Intimacy
Many reasons why ppl do sex work
Ex: inaccessibility to a country’s language
Not all sex work is prostitution
Gringo love: graphic novel. Brazilian women trying to be with rich european or northern american
foreigners. It is a feminist ethnography of global sex tourism to the global south more particularily in ponta
negra.
Relationship between money and sex
Unequal relationship (political and economical as well as gender) + historical processes (gendered patterns
also found in the global north)
The book interviews talking to women and men sexworkers and ppl who worked in ngos.
This is not just commercial sex: there is more to it than that.
It would be wrong to look at these women as mere victims, they also have agency and take decisions (look
back at my ba thesis)
Not all sex tourists are sexually deviant
The idea of rescuing these women will not work if u do not take into account the global forces that shape
the lives of these ladies: when these women engage in this transactional sex, it is not a simple synonym of
prostitution.
Complex positions and choices that women that are in these positions have to make.
These relationships also have an affective component (for example longer relationships; could be love)
Promise of escaping this dire situation/ of a better life
A way of rethinking themselves, their subjectivity, their mobility (economic, social) and the idea of being
more “modern”
Transactional sex needs to be distinguished from prostitution
● Revolves around gifts and implies a sexual dimension but this relstion is not “direct”
● The case is that of south african sugar daddies and their girlfriends which often implies a long term
relationship; it involves time and the time between the deed and the gift
● These relationships differ considerablu from the service provider-client relationship associated with
prostitution
● Access to ressources, money, housing
Two spheres distinguished
● Informal settlements: sex and subsistence
● Townships: sex and consumption
○ These are no strictly seperated
In the informal settlements:
The processes of industrailisation, de-industrialisation and migration created acute gendered inequalities.
No fixed employement, in extremeley vulnerable grp of low paid or unemployed female migrants
In the townships:
Younsters secure subsistence from their parents or guardians. Because they are better off, they go to their
sugar daddies for things such as jewelry, nice clothes, fine dining. Access to more mobility, more freedom.
This is not prostitution. U can look at it as a form of agency, a way of moving through the world.
Obv exceptions in typologies but this is a sociological approach
Also see previously, erfuson on the zambian copperbelt
A: material substratum:
1960-1990: rapid industralization/urbanization -> growing gendered divisions
Growing economic gap between owners and poorer labour migrants
Post 1990 (94 more preciously): industrial decline government policy (liberlisation) and foreign competition;
female sectors hardest hit
Mal sectors also suffered but less but many were able to retain employment and a steady (higher) wage;
even when fired, men wrre able to secure a golden handshake which allowed them fro example to start a
business of their own
Migration to urban aread vontinued even if no jobs on the road
And as a result of continuing influx of ppl, house/real estate prices continue to climb
Masculinities and feminities
● Norms that measure the expected behaviors that define a man and woman. Norms on how they
related to one another
● Rupture on existing “traditional norms”
As in the case of feruson, women thus become more and more dependent on men for their subsistence
Men justify multiple sexual relations by referring to traditional polygamy (even if these are completly
different things)
Pink tax and the thing about ppl of color having a harder time getting loans from banks etc…
(intersectionality)
With marriage unaffordable for many men and women, men’s gifts to multiple women have increasingly
replaced lobolo payment to parents
It is not prostitution
YET: men encouraged to have mutilple relationships, women no.
Why do women engage in such sexual relationships SUMMARY
Informal settlements:
● Multiple some lasting relationships for comfort and subsistence (food, company)
● gaining control of ur life not just dependencies even if hammered by economic constraints
Townships
● Better off neighborhoods (electricity, etc…) need to be sophisticated, fashionable
● Impact of (english-language) soaps, tv serials
Men who sell sex 1999
Much of the relatively little earlier work on male sex work
HIV as the gay men’s disease
Lack of research on male sex work
More recent approaches:
● Focuses on msm as a phenomenon that begs understanding and not a problem to be solved. No
one way of doing sex. Cultural variation. Gender variation.
● And ake on a more international/intercultural character
○ How is male sex work organized? What meanings does it articulate? Systems of power?
Sexual dentification? Subjectivities? What about the clients? What about social forces shape
the expeeriences of male sex workers?
