Abstract
Transactional sex and sex work are defined as mutually exclusive in both popular parlance and scholarly debates in South Africa, and yet this qualitative study based in Johannesburg suggests that the lines between these practices are blurring under neoliberalism, as poor women are forced to rely extensively (and sometimes exclusively) on sexual exchange to support themselves and their families. Drawing on Pierre Bourdieu’s theories of gift exchange, the paper argues that the historic institutions of trust and reciprocity upon which transactional sex relies are threatened by the precarity instigated by neoliberalism. As a result, poor women’s habituses have been destabilized. They respond by buttressing symbolic distinctions that are no longer supported by structural scaffolding and incorporate imaginary identifications of an idealized time when South Africa had full employment and stable gender customs, as melancholic loss. The faltering of the symbolic economy of gift exchange affords women both increasing freedom and precarity. Overall, the project contributes to our understanding of how relations between intimacy and the economy are reconfigured in the face of structural crisis and how this shapes peoples’ subjectivities.
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Notes
This is a pseudonym. Those subjects whose names are used in this study have consented to the use of their names. I have provided pseudonyms for all other participants to safeguard their confidentiality.
I use the term ‘sex work’ because this is the term preferred by most of the women interviewed in this study (though some still employ the term ‘prostitute’) and in order to situate it within a framework of informal labor. Because sex work is illegal in South Africa, the job is dangerous as well as highly stigmatized. In using the term ‘work,’ I do not mean to imply that the women who engage in it would have ‘chosen’ this vocation if there were other options available.
As I explain below, this is a popular phrase meaning to “get by,” to “hustle.”
As I explain later, transactional relationships are often long-term and not fleeting, as they are in Nomachina’s example.
This refers to South Africans of African descent – one of several populations racialized as Black in South Africa. All of the research participants in this study are African.
I discuss this destabilization at length in my previous work (Decoteau, 2013).
It is important to note that recruitment through local NGOs does have an effect on the sample. This particular NGO was not focused on providing support to sex workers. Rather, it provided legal and other support to itinerant South Africans, squatting in abandoned buildings. Participants were told that their participation (or non-participation) in the study would in no way affect their relationship to the NGO. However, the focus of the NGO and my usage of it as a hub for recruitment likely affected the sample and could have had an impact on the ways in which people answered questions about their work experiences.
In this quote, Lebo also distinguishes what she is doing from those engaged in sex work, a theme to which I return in the next section.
This is a derogatory but common term for “prostitute.”
A national study found that only one in 13 women reports rape to the police, but 25.3 percent of women interviewed had experienced sexual violence in their lifetimes (Vetten, 2014a). Intimate partner violence is the most common violence experienced by South African women, with one in 8 reporting it, though other studies have found higher incidence (Vetten, 2014b).
Thembi and “Kitty” also referred to this.
This was also true for “Promise,” “Kitty,” and “Zola.”
For example, the agrarian economy began to falter in the early decades of the 20th century and steadily declined since then; women have had a difficult time sustaining themselves through farming since the 1930s (Wolpe, 1980). At the end of apartheid, when only 34 percent of the population was employed, 65 percent of the unemployed reported that they had never worked (Seekings and Nattrass, 2005, pp. 178–179). As stated previously, unemployment has risen in the post-apartheid era. See footnote 6 for sources on the history of sexual practices and customs.
20 out of 33 women interviewed felt this way.
About 40 percent of sex workers I interviewed felt sex work was not “work.”
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Acknowledgments
I would like to thank all of the women who shared the intimacies of their lives and their strategies for ‘getting by’ with me. The project was made possible by a grant from the Institute for Research on Race and Public Policy at the University of Illinois at Chicago. I would also like to thank Ndivile Mokoena for her interpretation work, Shereza Sibanda at the Inner City Resource Center for her tremendous help with recruitment, and Paige Sweet for her research assistance. In addition, I would like to thank Andy Clarno, Isaac Reed, Monika Krause, Claudio Benzecry, Richard Swedberg, Lyn Spillman, and Iddo Tavory for their comments on earlier drafts of this paper. I would also like to thank the three anonymous reviewers for the journal who provided tremendous insights, which greatly strengthened the paper.
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Decoteau, C.L. “You can’t eat love”: “Getting by” in South Africa’s informal sexual economy. Am J Cult Sociol 4, 289–322 (2016). https://doi.org/10.1057/s41290-016-0010-x
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/s41290-016-0010-x