Anger, Economy, and Female Agency: Problematizing “Prostitution” and “Sex Work” among the...

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[Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society 2004, vol. 29, no. 4]! 2004 by The University of Chicago. All rights reserved. 0097-9740/2004/2904-0004$10.00

H o l l y W a r d l o w

Anger, Economy, and Female Agency: Problematizing

“Prostitution” and “Sex Work” among the Huli

of Papua New Guinea

W omen’s studies, anthropology, and international health all share anintellectual and, albeit in different ways, an activist or applied interestin prostitution/sex work, and this interest has recently intensified

amid concerns about the AIDS pandemic and global “trafficking” inwomen. These three fields have also shared an evolution in the termi-nology naming their object of study: from prostitution to sex work to,most recently, sexual networking and survival sex. This evolution reflectsa desire to shift the discursive fields surrounding monetized sexual ex-changes from moral to economic terms. In other words, while there hasbeen heated debate both within and among these different disciplinesabout how prostitution should be understood, whether and how nationaland international bodies should intervene in its practice, and who shouldrepresent it or speak for it, there has been some basic agreement that ofthe various terms to choose from, sex work, in particular, is a better label—better in that it may more accurately represent what women feel they aredoing when they engage in monetized sexual exchanges (i.e., working)and their reasons for doing so (i.e., economic need).

It is questionable whether researchers within these disciplines mean thesame thing when they use the term sex work. For some it may simply seema more culturally neutral term than prostitution, which may conjure up

Research for this article was made possible by grants from Fulbright-Hays (PO22A40008),Wenner-Gren (5848), the National Science Foundation (9412381), the Harry Frank Gug-genheim Foundation, the Association for Women in Science, and the National Women’sStudies Association. Earlier versions of this article were presented at many different venues:the Third Conference of the International Association for the Study of Sex, Culture, andSociety; the Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales (EHESS); the Centre de Rechercheet de Documentation sur l’Oceanie (CREDO); the University of Michigan women’s studiesdepartment; and Northwestern University’s anthropology department. Comments and ques-tions from those audiences were very helpful in developing the article. Special thanks go toBruce Knauft and two anonymous reviewers.



1018 ❙ Wardlow

images of nineteenth-century streetwalkers. For others, the term sex workis a political assertion that monetized sex is a kind of labor that—like otherforms of labor—should be remunerated, safe, and legal. Still others preferthe term sex worker because, unlike the term prostitute, it suggests anincome-generating activity rather than a totalizing identity. And finally,for some researchers, the term sex work speaks directly to causality; itimplies that women resort to the exchange of sex for money because ofthe structural violence that feminizes poverty and prevents women fromengaging in other financially viable ways of feeding their families.

While researchers may bring different tacit understandings to the termsex work, the widespread adoption of this term indicates that there is across-disciplinary trend to conceptualize monetized sexual exchanges aspractices engaged in because of economic need. In this article I complicatethis trend through an analysis of Huli pasinja meri (literally, passengerwomen) in Papua New Guinea.1 Huli passenger women exchange sex formoney, but passenger women’s initial motives have little to do with ma-terial necessity and everything to do with anger and resistance. Huli pas-senger women are therefore an interesting ethnographic case to considerin the context of scholarly debates about prostitution, because both theirown stated motivations and the locally dominant understandings of theirpractices do not correspond with the recent emphasis on economics andlabor in both academic and applied writings. Through this example Iquestion the narrowing of the study of sex work to materialist underpin-nings, and I argue that in order to understand monetized sexual exchangesin a range of cultural contexts one must examine more than women’seconomic positioning; one must also consider, first, local constructionsof gender and sexuality, particularly the role female gender plays in socialreproduction, and second, the ways in which economic structures aremediated by gendered meanings and processes to shape women’s moti-vations and agency.

Through this exegesis of the Huli passenger woman I hope to desta-bilize what Kamala Kempadoo has called “the ‘canon’ in prostitutionstudies” (1998a, 13). As she says, “Little research or theorizing to dateis, for example, grounded in the lives, experiences, definitions and per-spectives of Third World people in sex work, allowing western categoriesand subjects to be privileged in the international discourse on sex work”(1998a, 13). Throughout the article I therefore tack back and forth be-

1 The term pasinja meri is widely used in Papua New Guinea to refer to women whoengage in illicit sexual behavior. The reader should not assume that my analysis of Hulipassenger women is generalizable to women in other areas of Papua New Guinea.



S I G N S Summer 2004 ❙ 1019

tween ethnography and “the canon” to show how the meanings andpractices of Huli passenger women both do and do not resonate withanalyses of prostitution and sex work in the academic literature.

Huli passenger women: An introductionIt is difficult to find a word that captures all the meanings of the termpassenger woman, but I have often glossed it as incipient prostitution—that is, prostitution that is not institutionalized or naturalized as “theoldest profession.” Among the Huli, the term passenger woman is both astigmatizing slur directed at women who are believed to engage in sexuallyillicit behavior, whether it involves money or not, and an identity thatsome women embrace because it symbolizes rebellion and autonomy.Women who identify as pasinja meri engage in sexual relationships withnumerous men, and most of these liaisons involve the exchange of sexfor money. But passenger women also define their identity in terms offreedoms that have little to do with sexuality: freedom to use languagethat other “good” women do not, freedom to move through the localand national landscape that other women do not exercise, and freedomto buy goods that other women certainly desire but are prevented frombuying—primarily because “good” women are expected not to engage inselfish consumption (Wardlow 2002a). While the behavioral model forprostitution was most likely learned from expatriates in the cities andmining camps of Papua New Guinea, the behavior itself means somethingquite different when it is taken up by Huli women and is probably betterunderstood through contextualizing it in indigenous understandings ofgender, social reproduction, and the reproductive body. To provide a senseof what the exchange of sex for money looks like and means in this context,I will start with two narrative case studies of Huli passenger women.

