La Strada Documentation Center

Race, Gender and Sex on the Net: Semantic Networks of Selling and Storytelling Sex Tourism

Document number
1410
Date
2006
Title
Race, Gender and Sex on the Net: Semantic Networks of Selling and Storytelling Sex Tourism
Author/publisher
Peter A. Chow-White, Media Culture Society 2006; 28; 883
Availability
View/save PDF version of this document
Document type(s)
Research/Study/Analysis,
Keywords
Victims (of trafficking), Trafficked persons, Clients, Recruitment, Sexual exploitation, Internet, Child exploitation, Prevention, Law enforcement, Labour exploitation,
Summary
The type of society emerging from globalization has been characterized as one based around flows of information and networks. The crucial pathways to sources of domination and change in globalization lie in having access to the network and its internal logics. In this new, global dynamic ‘the power of flows takes precedence over the flows of power’ Sex tourism on the internet is at the confluence of issues of race, gender, sexuality, technology and globalization. Increasingly, information and communication technologies (ICTs), such as the internet, are playing a particularly significant role not only in the promotion and packaging of sex tourism but of a new type of global surveillance of bodies, race and desire. Cyberspace enables sex tourists to build deeper connections between the racialization, sexualization and commodification of sex workers’ bodies and Western masculinity. This study investigates how discourses of race, gender, sexuality and the market intersect online in sex tourism websites. The selling of sex tourism and sex tourist storytelling are structured in a manner where neither race, sexuality, gender, nor the market overdetermine the character of the discourse.
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