After Love: Queer Intimacy and Erotic Economies in Post-Soviet Cuba - Hardcover

Stout, Noelle M.

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0822356732 ISBN 13: 9780822356738

Publisher: Duke University Press Books, 2014

Synopsis

Focused on the intimate effects of large-scale economic transformations, After Love illuminates the ways that everyday efforts to imagine, resist, and enact market reforms shape sexual desires and subjectivities. Anthropologist Noelle M. Stout arrived in Havana in 2002 to study the widely publicized emergence of gay tolerance in Cuba but discovered that the sex trade was dominating everyday discussions among gays, lesbians, and travestis. Largely eradicated after the Revolution, sex work, including same-sex prostitution, exploded in Havana when the island was opened to foreign tourism in the early 1990s. The booming sex trade led to unprecedented encounters between Cuban gays and lesbians, and straight male sex workers and foreign tourists. As many gay Cuban men in their thirties and forties abandoned relationships with other gay men in favor of intimacies with straight male sex workers, these bonds complicated ideas about "true love" for queer Cubans at large. From openly homophobic hustlers having sex with urban gays for room and board, to lesbians disparaging sex workers but initiating relationships with foreign men for money, to gay tourists espousing communist rhetoric while handing out Calvin Klein bikini briefs, the shifting economic terrain raised fundamental questions about the boundaries between labor and love in late-socialist Cuba.
 

About this title

About the Author

Noelle M. Stout is Assistant Professor of Anthropology at New York University.

Review

"Immersing herself in Havana’s gay culture, Stout, an American anthropologist, gives readers a street-level view of the turbulent changes under way in Cuba, as Cuban society gradually transitions from conformist socialism to a more market-oriented individualism." (Richard Feinberg Foreign Affairs)

“As an ethnography, After Love gives a richly evidenced account of how Latin America’s  neoliberalization changes the very possibilities for economic and intimate relationships. Focusing on queer identities, Stout’s work is a welcome addition to the scholarship on neoliberalism in the region as it is able to illustrate the complex interplay through which neoliberal subjects constitute themselves through the resistance, re-imagining and embracing new forms of economic transfers through ‘love’ relationships.” (M. Gabriela Torres European Review of Latin American and Caribbean Studies)

"In After Love, Noelle Stout provides a refreshing take on a widely-studied topic: sex tourism and hustling in contemporary Cuba. Focusing on a handful of case studies of mostly young habaneros  trying to get by in a hostile economy and rapidly changing social and political environment, this is ethnography at its best: powerful portrayals of daily life presented in an engaging and elegant style." (Carrie Hamilton Journal of Latin American Studies 2015-05-01)

"Stout's attention to experiences of abandonment, betrayal, and disillusionment adds to the growing scholarship on Cuban sexual identities under neoliberalism and raises important question about populations in Cuba's economies of desire who have reached the outer limits of affective exchanges." (Karina Lissette Cespedes GLQ 2016-04-01)

“After Love is a very good book, well written, sympathetic, and insightful. It wears its sophisticated theory lightly, making it both accessible and rewarding to read as much as for the picture of contemporary Cuba it paints as for the more general insights it provides into how people negotiate the contradictions life throws at them.” (Mark Graham Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute 2016-04-27)

"This book is a timely and important contribution to contemporary anthropological accounts of queer sexual politics in Cuba. Beyond anthropologists specializing in Cuba or the Caribbean, this book is of interest to Cuban historians, professors and students of gender studies, scholars working on the intersection of neoliberalism and desire, and those utilizing affect theory. Stout’s debut is an extremely useful contribution to interdisciplinary scholarship on contemporary Cuban sexual culture." (Lisa M. Corrigan QED 2016-04-01)

"After Love is a must-read for anyone interested in gender, sexuality, and queer politics in the Caribbean and is
also a good read for those seeking to understand the broader socioeconomic contradictions of Cuba’s postsocialist transition. The engaging and crisp prose, rich with thick description and methodological intuitions, makes it an excellent text for assigning in undergraduate and graduate courses." (Mrinalini Tankha American Anthropologist 2017-02-21)

Edition details

• Publisher: Duke University Press Books
• Publication date: 2014
• ISBN 10: 0822356732
• ISBN 13: 9780822356738
• Binding: Hardcover
• Language: English
• Number of pages: 248