Masculinities and intimacies: performance and negotiation in a transnational tourist town in Caribbean Costa Rica

Abstract

In Puerto Viejo de Talamanca, a transnational tourist town located on the Caribbean coast of Costa Rica, masculinities are expressed and embodied in multiple ways as a result of particular interactions that take place at the convergence of the global and the local. This thesis interrogates the masculine performances of Western tourist men in the context of a hierarchy of desirability complexly located at the intersections of sexuality, tourism, and globalization. Specifically, I argue that tourist men construct their masculinities in contestational and oppositional ways to those of local Caribbean men - constructions mediated through their homosocial encounters with men (both local Caribbean and foreign men), as well as their heterosexual intimate relationships with local women – in order to increase their statuses as more sexually desirable subjects in Puerto Viejo’s sexual landscape.