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Erotics, love and violence: European

women's travels in the northeast of
Brazil
a

Adriana Piscitelli
a

Center for Gender Studies-PAGU, State University of Campinas,

Cidade Universitria, Zeferino Vaz, Campinas, SP, CEP 13083-970,
Brazil
Published online: 07 Jan 2015.

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To cite this article: Adriana Piscitelli (2015): Erotics, love and violence: European women's
travels in the northeast of Brazil, Gender, Place & Culture: A Journal of Feminist Geography, DOI:
10.1080/0966369X.2014.991697
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Gender, Place and Culture, 2015

http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/0966369X.2014.991697

Erotics, love and violence: European womens travels in the northeast

of Brazil
Adriana Piscitelli*
Center for Gender Studies-PAGU, State University of Campinas, Cidade Universitaria, Zeferino
Vaz, Campinas, SP, CEP 13083-970, Brazil

Downloaded by [adriana piscitelli] at 10:38 09 January 2015

(Received 27 June 2013; accepted 30 May 2014)

In this article I analyze the cross-border sexual and affective relationships women from
diverse European countries form with local men in two coastal touristic villages of the state
of Ceara, in the northeast of Brazil. Drawing on ethnographic research I consider how, in
the frame of ambiguous sexual, economic, and affective exchanges, violence intertwines
with erotics and with notions of love. I take the womens narratives as the central reference.
My main argument is that the delight provoked by the transformation of their erotic
subjectivities and the idea of rehearsing new forms of heterosexual relatedness, which
involve what they consider unusual forms of love, feed the ambiguities pervading their
relationships with local men, making these women unaware of the economic aspects
involved in their relationships and of occasional hostility and subalternization to which
they are subjected. Only in the frame of the acute increase in the tensions provoked by the
change in these womens status from tourists to foreign residents, they label their partners
economic demands as exploitative and their actions as violence.
Keywords: female sex travels; cross-border violence; love; transactional sex

Introduction
During the first seasons I spent conducting research in the state of Ceara, in the northeast of
Brazil,1 the narratives about the relationships between female tourists from European
countries and local men called my attention. In the first decade of the twenty-first century,
Fortaleza, the capital city, and some coastal villages were considered to be hubs for
heterosexual male sex travelers. In the context of the public anxiety associated with sex
tourism,2 these men were the center of a web of narratives that unambiguously depicted their
practices as predatory and exploitative. These stories also portrayed women of the lower
classes who dated male sex tourists as whores impelled by poverty or as greedy women
whose desires of consumption pushed them toward richer, frequently older, foreign men
(Piscitelli 2007, 2013). But the narratives about female travelers were different.
Cecilia, a 28-year-old tourist guide, from Fortaleza who owned a small hotel in a
coastal village synthesized the notions that permeated those stories. Highlighting the
economic exploitation and the mistreatment some Italian women suffered at the hands of
native3 men she said, Age does not matter. These women find someone to stay with them.
Money is an important factor. She laughingly added. But you also have to think that in
these places men fuck even goats. They are almost illiterate and lacking teeth, they get
drunk and beat them in front of everybody . . . but these women stay with them.
These narratives led me to consider gringas4 heterosexual relationships with local
men. Yet, in this article, my concern goes beyond comprehending why people in Ceara

