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Jessica Jacobs, Open University
" ‘Tourist places’
and negotiating modernity"
My paper would examine issues
raised by western women who engage in relationships with ‘indigenous’
men in tourist places in the ‘third’ world.
Based on interviews with ‘local’ men and European ‘tourist’
women in the tourist resorts of the Sinai, Egypt, I argue that the women
exploit the advantages of living in Europe to travel but still, for
the most part, travel with the aim to ‘escape’ life in Europe.
The women construct the Sinai as a place and a people of ‘nature’,
a place of freedom, a place ‘frozen in time’ that contrasts
with their perception of the ever moving modernity they have ‘escaped’
from. These geographical imaginations include colonial and other eroticised
sexual stereotypes of the Arab and the Sinai desert that help to fuel
romances.
The geographical imaginations of Europe held by the indigenous men means
that their relationships with European women are often not an escape
from, but an escape to, ‘modernity’ and all the perceived
benefits it can offer. The landscape and resorts of the Sinai become
mediated spaces through which this can be achieved, without actually
having to travel to Europe.
These resorts can therefore act as an intermediary space – a place
of interaction where conflicting notions of modernity and culture are
negotiated through a gendered and racialised discourse. By becoming
involved with European women, indigenous men are able to ‘negotiate
with modernity’ in a way that is not purely colonial or exploitative
– as it might be through other, more male-mediated relationships
with the west.
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