Az ELTE Társadalomtudományi Kutatóközpont (MTA Kiváló Kutatóhely) 
Szociológiai Kutatóintézete 
tisztelettel meghívja 178. Jour Fixe eseményére:

  “I Started This on My Own So I Wouldn’t Have to Depend on Anyone Else”: Unwriting Exploitation and Care in the Prostitution Industry through Ethnographic Engagement in Northern Hungary

 

Előadók: Dés Fanni, Durst Judit  (ELTE TK KI)

Hozzászólók: Katona Noémi, Virág Tünde

Időpont: 2026. szeptember 10. csütörtök 13:00

Helyszín: Az eseményt hibrid formában tartjuk meg. 
Személyesen: Szociológiai Intézet 1097 Budapest Tóth Kálmán utca 4.;  B.1.15

Online: Zoom link: 

HAMAROSAN

 

Absztrakt 

This article examines how exploitative relationships between madams and women involved in prostitution are understood and legitimised through idioms of care, kinship, and reciprocity in Northern Hungary. Drawing on long-term ethnographic fieldwork in one of Hungary's most economically deprived regions, including participant observation, interviews with seventeen madams and four women working under their control, and a longitudinal case study, the article explores how exploitation is embedded in everyday practices of care and dependency. Rather than treating care and exploitation as opposing forces, it argues that under conditions of structural marginalisation they become mutually constitutive. Building on scholarship on moral economy (Scott 1976; Carrier 2018; Karandinos et al. 2014), dependency (Ferguson 2013; Martin & Yanagisako 2020), and patron–client relations (Auyero & Benzecry 2017), the article shows that madams occupy brokerage positions through which they mediate access to housing, food, protection, childcare, income, and clients. These services are exchanged for women's sexual labour and are experienced simultaneously as care, obligation, and economic transaction. The language of fictive kinship—describing madams as "mothers" and women as their "daughters"—does not mitigate exploitation but constitutes the moral framework through which profoundly unequal relationships become meaningful and legitimate for those involved.

The article contributes to criminological debates on prostitution and exploitation by demonstrating that coercion cannot be understood solely through violence or legal categories of trafficking. Instead, exploitation is reproduced through locally embedded relations of dependency that emerge under conditions of welfare retrenchment, labour market exclusion, racialised poverty, and gender inequality in semi-peripheral Hungary (Sassen 2002; Böröcz 2009; Dés 2024). By foregrounding participants' own interpretations of these relationships, the article argues that care itself may become one of the principal mechanisms through which exploitation is organised and sustained.