Female Economic Agency in Kinship, Gender & Sexuality Studies

Abstract

This article intends to show how sociocultural anthropologists have increasingly acknowledged the economic agency of women in their works on the subjects of kinship, gender and sexuality and will focus on two examples that connect these three subjects- Gloria Wekker's study of Afro-Surinamese women involved in the relational practice known as mati and Louise White's study of the female prostitutes of colonial Nairobi. The article first analyzes how Wekker gives Afro-Surinamese women a sense of economic agency by describing the systems of exchange these women establish with their male partners, their extended families, fictive kin and even the supernatural beings of their religion. The article then goes on to analyze how White gives the female prostitutes of Nairobi's colonial period a sense of agency by describing how prostitutes in the city obtained a level of autonomy that would have been beyond the reach of most prostitutes living during the late 19th and early-to-mid 20th centuries, and how these prostitutes used the changing circumstances of life in Nairobi to their advantage.