This paper examines how practices of mass beach tourism in Tunisia affect national economies of intimacy and desire through an analysis of the film Bezness by Nouri Bouzid (1992). Since Tunisia's independence in 1956, economic development strategies for connecting the state to global flows of capital have been culturally rooted in the production of the nation as a modern "open society" (Hazbun 2008). The vigorous development and promotion of the tourist industry has been instrumental in producing that image. Wildly successful as an earner of foreign currency, tourism has also entailed the re-configuration of the nation's built environment. Insofar as they represent an extension of European culture within Tunisia, tourist enclaves are often perceived as a threat to the nation's cultural fabric and Islamic moral order. In spite of the emancipatory rhetoric of national feminism, post-colonial Tunisian thought nevertheless enacts a gendered division of culture into two distinct spheres--the material (male/public) and the spiritual (female/domestic). (Chatterjee 1993, Zayzafoon 2005). Bezness explores the messiness of this border between "spiritual" and "material" spaces and their gendered embodiments though an examination of male prostitution in a tourist town. The film draws a parallel between Tunisian bodies and the urban space of the coastal city of Sousse. While the city is spatially and conceptually divided between the "authentic" quarter of the medina, the functional modernism of the "ville francaise," and the fantasy-scapes of the tourist enclave Port El-Kantaoui, the Tunisian state has in fact worked to open up all parts of the city to the tourists' consumption practices. Paradoxically, the dividing line between 'Western' and 'authentic' must be re-enforced so that spaces marked as 'authentic' may be commodified as a purely Tunisian spectacle to be experienced by the tourist. Likewise, the protagonist Roufa, as a native gigolo, has developed a repertoire of racially-marked personae of Arab masculinity that he dons in order to seduce his clients into a commodity exchange. In both cases, the result is an emptying out, or loss of faith, in notions of authentic experience available to the Tunisian population itself. The film suggests a perilous instability latent in the Tunisian nationalist project, where older forms of patriarchal control have dissolved, yet newer principles of stability have not yet emerged. As a result, the only image by which the state recognizes itself is through the practice of exchange and commodification.