On 27 November 2009, a Mexican judge sentenced Jose Luis Alvarez Gonzalez to 60 years in prison for the rape of five women in the Mexican state of Guanajuato between October 2005 and June 2006. Rape is an all too common crime in Mexico, the United States, and throughout the world, but a number of factors rendered this case notable. All of the victims were foreigners (four Americans and one Canadian), over 55 years in age, and living permanently in a colonial town far from any beach or border. The 58-year-old perpetrator was a Mexican national who had served five years in a Texas prison for burglary; he broke into the women’s homes late at night, sexually assaulted them, and then spent hours in the homes seeking to converse in English. Beyond its most significant impact-the personal trauma inflicted upon the women-this incident highlights how gender, in complex intersection with other socio-cultural and political identities, influences the contested spatialities of lifestyle migration. Specifically, the media coverage of the rapes, exchanges on listservs and blog posts, and the author’s own fieldwork experience in San Miguel during the summer of 2006 reveal a complex, contested, and heavily gendered set of cultural and political narratives regarding the lifestyle aspirations of relatively affluent transnational migrants. This chapter begins with a discussion of the events surrounding the rape of

foreign women living in Mexico, in order to highlight issues relevant to the study of gender and lifestyle migration. Despite its emphasis on identity, belonging, and self-actualisation, the scholarship on lifestyle migration has paid little explicit attention to the role of gender in this growing migration trend. Other bodies of scholarship, reviewed in the second section and including international migration, transnationalism, expatriate communities, and travel and tourism, have addressed the issue of gender to varying degrees, and offer insights that can be extended to the study of lifestyle migration. Drawing on those insights, the third section of the chapter outlines ways in which gender is implicated in the migration decisions and settlement experiences of relatively affluent border crossers. Examples are drawn largely from lifestyle migrants in Mexico, but include the cases of Spain, Italy, and India. The conclusion makes a case for foregrounding gender as a variable in the study of lifestyle migration, and identifies areas for further investigation.