Wayward Women
Written with uncommon grace and clarity, this extremely engaging ethnography analyzes female agency, gendered violence, and transactional sex in contemporary Papua New Guinea. Focusing on Huli "passenger women," (women who accept money for sex) Wayward Women explores the socio-economic factors that push women into the practice of transactional sex, and asks how these transactions might be an expression of resistance, or even revenge. Challenging conventional understandings of "prostitution" and "sex work," Holly Wardlow contextualizes the actions and intentions of passenger women in a rich analysis of kinship, bridewealth, marriage, and exchange, revealing the ways in which these robust social institutions are transformed by an encompassing capitalist economy. Many passenger women assert that they have been treated "olsem maket" (like market goods) by their husbands and natal kin, and they respond by fleeing home and defiantly appropriating their sexuality for their own purposes. Experiences of rape, violence, and the failure of kin to redress such wrongs figure prominently in their own stories about becoming "wayward." Drawing on village court cases, hospital records, and women's own raw, caustic , and darkly funny narratives, Wayward Women provides a riveting portrait of the way modernity engages with gender to produce new and contested subjectivities.
297 pages, 7 editions
English edition · First published 2006 by University of California Press · ISBN 9781282771901
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Editions
7 editions
English
- Wayward women · University of California Press · 2006 · ISBN 9781282771901 This page
- Wayward Women: Sexuality and Agency in a New Guinea Society · University of California Press · 2006 · ISBN 9780520938977
- Wayward Women: Sexuality and Agency in a New Guinea Society · University of California Press · 2006 · ISBN 9786612771903
- Wayward Women: Sexuality and Agency in a New Guinea Society · University of California Press · 2006 · ISBN 9780520245600
- Wayward Women: Sexuality and Agency in a New Guinea Society · University of California Press · 2006 · ISBN 9781598759433
- Wayward Women: Sexuality and Agency in a New Guinea Society · University of California Press · 2006 · ISBN 9781423755524
- Wayward Women: Sexuality and Agency in a New Guinea Society · University of California Press · 2006 · ISBN 9780520245594
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