Case one: OgaiOgai’s husband worked at a mining camp and rarely came home, so Ogaiwas burdened with raising their two children on her own. What she mostresented about this situation was that she knew her husband spent moneyon other women but did not send money home to her. Nevertheless, heradult brothers and sisters helped her, and she had resolved that when itcame time for her daughter to marry she would demand that her ownfamily receive a large portion of her daughter’s bridewealth payment sincethey had contributed more to raising her than had Ogai’s husband or hisfamily. Despite her difficult situation, Ogai had no intention of leavingher husband, and it was only after she was raped—and her husband and



1020 ❙ Wardlow

her brothers refused to do anything about it—that she abandoned herhome and her children and started exchanging sex for money.

The rape, as she described it, was particularly degrading. Having spenta long day collecting thatch for the roof of a new house, she had hurriedto her garden alone at dusk to dig up some sweet potatoes for dinner. Asshe readied to return home, a man snuck up behind her, held a macheteto her throat, and demanded that she have sex with him, threatening thatif she struggled, he would kill her and throw her body in a ditch. No onewould find the corpse until it started stinking, he taunted, and when itwas found, who would know that he had done it? No murder compen-sation would ever be demanded for her; no one would take up arms torevenge her death. And anyway, he sneered, “Yu ting samting bilong yuem gutpela samting? Mi save repim wait meri, olsem na yu, mi no savekauntim yu.” [You think your “thing” (i.e., vagina) is a good thing? I’vehad sex with/raped white women, so you, I don’t even count you.]2

When Ogai told her brothers about the rape, they responded that shewas a married woman—her husband had paid bridewealth for her—andit was therefore her husband’s responsibility to threaten tribal warfare orto take the culprit to village court and demand compensation. Her hus-band, however, refused to leave work and come home; he asserted thatsince there were no witnesses to the assault it was not worth the troubleof a village court case. From Ogai’s perspective, the refusal of her brothersand husband to take action reinforced her rapist’s assertion that she “didn’tcount.” She had been discursively stripped of value by the assailant’s in-vocation of a racially based hierarchy of female sexual worth; by assertingthat she did not even figure in his implied tally of victims, her assailantessentially forced her into the subject position of being “unrapeable”through the very act of rape (see also Sharpe 1991). Then her male kintacitly accepted this devaluation by allowing her violation to standunavenged.

Ogai was so angry that she absconded from her home and became apassenger woman. She began by sneaking off to the local “bush discos”(rural, late-night dance parties) where she would dance with a number ofmen and then have sex with one of them in the underbrush for a fewdollars. Later she joined a group of women who also self-identified aspassenger women, and they cooperated in organizing liaisons with groups

2 The reader may be disconcerted by the phrase “had sex with/raped” in this narrative.Among the Huli, the English-derived Tok Pisin verb repim refers to any extramarital sexualliaison, consensual or otherwise. Ogai herself did not know if her assailant meant rape orconsensual sex.



S I G N S Summer 2004 ❙ 1021

of men. Eventually she hopped on a public bus and decided to take herchances on the roads and towns of Papua New Guinea. She lived this wayfor approximately five years and claimed to have had sex with hundredsof different men.

Case two: TaraliTarali’s family thought she had married well: her husband owned a fewtrade stores in urban centers, and he took her with him wherever he wentinstead of leaving her at home to make gardens and raise pigs, as mostwives are expected to do when their husbands travel. But then he infectedher with gonorrhea, her doctors declared her infertile, she and her husbandbegan to fight constantly, and he eventually sent her back home. Whenshe heard that he had taken a second wife and was bringing this womanto Tari, the one town in Huli territory, she and her sisters waited at theTari airstrip and attacked the couple as they got off the plane. In themelee her husband punched out her front tooth. The gonorrhea andsubsequent infertility, her lost tooth, and the strength of her father’s clanwere all persuasive arguments during the subsequent divorce case, andnone of her bridewealth was returned to her husband, a remarkable out-come in Huli divorces.

But afterward Tarali became depressed. Even her younger sisters weremarried and had children, and there she was, back at home with her father,who blamed her for the failure of her marriage. Moreover, when hermother died, soon after Tarali’s divorce, her father refused to let her goto the funeral. Her mother had run away to become a passenger womanwhen Tarali was quite young, and her father, angry and ashamed, haddone his best to sever contact between them. Tarali asserted that all theseincidents culminated in her decision to become a passenger woman. Herhusband’s promiscuity, her consequent infertility, and the fact that despiteprofiting from her bridewealth her father refused to let her attend hermother’s funeral all resulted in a consuming rage. So Tarali started goingto bush discos, and when men asked to have sex with her, she would. Shesaid that she did not ask for money at this time; she just felt angry, and,as she put it, she had sex with them simply because she could. “Laik bilongmi” (my choice), she said.

Ogai and Tarali are typical of Huli pasinja meri in a number of ways.Most of the passenger women I interviewed had been married (fifteenout of eighteen interviewees), and they often had a few children (thirteenout of eighteen interviewees) before they decided to run away. In otherwords, for the most part, it is not young, never-married women whobecome passenger women. Like Ogai, many passenger women leave Huli



1022 ❙ Wardlow

territory, and most of them are quite proud of the journeys they havetaken and their skills at adapting to new places and to people from othercultural groups. And like both Ogai and Tarali, most passenger womenI interviewed had grown up in rural areas but usually had at least a fewyears of education, and they knew how to speak Tok Pisin, the linguafranca of Papua New Guinea. Like Ogai and Tarali, many passengerwomen do not initially expect to receive money in exchange for sex.Instead, they begin by running away and having a number of extramaritalsexual partners and only later come to insist on receiving cash in exchangefor sex. Often they have an encounter in which a man offers them money,or they meet other passenger women who teach them that they can andshould demand money from men if they offer sex. And perhaps mostimportant, like Ogai and Tarali, many passenger women describe theirentry into this social category as triggered by incidents of violence andmotivated by feelings of betrayal and anger (thirteen out of eighteeninterviewees). In other words, to the extent that these motivations canbe disentangled, it was emotion, not economics, that first impelled themto engage in extramarital sex with multiple partners.

