Sociospatial Sublimation: The Human Resources of Love in Sandals Resorts International, Jamaica

Abstract

Interactions between visitors and workers are central to tourism. In the Global South, this relationship usually consists of the spatial concentration and division of people with vastly contrasting economic resources and cultural identities. Research on the commodification of tourism in the Global South, then, focuses on the uneasy confluence of poor and dependent service workers who labor so that wealthy and privileged tourists can enjoy. Drawing on the work of Slavoj Žižek, this article argues that the current approaches to these interactions, although exposing the capitalist "contents" concealed behind tourism's alluring commodity form, fail to examine the "secrets" of the form itself; that is, the enjoyment generated between workers and tourists. As a result, researchers have yet to fully explain how—with all its socioeconomic contradictions of smiles and servility, luxury and poverty—the commodity form of tourism in the Global South endures. To elaborate my argument, I use Jacques Lacan's concept of sublimation and an organizational ethnography of the all-inclusive hotel company Sandals Resorts International, headquartered in Jamaica. I explore two ways through which sublimation, a place- and value-making activity par excellence, informs the commodified interactions between Sandals service workers and tourists: first, how management discourses "elevate" workers to the "place of the Thing"—a place that radiates sublime enjoyment; second, how workers avoid the dangers of overwhelming guests with too much enjoyment by following the practices of "love-sublimation" codified in the fantasies of "Guest Courtesy" and "The Sandals Customer Service Checklist."