Identification a process that changes that is subject to change
Whereas identity is u are what u are and it is unchangeable
Difference in how u identify and what u do
Sex work is performative
Main idea is that male sex work reflects existing structures in the social org of gender and sexuality
And creates opportunities for men to push out of their conditions
Globalization (period after 1990) new forms of inclusion but mainly exclusion (economic)
Sex work as a form of strategy to make ends meet
The internet also has changed the nature of sex work
Castañeda 2013 on street based male sex workers in germany
In germany, commercial sex is legal but migrant sex workers find themselves in the margins/excluded from
the relative liberal legislation in western europe
Male sex workers are more ignored in studies etc.. as they are seen as strong men, less vulnerable than
female sex. Different health issues than female sex workers
Often find themselves in precarioys situation
Don’t find their ways in the burreaucracy (no access to the language, etc..)
Many of these sex workers consider themselves straight. Outside of work sex with women but in work with
men,
Is it always good to legalize something (in this case sex work)? Ppl become more vulnerable to policing
It can mean more insecurity sometimes but u also get the social benefits. If u don’t have the social contacts,
don’t speak the language. Less access to these social benefits.
Sex diseases only account for 1/4th of the health complaints
Legislation and sex work:
Dutch legislation on sex work
From tolerance to regulation and repression
Focus mainly on dark side: forced sex work, human trafficking, sex work by minors
Ppl who are registered sex workers also pay taxes
Form of legal fiction/fetishism of law: the idea that u can solve social economic etc.. issues by making a law
against it.
Does regulation lead to more repressive action? Does it lead to less arbritayion? Is tolerance, for the
majority of sex workers, a better solution?
This regulation = control
Restraints
Men who are involved in sex work are not necessarily victims
Surfing liquid modernity (closely related to colonialism/coloniality)
Different ways of engaging with it
These migrants usually come from rather conservative households
At the same time this dream or ideal: nice clothes, phones, etc…
This money to help their families back home.
The sex work is therefore not smth that they brag about to their folks back home
Not all queer, simply an economic transaction (just like more ppl don’t enjoy their job)
Research among albanian and romanian men working as sex workers in western european cities
Triggered by the contrast between the homophobia and heternomativity in their home country and their
lives away from home
At home: emphasis on family, state
Collectivist ethos
Post-social context: eastern european countries moving to a capitalist economy… individualisation aka
moving from rather fixed position and liquification of these ppl (changeable, malleable)
Very formal reaction against these notions such as different gender identifications
Bondaries are no longer strictly discernable
Second lecture of the day for second discussion note
Technology and the commodification of intimacy
Technology also affecting the self. Idea of the self as customizable, way that we dress, change our bodies
etc…
This customizability of the self becomes a standard
What is a technology? Many ways to answer it
Is inbreeding technology?
See actor-network theory:
● Things like humans are actants and make part of a network of ppl and things as such they are not
ontologically different from humans (hence ontological approaches/ the ontological turn”: all is
situated on the same plane of existence; no life or non-life is placed ontologically higher than others)
Technology is not gender-neutral
Male often seem as the prototype
Technology is often seen as the great equalizer but it isn’t. In most cases it just deepens relationships of
inequality
Technology and gender are socially co-produced
Eg: domestic appliances: washing machines, vaccum cleaners. Putting women in the labor market. These
machines did not free the time of women but just added to their daily chores.
Gender and technology
Women always been in the heavy labor in the industry esp woc. Only in the 20th century was this idea of
the stay at home wife really reinforced. Also again only the case for rich white women. Ref: angela davis
Mining industry always been a male industry. In south africa, women always seen as not allowed to do this
heavy labor in mines
But throughout history women were participating in these hard industries. Eg: the led girls.
Eg: women in mining conference
Women in mining sites not homogenous group: young/old, diffeeent backgrounds; miners, businesswomen,
barmaods, ofte in combination w other jobs
Always been involved but since the 80s, been some changes: privatisation; liberalization of indstry:
● A deterioration of subsistence farming
● Low demand of public and provate employment
● Lack of trading commodities
Ball mill
New technologu in tanzania: metal detectors
One problem: besides expensive, they make them wear earphones so they dk if the detector is beeping or
not so he doesn’t dig it up for himself
Both technologies put these devices out of reach for women miners
Women miners have become dependent on these technologies that for various reasons are in the hands of
specialized experts, and who benefit most from makongolosi’s gold fever. Because of this growing
dependence on technology
Facebook
Informants
Students experimenting with monogamy, abiut to enter the job market
Parasocial relationships
Quantify ur relationships (how many friends, how many likes) number on social competence/popularity
Measure ur self value
Market mechanism with influencers (individual marketeers)
Neoliberal design of social media fosters competition
This profile is a consciously managed representation of an embodied neoliberal self
Late capitalism
By shopping u also build urself (buying bio vs not; not buying certain clothes etc…) how u present
urself/how u see urself. Identifiying through consumption not labor
Identity politics partly responsible for nationalism etc..,
Our society has a hard time dealing with hybridity
Cyborg is hybridity. Man and machine. Male and female or neither.