Cultural contextWith a population of approximately ninety thousand, the Huli are one ofthe larger cultural groups in Papua New Guinea. Most Huli are subsistencehorticulturalists, but the economy is sufficiently monetized that cash isrequired for transport, school fees, clothing, bedding, pots and pans, andtypical sources of protein, such as canned mackerel. In other words, whileeveryone raises pigs and maintains gardens of sweet potato and othercrops, they also require cash, if not on a daily basis then certainly for allthe goods and services that people need for a comfortable existence andto help at least some of their children obtain the education that canpotentially move them into the ranks of salaried workers. However, littlewage or salaried labor is available in Tari. Although Tari can boast ahospital, police station, courthouse, airstrip, and a number of primaryschools, these services employ only a very small percent of the population;therefore, most people procure cash through selling produce at marketor selling coffee, and men often leave the area in search of wage labor incities or at mine sites.

Importantly, the Huli have a bridewealth marriage system in which thegroom’s family gives pigs and money to the bride’s family. Traditionally,the bride’s father claims almost all of this bridewealth and distributes itto those kin who assisted him in marrying his own wife, the bride’s mother,



S I G N S Summer 2004 ❙ 1023

and to kin who can be counted on to contribute in the future to helpinghis sons to marry. However, as mentioned in Ogai’s narrative, mothersand their natal families are increasingly successful at claiming a greaterproportion of bridewealth payments, often invoking the controversial logicthat they have contributed significantly to a girl’s upbringing by buyingher clothes and paying her school fees, particularly if a husband has beenabsent for a long period of time.

In the ethnographic literature, the Huli are known for having extremelyrigid gender pollution beliefs and codes of heterosexual avoidance.3 Inthe past, men and women lived in separate houses; they maintained sep-arate gardens; men cooked their own meals; in some areas there wereseparate walking paths for men and women; and a majority of men joined“bachelor cults” that in part were meant to teach young men how toprevent potentially fatal contamination by women. Exposure to a woman’smenstrual fluids was, and still is, said to cause a man’s intestines to twistinto knots until they rupture inside him, causing death. Men (and somewomen) say that women’s bodies are ngubi (smelly) and that women haveno mana (cultural/moral knowledge, capacity to internalize social rules).Many men still maintain separate houses or live most of the time in clanmen’s houses, and some only accept raw food from women and insist oncooking it in their own pots over their own fires. In a cultural contextthat has long emphasized gender avoidance and the potency of femalereproductive substances, it may seem remarkable that a practice that lookssomewhat like prostitution exists. What is important, then, is to examinewhat such practices mean. Do existing theorizations of prostitution/sexwork help in understanding the phenomenon of passenger women?

Passenger women: Prostitutes, sex workers, or none of the above?Because of the global AIDS pandemic, “prostitution” has been the objectof much research. While researchers in international health have empha-sized prostitutes’ “rapid acquisition of new sexual partners”—a phrasemeant to replace the ambiguous and stigmatizing adjective promiscuous—and the consequent implications for disease transmission, feminist liter-ature has been more concerned with whether prostitution should be con-ceptualized as indicating and reinforcing female subordination or, alter-natively, whether it should be conceptualized as a potentially emancipatorypractice that exposes, transgresses, and thereby undermines dominant dis-courses about gender. Anthropologists, for their part, have focused on

3 See Glasse 1968; Goldman 1983; Frankel 1986; Clark 1993; Wardlow 2002b.



1024 ❙ Wardlow

the lived experience of prostitution in a variety of cultural contexts (Law2000; Nencel 2001); the (neo)colonial histories that have alienated do-mestic, erotic, and emotional labor (White 1990; Muecke 1992); and thewide array of culturally variable sexual and economic unions that challengethe entrenched Western opposition between marriage and prostitution.4

Much recent ethnographic research—regardless of the academic disciplineof the researcher—has critically analyzed the ways in which systems ofprostitution, particularly transnational prostitution, are structured notonly by economic inequalities but also by racialized constructions of desire(Truong 1990; Kempadoo 1998b; Bishop and Robinson 2002). Re-searchers vary markedly in whether they conceptualize such erotic “ori-entalism” as a potential resource to be exploited by sellers of sex (Phillips2002; Spanger 2002) or as further sealing sellers of sex into relations ofinequality (Davidson 1998).

While researchers in international health, and sometimes in women’sstudies, have accepted prostitution or sex work as a cross-culturally ge-neralizable category, anthropologists have often sought to vex the concept.In a critique of the reification of prostitution in epidemiological research,Barbara De Zalduondo discusses the illogic of using prostitution as anindependent variable when the defining feature of prostitution—payingmoney for sex—is not in and of itself a risk factor for disease. She alsopoints out the implicit misogyny of deploying a category that focuses“attention and responsibility on the sellers of sex despite universal rec-ognition that the customers of women in prostitution are ‘part of theproblem’” (1991, 225). Meredith Turshen, on a mission to deconstructreceived biomedical nosologies, suggests a reclassification of AIDS as an“environmental” disease—“much as we understand diarrheal disease tobe related to poverty and an unsanitary environment” (1998, 180)—ratherthan as a sexually transmitted disease. In her analysis of the African context,economic structures inherited from the colonial period necessitate highlevels of long-term male labor migration, leading ineluctably to extra-marital relationships and sexually transmitted infection. Her interventionstrategically shifts the lens away from prostitutes and toward labor struc-tures as the ultimate “reservoirs of disease.”

In addition to critiquing discourse about the supposedly seamless re-lationship between prostitution and disease, anthropologists have used

4 See Dirasse 1991; Hammar 1992; Schoepf 1992; De Zalduondo and Bernard 1995;Hammar 1996. This is an overly neat description of how different disciplines have approachedthe topic of prostitution. There are, of course, feminist anthropologists, anthropologists whowork in the field of international health, etc.



