Sex, romance and the carnivalesque between female tourists and Caribbean men

In this paper I examine interviews with female travelers who have been involved with Caribbean males during their holidays in Trinidad and Tobago and suggest that their experiences can best be understood employing the concept of the carnivalesque. Bakhtin (1984 [1968]) has described the carnivalesque as a temporary liberation of the established order, a world ‘upside down’ where bodily excess is celebrated. The concept of the carnivalesque seems useful not only because of the apparent suspension of the traditional order that takes place when white, Western, middle-class women are dating poor, uneducated, black males, but also because it allows to transgress the dichotomy of sex tourism and romance. Furthermore, carnival has been considered as potentially subversive, as it leads to an inversion of hierarchies, but also as conservative, since a temporary transgression is often followed by a return to an order that is thereby strengthened. Indeed, the narratives of some women suggest that their engagements with social and racial ‘Others’ remain temporary with little effect to the racial discourses they draw on, while others appear to transgress social and racial borders more substantially without falling into racial Othering.

► Interviews with female travelers who have been involved with Caribbean males during their holidays are examined.
► It is argued that their experiences can best be understood employing the concept of the ‘carnivalesque’.
► The carnivalesque represents a temporary liberation of the established order, a world ‘upside down’.
► In the carnivalesque, hedonism, licentiousness, and sexual excess are celebrated.
► Social divisions are swept away.