Vulnerability in Domestic Discourses on Trafficking: Lessons from the Indian Experience

In recent years, rather than addressing the needs of sex workers themselves or of trafficked persons, international anti-trafficking law has been mobilised towards an ideological end, namely the abolition of sex work. The vulnerability of ??third world?? female sex workers in particular has provided a potent image for justifying state intervention backed by the full force of the criminal law. Moral legitimacy has been afforded to this by a radical feminist discourse which views sex workers as nothing but hapless victims. Drawing on the work of Martha Fineman and legal realists like Robert Hale, this article redeploys vulnerability in trafficking debates to depart from its narrative of victimhood and to offer a renewed critique of liberal legalism, which has in the trafficking context been characterised by legal strategies of criminalisation and the attendant rescue and rehabilitation of trafficked persons. Specifically, it examines how three Indian social legislations regulating bonded labour, contract labour and inter-state migrant labour, and targeted at the domestic trafficking of men, conceptualise vulnerability in substantially different ways when compared to the 2000 Palermo Protocol on Trafficking (at least as it has been enforced to date). To the extent that these Indian laws construe the vulnerability of labour as systemic, trafficking is understood as a problem of labour migration to be addressed primarily by labour law. As such, this view of vulnerability, I argue, not only helps to de-exceptionalise trafficking as always equivalent to the trafficking of women for sex work, and therefore sex work, but also to substantively address the vulnerability of both male and female workers in other labour markets.     

Ouch! Western Feminists' ‘Wounded Attachment’ to the ‘Third World Prostitute’

‘Trafficking in women’ has, in recent years, been the subject of intense feminist debate. This article analyses the position of the Coalition Against Trafficking in Women (CATW) and the writings of its founder, Kathleen Barry. It suggests that CATW's construction of ‘third world prostitutes’ is part of a wider western feminist impulse to construct a damaged ‘other’ as justification for its own interventionist impulses. The central argument of this article is that the ‘injured body’ of the ‘third world trafficking victim’ in international feminist debates around trafficking in women serves as a powerful metaphor for advancing certain feminist interests, which cannot be assumed to be those of third world sex workers themselves. This argument is advanced through a comparison of Victorian feminist campaigns against prostitution in India with contemporary feminist campaigns against trafficking.The term ‘injured identity’ is drawn from Wendy Brown's (1995) States of Injury, Power and Freedom in Late Modernity. Brown argues that certain groups have con.gured their claims to inclusion in the liberal state in terms of ‘historical ‘injuries’. Antoinette Burton (1998) extends Brown's analysis to look at Victorian feminists’ relationship to Empire, arguing that the ‘injured identities’ of colonial ‘others’ were central to feminist efforts to mark out their own role in Empire. This paper builds on Burton's analysis, asking what role the ‘injured identities’ of third world sex workers play in the construction of certain contemporary feminist identities. The notion of ‘injured identities’ offers a provocative way to begin to examine how CATW feminists position the ‘traficking victim’ in their discourse. If ‘injured identity’ is a constituent element of late modern subject formation, this may help explain why CATW and Barry rely so heavily on the ‘suffering’ of ‘third world traficking victims’ in their discourses of women's subjugation. It also raises questions about the possible repressive consequences of CATW's efforts to combat ‘traficking in women’ through ‘protective’ legislation.     

Beyond Liberalism: Marxist Feminism,Migrant Sex Work,and Labour Unfreedom

In this article, I use a Marxist feminist methodology to map the organisation of migrant sex workers’ socially reproductive paid and unpaid labour in one city and country of arrival, London, UK. I argue that unfree and ‘free’ (sexual) labour exists on a continuum of capitalist relations of (re)production, which are gendered, racialised, and legal. It is within these relations that various actors implement, and migrant sex workers contest, unfree labour practices not limited to the most extreme forms. My analysis reveals that many migrant sex workers have very limited ‘freedom’. This is in stark contrast to the classical liberal claim of sex worker rights activists and academics that the vast majority of migrant sex workers are free, and therefore not coerced, exploited or trafficked. I then consider whether the emerging labour approach to trafficking could help achieve ‘freedom’ for migrant sex workers. Advocates argue that anti-trafficking efforts must, and can, be refocused on extending minimum labour and social protections to all vulnerable workers. I argue that this approach is disconnected from material interests and history. Rather, migrant sex workers, sex worker rights activists, and all migrant and citizen workers and activists globally must collectively organise against ‘labour unfreedom’ and hence for meaningful control over their labour and lives.     

