Freelancers, Temporary Wives, and Beach-Boys: Researching Sex Work in the Caribbean Kamala Kempadoo F E Abstract M I N I S T This article presents insights from a research project on sex work that took place R E in the Caribbean region during 1997–8. First it briey summarizes common themes V I E W in historical and contemporary studies of sex work in the region, then describes N O the aims, methodology, and main trends of the project. It pays particular attention 6 7 , to the differences between denitions and experiences of sex work by female and S P R I male sex workers and of male and female sex tourists, as well as describing con- N G 2 ditions in the Caribbean sex trade. Finally the article identies some implications 0 0 1 of the complexity in the region that were uncovered through the research project , P P . for feminist theorizing about sex work. 3 9 – 6 2 Keywords Caribbean; feminist research; male prostitution; female prostitution; sex tourism; international relations Introduction Until recently sex work, prostitution, and the wider sex trade in the Caribbean has commanded little attention from social scientists, researchers or activists – even among those concerned with gender relations – despite its long history and embeddedness in Caribbean societies. In this article I present insights that draw from a recent research project that took place in a number of English, Dutch, and Spanish-speak- ing territories in the region that attempted to ll this lacunae. The project, which involved a team of Caribbean, British, and North American-based researchers, women’s, human rights, and sex worker organizations as well as individual sex workers, was one of the rst region-wide efforts to produce knowledge about a part of Caribbean society that is so tightly interwoven with gendered, economic, and international relations yet has been sorely neglected in social studies. In the following I rst briey review the common themes and treatment of 39 Feminist Review ISSN 0141-7789 print/ISSN 1466-4380 online © Feminist Review Collective http://www.tandf.co.uk/journals 1 0 0 prostitution in historical and contemporary studies of the region that 2 G formed the backdrop for the project. I then present the aims, methodol- N I R P S ogy, and main trends in the research. A central conceptualization of prosti- , 7 6 tution in the region that emerged was of sex work as an activity that O N provides material benets, shaped and given meaning by broader gen- W E I V dered, racialized, and economic patterns and relations. In addition, with E R T the research indicating that prostitution was not exclusive to women’s S I N I activities, but rather was also shared by men in the region, it was found M E F that the global location of the Caribbean as a service center and play- ground for wealthier nations and peoples has positioned both Caribbean women and men as sex workers, reinforcing not only global gendered inequalities but also long-standing patterns of dominance and subordi- nation between the North and the South. I discuss these and other trends in greater detail. Finally, I identify some implications of the complexity in the region that was uncovered by the research for feminist theorizing about prostitution and sex work. Earlier studies of Caribbean sex work Despite the earlier work undertaken by Jamaican anthropologist Fernando Henriques on prostitution in the Americas (1965), no extensive study has been made on the subject in Caribbean history. Nevertheless, the references to sex work that do exist indicate that it was an integral part of the region’s past, inextricably tied to colonialism and the power and control exerted by European men over Black women, and stood at the nexus of at least two areas of women’s existence – as an extension of sexual relations (forced or otherwise) with (white) men, and as labor (Kalm, 1975; Del Omo, 1979; Martins, 1984; Beckles, 1989; Morrissey, 1989; Bush, 1990). Since the 1960s, reecting the concerns expressed by Frantz Fanon (1963) about the region becoming ‘the brothel of Europe’ due to the neocolonial relationships established through the emerging global tourism industry, various studies have focused on the interplay of prostitution with tourism in such countries as Barbados, Jamaica, the Dominican Republic, and Cuba (Press, 1978; Karch and Dann, 1981; Pruitt and LaFont, 1995; Díaz et al., 1996; Fusco, 1996; O’Connell Davidson 1996; O’Connell Davidson and Sanchez Taylor, 1996a, 1996b; de Albuquerque, 1998; Cabezas, 1998a). Within this focus, the involvement of both men and children has also drawn attention. The trafcking of women both internationally and regionally has been another important issue, addressed primarily by feminist researchers, prompted in the rst instance by an analysis of prostitution as violence towards women (Cavalcanti