“I dumped my husband for a Turkish toyboy”: Romance tourism, intersectionality and inequality in British popular media

Hamid-turksoy, N., Liesbet Van Zoonen, Giselinde Kuipers (2011). “I dumped my husband for a Turkish toyboy”: Romance tourism, intersectionality and inequality in British popular media. IAMCR conference 2011: "Cities, Creativity, Connectivity". 13-17 July.

Abstract: This article analyses how British tabloid newspapers represent the relationship between mature British women and younger Turkish toyboy lovers. Employing a combination of thematic, lexical, narrative, and visual analysis, we analyze how the British popular press tries to make sense of many contradicting social categories and power relations at play in romance tourism. Like its male counterpart sex tourism, romance tourism involves intimate encounters with exotic “Others”, leading to complex interactions of many different inequalities, in particular age, gender, nation and economic position. This case then allows us to study intersectionality in practice. As such, our analysis both critiques and complements current scholarly work on intersectionality, which is often characterized by a high level of abstraction and rarely engages in systematic empirical analysis. Focusing on media representation of intersectionality, our analysis introduces a novel element in intersectionality studies. Our analysis shows how tabloid newspapers work hard to redress the contradictions and intersections inherent in romance tourism. They do so by constructing coherent normative narratives with clear moral messages. With some interesting exceptions, these narratives condemn especially the female protagonists who have flaunted gender norms by dating a much younger man in an economically less powerful position.