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Chapter Four Tourist Tales and Erotic Adventures In the summer of 2005, I interviewed Joe, a twenty-eight-year-old white public school teacher from New York City. We met at a party in a workingclass neighborhood, Vasco da Gama. Certain cues suggested to me that he was American: his pale skin, his style of dress, his hip-hop-inflected dance movements, and his expression of sheer ecstasy at being at a crowded, sweaty, party with a live band and very few foreigners. When I approached him to strike up a conversation, I discovered that he was, in fact, American. He was very friendly and gregarious as we discussed what had brought us to Salvador. When I told him about the topic of my research, he chuckled and volunteered to participate in an interview. We exchanged phone numbers and scheduled an appointment for the following week. On a breezy day, Joe and I sat on the rocks overlooking Barra beach after he had just finished his guitar lesson. Joe was well traveled, having spent time in Europe, Morocco, and Mexico. When I asked him what originally brought him to Bahia, he enthusiastically exclaimed, “The women and the music!” He had enjoyed his first trip to Brazil so much that he had vowed to return regularly, and this was his third visit. He found life in Brazil easier and less stressful than in the United States, and he made a point of visiting Salvador at least once a year: “After spending two months here, I have a good sense of what it’s like for wealthy men in America. The women think I’m rich, and the sex comes easy.” His whiteness, American nationality, and foreign currency led locals to perceive Joe as “rich,” even though his salary as a public school teacher would hardly qualify him as such in the United States. In this way, his story challenges scholarship and media coverage on sex tourism that 84 chapter four tends to depict sex tourists as older, upper-middle-class businessmen (Enloe 1990). Furthermore, as Nancy A. Wonders and Raymond Michalowski argue, sex tourism provides an opportunity for men from the developed world “to experience—in their bodies—their own privilege” (2001, 550). This privilege goes beyond white privilege to encompass gender, national, and class privilege as well. Joe admitted that Brazil was the first country to which he had traveled where the possibility of sex was a key motivating factor. While he boasted that he “turned down more sex in Brazil in one month” than he was “offered in NYC in a year,” he also emphasized that he was “not coming to Brazil for two months just to get pussy!” He portrayed himself as a connoisseur of all things Brazilian, a fact that was reflected in his busy schedule of guitar, Portuguese, drumming, and dance lessons. Joe engaged in certain strategies to establish himself as a “traveler” or “temporary resident” rather than a “typical” tourist, including immersing himself in Brazil’s language, music, and culture; attending parties in peripheral, working-class neighborhoods such as García and Vasco da Gama, where the presence of tourists was not common; and renting a furnished apartment in the neighborhood of Federação, which was outside of (though still relatively close to) the tourist district. I somewhat identified with Joe in this regard, a fact that reflects long-standing tensions between tourists and ethnographers, travelers, or sojourners, all of whom desire to move beyond the facade or “front stage” of tourism (Goffman 1959, 22). This chapter sheds light on the motivations, experiences, and subjectivities of sex tourists. How do sex tourists understand and articulate their racialized desires? How is the tourist experience characterized by liminality? Finally, how does the desire for “touristic intimacy” (Frohlick 2007, 152) play out in Salvador’s touristscape? Drawing inspiration from Julia Harrison (2003), Susan Frohlick uses this concept to describe how tourists seek intimacy to justify “international travel as a means to gain cross-cultural understanding ” (2007, 152). Erotic desires, she argues, are inseparable from the desire for “touristic intimacy” (154). As a concept that evokes the diffuse nature of sexualized tourist practices, “touristic intimacy” can be applied to the touristscape of Salvador because it blurs the boundaries between the cultural and the sexual. Joe elaborated on issues of fantasy, exoticism, and racialized desires when he said, “I’ve had a thing for Latin, brown-skinned women since my early twenties. I’m from [a place] where there are...

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