home > TRiO and USP Programs > McNair > symposium > 2008 presentations > Deanna Campbell

Deanna Campbell
Anthropology

Diane Baxter, Mentor

Sex Tourism: Travel Media and the Portrayal of Thai Women from a Feminist Perspective

The sex tourism industry has become a booming market in the last several decades with a corresponding increase in marketing for such types of tourism. Many images generated for travel brochures, websites, and travel books portray Thai women as submissive sex objects. Much research has been done on the creation of such images and why people of color from third world countries, especially women, are shown in such a demeaning fashion. Using a feminist perspective to analyze gender relations between Thai women and Western male consumers, this paper shows that the images used in tourism marketing give the Western consumer the belief that the women shown in travel media are submissive, inferior, and the subservient “other.”