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In this article, I explore a particular category of young women within local systems of exchange as well as within a transnational urban landscape of intimate transactions. What curtidoras in Maputo elucidate and what anthropologists perhaps have not sufficiently understood about transactional sex is the power of female eroticism and how this power connects to kinship, gender dynamics, and moralities of exchange. Drawing on postcolonial feminist scholarship, I extend existing frameworks of analysis by addressing how curtidoras’ sexual–economic exchanges with men are never fully divorced from moral obligations toward their female kin as well as characterized by diverging and converging moral economies in the intimate encounter between the younger women and older European men. Palavras-chave: Gender, Power, Kinship, Sexuality, Exchange, Urban Africa. * Received February 19 2016, accepted March 23 2016. ** Associate Professor, Department of Culture and Identity, Roskilde University, Roskilde, Denmark. cgroes@ruc.dk cadernos pagu (47), 2016:e16476 Exploitation or appreciation? Academic discourses have often portrayed women in transactional sexual relationships as powerless and vulnerable victims of economic inequalities and patriarchal privilege. Yet, in recent years, a growing number of scholars have shown how women’s choice to engage in cross-generational and transactional sex can also be part of an economic strategy within unequal playing fields (Cole, 2010; Kaufman; Stavrou, 2004; Leclerc-Madlala, 2003; Mills; Ssewakiryanga, 2005; Newell, 2009). With this article, I add to such theoretical thinking by exploring a particular category of young women within local systems of exchange as well as within a transnational urban landscape of intimate transactions. What curtidoras in Maputo elucidate and what anthropologists perhaps have not sufficiently understood about transactional sex is the power of female eroticism and how this power connects to kinship, gender dynamics, and moralities of exchange. Drawing on postcolonial feminist scholarship, I extend existing frameworks of analysis by addressing how curtidoras’ sexual–economic exchanges with men are never fully divorced from moral obligations toward their female kin as well as characterized by diverging and converging moral economies in the intimate encounter between the younger women and older European men. Curtidoras and their exchanges with white men can inform our understanding of gender, power, kinship, sexuality, and exchange in urban Africa and add to recurring debates in anthropology and neighboring disciplines on transactional sex and sexual economies (Cole, 2004; Cornwall, 2002; Haram, 2004; Hunter, 2002, 2007; Leclerc-Madlala, 2003; Luke, 2003; Maganja et al., 2007; Newell, 2009; Swidler; Watkins, 2007; Wojcicki, 2002). Yet, I also want shed light on these women’s male partners, the sponsors who have hitherto received little attention in the literature. This article discusses the moral grammar of these intimate exchanges by looking at how expat men and Mozambican women’s perceptions of exchange reveal different moralities regarding giving and receiving material and affective gifts, such money, consumer goods, care, love, sex and company. I would like to make three interconnected arguments: First, I point to the cadernos pagu (47), 2016:e16476 Christian Groes-Green moralities of exchange that I encountered among curtidoras and how they can be understood against the background of notions of female entitlements and the value of women, stressing reproductive, sexual and cosmological powers and rights. Then I show how expat men’s notions of intimate exchange differ by seeing monetary support of women as either exploitation and prostitution or as part of an obligation to support poor African women. Second, I argue that curtidoras negotiate these exchange moralities through “intimate patronage”, involving asymmetrical ties and forms of what Erving Goffman (1959) called “impression management”. Third, I argue that exchange moralities in these relationships can be seen as a micro-cosm illustrating larger global collision between moralities of development aid among Western donors and local conceptions of aid and obligations in the global south. As part of this, I address circulations within the sexual economy and why sexual-monetary exchanges are more acceptable than perhaps we are used to in many European or Western settings. Fieldwork: Intimate studies, field sites, and key informants The findings in this article are based on 18 months of anthropological fieldwork I conducted between March 2007 and December 2011. My primary ethnographic tools were individual interviews and participant-observation among young people between the ages of 16 and 28 years as well as among their families and sexual partners. The original focus of my research was on sexual cultures, gender relations, and HIV prevention among secondary school students coming from impoverished social backgrounds. But, as I spent more time with young women, the seduction of patrocinadores