"... many of my informants were pleased to know that I had a boyfriend to 'take care of me' and 'accompany me'. As anthropologist Rose Jones found elsewhere in the Caribbean, people would probably have worried for me had I not had a boyfriend or husband present during the majority of my fieldwork (Jones 1999). Karel's own relatively unobjectionable status as a suitor-since he was white, well educated, employed, single and childless-increased the likelihood of our relationship helping rather than harming my position within the community where I was working. In a society that is highly charged with complex social, political, racial and economic tensions, had my future husband been black, uneducated, unemployed, married, and fathered multiple children, I imagine that my relationship would not have been so well received, and might have been seen by some of my informants to reflect an inferior capacity for judgement of appropriate behaviour. (For discussions of the politics of 'race' in contemporary Cuba, see De la Fuente 2001:317-34, Fernández 1996.)
Nevertheless, although our romance seemed to be received for the most part with pleasure and approval, being a foreigner in a relationship with a Cuban certainly placed me within a series of social categories that some anthropologists might be keen to avoid. The economic significance of US dollars and the massive expansion of the tourist industry in the post-Soviet era have made the sexual politics of foreigner-Cuban relationships a minefield in which allegations of predatory sexuality and immoral greed are common (Fernández 1999, see also Brennan 2004 for a comparable discussion on the Dominican Republic). In both local and international accounts of the growth of sex tourism and transnational marriages in Cuba, foreigners are often represented as desperate for youthful flesh while Cubans are characterised as desperate for US dollars. Both sides of such relationships can seem to be built upon the pursuit of unlikely and even immoral dreams."... "When reading of Palmié's own discomfort in being identified by German sex tourists either as a fellow foreign traveller or as an expert to consult in understanding their own intercultural sexual encounters, I was reminded of my own discomfort in being one of a long line of foreigners to become inevitably engaged with the sensual and emotional encounters that are constitutive of what Palmié analyses as a form of 'carnal modernity' embodied in contemporary Cuba (Palmié 2002:260-89)." "Even the most prepared of anthropologists can have moments of naivety, and mine had been to assume that my concept of a 'simple' wedding was not laden with complex assertions of my own identity and status. As I increasingly realised, my insistence upon the aesthetics of elegant simplicity was in itself a complex series of objectifications that distinguished my own aesthetic sense from those of the Cubans invited to my wedding (Bourdieu 1984). I became increasingly uncomfortable with the degree to which my own insistence upon a 'simple' wedding cake and a 'generous' buffet were little more than ethnocentric demands, which Karel and his family were struggling against the odds to fulfil."

"Academic writing, as a strategy for creating change and manifesting resistance - both inside and outside the academic context. Is one of the foremost challenges for contemporary feminist and gender studies. In this light, the emergence of critical, creative, performative and reflective writing can be seen as an integrated part of the ongoing debate on methodological and theoretical issues. Indeed, it is possible to say that the field of feminist and gender studies demonstrates how relations between power and privilege, marginalised and subjugated knowledge, ethics and change, are tied to praxis of style and representations where form and content is intimately intertwined. Contributions fromo for instance, dialogical, polyphonic and genre transgressive writing strategies can be applied as a means for re-situating of epistemological claims as well as an experimental approach to the textual form itself."