The boundaries of belonging: gender,human trafficking and embodied citizenship

A ‘victim of trafficking’ is an identity that an individual can adopt to access legal resources that would otherwise not be open to them. However, this identity contains certain implicit assumptions about that individual and their experiences. This article analyses 12 applications for a one-year visa, written by women from the former Soviet Union who were trafficked to Israel and forced to sell sex. To apply for a visa as a ‘victim of trafficking’ applicants assert certain narrative tropes to emphasise their desire to belong in Israel. These tropes obscure the complexities of their experiences by emphasising themes of naivety and innocence, a commitment to familial obligations and a lack of agency. They reject the alternative identity of a migrant sex worker and distance themselves from any implication of a desire to illegally cross national borders. When they describe their hopes for the future, they assert normative gendered desires to marry and have children. This article argues that by closely aligning themselves with gender norms, these women seek to respond to conceptualisations of individuals who transgress gender and moral norms and who pose a threat to national borders and integrity.     

Why Unfree Labour is Not ‘So-Called’: The Fictions of Jairus Banaji

In a recent critique of the deproletarianization thesis, which links the reproduction of unfree labour mainly - but not only - in Third World agriculture to class struggle prosecuted by capitalist producers, Banaji maintains in effect that there is no such thing as unfree labour. Equating the latter with nineteenth-century liberal ideas about freedom as consent, he conceptualizes all historical working arrangements simply as ‘disguised’ wage-labour that is free, a theoretically problematic claim first made during the Indian mode of production debate. Such a view, it is argued here, ignores the fact that unfree workers get paid and also appear in the labour market, but not as sellers of their own commodity. Moreover, by abolishing the free/unfree labour distinction, and adopting instead the view that all rural workers are simply ‘disguised’ hired labourers who are contractually ‘free’, Banaji aligns himself with anti-Marxist theory in general, and neoclassical economic historiography in particular.     

Prostitution Policy in Europe: A Time of Change?

There has been considerable recent debate about prostitution in Europe that reflects concerns about health, employment and human rights. Legal changes are being introduced in many countries. We focus on two examples in order to discuss the likely implications. A new law in The Netherlands is normalizing aspects of the sex industry through decriminalizing both workers and businesses. In Sweden, on the other hand, prostitution is considered to be a social problem, and a new law criminalizes the purchasers of sexual services in an attempt to reduce demand.Both reforms appear to have had their desired effect at one level; in The Netherlands, health and safety regulations will be introduced as in any other job, and EU sex workers gain full social, legal and employment rights; in Sweden there was initially a tenfold decrease in the numbers of women working visibly on the streets, and some workers have left the industry. However, in both countries, the new legislation has also driven some sex work underground. Many sex workers are excluded by the Dutch system and move underground to become effectively invisible to the authorities. In Sweden sex workers and their clients also become less visible in order that the latter can avoid sanction. Social and economic changes, such as increased migration and the growing use of the Internet will also render the sex industry less visible both to state regulation and to health care workers.The major problems of prostitution for the workers remain exploitation, stigma, abuse and criminalization. These are not unique to the industry, and can only be tackled effectively by the self-organization of sex workers into unions and rights groups, along with full decriminalization. An alternative vision is promised through self-organization and anti-racist actions by sex workers in Germany; normalization and workers’ rights are tackled alongside training programmes for those seeking alternatives. Policy makers throughout Europe would do well to look at their experience and not simply at the clash of legal reforms.     

