Christian Groes-Green

Philogynous Masculinities: Contextualizing Alternative Manhood in Mozambique

Masculinity studies in Africa have often highlighted young men’s tendencies to be dominant, violent, and selfish in relation to female peers. This article introduces the concept of “philogynous masculinities” as part of an exploration of more gender equitable tendencies among young men in secondary schools in Maputo, the capital of Mozambique. Findings from fieldwork in schools and student’s neighborhoods reveal that understanding alternative notions of manhood requires sensitivity to the contexts in which these are accentuated. While the bom pico notion, stressing men’s sexual satisfaction of women, received emphasis in the context of sex education, the ndota notion of restraint and antiviolence was activated under homely circumstances. Discussing multiple male subjectivities across contexts rather than classifying individual men allows for alternative configurations without ignoring their contradictory manifestations. The article urges masculinity studies to move beyond dichotomies between modern and traditional forms and to explore entanglements of hegemonic and alternative masculinities.

Health discourse, sexual slang and ideological contradictions among Mozambican youth: implications for method

Despite the urgency of improving an understanding of sexual cultures in the face of a globally devastating HIV epidemic, methodological reflection and innovation has been conspicuously absent from qualitative research in recent years. Findings from fieldwork on condom use among young people in Mozambique confirm the need to remain alert to the ideological and linguistic bias of applied methods. Interviewing young people about their sexuality using a conventional health discourse resulted in incorrect or socially acceptable answers rather than accurate information about their sexual behaviour. Young peoples resistance to enquiry, the paper argues, is due to ideological contradictions between their sexual culture and slang, on the one hand, and Western health discourses associated with colonial and post-colonial opposition to traditional culture and languages, on the other. Mixing colloquial Portuguese and changana sexual slang is constructed around ideas of safedeza and pleasure, while dominant health discourses address sexuality as both ‘risky’ and ‘dangerous’. In order to gain a deeper understanding of sexual cultures and to make HIV prevention efforts relevant to young people, it is suggested that researchers and policy makers approach respondents with a language that is sensitive to the local ideological and linguistic context.

Orgies of the moment: Bataille's anthropology of transgression and the defiance of danger in post-socialist Mozambique

In this article I explore socially marginalized young men’s excessive acts of violence, drug use, death race and unsafe sex against the background of George Bataille’s anthropology of transgression. When young men in the Mozambican capital engage in dangerous sex or violent riots, the findings indicate, it is less a sign of ignorance about HIV or indifference towards the rule of law than an expression of living in a ‘state of emergency’ where transgressive defiance of danger and death become attractive. Everyday transgressions of young men who call themselves moluwene (wild, unruly) are moulded in narratives and acts which at once oppose a smouldering socialist ideology of education and a neoliberal regime exiling marginalized young men from the realms of work and consumption to permanent unemployment, poverty and orgies of the moment.

Exploitation or appreciation? Intimate patronage and the moral grammar of sexual-economic exchanges between young curtidoras and older European expat men in Maputo, Mozambique

