Recent research indicates that the extent of Western women who intimately engage in relations with men from poor economic conditions in developing countries is increasing. The purpose of the following article is to investigate the phenomenon of sex tourism, prostitution and transactional relationships and transnational intimacy, mainly from a female Western perspective. The article is informed by fieldwork in a salsa community in Havana, Cuba and additionally grounded in fieldwork from the Gambia in West Africa. Thus, the phenomenon is framed within a meta-ethnographic study. The article suggests that the process of bargaining and exchange economy represents the social shape of the relationship. As a result of this it is possible to see the transactional economic and sexual processes as a bazaar. The bazaar challenges a traditional conceptualisation of the phenomenon as “sex tourism”, “prostitution”, “sex work” or sexual oppression while highlighting the fluid social organizations of intimacy in diverse transnational contexts. The article challenges the distinction between the global and the local, and makes methodological use of a more inclusive cosmopolitan perspective.
Keywords: Sex tourism, exchange economy, intimacy, transnationalism