This thesis was aimed at exploring and understanding the experiences, attitudes and perceptions of gender, sexuality, race, and victimisation in male sex workers' interactions with sex tourists in Botswana. The sex work and sex tourism linkage is very complex, especially in the African context, where it is entangled in a web of denial of its existence, religious disapproval, and political views fuelled against it. Reference is made to local dynamics throughout the thesis, in order, to understand how these cross-national interactions influence how male sex work is practised and perceived in Botswana. Over the past decade, the tourism industry has been one of the fastest growing and largest economic sectors in Africa. Studies in other contexts confirm a strong correlation between growth in the tourism industry and an increase in sex work. While there are theoretically sound and empirically informed studies on the many forms of sex work, especially in Asia and other parts of the world, as well as studies focused on female sex work in the tourism industry, male sex work is still underresearched, and especially its occurrence in the tourism industry in Africa. In-depth face-to-face interviews were conducted with male sex workers. Support groups and the police were also interviewed as important players given the existence of sex work in a semi-criminalised and fuzzy legal system in Botswana. From the analysis of interview data, it was evident that partial criminalisation of sex work and the wide stigmatisation of homosexuality had pushed male sex workers underground. They operate within organised networks, with the aid of technology and friends, which the police interviews also noted as a barrier to enforcing the laws, in addition to a lack of clarity in the laws. Motives and benefits of sex work were outlined to include making money to fulfil the provider role, sponsored travel, accommodation support, alcohol, fine dining, as well as exploring one's sexuality. The preference of sex tourist over local clients emanates from the need to conceal their activity, protect their identities and reaffirm their masculinities given the local dynamics in Botswana's context. Given health risks MSWs encounter, support groups were more focused on the accessibility of health facilities, having their own clinic within their various premises funded by USAID to offer sexual health services. This thesis argues that there are a lot of issues interwoven into the transactional relations between male sex workers and foreigners/tourists, including blurred lines between same-sex and heterosexual identities, blurred lines between love/attachment/affection and sex work, the Othering of clients’ ethnicities, traumatic childhood experiences and the influences of family, race, and religion. All these occur against local dynamics of socio-cultural expectations, economic struggles, and the legal positioning of men in society. Male sex workers in Botswana can, therefore, be viewed as 'situational entrepreneurs' engaging in 'strategic escapes, returns, strategic borrowings and rejections' to manage such, a framework proposed by this thesis. This study achieved its main objective to discover and enhance understanding of male sex work in the context of Botswana, especially those servicing sex tourists.

Keywords: Discourse, Intersectionality, Male Sex Work, Masculinity, Same Sex, Sex Tourism, Sex Tourist.​​​​​​​

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