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SEXING THE CARIBBEAN: GENDER, RACE, AND SEXUAL LABOR by Kamala Kempadoo. London: Routledge, 2004. $24.95 US (paperback), 264 pages
Kempadoo provides an extensive, but impassioned, exploration into the economic and social motivations of Caribbean sex workers. Though "numerous studies have been conducted on aspects of sex and sexuality in the Caribbean," she states, "little has centered exclusively on Caribbean sexuality or connects racialized sexualized practices with the economy." She backs her claims with a decade of research, placing herself within Third World feminism as practiced by Chandra Talpade Mohanty and Himani Bannerji.
She explores the inevitable link between tourism and the sex industry, simultaneously oppressing and liberating Caribbean sex workers. On one hand, workers "confirm racializing and exoticizing ideas about the hypersexual nature of the Caribbean" and thus often reconstruct the limits of obtained financial mobility. Nevertheless, Kempadoo asserts that, by taking such work, "they transform racialized, exoticized bodies into resources for freedom, betterment, and economic development." As...