Embodiment and sexual performance among Dominican male sex workers
Mark B. Padilla
As in many parts of the world, the tourism industry in the Caribbean is becoming an increasingly pervasive and all consuming force. In the Dominican Republic, the Caribbean country where the ethnographic research that informs this chapter was conducted, fully one-quarter of the country’s GDP comes from tourism, and this single industry provides jobs for about one out of every five Dominicans, who cater to the more than three million international tourists who enter the country annually (Padilla 2007c). As a medical anthropologist, my work for the past several years has been oriented toward understanding the economic, social and health consequences of the tourism industry in the Dominican Republic. The lens through which I have done this is to examine men who are informally employed in tourism areas, and who have a history of intimate sexual and romantic exchanges with both male and female tourists.
Although these men have experience with sexual-economic exchanges, they often do not think of themselves as ‘sex workers’. As I discussed in detail in my recent book Caribbean Pleasure Industry – based on ethnographic data from a threeyear study in two Dominican cities – most of these men describe themselves as ‘normal men’ (hombres normales), are frequently married or intimately involved with women, often have children and use the local identities of bugarron or sanky panky to describe themselves (Padilla 2007c). Based on historical and ethnographic sources of evidence, I argue that these sexual identities have roots in particularly Dominican cultural expressions of sexuality, but they have also been incorporated into and redefined by the tourism industry since the 1970s. Through an increasingly diversified global sex tourism economy, local sexual identities have become global commodities as they have become incorporated into tourist sexual experiences and fantasies of Caribbean sexuality. For local people, they have become instruments not only for the enactment of intimate sexual pleasures, but for access to material securities and opportunities for social advancement, transnational marriage, remittances and immigration.
While many of these opportunities are often more mythic than real (see Brennan 2004), the tourism industry – and particularly the possibility of establishing instrumental relationships with wealthy foreigners – has become the repository for dreams of an elusive economic security. In a declining national economy that relies on cheap, exploited, unskilled and disenfranchised labourers, bodies and sexual practices have become ways in which informal tourism workers function as erotic entrepreneurs, generating what I have described as a ‘marketable fantasy’ in an attempt to respond as productive agents to the shifting constraints of a weak and dependent economy (Padilla 2007c).
Yet the creation of a marketable fantasy is not simply a one-way process of ‘performing’ for the tourist for profit, but also can involve the establishment of longterm intimate relationships described by both participants as ‘love’ or ‘affection’, and occasionally leading to marriage or sustained relational commitments. Thus, the rapid shift to a tourism-based economy not only affects the material conditions of society, but reverberates in the most basic ways people experience relational and sexual intimacy. Perhaps more provocatively, it affects how individuals use and understand their bodies and body parts, which is one of the primary arguments of this chapter.
The intention of much of my work in the Dominican Republic has been to understand how political-economic changes related to the intensification of the Caribbean tourism industry and other neoliberal development policies have influenced the enactment of local sexualities. In an attempt to investigate this linkage ethnographically, I have focused most of my research on the sexual exchanges between local Dominican men and foreign gay tourists, which are much more common than the literature on ‘beach boys’ in the Caribbean would imply, but which present social and emotional challenges for these men. As I argue in this chapter, the engagements with gay foreigners can lead to embodied moments of inter- and intrapersonal tension in which the material, cultural and emotional investments of sex workers and clients must be worked out and negotiated in the symbolically charged uses of genitals and orifices. In this chapter, I consider bodies and body parts as key sites for the analysis of the embodiment of tourism, and seek to use men’s narratives of sexual encounters with tourists to examine how practices of sexuality are embedded in wider material and symbolic contexts.
As a medical anthropologist also working in HIV prevention, this approach is critical to understanding linkages between tourism and HIV. In the Caribbean, a growing body of evidence suggests that the tourism industry is associated with the emergence of local HIV epidemics and shapes vulnerabilities among those who work in tourism settings.1 While some suggestive epidemiological evidence suggests a correlation between tourism dependence and HIV prevalence throughout the Caribbean, there is no research by which to specify or describe the mechanisms through which this association may or may not occur. Therefore, a critical question for HIV research in the region is: How might the structure of the tourism industry as it is embodied and experienced influence HIV-related vulnerabilities for specific individuals and groups? Answering this question requires ethnographic research that examines the contextualised, embedded nature of sexual practices in tourism areas.
