Learning from women who trade sex in Kenya about the antiblackness of Global Health

Brianna Simmons and Jennifer L. Syvertsen

Social Science & Medicine, 2022, vol. 313, issue C

Abstract: Sex work and violence have become co-constituted, routinized, and even sanitized in Global Health journals dispassionately advocating for intervention. This paper situates ethnographically shared experiences of Kenyan sex working women within the global condition of antiblackness. By grounding our conceptual analytic in Black Feminist scholarship, we illustrate how antiblackness subtends the conditions of possibility for women's entry into sex work, their subsequent experiences with interpersonal and institutional forms of predatory violence, and lack of recourse for their material needs and suffering. This analysis requires a meditation on the relationships between the types of violence conditioning Kenyan women's lives and the limitations of Global Health's conceptual logics and disciplinary practice. Our discussion reflects on the ways Global Health practice can neglect conceptual foundations in antiblackness, thus complicit in upholding violence against the very groups it purports to assist. In charging Global Health “as usual” as methodologically violent and sustaining global antiblackness, we call for disciplinary transformations beginning from a shared consciousness regarding the ways global antiblackness structures health inequities. Beyond critique, our meditation is an invitation for all committed to dignified Global Health to contribute creative, non-hierarchically collaborative work engaged with those in material, structural, and immaterial need.

Keywords: Violence; Sex work; Insurgent agency; Antiblackness; Global Health (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2022
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Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:eee:socmed:v:313:y:2022:i:c:s0277953622005524

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DOI: 10.1016/j.socscimed.2022.115246

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