What′s Love Got to Do with It?

“What’s Love Got to Do With It? Is a finely detailed ethnography of sex tourism in Sosua, a tourist town in the Dominican Republic. . . . Through her detailed study of the lives of these women and the relationships they engage in, Brennan highlights the economic, gendered and racialised overdeterminations of global sex tourism industries—sexscapes—and the as yet undetermined opportunities that particular women might experience within this circumscribed domain.” - Rosemary Wiss, The Australian Journal of Anthropology

“An impressive ethnographic study and important contribution to research on Latin America.  . . . What’s Love Got to Do With It?, written in plain language and a narrative style, lacks academic jargon and is accessible for a diverse audience. . . . What’s Love Got to Do With It? . . . works to break down simplistic binary ways of thinking about the global sex industry to reveal an extremely complicated transnational industry.” - Emily Van der Meulen , International Feminist Journal of Politics

“This is a readable ethnography which should interest many scholars on race, gender, and migration. It introduces this under-explored area through rich and accessible photographic and fieldwork data.” - Jinthana Haritaworn , Ethnic and Racial Studies

“Brennan allows the reader to do a bit of what Maria Lugones refers to as ‘world travelling’ in the process of creating sympathetic understanding and allowing compassion to flow. In a wonderful example of feminist scholarship, facts are not alienated from the lives in which they impact.” - Maurice Harrington , NWSA Journal

“Brennan is largely successful in tapping into the imagination of both Dominican and European residents and sojourners in the town of Sosua. - William H. Leggett , Anthropology of Work Review

“Brennan’s lucid writing and direct argumentation provide a refreshingly clear discussion of the theoretical and ethnographic concerns involving the globalization of sexual consumption and commodification.” - Cymene Howe , Journal of Anthropological Research

“This new research … understands the multifaceted ways in which Caribbean people negotiate the relationship between sexuality and globalization.” - Jenny Sharpe and Samantha Pinto , Signs

"Brennan’s writing is clear and engaging. . . .  What’s Love Got to Do With It? is a book that offers profound insights into women’s work, sexual commerce, international tourism, and the global economy. It is essential reading for scholars and students of gender, sexuality, and political economy in Latin America." - Patty Kelly , American Anthropologist

“A smart, timely, eye-opening account. What’s Love Got To Do with It? makes both men’s and women’s hopes and strategies visible. It underscores poor women’s capacity for agency and internationalized thinking without portraying the international system of commercialized sexuality as one in which women and men are meeting on a level playing field.” - Cynthia Enloe, author of The Morning After: Sexual Politics at the End of the Cold War

“In this finely hued ethnography, Denise Brennan questions how transnationalization gets transacted, imagined, and experienced through an examination of the sex trade in a specific locale, Sosúa in Dominican Republic. Interweaving the grand themes of political economy and power inequities with those of desire and fantasy—and from the sides of both (foreign) customer and (local) sex worker—she has crafted a richly textured study of a ‘sexscape’ and its brokering of dreams as much as of money and sex.” - Anne Allison, author of Nightwork: Sexuality, Pleasure, and Corporate Masculinity in a Tokyo Hostess Club