Bloom Spaces

This creative ethnography explores the surprising entanglements between tourism and reproduction on the Caribbean coast of Costa Rica.

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Tourism generates intense atmospheric relations between people and places. Exploring the complex nature of these relations, Bloom Spaces considers the experiences of women who travel to Costa Rica in search of health and wellness, and find that it leads to an unexpected but seemingly natural outcome: pregnancy. The book looks beyond pregnancy as the result of an isolated act between two people, and instead probes the ways that the reproductive experience resonates with powerful tourist imaginaries of the Caribbean and multisensory environments of culture and place.


Inviting readers into a world of yoga studios, beaches, and rainforests, Susan Frohlick investigates how atmosphere can create "bloom spaces" that lead tourists down reproductive paths. Through an experimental approach that combines creative non-fiction, poetry, photography, and narrative ethnographic writing, this book seeks to capture the feelings and sensations that influence reproduction in tourist destinations. Ultimately, the book urges a rethinking of tourism that takes reproduction into consideration, highlighting the multiple actors involved in reproduction and the inequities of tourism that are reproduced.