Making money moves: rural women, returnees, and renegotiations of sex work through the street in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia

Abstract

ABSTRACT Feminist research has highlighted both the emancipatory components of sex work on women’s lives, as well as the problematic nature of an overly romanticised reading of women’s sexual labour. In Ethiopian cities, including the capital, Addis Ababa, rural migrant women and returnee women from the Gulf States are confronted with layered forms of structural disadvantage that narrow the scope of their prospects for economic empowerment and deepen their vulnerability. Consequently, women relate to the street as a connector to capital, despite clashing claims for access and proximity that govern the street economy. This paper explores the everyday lived experiences of rural migrant women and returnee women streetworkers in Addis Ababa. Drawing on qualitative data collected in 2022 and 2023, the findings of this study show that women resort to sex work under conditions of protracted economic strain and an absence of viable alternatives for self-employment. Due to the marginalisation they face as part of the informal labour market, women exercise sex work both in the form of streetwalking and through routine engagements in transactional sexual relationships; both activities representing a central component of women’s ability to get by in the city. This paper argues that despite being the site of consequential transformation, women’s economic empowerment through sex work takes place within an entrenched patriarchal order that reproduces disenfranchising power inequalities through the practice of sex work itself, while reasserting the way women’s bodily integrity, safety, aspirations, and social standing are governed on – and by – the street.