In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

172 Chapter 8 Expanding Networks The relationships between erotic dancers and their clients, friends, lovers , husbands, or boyfriends in New York have consequences that reach far beyond the confines of the bar or of any specific geographic location. Rather, these relationships have unexpected outcomes as they expand these men’s expectations to realize their fantasies of adventure, love, and desire. Meeting a Brazilian woman in New York becomes, indeed, a stepping-stone toward a series of interconnected relationships that span nation-states and have an effect on a number of women and men in other countries. The language of help, at times, is how some men justify their traveling to search for women from peripheral locations. At other times, a longing for the exotic and for other venues of desire and satisfaction are in play. Never just one thing or the other. As much as Brazilian dancers confuse affection and monetary exchange, the men they meet are torn between worlds, between seemingly contradictory ways of living their lives and experiencing their bodies, of defining a trajectory that would fit with an ambiguously defined desire for the other. Nana’s Best Friend: Having Fun and Helping Out Nana’s influence in the creation of transnational ties does not stop with her relationship with her husband. Soon after she started working as a dancer, she met Tommy, who became one of her best male friends in New York. Tommy does not like to think of himself as a regular client in gentlemen’s bars, but as someone who just passes by once in a while to have a beer and talk to the girls, a friend. Tommy likes the girls. “Some of them are really smart, like Nana; too bad they have to work in Expanding Networks 173 a place like this,” he sometimes says, reflecting his ambivalent thinking about sex-related commerce. Tommy is a handsome white male with a strong, if a little overweight, body, short hair, and blue eyes. He has a job as a unionized electrician, which allows him to go for days or even weeks without working. He listens to Air America and is politically liberal . For three years before he met Nana, Tommy had a girlfriend who was a young Haitian American corporate accountant. But he says she wanted a very conventional life with children and a house on Long Island , on which they would pay the mortgage for a lifetime. Tommy is twenty-eight years old and thinks that this is not the life he wants just now. Before Nana got married, Tommy used to come to her place and hang out in the afternoons. Sometimes he would cook or invite her and Ivana for dinner, drive them to the shopping mall, or just go out for a beer. As a friend, Tommy helped them both with their English and did little jobs in the house. Nana dispelled the boredom of his life. She liked to tell him about what it is like to be Brazilian, what it is like in Brazil. Nana gave him Brazilian music and showed him pictures. “You should go there, it’s beautiful and a nice place to visit,” she told him, and mentioned as an aside how difficult it is to live and to make money there, the poverty. After a while, Tommy started entertaining the idea of a trip to Brazil to check it all out: the women, the beauty, and the poverty. For Tommy all these come together. Tommy bought a Brazilian Portuguese phrase book and with Nana’s help started learning the language. He had taken Spanish lessons in high school and picked up Portuguese words fairly easy. He started researching websites that promoted encounters between Brazilian women and foreign men. To Tommy one thing was clear: he wanted to know the country through the body of its women. And he was not quite looking for romance. Among all the sites he searched, he chose the site of a German man who had been living in Rio de Janeiro for ten years. This site, like other similar sites, emphasizes the natural beauty of Brazilian women. “Besides being beautiful, Brazilian women enjoy having sex,” Tommy said to me, sharing a belief common among sex tourists (Brennan 2002). Although Tommy never identified himself as such in his conversations with me, he could easily fit into the category of sex tourist as defined in the discourses created to describe encoun- [3.144.104.29] Project MUSE (2024-04-25...

Share