Race, gender and sex on the net: semantic networks of selling and storytelling sex tourism

Abstract

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. Using a quantitative approach to usually qualitative concerns, this study employs a complementary combination of content analysis and network analysis to show how identity formation is based not on a dominant unitary identity but emanates through a number of strategic points of negotiation over the meaning of identification and difference. Increasingly, information and communication technologies, such as the internet, are playing a particularly significant role, not only in the promotion and packaging of sex tourism but also of a new type of global surveillance of bodies, race and desire.