Money talks?: Secrecy and money management in the family affective bonds of women who perform sex commerce in Argentina

Abstract

Family, even with its historical transformations, has been in charge of controlling and administering domesticity, sexualities, and finances, making family bonds a key dimension to consider in the discourses of women who engage in sex commerce. This chapter utilizes the tension stemming from secrecy and its links with money, gender, and kinship to analyze sex workers' family and affective relationships focusing on its micropolitical dimensions. Through the lens of secrecy, the chapter approaches different dimensions of affective bonds: ties with family and friends, the role of money, relationships within a couple, and vis-à-vis children. Money, an issue as intimate as sexuality, is the main means of filtering and silently translating that aspect of the women’s sexualities that the family cannot bear to speak about. Secretion expresses the tension between the positive valuation of monetary “ayudas” that women provide to their families and the silence about the origin of that money, which is “dirty” and difficult to (re)count.