S I G N S Summer 2004 ❙ 1025

ethnographic data to defamiliarize and even dismantle categories—suchas “wife” and “prostitute”—that are often naturalized and assumed to beopposed binaries. From a historical perspective, Luise White (1990) dem-onstrates that what has been called prostitution in colonial Nairobi actuallyinvolved the provision of a range of domestic services that the colonialpowers relied on for the cheap reproduction of labor. From an ethno-graphic perspective, Brooke Schoepf has paved the way in showing thatin Zaire there are many women of different ages, classes, and marital andreproductive histories who do not identify as commercial sex workers butwho do occasionally accept money or gifts in exchange for sex (Schoepf1992, 1993). Similarly, Laketch Dirasse (1991) problematizes the Westernopposition between marriage and prostitution by discussing seven namedcategories of heterosexual partnership in Ethiopia that vary in terms ofdomestic arrangement, duration, the degree to which they are jurally andreligiously sanctioned, and the nature of goods or services exchanged. Inthis article I contribute to these previous critiques of the category ofprostitution and its deployment in a range of literatures by exposing howthoroughly the category itself is saturated with Western assumptions aboutfemale personhood, commoditization, and sexual desire.

Nevertheless, in order to compare Huli passenger women with standardunderstandings of prostitution and sex work, it is important to have someprovisional definitions with which to start. On an empirical level, onecould perhaps agree that prostitution and/or sex work involve a few spe-cific behaviors: multiple sexual partners and a “high rate of acquisition ofnew partners”; the exchange of sex for money, or perhaps other items ofvalue; and discrete sexual transactions that imply no commitments tofuture relationships or subsequent exchanges (in other words, pay persexual transaction). Many discussions of prostitution also assume that itis an urban phenomenon that is socially institutionalized and spatiallylocalized, and many, though not all, assume that prostitution involvessome sort of sex broker, such as a pimp.

Most self-identified Huli pasinja meri meet some of the above criteriafor prostitution at least some of the time. For example, most of them haveat one time or another snuck off into the roadside undergrowth andexchanged sex for money with men they did not know and with whomthey had no further interaction. However, passenger women’s sexual re-lationships can take a variety of forms—some discrete, some relatively longin duration; some for cash, some for other goods; some with strangers,some with men they know. Moreover, the emerging “sex work” scene inTari is not taking place in an urban area: Tari is basically an airstrip sur-rounded by a hospital, a market, a few government buildings, and a few



1026 ❙ Wardlow

stores. And, since all Huli land is owned by particular families and is usuallysurrounded by deep trenches and thick bushes, finding a space where“prostitution” can occur is a substantial obstacle. Moreover, when pasinjameri and their partners are caught on other people’s property, they aretaken to village court for brukim banis (literally, breaking the fence; tres-passing) and “pollution” of the land. Thus, “prostitution” in Tari is forthe most part extremely fragmented and atomistic.

Even when behaviors look like that of stereotypical prostitution—thatis, when they look like they meet the criteria listed above—the motivationsbehind them can be quite different. For example, self-identified passengerwomen tend to have many sexual partners, but sometimes this is con-ceptualized as a strategy for maintaining one’s autonomy, not as a behaviorcompelled by economic necessity. In other words, some Huli passengerwomen have many different sexual partners not because their economicsituation requires it but because they want to in order to maintain theirfreedom and independence. Ogai, for example, said she always got nervouswhen a man wanted to be with her more than once; “one day, one man”was her policy because, as she said:

Like, the first time I “befriended” [i.e., had sex with] this man, thatsame day he asked me to meet with him again. Oh, you’re this kindof man [i.e., she felt he wanted to establish some kind of ongoingrelationship]. Forget it. I went and had sex with somebody else. Idon’t “use” the same man for more than one day. I “hate” them.It’s like this: I already left my husband. I was fed up with him, andso I left him. [Olsem na first time mi frenim dispela man, same timeem askim mi gen. Ai, yu dispela kain man ya, maski. Mi frenimnarapela. Same man mi no save usim 2, 3 days. Olsem mi save hetimol. Olsem mi lusim man bilong mi pinis. Mi les long man na milusim.]

In other words, Ogai avoided establishing an ongoing relationship withany of her partners because she had no intention of entering into marriageor any other sort of relationship in which she could not raun long laik(go where she pleased). Thus, the motivation for her “high rate of ac-quisition of new partners” was not economic but was rather a means ofavoiding attachments that might become subordinating and oppressive.In sum, it is important to pay attention to the culturally embedded mean-ings of behaviors and not just the behaviors themselves when attemptinga cross-cultural comparison of monetized sexual exchanges.



S I G N S Summer 2004 ❙ 1027

The directionality of desireWhen one goes beyond behavioral notions of prostitution to its affectivedimensions and cultural meanings, it becomes clear that Huli pasinja merido not conform to many Western assumptions. For example, implicit inmany studies of prostitution, and probably in Western folk notions of(hetero)sexuality more generally, is a pseudobiologistic assumption thatmen are the sexual desirers and women the desirables. Recent work inevolutionary psychology, for example, tells us that the male mind is shapedby evolution to desire many sexual partners. Along the same lines, self-help books such as The Rules (Fein and Schneider 1996) attempt to setwomen straight as to their evolutionarily designated role, implying thatmodern women have strayed off course and assumed a more assertive rolein romance than is “natural.” Since in Euro-American constructions ofgender it is women who are “naturally” the objects of desire, it is, ofcourse, women who withhold sex, sell sex, and variously bargain with theone chip they automatically have regardless of other conditions. A numberof critics of this assumption have asserted that prostitution has little todo with biologically based desire and everything to do with power, theimplication being that if women were the ones with economic and politicalpower, then they just might find themselves paying men for sex—andperhaps more to the point, women might be constructed as the “natural”desirers and buyers of male sexuality. Nevertheless, the ideology thatwomen are the “natural” objects of desire is quite powerful.