Neste artigo exploro uma categoria particular de mulheres inserida em sistemas de intercâmbio locais assim como na paisagem urbana transnacional de trocas intimas. As curtidoras em Maputo mostram o poder do erotismo feminino e como ele se conecta com o parentesco, as dinâmicas de genero e as moralidades de intercâmbio. Baseando-me na producao feminista pos-colonial amplio os marcos de analise existentes considerando como as trocas sexuais e economicas das curtidoras com os homens nunca estao completamente divorciadas de obrigacoes morais com as mulheres integrantes de suas redes de parentesco assim como caracterizadas por economias morais divergentes e convergentes nos encontros intimos entre mulheres jovens e homens europeus mais velhos.In this article, I explore a particular category of young women within local systems of exchange as well as within a transnational urban landscape of intimate transactions. What curtidoras in Maputo elucidate and what anthropologists perhaps have not sufficiently understood about transactional sex is the power of female eroticism and how this power connects to kinship, gender dynamics, and moralities of exchange. Drawing on postcolonial feminist scholarship, I extend existing frameworks of analysis by addressing how curtidoras’ sexual–economic exchanges with men are never fully divorced from moral obligations toward their female kin as well as characterized by diverging and converging moral economies in the intimate encounter between the younger women and older European men. Palavras-chave: Gender, Power, Kinship, Sexuality, Exchange, Urban Africa. * Received February 19 2016, accepted March 23 2016. ** Associate Professor, Department of Culture and Identity, Roskilde University, Roskilde, Denmark. cgroes@ruc.dk cadernos pagu (47), 2016:e16476 Exploitation or appreciation? Academic discourses have often portrayed women in transactional sexual relationships as powerless and vulnerable victims of economic inequalities and patriarchal privilege. Yet, in recent years, a growing number of scholars have shown how women’s choice to engage in cross-generational and transactional sex can also be part of an economic strategy within unequal playing fields (Cole, 2010; Kaufman; Stavrou, 2004; Leclerc-Madlala, 2003; Mills; Ssewakiryanga, 2005; Newell, 2009). With this article, I add to such theoretical thinking by exploring a particular category of young women within local systems of exchange as well as within a transnational urban landscape of intimate transactions. What curtidoras in Maputo elucidate and what anthropologists perhaps have not sufficiently understood about transactional sex is the power of female eroticism and how this power connects to kinship, gender dynamics, and moralities of exchange. Drawing on postcolonial feminist scholarship, I extend existing frameworks of analysis by addressing how curtidoras’ sexual–economic exchanges with men are never fully divorced from moral obligations toward their female kin as well as characterized by diverging and converging moral economies in the intimate encounter between the younger women and older European men. Curtidoras and their exchanges with white men can inform our understanding of gender, power, kinship, sexuality, and exchange in urban Africa and add to recurring debates in anthropology and neighboring disciplines on transactional sex and sexual economies (Cole, 2004; Cornwall, 2002; Haram, 2004; Hunter, 2002, 2007; Leclerc-Madlala, 2003; Luke, 2003; Maganja et al., 2007; Newell, 2009; Swidler; Watkins, 2007; Wojcicki, 2002). Yet, I also want shed light on these women’s male partners, the sponsors who have hitherto received little attention in the literature. This article discusses the moral grammar of these intimate exchanges by looking at how expat men and Mozambican women’s perceptions of exchange reveal different moralities regarding giving and receiving material and affective gifts, such money, consumer goods, care, love, sex and company. I would like to make three interconnected arguments: First, I point to the cadernos pagu (47), 2016:e16476 Christian Groes-Green moralities of exchange that I encountered among curtidoras and how they can be understood against the background of notions of female entitlements and the value of women, stressing reproductive, sexual and cosmological powers and rights. Then I show how expat men’s notions of intimate exchange differ by seeing monetary support of women as either exploitation and prostitution or as part of an obligation to support poor African women. Second, I argue that curtidoras negotiate these exchange moralities through “intimate patronage”, involving asymmetrical ties and forms of what Erving Goffman (1959) called “impression management”. Third, I argue that exchange moralities in these relationships can be seen as a micro-cosm illustrating larger global collision between moralities of development aid among Western donors and local conceptions of aid and obligations in the global south. As part of this, I address circulations within the sexual economy and why sexual-monetary exchanges are more acceptable than perhaps we are used to in many European or Western settings. Fieldwork: Intimate studies, field sites, and key informants The findings in this article are based on 18 months of anthropological fieldwork I conducted between March 2007 and December 2011. My primary ethnographic tools were individual interviews and participant-observation among young people between the ages of 16 and 28 years as well as among their families and sexual partners. The original focus of my research was on sexual cultures, gender relations, and HIV prevention among secondary school students coming from impoverished social backgrounds. But, as I spent more time with young women, the seduction of patrocinadores and having sex for money became a recurring issue. Its prominence prompted me to explore in depth the power dynamics of female sexual practices and the responses of the women’s older and predominantly white and wealthy partners. cadernos pagu (47), 2016:e16476 Exploitation or appreciation? I focus in this article on findings among 20 young women who self-identified as curtidoras, but I also draw on informal talks with ten family members and 14 white patrocinadores. The family members included mothers, aunts, and sisters as well as some male relatives, all of whom gave me invaluable knowledge about kin structures and generational relations. The patrocinadores I talked to came from Portugal, Italy, Germany, Spain, France, England, the United States, Ireland, Holland, and Scandinavia. They were businesspeople, entrepreneurs, and consultants or were employed in the development industry as UN personnel or NGO workers. As such, they were quite representative of Maputo’s “expat community,” a group of highly “privileged migrants” (Fetcher; Walsh 2010) who live in the