Making sense of sex tourism through the accounts of sex tourists : a Foucauldian discourse analysis of sex tourists' online communication

Abstract

This thesis explores the perspective of the male sex tourist by studying posts on a ‘sex travel guide’ web page. The study is placed within qualitative social psychology, and makes use of Foucauldian discourse analysis in a naturalistic setting. Thus, it is framed within social constructionist and poststructuralist epistemological frameworks. The aims of the study are to analyze the discursive resources the sex tourists draw upon in their posts, to explore how they construct the phenomenon of sex tourism, and to identify the subject positions they take on through these constructions and the opportunities of experience that these entail. The men posting messages on the ‘sex travel guide’ present the act of buying sex from women as ethically acceptable. The data indicates that they do so through drawing upon ideas from market economy, colonialism, individualism and heteronormativity. Through the subject positions opened by these frameworks of understanding, the sex tourists express experiences of power, of being desired, of being normal, and of being emotionally distanced to the prostitute. I argue that these experiences allow regarding oneself in a favorable light, while carrying out the stigmatized behavior that buying sex could be said to represent. Finally, I suggest that the market economic discourse is of special relevance to study in further research, as I argue that this discursive resource provides ethical justification of buying sex, while at the same time fostering an objectified representation of the prostitute that might lead to a process of dehumanization.