Sexuality, Women, and Tourism: Cross-Border Desires through Contemporary Travel by Susan Frohlick (review)

Frohlick, Susan, Sexuality, Women, and Tourism: Cross-Border Desires through Contemporary Travel, London: Routledge, 2013, 222 pages.Tourism, by definition, is fraught with complicated relationships: between tourists and the toured, between more and less successful regions, between nation-states competing for tourism dollars. The search for newness and difference, always defined by a variety of kinds of inequalities, has frequently included travellers who seek out sex and intimacy in the context of "exotic" and usually racialized settings. Susan Frohlick's new book marks a rich contribution to a growing body of literature on contemporary transnational sexuality. Sexuality, Women, and Tourism is a beautifully written ethnography of the transnational sexual and intimate encounters that take place in Puerto Viejo, Costa Rica, a small town on the country's southern Caribbean coast that is thoroughly imbricated in global tourism markets and processes. Frohlick offers a thoughtful and nuanced exploration of the experiences of women tourists (both short and long term, as well as some documented and undocumented residents). The book asks us to ponder relevant and important questions about heterosexuality, challenging the ways in which it is so often left unmarked, while simultaneously directing us to think about how it is enacted differently through travel.One of the many strengths of Sexuality, Women and Tourism is that it focuses not just on the relationships between tourists and local men (which are fascinating) but also on the tourist women's own sexual subjectivities and the role that international travel plays in shaping specific kinds of gendered heterosexualities. While we may assume that we already know that sexuality is frequently shaped by a search for an exotic other, Frohlick's powerful research demonstrates the importance of paying close attention to the specificities of place and time. The way exoticism plays out in Puerto Viejo, the contradictory and confusing understandings about race and place that are demonstrated through interview vignettes, aptly illustrates the significant impact that ethnographic inquiry can have. Indeed, Frohlick beautifully captures the particular complexities of Limon province. Defined by tangled transnational flows for much of its history (including various waves of migration, as well as a shifting dependence from bananas to tourism), Limon is still neglected by the Costa Rican state, treated as other, a space of conveniently colourful multiculturalism but also of violence, poverty and social disorder. Frohlick's detailed descriptions of the town offer a vivid juxtaposition of surf shops, yoga schools and vegan restaurants with the lack of a high school and even a basic medical clinic. Frohlick's inclusion of excerpts from her field notes and personal reflections on her own time in Puerto Viejo is very welcome. This is mainly because Frohlick is such a sensitive anthropologist, offering cogent critiques of her research participants' comments while at the same time remaining largely sympathetic to their attempts to make sense of their lives in Puerto Viejo. …