Nowadays we are all cyborgs somehow. We cannot function without our cellphones
Cyborg world may be dystopian, a world of patriarchal, etc… control
Or utopian a society where one is not afraid to inhabit the margins, of living with contradictions and
ambiguities
Cyborgs are not good or evil
Can be used to untrap ppl from these “pigeon holes” haraway
Through technology exemplified and criticized by the figure of the cyborg
Thre self is customizable/makeable: one is under pressure to demonstrate one’s social competence by
looking good, be healthy, successful
Why change? To becoming more successful
Customizability closely related to commodification not just of body parts but also of relationships
Eg: reproduction, of care,
These possibilities offered by technology and science have amplified the possibilities of self making
Which also means that success is ur own responsibility
Feminization of migration/migrant labor
Newly emerging sex scapes
Gendered geographies of mobility
New technologies of consumption
Redefinition of family and reproduction
Reproductive processes commoditized
● Family forms
● Challenge heternormativity
procreative/reproductive services
Not necessarily bad; can be emancipatory, but not necessarily
Goes together with call for roots and authenticity
Fragmentation and the individual
Is fragmentation a postmodern condition?
Called a pathology by scholars
The idea that we are one, indivisable, a business that has to manage and self itself.
Or is fragmentation a human universal?
Contradicts our lived experience. We are with relationships, we are with others. We cannot but rely on
others. The sources that we are outside of us.
Individuality western ideology and culture
Marshal sahlins: dividuality as a form of relational personhood.
Dividual and individual as two poles of the same continumum
Lecture: Sex works + commodification of intimacy
Many reasons why ppl do sex work
Ex: inaccessibility to a country’s language
Not all sex work is prostitution
Gringo love: graphic novel. Brazilian women trying to be with rich european or northern american
foreigners. It is a feminist ethnography of global sex tourism to the global south more particularily in ponta
negra.
Relationship between money and sex
Unequal relationship (political and economical as well as gender) + historical processes (gendered patterns
also found in the global north)
The book interviews talking to women and men sexworkers and ppl who worked in ngos.
This is not just commercial sex: there is more to it than that.
It would be wrong to look at these women as mere victims, they also have agency and take decisions (look
back at my ba thesis)
Not all sex tourists are sexually deviant
The idea of rescuing these women will not work if u do not take into account the global forces that shape
the lives of these ladies: when these women engage in this transactional sex, it is not a simple synonym of
prostitution.
Complex positions and choices that women that are in these positions have to make.
These relationships also have an affective component (for example longer relationships; could be love)
Promise of escaping this dire situation/ of a better life
A way of rethinking themselves, their subjectivity, their mobility (economic, social) and the idea of being
more “modern”
Transactional sex needs to be distinguished from prostitution
● Revolves around gifts and implies a sexual dimension but this relstion is not “direct”
● The case is that of south african sugar daddies and their girlfriends which often implies a long term
relationship; it involves time and the time between the deed and the gift
● These relationships differ considerablu from the service provider-client relationship associated with
prostitution
● Access to ressources, money, housing
Two spheres distinguished
● Informal settlements: sex and subsistence
● Townships: sex and consumption
○ These are no strictly seperated
In the informal settlements:
The processes of industrailisation, de-industrialisation and migration created acute gendered inequalities.
No fixed employement, in extremeley vulnerable grp of low paid or unemployed female migrants
In the townships:
Younsters secure subsistence from their parents or guardians. Because they are better off, they go to their
sugar daddies for things such as jewelry, nice clothes, fine dining. Access to more mobility, more freedom.
This is not prostitution. U can look at it as a form of agency, a way of moving through the world.
