 42 Development of Intimate Tourism ............................................................................ 45 Philippines....................................................................................................................