Selling Sex for Visas

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Selling Sex for Visas Sosúa has been a popular vacation spot for male European tourists, especially Germans. Poor women migrate from throughout the Dominican Republic to work in Sosúa’s sex trade; there they hope to meet and marry foreign men who will sponsor their migration to Europe (Global Woman, Page 154). The focus of the chapter from Global Woman titled Selling Sex for Visas: Sex Tourism as a Stepping-stone to International Migration, by Denise Brennan is that the women of Sosúa who are involved in the sex work industry are not necessarily exploited victims, but primarily independent women who are using available resources to better their economic situations. These women a lot of times are playing a role and develop skills that can help manipulate wealthy European men into providing them with financial stability whether it’s long or short term. Dominican sex workers use sex, romance, and marriage as a means of turning Sosúa’s sex trade into a site of opportunity and possibility, not just exploitation and domination (Global Woman, Page 168). From the reading, it’s apparent that these women get a sense of empowerment through the sex work they do because it allows them to provide for their families and better their lives. Because these women are willingly migrating to Sosúa to enter the sex industry, I believe that they are creating a sense of independence and partaking in a legitimate form of work, even though it’s considered illegal, but I wonder how independent many of these women truly are. Brenan does a good job of bringing attention to the issue of sex work in the city of Sosúa, and by doing this she directly and indirectly touches on ideas such as emotional labor, the portrayal of women of color as highly sexual, and poorly paid female labor. By focusing specifically on the city of Sosúa where the women are not trafficked and are willingly

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