2017 Berkshire Conference on the History of Women, Genders and Sexualities

June 01 - 04, 2017

In 1991 Louis White’s groundbreaking book, The Comforts of Home: Prostitution in Colonial Nairobi, was awarded the Herskovits Prize for the best scholarly work in African Studies. At the time of its publication Comforts of Home was lauded for opening up an entirely new prism for understanding African life in Nairobi by bringing together social history, gender and sexuality studies, urban studies, and economic history. Over the last 25 years there has been an explosion of Africanist scholarship that has both expanded our understanding of prostitution and moved well beyond it as a lens for understanding economies of sexuality and allied concerns in Africa. The work of the three presenters on this panel, Rachel Jean-Baptiste, Iris Berger, and Emily Callaci, powerfully exemplifies the kind of scholarship that Comforts of Home hailed in its wake. Their contributions will take up the methodological, historiographical, and conceptual contributions that Comforts of Home has made to a variety of subfields within African history, while also exploring how it has beckoned a new generation of scholars to ask different questions about the place, meaning, and modalities of sexuality in African life.