Scan barcode
A review by bahareads
After Love: Queer Intimacy and Erotic Economies in Post-Soviet Cuba by Noelle M. Stout
challenging
emotional
funny
hopeful
informative
sad
tense
fast-paced
4.5
I read for a graduate class
I highly recommend this book. I enjoyed it a lot, even for school. Noelle Stout explores boundaries between labor and love, and how these boundaries are blurred in practice. Her source material is 100 hours of formal and informal interviews with queer persons, sex workers, and tourists. Noelle Stout prefers subjectivity over identity and uses the word 'queer' to highlight the shifting nature of desire and fluidity of sexuality. She focuses on Cuban on Cuban relationships but looks at Cuban-tourist encounters. However 'tourist' is used as a broad encompassing term. She uses her experiences and reactions to relationships cultivated while in Cuba and the demand placed on them as a source of insight and is very transparent about it.
For the scholarship, Stout is targeting two distinct realms: (1) sexuality and (2) contemporary transnational capitalism that associates practices of love and intimacy with heterosexuality, excluding queer people. She builds on those who look at intimate economies (tangle of market and everyday intimacies) and counteracts superficial accounts of homosexuality in Cuba. She also looks at lesbians and bisexual women, not just gay men which uncovers how gender norms play a role in socially acceptable forms of homoeroticism. However Stout Focuses on people with nonconforming genders and sexuality to uncover the experiences and concerns of contemporary Cuban social life. She uses 'gay' as a gender-neutral word; saying terms are flexible by nature.
Stout argues that disagreements about intimacy in the context of rising inequality can teach us a lot about young Cubans in a post-Soviet nation. She says intimacy and desire are shaped and influenced by cultural meaning during the introduction of capitalism to Cuba during the 1990s and early 2000s. The study illuminates how people whose sexual desire is outside the mainstream failed to conform during the transition from communism to socialism. One significant piece of her work is to show that Skin colour played a huge role in people separating sex work from jineterismo; as blackness can = criminality in Cuba.
In talking about race, Noelle Stout brings in her own experiences of how she was perceived in Cuba. She has a whole paragraph dedicated to in. She says "Because I am light-skinned and blue-eyed, Cubans in Havana's queer nightlife often assumed that I was the tourist client of my American girlfriend..." whom they mistook as Cuban. Stout discusses her ethnicity, a "combination of French-Candian and Native American-Germn heritage." And I want to touch her hand when I say this - it's okay to be White presenting and to call yourself White while holding on to your ethnic heritage. She never explicitly calls herself a POC but that's what I was gathering from the paragraph.
Once again I highly recommend it. There's a lot to be said about the book but it's a great read, actually entertaining.
I highly recommend this book. I enjoyed it a lot, even for school. Noelle Stout explores boundaries between labor and love, and how these boundaries are blurred in practice. Her source material is 100 hours of formal and informal interviews with queer persons, sex workers, and tourists. Noelle Stout prefers subjectivity over identity and uses the word 'queer' to highlight the shifting nature of desire and fluidity of sexuality. She focuses on Cuban on Cuban relationships but looks at Cuban-tourist encounters. However 'tourist' is used as a broad encompassing term. She uses her experiences and reactions to relationships cultivated while in Cuba and the demand placed on them as a source of insight and is very transparent about it.
For the scholarship, Stout is targeting two distinct realms: (1) sexuality and (2) contemporary transnational capitalism that associates practices of love and intimacy with heterosexuality, excluding queer people. She builds on those who look at intimate economies (tangle of market and everyday intimacies) and counteracts superficial accounts of homosexuality in Cuba. She also looks at lesbians and bisexual women, not just gay men which uncovers how gender norms play a role in socially acceptable forms of homoeroticism. However Stout Focuses on people with nonconforming genders and sexuality to uncover the experiences and concerns of contemporary Cuban social life. She uses 'gay' as a gender-neutral word; saying terms are flexible by nature.
Stout argues that disagreements about intimacy in the context of rising inequality can teach us a lot about young Cubans in a post-Soviet nation. She says intimacy and desire are shaped and influenced by cultural meaning during the introduction of capitalism to Cuba during the 1990s and early 2000s. The study illuminates how people whose sexual desire is outside the mainstream failed to conform during the transition from communism to socialism. One significant piece of her work is to show that Skin colour played a huge role in people separating sex work from jineterismo; as blackness can = criminality in Cuba.
In talking about race, Noelle Stout brings in her own experiences of how she was perceived in Cuba. She has a whole paragraph dedicated to in. She says "Because I am light-skinned and blue-eyed, Cubans in Havana's queer nightlife often assumed that I was the tourist client of my American girlfriend..." whom they mistook as Cuban. Stout discusses her ethnicity, a "combination of French-Candian and Native American-Germn heritage." And I want to touch her hand when I say this - it's okay to be White presenting and to call yourself White while holding on to your ethnic heritage. She never explicitly calls herself a POC but that's what I was gathering from the paragraph.
Once again I highly recommend it. There's a lot to be said about the book but it's a great read, actually entertaining.