*Email: pisci@uol.com.br
q 2015 Taylor & Francis

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A. Piscitelli

depicted European females relationships with local men as something that provoked
compassion toward the women and at the same time mockery. My interest is to focus on
the experiences of those female travelers who, in the local narratives, appeared as subjects
of mistreatment.
In Jericoacoara and Canoa Quebrada, the two coastal villages where these stories were
concentrated, I soon realized that European women were sparse in a heterogeneous flux of
female outsiders, tourists and residents of diverse ages but mostly young and
predominantly from the states of the south of Brazil and of other Latin American
countries. Among these women, some looked for love and sexual adventures with local
men permeated by racialized and sexualized conceptualizations of Brazilian northeastern
masculinity. The relationships the richer women formed with local men involved
ambiguous economic exchanges that were often blurred by notions of love, particularly in
the initial phases of these affairs.
The uncertainties that pervade economic exchanges in tourist local modes of sexual
sociability involving foreign women from more affluent countries and local men have
been documented in other contexts (Frohlick 2007). Yet, in the villages where I conducted
my research, these ambiguities disappeared and the economic aspects of these
relationships acquired clear and distressing contours in the accounts of women who
considered that they have been economically exploited in long-term relationships and in
the stories of female European residents who were older than their partners and reported
having also been subjected to what at some moment they perceived as violence. Some
among them endured what, looking back, they considered as highly abusive relationships
for months and even years. In closely looking at these womens narratives, I consider how
experiences of violence intertwine with erotics and notions of love.
Analyzing the connections between violence, gender, and subjectivity, Das (2008)
affirms that the ethnographic records show that the conceptualizations of violence are
unstable. Yet, by engaging that instability, it would be possible to perceive what is at stake
in naming something as violent. Drawing on Dass suggestion, I analyze what is at issue in
the naming of violence at some point in those narratives, exploring how affects, erotics,
and the interplay of shifting inequalities in those relationships play a part in this particular
unsteadiness.
My main argument is that the delight provoked by the transformation of these female
travelers erotic subjectivities and the idea of rehearsing new forms of heterosexual
relatedness, which involve what they consider unusual forms of love, feed the ambiguities
pervading their relationships with local men, making these women unaware of the
occasional hostility and subalternization to which they are subjected. Only the acute rise of
the tensions provoked by the shift in these womens status from tourists to foreign
residents dissolves those uncertainties, leading them to label their partners economic
demands as exploitative and their actions as violence. Yet, understanding these strains
requires an analysis that, besides considering the complexities of the emotional and sexual
subjectivities of these travelers, takes into account how violence affects them, leading to
the perception of the differentiated fluxes of power permeating the cultural, social, and
economic context in which they are enacted.
Gringas
I analyze the experiences of foreign women who formed relationships with native men
centering my remarks on the narratives of 19 women ranging in age from 20 to 60 years
old. These accounts were collected while conducting ethnographic research centered on

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Gender, Place and Culture

the effects of tourism in the sexual and affective choices of the local population in the state
of Ceara. I carried out my study in Fortaleza and in some beaches of this state for a total of
18 months over several periods from 2000 up to 2008. Fieldwork in Canoa and Jeri was
concentrated during several months in 2002 and 2008. The research combined participant
observation, unstructured conversations, and in-depth interviews with 94 people,
including foreign and local men and local women involved in transnational sexual and
affective relationships, and also interviews with agents employed in the tourism sector and
in the sex markets. Part of the interviews was conducted in Portuguese with the rest being
conducted in English, Italian, and Spanish. The majority of my interviews were recorded
digitally, while informal conversations and observations were recorded in my field diary.
Although the fieldwork was directed toward apprehending the dynamics and the notions
that permeated the relationships of a vast array of agents, in this article, prepared as part of
a dossier on womens heterosexual subjectivities away from home, I privilege the
narratives of foreign women.
Sixteen of the interviewed women were residents of Canoa or Jeri,5 having lived there for
periods ranging from 2 months to 16 years. The remaining three women were tourists who
spent weeks in one of the two villages. Two of my interviewees were Latin American, from
Argentina and Colombia, and the rest were from European countries: Italy, Germany,
Switzerland, Spain, France, and Holland. These women are all considered to be white. Mostly
from middle-class backgrounds, the majority of the women completed their high school level
courses and some have college degrees. In their native countries they were employed in the
sales and services sector with low- to middle-income salaries. Upon moving to Brazil, most of
them dedicated themselves to working in the tourist industry. Three of the women had
children with local men. The older among my interviewees forged relationships with men who
were 520 years younger than they were. Sometimes the women identified themselves as
European or Latin American while other times they identified themselves by nationality.
In this universe, terms like European are frequently used evoking a differentiated and
privileged position in global terms. Yet, the idea of Western alluding to the cultural
differences connected with those positions was definitely not used by my foreign interviewees
or by locals. That notion, rarely if ever present in Brazil, does not convey the perceptions of
Brazilians who recognize and even celebrate the miscegenation of which they are the outcome
but consider themselves as sharing a Western culture.
In the local views, foreign women are gringas and European; particularly older women are
usually seen as richer gringas, a notion that frequently acquires negative connotations. This
expression encompasses women from different countries and diverse ages that are by no
means homogeneous in terms of gender codes and of sexual habitus. However, the
interweaving of local and transnational configurations of power frequently contributes to
efface this heterogeneity. Some long-term resident women try to displace themselves from
that social position, making an effort in order to be immersed in the local community
networks. In these womens perceptions, cultural difference involves class, education, and
the performance of what are seen as proper gender and sexuality codes (open to new but not
excessive experiences). Some female interviewees from European countries stated that they
frequently felt more cultural closeness with (middle class mostly white) residents from
Fortaleza, the south of Brazil, or from other Latin American countries than with visitors from
their own countries. This was particularly the case when they alluded to European citizens
whose practices they perceived as morally reprehensible, such as male and female sex tourists.
I was introduced to some of my interviewees in Jeri and Canoa by friends from
Fortaleza who lived in these villages. I approached others on the seafront, in cafes, and
shops. My status as a Latin American foreigner with southern European ancestry was

A. Piscitelli

crucial to many of the interactions and dialogs that I had, particularly with Italian and
Spanish women. At the same time, the fact of having lived for over 20 years in Brazil and
visited these coastal villages since they were discovered by alternative tourists helped in
the interactions with the local people, who felt that I could understand the impacts of
tourism in these places of history.

