Analysis of the 's contribution to the study of sex and gender - Book Report/Review Example

New images of prostitutes began occurring: the wealthy call girl who earns masses of money, and chooses to use prostitution as a way of entering the highest of income brackets, rather than as a method of escaping poverty, for instance. Feminist scholarship began a similar move, beginning to understand sex work as something that should be a choice, and could be an exercise of agency. Though the consensus remained that forced prostitution through widespread poverty was deplorable, not all poverty was bound up in such ideas.

These images of changing poverty were largely restricted to wealthy areas, however, and the understanding of poverty in less wealthy parts of the globe still consisted largely of the forced-prostitution as effort to escape from poverty. More recent scholars have begun to examine these assumptions, and create less colonial attitudes: clearly if North American or European prostitution could be an act of agency and not of desperation, it could be equally so in other parts of the world. Denis Brenna, in her work What’s Love Got to do with it: Transnational Desires and Sex Tourism in the Dominican Republic, the author essentially argues that, at least in the Dominican Republic, a large part of the sex trade fits into the sexwork-as-agency model, rather than the sexwork-as-desperation model, recognizing, however, that the Dominican represents a complex situation that is not easily modeled.

Brennan’s work first and foremost does an excellent job informing the reader of the life of a sex worker, and the lives and motivations of their clients, in Sousa, one of the sex work capitals of the Dominican Republic. It begins with a somewhat narrative approach, telling the story of a Dominican sex worker who gets rounded up by police and put in jail, so that they could charge the women the usual bribe ($42) for their release (Brennan, 2004, 3). This made one assume immediately that this book