My ethnographic work consisted of three years of research in two cities in the Dominican Republic: Santo Domingo (the capital and largest urban centre in the country) and Boca Chica (a small tourist town about 30 kilometres to the east). In Santo Domingo – now home to three million people in the metropolitan area – sex work is an active and visible feature of the social landscape, especially in the many lower class barrios and in the more heavily touristic areas, such as the Zona Colonial. Non-governmental organisations (NGOs) and activists working with female sex workers in the Dominican Republic estimate there are nearly 300,000 women who are employed in the sex industry domestically, and another 300,000 working abroad – dramatic numbers given a national population of only 9.3 million (Padilla 2007c). Similar estimates have not been made of male sex workers, who have no organisational representation of any kind, are more independently employed, and have not been incorporated into HIV/AIDS prevention or treatment services. Boca Chica – which until relatively recently was a quiet beach town adjacent to the small community of sugar cane workers at Batey Andrés is now inundated with hotels and resorts catering to an international clientele. The town has been prioritised by the Dominican Secretary of Tourism as one of the five main ‘tourism poles’ in the country, motivating in part recent government investments in the highway linking Boca Chica to the nearby international airport, where most foreign tourists enter the country. It is also considered a ‘must-see’ on the travel itinerary of many tourists who come to the region primarily for sex, and is known in the Dominican Republic as a zona caliente (a hot zone) for prostitution.
Conducted through my affiliation with the local NGO Amigos Siempre Amigos – which has nearly 20 years’ experience working on HIV prevention among gayidentified men – this project involved the combination of various research methods, including a large-sample social, behavioural and demographic survey with 200 male sex workers, focus groups, 98 in-depth interviews and extensive participant observation in male sex work sites. The research focused on two local categories of sex workers – bugarrones and sanky pankies – terms which overlap in meaning but which also express certain conceptual distinctions. Bugarrón is a term with a longer socio-linguistic history extending back to at least the nineteenth century, is used throughout the Hispanic Caribbean and is closely associated in actual discourse with sexual-economic exchanges between men. My research has also attempted to demonstrate that the social category of bugarron is a broader or superordinate category of Dominican homoeroticism, of which sanky panky is a specific subtype or example. The men I interviewed defined bugarrón in relation to three qualities: (1) he is ‘the one who presents himself as the “macho” in the relationship’; (2) he is stereotypically the insertive partner in anal sex; and (3) he often accepts money or gifts from other men in exchange for sex. The bugarrón is also similar in many overall features to the identities mayate in Mexico and the michê in Brazil, as described in prior ethnographic accounts in those countries (Kulick 1998; Parker 1999; Prieur 1998), and has a deeper historical trajectory than the term sanky panky.
The figure of the sanky panky emerged during the country’s historical transition to a tourism-based economy in the 1970s and 1980s. The term is a linguistic Dominicanisation that derives from the English phrase ‘hanky panky’, and came into vogue to describe the beach boys that have grown in number in direct proportion to the rising volume of tourists entering the country. Sanky pankies bear a certain resemblance to the phenomenon of the ‘Rent-a-Dred’ in Jamaica (Campbell et al. 1999), often wearing dreadlocks and catering more explicitly to the racialised stereotypes of Caribbean men that emphasise youth, hypermasculinity, athleticism and dark skin.
The general stereotype of sankies in Dominican society is that their sex work is primarily oriented toward foreign women, and indeed this interpretation is in accordance with their outward gender performance and public persona. Nevertheless, in my study, both bugarrones and sanky pankies commonly reported sexual encounters with male clients, despite social stereotypes to the contrary. It should be stressed that the identities of bugarron and sanky panky are not stable aspects of personhood, but rather are highly fluid, situational and performative. An example of this is the fact that some of my informants who self-identified as bugarrones in Santo Domingo would go to Boca Chica on the weekend to sanquipanquiar (to sanky panky). Similar constructions were used in converting bugarron to bugarroniar, linguistically signalling the action of performing a bugarron role, rather than assuming a stable sexual identity.
