Paper details
| Paper authors | Clea Kahn |
| In panel on | Transactional Sex in Humanitarian Contexts |
| Paper presenter(s) will be presenting |
In-Person / |
Abstract
Transactional sex, defined as the exchange of sex for cash, goods, services, commodities or privileges, takes place in all societies. A complex and ambiguous practice, transactional sex inhabits a middle ground between consensual intimate relationships and sex work. Although substantial research has been done on transactional sex in stable contexts, there is a relative paucity of research that looks at the topic in contexts of conflict and crisis, considering it not as a form of violence, but as a livelihood strategy. This study is a Foucauldian discourse analysis analysing the discourses of five practitioners working in humanitarian field operations. Taking a critical realist approach, it asked how practitioners construct transactional sex and the people who engage in it in the areas where they work. The study practitioners foregrounded stigma as the primary risk to people engaging in transactional sex. Vulnerability emerged as a prominent theme, with practitioners constructing those engaged in transactional sex as helpless, passive and victims, but also as active, strategic and agentic. An important theme emerged of insider/outsider dynamics on the part of both people living through conflict and crisis and the practitioners working in these contexts that found resonance in Giulio Agamben’s concept of the refugee in the camp as reduced to a ‘bare life’, expelled from the social and political sphere, and the figure of sacer homo.
Back