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Gender and sexuality in transnational settings

Tourism is locally perceived as playing a critical role in Jeri and Canoas transformations.6
In Jeri, at the beginning of the 1980s, the local economy was still based on barter, and
electrical energy only arrived at the end of the 1990s. Initially seducing travelers in search
of natural beauty and some sort of primitivism and later on also kite and windsurfers, both
places rapidly became two of the principal tourist destinations of Ceara and attracted
comparatively more foreign tourists, particularly female travelers, than other tourist
destinations in the state (Figure 1).
Along this process, a significant part of the villages traditional economic activities
was abandoned and substituted by work in the tourism sector. There were also relevant
changes in the ways in which land and space were occupied and inequalities produced.
Tourism intensified the social distances in the local population and in regard to the
outsiders. In both places, foreigners rapidly became integrated into circuits of sexual,
affective, and economic exchanges with the local population. Several later became
residents and owners of tourism-related businesses.
In the frame of the expansion of the global and national awareness of domestic
violence, in Brazil there is an increasing preoccupation with gender violence that

Figure 1. Canoa Quebrada and Jericoacoara in the map of Ceara.

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Gender, Place and Culture

victimizes women (De Oliveira and Gomes 2011). This concern is also present in Jeri and
Canoa, where natives and residents point to the fact that one of the effects of tourism has
been to reduce gender inequalities, highlighting the decrease of domestic violence. In the
recent past, the asymmetric complementarity between men and women was anchored in a
sexual division that designated men with the responsibility for materially supporting
women, children, and the home. The disappearance of fishing, which was a masculine
activity, and poorly paid male seasonal work options have affected this possibility for local
men (Clerc-Renaud 2002). Concurrently, womens increasing role as tourism microentrepreneurs and paid workers is seen as having relatively balanced gender dynamics in
terms of domestic power and decision-making. These changes, however, co-exist with
traditional notions of gender and sexuality which permeate styles of masculinity that
revolve around homosociality, intensive consumption of alcohol, and multiple
sexual affective partnerships (Ribeiro 2006). And as in other places in the northeast of
Brazil, contrary to the masculine values on public display, in these villages where up to the
1960s marriages were arranged by the fiances parents (Clerc-Renaud 2002), women still
are expected to conform to a relatively more controlled sexuality (Rebhun 2004).
In the transnational tourism circuits, Brazilian women and men are associated with a
racialized sexual availability and proficiency. But, differently from the sex tourism circuits
in Fortaleza, in Jeri and Canoa the changes brought by tourism did not lead to filtering the
social and economic relations through the overt selling of sex to foreigners. However,
these transformations are perceived as having had significant effects on local gender codes
and on sexuality, leading to the re-configuration of the entwinement between economy,
sociality, and sexuality.
In both villages, sexual initiation still tends to take place with natives. By the end of the
adolescence, however, many girls and, particularly, boys choose to form relationships with
tourists. The dating atmosphere that permeates the local and transnational youth culture
also involves older women. As a woman in my early 50s, I have been the target of local
mens seductive styles on several occasions such as when at a disco, Leon, a local musician
in his 40s told me the stories of his relationships with foreign women. He explained me that
he had had three wives: a woman from Fortaleza, then an Italian woman with whom he had a
daughter and the third one was a Spanish woman who owned a house in Jeri. And caressing
my arms, he added, I like foreign women . . . They are more open-minded, less jealous.
These relationships frequently entail economic exchanges. It must be noted, though,
that so-called transactional sex (Hunter 2010; Kempadoo 2004; Cabezas 2009) has been
traditionally on display across a wide section of Brazil. Extra-marital sexual, affective, and
economic exchanges have principally involved younger women and older men with higher
economic resources. These exchanges have been frequently associated with the notion of
economic and also emotional help. Yet transnational tourism has altered its dynamics.
Young women often forgo the help offered by local men for that which they receive from
foreigners and, in Canoa and Jeri, these exchanges have expanded now including local
men. These relationships sometimes entail male homoerotic sex. Yet, young mens
involvement in heterosexual relationships with foreign women comprising meals, gifts,
trips, and sometimes the necessary resources to transform them into small tourism
entrepreneurs is far more recurrent.
There is a general understanding, however, that these sorts of relationships should not
be qualified as sex tourism as they do not involve prostitution, understood to be the direct
exchange of sex for money. Jose, a 30-year-old moreno (brown) local man, who at the
moment of the interview had recently returned from a trip to Europe invited by a foreign
girlfriend and was uncomfortable with my questions regarding his sexual relationships,