The Australian Marriage Law Postal Survey and the Limitations of Vulnerability-based Politics

ABSTRACT

This article investigates opposition to the Australian Marriage Law Postal Survey, which surveyed Australians on their position on marriage equality from September to November 2017. Opposition to the hosting of a public vote on marriage equality was based in a perceived vulnerability of LGBTIQ Australians, with marriage equality advocates taking what Tietze (2016) described as a ‘dark view of the voting public’. While acknowledging the high levels of homophobic rhetoric that occurred during the postal survey, and the impacts that public votes can have on the mental health of LGBTIQ people, the article argues this ‘dark view’ was overstated. This article argues that opposition to the survey reinforced vulnerability within LGBTIQ Australians, promoting an increased reliance on the state for protection and recognition. Opposition ignored the democratic potential of the survey, particularly as an opportunity to further debate on LGBTIQ issues and to reduce broader societal homophobia. Despite the eventual yes vote therefore, approaches to the postal survey missed a political opportunity, likely leaving LGBTIQ Australians and the Australian queer movement in a weaker position than previously.     

To Buy or Not to Buy? Vulnerability and the Criminalisation of Commercial BDSM

This paper examines the interaction of law and policy-making on prostitution, with that of BDSM (bondage and discipline, sadism and masochism). Recent policy and legal shifts in the UK mark out prostitutes as vulnerable and in need of ??rescue??. BDSM that amounts to actual bodily harm is unlawful in the UK, and calls to decriminalise it are often met with fears that participants will be left vulnerable to abuse. Where women sell BDSM sex, even more complex questions of choice, exploitation, vulnerability, power and agency might be thought to arise. Does the combination of activities take two singular behaviours into the realm of compound harm? Are those who sell BDSM doubly vulnerable in a way that would justify criminal intervention? This paper argues that in imposing categories of vulnerability, the state engages in the heteronormative construction of risky sexual subjects who must be rehabilitated, responsiblised or punished. Through an examination of existing empirical studies on BDSM, the paper offers a feminist critique of the potential criminalisation of commercial BDSM and calls for more research on the lived experiences of those who buy and sell BDSM.     

The development and agriculture paradigms transformed: Reflections from the small-scale organic rice fields of the Philippines

This article tracks the debate about development in theory and practice, moving from the global level of the development debate to the rice fields of the Philippines. The authors offer a reframing of the development debate through the lens of ‘vulnerability’ versus ‘rootedness’ in social, environmental and economic terms. They argue that food and farming are currently at the leading edge of the development debate and of the vulnerability versus rootedness frame. They demonstrate this through their field notes from research with small-scale, rice farmers in the Philippines who have transitioned from chemical-intensive to organic production. The authors then show how their research results mesh with those of others and examine the significance of this farming ‘revolution’ for a transformation of the overall development paradigm.     

The Elephant in the Room: Heterosexuality in Critical Gender/Sexuality Studies

Gender equality workers have to perform a balancing act between feminist ideals for change and neo-liberal management trends. So-called audit discourses have gradually been introduced into Swedish universities, in line with an enterprise model. In this new context, the aim of our article is to investigate how gender equality workers at universities articulate gender equality and possibilities for change. What are their visions and strategies for achieving gender equality? This article is based on interviews with gender equality workers at three Swedish universities and explores how the legitimate gender equality worker is constructed. We found that there is a lack of visionary thinking among gender equality workers, which manifests itself in a sense that the distinction between visions and strategies has collapsed and technologies like auditing have become the vision. It seems that, whilst navigating between liberal feminist discourses and an increasingly neo-liberal setting, two positions are available for gender equality workers. The first is the “administrator”, who asks for more tools and monitoring of gender equality, in order for the work to become more efficient and legitimate. The second position, the “critical cynic”, makes scepticism and resistance to the increasing bureaucratization of gender equality work possible, but lacks alternative visions and strategies. Gender equality initiatives have thus become increasingly embedded in auditing technologies, and the possibilities for articulating alternatives or visionary ideals, beyond liberal values of anti-discrimination, seem limited.     

