Location:  Technical University Dortmund, EF50, Raum 0.215 

Time: 13 June 2022, 12.00 p.m. - 1.00 p.m.

In my talk I will address forms of support offered between sex industry workers, their family members, and intimate partners, considering how Latin American sex workers, mainly Brazilians, coped with Spain’s economic crisis during the decade of 2010.  I will reflect on the connections between sex work, intimacy and kinship relationships drawing on studies that have analysed the modalities of intimacy in which sex workers are engaged and on scholarship on migration that considers kinship relationships as central aspects of sex work and gendered migration. Both lines of thought pay attention to the interconnections between exchange and intimacy. Expanding on these lines of discussion I will consider how the connections between increased precariousness and intimacy offer elements to deepen the understanding of how reciprocity operates in these moral economies, in the case of sex workers.  This analysis, in which I consider how economic, sexual and emotional exchanges operate at a time of changing migratory flows between Spain and Brazil is part of a broader multi-sited ethnography conducted since 2004. My main argument is that economic re-configurations related to Spain’s crisis influence changes in sexual economies and intimate dimensions of life.  My interviewees’ involvement in these economies changed and so did the styles of affection that were predominant in the intimate relations.  The flows of re-distribution of resources in the realm of kinship were also modified, affecting these relationships and revealing the particularities that reciprocity assumes in these flows.

Back