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A. Piscitelli

said, Yes, I go out with women, with Brazilian and foreign women . . . But here there is
no prostitution. Nobody pays.
By updating traditional patterns of masculinity regarding multiple affective and sexual
partnerships with the inclusion of foreign women, several local men collect different
outsider girlfriends. The alteration in gender codes and in the dynamics of the sexual,
economic, and affective exchanges has been accompanied by changes that created diverse,
hybrid esthetical patterns. The traditional masculine taste preferred strong women with pele
alva (light colored skin) and thick thighs, but young men these days now favor morenas with
slim, well-toned bodies and also appear to be fascinated by European blonde women with
light colored eyes and hair. The estheticization of these blondes cannot be disconnected both
from the historical value attributed to European whiteness in Brazil (Moutinho 2003) and to
the commodification process involved in tourism. In Jeri and Canoa, this whiteness is
shorthand for the relatively privileged social position these women occupy.
Yet, this esthetization process does not include older European women understood to
be on the prowl. Local men value feminine youth in heterosexual relationships although
in both villages younger men and older women make up some local couples. While
sometimes the men involved in those relationships are jokingly ridiculed by their friends,
these older local women are neither objects of hostility of the community nor subject to
mistreatment by their partners. On more than one occasion, however, we saw scenes and
heard stories in which older rich gringas encountered aggressive and humiliating
sexualized gestures and language. One of these narratives involved the long-term
relationship of Veronica, an elegant 60-year-old Italian woman, currently the owner of a
bed and breakfast, with a local man 11 years her junior. According to the story, at the
beginning of the relationship, when she still did not speak and understand Portuguese, he
used to drink with his friends commenting in a loud voice, Ill fuck her in such and such a
way. And they all laughed while she nodded without understanding what was said. In this
environment, the act of choosing older women from rich countries cannot be detached
from the benefits and opportunities that these women offer. Such exchanges were open to
only a few local men, however, particularly those involved in aquatic sports and capoeira.
Capoeira was introduced in the villages in the 1990s as part of a process of the
diffusion of this martial art with African roots. In Ceara, the population is seen as being
descended from a mixture of Portuguese colonists and Native Brazilians. The states
identity icon, in racial terms, is the caboclo, (mixture of whites and aboriginals), short in
stature and with a skin color that, although dark, is distant from the highly estheticized
color of the mulattos. In these villages most of the capoeiristas are not African-Brazilian,
but they display bodily styles that, in foreign womens understanding, confirm sexualized
and racialized views of Brazilian masculinity. Analyses of the relationships between
capoeira and eroticism make the claim that, in Brazil, players abilities in the martial art
are seen as expressing their virility, with the best players being the most virile and,
therefore, the best lovers (Lewis 1999).
Among foreign women, this eroticism is also linked to the concept of a blackness
which is not necessarily observable on players bodies, but appears in the cultural
associations with the martial arts African roots. According to Elisa, a delicate 28-year-old
blonde from Spain, who married a local capoeira player 2 years before I met her and who
classified her husband (along with all the local players) as cabezon (large head) and
Moreno caboclo but not negro,
My image of the Brazilian man is more Bahian . . . with darker skin, bigger, smiling a lot . . .
[Capoeira ] is super beautiful to me . . . because of all the history it contains, you know, of the
slaves and stuff. Its like all history here.

Gender, Place and Culture

The nexus between virility, eroticism and African roots makes capoeiristas highly
valued in these spaces of transnational contact. They acquire market value, prestige and
power through their corporification of this version of Brazilian masculinity (Figure 2).

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Transforming erotic subjectivities

The interviewed women who repeatedly returned to Canoa and Jeri or moved into these
villages expressed their fascination for these places offering romanticized readings both of
the landscape and of the community. Dona, a 54-year-old Italian woman, petit blond,
green-eyed, and with a youthful-looking body, who was the owner of a bed and breakfast
in Jeri and had two children with two different local men, evoked the pleasure of letting
herself loose in a place that appeared as located in the margins of time,
Few people lived here and the place was so native . . . I wanted to live in a more primitive
place . . . in a small community . . . in a simple way . . . That magic, that nature, at that
personal moment of my life and that person that I met, a capoeira player.