most expensive parts of the city and often stay there for relatively long periods of time. Approximately half of the sponsors were single, one-third were married to women back home, and a few lived with their wives in Maputo. Besides having transactional sex with local women, these privileged migrants also shared a nocturnal lifestyle of visiting bars, discos, restaurants, cafes, and cultural venues in the finest parts of the city. I met and talked to sponsors in these social hangouts where I listened to stories of sexual adventures, love, desire, and frustration. Most of them were between 40 and 65 years old, but I also encountered younger sponsors who were in Maputo as students, tourists, or NGO volunteers. Reaching a level of rapport that allows for open and confidential talks about intimate matters can be a time-consuming challenge that requires prolonged social interaction and a high degree of personal engagement (Groes-Green, 2009b). To become respected among curtidoras and to grasp the deeper meaning of young peoples’ everyday life, I learned Mozambican Portuguese, youth slang, and basic Changana, the mother tongue of my bilingual informants. Having built trust among these young women over time, I was allowed to follow them and their friends in the social life of neighborhoods and families and to accompany them when they ventured into the city’s pulsating nightlife to meet men. In the beginning, curtidoras regarded me as an odd white male cadernos pagu (47), 2016:e16476 Christian Groes-Green who asked embarrassing questions and who, much to their dismay, refused to take part in parties and drinking games. Later, I attempted to break down structural barriers of fieldwork related to race, gender, and class by participating in a variety of social and festive activities with them (Groes-Green, 2012). As a result, I was transformed from a distant observer into what they described as a “brother” (irmão), an expression that refers to my seniority as well as their confidence in me as an advisor on issues relating to love, money, and relationships. My largely asexual role prevented them from seeing me as a potential boyfriend, and therefore I posed no threat to male partners and family members. I was thus able to get a firsthand experience of the dramas that played out in the broader social network of patrocinadores, boyfriends, and kin. Learning Changana expressions for sex, love, and ancestral spirits also served as a “can opener” for more unfiltered discussions (Groes-Green, 2011, Groes-Green; Barret; Izugbara, 2011). Throughout different fieldwork periods, at different fields sites, and with various informants, I followed a simple guideline: I tried to identify and trace the basic patterns of exchange between main actors in Maputo’s sexual economy and to understand these patterns by using theories consistent with informants’ world views. Privileging their views and observing everyday interaction in families and nocturnal dramas yielded results that challenged some of my initial research assumptions. Conventional theories of female subordination, prostitution, and commoditization in Africa failed to fully account for my findings. Instead, I began analyzing gender, power, and sexual exchange through postcolonial feminist perspectives on kinship, female power, and political economy. The political economy of sex and gender transformations If we want to understand transactional sex in Maputo today, we must first look at the way changes in the political economy have profoundly transformed people’s perceptions of and practices related to sex, gender, and family life. The devastating effects of neoliberal reforms in postsocialist Mozambique have been widely cadernos pagu (47), 2016:e16476 Exploitation or appreciation? described, and there is no doubt that globalizationIn this article, I explore a particular category of young women within local systems of exchange as well as within a transnational urban landscape of intimate transactions. What curtidoras in Maputo elucidate and what anthropologists perhaps have not sufficiently understood about transactional sex is the power of female eroticism and how this power connects to kinship, gender dynamics, and moralities of exchange. Drawing on postcolonial feminist scholarship, I extend existing frameworks of analysis by addressing how curtidoras’ sexual–economic exchanges with men are never fully divorced from moral obligations toward their female kin as well as characterized by diverging and converging moral economies in the intimate encounter between the younger women and older European men. Palavras-chave: Gender, Power, Kinship, Sexuality, Exchange, Urban Africa. * Received February 19 2016, accepted March 23 2016. ** Associate Professor, Department of Culture and Identity, Roskilde University, Roskilde, Denmark. cgroes@ruc.dk cadernos pagu (47), 2016:e16476 Exploitation or appreciation? Academic discourses have often portrayed women in transactional sexual relationships as powerless and vulnerable victims of economic inequalities and patriarchal privilege. Yet, in recent years, a growing number of scholars have shown how women’s choice to engage in cross-generational and transactional sex can also be part of an economic strategy within unequal playing fields (Cole, 2010; Kaufman; Stavrou, 2004; Leclerc-Madlala, 2003; Mills; Ssewakiryanga, 2005; Newell, 2009). With this article, I add to such theoretical thinking by exploring a particular category of young women within local systems of exchange as well as within a transnational urban landscape of intimate transactions. What curtidoras in Maputo elucidate and what anthropologists perhaps have not sufficiently understood about transactional sex is the power of female eroticism and how this power connects to kinship, gender dynamics, and moralities of exchange. Drawing on postcolonial feminist scholarship, I extend existing frameworks of analysis by addressing how curtidoras’ sexual–economic exchanges with men are never fully divorced from moral obligations toward their female kin as well as characterized by diverging and converging moral economies in the intimate encounter between the younger women and older European men. Curtidoras and their exchanges with white men can inform our understanding of gender, power, kinship, sexuality, and exchange in urban Africa and add to recurring debates in anthropology and neighboring disciplines on transactional sex and sexual economies (Cole, 2004; Cornwall, 2002; Haram, 2004; Hunter, 2002, 2007; Leclerc-Madlala, 2003; Luke, 2003; Maganja et al., 2007; Newell, 2009; Swidler; Watkins, 2007; Wojcicki, 2002). Yet, I also want shed light on these women’s male partners, the sponsors who have hitherto received little attention in the literature. This article discusses the moral grammar of these intimate exchanges by looking at how expat men and Mozambican women’s