In contrast, among the Huli it is thought that men are the epitome ofbeauty and that which is desired. It is little boys whose cleanliness andphysical appearance are carefully tended to by mothers. It is young menwho leave the family home to go live in bachelor houses, where they aretaught how to cultivate and maintain their health, beauty, and social ef-ficacy. And, during ritual celebrations, it is men—armed with mirrors andcarefully inspecting one another’s appearances—who slick down their bod-ies with oil; paint their faces with bold yellow, black, and red paint; anddon the long woven aprons that cover them in the front but provocativelyprovide glimpses of their thigh and gluteal muscles from the side. Whenspeaking of desire, Huli men boasted to me that they had only to oil theirskins and put on their ceremonial gear to attract women. And women?Well, “it is a shame,” older men would sigh, but in order to attract men,mere physical beautification is often not enough. Women are not thoughtto be “naturally” beautiful and desirable in the way that men are; sadly(and sometimes frighteningly), women must resort to love magic.

The assumed directionality of desire, in this particular model, departs



1028 ❙ Wardlow

dramatically from Western assumptions, and so the commoditization offemale sexuality does not follow “naturally” at all. Indeed, Huli people—both men and women—often seem puzzled about giving money towomen for sex. The commodity logic of prostitution is only slowly anduneasily coming to “make sense” among the Huli. Men, for their part,often scoff, “Do these passenger women think their ‘things’ [i.e., vaginas]are ‘good things,’ so that they have just cause for expecting money?”Women’s vaginas are said to be ngubi (smelly), and so passenger women’sexpectations that men should provide money for access to them strikesmany men as transgressive and nonsensical. Moreover, men will sometimesgrumble that they do not see why a woman should receive money whenshe is not cooking for a man, raising his pigs, doing his laundry, or per-forming some other kind of labor. Sex in and of itself, they will explicitlysay, is not work—it produces nothing, transforms nothing, and creates norelational ties (see also Nihill 1994). Therefore, it deserves no compen-sation. Thus, two of the pivotal concepts that “make sense” of prostitutionin a Western context—women as sexually desirable objects and sex as acompensable kind of labor—are confounded by Huli cultural logics thatassert that women are not necessarily the desirable ones and sex is notwork. In short, Western pseudobiologistic and pseudoeconomistic as-sumptions about desire, and its supply and demand, carry little weight inthis context.

Why, then, do Huli men pay? Why do they participate in this type oftransaction if it is so contrary to their own logic about desire and theinherent value (or lack of value) of sex? What are they paying for? Thisis a question that is increasingly being asked in ethnographic work onprostitution. Whereas past research took the exchange of sex for moneyas unproblematic—men are paying for sex, a semiotically transparent and“natural” desire—researchers increasingly interrogate what exactly menderive from these transactions and how this can shape what prostitutionmeans in any particular context (Allison 1994; Davidson 1998; Nencel2001).

In the Huli context, men assert that they are sometimes paying fornontraditional sexual practices that they are reluctant to request from theirwives.5 In more enduring relationships with passenger women, men are

5 Most passenger women I interviewed asserted that they refused men’s requests forsexual practices such as fellatio, discursively demarcating the body into two mutually exclusivesites of consumption by arguing that “mouths are for eating and genitals are for sex.”Nevertheless, many said they engaged in pobo bi (literally hot talk, talk meant to arouse) andtried different sexual positions.



S I G N S Summer 2004 ❙ 1029

sometimes paying for a kind of physical and emotional intimacy that theysay is not always possible in marriage. At a broader level, Huli men arepaying passenger women for a certain kind of masculinity that they as-sociate with being modern. Young Huli men are often told that they mustchoose between one of two “roads,” or ways of living in the world—nupela rot (the new or modern road) and rot bilong tumbuna (the an-cestors’ road). To adhere to the ancestors’ road requires a man to builda house for himself and one for his wife; he must cook for himself, certainlywhen a wife is menstruating but ideally all the time; and he must learnthe lineage myths and genealogies that serve as cultural capital duringland disputes (Wardlow 2001). Modern masculinity, in contrast, is asso-ciated with insouciance about gender-related taboos, obtaining knowledgethrough school and urban experience, cultivating a conquest orientationtoward women, and displaying a certain degree of autonomy and tran-scendence of clan identity. Paying women for sex is a means for men toassert this modern masculinity: it shows that they worry little aboutwomen’s bodily substances and that they can gain access to women with-out enmeshing themselves in the heavy web of kinship obligations entailedin marriage.

Prostitution and the forfeited self?In addition to the discrepancy between Western and Huli constructionsof “natural” desire, the central significations of “prostitution” in theWest—the commoditization of sexuality and its consequent disembed-dedness from romantic and enduring social relations (Pateman 1999)—have little purchase in the Huli context. As Georg Simmel put it, “Onlytransactions for money have that character of a purely momentary rela-tionship which leaves no traces, as is the case with prostitution. With thegiving of money, one completely withdraws from the relationship. . . .Only money is an appropriate equivalent to the momentary peaking andthe equally momentary satisfaction of the desire served by prostitutes, formoney establishes no ties” (1971, 121).

In the West the prostitute embodies and epitomizes anxieties aboutthe commoditization of human relationships. In the Western popularimaginary, love is only love if it is “freely given,” thus, a monetized trans-action is, by definition, devoid of the emotional attachments that definegenuine, heartfelt relationality. As Noah Zatz puts it, “In hegemonic Euro-American culture, sexuality and money are thought of as things that can-not, do not, and/or should not mix. This separation is related at least inpart to the attribution of money, commerce, and contract to the public



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realm of work, and intimacy, desire, and pleasure to the private realm offamilial and other affective relationships” (1997, 294). Moreover, thispartitioning of the world into public and private spheres has, in Euro-American society, long been gendered. Women are the keepers of theaffective economy, safeguarding emotional labor from its possible alien-ation in the capitalist economy. Therefore, promiscuous and/or paid sex-uality, particularly on the part of women, is frowned on in Western societiesin part because it implies the lack of “pure” sentimental attachment anddeep emotion that are stereotypically the province of women. For women,sex is meant to be motivated by, and expressive of, love. Prostitution, inwhich sex occurs with many persons and is presumably not motivated bylove, violates this gendered moral imperative. By commoditizing thatwhich ideally signifies the transcendence of commoditization, prostitutesrepresent the possibility of a world in which all relationships are instru-mental and mediated by cash.