With this general context in mind, it is useful to turn to the case of one of my key informants, Ricardo, who was aged 33 when I met him, and who had many years of experience in the industry. ‘Ricardo’ was an influential maipiolo (roughly, a pimp), partly because he was proficient in conversational English, and began what he described as the first ‘agency’ of male sex workers catering to a gay tourist clientele in Santo Domingo. Ricardo’s childhood, until his early adolescence, began outside the small town of San Francisco de Macorís, in what he calls a ‘humble’ rural home.
When he was 14 the situation at home became, in his words, ‘intolerable’ (insoportable), due to the lack of work in his home town that made providing for him and his three siblings a constant stress on his parents, and an easy rationalisation for abuse by his father. As a result, Ricardo decided to head out for Santo Domingo, bartering some of his possessions for a ride to the capital city along the southern coastal highway. Ricardo’s move to Santo Domingo required him to live with his aunt in a sprawling barrio of the capital city, Villa Mella, where there is an active sex work industry catering to both tourists and locals. While attending high school, Ricardo gradually got involved with la gente mala (or bad people), began using drugs and was ‘seduced’ (seducido), in his words, by the urban night life he encountered in Villa Mella. His first contact with the possibility of sex work occurred at age 15, when a friend –a self-identified bugarrón – took him to a gay disco frequented by many foreign tourists. This disco, a site of much participant observation during my first months of fieldwork, was closed in 2000 after a horrific multiple murder occurred there in full view of the clientele, and was covered extensively in the national press. Ricardo recalled:
The person who took me [to the disco] explained to me, ‘Look, a lot of American guys come here. Here they pay you. You have a good piece [pedazo, meaning penis] between your legs. With that you can make a lot of money’. So, he educated me in what the search [la búsqueda or sex work] is, because he had been in that environment and he knew how things worked there… [In friend’s voice:] ‘I’m going to take you to a place like this and like that, where you’re going to be able to get money easily, things that you like, and you’re not going to have to do anything disgusting [asqueroso] either’.
With this introduction, Ricardo began regularly engaging in sex-for-money exchanges, specialising in providing sexual services to male tourists, but also serving women on occasion. His friendships with gay business owners and wealthy foreign clients placed him in an ideal position from which to broker contacts between local men and tourists. As he described, his growing awareness of his social status in the world of international sex work convinced him to begin what he called an ‘agency’ of sex workers to serve foreign visitors. Ricardo explained:
Well, the American queens [ las locas americanas, meaning gay men] started to visit me at my house. They [the tourists] began with the bugarrones that I know from my generation, and from the [old] disco [a gay bar that closed in 1999]. They have the ability to get the expensive tennis shoes, the jewellery, the clothes … And so [the bugarrones] come to me and they say, Look, are you Ricardo? I’m so-and-so, I go to such-and-such gym, I don’t drink, I don’t use drugs, I’m in the university, things are really hard, I like doing this. Help me. So I think, I look at the economic situation like it is… and the idea occurs to me, I say, Well, these boys who look good, young, and look good, that don’t have vices, and the queens come to me because they trust me, so why don’t I start an agency? And so through one I got another, and through that one another, and I got 25 guys… And if I had my way I’d have 75 or 100 sex workers [trabajadores sexuales] here right now.
While Ricardo is a more dramatic case than most due to his level of professionalisation, as well as his use of terminology such as ‘sex worker’ (which is itself influenced by his incorporation into HIV-prevention efforts by the NGO with which I was affiliated), several aspects of his narrative are instructive, representing larger patterns in men’s experiences of tourism labour. As with Ricardo, most of the men in the study emphasised the lack of options available in their natal areas, which motivated in part their movement to the city or to coastal resort towns, where they were gradually socialised into the sex industry. For example, approximately three-quarters of the sex workers in Boca Chica had immigrated to one of the two research sites, often for the purpose of finding work related to the tourism industry.
