When a Yuma Meets Mama: Commodified Kin and the Affective Economies of Queer Tourism in Cuba

Abstract

In this article, I explore the kinship imaginaries that emerged between gay male tourists from North America and Europe and Cuban male sex workers and their families within the context of Havana’s queer-erotic economies. Whereas male sex workers throughout Latin America and the Caribbean tend to conceal their male clients from their families, Cuban sexual laborers in this study incorporated queer foreigners into kinship imaginaries. Such bonds often conferred the rights and obligations of kin, while “blood” kinship was increasingly described in and subject to financial terms. Motivated by money rather than “blood” or “choice,” kinship ties fostered between foreign gay men and younger male sex workers prompt a rethinking of non-normative kin ties as an alternative to dominant systems of kinship and suggest the political and economic roots of familial bonds more broadly.

Reciprocity and intimate capital in household work: Exchanging love and care for labor rights in contemporary Buenos Aires

“…My analysis is not intended to refute compelling ethnographic accounts of how, in the name of family, reciprocity, or affection, household workers are subject to violation of their labor rights or exploitation by their employers (e.g., Brites, 2014; Romero, 1992; Young, 1987). Instead, I show, as Stout (2015) does in a different ethnographic context and with a different group of laborers, how workers contend with a particular political economy of household work that situates them in positions of intersectional inequality vis‐à‐vis their employers.…”

Nobody likes to sleep alone: aspiring to kinship futures in post‐Soviet Cuba

“…During the post-Soviet era, relationships have become plagued by suspicions of commercialization in an environment structured by local and global gendered, racialized, and class inequalities (Allen 2011;Fernandez 2019;Roland 2011;Stout 2014). Education, which in many contexts provides disadvantaged individuals with possibilities for a wealthier life (e.g.…”

“…It is likely that among them the significance of kinship for such pragmatic survival is particularly heightened. However, pragmatic transnational reproduction (Andaya 2014) and international kinship and love connections (Fernandez 2019;Stout 2015) play crucial roles for many Cubans' strategies of subsistence and economic and geographical mobility. This suggests that kinship relations carry relevance for Cubans' aspirations for the future more broadly as well.…”

“…Although Cubans' affective relationships shifted in the past as well (Martinez-Alier 1974), in post-Soviet Havana, gendered tensions have intensified as Cubans have become suspicious of material interests that shape intimate engagements (Andaya 2013;Cabezas 2009;Härkönen 2019;Stout 2014). My male interlocutors at times complained about women's excessive material demands on them, while women could be equally distrustful of men's economic interests in their relationships (Härkönen 2015;.…”