Becoming Middle Class? Consumption, Respectability, and Place in Sex Tourism

Recent work has demonstrated the growing importance of the sex industry in a wide variety of settings, suggesting that participation in the industry is expanding and that it can no longer be considered in isolation from other sectors, especially tourism. As Brents and Hausbeck argue, “sex businesses as forms of commerce must be situated in local institutional fields of consumption as they intersect with global late capitalist culture and economy” (2007, 426). Similarly, Bernstein (2007) suggests that sexual consumption has become increasingly acceptable, and respectable, in recent decades and that there is a marked increased in the participation of middle-class people, both as clients and as sex workers. The sex industry thus is intricately linked to late capitalist consumption and, in many places, to mainstream tourism. Yet how have these trends played out in Latin America? What are the specific manifestations of the connections between tourism, consumption, and the sex industry?