Closely connected to this stigmatized decoupling of love and sex inthe Western conceptualization of prostitution is the notion that prosti-tution is a forfeiture of integrity—the betrayal of one’s most true “self.”As Laurie Shrage puts it, “In the English-speaking world, the term ‘pros-titution’ has a kind of double, layered meaning. It designates both sexualactivity that is commercially oriented, and the act of debasing oneself”(1994, 120). The latter meaning can be seen in the way that the idiomof prostitution is invoked in other contexts. For example, in his analysisof Honore de Balzac’s writing, the literary critic Peter Brooks notes that“Balzac was the first French novelist to serialize his fiction in installmentsin the daily newspaper . . . he understood that literature was becominga commodity . . . a kind of prostitution” (1999, 39). Similarly, JanetMalcolm, in a recent article about Gertrude Stein, writes, “Finally, at theage of fifty-eight, she decided to (so to speak) prostitute herself and writea book in regular English that would be a best-seller” (2003, 60). Movingto a different genre, the comedian Dennis Miller has been known toconfide to his whistling and clapping audiences that “I’m a whore forthat,” meaning he will “do anything”—that is, compromise his sense ofself—for an enthusiastic response from the public. When an artist “sellsout” or “whores himself” he betrays his truest self—his unique aestheticand philosophical vision—in order to appeal to the public and to makemoney. Even self-identified prostitutes themselves invoke this meaning ofprostitution: “Some prostitutes reserve the word prostitute for professionalsex work which they consider honorable and delegate the word whore toself-compromising sexual accommodation which they consider dishon-orable. One prostitute said, ‘Women who have sex out of duty or sub-



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mission are the real “whores”’” (Pheterson 1993, 47). In the above (pri-marily male) examples, “prostitution” is a metaphor for loss of “integrity”and self-betrayal, particularly of one’s deepest commitments and one’ssense of a unique and autonomous individuality. The logical implication,then, is that a woman’s source of integrity is not an aesthetic and phil-osophical vision or principle but rather her capacity for love of others,particularly love of one man, as this is expressed through monogamoussexual desire.

Such notions of prostitution clearly assume a culturally and historicallyspecific construction of female gender. Among the Huli, concerns aboutwomen’s emotional breaches of gender propriety or loss of personal in-tegrity are not particularly salient. Likewise, paid sex among women isconsidered wrong not because of anxiety about the commoditization ofbehavior meant to be safeguarded within the domestic sphere but becauseit implies the repudiation of kin obligations for the purpose of personalprofit. Passenger women’s exchange of sex for money is not perceived asthe crude sale of something that should not be sold. Rather, it is seen asa kind of theft and as the selfish consumption of a resource that rightfullybelongs to a woman’s kin. Huli female sexuality is conceptualized as re-productive potential, and it is thought to be embodied by the individualwoman but to belong to her family and clan. Thus, for example, the mostsalient aspect of a woman’s rape for most people in her community is notthat she as an individual has been violated but that her sexual potentialhas been stolen from her kin. Likewise, since a woman’s sexuality doesnot belong to her, her “sale” of it is not a betrayal of personal integritybut rather a betrayal of her kin. In sum, in terms of its very culturallyspecific and quite gendered moral and emotional meanings, prostitutionis a misleading term to apply to Huli pasinja meri.

Money, motivation, and causalityWhen one turns to the question of causation and motivation, here tooHuli passenger women do not fit easily into Western constructions ofprostitution. Most social science research—whether in Western or non-Western contexts—stresses either economic desperation or the awarenessthat sex work potentially pays better than other service work usually doneby women. As Maggie O’Neill puts it, “The bottom line for entry intoprostitution is economic need” (2001, 148). However, neither I nor mostHuli nor self-identified pasinja meri would assert that passenger womenare motivated by economic necessity (see also Pickering and Wilkins 1993;NSRRT and Jenkins 1994, 117). Only three of the eighteen passenger



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women I interviewed cited money as the reason they engaged in mone-tized sexual exchanges. Moreover, not a single woman I spoke with saidthat she had ever demanded a specific amount of money from a man.Indeed, it is a point of pride for many women that they do not demandmoney and that instead men offer it to them. According to many passengerwomen, when a man offers money for sex, this shows that he is so con-sumed by desire that he has overcome his fear that women, and theirvaginas, are dangerous and ngubi. Desire has made him abandon the self-discipline that defines masculinity; to get a man to offer money is tovanquish him. (Thus, according to passenger women, if anyone’s integrityis damaged by the exchange of money for sex, it is men’s.)

This attitude of pasinja meri toward money problematizes the intel-lectual and strategic step of replacing the term prostitution with that ofsex work. While the category sex work fruitfully invites approaches thatfocus on labor issues rather than on moral status, it can be critiqued asthe compulsion to salvage women’s morality by labeling what they do as“work,” an activity that in the West is inherently virtuous and that isassociated with industriousness, productivity, efficiency, and so forth. Inother words, according to our Protestant ethic, work is always the savinggrace; if the woman is engaged in work, even if it is on her back, then itmust be okay. However, most Huli pasinja meri—and the men with whomthey have sex—do not consider what they do “work.” According to moretraditional conceptualizations, work is embodied, physical labor that gen-erates wealth and reproduces sociality (Biersack 1995). Fence building iswork, making gardens is work, even breast-feeding is work, since it goestoward “making” a child. The act of sex outside of marriage and repro-duction is not work.

