ABSTRACT
This chapter examines the Cuban and Dominican sexual markets connected to the travel and tourism industry. Drawing on field work with sex-trade participants, hospitality workers, and other informal sector workers, the chapter examines some of the manifestations of flexible labor and sexual identities. The chapter proposes a more complicated approach that accounts for the provisional practices and identities that constitute sexual markets and envelops understandings of labor and sex more as matters of continua than as hard and fast definitions. Another sexual identity to emerge with the Cuban tourist economy in the 1990s is pinguero, derived from pinga, a slang term for penis, which is used to categorize men who provide commodified sexual practices within the tourist sector. A broader framework than the one used to examine sex tourism is needed; it should account for the provisional practices and identities that constitute sexual markets and envelop notions of labor and sex as liminal.
