Canova, Paola. Frontier Intimacies: Ayoreo Women and the Sexual Economy of the Paraguayan Chaco. Austin: University of Texas Press, 2020.

By N. H. Gill
October 2020

Paola Canova explores the impacts of development in Paraguay’s Chaco region through the lens of curajodie, a practice among Ayoreo people in which single women exchange sex for money or goods with non-Ayoreo men. Canova argues that curajodie, which emerged after the Ayoreo people made contact with the Paraguayan state in the 1960s, exposes the ways in which global capitalism is reinterpreted in frontier societies as different communities engage with economic “development” on their own terms.