Abstract
This chapter examines the intricate set of arrangements employed by sex workers in Nairobi, Kenya, to defy arrest and regulation by law enforcement agents and to protect themselves and one another from violent assaults by police and clients, along with the implications of these strategies for their well-being and vulnerability. Drawing on the author's three and half years of ethnographic work among sex workers in urban Nairobi, the chapter considers how the city's sex workers unite into a community of victims and inventors to counter the efforts of law enforcement agents to regulate prostitution. It also discusses the effects of criminalization, and specifically Nairobi's antiprostitution law, on sex workers and suggests that sex work in the city is intertwined with the postcolonial politics of Kenyan life.
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