The important point about these migrations is that they are almost exclusively motivated by the country’s development of coastal tourism enclaves, which are essentially clusters of hotels, resorts, bars, restaurants and shops in ‘pristine’ areas of coastline prioritised by historically recent development initiatives, and typically include adjacent communities of migrant Dominicans who provide the service labour for these tourism businesses (Padilla 2007c). Many of these labourers return regularly to their home communities or move away during the low tourism season, creating circular or complex internal migratory pathways. As with Ricardo, many of the participants in the research had not planned or sought out to engage in sexual-economic exchanges; it simply presented itself organically as an option for income generation in the pervasively opportunistic and diversified informal economy of tourism areas. Often, as in Ricardo’s case, men were often introduced into the informal sex economy or learned about how to negotiate or consummate a deal through peers who were familiar with the tourism area and sexual exchanges. Social peers or co-workers therefore become conduits of information about how to use sexuality and eroticism as a means for making a living, illustrating how tourism areas function to situationally normalise ‘deviant’ sexual behaviours and identities through a resocialisation process. In the experience of many of the men I interviewed, however, this resocialisation did not function to entirely destigmatise sexual practices or sexfor-money exchanges, but to temporarily rationalise or justify them in spite of their ‘bad’ moral or social consequences.
Tourism areas were therefore perceived as ambivalent spaces, borderlands that blurred the boundary between ‘normal’ and ‘bad’ expressions of sexuality and sexual behaviour. One participant, Martin, described this quality of tourism areas when he remarked as follows in an interview: ‘Here in Boca Chica one opens up a lot … Any person that works here opens up because that person has to … Sometimes a situation makes one do things, not so much for money, but tourism makes many things outside of the normal’.
Indeed, in this study, the quality of being ‘outside of the normal’ in tourism areas was connected to the fact that sexual encounters with foreigners were widely perceived as a potential source of ‘easy money’ (dinero facil) within the tourism economy. For example, in Boca Chica, the economic benefits of instrumental exchanges were so pervasively understood that it created an environment in which the strategic use of sexuality was almost an expectation, even if explicit discourse about it was not always encouraged. In light of the high male unemployment and the shrinking options for men’s labour, sexual-economic exchanges in the tourism industry provided a rational means to make ends meet that many men viewed as less exploitative and more economically viable than other options available to them, few of which had the income potential of sex-for-money exchanges. Additionally, many men possessed a talent for ‘emotion work’, or the ability to connect socially with clients, establish trust and rapport and effectively use interpersonal relations to leverage income (Hochschild 1979).
The best illustration of this is sex workers’ awareness of the material benefits of sustained romantic relationships with tourists, which were perceived as means to a more generalised material security. In interviews, men explained that they often preferred such relationships because they can provide larger gifts or remittances that exceed the value of direct sex-for-money exchanges or casual encounters, and therefore have the greatest potential to influence overall economic stability. Men described these intimate relationships as possessing four interrelated qualities: they involve less explicit forms of exchange; they often include non-monetary compensation or payments ‘in kind’; material benefits often take the form of ‘gifts’ or ‘help’ rather than rationalised payments for sex; and exchanges are often framed within a notion of partnership, intimacy, affection or love.
Given the importance of intimate exchanges with foreigners as a means to make ends meet, participants’ interactions with tourists had high stakes, resulting in performative interactions aimed at the construction of what I referred to earlier as a marketable fantasy. That is, for an encounter to be consummated, men sought to provide tourists with erotic experiences that were perceived as authentic, both conforming to tourist fantasies of Dominican masculinity and reconstructing those fantasies through the interaction itself. In producing this fantasy, local men cultivated a remarkable ability to deploy their masculinity and sexuality in ways that maximised their desirability. This required, first and foremost, a performance of difference, since the Dominican sex tourism economy functions, fundamentally, through the commodification of sexually exoticised differences. In tourists’ stories, Dominican bugarrones are described as ‘real men’, more masculine or ‘macho’ and more ‘natural’ than men in their home countries (Padilla 2007a, 2007b), reflecting colonial assumptions about black sexuality that have been described by other scholars of Caribbean sex work such as Kempadoo (1999) and O’Connell Davidson (1996).
