Feminist Anthropology, Migrant Sex Work, and Transformation in East Africa

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The recent anti-trafficking fervour as well as the moral panic surrounding prostitution has given rise to large gaps within migrant sex work research, especially in Africa. Bringing feminist anthropology, gender, and sexuality to the forefront of discussions surrounding transformation in Africa, at the heart of this paper is how the most excluded female sex worker – the internally displaced, labour migrant, or sex worker in transit – exists in her everyday experience within the global political economy. Drawing on feminist ethnography and migration stories, this paper challenges listeners to understand the sex worker migrant as a complete person, focusing on her mobile sociality and worldliness rather than only her morality, calling for a gendered rescaling of African sex work research beyond the street level. Focusing on how sexual-economic transactions are made meaningful through multi-scalar processes and power dynamics across time, space, and place from one ethnographic location, this paper takes the listener across the topography of sexual commerce in Naivasha, Kenya. Naivasha is a unique site from which to study the sex worker migrant across East Africa. Naivasha has a large street-based sex economy and a tourist industry second only to Mombasa, and is a place where unique migration patterns and types of sexual commerce converge. This is because it is home to one of the largest internally displaced person (IDP) camps in the Rift Valley, where sex worker IDPs engage in survival sex, transactional sex, and sex work with both the camp residents and the host community. The global cut flower industry is also concentrated in Naivasha, where women labour migrants exchange sex for work in flower farms and supplement their low incomes with transactional sex and part-time sex work. Naivasha is also a major stop along the East African highway, and itinerant female sex workers often travel long distances with truck drivers, pursuing cosmopolitan identities, learning languages, and encountering different cultures. Furthermore, the rapid explosion of mobile phone use has had a huge impact on the nature of sex work here (and across East Africa), especially the use of the mobile money transfer system known as M-Pesa, which has contributed significantly to the active restructuring of traditional gendered norms and relationships. While the street persists as an important space of sexual-economic exchange in Kenya, globalization is fundamentally and forever changing the street corner as both a space and idea in contemporary Kenya. In fiction, scholarly work, and policy discussions, the street, street corners, and red light districts remain at the very heart of the imaginary of where sex work takes place and who female sex workers are. Despite this, this paper argues street level transactions are inextricably linked to broader local, regional, and global processes across time, space, place, and scale far beyond red light districts. Most importantly, an examination of these migrant sex work spaces, including the IDP camp, flower farms, highways, and even mobile phones, reveal how female sex workers too are part of the innovative, transformative, and sustainable in East Africa today.