et al., 1986; Imbert Brugal, 1991). Trafcking 40 K A was also the topic of several conferences in the region, among them the M A L Caribbean Conference on Prostitution held in Bonaire in 1978, and two A K E held in the Dominican Republic in December 1996 and June 1998. Much M P A D of the recent work done on the issue of trafcking was developed in the O – context of an international investigation on trafcking, forced labor and R E S E slavery-like practices that was commissioned by the UN special rapporteur A R C on Violence Against Women (Azize Vargas and Kempadoo, 1996). The H I N G research project clearly indicated that while prostitution involved many S E X violent and coercive practices for women, it was also being experienced W O R and dened as a labor issue (Wijers and Lap-Chew, 1997). K I N T The HIV/AIDS pandemic, and the fact that countries such as Haiti and H E C Guyana were experiencing some of the highest rates of infection in the A R I B western hemisphere prompted several studies in the early 1990s among the B E A ‘vectors’ of the disease. Given that the transmission in the region was N identied as primarily heterosexual, prostitutes were identied as an important group, with studies being carried out, most often under the aus- pices of governmental health departments or Pan American Health Organization (PAHO) programs, in countries such as Suriname, Belize, the Dominican Republic, Jamaica, Puerto Rico, and Guyana (see, for example, Terborg, 1990a, 1990b; Carter et al., 1997; Kane, 1993, 1998; Alegría et al., 1994a, 1994b; COIN, 1994; O’Caroll-Barahona et al., 1994; De Moya and Garcia, 1996; Jamaican Ministry of Health, 1996; Cannings and Rosenzweig, 1997). Finally, studies in the 1990s – in Curaçao (Kempadoo, 1994), Barbados (Paul, 1997), and the Dominican Republic (Brennan, 1998; Cabezas, 1998b) – have focused on the general living and working conditions, rights, and perspectives of sex workers. Within these studies, issues of migration within the region and between the Caribbean and Europe and North America were highlighted, as well as the role of the global economy in structuring the local practices. A report on the rst sex workers confer- ence in the Dominican Republic is one of the few publications that pre- sents extensive analyses and testimonies by sex workers themselves (COIN, 1996). The focus in the majority of these studies – on sexually transmitted dis- eases, forced prostitution, child prostitution and sex tourism – emphasizes the social problems associated with the sex trade, and in doing so unwit- tingly reinforces notions of prostitution as a social evil or disease. It also, for a large part, obscures other dimensions of the everyday lives of female and male sex workers in the region, such as their own agency and subjec- tivity, their roles as mothers or providers for the family, and their hopes and aspirations, with the consequence that whole arenas of social life have 41 1 0 0 been overlooked. This is indeed strange, given that within the Caribbean 2 G arts – literature, theatre, and music – and in everyday story-telling and N I R P S anecdotes, prostitutes are invariably portrayed as an integral part of village , 7 6 and town life. There can be little doubt to anyone familiar with the region O N that widespread common knowledge and experience with sex work is a W E I V part of Caribbean history and contemporary society, yet this is barely E R T reected in academic studies. Part of the aim of the research project was, S I N I therefore, to produce studies that would neither pathologize nor condemn M E F working women and men for taking up prostitution to make a living, but would instead critically examine the sex trade, foregrounding sex worker experiences and perspectives. The project methodology The project was born out of a specic concern among Latin American and Caribbean feminists about the rapidity and ease with which ‘sex tourism’ was becoming embedded in Caribbean societies in the mid-1990s, par- ticularly in Cuba. We realized that this new development was not isolated from a sex trade that had existed in the region for several centuries or from international racialized and gendered divisions of labor and power and the new recolonizations that were occurring through globalization (Bolles, 1992; Carty, 1994; Kempadoo 1994). Nevertheless, it was not until Gladys Acosta Vargas, who at the time was attached to the Instituto Latinoamer- icano de Servicios Legales Alternativos (ILSA) in Bogota, Colombia invited Elena Díaz, director of the Facultad Latinoamericana de Ciencias Sociales Program (FLACSO) at the University of Havana, Cuba, and myself in late 1995 to address the issue together, that an initiative was taken to conduct a collaborative region-wide research project on the contemporary sex trade in the Caribbean.