Sustaining Life: Rethinking Modes of Agency in Vulnerability

ABSTRACT

This article discusses ambivalence in the meaning and attribution of agency, and the role it plays in understanding vulnerability as a concept and condition that is specific to individual bodies. This involves examining agency as an embodied resource that vulnerability might draw upon when bodies endure conditions of uncertainty, detention and exile. The documenting of a partial narrative of an individual who set his body on fire provides an analytic lens through which to investigate the complexity and contextual specificities of vulnerability. The article argues that working with a single modality of agency resulting from a certain slippage between meanings of agency, political agency and resistance, might result in foreclosing alternative forms of living and sustaining lives. Agency is considered more expansively as a capacity for action that is necessarily mediated through situated capabilities, struggles and desires. The article argues for the need to analyse concepts held within a ‘grammar of vulnerability’ in order to discuss modalities of agency that capture both activities of resistance, but also other, often unseen, investments in sensory, affective and physical labours required for everyday activities in which individuals sustain their lives.     

subjects of debate: secular and sexual exceptionalism,and Muslim women in the Netherlands

This article attends to the transformation of national identity that occurs in the context of ‘the multicultural debate’ in the Netherlands, and unfolds on the terrain of Dutch (secular and sexual) exceptionalism. First, it explores the connections between two topics that are prominent in the ‘multicultural debates’ all over Europe and undergird the civilizational discourse of a post-Cold War geopolitical era: discussions about secularism on the one hand, and gender and sexual politics on the other. Through a mode of ‘secular nostalgia’, which mobilizes the understanding of the Netherlands as a place par excellence of emancipation for both women and sexual minorities, the Dutch secular arrangement is restructured in new exclusionary ways. Second, it explores how dominant discourses on the symbolic and material borders of the nation interpellate young Muslim women who often figure as the central ‘subjects of debate’. I rely on the notion of interpellation (Althusser) to explore the question of subject formation, with a particular attention to the epistemological conditions of ‘talking back’ as a subject whose constituency and agency is always already informed by the terms in which she is addressed.     

Challenging the Kerb Crawler Rehabilitation Programme

During recent years in North America and Europe many feminists have become increasingly critical of responses to street prostitution that concentrate solely on punishing women who sell sex while ignoring their male clients. In order to address this gender imbalance some feminists have advocated the enforcement and/or strengthening of kerb crawling legislation and other schemes that target men who pay for sex. During 1998–9 one initiative, which aimed to target men who pay for sex in the UK, the Kerb Crawler Rehabilitation Programme (KCRP), was piloted in Leeds, West Yorkshire. Although the KCRP received considerable media coverage there has been relatively little critical debate among feminists about this approach to working with clients of sex workers. This article draws attention to some of the opposition to the Leeds KCRP.     

When two become one: sexuality studies and critical studies of men and masculinities

Men think about sex … a lot. Is this a problem or is this a site for reformation? In this paper, we set out to think actively, deeply, about the question of sexuality, to penetrate the limits of men and masculinity studies, and to tease at a range of questions that it seems the field is not attending to for any number of reasons. When men’s studies scholars speak of sex, we often speak of rape culture, violent sex, ideas of entitlement to sex, sex workers and pornography. Many of these approaches would be framed and understood by many as ‘sex negative.’ This paper sets out to think about what a ‘sex positive’ vision of men’s studies might look like – and also to ask if a sex positive vision of the field is even possible, desirable or necessary. In this paper, we braid together sex positive feminist theory, queer theory and men’s studies to complicate the matter of sexuality, both as an actual site of the kinds of things we do, and as a site of psychic and affective possibility.     