perceptions of exchange reveal different moralities regarding giving and receiving material and affective gifts, such money, consumer goods, care, love, sex and company. I would like to make three interconnected arguments: First, I point to the cadernos pagu (47), 2016:e16476 Christian Groes-Green moralities of exchange that I encountered among curtidoras and how they can be understood against the background of notions of female entitlements and the value of women, stressing reproductive, sexual and cosmological powers and rights. Then I show how expat men’s notions of intimate exchange differ by seeing monetary support of women as either exploitation and prostitution or as part of an obligation to support poor African women. Second, I argue that curtidoras negotiate these exchange moralities through “intimate patronage”, involving asymmetrical ties and forms of what Erving Goffman (1959) called “impression management”. Third, I argue that exchange moralities in these relationships can be seen as a micro-cosm illustrating larger global collision between moralities of development aid among Western donors and local conceptions of aid and obligations in the global south. As part of this, I address circulations within the sexual economy and why sexual-monetary exchanges are more acceptable than perhaps we are used to in many European or Western settings. Fieldwork: Intimate studies, field sites, and key informants The findings in this article are based on 18 months of anthropological fieldwork I conducted between March 2007 and December 2011. My primary ethnographic tools were individual interviews and participant-observation among young people between the ages of 16 and 28 years as well as among their families and sexual partners. The original focus of my research was on sexual cultures, gender relations, and HIV prevention among secondary school students coming from impoverished social backgrounds. But, as I spent more time with young women, the seduction of patrocinadores and having sex for money became a recurring issue. Its prominence prompted me to explore in depth the power dynamics of female sexual practices and the responses of the women’s older and predominantly white and wealthy partners. cadernos pagu (47), 2016:e16476 Exploitation or appreciation? I focus in this article on findings among 20 young women who self-identified as curtidoras, but I also draw on informal talks with ten family members and 14 white patrocinadores. The family members included mothers, aunts, and sisters as well as some male relatives, all of whom gave me invaluable knowledge about kin structures and generational relations. The patrocinadores I talked to came from Portugal, Italy, Germany, Spain, France, England, the United States, Ireland, Holland, and Scandinavia. They were businesspeople, entrepreneurs, and consultants or were employed in the development industry as UN personnel or NGO workers. As such, they were quite representative of Maputo’s “expat community,” a group of highly “privileged migrants” (Fetcher; Walsh 2010) who live in the most expensive parts of the city and often stay there for relatively long periods of time. Approximately half of the sponsors were single, one-third were married to women back home, and a few lived with their wives in Maputo. Besides having transactional sex with local women, these privileged migrants also shared a nocturnal lifestyle of visiting bars, discos, restaurants, cafes, and cultural venues in the finest parts of the city. I met and talked to sponsors in these social hangouts where I listened to stories of sexual adventures, love, desire, and frustration. Most of them were between 40 and 65 years old, but I also encountered younger sponsors who were in Maputo as students, tourists, or NGO volunteers. Reaching a level of rapport that allows for open and confidential talks about intimate matters can be a time-consuming challenge that requires prolonged social interaction and a high degree of personal engagement (Groes-Green, 2009b). To become respected among curtidoras and to grasp the deeper meaning of young peoples’ everyday life, I learned Mozambican Portuguese, youth slang, and basic Changana, the mother tongue of my bilingual informants. Having built trust among these young women over time, I was allowed to follow them and their friends in the social life of neighborhoods and families and to accompany them when they ventured into the city’s pulsating nightlife to meet men. In the beginning, curtidoras regarded me as an odd white male cadernos pagu (47), 2016:e16476 Christian Groes-Green who asked embarrassing questions and who, much to their dismay, refused to take part in parties and drinking games. Later, I attempted to break down structural barriers of fieldwork related to race, gender, and class by participating in a variety of social and festive activities with them (Groes-Green, 2012). As a result, I was transformed from a distant observer into what they described as a “brother” (irmão), an expression that refers to my seniority as well as their confidence in me as an advisor on issues relating to love, money, and relationships. My largely asexual role prevented them from seeing me as a potential boyfriend, and therefore I posed no threat to male partners and family members. I was thus able to get a firsthand experience of the dramas that played out in the broader social network of patrocinadores, boyfriends, and kin. Learning Changana expressions for sex, love, and ancestral spirits also served as a “can opener” for more unfiltered discussions (Groes-Green, 2011, Groes-Green; Barret; Izugbara, 2011). Throughout different fieldwork periods, at different fields sites, and with various informants, I followed a simple guideline: I tried to identify and trace the basic patterns of exchange between main actors in Maputo’s sexual economy and to understand these patterns by using theories consistent with informants’ world views. Privileging their views and observing everyday interaction in families and nocturnal dramas yielded results that challenged some of my initial research assumptions. Conventional theories of female subordination, prostitution, and commoditization in Africa failed to fully account for my findings. Instead, I began analyzing gender, power, and sexual exchange through postcolonial feminist perspectives on kinship, female power, and political economy. The political economy of sex and gender transformations If we want to understand transactional sex in Maputo today, we must first look at the way changes in the political economy have profoundly transformed people’s perceptions of and practices related to sex, gender, and family life. The devastating effects of neoliberal reforms in postsocialist Mozambique have been widely cadernos pagu (47), 2016:e16476 Exploitation or appreciation? described, and there is no doubt that globalization