In these womens narratives, the recurrent association between simplicity and

primitivism is also expressed in qualities attributed to Brazilian partners, at least at the
beginning of relationships. These men are described as happy, gentle, noble, and lacking
malice, sensitive, shy, and even fragile. Yet, these supposed male qualities are further linked
to a style of virility that is understood to be strong and exotic. For most of my interviewees,
traveling is also about exploring themselves. Attempting to absorb these places through
their affective and sexual encounters with local men embodying that virility, some of these
women feel they attained the self-discovery they sought. In the European interviewees
accounts, this process is expressed by allusions to the transformation in their sexual
subjectivities achieved by means of the contacts with local styles of masculinity.
These mens virilities are associated with a machismo that attracted them in terms of
allowing them to rehearse a certain sexual passivity. But in these womens accounts,

Figure 2. European women watching a capoeira performance in Jeri, 2008. Photograph by

Fernanda Leao.

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A. Piscitelli

passivity appears as an expression of sexual agency and as a new, different and, exciting
experience. Ema, a 20-year-old student from Germany, talking about her local boyfriend
in Canoa, explained that she did not understand much Portuguese and she could not guess
what he said and she considered that was sexy. But, above all, she appreciated the fact that
he could be sexually dominant, the leader in bed while she just lay back. In her words,
that is unusual, because men in Germany are so lazy . . . I enjoy it, because it is so
different for me.
The discoveries associated with these relationships are most of all connected with the
sexual intensity attributed to local masculinities that are perceived as closer to nature.
According to Laura, a 21-year-old Italian girl in love with a local windsurfer with whom
she was involved for over a year in Jeri, For example, here you smell scents which you no
longer smell in Italy. Italian men have no smell. And hugs are another thing [one finds
here]. Its the simplicity. Elisa, from Spain, offered an account of the difference attributed
to local men. She thought that they were machistas. And this character was evident in the
selfishness several men showed in sexual terms, it is like, tic-tic, very quickly, and it is
over. At the same time she considered that they were more sexual, very physical, touching
a lot and having sex more frequently, I keep on asking myself, Am I frigid or
something? I cant do it so many times a day. Musing about the effects this style of
sexuality had on her, she arrived at the conclusion that it made her feel much more
feminine. And this style of masculinity embodied in a capoeira player provoked such an
explosive love that she decided to stay and to marry him.
These sexual interactions are seen to enhance the freedom these women seem to be
rehearsing in different aspects of their lives, while leading to new perceptions of their own
sexualities. The combination of these appeals led women who traveled looking for selfdiscovery in special places to return to these villages year after year and/or become
residents of these tourist destinations.
Love and violence
In these womens narratives, their relationships with local men represent the choice of
trading stable European lifestyles understood as ordered, predictable, boring, and
stressful for adventures created by intimate contacts in the midst of a culture considered
as open and living day-by-day. The idea of freedom materializes in the option for these
relationships racialized and sexualized men who are situated in economically and socially
inferior positions and who are, on occasion, much younger than the women in question.
The eroticization of these relationships also involves a certain perception of the risks of
getting involved with men who are seen as intensely virile, but whose gender codes are
perceived as different from the egalitarian gender patterns that the women claim to be
accustomed to.
Among these women, the fact of suspending their normative love objects when far
from home is not necessarily perceived as transgressive, particularly when they are young
and involved in short-term, holiday flings. In these cases, the sexual attraction linked to
local masculinities can appear as normalized, as an option in a tourist destination. As Elisa
explained, referring to her first visit to Jeri, when she arrived with that European
mentality of not getting involved in affective terms, You are on vacation, you do not
want to have anything serious . . . going to bed with anyone was okay, but that was all I
wanted.
Yet, long-term relationships and marriages only acquire a non-transgressive character
through delicate and persistent work directed toward blurring the inequalities that

