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Denise Brennan What's Love Got To Do With It Summary

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Love has always been a complicated emotion to experience, let alone study; however, Denise Brennan has captured the complexity of performing love in her book What’s Love Got to do With it?. What’s Love Got to do With it?, traces the evolution of Sosua, a small coastal Dominican town, struggling to resolve its traditional understandings of Dominican identity with its growing role in the transnational tourism economy. Europeans, particularly Germans, flocked to Sosua in the early 1990s in search of an “exotic”, and often erotic paradise (68). The influx both Dominican migrants and European immigrants as well as their associated cultures, goods, and ideas converged allowing Sosua to take on a transnational identity which Brennan describes and …show more content…

Through the weaving together of these voices Brennan is able to analyze Sosua from a transnational scale and chooses to draw from the tradition of ethnography in shaping her work. As George Marcus and Michael Fischer have demonstrated ethnography must be treated as a “form of representational literature”, wherein the anthropologist must “move forward by writing in the ironic mode” (Marcus & Fischer 443). In light of this information Brennan attempts to avoid literary plotting and rhetorics of romance, tragedy, and comedy by constantly reminding the viewer that “very few women ever make it out of poverty”, only some women “break even” and that some may be “worse off after coming to Sosua” (Brennan 20, 56, …show more content…

Through the adoption of feminist anthropology, globalization, politics of representation and political economy frameworks and theories Brennan is able to effectively explain that the sex trade is more than a means of survival- it is an advancement strategy that hinges on the sex workers successful “performance” of love. Through the successful application of these frameworks Brennan reveals that the status of anthropological theory and ethnographic representation is important in understanding the constantly evolving and globalized sociocultural

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