Exploração ou gratidão? Patronagem íntima e a gramática moral das trocas sexuais econômicas entre jovens curtidoras e europeus mais velhos, expatriados, em Maputo – Moçambique

Neste artigo exploro uma categoria particular de mulheres inserida em sistemas de intercâmbio locais assim como na paisagem urbana transnacional de trocas intimas. As curtidoras em Maputo mostram o poder do erotismo feminino e como ele se conecta com o parentesco, as dinâmicas de genero e as moralidades de intercâmbio. Baseando-me na producao feminista pos-colonial amplio os marcos de analise existentes considerando como as trocas sexuais e economicas das curtidoras com os homens nunca estao completamente divorciadas de obrigacoes morais com as mulheres integrantes de suas redes de parentesco assim como caracterizadas por economias morais divergentes e convergentes nos encontros intimos entre mulheres jovens e homens europeus mais velhos.In this article, I explore a particular category of young women within local systems of exchange as well as within a transnational urban landscape of intimate transactions. What curtidoras in Maputo elucidate and what anthropologists perhaps have not sufficiently understood about transactional sex is the power of female eroticism and how this power connects to kinship, gender dynamics, and moralities of exchange. Drawing on postcolonial feminist scholarship, I extend existing frameworks of analysis by addressing how curtidoras’ sexual–economic exchanges with men are never fully divorced from moral obligations toward their female kin as well as characterized by diverging and converging moral economies in the intimate encounter between the younger women and older European men. Palavras-chave: Gender, Power, Kinship, Sexuality, Exchange, Urban Africa. * Received February 19 2016, accepted March 23 2016. ** Associate Professor, Department of Culture and Identity, Roskilde University, Roskilde, Denmark. cgroes@ruc.dk cadernos pagu (47), 2016:e16476 Exploitation or appreciation? Academic discourses have often portrayed women in transactional sexual relationships as powerless and vulnerable victims of economic inequalities and patriarchal privilege. Yet, in recent years, a growing number of scholars have shown how women’s choice to engage in cross-generational and transactional sex can also be part of an economic strategy within unequal playing fields (Cole, 2010; Kaufman; Stavrou, 2004; Leclerc-Madlala, 2003; Mills; Ssewakiryanga, 2005; Newell, 2009). With this article, I add to such theoretical thinking by exploring a particular category of young women within local systems of exchange as well as within a transnational urban landscape of intimate transactions. What curtidoras in Maputo elucidate and what anthropologists perhaps have not sufficiently understood about transactional sex is the power of female eroticism and how this power connects to kinship, gender dynamics, and moralities of exchange. Drawing on postcolonial feminist scholarship, I extend existing frameworks of analysis by addressing how curtidoras’ sexual–economic exchanges with men are never fully divorced from moral obligations toward their female kin as well as characterized by diverging and converging moral economies in the intimate encounter between the younger women and older European men. Curtidoras and their exchanges with white men can inform our understanding of gender, power, kinship, sexuality, and exchange in urban Africa and add to recurring debates in anthropology and neighboring disciplines on transactional sex and sexual economies (Cole, 2004; Cornwall, 2002; Haram, 2004; Hunter, 2002, 2007; Leclerc-Madlala, 2003; Luke, 2003; Maganja et al., 2007; Newell, 2009; Swidler; Watkins, 2007; Wojcicki, 2002). Yet, I also want shed light on these women’s male partners, the sponsors who have hitherto received little attention in the literature. This article discusses the moral grammar of these intimate exchanges by looking at how expat men and Mozambican women’s perceptions of exchange reveal different moralities regarding giving and receiving material and affective gifts, such money, consumer goods, care, love, sex and company. I would like to make three interconnected arguments: First, I point to the cadernos pagu (47), 2016:e16476 Christian Groes-Green moralities of exchange that I encountered among curtidoras and how they can be understood against the background of notions of female entitlements and the value of women, stressing reproductive, sexual and cosmological powers and rights. Then I show how expat men’s notions of intimate exchange differ by seeing monetary support of women as either exploitation and prostitution or as part of an obligation to support poor African women. Second, I argue that curtidoras negotiate these exchange moralities through “intimate patronage”, involving asymmetrical ties and forms of what Erving Goffman (1959) called “impression management”. Third, I argue that exchange moralities in these relationships can be seen as a micro-cosm illustrating larger global collision between moralities of development aid among Western donors and local conceptions of aid and obligations in the global south. As part of this, I address circulations within the sexual economy and why sexual-monetary exchanges are more acceptable than perhaps we are used to in many European or Western settings. Fieldwork: Intimate studies, field sites, and key informants The findings in this article are based on 18 months of anthropological fieldwork I conducted between March 2007 and December 2011. My primary ethnographic tools were individual interviews and participant-observation among young people between the ages of 16 and 28 years as well as among their families and sexual partners. The original focus of my research was on sexual cultures, gender relations, and HIV prevention among secondary school students coming from impoverished social backgrounds. But, as I spent more time with young women, the seduction of patrocinadores and having sex for money became a recurring issue. Its prominence prompted me to explore in depth the power dynamics of female sexual practices and the responses of the women’s older and predominantly white and wealthy partners. cadernos pagu (47), 2016:e16476 Exploitation or appreciation? I focus in this article on findings among 20 young women who self-identified as curtidoras, but I also draw on informal talks with ten family members and 14 white patrocinadores. The family members included mothers, aunts, and sisters as well as some male relatives, all of whom gave me invaluable knowledge about kin structures and generational relations. The patrocinadores I talked to came from Portugal, Italy, Germany, Spain, France, England, the United States, Ireland, Holland, and Scandinavia. They were businesspeople, entrepreneurs, and consultants or were employed in the development industry as UN personnel or NGO workers. As such, they were quite representative