Although sex work remains highly stigmatized around the world, its relatively high value (when compared to other kinds of work available for low-income women) allows sex workers to attain some level of economic, if not social, mobility. This article challenges the idea that sex work in 'third world' settings is always about mere subsistence. Instead, it suggests that sex workers in Costa Rica's tourism sector work to survive, but they also demonstrate significant personal ambition and aim not only to increase their own consumption levels, but crucially to get ahead. Women are clear about what sex work enables for their families and themselves: not the maintenance of the status quo, but rather a level of consumption otherwise unavailable to them as low-income and poor women. Sex work offers an opportunity to consume and to get ahead that these women have been unable to attain in other kinds of employment, primarily domestic and factory work. Furthermore, sex work allows women to think of themselves as particularly good mothers, able to provide for and spend important quality time with their kids. The article argues that survival, consumption, and motherhood are discursively deployed, in often contradictory and conflicting ways, in order to counteract the effects that stigma has on sex workers. It also suggests that sex workers may very well be the quintessential subjects of neo-liberalism in Latin America, in their embrace of entrepreneurial work and consumption.

Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork and interviews with sex tourists in San José, Costa Rica, this article explores the connections between masculinity and the production of value in sex tourism. I argue that in the context of increasing opportunities for travel and technological innovations, North American masculine identities have become transnational, including for non-elite men. Sex tourists’ descriptions of their experiences reveal that they are involved in a contradictory search for a masculine identity that is simultaneously progressive and hegemonic, one that relies not only on sex workers but also on a critique of the masculinity of Costa Rican men and other tourists. This article also suggests that sex tourism is best understood as a relational economy, in that the encounters between sex tourists and sex workers produce value that is simultaneously economic, embodied, and emotional, including the possibility of temporarily enhanced social status.

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This article considers the role of beauty in Costa Rican sex work. In the context of sex tourism, beauty operates as affective labour performed by sex workers, labour that is mediated by deeply contradictory understandings of race and nation. Theorising beauty as a form of affective labour means thinking about beauty as value, as something that circulates, can be exchanged and is ultimately relational. While Costa Rica's national mythology has long focused on claims to white origins, sex tourists identify local women's 'exoticism' and non-whiteness as particularly appealing. Commercial sex does not simply depend on an imperial male gaze, but rather requires us to consider how particular national mythologies about race are linked to ideals of attractiveness in complex ways. I also explore how women experience and manage their sexual attractiveness to foreign tourists in their daily lives and work.