Intimate Encounters: affective economies in Cuba and the Dominican Republic
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.11606/issn.1981-3341.pontourbe.2024.231800Keywords:
Intimate labor, Sex tourism, Hospitality industry, Cuba, Dominican RepublicAbstract
Drawing on research in Cuba and the Dominican Republic, this paper explores the uses of intimacy in both the corporate sector and romantic relationships. I use research with hotel workers and with people involved in sexual-affective exchanges connected to tourism to link intimacy to the political and economic structures of transnational tourism. These new spaces of analysis present practices of transnational corporate-generated intimacy that combine love - or the exploitation of workers' emotions - and labor. The central aim is to intertwine the intimate with the global, from transnational hotels' formal customer service policies to the informal, on-the-ground, intimate encounters between tourists and hospitality workers. The commercialization of intimacy, including sexual-affective relations in the delivery of hospitality services, is linked to political and economic processes that are part of transnational tourism practices. This paper challenges the notion that sex tourism and sex work are individualistic practices that exist outside of the spaces of corporate global profit. It further posits that relationships where money is exchanged are not necessarily devoid of care and intimacy.
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