Beyond Consent: Rethinking Approaches to Sex Tourism in the Global South

Abstract

Sex tourism is a complex, multi-billion-dollar industry entangled with issues of consent, exploitation, and power imbalances. Traditional frameworks for understanding consent — dominance feminism and sex-positive feminism — offer limited insights into the nuances of sex tourism. In this paper, I argue that the concept of consent is too narrow to embody the social, political, and economic complexities of agency, sex work, and exploitation within the realm of sex tourism in the Global South specifically. Additionally, I seek to establish an alternative framework for understanding sexual relations within the realm of sex tourism, encouraging divestment from and addressing the lack of applicability of conventional consent frameworks. In this paper, I apply dominance feminism and sex-positive feminism frameworks to the context of sex tourism and discuss their implications and shortcomings. Following this, I expand upon Daniel Loick’s (2017) politics of forms of life to establish a more holistic approach to understanding and addressing the complexities of sex tourism. I intend for this paper to serve as a starting point for an approach to sex work and agency in the context of sex tourism that does not simply rely on a rigid, binary framework of consensual or non-consensual as a measure of goodness and to build upon literature that seeks to recognize the agency of sex workers while also recognizing the broader social, political, and economic contexts in which sexual encounters occur within this realm.