Exploitation or Gratitude? Gifting, Exchange, and Sexual Health Risks in Intimate Relationships among Young Malawians

• In Event: 1476 - Biomedical Anxieties: AIDS Risk, Discrimination, and Healthcare Access

Abstract

The landscape of sexual relationships in sub-Saharan Africa has long been characterized as risky given the need to navigate a widespread AIDS epidemic. With this in mind, a large body of work analyzes the causes and consequences of transactional sex in both commercial and noncommercial relationships as it has been shown to increase the risk of HIV infection and other sexual infections. For some scholars, transactional sex identifies for whom and in what settings sex is “risky” and even disempowering for young women. For others, often from fields such as anthropology and sociology, transactional sex is argued to be representative of the broader exchange and reciprocity that is commonplace across all social ties in the African settings (Swidler & Watkins, 2007). To date, very little attention has been paid to examining both of these perspectives in a single analysis. Drawing on longitudinal data from the Tsogolo la Thanzi (TLT) project in southern Malawi, we apply novel measures of gifting duration and value to examine its association with sexual health behaviors such as consistent condom use, as well as indicators of relationship commitment (i.e. expectations of marriage and childbearing). We find that gifting levels and duration have stronger effects for increasing the desire to marry but are not connected to consistent condom use. Further sensitivity analyses are proposed as well as an expansion of the analytic sample. We plan to analyze the trajectories and changes in gifting, and its association with relationship processes of marriage and dissolution. To do so, we will draw upon eight waves of TLT data collected every four months from 2009 to 2011. The combination of theory and novel measurement make this paper a substantial contribution to the field.

Authors

• Sarah Garver, University of Chicago

• Jenny Trinitapoli, University of Chicago