To browse Academia. Eroticism, kinship, and gender all intersect in transactional sexual relationships between young women known as curtidoras and older white men in Maputo, Mozambique.
Transactional sex often makes the partners mutually dependent and emotionally vulnerable, and, although moralities of exchange collide, young women tend to redistribute accumulated money from men among female seniors and kin.
The article explores how young Mozambican women's migratory trajectories towards Europe are shaped by sexual relationships with older white men and obligations towards female kin. Triads of exchange between young women known as curtidoras women enjoying life and their partners and kin in Maputo are understood through theories of patronage and exchange moralities. Searching for respect, adventure, and consumption in the sexual economy, young women at the same time struggle to ensure their families' well-being by redistributing the money they extract from white men.
Sexual-monetary transactions, love, and desire must be understood as part of broader moralities of exchange in which migration to Europe and sending of remittances is also a kinship project.
The forms of patronage available in Maputo's sexual economy become stepping stones as well as obstacles to migration northwards. Drawing on ethnographic work carried out among Mozambican men living in Maputo the capital of Mozambique , this paper intends to describe how subordinate men from a poor background are reconstructing their masculinity through the explicit sexualization of their self.
