Women Work, Men Sponge, and Everyone Gossips: Macho Men and Stigmatized/ing Women in a Sex Tourist Town by Denise Brennan
This article focuses on gossip about Dominican womens sexual labor as an entry point into documenting shifting gender relations and ideologies in Sosúa, a sex tourist destination frequented primarily by German tourists. In Sosúas sexscape, new meanings of masculinity have emerged alongside womens earning capacity. While sex workers must temper their displays of monetary gains so as to not compromise their reputations as mothers sacrificing for their children, men openly enjoy freedom from...
Read MoreTourism in Transnational Places: Dominican Sex Workers and German Sex Tourists Imagine One Another by Denise Brennan
This paper considers how Dominican sex workers and German sex tourists imagine each other across national borders. They meet in a transnational space, Sosuacutea, a tourist town on the north coast of the Dominican Republic. Sex tourism has redirected migration patterns within the Dominican Republic to Sosuacutea, as well as off the island by building new transnational connections to Germany. I examine why Dominican women migrate to Sosuacutea’s sex trade, how they see German men, and what...
Read MoreMethodological Challenges with Research in Trafficked Persons by Denise Brennan
This article is intended to discuss methodological challenges to conducting research with trafficked persons in the United States. It draws from my experiences as an anthropologist involved in an ongoing book project on life after trafficking.1 By exploring the methodological difficulties and ethical concerns that I have faced as an anthropologist, I hope to lay bare some of the methodological challenges that researchers across disciplines, particularly social scientists who rely on...
Read MoreEnding Forced Labor by Securing Immigrant Workers’ Rights by Denise Brennan
Immigration reform that protects the rights of all workers in all industries is a critical step toward ending trafficking into forced labor in the United States. Trafficking—labor that involves force, fraud, or coercion—is a particularly violent form of migrant labor exploitation that emerges out of everyday labor practices in places where migrants work. Ending Forced Labor by Securing Immigrant Workers...
Read MoreCompeting Claims of Victimhood? Foreign and Domestic Victims of Trafficking in the United States by Denise Brennan
This article considers how, in the United States, a rhetorical and policy shift that focuses on domestic youth in prostitution affects the broader effort to fight trafficking of foreign nationals in industries other than sex work. Common sense suggests that with resources directed toward finding domestic youth in forced prostitution, fewer efforts will be made to reach foreign workers exploited in work sites outside of the sex industry. The author contends that the low numbers of individuals...
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