Tourist Tales and Erotic Adventures

This chapter examines the motivations, experiences, and subjectivities of sex tourists in Salvador by considering the experiences of a young white heterosexual male sex tourist from New York and an African American man who is not a sex tourist but who provides insights into the imagination of Brazilian women as exotic and hypersexual. More specifically, the chapter asks how sex tourists understand and articulate their racialized desires, how the tourist experience is characterized by liminality, and how the desire for “touristic intimacy” plays out in Salvador's touristscape. Drawing on the stories of the two men, the chapter shows how discourses of black hypersexuality circulate both in Brazilian sex tourism and in the transnational tourism industry. In particular, the (imagined) hypersexuality of Brazilian women of African descent plays an important role in the experiences of foreign tourists, regardless of whether or not they actually have sex with Brazilian women.