ABSTRACT
This book has argued that sex tourism occupies marginal spaces that are in themselves a component of the inherent marginality of tourism in contemporary Western society. The previous chapter discussed how sex tourism may well be illicit, but, as earlier chapters noted, the inter-relationship between sex tourist and sex worker may also move from the symbolic to the pragmatic and thence progress to the functional. The marginal spaces of sex tourism are therefore consistently shifting according to different social, cultural, economic and political factors. Indeed, the contested, multi-layered, nature of sex tourism implicitly suggests that this, at times, transitory space of inversion, provides the capacity for new understandings, perceptions, relationships and representations of sexuality, travel and the sex industry. Due to its increasing visibility, sex tourism therefore possesses the potential to act as a catalyst for encapsulating or creating social change, and in Australia and New Zealand, the countries with which the authors are most familiar, this has certainly become evident with respect to changing attitudes towards the sex industry. Such changes become codified through the regulatory actions of the state which has historically served to implement a moral code with respect to sexual behaviours through legal sanctions. Indeed, the role of the state with respect to sex tourism may not necessarily be one of prohibition or prevention. In some jurisdictions sex tourism has been implicitly or even overtly encouraged in order to attract foreign exchange and encourage economic development. This, to some, perhaps paradoxical relationship between sex tourism and the state, reflects the complex multilayered nature of understanding sex tourism to which we have often referred within this book.
