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Almighty Gringos and the Relational Economy of Sex Tourism

Megan Rivers-Moore

in Gringo Gulch: Sex, Tourism, and Social Mobility in Costa Rica

This chapter explores the connections between masculinity and the production of value in sex tourism. Sex tourists’ descriptions of their experiences reveal that they are involved in a contradictory ... More

This chapter explores the connections between masculinity and the production of value in sex tourism. Sex tourists’ descriptions of their experiences reveal that they are involved in a contradictory search for a masculine identity that is simultaneously progressive and hegemonic, relying not only on sex workers but also on a critique of Costa Rican men and other tourists. The chapter analyzes how sex tourists’ activities can be understood as masculinizing practices, and how those practices create particular value and materialities. It introduces the concept of the relational economy, referring, first, to the importance of relationality in how sex tourists think about themselves and other men as masculine subjects, and second, to the value, both embodied and emotional, that is generated through their encounters with sex workers. The chapter considers the significance of the search for the often elusive “girlfriend experience” and what it reveals about what is being bought and sold in San José. Finally, the chapter concludes that we can only understand the presence of the specific demographic of men who are found in Gringo Gulch if we pay attention to neoliberal policing practices and their selective and disproportionate impact at home in the United States and Canada.Less

Devising Relations: Markets, Streets, Households, and Workshops

AbdouMaliq Simone

in Jakarta, Drawing the City Near

People figure themselves out by figuring arrangements of materials, of designing what is available to them in formats and positions that enable them different vantage points. What is possible for ... More

People figure themselves out by figuring arrangements of materials, of designing what is available to them in formats and positions that enable them different vantage points. What is possible for people to do with each other is largely a question of what exists between them, and how this “between” can be shaped as active points of reference, connection, and anchorage. How do markets, public spaces, infrastructure, attract things and people, draw them in, coalescence and expend their capacities. By taking materials out of their usual contexts, uses and meanings and then piecing them together, residents could produce unforeseen and not readily controllable ways of existing. This is a politics that goes beyond specific claims, interests, and agendas.Less

Spatialities of Commodity Production

Eric Sheppard

in Limits to Globalization: The Disruptive Geographies of Capitalist Development

Mainstream geographical economists’ socio-spatial ontology emphasizes a mathematical theory language, micro-foundations, market exchange, and spatial economic equilibrium. By contrast, economic ... More

Mainstream geographical economists’ socio-spatial ontology emphasizes a mathematical theory language, micro-foundations, market exchange, and spatial economic equilibrium. By contrast, economic geographers begin with the spatio-temporal process of commodity production in a relational (multi-sectoral and multi-regional) economy. Irrespective of theory-language, spatio-temporality challenges capitalists’ ability to make good on their expectations and realize anticipated profits, particularly because commodity production must include the very geographical commodity of accessibility (transportation and communications). The special role played by accessibility as a commodity challenges aspects of mainstream geographical economics and classical political economy. A capitalist space-economy is characteristically out-of-equilibrium, fosters uneven geographical development, frustrates economic agents’ expectations, cannot be reduced to microfoundations, and is generative of spatially heterogeneous values and prices. This undermines core parables of mainstream micro- and macroeconomics, but also of Marxian value theory.Less

The Near-South: Between Megablock and Slum

AbdouMaliq Simone

in Jakarta, Drawing the City Near

Offers a theoretical formulation that not only explores the ways in which major metropolitan areas of the Global South remain near to the conditions of urbanization usually associated with this ... More

Offers a theoretical formulation that not only explores the ways in which major metropolitan areas of the Global South remain near to the conditions of urbanization usually associated with this designation and near to the contemporary trends of urbanization everywhere, but also keeps near a wide range of complexions, economies, and practices as instruments for situating and developing themselves within a globalized urban world.Less

The Urban Majority: Improvised Livelihoods in Mixed-up Districts

AbdouMaliq Simone

in Jakarta, Drawing the City Near

Considers districts where people of different backgrounds operate in close proximity to each other, and where the proximity means different thing—sometimes closeness, sometimes distance, ... More

Considers districts where people of different backgrounds operate in close proximity to each other, and where the proximity means different thing—sometimes closeness, sometimes distance, collaboration, or separation. But the oscillation is important. There is not underlying commonality, Things do not fit easily. But the sheer diversity of ways of doing things provide a basis for collaboration, constitute a “working majority”, and offer individuals the concrete potential to alter their course of action. Residents always had to initiate some kind of activity to create or supplement incomes. Since most knew that their initiatives would operate in a crowded field of others, they had to adjust and come-up with project that incorporated the ideas, income, and labor of others. Viable, if sometimes only limited, livelihoods derived from a multiplicity of incremental maneuvers undertaken to build upon and extend whatever a household had access to. These maneuvers often relied upon positioning whatever assets the family had within new “neighborhoods” of association.Less

Inventive Policy: Integrating Residents into Running the City

AbdouMaliq Simone

in Jakarta, Drawing the City Near

How to inculcate the sensibility that whatever people are doing, they are doing the work of the city, that they are emitting contributions that could be recognized somewhere, and that the job of ... More

How to inculcate the sensibility that whatever people are doing, they are doing the work of the city, that they are emitting contributions that could be recognized somewhere, and that the job of municipal government and other key institutions is to connect themselves to these contributions. Policy work should assume that people are already participating and then look for ways to register this participation, just as different actors could use this moment to bring themselves to the stage as participants in the pursuit of “policy objectives.”Less

Introduction: Rehearsal for an Urban Commons in Jakarta

AbdouMaliq Simone

in Jakarta, Drawing the City Near

Introduces literature on Jakarta and Indonesia salient to the book’s work and through the lens of a long, turbulent history of efforts to forge experiences of commonality.

Conclusion: Reimagining a Commons

AbdouMaliq Simone

in Jakarta, Drawing the City Near

Sums up the contributions of this study of Jakarta to future urban work. How the efforts of residents constitute a way of continuously reimagining the ability to operate in concert. How discovering ... More

Sums up the contributions of this study of Jakarta to future urban work. How the efforts of residents constitute a way of continuously reimagining the ability to operate in concert. How discovering in the intricate relational meshes of how things get done the incipient formation of a new city, a city that is more inclusive and which maximizes the resourcefulness of its inhabitants, that suggests new ways for institutions to concretely connect with their constituents and for the practices of residents to inform the operations of those very institutions.Less

Endurance: Risking the Familiar

AbdouMaliq Simone

in Jakarta, Drawing the City Near

If communities and institutions are to endure, they must constantly draw bridges between what they do and what others are doing. This is not a bridge that links distinct entities into a common ... More

If communities and institutions are to endure, they must constantly draw bridges between what they do and what others are doing. This is not a bridge that links distinct entities into a common purpose, resemblance, or mutuality. For, bridges also point to breaks and frictions in putting to work different operating systems. Without such frictions there is little motivation to work out ways of associating things that have no overarching reason to be associated. Endurance means to conjoin ourselves with others in the possibility of “saying something” that need not be summed up, that need not have specific parameters of efficacy or objectivity, something that keeps people going in and through transformations that are without precedent in the sense that they need not represent the culmination of a goal or necessity. It means the capacity to risk what is familiar, because what is familiar may not be what it seems to be; every ground and appearance is deceptive.Less