Gringo Love

Reviewed by: Gringo Love: Stories of Sex Tourism in Brazil by Marie-Eve Carrier-Moisan Laura Rebecca Murray Marie-Eve Carrier-Moisan. Gringo Love: Stories of Sex Tourism in Brazil. William Flynn, compiler. Débora Santos, illustrator. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2020. 200 pp. What is sex tourism? Marie-Eve Carrier-Moisan asks this question in one of the appendices to her graphic novel, noting that the answer is not a simple one and that her book opts to provide possible definitions rather than definitive answers. In fact, throughout the book, she makes clear that Gringo Love is less about what sex tourism is and more about how it is experienced by the book's protagonists and operated by diverse state and non-state interests in Ponta Negra, Natal, Brazil. With Gringo Love, Carrier-Moison along with William Flynn who adapted the research to the graphic format and Brazilian freelance illustrator Débora Santos have created an engaging, nuanced look at the complexities of sexual economies. The core themes of the book are introduced early and woven throughout: how anti-sex tourism campaigns are heavily raced and classed, the tenuous and blurred lines between romance and money, and the centrality of the women's relationships with one another for support, guidance, and solidarity. The graphic novel follows Carol, the main character, and her friends Ester, Sofia, Luana, and Amanda as they navigate sexual economies in Natal. Carrier-Moisan's character "Eva" in the story plays an important role as a narrator, friend, and anthropologist who reflects on the diverse challenges of ethnographic fieldwork in the "Fieldnotes" section breaks. "Part I: Arrivals" opens with a sensationalistic journalistic story and police operations to crack down on "sex tourism." The decision to start the graphic novel this way foregrounds and locates the women's stories in the [End Page 771] crossfires of moral brigades and gentrification projects that fan the flames of moral panics and justify violent state intervention. Carrier-Moisan's central argument throughout the book is that rather than protect sex workers' safety and health, such interventions against "sex tourism" often have the opposite effect, increasing their vulnerabilities to violence and exploitation while reducing their opportunities for social mobility and agency in their lives. The introduction of the Ponta Negra neighborhood, where the graphic novel is located, is particularly striking. Carrier-Moisan devotes attention to the history of the neighborhood and its transformations. The history is told through an encounter between her character, Eva, and her neighbor, Beatriz, who is a white, middle-class woman on her way to meet gringos at a bar after participating in an anti-sex tourism protest. Beatriz details how Ponta Negra changed from a fishing village into middle-class neighborhood of gated communities and bars "for us—the locals" (24), prior to the opening of an international airport in the 2000s that, much to Beatriz's discontent, transformed the area into a tourist beach predominantly frequented by gringos and sex workers. In opting to have the neighborhood history told from Beatriz's perspective, Carrier-Moisan hints at how disputes surrounding sex tourism are rooted in the country's colonial past and structural racism of the present. These undertones are more directly discussed in Appendix 3 where she analyzes the history of Ponta Negra as "a complex, shifting social space, where relations of power exceed the simplistic dichotomy of locals and tourists" (150). Indeed, the graphic presentation of Carrier-Moisan's research is a compelling way to communicate the hypocrisies and complexities that surround sex workers in Brazil, particularly in tourist cities such as Natal. The Epilogue is especially important as it compares her fieldwork from 2007–2008 to her experience when she returned to Natal during the 2014 World Cup. She does an excellent job of showing how the campaigns that took over the landscapes in 2007–2008, and even more aggressively leading up to the World Cup, successfully changed Natal's sex tourism industry. As is the case in so many other Brazilian cities and global contexts, spectacles and police violence served real estate and middle-class interests, rather than benefiting sex workers. Prostitution in the neighborhood shifted from relationships intertwined with hopes

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