Women and Tourist Work in Jamaica: Seven Miles of Sandy Beach

(Hardback)

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In Women and Tourist Work in Jamaica: Seven Miles of Sandy Beach, A. Lynne Bolles examines Jamaican women tourist workers and their workplaces in Negril, Jamaica. A major component of Negrils tourism success is the labor of women tourist workers, ranging from housekeepers to hotel and business owners. Bolless ethnographic research examines key aspects of womens labor in the tourist industry through the lenses of class, color, education, and training. Through the narratives of thirty interlocutors, Bolles focuses on the prescience of emotional labor and face-to-face encounters, investigating these womens ideas about tourism on the local level and their wariness of the changing physical environment as a result of tourism expansion.

Reviews

Bolles synthesizes and contextualizes her vignettes of women in every category to form a book that does much more than just describe individuals. Her interviews convey Jamaican gender socialization, cultural values, household arrangements, and class. The text also includes a brief history of the tourist industry in Jamaica and nods to comparable research on Caribbean tourism. An accessible study for all academic levels. Recommended. Lower-division undergraduates through faculty; professionals.

-- "Choice Reviews"

The stories in these three chapters are the core of Women and Tourist Work in Jamaica. The insights that we gain from the accounts of the complicated and challenging lives of women working to provide satisfying experiences for tourists to Negril add importantly to our understanding of the culture of tourism. It is these stories, above all, that make this book a unique contribution to the anthropological literature on the subject.

-- "New West Indian Guide"

This long-awaited study by A. Lynn Bolles provides the most detailed and poignant picture to date of the lives of women working in Jamaica's tourism industry. Set in the storied destination of Negril, with its sharp social divisions and clear-cut distinctions between the 'laid back' West-End and the Beach, Bolles spares us no sentimental recourse to tropes of 'tropical paradise' in her careful ethnographic study. Life is harsh and exploitative for these women, but beyond this, Bolles captures what she describes as a sense of Jamaicanness, a spirit of 'cordial, reciprocal and mutual respect, ' which is the lasting impression from this important work.

--Brian Meeks, Brown University

Women and Tourist Work in Jamaica is an insightful account of the crucial roles played by women in the day-to-day re-creation of Jamaica's tourism industry. Its considerable strength derives in no small part from Bolles' long-term commitment to the subject. Few ethnographies of tourism provide such a magnificent grounding in the intricacies of gender or the importance of historical context to the subject. This book is a must-read.

--Erve Chambers, University of Maryland

Author Bio

A. Lynn Bolles is professor emerita of The Harriet Tubman Department of Womens, Gender, and Sexuality Studies at the University of Maryland, College Park.