Obv exceptions in typologies but this is a sociological approach
Also see previously, erfuson on the zambian copperbelt
A: material substratum:
1960-1990: rapid industralization/urbanization -> growing gendered divisions
Growing economic gap between owners and poorer labour migrants
Post 1990 (94 more preciously): industrial decline government policy (liberlisation) and foreign competition;
female sectors hardest hit
Mal sectors also suffered but less but many were able to retain employment and a steady (higher) wage;
even when fired, men wrre able to secure a golden handshake which allowed them fro example to start a
business of their own
Migration to urban aread vontinued even if no jobs on the road
And as a result of continuing influx of ppl, house/real estate prices continue to climb
Masculinities and feminities
● Norms that measure the expected behaviors that define a man and woman. Norms on how they
related to one another
● Rupture on existing “traditional norms”
As in the case of feruson, women thus become more and more dependent on men for their subsistence
Men justify multiple sexual relations by referring to traditional polygamy (even if these are completly
different things)
Pink tax and the thing about ppl of color having a harder time getting loans from banks etc…
(intersectionality)
With marriage unaffordable for many men and women, men’s gifts to multiple women have increasingly
replaced lobolo payment to parents
It is not prostitution
YET: men encouraged to have mutilple relationships, women no.
Why do women engage in such sexual relationships SUMMARY
Informal settlements:
● Multiple some lasting relationships for comfort and subsistence (food, company)
● gaining control of ur life not just dependencies even if hammered by economic constraints
Townships
● Better off neighborhoods (electricity, etc…) need to be sophisticated, fashionable
● Impact of (english-language) soaps, tv serials
Men who sell sex 1999
Much of the relatively little earlier work on male sex work
HIV as the gay men’s disease
Lack of research on male sex work
More recent approaches:
● Focuses on msm as a phenomenon that begs understanding and not a problem to be solved. No
one way of doing sex. Cultural variation. Gender variation.
● And ake on a more international/intercultural character
○ How is male sex work organized? What meanings does it articulate? Systems of power?
Sexual dentification? Subjectivities? What about the clients? What about social forces shape
the expeeriences of male sex workers?
Identification a process that changes that is subject to change
Whereas identity is u are what u are and it is unchangeable
Difference in how u identify and what u do
Sex work is performative
Main idea is that male sex work reflects existing structures in the social org of gender and sexuality
And creates opportunities for men to push out of their conditions
Globalization (period after 1990) new forms of inclusion but mainly exclusion (economic)
Sex work as a form of strategy to make ends meet
The internet also has changed the nature of sex work
Castañeda 2013 on street based male sex workers in germany
In germany, commercial sex is legal but migrant sex workers find themselves in the margins/excluded from
the relative liberal legislation in western europe
Male sex workers are more ignored in studies etc.. as they are seen as strong men, less vulnerable than
female sex. Different health issues than female sex workers
Often find themselves in precarioys situation
Don’t find their ways in the burreaucracy (no access to the language, etc..)
Many of these sex workers consider themselves straight. Outside of work sex with women but in work with
men,
Is it always good to legalize something (in this case sex work)? Ppl become more vulnerable to policing
It can mean more insecurity sometimes but u also get the social benefits. If u don’t have the social contacts,
don’t speak the language. Less access to these social benefits.
Sex diseases only account for 1/4th of the health complaints
Legislation and sex work:
Dutch legislation on sex work
From tolerance to regulation and repression
Focus mainly on dark side: forced sex work, human trafficking, sex work by minors
Ppl who are registered sex workers also pay taxes
Form of legal fiction/fetishism of law: the idea that u can solve social economic etc.. issues by making a law
against it.
Does regulation lead to more repressive action? Does it lead to less arbritayion? Is tolerance, for the
majority of sex workers, a better solution?
This regulation = control
Restraints
Men who are involved in sex work are not necessarily victims
Surfing liquid modernity (closely related to colonialism/coloniality)
Different ways of engaging with it
These migrants usually come from rather conservative households
At the same time this dream or ideal: nice clothes, phones, etc…
This money to help their families back home.