In order to produce a marketable fantasy consistent with these expectations, sex workers must learn to deploy their masculinity and sexuality in ways that maximise their desirability. As an expression of this, bugarrones often emphasised how Dominican men’s bodies were fundamentally ‘different’ from those of their clients. Men claimed that Dominican men’s bodies were ‘stronger’, more masculine or more capable of physical endurance than the ‘weaker’ bodies of the foreigners who visited their country. ‘Many gringos don’t have bodies like us – stronger, hotter’, 21-year-old Antonio commented in an interview. ‘Here we are strong. We are real men’. Similarly, Marcos, aged 21, explained that he was often nervous when he had sex with tourists, since their bodies were so ‘weak’ and ‘fragile’ ‘that it feels like they’re going to break’. Such narratives of physical differences were also implicitly or explicitly embedded in presumed racial differences that were expressed in distinctly sexualised bodies.
Rafael, a 43-year-old, highly experienced sex worker who made most of his money by connecting clients with sex workers, explained that one of the requests he commonly had from clients was to find the ‘darkest, ugliest, smelliest, prieto [black man]’.2 The fact that Rafael had an established relationship with a specific local sex worker to satisfy such requests not only reiterates that the global sex trade is fundamentally racialised, but also reminds us that sex workers possess a sophisticated understanding of these racial discourses and deploy them instrumentally to make a living in the tourism economy. By deploying racial and sexual stereotypes through such performances of masculinity, these men become subjects in their own commodification.
These bodily performances, however, were not without limits. In understanding how men deployed their bodies in the tourism area, it is critical to emphasise that one of the characteristics most consistently expressed by these men is that they do not participate in passive sexual acts, particularly receptive anal sex. In discussing sexual acts, many men emphasised that they were hombres de verdad (true men) or hombres normales (normal men), phrases intended to communicate not only that they were not maricones (or fags), but that they engaged exclusively in penetrative sexual practices with their male partners. Twenty-two-year-old Julio, a bugarron in Santo Domingo, for example, observed: ‘I’m not homosexual, not bisexual, not anything. I consider myself a man always in sex. Always the man. Nothing more’. Julio’s references to being ‘always a man’, in addition to reflecting a notion of normative masculinity and disavowing homosexuality, are references to his presumed ‘manliness’ in bed, communicating that he is the penetrative partner who is only insertive during sex with men, not the symbolic ‘woman’ (or maricón) who is penetrated. While it is clear that sex workers’ behaviour cannot be stereotyped into the unrealistically fixed categories of activo and pasivo that have unfortunately dominated much of the literature on Latin American homoeroticism, one of the characteristics most consistently expressed by these men, and which is a critical feature of their gendered practices, is that they do not participate in passive sexual acts, particularly receptive anal sex, with their male clients. This reverberated throughout the interviews and functioned as a way to establish sociosexual boundaries between sex workers and the maricones who are symbolically feminised vis-à-vis their penetrable bodies.
Occasionally these sociosexual boundaries are challenged in the negotiation of sexual exchanges. When I inquired whether he had ever been asked to engage in receptive anal sex, Alfonso, a 26 year old in Santo Domingo, told a story of an incident in which he had protected his masculinity despite a client’s persistent attempts to manipulate him financially into adopting a passive sexual role:
Once a foreigner offered me 500 dollars for me to penetrate him, and later he told me – after I penetrated him – ‘I’m going to give you 500 dollars more now for me to penetrate you’, he told me. And he took out the 500 and put them in my hand and I said ‘I don’t let myself get fucked in the ass [ no me dejo dar por el culo]’…. And the fag [el pájaro] said, ‘Okay, that’s fine, no problem. Come by tomorrow’. And I came back the next day like normal, for me to give it to him, and he wanted to give it to me! He handed me the money again, but I gave the 500 back. But I didn’t let myself be penetrated! I never want to be penetrated. Because I’m going to tell you the truth: I’m not a maricón. I ‘look for life’3 out of necessity, but I don’t feel anything back there. Here in front, around my dick, yes. It gets hard as soon as they put a hand on it, right away. But for them to penetrate me?! No, I don’t feel anything back there.