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Gender, Place and Culture

permeate them. In these social worlds, gendered differences of nationality, race, class,
and age and attraction interrelate with a material dimension. The narratives that we have
collected show the awareness, on the part of these women, of their relatively privileged
situation in the villages. They speak about a feeling of being hunted because they are
supposedly wealthy foreigners. One of the most dreaded and painful expressions of those
inequalities is the evidence of the local partners material interest, in terms of crystallizing
a realization that the men are after something other than their love.
In my younger interviewees stories, their long-term relationships are constructed
around the notion of an intense/passionate love that overcomes differences, making it
possible to enjoy the intensely sexualized local masculinities while challenging machismo
in the non-sexual dimensions of their relationships. They believe that they have been
successful in establishing egalitarian relationships with their local partners in the domestic
and extra domestic spheres. They claim to have re-educated the men, who are used to
having their mothers and sisters do the domestic work, to take part in household
maintenance and also in the tourist businesses they run. Elisa, spending the money she
saved working as a teacher in Spain, rented a small hotel and explained how her husband,
besides teaching capoeira, shared all the work, He works with us, he cleans the rooms, he
prepares breakfast for the guests. He does everything, together with us. This combination
is perceived as producing a form of exciting heterosexual relatedness these women had
never experienced in previous romantic and sexual relationships at home. And love
contributes to dilute the distress provoked by the threat posed by their relatively privileged
economic conditions.
The narratives of older women who at the time of the interviews were aged between
35 and 60 years old, engaged in relationships with younger men, draw a seemingly more
dramatic picture in which the economic exchanges involved in the relationships that they
maintained with local men were painfully disclosed. The suggestive aspect of most of
these interviewees narratives is how they came to perceive their partners economic
demands and to label them as exploitative. This awareness is closely related to the process
by means of which some of these mens actions were seen as aggressions and named as
violence.
Dona, from Italy, recalls the moment when, after the birth of her first child, her partner
physically abused her. As she articulated [He] would arrive home and break everything.
Once he locked me in the bedroom and took all the keys to the rooms and threw them
away. Several times he hit me . . . He became . . . very violent. When a childhood friend
of hers arrived from Italy he became frightened by what he saw and called her parents.
After telling them that that man was practically holding their daughter hostage, her parents
traveled to Jeri, and stayed some 6 months there. Only then did she go to the local Police
Station and manage to throw him out.
In her narrative, the physical violence she endured and her homes destruction
disclosed the perception of her previous hardships in the hands of her husband and of other
locals. Associating violence with suffering, she remembered how much she had to put up
with getting pregnant in Jeri, among those sexist people. She did not know how to speak
Portuguese and her husband tried to isolate her, He always put himself in the middle of
everything, wanting to be the only [contact with] the outside world. And her suffering was
also connected with the perception of how she has also been economically exploited.
Donas stories, as well as other interviewees accounts, allow us to perceive how the
suffering endured in events considered as expressions of physical or psychological
violence is also associated with the humiliation they felt discovering how much they had
profited from them in the process of buying land and dune buggies, constructing homes

10

A. Piscitelli

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and bed-and-breakfasts. And this perception is connected with the fact that they generally
had to face the workload of their new tourist enterprises alone, sustaining their Brazilian
partners and their consumption of alcohol and also drugs.
Naming their partners actions as violence, these women evoked the moments in which
the ambiguities that permeated their relationships dissipated, in the frame of a suddenly
acute perception of the inequalities on which they were anchored. At the same time, this
insight forced them to face the fact that those inequalities, seen as key aspects that
prompted those violent events, were already inscribed in their everyday relationships. And
love is evoked to explain their attachments toward men who subjected them to what they
perceive as reprehensible gender dynamics. As Pamela, a 35-year-old Italian woman,
owner of a small hotel in Jeri and mother of a young child put it, describing her
relationship with her first local husband,
The cultural differences were huge, because hes from here, right? He barely knew how to read or
write, see? [But] at the beginning of the relationship, when you are passionately in love, you close
your eyes to a number of things, dont you? There is also that enchantment for what is exotic.

Passionate or angelic love allowed these women to help their local partners
during certain time divesting their relationships from the notion of sexual/economic
exchanges. Veronica explained how much she struggled in Italy in order to be able to buy
something in Jeri. I helped him a lot . . . Three times I opened a bar for him. He was
involved with drugs and had a lot of debts. My love was angelic, the kind that only gives
but seeks nothing in return. In these womens narratives, help articulated with love,
blurred the economic exchanges with local men that comprised the investment of
resources in promoting their partners businesses, buying buggies, and organizing their
tours of Europe as part of their sports or capoeira careers, housing and feeding them and
also struggling for their residence permits and work visas abroad.
Considering that their cross-border sexual desires were problematic since they led them
to breach social difference, these interviewees conjured up love in order to neutralize the
guilt and shame associated with the idea of being punished for having crossed the
homogamic (and homoethnic) borders that delimitate acceptable long-term relationships.
Viviane, a 49-year-old Frenchwoman who was a ski instructor and a sailor and who fell in
love with a local man 10 years younger, lamenting the money and dignity that she had lost in
the years she spent in Jeri, exemplifies this perception. She explained how much she wanted
to help her local partner. Seeing that he could not get much work, she bought him a buggy but
told him that it was not a present; he would have to work to pay it off. But he never had
money for gasoline, for repairs, he spent everything on drugs, and he went so far as to rob her
house and steal her money. Viviane uttered, As if I picked money from trees in France. She
was sad over what happened. She felt stupid, for having lost money and time, and ashamed.
She believed that this situation would never have happened to her in France, because she
only went out with people who were like her, socially speaking.
Alluding to violence these women referred to the increasing tensions in a process
whereby, no longer tourists but residents in the villages, they were simultaneously localized
within global and regional histories of inequalities and situated in frail social positions despite
their relative privileges. When their status changed from tourists to foreign residents,
gradually enmeshed in local gender and sexuality codes, these women felt how this alteration
curbed their negotiating possibilities. In this process, asymmetric gender codes seem to
enclose women who are not inserted in local kinship7 and sociability networks.
Far from considering local mens masculinities as inherently violent, I observe that in
these two coastal villages under intense social transformations connected with the

