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Paper short abstract

Our paper examines dependent and exploitative relations between madams and women selling sex in the prostitution industry in Hungary. We examine how these exploitative relationships are morally framed and locally legitimised through idioms of care, kinship, friendship, and female solidarity.

Paper long abstract

Our paper examines dependent and exploitative relations between madams and women selling sex in the prostitution industry in Northern Hungary, drawing on long-term ethnographic fieldwork in a semi-peripheral region. In such contexts, households are often compelled to develop alternative livelihood strategies (Sassen 2002), rendering involvement in prostitution a constrained strategy of survival despite its exploitative and frequently violent conditions (Dés 2024). Madams operate as female intermediaries within the informal economy of prostitution, structuring access to income for marginalised women while simultaneously exercising control over their labour, mobility, and earnings (Guha 2024). The paper examines local interpretations of the relationships between madams and women selling sex. We examine how these relationships are morally framed and locally legitimised through idioms of care, kinship, friendship, and female solidarity. These moral narratives form part of a local moral economy (Karandinos et al. 2014) through which exploitation is rendered intelligible, tolerable, and at times preferable to alternative forms of dependency, particularly in contrast to male traffickers and violent clients. A central argument of the paper is that madams’ capacity to occupy shifting and ambivalent roles within these relations is not incidental but structurally gendered. By following one case in depth, we demonstrate that the madam’s role is not fixed but situational, shifting between care, control, and coercion depending on relational and structural conditions. This gendered positioning distinguishes madams from male traffickers and helps explain both the moral legitimacy they may hold within local communities and the instability of their authority.