Caught Between Structure and Agency: The Gender of Violence and Prostitution in Papua New Guinea

Abstract

Luise White's (1991) framework for studying prostitution empirically, in terms of its "labor forms," uncovers the structure and function of "sex industries." In this essay I describe and analyze four such labor forms based upon fieldwork conducted during 1990-92 on Dam island, capital of Papua New Guinea's Western Province. Those forms are: 1) family, 2) freelance, 3) sex broker, and 4) outdoor bush. Amidst these different forms of sexual networking, including marriage, women are caught between their opportunities to act agentially and the structures of domination that impinge upon them — patriarchy, capital, heterosexuality, and the state. Using what Allen Feldman calls "zones of terror" to develop an ethnography of violence, and to sharpen our sense of anthropological praxis, 1 clarify the difference between gender violence and gendered violence. Gender violence consists of social, economic, political, and cultural double standards that are multiplying in form and intensity through Papua New Guinea. Gendered violence, or sexually embodied violence wrought through genitalia, is likewise multiplying and becoming eroticized. I conclude that anthropological praxis requires not only doing "good enough" ethnography but situating violence in an expanded, reflexive field that includes ethnographers.

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