The Dual Nature of the Gift: ‘Getting By’ in South Africa’s Transactional Sexual Economy

• In Event: 086 - Regular Session. Economic Sociology. Gender in the Economy

Abstract

Ukuphanda is Zulu slang meaning ‘to get by,’ to survive in times of constraint; however, under neoliberalism, it has become strongly gendered, as it is often used to refer to the practice of sex-for-money exchange, or what is now commonly referred to as ‘transactional sex.’ Most of the literature on ‘transactional sex’ in the African context defines transactional forms of exchange in counterdistinction to sex work. And yet, my ethnographic research in Johannesburg suggests that the boundaries between sex work, transactional sex and even marriage (in some contexts) has blurred as women’s sexuality has increasingly become the only resource they have for survival. I argue that when theorists of transactional sex draw a strict binary between it and sex work, they employ the classic distinction between gift and commodity exchange which also serves to reify the dichotomy between the West and Africa. Rather, the paper will employ Bourdieu’s theory of gift exchange which insists on its ‘dual nature’ to show that although sexuality is increasingly commodified in contemporary South Africa, women make symbolic distinctions between transactional sex and sex work as a defense against the onslaught of structural crisis.

Author

• Claire Laurier Decoteau, University of Illinois-Chicago