Sex tourism (female)

Female sex tourism is a contested concept. “Sex tourism” often refers to commercial sexual relationships between tourists and locals, but few female tourists enter into explicitly commodified cash-for-sex exchanges. As a result, some researchers have emphasized the emotionality and intimacy of tourist women’s sexual relationships with locals and have described their practice as “romance tourism” rather than “sex tourism.” Other researchers disputed the distinction between male sex tourism and female romance tourism and explored the ways in which sexualized racisms and global structures of inequality impact on the options, motivations, and desires of local men and tourist women in tourist settings. Recent research focuses on questions related to women’s agency as well as on love, desire, intimacy, and emotionality, the ways in which female tourists imagine and narrate their transnational sexual relationships, and the impact of sex tourism on gendered identities. Less attention has been paid to the wider structural factors that constrain actors and shape sexual encounters.