Abstract
This article focuses on Malawian sex workers’ understandings of exchange and intimacy, showing how multiple historically emergent categories and specific work pragmatics produce specific patterns of relational meanings. As we show, sex workers make sense of their relationships with clients through two categories. The first is sex work; the second is the chibwenzi, an intimate premarital relational category that emerged from pre-colonial transformations in courtship practices. These categories, in turn, are also shaped differently in different work settings. We use narratives from in-depth interviews with 45 sex workers and bar managers in southern Malawi to describe how the everyday pragmatics of two forms of sex work—performed by “bargirls” and “freelancers”—foster distinct understandings of relationships between them and men they have sex with. Bargirls, who work and live in bars, blurred the boundaries between “regulars” and chibwenzi; freelancers, who are not tethered to a specific work environment, often subverted the meanings of the chibwenzi, presenting these relationships as both intimate and emotionally distant. Through this comparison, we thus refine an approach to the study of the intimacy-exchange nexus, and use it to capture the complexities of gender relations in post-colonial Malawi.
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Notes
In July–September 2006, when these interviews were conducted, one US dollar was equal to 141 Malawian Kwacha.
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Acknowledgments
The authors would like to thank Nicole Angotti, Adam Ashforth, Rebecca Emigh, Steve Epstein, Nahoko Kameo, Alexandra Murphy, Bill Roy, Abigail Saguy, Michael Stambolis, Ann Swidler, Stefan Timmermans, Lynne Zucker, and the UCLA historical sociology group for reading and commenting on earlier drafts of this article. Susan Watkins provided unerringly patient feedback and support throughout the project. Their criticisms and suggestions have been invaluable.
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Tavory, I., Poulin, M. Sex work and the construction of intimacies: meanings and work pragmatics in rural Malawi. Theor Soc 41, 211–231 (2012). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11186-012-9164-x
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11186-012-9164-x