Denise Brennan, PhD

Dr. Denise Brennan

Associate Professor
Department of Sociology and Anthropology
Georgetown University
ICC 582
Washington, D.C. 20057

 
Tel: 202-687-7327
Fax: 202-687-7327
brennade@georgetown.edu

Research Interests

Women and globalization, women and migration, the global sex trade, and human trafficking.

Research Summary

My research interests include women’s sexual labor, with particular focus on women’s participation in the sex-tourist trade in the developing world. This research is the basis for my first book, What’s Love Got to Do with It? Transnational Desires and Sex Tourism in Sosúa, the Dominican Republic, which will be out with Duke University Press in 2004. I have just begun research on women who are trafficked for forced labor, and am particularly interested in how they rebuild their lives after they have been trafficked. The health effects—both mental and physical—will be critical to this project. This research focuses on women who were trafficked to the United States for all kinds of forced labor, as well as on Dominican women who were trafficked overseas for the sex trade. This new book project tentatively is called: Returning Home/Creating Home: Life after Trafficking.

Representative Publications

  • What’s Love Got to Do with It? Transnational Desires and Sex Tourism in Sosúa, the Dominican Republic. Durham: Duke University Press, (forthcoming 2004). Part of the Latin America and Otherwise series, edited by Walter Mignolo, Irene Silverbatt, and Sonia Saldivar-Hall.
  • “When Sex Tourists and Sex Workers Meet: Encounters within Sosúa, the Dominican Republic’s Sexscape,” in Tourists and Tourism. Sharon Gmelch, ed. Prospect Heights, IL: Waveland Press. (forthcoming 2003).
  • “Selling Sex for Visas: Sex Tourism as Stepping Stone to International Migration for Dominican Women,” in Global Woman: Nannies, Maids, and Sex Workers in the New Economy. Barbara Ehrenreich and Arlie Russell Hochschild, eds. New York: Metropolitan Books. (2002).
  • “Globalization, Women’s Labor and Men’s Pleasure: Sex Tourism in Sosúa, the Dominican Republic,” in Urban Life: Readings in Urban Anthropology. George Gmelch and Walter P. Zenner, eds. Prospect Heights, IL: Waveland Press. (2002).
  • “Tourism in Transnational Places: Dominican Sex Workers and German Sex Tourists Imagine One Another,” in Special Issue, “Theorizing Gender within Transnational Contexts,” Identities: Global Studies in Culture and Power, December 2001, 7(4):621-663