Paper short abstract:

Through interviews, I explore a hidden ‘marketplace of intimacy’ occurring in city public spaces. Despite Africa’s ‘crisis’ of marriage, low-wage human labor continues to be reproduced for the neoliberal African city, catalyzed by this ‘marketplace’. I examine its underlying practices and logics.

Paper long abstract:

With decreasing rates of marriage in Sub-Saharan Africa, low-wage workers for Africa’s cities continue to be birthed and raised - now by single mothers. This is catalyzed by what I call a heterosexual ‘marketplace of intimacy’: not a physical place but a field of activity based on monetary transaction and closeness-seeking that encompasses all public spaces of the city. People enter and exit this marketplace at different points depending on their needs and desires, but the entire field of activity gives rise to those sexual networks in which HIV/AIDS researchers are particularly interested. Using interviews conducted 2010–2020 with the residents of one low-income neighborhood, I examine how chronically poor men and women experience this marketplace and urban social reproduction in ethnically heterogeneous Dar es Salaam. Men compete with other men for the intimacy they desire and need, whereas women compete with other women for monetary ‘help’ and a sense of social worth. By seeing neoliberal heterosexuality as a field of activity rather than individual desire or particular sex acts, the analytic focus shifts to the local logics that structure its complex negotiations and outcomes (marriage, short-term relationships, sex work, HIV and pregnancies for which many fathers cannot afford to provide). The children of single mothers in Dar es Salaam ensure the continued pool of flexible labour needed by cities to function efficiently and keep urban living costs down. I examine the signaling, bargaining and mobile phone practices that create this marketplace of intimacy.