I ♥ Egypt: Sex, Tourism and Landscapes of Longing in the Sinai
 
Tuesday, February 14th - 12:00Noon, Althouse 106
 
The tourist-local encounter is one of the most important elements to any holiday, nowhere more so than in Egypt's Sinai peninsula, whether you are on a package holiday in Sharm El Sheikh making friends with a waiter or backpacking with the Bedouins in Nuweiba. Of all these encounters, the sexual/romantic encounter between local men and tourist women is a misunderstood yet crucial one to understanding how tourism to the MENA region operates.
 
In this talk Jessica Jacobs challenges many of the assumptions about the female 'sex tourist'. She traces the links between a not so distant colonial part and our tourist present to show how the intrepid 19th century female traveler connects with the contemporary tourist and how the colonial desire to inhabit a space that is pre-modern lives on in the tourist resorts of the Sinai.
 
Jessica Jacobs is a cultural geographer and filmmaker based at Royal Holloway and Queen Mary, University of London. She is the author of the only book (to date) on women's sex/romance tourism in the MENA region: Sex, Tourism and the Postcolonial Encounter, Landscapes of Longing in Egypt (Ashgate, 2010).