Guidelines:Make sure to answer each heading. Mention all major points in the article that pertains to the headings. Write a minimum of one paragraph for each heading. Answer these headings for each article. We will use the questions section to spur conversations about the readings.
Group Presentation Sheet
Author / title / year:
Julia O’Connell Davidson and Jacqueline Sanchez Taylor; Fantasy Islands: Exploring the Demand for Sex Tourism from the book Sun, Sex, and Gold: Tourism and Sex Work in the Caribbean; 1999
Author’s main position:What is the author trying to argue? What is the author trying to contribute? What is their perspective? Why did the author write the piece in the first place?
· The article begins by saying that men (predominatly white western men from the US, Canada, and even Europe) seek out prostitutes in third world countries (the non-white “other”), i.e. Ibiza, Dominican Republic, and Southeast Asia, and pay them to help them act out their repressed sexual desires and fantasies that white women in Western culture do not normally engage in or support
Arguments in support of main position: What reasoning does the author use to support their main position?
· The main desire these men are trying to feed is one that is out of the norm or exotic to them—they believe they need to obtain a woman they can have control over, even if they are paying for her in the end
· Most of the time, they believe they have to obtain their needs from a women who is different from them—a woman of a different race (the “Other”)
· The reasoning the authors use to support their main position is the demand for sex tourism is inextricably linked to discoursed that naturalize a celebrate inequalities structured along lines of class, gender, race/Otherness—in other words, discourses that reflect and help to reproduce a profoundly hierarchical model of human sociality
Evidence to support arguments: What statistical information, historical events, or case examples does the author use in backing up their arguments?
· In 1995, the ECPAT (End Child Prostitution in Asian Tourism) commissioned this research on the identity, attitudes, and motivations of clients of child prostitutes; the fieldwork was done in tourist areas such as South Africa, India, Costa Rica, Venezuela, Cuba, and the Dominican Republic
· Evidence the author gives is although sex tourists are a heterogeneous group in terms of their background characteristics and specific interests, they share a common willingness to embrace this hierarchical model and a common pleasure in the fact that their Third World tourism allows them either to affirm their dominant position within a hierarchy of gendered, racialized, and economic power or to adjust their own position upward in that hierarchy
How does this article relate to the class:What is found in the article that relates to the topics in class? How does the article tie into other readings that we have had?
· Intersectionality comes into play when the authors discuss the need these men feel for women of another race when it comes to sexual activities
3 Questions that pertain to the article: What does the article leave open ended? What wasn’t clear in the article? What questions did you find interesting in the article? How could you summarize this article in question form?
· The authors stated that across the board, white men as well as black men do not all recognize what they are doing as prostitution or sex tourism, but if sex tourism is an issue that objectifies woman as an object to be controlled under men’s power overall, how do we curb this issue and is it even possible to curb sex tourism at this point in time?
· They leave open the current research project they are working on (Economic and Social Research Council), which builds on this research through a focus on prostitution and the informal tourist economy
· The questions I found interesting
