Fluid Exchanges: The Negotiation of Intimacy between Tourist Women and Local Men in a Transnational Town in Caribbean Costa Rica

Abstract

In a transnational tourist town in black Caribbean Costa Rica situated both on the margins of “white” Costa Rican society and squarely in global tourism, the mobility of European and North American women tourists in and out constitute a significant tourist flow. Central to the town's social sexual history and modes of sociability are economically ambiguous sexual and often intimate relations between female tourists and local predominantly black Caribbean men. I use the concept of “fluid exchanges” to comprehend the fluidity and corporeality of these relationships in which, I argue, intimacy plays a significant role. Local men, who are situated outside of hegemonic masculinity, use sexual knowledge and masculine privilege to “give” intimacy freely as well as to bargain for payment and acquire cosmopolitan identities, and to regulate the unfettered mobility of First World women tourists within a disparate global sex market and era where new erotic subjectivities and transnational intimate relations are being forged in hybrid and fluid places like Puerto Viejo, Costa Rica.