of Maputo’s “expat community,” a group of highly “privileged migrants” (Fetcher; Walsh 2010) who live in the most expensive parts of the city and often stay there for relatively long periods of time. Approximately half of the sponsors were single, one-third were married to women back home, and a few lived with their wives in Maputo. Besides having transactional sex with local women, these privileged migrants also shared a nocturnal lifestyle of visiting bars, discos, restaurants, cafes, and cultural venues in the finest parts of the city. I met and talked to sponsors in these social hangouts where I listened to stories of sexual adventures, love, desire, and frustration. Most of them were between 40 and 65 years old, but I also encountered younger sponsors who were in Maputo as students, tourists, or NGO volunteers. Reaching a level of rapport that allows for open and confidential talks about intimate matters can be a time-consuming challenge that requires prolonged social interaction and a high degree of personal engagement (Groes-Green, 2009b). To become respected among curtidoras and to grasp the deeper meaning of young peoples’ everyday life, I learned Mozambican Portuguese, youth slang, and basic Changana, the mother tongue of my bilingual informants. Having built trust among these young women over time, I was allowed to follow them and their friends in the social life of neighborhoods and families and to accompany them when they ventured into the city’s pulsating nightlife to meet men. In the beginning, curtidoras regarded me as an odd white male cadernos pagu (47), 2016:e16476 Christian Groes-Green who asked embarrassing questions and who, much to their dismay, refused to take part in parties and drinking games. Later, I attempted to break down structural barriers of fieldwork related to race, gender, and class by participating in a variety of social and festive activities with them (Groes-Green, 2012). As a result, I was transformed from a distant observer into what they described as a “brother” (irmão), an expression that refers to my seniority as well as their confidence in me as an advisor on issues relating to love, money, and relationships. My largely asexual role prevented them from seeing me as a potential boyfriend, and therefore I posed no threat to male partners and family members. I was thus able to get a firsthand experience of the dramas that played out in the broader social network of patrocinadores, boyfriends, and kin. Learning Changana expressions for sex, love, and ancestral spirits also served as a “can opener” for more unfiltered discussions (Groes-Green, 2011, Groes-Green; Barret; Izugbara, 2011). Throughout different fieldwork periods, at different fields sites, and with various informants, I followed a simple guideline: I tried to identify and trace the basic patterns of exchange between main actors in Maputo’s sexual economy and to understand these patterns by using theories consistent with informants’ world views. Privileging their views and observing everyday interaction in families and nocturnal dramas yielded results that challenged some of my initial research assumptions. Conventional theories of female subordination, prostitution, and commoditization in Africa failed to fully account for my findings. Instead, I began analyzing gender, power, and sexual exchange through postcolonial feminist perspectives on kinship, female power, and political economy. The political economy of sex and gender transformations If we want to understand transactional sex in Maputo today, we must first look at the way changes in the political economy have profoundly transformed people’s perceptions of and practices related to sex, gender, and family life. The devastating effects of neoliberal reforms in postsocialist Mozambique have been widely cadernos pagu (47), 2016:e16476 Exploitation or appreciation? described, and there is no doubt that globalizationIn this article, I explore a particular category of young women within local systems of exchange as well as within a transnational urban landscape of intimate transactions. What curtidoras in Maputo elucidate and what anthropologists perhaps have not sufficiently understood about transactional sex is the power of female eroticism and how this power connects to kinship, gender dynamics, and moralities of exchange. Drawing on postcolonial feminist scholarship, I extend existing frameworks of analysis by addressing how curtidoras’ sexual–economic exchanges with men are never fully divorced from moral obligations toward their female kin as well as characterized by diverging and converging moral economies in the intimate encounter between the younger women and older European men. Palavras-chave: Gender, Power, Kinship, Sexuality, Exchange, Urban Africa. * Received February 19 2016, accepted March 23 2016. ** Associate Professor, Department of Culture and Identity, Roskilde University, Roskilde, Denmark. cgroes@ruc.dk cadernos pagu (47), 2016:e16476 Exploitation or appreciation? Academic discourses have often portrayed women in transactional sexual relationships as powerless and vulnerable victims of economic inequalities and patriarchal privilege. Yet, in recent years, a growing number of scholars have shown how women’s choice to engage in cross-generational and transactional sex can also be part of an economic strategy within unequal playing fields (Cole, 2010; Kaufman; Stavrou, 2004; Leclerc-Madlala, 2003; Mills; Ssewakiryanga, 2005; Newell, 2009). With this article, I add to such theoretical thinking by exploring a particular category of young women within local systems of exchange as well as within a transnational urban landscape of intimate transactions. What curtidoras in Maputo elucidate and what anthropologists perhaps have not sufficiently understood about transactional sex is the power of female eroticism and how this power connects to kinship, gender dynamics, and moralities of exchange. Drawing on postcolonial feminist scholarship, I extend existing frameworks of analysis by addressing how curtidoras’ sexual–economic exchanges with men are never fully divorced from moral obligations toward their female kin as well as characterized by diverging and converging moral economies in the intimate encounter between the younger women and older European men. Curtidoras and their exchanges with white men can inform our understanding of gender, power, kinship, sexuality, and exchange in urban Africa and add to recurring debates in anthropology and neighboring disciplines on transactional sex and sexual economies (Cole, 2004; Cornwall, 2002; Haram, 2004; Hunter, 2002, 2007; Leclerc-Madlala, 2003; Luke, 2003; Maganja et al., 2007; Newell, 2009; Swidler; Watkins, 2007; Wojcicki, 2002). Yet, I also want shed light on these women’s male partners, the sponsors who have hitherto received little attention in the literature. This article discusses the moral grammar of these intimate