Policing Pleasure by Dewey Susan; Kelly Patty;

Author:Dewey, Susan; Kelly, Patty;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: New York University Press
Published: 2011-12-08T16:00:00+00:00

Currently scholarship positing social actors as agentive beings capable of creatively mediating or transforming their own relationships with the structural forces at work in their lives has led to calls for critical research on how sex workers, particularly in contexts where prostitution is criminalized, negotiate the activities of state regulatory agents (Okal 2009). While agency has offered scholars a conceptual tool for charting sex workers’ maneuverability, inventiveness, and reflective choices in relation to the constraints they face at work (Emirbayer and Mische 1998), it has also inspired two important questions: Does sex workers’ engagement with the structures governing or regulating their lives actually cancel out the effect of disempowering social regulations? And, moreover, do sex workers’ everyday practices for managing policing truly promote their well-being? (Izugbara 2007). Without downplaying the dangers and violations to which criminalization exposes sex workers globally, this chapter focuses on the strategies used by female sex workers in Nairobi, Kenya, to avert arrest by law enforcement agents and the implications of these strategies for their well-being and vulnerability. Nairobi offers an intensely exciting location for studying sex workers’ engagement with formal policing. Prostitution flourishes in Nairobi despite the 2007 Nairobi General Nuisance By-Laws (formerly The By-Laws of the City of Nairobi of 1960), which directly criminalize it.

I raise two major points in this chapter. First, I argue that the efforts of law enforcement agents to regulate prostitution in Nairobi unite the city’s sex workers into a community of victims and inventors. Nairobi’s antiprostitution laws expose sex workers to a painful list of daily victimization and indignities. But sex workers in Nairobi are also not passive social agents struggling against unsympathetic laws, implemented primarily by corrupt and inefficient state agencies; they have developed strategies for defying arrest and regulation by law enforcement personnel. My second contention is that these strategies are paradoxical in nature: while they permit sex workers to flout formal control, they also reaffirm sex workers’ marginality, making them more susceptible to victimization and negative health outcomes.

The arguments presented here are based on my three and half years of ethnographic work among sex workers in urban Nairobi, Kenya. During this time I lived and worked in Nairobi as an ethnographer with a leading international research organization. Data collection involved an assortment of qualitative techniques, including ethnographic observation and in-depth interviews. Informants were mainly sex workers operating in the bars and on the streets of Nairobi, although information was also sought from groups and individuals concerned with their lives, including police officers, Nairobi City Council officials, leaders of sex workers’ organizations, taxi drivers, male clients of sex workers, human rights activists, lawyers, and night watchmen. I also regularly visited and spent time in bars and other places frequented by sex workers observing their behavior, drinking and chatting with them as well as clients, and eavesdropping on conversations. On many nights I walked throughout Nairobi’s red light districts and conversed with the street-based sex workers there. Data from formal interviews were audiotaped and complemented with handwritten notes based on observations and informal discussions.

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