Georg-Paul Meiu - Death and the Debris of Desire in Kenya’s Sex Economies

Lecture abstract

Death and the Debris of Desire in Kenya’s Sex Economies
Over the past two decades, at the Kenyan coast, upcountry migrants have struggled with bodies which, upon their death, interrupt their funeral journeys upcountry for burial. Known locally, as “the dead who refuse” (marehemu anaekataa) these are mostly persons who, dying before having acquired the means of respectability, cause the cars transporting their bodies to break down or crash. Funeral attendants interpret these occurrences as an expression of the dead’s excess desire for respectability, manifesting as a determination to remain at the coast to pursue its means. Sex workers, at whose funerals such incidents have been common, deploy a ritual called kuongelesha, through which they address the disobedient body and seek to contain its excess desire. Ritual efforts towards a similar end also occur now, for example, in the distinct funerals of motorbike cab drivers (bodaboda). And the idea that excess desire can linger in the aftermath of particular deaths is also quite common among coastal urban residents. 

In this paper, I explore how sex economies based on intimate mobilities generate what I call “debris of desire”: a certain material excess left in the aftermath of particular couplings of sex and commodity, a remnant that drives mobility, fantasy, and desire in sex economies. Such remnants of desire most commonly manifest through media of mobility (cars, motorbikes, wheals) or tokes of inheritance (houses, land, objects) and produce vast efforts to realign body and desire, personal failures and collective futures. The dead who refuse, I argue, both confront contradictions of desire and express their violent implications for a political economic context in which sexuality, commodity, and social reproduction have come to intersect in striking new ways. 

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