This article identifies a prevalent strand of feminist writing on beauty and aesthetic surgery and explores some of the contradictions and inconsistencies inscribed within it. In particular, we concentrate on three central feminist claims: that living in a misogynist culture produces aesthetic surgery as an issue predominantly concerning women; that pain -both physical and psychic -is a central conceptual frame through which aesthetic surgery should be viewed; and that aesthetic surgery is inherently a normalizing technology. Engaging with these 'myths', we explore the tensions uncovered through a historical analysis of the practices of aesthetic surgery as well as the challenges to feminist claims offered by post-feminism. In particular we seek to destabilize the connection in feminist writing between beauty and passivity. We argue that through aesthetic references to denigrated black and working-class bodies, young women may mobilize aesthetic surgeries to reinscribe active sexuality on the feminine body.keywords aesthetic surgery, beauty, body, class, race In this article we aim to disrupt some of the usual ways in which feminists have come to think about the female (and male) body, in order to find a space between the prevalent discourses for some alternative explanations. Our principal aim is to explore some of the diverse reasons why women (and men) may engage in aesthetic surgery, 1 without relying on the beauty myth as a determining argument. Instead we focus on seekers of aesthetic surgery as either consumers (exercising choice within a given set of constraints) or as reflexively engaged in a project of the self (within a limited range of possible selves). We aim to widen understandings of aesthetic bodily practices to extend beyond gender and/or 'race' in any conventional sense. Furthermore, we aim to decouple the link between beauty and passivity, or at least to decentre it, by positing alternative correlations such as the link between glamour and active sexuality. In doing this we will also uncover some of the ways in which feminist discourses of beauty are inherently classed and 'raced'. However, moving away from a singular explanation -beauty, normalization, internalized racism, for instance -inevitably complicates our argument. In the following sections
This paper argues that the ‘double-standard’ applied to male and female tourists’ sexual behaviour reflects and reproduces weaknesses in existing theoretical and commonsense understandings of gendered power, sexual exploitation, prostitution and sex tourism. It looks at how essentialist constructions of gender and heterosexuality blur understandings of sexual exploitation and victimhood and argues that racialized power should also be considered to explore the boundaries between commercial and non-commercial sex. This paper is based on ethnographic research on sexual–economic exchanges between tourist women and local men and boys in the informal tourist economy in Jamaica and the Dominican Republic.
This paper explores the ways in which cosmetic surgery tourism can be thought of specifically as a tourist experience. We argue that whilst essentially involving travel for the purpose of undertaking painful surgery, cosmetic surgery tourism has a particular resonance with the holiday, most usually constructed as relaxing and restorative. This resonance is connected to the importance in contemporary society of not simply possessing the cultural capital associated with travel knowledge and conspicuous leisure, but of being able to mark that upon and express it through the body. The paper also explores the elements of tourism that seem important to a successful cosmetic surgery tourism experience. These include a sense of place, constituted through cultural and physical proximity or distance, and discursive and physical construction of a destination's particular characteristics-most usually in terms of the idea of 'retreat', care and the 'friendliness' of its people. This is connected to the willingness of a range of staff, from surgeons and nurses
Though increasingly a focus of both political concern and academic research, 'sex tourism' is a difficult term to define. This article presents both quantitative and qualitative data on the sexual behaviour and attitudes of single and/or unaccompanied heterosexual female tourists in the Dominican Republic and Jamaica. In so doing it aims to contribute to the body of research evidence on the phenomenon, as well as to highlight some of the conceptual problems associated with existing analyses of both 'sex tourism' and 'romance tourism' . It calls for the development of a theoretical model of sex tourism which can accommodate both the diversity of tourist-related sexual-economic exchanges which take place in economically underdeveloped countries and the complexity of the power relations that underpin them.KEYWORDS gender, prostitution, race, sex tourism, sexual behaviour, tourism Though increasingly a focus of both political concern and academic research, 'sex tourism' is a difficult term to define. The stereotypical image of the 'sex tourist' is that of the Western man who travels to Thailand or the Philippines in order to pay for sex with Go Go bar/brothel prostitutes. There is also a tendency amongst radical feminist writers to treat 'sex tourism' as though it simply involves men travelling abroad to engage in brief, highly commodified exchanges of sex for cash or kind with prostitute women or children. Enloe (1989:36), for instance, defines sex tourism as travel 'specifically to purchase the sexual services of local women', while Jeffreys (1998) holds that 'sex tourism' is more accurately termed 'prostitution tourism' and argues (p. 70) that:Prostitution tourism depends upon pro-prostitution abuse attitudes formed in the abusers' country of origin. Affluent cultures in the west and in the east which teach boys and men that the sexual use of women and children, irrespective of their pleasure or personhood, is a natural right of their masculinity, produce sex tourists and prostitution abusers.These commentators treat sex tourism and prostitution as first and foremost an expression of male patriarchal power and female powerlessness, and their analyses do not therefore allow for the possibility of female sex tourism. Prostitute-users are,
Though increasingly a focus of both political concern and academic research, 'sex tourism' is a difficult term to define. This article presents both quantitative and qualitative data on the sexual behaviour and attitudes of single and/or unaccompanied heterosexual female tourists in the Dominican Republic and Jamaica. In so doing it aims to contribute to the body of research evidence on the phenomenon, as well as to highlight some of the conceptual problems associated with existing analyses of both 'sex tourism' and 'romance tourism' . It calls for the development of a theoretical model of sex tourism which can accommodate both the diversity of tourist-related sexual-economic exchanges which take place in economically underdeveloped countries and the complexity of the power relations that underpin them.KEYWORDS gender, prostitution, race, sex tourism, sexual behaviour, tourism Though increasingly a focus of both political concern and academic research, 'sex tourism' is a difficult term to define. The stereotypical image of the 'sex tourist' is that of the Western man who travels to Thailand or the Philippines in order to pay for sex with Go Go bar/brothel prostitutes. There is also a tendency amongst radical feminist writers to treat 'sex tourism' as though it simply involves men travelling abroad to engage in brief, highly commodified exchanges of sex for cash or kind with prostitute women or children. Enloe (1989:36), for instance, defines sex tourism as travel 'specifically to purchase the sexual services of local women', while Jeffreys (1998) holds that 'sex tourism' is more accurately termed 'prostitution tourism' and argues (p. 70) that:Prostitution tourism depends upon pro-prostitution abuse attitudes formed in the abusers' country of origin. Affluent cultures in the west and in the east which teach boys and men that the sexual use of women and children, irrespective of their pleasure or personhood, is a natural right of their masculinity, produce sex tourists and prostitution abusers.These commentators treat sex tourism and prostitution as first and foremost an expression of male patriarchal power and female powerlessness, and their analyses do not therefore allow for the possibility of female sex tourism. Prostitute-users are,
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