Sex, social reproduction, and mobile telephony as responses to precarity in urban Tanzania

The gendered effects of neoliberal economic restructuring around the world are usually studied in their most dramatic forms: cross-border migration, exploitation, resistance, and violence. This chapter examines significant transformations arising from economic restructuring in the nexus between gender, labour, and urban space — transformations in which mobile technologies are deeply implicated. It explores how mobile phones are used by the poor for day-to-day survival in Tanzania’s largest city. The chapter shows how gendered economic bargains are negotiated at the very bottom of a survival economy located within the dynamics of a globalized economic system. An important characteristic of mobile telephony in Tanzania is its broad and efficient network of mobile money services. Mobile telephony alters the experiential effect of distance in a densely populated city with insufficient transportation infrastructure. Prior to sexual intimacy, mobile telephony and m-money provide the physical and temporal distances between the participants needed to help women evaluate their potential sexual partners through conversation.