Of course, in the Euro-American context there has also been resistanceto the idea that monetized sexual exchanges constitute work; therefore,simply because hegemonic discourses among the Huli assert that whatpassenger women are doing is not work does not mean that the researcherneeds to accept this diagnosis. Perhaps more important than whetherpasinja meri-ism corresponds to culturally specific notions—or dominantideologies—about work is the economic context in which monetized sex-ual exchanges take place. Conceptualizing a sexual transaction as sex workmakes sense in a context where being a “worker” is a known categoryand can potentially enable one to leverage certain rights and benefits. AsZatz notes, “Under a Marxist interpretation, every sale of services is en-trance into a relation of subordination that transforms the worker into acommodified object. . . . Hence, Marx wrote: ‘Prostitution is only aspecific expression of the general prostitution of the laborer’” (1997,



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287–88). Thus, while sex workers and segments of the feminist movementin the Euro-American context have labored long and hard to “make itwork” (Jenness 1993), they have only been able to do so because Euro-American sex workers live in an economy where most people are “workers”(i.e., their labor is alienated), and other kinds of workers have in historicalmemory also struggled to secure certain rights and protections from thestate.

Moreover, Euro-American sex workers have struggled in a culturalcontext where the construction of gender pushes women into a servicesector in which many jobs mirror both the gender arrangements of thehome (woman as nurturer and cleaner) as well as the gender arrangementsof prostitution (woman as sexual object). Thus prostitutes in the Westcan somewhat easily point out analogies between being a wife, being aservice worker, and being a prostitute. And, indeed, many Euro-Americansex workers do exactly that when explaining why they do what they do:“I got used more as a secretary than as a whore and I didn’t get paid forit” (Pheterson 1993, 59). In other words, in a capitalist economy wherework is alienated, and in a gendered economy where women are serviceworkers, conceptualizing monetized sexual exchanges as “sex work” makessense and, moreover, can be deployed to strategic ends. Whether theidentity “sex worker” or the activity “sex work” makes strategic or con-ceptual sense in a context where this is not the case—where few peopleengage in wage labor, where “the worker” is not a category with a longand meaningful history, and where the alienation of labor is not the nor-mative condition—is another question.

“Eating her own vagina”: The subversion of social reproductionIf it is not the need for cash that motivates Huli passenger women, thenwhat does motivate them, and how do they understand the practices thatthey engage in? To answer these questions, it is important to see thesignificance of passenger women in a context where women’s participationin the generational circulation of bridewealth is central to social repro-duction. In other words, one needs to understand Huli passenger womenthrough the lens of a clan-based society, the clan’s management of femalesexuality, and the way in which the meaning and value of this managementhas changed in the context of monetization. As Stephane Breton assertsof another New Guinea society, “The clan is essentially a community ofshareholders bound up together in matrimonial investment projects”(1999, 566). What holds the clan together, and what enables social re-production from one generation to the next, is the collective payment



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and receipt of bridewealth. Bridewealth secures the reproductive sub-stances and the gestational labor necessary for creating the next genera-tion, and the processes of collective giving, collective waiting, and col-lective recuperation of debt link people vertically and horizontally overtime. This definition radically departs from standard anthropological un-derstandings in which “clan” is usually conceptualized as a political unitin relation to other similarly organized units. However, Breton’s definitionseems particularly salient in the contemporary Huli context where, as willbe seen, bridewealth payments are fundamental to economy and genderbut are being transformed by monetization.

The cooperation of women in their role of transacted valuable is criticalin societies where social reproduction depends on bridewealth. It is byattaining women through marriage that men are able to reproduce theirclans, and it is by giving their daughters in marriage that men acquire thewealth necessary for their sons to marry and to pay back those kin whohelped them marry their own wives. If women refuse to cooperate, thentheir fathers may not be able to pay back debts incurred through theirown marriages, and their brothers may not be able to obtain wives.Women’s cooperation continues to be necessary even after the maritaltransfer of bridewealth has taken place: women are expected to growthe sweet potato that feeds the children and pigs that will eventuallymake up the next bridewealth transaction. Passenger women are womenwho refuse to cooperate.

According to many passenger women, their decisions not to cooperatewere precipitated by incidents of violence, loss, or humiliation: rape, themurder of female kin, and public shaming, adultery, or abandonment bya husband (twelve out of eighteen interviewees). Such incidents and, moreimportant, the subsequent failure of kin to pursue proper justice wereconsistently described as turning points by self-identified passengerwomen. To provide a few brief examples: Palai’s father killed her oldersister, and none of her maternal kin were willing to kill him in retaliationor to demand compensation from his clan. So she ran away and had anumber of sexual liaisons, some in exchange for money. She stated thatshe wanted to ruin her reputation so that no man would want to marryher and her father would thus never be able to use her to acquire bride-wealth. Agali’s father killed her mother, and she also ran away and becamea passenger woman, citing the same logic as Palai. Jakili physically foughtwith her husband and eventually ran away from him. Her husband thenhumiliated her by publicly announcing that since she had absconded fromthe marriage and her family had not yet returned his bridewealth payment,any man from his clan should have a right to her. Her half brother (the



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son of one of her father’s other wives) then refused to let her build ahouse on their father’s land, asserting that he had not received any of herbridewealth when she married, and that she should go build a house onthe land of relatives who had received a portion of her bridewealth pay-ment. She said she felt that all her husband and her half brother reallycared about was whether they received the bridewealth they felt entitledto, and if both of them were going to treat her as if she were olsem maket(like a market good), then she was going to act like one.

While experiences of violence and humiliation figure prominently inwomen’s stories, equally striking is their consistent and angry invocationof bridewealth (Wardlow 2002c). As most Huli women see it, bridewealthis an expression of women’s value. Thus, husbands and brothers shouldbe willing to wage war—or at least go to court—if a woman is raped orkilled. Families should continue to care for their daughters and sistersonce they are married—not exploit them as a source of cash. However,many passenger women asserted that kin now “are just greedy for bride-wealth.” Thus, self-identified passenger women cited two reasons for theirbehavior. First, like Jakili, some women felt that their kin, particularly malekin, had asserted or implied that bridewealth was more valuable than theywere as persons; they had, as they put it, been treated olsem maket. Thus,they decided to shame and humiliate their kin for their cupidity by actingolsem maket. Second, some women, like Palai and Agali, felt that a graveinjustice—usually an act of violence against themselves or their femaleloved ones—had not been redressed. They knew that the denial of bride-wealth to their kin was the best way a woman could take revenge, andthe most shameful way to rob kin of bridewealth was for a woman to“ruin herself,” as Agili put it, through illicit sexual activity. In other words,what looks behaviorally like prostitution among the Huli is articulated bywomen themselves as a kind of revenge promiscuity in retaliation forfailures by kin—particularly male kin—to accord women their proper socialvalue.