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transnationalization of tourism, the aggressions toward European female residents are

highlighted while domestic violence among locals is seen as decreasing. Violence appears
associated with the fact that they are rich (and vulnerable) gringas involved in relationships
with men with scarce economic resources. Yet, these aggressions are different than the use
of male sexuality as a means of challenging economic and political inequalities in places
like Jerusalem in the 1980s (Bowman 1989), where Palestinian merchants played out
scenarios of vengeance against American females, a nationality seen as oppressing them
economically and socially. In Jeri and Canoa, vindictiveness affects mainly older female
European residents, seen as richer, in long-term relationships, who refuse the economic
demands of their male partners.
In this process, the precariousness of local social connections and, in some cases, the
eagerness to obtain legal residence in Brazil contributed to womens decisions to remain in
these relationships. However, the romanticized eroticization of the relationships with local
men was a crucial factor to their confinement for years in abusive dynamics. Pamela, from
Italy reveals the ultimate meaning with which she imbues the relationship with her local
husband: I think that above all it was because I was passionately in love with him, I loved
him so much, I gave myself entirely to him. Viviane, from France, explained He cheated
me . . . he robbed me . . . [but] I still liked him and was still in love.
Emotions and inequalities
Analyzing how the entanglement between economic practices and intimate social
relations affecting North South relationships is understood and experienced by those
involved in such relationships, several authors consider the relational possibilities of
love. Taking into account the relationships between Cubans and foreign visitors, Simoni
(2012) considers that, for the participants of transnational encounters, love might open
ways for being together in what they perceive as shared social worlds that are not
dominated by material concerns and structural inequalities. Despite acknowledging this
possibility, Tornquist (2012) ponders that it is not in any way evident how intimacy and
romance, as a set of discursive scripts and embodied and emotionally invested practices,
operate in a global world. Reflecting on the gendered and racialized dynamics of tango
tourism in Buenos Aires, she articulates the questions raised by the variety of intimate
transnational relations: it is possible that they constitute a radical resistance of racist
decrees of social segregation and dominant assumptions of gendered orders just as they
might best be seen as the ultimate expression of cynical power relations, whereby
material goods and promises of a better life are exchanged for intimacy.
The analysis of foreign womens experiences in Jeri and Canoa suggests that both
possibilities might coexist. In these villages, notions of passionate love that overlook
inequalities have opened relational possibilities for several transnational predominantly
young couples. Those conceptualizations have also infused most of my foreign female
interviewees engagements with local men. However, the relationships that are
categorized as exploitative and violent in which women experienced acute tensions
associated with imbalances in power reveal how the complex web of inequalities in which
they were immersed could interfere with the relational possibilities of love.
The perception of having been subjected to violence had diverse effects on those
interviewees subjectivities. These women became acutely aware of their global social
position, considering impossible to erase its effects in their intimate relationships with
local men. Some women, like Viviane, extended this painful knowledge to her
relationships with the villagers. In her words As Im a gringa, everyone thinks I have to

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A. Piscitelli

pay . . . And it doesnt matter how long I live here, its gringa! They, in their stupid heads,
think . . . this is a rich gringa . . . Jeri was paradise and now its hell . . . . These
unpleasant experiences led these interviewees to consider permanence in these places
unbearable and to sell their properties in order to leave.
Others, such as Veronica, stayed but decided not involve themselves anymore in
sexual/affective relationships. Simultaneously she worked in the production of an aura of
local respectability around her commitment with the communitys problems and her
dedication to her Brazilian grandchild. In other cases, the understanding of the local
entrenchments between economy, sexuality, and gender was accompanied by more
rationalized versions of erotic and emotional attachments by means of which the women
rehearsed safer relationships.
Besides maintaining their businesses, these women invested heavily in the creation of
local social networks that could protect them, and in this new social setting they chose
new local sexual and affective partners. Several aspects they valued in the local
masculinities were reiterated in these choices. They still looked for intensely virile,
sexualized, and racialized men. Yet, the construction of their sexual lives occupying
stronger social positions, the less romanticized visions of their partners, acknowledging
their material interests, and the preservation of their private spaces were all strategies
that allowed them to further explore their erotic subjectivities with less danger. They thus
rehearsed their erotic agency by rejecting cohabitation. Donas account portrays that
process,
The father of my first child was tall, well built, he did water sports, but he wasnt black, and
I have a crush on black cultures. But I was madly in love at the beginning. I do not know if it
was because I was arriving from that city, Milan, full of rules, of history. It was amazing, to
live such a strong passion in this extraordinary place. Afterwards, all that became secondary.
That was the most violent relationship I had. Then I had a relationship with a capoeira player,
who is the father of my daughter. He was violent not in physical but in psychological terms.
Finally he found a Dutch gringa who paid his plane ticket to Europe . . . . He said: . . . I am
sorry to leave my daughter with a mother like you that is good for nothing! Can you believe
that? He did not work, he never gave money to my daughter. Now I have this relationship with
this man. He teaches capoeira angola, which I love. We have been together for one and a half
years. I met him in Salvador. But he came here and it did not work. He arrived and said, You
have a hotel, you are powerful. And I realized that I did not want him here. So, hes living in
Fortaleza. I visit him. He came here for Christmas. This one is handsome, black, and we have
a fantastic sexual relationship. Hes much younger than me because I am 54 and he is 32. All
my partners were younger than me. Our relationship is great but in this way, he in Fortaleza
and me here.