The sex work is therefore not smth that they brag about to their folks back home
Not all queer, simply an economic transaction (just like more ppl don’t enjoy their job)
Research among albanian and romanian men working as sex workers in western european cities
Triggered by the contrast between the homophobia and heternomativity in their home country and their
lives away from home
At home: emphasis on family, state
Collectivist ethos
Post-social context: eastern european countries moving to a capitalist economy… individualisation aka
moving from rather fixed position and liquification of these ppl (changeable, malleable)
Very formal reaction against these notions such as different gender identifications
Bondaries are no longer strictly discernable
Second lecture of the day for second discussion note
Technology and the commodification of intimacy
Technology also affecting the self. Idea of the self as customizable, way that we dress, change our bodies
etc…
This customizability of the self becomes a standard
What is a technology? Many ways to answer it
Is inbreeding technology?
See actor-network theory:
● Things like humans are actants and make part of a network of ppl and things as such they are not
ontologically different from humans (hence ontological approaches/ the ontological turn”: all is
situated on the same plane of existence; no life or non-life is placed ontologically higher than others)
Technology is not gender-neutral
Male often seem as the prototype
Technology is often seen as the great equalizer but it isn’t. In most cases it just deepens relationships of
inequality
Technology and gender are socially co-produced
Eg: domestic appliances: washing machines, vaccum cleaners. Putting women in the labor market. These
machines did not free the time of women but just added to their daily chores.
Gender and technology
Women always been in the heavy labor in the industry esp woc. Only in the 20th century was this idea of
the stay at home wife really reinforced. Also again only the case for rich white women. Ref: angela davis
Mining industry always been a male industry. In south africa, women always seen as not allowed to do this
heavy labor in mines
But throughout history women were participating in these hard industries. Eg: the led girls.
Eg: women in mining conference
Women in mining sites not homogenous group: young/old, diffeeent backgrounds; miners, businesswomen,
barmaods, ofte in combination w other jobs
Always been involved but since the 80s, been some changes: privatisation; liberalization of indstry:
● A deterioration of subsistence farming
● Low demand of public and provate employment
● Lack of trading commodities
Ball mill
New technologu in tanzania: metal detectors
One problem: besides expensive, they make them wear earphones so they dk if the detector is beeping or
not so he doesn’t dig it up for himself
Both technologies put these devices out of reach for women miners
Women miners have become dependent on these technologies that for various reasons are in the hands of
specialized experts, and who benefit most from makongolosi’s gold fever. Because of this growing
dependence on technology
Facebook
Informants
Students experimenting with monogamy, abiut to enter the job market
Parasocial relationships
Quantify ur relationships (how many friends, how many likes) number on social competence/popularity
Measure ur self value
Market mechanism with influencers (individual marketeers)
Neoliberal design of social media fosters competition
This profile is a consciously managed representation of an embodied neoliberal self
Late capitalism
By shopping u also build urself (buying bio vs not; not buying certain clothes etc…) how u present
urself/how u see urself. Identifiying through consumption not labor
Identity politics partly responsible for nationalism etc..,
Our society has a hard time dealing with hybridity
Cyborg is hybridity. Man and machine. Male and female or neither.
Nowadays we are all cyborgs somehow. We cannot function without our cellphones
Cyborg world may be dystopian, a world of patriarchal, etc… control
Or utopian a society where one is not afraid to inhabit the margins, of living with contradictions and
ambiguities
Cyborgs are not good or evil
Can be used to untrap ppl from these “pigeon holes” haraway
Through technology exemplified and criticized by the figure of the cyborg
Thre self is customizable/makeable: one is under pressure to demonstrate one’s social competence by
looking good, be healthy, successful
Why change? To becoming more successful
Customizability closely related to commodification not just of body parts but also of relationships
Eg: reproduction, of care,
These possibilities offered by technology and science have amplified the possibilities of self making
Which also means that success is ur own responsibility
Feminization of migration/migrant labor
Newly emerging sex scapes
Gendered geographies of mobility
New technologies of consumption
Redefinition of family and reproduction
Reproductive processes commoditized
● Family forms
● Challenge heternormativity
procreative/reproductive services
Not necessarily bad; can be emancipatory, but not necessarily
Goes together with call for roots and authenticity
Fragmentation and the individual
Is fragmentation a postmodern condition?
Called a pathology by scholars
The idea that we are one, indivisable, a business that has to manage and self itself.
Or is fragmentation a human universal?
Contradicts our lived experience. We are with relationships, we are with others. We cannot but rely on
others. The sources that we are outside of us.
Individuality western ideology and culture
Marshal sahlins: dividuality as a form of relational personhood.
Dividual and individual as two poles of the same continumum