Alfonso’s narrative offers insight into the bodily boundaries and taboos that are established through gender definitions that organise sexual-economic exchanges with tourists but also can create bodily challenges to sex workers when material interests defy these boundaries. But his narrative also offers insight into the symbolic boundaries that envelope sexuality and the ways that participation in sexual-economic exchanges can create phenomenological challenges to bugarrones and sanky pankies as they navigate the precarious terrain of the tourism industry. The anxiety provoked by these moments of bodily boundary maintenance are an expression of the shame that is symbolically distributed in the body, since many of these men, drawing on Dominican cultural models that equate sexual passivity with the maricón, have constructed their sense of masculinity around a penetrative notion of self.4 These men’s insistence on bodily boundary maintenance provided a means to maintain masculine dignity in the course of their work and to construct sexual differences that are marketable in the tourism economy.
In medical anthropology, embodiment has become a term of increasing theoretical discussion, reflecting a general turn in the social sciences toward the reassessment of the body not as a natural phenomenon with an objective biological essence, but as a social phenomenon that mediates individual experience and the organisation of human societies (Scheper-Hughes and Lock 1987; Scheper-Hughes 1993). Bodies, in this framework, are examined as the instruments of both exploitation and resistance in the context of social hierarchy. As such, bodies provide a highly productive unit of analysis for conceptualising how local and global inequalities are manifested and contested in and through individual experience.
Approaches to embodiment provide a useful synergy with one of the dominant frameworks in tourism studies: authenticity. According to Dean MacCannell, tourists express their status as modern workers and consumers through their experiences of ‘authentic’ local cultures, creating a market for the performance or ‘staging’ of difference (MacCannell 1976). As the successful performance of authenticity is often directly related to material success in the provision of tourism services, local tourism workers benefit from their ability to meet tourists’ expectations for authentic experiences. This chapter has made a parallel argument in relation to the sex tourism economy. In the case of sex tourism, embodied practices of gender and sexuality become tools by which local men and women are able to stage authenticity through the production of a marketable fantasy. But in the case of sexual or erotic commodities, fantasies and the material inequalities that frame them are worked out in and through bodies and body parts, with myriad consequences for how local people understand and embody tourism.
Ethnographic research seeking to explain the linkages between the tourism economy and the embodied performances of locals is more than simply theoretical. While a variety of epidemiological and behavioural studies have suggested a linkage between tourism dependence and the HIV epidemic in the Caribbean, there is a near total lack of contextualised ethnographic projects aimed at understanding how tourism, as a broad set of social and economic processes, may be linked to sexual practices. Tourism-oriented HIV initiatives in the Caribbean – the region now showing the highest HIV prevalence rates outside sub-Saharan Africa – should be informed by nuanced analyses of how the micro-practices of sexuality are linked to the performative needs of the growing tourism economy. What are the valued attributes of ‘authentic’ sexual performance in Caribbean tourism environments? What are the cultural and material parameters of sexual performance that shape the behaviours and meanings of sexual practices? Answering such questions would assist greatly in understanding how HIV risk is shaped by the tourism economy, providing an evidence base for describing the social patterning of sexual practices and HIV-related risk behaviours in specific vulnerable populations, such as sex workers.
1 For example, a geographical association appears to exist between those Caribbean islands with the greatest economic dependence on tourism and the adult population prevalence of HIV on specific islands, an association that has been commented on by the Caribbean Epidemiological Centre in Trinidad (Camara 2001). In the Dominican Republic, studies among men who have sex with men (MSM) (De Moya and Garcia 1996, 1998; Padilla 2007c), female sex workers (Kerrigan et al. 2003) and hotel/resort employees (CEPROSH 1997; Forsythe et al. 1998) have found high rates of sexual contact and sexual risk behaviours with foreign tourists.
2 Prieto is a Dominican race term that is often employed disparagingly to refer to darker skinned persons or those with more pronounced Afro-Caribbean features (see Howard 2001).
3 ‘Looking for life’, or buscándose la vida, is a local phrase in the Dominican Republic often used by sex workers to describe how they make a living. It connotes the ad hoc and flexible income generation activities in which informally employed sex workers engage (Padilla 2007c).
4 See Octavio Paz for a classic discussion of this phallic symbolism – embodied in the figure of the chignon – which Paz claims is a fundamental features of masculinity and sexuality in Mexico (Paz 1985). For a parallel discussion on Dominican men, see De Moya (2003).
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