Paper short abstract:

Here I analyze the connections between white European women sexualized travels and violence in two beaches in the Northeast of Brazil. Based on ethnographic fieldwork, I consider how the social changes provoked by the dramatic growth of tourism are related to these situations of violence

Paper long abstract:

Violence in the context of relationships between local men and female travelers from the Global North has been registered in socio-anthropological studies in different parts of the world. Yet, the connections between these journeys and situations of violence have not received sufficient attention. Dialoguing with these approaches, in this paper I consider white European women sexualized travels, in two transnational beaches of Ceará, in the Northeast of Brazil. The study is based on ethnographic fieldwork carried out over an 18 month period stretched across several "high seasons" from 2000 up to 2008. I analyze the experiences of women who engage in eroticized relationships with sexualized/racialized local men, perceived as embodying "Brazilian masculinity", in the context of intense local social changes provoked by the dramatic growth of tourism. During the early phases of these romances, passion contributes to blur their transactional nature. But these affective dimensions are disrupted when women become migrants. In the process of abandoning their tourist status, the fluidity of those sexual-economic exchanges disappears, with particular cruelty for the older women, when the reconfiguration of local gender codes imbalances these women's privileges, subjecting them to symbolic and material violence. The domination that these women suffer is temporary, however. They continue to be positioned as white/European and, most of the time, are still the owners and operators of the tourism businesses that they set up. New and safer possibilities of agency open up for those who stay, seeking deeper insertion into local social networks.