When a Yuma Meets Mama: Commodified Kin and the Affective Economies of Queer Tourism in Cuba

Abstract

In this article, I explore the kinship imaginaries that emerged between gay male tourists from North America and Europe and Cuban male sex workers and their families within the context of Havana’s queer-erotic economies. Whereas male sex workers throughout Latin America and the Caribbean tend to conceal their male clients from their families, Cuban sexual laborers in this study incorporated queer foreigners into kinship imaginaries. Such bonds often conferred the rights and obligations of kin, while “blood” kinship was increasingly described in and subject to financial terms. Motivated by money rather than “blood” or “choice,” kinship ties fostered between foreign gay men and younger male sex workers prompt a rethinking of non-normative kin ties as an alternative to dominant systems of kinship and suggest the political and economic roots of familial bonds more broadly.

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