exchanges by looking at how expat men and Mozambican women’s perceptions of exchange reveal different moralities regarding giving and receiving material and affective gifts, such money, consumer goods, care, love, sex and company. I would like to make three interconnected arguments: First, I point to the cadernos pagu (47), 2016:e16476 Christian Groes-Green moralities of exchange that I encountered among curtidoras and how they can be understood against the background of notions of female entitlements and the value of women, stressing reproductive, sexual and cosmological powers and rights. Then I show how expat men’s notions of intimate exchange differ by seeing monetary support of women as either exploitation and prostitution or as part of an obligation to support poor African women. Second, I argue that curtidoras negotiate these exchange moralities through “intimate patronage”, involving asymmetrical ties and forms of what Erving Goffman (1959) called “impression management”. Third, I argue that exchange moralities in these relationships can be seen as a micro-cosm illustrating larger global collision between moralities of development aid among Western donors and local conceptions of aid and obligations in the global south. As part of this, I address circulations within the sexual economy and why sexual-monetary exchanges are more acceptable than perhaps we are used to in many European or Western settings. Fieldwork: Intimate studies, field sites, and key informants The findings in this article are based on 18 months of anthropological fieldwork I conducted between March 2007 and December 2011. My primary ethnographic tools were individual interviews and participant-observation among young people between the ages of 16 and 28 years as well as among their families and sexual partners. The original focus of my research was on sexual cultures, gender relations, and HIV prevention among secondary school students coming from impoverished social backgrounds. But, as I spent more time with young women, the seduction of patrocinadores and having sex for money became a recurring issue. Its prominence prompted me to explore in depth the power dynamics of female sexual practices and the responses of the women’s older and predominantly white and wealthy partners. cadernos pagu (47), 2016:e16476 Exploitation or appreciation? I focus in this article on findings among 20 young women who self-identified as curtidoras, but I also draw on informal talks with ten family members and 14 white patrocinadores. The family members included mothers, aunts, and sisters as well as some male relatives, all of whom gave me invaluable knowledge about kin structures and generational relations. The patrocinadores I talked to came from Portugal, Italy, Germany, Spain, France, England, the United States, Ireland, Holland, and Scandinavia. They were businesspeople, entrepreneurs, and consultants or were employed in the development industry as UN personnel or NGO workers. As such, they were quite representative of Maputo’s “expat community,” a group of highly “privileged migrants” (Fetcher; Walsh 2010) who live in the most expensive parts of the city and often stay there for relatively long periods of time. Approximately half of the sponsors were single, one-third were married to women back home, and a few lived with their wives in Maputo. Besides having transactional sex with local women, these privileged migrants also shared a nocturnal lifestyle of visiting bars, discos, restaurants, cafes, and cultural venues in the finest parts of the city. I met and talked to sponsors in these social hangouts where I listened to stories of sexual adventures, love, desire, and frustration. Most of them were between 40 and 65 years old, but I also encountered younger sponsors who were in Maputo as students, tourists, or NGO volunteers. Reaching a level of rapport that allows for open and confidential talks about intimate matters can be a time-consuming challenge that requires prolonged social interaction and a high degree of personal engagement (Groes-Green, 2009b). To become respected among curtidoras and to grasp the deeper meaning of young peoples’ everyday life, I learned Mozambican Portuguese, youth slang, and basic Changana, the mother tongue of my bilingual informants. Having built trust among these young women over time, I was allowed to follow them and their friends in the social life of neighborhoods and families and to accompany them when they ventured into the city’s pulsating nightlife to meet men. In the beginning, curtidoras regarded me as an odd white male cadernos pagu (47), 2016:e16476 Christian Groes-Green who asked embarrassing questions and who, much to their dismay, refused to take part in parties and drinking games. Later, I attempted to break down structural barriers of fieldwork related to race, gender, and class by participating in a variety of social and festive activities with them (Groes-Green, 2012). As a result, I was transformed from a distant observer into what they described as a “brother” (irmão), an expression that refers to my seniority as well as their confidence in me as an advisor on issues relating to love, money, and relationships. My largely asexual role prevented them from seeing me as a potential boyfriend, and therefore I posed no threat to male partners and family members. I was thus able to get a firsthand experience of the dramas that played out in the broader social network of patrocinadores, boyfriends, and kin. Learning Changana expressions for sex, love, and ancestral spirits also served as a “can opener” for more unfiltered discussions (Groes-Green, 2011, Groes-Green; Barret; Izugbara, 2011). Throughout different fieldwork periods, at different fields sites, and with various informants, I followed a simple guideline: I tried to identify and trace the basic patterns of exchange between main actors in Maputo’s sexual economy and to understand these patterns by using theories consistent with informants’ world views. Privileging their views and observing everyday interaction in families and nocturnal dramas yielded results that challenged some of my initial research assumptions. Conventional theories of female subordination, prostitution, and commoditization in Africa failed to fully account for my findings. Instead, I began analyzing gender, power, and sexual exchange through postcolonial feminist perspectives on kinship, female power, and political economy. The political economy of sex and gender transformations If we want to understand transactional sex in Maputo today, we must first look at the way changes in the political economy have profoundly transformed people’s perceptions of and practices related to sex, gender, and family life. The devastating effects of neoliberal reforms in postsocialist Mozambique have been widely cadernos pagu (47), 2016:e16476 Exploitation or appreciation? described, and there is no doubt that globalization