Conclusion
In these social worlds, power is central in the configuration of the changing terrain in
which the relationships formed with local sexualized and racialized men in Jeri and Canoa
are crucial in the transformation of these womens erotic subjectivities. For several of
them, those inner experiences are also produced by what at some point they perceive as
violence. Naming violence as such led these women to shape their perceptions of their
fragile social positioning between those fluxes of power, connected with their status,
gender, nationality, and age. Yet, as Das (2007) suggests, individual lives are defined by
context, but they are also generative of new contexts. The (passionate) knowledge
involved in these womens understanding of violence opens the way for the actions they
take when they escape from the obligations of love, move away from those relationships,
and strengthen their social positions.

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13

Acknowledgements
My warmest thanks to the anonymous reviewers for their thoughtful and generous comments.
Thanks also to Fernando Leao and Ana Fonseca, who accompanied me during the field work, to
Susan Frohlick, who provided valuable insights and to Jenny Lloyd for the proof reading.

Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Funding
Many thanks to FAPESP, the State of Sao Paulo Research Funding Agency.

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Notes
1. The northeast still is one of the poorest regions of Brazil, where inequalities persist, in spite of
public policies directed toward reducing poverty (Instituto de Pesquisa Economica Aplicada 2012).
2. I write the term sex tourism in italics, pointing to the fact that during the years in which the
research was conducted it became an emic term, frequently considered as synonymous with
heterosexual prostitution directed toward foreign male visitors.
3. Emic term that usually refers people born in the land.
4. Gringo/gringa is a word locally used to refer to foreigners, frequently but not exclusively from
countries of the Global North. It can be used in descriptive, but also in pejorative terms.
5. Nicknames for Jericoacoara and Canoa Quebrada.
6. Canoa, in the states northeastern coast, with little more than 4000 stable residents in 2005, has
received visitors since the end of the 1960s. On the west coast, with almost half the population,
Jeri was discovered 10 years later.
7. In these cases, not even the birth of children has the potential to create kinship in the sense of
producing relatedness with their partners relatives.

Notes on contributor
Adriana Piscitelli is a feminist social anthropologist, Senior Researcher at the University of
Campinas Centre for Gender Studies (Brazil). During the last 13 years she has been engaged in
studies focusing the transnational sex and marriage markets.

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ABSTRACT TRANSLATIONS
Erotismo, amor y violencia: viajes de mujeres europeas en el noreste de Brasil
En este artculo analizo las relaciones sexuales y afectivas transfronterizas de mujeres de
diversos pases europeos con hombres locales en dos villas tursticas costeras del estado de
Ceara, en el noreste de Brasil. Basandome en trabajo etnografico, considero como, en el
marco de intercambios sexuales, economicos y afectivos ambiguos, la violencia se
entrelaza con el erotismo y con nociones de amor. Tomo las narrativas de las mujeres
como la referencia central. Mi argumento central es que el disfrute provocado por la
transformacion de sus subjetividades eroticas y la idea de ensayar nuevas formas de
relacionamiento heterosexual, las cuales suponen que consideren formas inusuales de
amor, alimenta las ambiguedades que dominan sus relaciones con los hombres locales,
haciendo a estas mujeres inconscientes de los aspectos economicos involucrados en sus
relaciones y de la ocasional hostilidad y subalternizacion a la que son sujetas. Solo en el
marco de un aumento subito de las tensiones provocadas por el cambio en el estatus de
estas mujeres de turistas a residentes extranjeras, ellas categorizan las demandas
economicas de sus parejas como explotacion y a sus acciones como violencia.
Palabras claves: viajes sexuales de mujeres; violencia transfronteriza; amor; sexo
transaccional

; ; ;