Exploitation or appreciation? Intimate patronage and the moral grammar of sexual-economic exchanges between young curtidoras and older European expat men in Maputo, Mozambique

In this article, I explore a particular category of young women within local systems of exchange as well as within a transnational urban landscape of intimate transactions. What curtidoras in Maputo elucidate and what anthropologists perhaps have not sufficiently understood about transactional sex is the power of female eroticism and how this power connects to kinship, gender dynamics, and moralities of exchange. Drawing on postcolonial feminist scholarship, I extend existing frameworks of analysis by addressing how curtidoras’ sexual–economic exchanges with men are never fully divorced from moral obligations toward their female kin as well as characterized by diverging and converging moral economies in the intimate encounter between the younger women and older European men