Beyond Consent: Rethinking Approaches to Sex Tourism in the Global South
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Sex tourism is a complex, multi-billion-dollar industry entangled with issues of consent, exploitation, and power imbalances. Traditional frameworks for understanding consent — dominance feminism and sex-positive feminism — offer limited insights into the nuances of sex tourism. In this paper, I argue that the concept of consent is too narrow to embody the social, political, and economic complexities of agency, sex work, and exploitation within the realm of sex tourism in the Global South specifically. Additionally, I seek to establish an alternative framework for understanding sexual relations within the realm of sex tourism, encouraging divestment from and addressing the lack of applicability of conventional consent frameworks. In this paper, I apply dominance feminism and sex-positive feminism frameworks to the context of sex tourism and discuss their implications and shortcomings. Following this, I expand upon Daniel Loick’s (2017) politics of forms of life to establish a more holistic approach to understanding and addressing the complexities of sex tourism. I intend for this paper to serve as a starting point for an approach to sex work and agency in the context of sex tourism that does not simply rely on a rigid, binary framework of consensual or non-consensual as a measure of goodness and to build upon literature that seeks to recognize the agency of sex workers while also recognizing the broader social, political, and economic contexts in which sexual encounters occur within this realm.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.020 | 0.011 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.003 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.009 | 0.103 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.010 | 0.017 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.014 |
| Research integrity | 0.005 | 0.011 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.004 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".