Why do some women choose to perform sex work, how do they pursue their goals within the context of the commercial sex industries, and how are these choices shaped by the socioeconomic and gender structures in which they find themselves? In Selling Sex in Kenya, Eglė Česnulytė traces the multiple ways that the adoption of neoliberal policies and the embrace of neoliberal ideology have shaped the opportunities available to women and men in the Global South broadly and the choices of women in Kenya’s sex industries specifically.

In so doing, Česnulytė emphasizes the value of looking for evidence of the general in the particular, as she focuses on the lived experiences and perspectives of female sex workers in the Kenyan port city of Mombasa. Commercial sex work bridges productive and reproductive forms of labor, a divide many women must navigate, and it is situated in the informal sector to which many women have been relegated. Thus, an exploration of commercial sex helps Česnulytė tell a larger story about the challenges that women face and the strategies they employ in gendered and socioeconomically unequal societies. She also does the important work of centering marginalized women in the frame, helping balance out the implicit and sometimes explicit concern with the privileged Global North and the inattention to gender dynamics that she argues pervades political economy scholarship.

Česnulytė’s particular interest is in the array of gendered consequences associated with ostensibly gender-neutral neoliberal discourse and its implementation. She argues that neoliberal policies like privatization and deregulation mine existing social and economic inequalities, including gender inequality, for profit, and that they have complex impacts on women’s lives. Although some (privileged) women gain new opportunities to participate in the (formal) labor force as a result of neoliberal reforms, and some also internalize neoliberal ideology in ways that help them pursue profit and improve their position in society, many women are further marginalized by policies that strip away their traditional safety nets and leave them in a position of “gendered precarity” (p. 32). In response, women relegated to the informal sphere within patriarchal systems often find that their well-being depends on performing one of a number of gender roles involving the exchange of reproductive labor for male income, such as “wife,” “mistress,” or “commercial sex worker.”

Those women who opt to pursue commercial sex work then make further choices about how to approach this work, with the recognition that their strategies affect both their short-term objectives of earning a living and caring for family and their long-term goal of achieving security by marrying or finding other well-paid work. Many implicitly recognize that in order to succeed they cannot fundamentally challenge existing neoliberal or gender structures, so they adjust their behavior and appearance to play into perceived male desires and to attempt to cross socioeconomic boundaries. Although some sex workers embrace neoliberal thinking and an entrepreneurial approach (what Česnulytė terms a “logic of accumulation”), using profits from sex work to fund higher education or provide investment capital for small businesses, many others are only able to focus on their day-to-day survival (a “logic of livelihood”) due to the precarity of their situations (p. 72). Even those who do have big dreams often find that exiting commercial sex work on one’s own terms is a difficult task because of the financial outlays required to attract better clients, the likelihood of pregnancy, the lure of alcohol and drugs, the threat of violence, and the risk of contracting HIV/AIDS.

Ultimately, Česnulytė is concerned with the interplay of structure and agency in explaining the behavior and beliefs of women who sell sex—the ways in which neoliberal policies and traditional gender norms jointly narrow the set of options available to many women, leaving them to exercise their agency by choosing among a set of unappealing alternatives. Although marginalized women in neoliberal systems do have options other than selling sex, many are drawn into the commercial sex industry because it offers the potential for higher pay and greater flexibility than other forms of low-skilled work to which women have access, even as it frequently traps these women in “survival circuits” (p. 39).

Česnulytė provides a thorough and thoughtful discussion of her research design and methods. She embraces a grounded theory approach, building theoretical insights from rich qualitative data primarily drawn from in-depth interviews with sex workers, sex worker activists, academics, and NGO and social services staff in Mombasa and in Nairobi, Kenya’s capital. Her ability to gain access to and have open conversations with women working in an illegal trade is a testament to the care with which she approached this research, first building connections through a local NGO that provides support to sex workers and then working with a research assistant who had existing ties to the sex worker community. Česnulytė built rapport with her research participants by getting to know them in social contexts and interviewing them in spaces in which they felt comfortable, and she took an open-ended approach that allowed her interviewees to tell their stories in their own words. Crucially, Česnulytė also details how she navigated ethical questions associated with interviewing research participants who were engaged in illegal activities and who were members of vulnerable populations. Yet the book would have benefited from similar attention to the particular ethical considerations associated with interviewing research participants who experienced trauma while performing sex work and in their prior lives—in particular, from a discussion of the particular strategies Česnulytė used to minimize the chances that conversations about past trauma might retraumatize her interviewees.

The richness of Česnulytė’s interview data is nonetheless impressive, though she does make something of an analytical leap when interpreting it. Although she argues that Kenya’s embrace of neoliberal policy and ideology constrains women’s choices, thereby pushing them to seek out sex work and shaping their strategies as sex workers, her interviewees certainly do not discuss neoliberalism and its consequences explicitly. Instead, they focus more generally on poverty, a lack of education, and family conflict as drivers of their income-generating strategies, and it is Česnulytė who links these proximate factors to an ultimate neoliberal source. Although it is not surprising that neoliberalism is not a buzzword for Česnulytė’s interviewees, she would be better positioned to link their words to this concept if she could leverage some source of variation in the embrace of neoliberalism; that is, if we could see that women’s choices and strategies changed after the introduction of neoliberal policy and discourse or that women’s choices and strategies were different in a country that had not been as influenced by neoliberalism as Kenya. As it stands, without variation in the key independent variable, and without her interviewees drawing the causal link themselves and attributing their actions to neoliberalism, this broader theoretical argument becomes a harder sell.

Nonetheless, Česnulytė does tell a persuasive story from sex workers’ perspective about the constrained circumstances many women in the Global South face as a consequence of socioeconomic and gender inequality and about the choices they make within those circumstances to try to better their own lives and the lives of their families. As such, the book should be of great interest to political economy, development, and gender politics scholars.