The road to a better life : A critical perspective on human trafficking, global inequalities and migration from Mozambique towards Europe

This work discusses the root causes behind human trafficking in the sex industry, from Mozambique to South Africa and, eventually, Europe. With examples taken from younger Mozambican women called curtidoras since 2007, social obligations towards poor families, awareness of global inequalities and dreams of going to Europe are major drivers of migration northwards and that current anti-trafficking policies do not take this into account. Instead, these policies fail to address poverty and global inequality and risk making migrants more vulnerable to trafficking, not only by leaving them in a poor and desperation situation where they are willing to take great risks but also by reinforcing tight anti-immigration laws. These laws make it impossible for migrants to enter into Europe legally and thus one of the only options is to be smuggled or trafficked in, jeopardizing female migrant even more. Key words: Migration, human trafficking, global inequalities.

Sexual Markets or Black Markets？ Gendered Technologies of Extraction and Redistribution among Young Men and Women in an African City

This article addresses the everyday technologies of ‘extraction and redistribution’ that young women and men use in order to adapt to a situation of increasing unemployment in Maputo, Mozambique and other African cities. In this neoliberal economy informal and illicit trade with sex, stolen goods and counterfeit products are on the rise and the article shows how technologies of survival are highly gendered and reconfigure masculinities and femininities. In this article I argue that technologies of survival in urban Africa are based on logics of extraction–of money, goods and other valuables from the well off - as an alternative to wage labor, salaries and more respected sources of income and redistribution of incomes to kin and social networks. Technologies of extraction are highly gendered and a division of “informal labor” exists in this shadow economy where many young women enter into transactional sex with sugar-daddies, called sponsors or patrons, who provide for them in exchange for sex while male peers often become street vendors, street artists or petty criminals engaged in the so-called ‘black’ markets of theft, sale of counterfeits, and circulation of stolen goods, alcohol and drugs. As I show, these gendered markets are highly entangled and interdependent, and as I argue, male and female markets use many of the same technologies, sources and circuits of exchange.

Decolonizing and Reinvigorating Gender Studies in Africa

Throughout the academic career of Danish scholar Signe Arnfred, her research has been driven by two overall urges: one is an ethnographic attempt to understand and represent Makhuwa women in Northern Mozambique in a way that does justice to their cultural complexity and life worlds. The other, which seems to be a natural consequence of the first, is the highly ambitious urge to rethink and reorient the way in which Western scholars tend to conceive of gender, sexuality, and power on the African continent. Her new book, which is a collection of articles published over the last 25 years, serves as an introduction to her ground-breaking theoretical thinking and is replete with emphatic and generous analyses of complex historical and ethnographic matters concerning the Makhuwa people. By always addressing the intimate issues of this rural population against the background of a broader and more powerful world of colonialists, missionaries, post-independence politicians, and market forces, Arnfred ensures that the conclusions remain relevant to those readers who are not familiar with Makhuwa culture or Mozambique. The book presents three overall contributions that will inspire readers from social, cultural, and gender research who have not yet been introduced to Arnfred’s thinking. The first is an eyeopening challenge to conventional Western feminist wisdom on gender and women based on years of field-work as well as continuous theoretical dialogues with postcolonial scholars. The second is the intriguing ethnographic work and cultural analyses of specific Mozambican formations of gender, power, and sexuality, and the third is the critique of changing modernizing and development discourses on gender in Africa.

Playing on the Edge: Sadomasochism, Risk, and Intimacy

hoods built around family connections and Islamic rituals, has been institutionalized into official mahalla committees that serve as extensions of government control. These official mahalla committees help fix the terms of public participation through close monitoring of neighborhood activities (p. 121). In the village, there remain informal mahallas centered on a mosque that manages religious and ritual life. While the informal mahalla is in a hierarchical relationship to the official mahalla committees, a reflection of power dynamics between local and national authority, the mahalla remains an ideal of moral community (p. 51). The discussion of the village–city dichotomy nicely conveys structural conditions of community involvement in framing identities and constructing religious selves. The second part of the book moves from public structuring to narratives of individual engagements with discussions of religion. Islam per se is not the object of this study. Rather, as Rasanayagam argues, ’analytical frames that set up religion, culture, and the social as discrete categories are not helpful for understanding how sociality itself can provide the quality of transcendence typically reserved for the “religious”’ (p. 95). Here, Rasanayagam addresses the constructive aspects of direct experience with the divine, the interpretation of experience through illness, and how spirits become sites for debating the form and content of Islam. As he recognizes, there are distinctions between universalist, scripturalist approaches to Islam and those rooted in local cultural practices, yet these distinctions are not always clear (p. 178): practice finds people moving freely between the two poles and contradictions are reconciled through individual experience. Fortune and misfortune are often understood relative to individual conduct (200), thus even when the mosque and the healer have conflicting conceptions of jinn (spirits capable of influencing good or evil), the individual makes sense of both conceptions as applicable, meaningful, and morally relevant. In combining the structural restrictions imposed by government attempts to control individual behavior with lifecycle experiences or tragedies of health, we see the foundational role ambiguity plays in constructing the self. People personalize their understandings of Islam out of a multiplicity of possibilities, but are always engaged by experience that is moralized. Rasanayagam has captured Islamic life as it is being debated and showed how cosmologies are negotiated and contradictions are reconciled. Arguing for a moral perspective on events, he shows that looking at actions through a lens of morality is precisely what our interlocutors are doing. Experience is what makes their worlds intelligible to them and recognizing this helps make it intelligible to us.