As discussed above, according to Huli constructions of female sexuality,by accepting money for sex, passenger women are seen as accepting moneyfor something that does not belong to them. They are thought to selfishlyconsume the compensation money that rightfully belongs to their kin. Infact, many Huli contemptuously refer to payments for sex as a woman“eating her own bridewealth” or, more viscerally, “eating her own vagina.”The latter phrase is analogous to one that Huli parents use to chastiseyoung children who refuse to share or who do not adequately expressgratitude for gifts of food from others: they are told that if they do notlearn to exchange with others they will grow up to “eat their own shit.”



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To eat one’s own shit—as dogs and pigs are seen to do—is to be less thanhuman, as well as disgusting. One becomes fully human by cultivatingexchange relationships and by refraining from selfish consumption. Thus,not only is a passenger woman’s “sex work” a kind of theft, it is also aform of grotesque self-interest.

Many passenger women themselves agree, in fact, that what they aredoing is a kind of “theft”—indeed, it is exactly this logic that motivatesthem—but from their perspective it is a righteous theft. Indeed, two ofthe young women described above stated that they became passengerwomen specifically so their fathers would not receive bridewealth for them.Their explicit desire was to disrupt the flow of wealth and properly con-tained sexual unions. In their eyes, their kin have forfeited their “own-ership” of women’s sexuality by engaging in acts as selfish as—if not moreselfish than—passenger women’s exchange of sex for money.

Earlier in this article I asserted that it was emotion, not economics,that motivated passenger women. By this I meant to emphasize that it isnot rural poverty that drives Huli passenger women to sell sex (at leastnot yet) but anger at male kin. However, it is somewhat disingenuous onmy part to suggest that emotion and economics can be so easily disen-tangled. Indeed, it is the changing economic context that is shaping thesituations that elicit women’s wrath. As the Papua New Guinea economybecomes increasingly monetized, bridewealth has become a means forjobless men to gain access to cash. Increasingly, men ask that a greaterportion of bridewealth consist of cash instead of pigs. The bridewealthtransaction is, to some extent, becoming commoditized; women recognizethis, and when particular trigger incidents expose the contradictions inbridewealth as it is currently practiced, some of them decide to repudiatethe system altogether. Moreover, Huli passenger women can be seen asreacting to men’s own incipient individualism. As men increasingly selltheir labor to mines and other distant companies, their identities becomeless embedded in clan interests and obligations. Prestigious modes ofmodern masculinity reinforce this shift in identification. Women experi-ence this incipient individualism as a lack of clan support and solidarity,and some women—in response to trigger events such as those discussedabove—respond with a parallel form of agency: appropriating their sex-uality as an individual capacity rather than as a resource for the clan.

ConclusionIn a sense, then, passenger women are refusing to participate in the “traf-ficking of women” as Gayle Rubin first theorized it—that is, the exchange



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of women that occurs through the reproduction of kinship systems. Inher article, “The Traffic in Women: Notes on the ‘Political Economy’ ofSex” (1975), Rubin argued that gender is a product of kinship systems:in order to guarantee the reproduction and continuity of kinship systems,individuals must be made male and female. More specifically, female gen-der must result in individuals who are psychologically willing to be ex-changed. Thus, Rubin concluded that “we are not only oppressed aswomen, we are oppressed by having to be women” (1975, 204). In aninterview with Judith Butler, Rubin suggested that “it might be possibleto get beyond gender identity if one could do something like overthrowkinship” (1997, 72), and in a sense, that is exactly what passenger womenare trying to do in fragmented and atomistic ways. They are taking aimat their kin—particularly their male kin—precisely where women can hurtthem most: through disrupting the kinship-based trafficking in womenby abandoning or refusing marriage, appropriating their own sexuality,selling it, and keeping the resources acquired for themselves.

Of course, it is important to bear in mind that, in a sense, passengerwomen are exchanging one form of “trafficking” for another. In theirattempts to evade or undermine the trafficking of women through bride-wealth and marriage, they may eventually find themselves caught in thetrafficking of women through monetized sexual exchanges. Moreover,passenger women suffer for the choices they make. They are stigmatizedby their communities, often repudiated by their natal families, attackedby other women who suspect them of having sex with their husbands,and sometimes become prey to gang rape and murder by men who resentthe fact that passenger women claim what Gail Pheterson (1993) has called“the right of refusal”—that is, the right to reject a potential sexual partnerfor any reason.

We are left, however, with the question of whether pasinja meri shouldbe considered “prostitutes” or “sex workers,” or whether their practices,motivations, and cultural logics are sufficiently distinct to make these termsand concepts too awkward a fit. The possibility that passenger women arenot prostitutes or sex workers—despite exchanging sex for money—raisesa number of questions. Should we think of prostitution as a monolithiccategory, and can the term sex work be applied to every case that involvesthe exchange of sex for money? Are the structural forces that positionwomen as sellers of sex so universal that local histories and meanings ofsexuality diminish in importance? The globalization of terminology likesex work is potentially problematic because it assumes particular kinds ofsubject positions, motivations, and gendered identifications that may notbe accurate for all women who exchange sex for money. The globalization



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of these terms has been instrumental in organizing sex workers inter-nationally around the issues of labor conditions, decriminalization, andstigma, enabling women to transcend contextual differences as they uniteunder the banner of work. However, this globalization also has thepotential to exclude other meanings that the exchange of sex for moneymight have in other cultural contexts.

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