‘Putting femininity to work’: Negotiating hypersexuality and respectability in sex tourism, Brazil

Abstract

Feminist scholars have documented the ways in which racialized women make strategic use of their hypersexualized bodies in the global sex industry. In this article, I build on these claims to examine how this unfolds in the context of sex tourism, drawing on ethnographic research conducted in the city of Natal, Brazil. I propose that in Natal, young, racialized Brazilian women seek to establish both their hypersexuality and respectability through various processes of distinction, given the potential for mobility, migration, and marriage that comes with sex with foreigners. These women thus ‘put their femininity to work’, a form of embodied capital and one of the few resources they have at their disposal.