Europe’s sex trade reveals racialized desire ranking foreign bodies by region of origin.

Evidence

If migrations are demographically transforming, sexual desire is perhaps more deeply revealing. The body work may have morphed aside the distancing in time, space, memory, and morality from exterminating modalities of moments past, but sex-workers parading today in Amsterdam’s famed red light district, as elsewhere, on display each evening as tourists flock by, drawn by the smell of sex or transfixed on the spectacle, are overwhelmingly from Asia, the Caribbean, Latin America, and Eastern Europe. The former three regions represent exoticized sites of sexual attraction, male and female, the preferred destinations of Europe’s thriving tourist sex trade today, a point driven home in the wake of the devastating Indian Ocean tsunami, Christmas 2004. The latter region represents Europe’s limits, contestedly European if at all, as the testiness of EU expansion makes all too evident today. The fountain of cowboy capitalism, organized gangs control the sex industry within Europe’s borders. — David Theo Goldberg, The Threat of Race, 924

Categorization

• SHARE: The point that post-tsunami sex tourism traffic to affected regions spiked is a narrow, morbid detail worth sending to someone studying sex tourism or Southeast Asia economics.