Title: Indebted Sisterhood: Sex Work and Social Reproduction Across Kenya, Vietnam, and China

Abstract:  The heightened China’s presence in Kenya has provoked rampant rumors around Chinese women working in local brothels or Vietnamese women being trafficked to Chinese sham entertainment business. While the rumors demonstrate growing public attention to gendered labor in connection to Chinas One Belt and Road Initiative (BRI), they also reveal lack of reliable information about immigrant life of Chinese and Vietnamese female sex workers (VCFSWs) in Kenya. Hence, VCFSWs more likely suffer from police arrest, immigration scrutiny, and even Uber driversviolence. Drawing on fieldwork of six Chinese hostessing nightclubs in Nairobi, Kenya, this talk focuses on VCFSWs’ interpersonal relationships with their employer and sex worker “sisters”. Although the international anti-trafficking campaigns and Kenyan authorities stereotype VCFSWs as trafficked victims or indentured labor, this talk highlights debt embedded in culturally-mediated emotional ties and social reproduction that disrupts popular belief of non-Western migrant sex workers as temporary, and forced labor.

Xinlei Sha is PhD candidate in Anthropology at Cornell University whose research examines the circulation of intimate labor and relations alongside Chinese business and immigration in Kenya. This research was supported by the Wenner Gren, Social Science Research Council, East Asian Program, and among others.