Your pocket is what cures you: the politics of health in Senegal

Abstract

significant phenomenon that these women seem to suffer comparatively little abuse and violence (136–138) is only discussed very briefly (the author does take this theme up in other publications), while the story of a fight between seamen a few pages later (147–150) receives twice the space. Even HIV/AIDS is only really discussed through the lens of risk management, as a virus rather than a societal problem. The lack of a nuanced interpretation of these women’s lives and decision making, one that goes beyond the rules of the game, is illustrated by passages which seemingly reduce the decision to enter the profession to the experience of getting easy money from their first client (190), or which assume that older sex workers failed to get out because they “seem to lack the imagination or skills necessary for leaving the business” (194). Conscious of the wealth of fascinating ethnographic material that the author collected, this reviewer was mostly struck by the missed opportunities. This work could have been much more than a book about the game, but Trotter seems unwilling to look beyond the nightclubs. It presumably is not easy to write about a charged topic like prostitution, but there are some shining examples of how to discuss transactional sex while doing justice to the complexity of these women’s lives. Strikingly, he does not refer to Mark Hunter’s excellent work on the intimate connections between political economy, gender, and sexuality, or to Luise White’s The Comforts of Home (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991). These authors make connections between the wider political economic context and transactional sex (whether it is prostitution or the exchange of resources between boyfriends and girlfriends) central to their analysis. In Sugar Girls & Seamen, on the other hand, we only see glimpses of this context, which are consistently underexplored. It is telling that Trotter discusses prostitution in the context of a dockside game, where White treats it as labour. Of course, the author wants to reach the general reader, as opposed to Hunter or White. Accessibility is a laudable goal, but this bookmakes onewonder towhat endwewant to reach a wider audience. Its readers may have been entertained, but one would like to think that it is possible to reach an interested audience without reducing sex workers, who undoubtedly have very complex and remarkable lives, to players of a sexual game and vehicles for juicy stories. If we cannot do that, these workers may simply provide one more form of amusement for the readers. Surely, that is not the purpose of reaching a bigger audience.