Pleasures and Perils: Girls’ Sexuality in a Caribbean Consumer Culture by Debra Curtis

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Tracy Carpenter

Abstract

Pleasures and Perils is an ethnography of adolescent sexuality, globalization and consumer culture on Nevis, a small Caribbean island. In this study, Curtis highlights the fluidity and complexity of adolescent sexuality as influenced by globalization and localized cultural norms. The notion of commodity erotics in Nevis—the conflation of sexual practices and commodity desire—renders a continuum that ranges from the exchange of sex to meet the family’s basic needs, to sex for personal consumption. Commodity erotics also measure the sexual value of commodities, like sexy lingerie, designer clothing and jewelry, which produce sexual desirability. Curtis’s study of Nevis offers a snapshot of globalization by focusing on popular culture influences on conceptions of adolescent sexuality in a society that has undergone rapid socio-economic and technological changes over the past two decades.

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Reviews