and having sex for money became a recurring issue. Its prominence prompted me to explore in depth the power dynamics of female sexual practices and the responses of the women’s older and predominantly white and wealthy partners. cadernos pagu (47), 2016:e16476 Exploitation or appreciation? I focus in this article on findings among 20 young women who self-identified as curtidoras, but I also draw on informal talks with ten family members and 14 white patrocinadores. The family members included mothers, aunts, and sisters as well as some male relatives, all of whom gave me invaluable knowledge about kin structures and generational relations. The patrocinadores I talked to came from Portugal, Italy, Germany, Spain, France, England, the United States, Ireland, Holland, and Scandinavia. They were businesspeople, entrepreneurs, and consultants or were employed in the development industry as UN personnel or NGO workers. As such, they were quite representative of Maputo’s “expat community,” a group of highly “privileged migrants” (Fetcher; Walsh 2010) who live in the most expensive parts of the city and often stay there for relatively long periods of time. Approximately half of the sponsors were single, one-third were married to women back home, and a few lived with their wives in Maputo. Besides having transactional sex with local women, these privileged migrants also shared a nocturnal lifestyle of visiting bars, discos, restaurants, cafes, and cultural venues in the finest parts of the city. I met and talked to sponsors in these social hangouts where I listened to stories of sexual adventures, love, desire, and frustration. Most of them were between 40 and 65 years old, but I also encountered younger sponsors who were in Maputo as students, tourists, or NGO volunteers. Reaching a level of rapport that allows for open and confidential talks about intimate matters can be a time-consuming challenge that requires prolonged social interaction and a high degree of personal engagement (Groes-Green, 2009b). To become respected among curtidoras and to grasp the deeper meaning of young peoples’ everyday life, I learned Mozambican Portuguese, youth slang, and basic Changana, the mother tongue of my bilingual informants. Having built trust among these young women over time, I was allowed to follow them and their friends in the social life of neighborhoods and families and to accompany them when they ventured into the city’s pulsating nightlife to meet men. In the beginning, curtidoras regarded me as an odd white male cadernos pagu (47), 2016:e16476 Christian Groes-Green who asked embarrassing questions and who, much to their dismay, refused to take part in parties and drinking games. Later, I attempted to break down structural barriers of fieldwork related to race, gender, and class by participating in a variety of social and festive activities with them (Groes-Green, 2012). As a result, I was transformed from a distant observer into what they described as a “brother” (irmão), an expression that refers to my seniority as well as their confidence in me as an advisor on issues relating to love, money, and relationships. My largely asexual role prevented them from seeing me as a potential boyfriend, and therefore I posed no threat to male partners and family members. I was thus able to get a firsthand experience of the dramas that played out in the broader social network of patrocinadores, boyfriends, and kin. Learning Changana expressions for sex, love, and ancestral spirits also served as a “can opener” for more unfiltered discussions (Groes-Green, 2011, Groes-Green; Barret; Izugbara, 2011). Throughout different fieldwork periods, at different fields sites, and with various informants, I followed a simple guideline: I tried to identify and trace the basic patterns of exchange between main actors in Maputo’s sexual economy and to understand these patterns by using theories consistent with informants’ world views. Privileging their views and observing everyday interaction in families and nocturnal dramas yielded results that challenged some of my initial research assumptions. Conventional theories of female subordination, prostitution, and commoditization in Africa failed to fully account for my findings. Instead, I began analyzing gender, power, and sexual exchange through postcolonial feminist perspectives on kinship, female power, and political economy. The political economy of sex and gender transformations If we want to understand transactional sex in Maputo today, we must first look at the way changes in the political economy have profoundly transformed people’s perceptions of and practices related to sex, gender, and family life. The devastating effects of neoliberal reforms in postsocialist Mozambique have been widely cadernos pagu (47), 2016:e16476 Exploitation or appreciation? described, and there is no doubt that globalization

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Exploração ou gratidão? Patronagem íntima e a gramática moral das trocas sexuais econômicas entre jovens curtidoras e europeus mais velhos, expatriados, em Maputo – Moçambique