Foreign farm workers in Ontario (Canada): Exclusionary discourse in the newsprint media

Seasonal offshore labour from Mexico and the Caribbean is a vital element in the horticulture industry of Ontario, Canada. The offshore programme run by the government regulates the recruitment of foreign workers into a seemingly feudal labour regime. It is argued here that media discourse about foreign workers plays an important role in generating public consent for this regime. An analysis of the daily newsprint media reveals several co-existing narratives, which constitute a wider public discourse about offshore labour. By portraying foreign workers as crucial for the economy, a liability to rural communities and a form of aid to the global south, this discourse legitimates existing labour practices, cultural exclusion and workers' temporary status in Canada.     

not-/unveiling as an ethical practice

The practice of Islamic veiling has over the last ten years emerged into a popular site of investigation. Different researchers have focused on the various significations of this bodily practice, both in its gendered dimensions, its identity components, its empowering potentials, as a satorial practice or as part of a broader economy of bodily practices which shape pious dispositions in accordance with the Islamic tradition. Lesser, however, has this been the case for the practice of not veiling or unveiling. If and when attention is accorded to the latter, it is often grasped as a product of integration or an effect secular governmentality, but only rarely as a bodily practice. Drawing on narratives of second generation secular and religious Maghrebi Muslims in Belgium, this paper pursues this second perspective by examining to which extent not-veiling can be understood as a technique of the self (Foucault) that is functional to shaping a liberal (Musilm) subject. While a first part of this article will unpack the ethical substance of such discursive interrogations and point to the ways in which they are intertwined with the enactment of a liberal self, the second part will examine the embodied contours of this problematization, which appeared through the labour upon one's affect and bodily dispositions that this refusal of the hijab, or the act of unveiling, implies.     

Women’s Sexuality in the South African Constitutional Court

In 2002 the constitutionality of the Sexual Offences Act, which criminalizes the behaviour of sex workers but fails to punish their clients, was at issue in the South African Constitutional Court. The majority of the Court held that the legislation does not constitute indirect discrimination on the basis of gender. The minority judgment found indirect gender discrimination, but held that the legislation did not infringe upon sex workers’ rights to dignity and privacy. This note argues that the reasoning in both the majority and minority judgments reflects and contributes to detrimental stereotypes of feminine sexuality, which, in turn, exacerbate women’s vulnerability to H.I.V. infection in South Africa.     

Identities in reconstruction: from rights of recognition to reflection in post-disaster reconstruction processes

This article examines the role of rights in both governing and shaping women’s relationship with the reconstruction process and their position in the reconstructed society. Through four years of empirical research in the post-earthquake reconstruction process in Maharashtra, India, this article focuses upon how women’s rights in social reconstruction are contingent upon processes of recognition. From the United Nations to local women’s organising, the article considers how women’s rights to “determine the pattern of their lives and the future of society” (United Nations Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination Against Women (C.E.D.A.W.). General Recommendation No. 23 (1997), Article 7, para. 9.) are dependent upon processes of recognition. Through a critique of cultural, material and spatial acts and frameworks of recognition within the U.N., World Bank, State Government, public interest litigation, personal and nonformal law, rights are seen to actively and hierarchically construct either a modern, liberal subject or a religious, communitarian subject, which both either deny or prescribe agency. The experience of women’s organising reveals the possibility of reconstructing a feminist rights strategy of reflection.     

主体性缺失与工具理性选择：社会工作介入工业园区职工服务的角色困境与策略研究

目前，我国处于经济社会转型上升期，职工处于“强资本、弱劳动”的社会环境中，社会工作 参与职工服务成为政府和企业力量的有力补充，经过 20 余年探索，企业社会工作已经形成稳定的服务模式。在 此背景下，本研究以实证调查素材为案例，分别对园区社工服务过程中所承担的支持者、服务提供者、政策影响者、 资源整合者和赋能者的角色困境进行分析和探讨。研究发现，在低社会认知、过多的行政干预和制度缺位下， 园区社工逐渐丧失服务的主体性并趋向于工具理性选择。研究建议，需从服务的信任根基搭建、主体性释放、 制度保障建设和组织能力提升 4 个方面帮助一线社工走出角色困境，向服务的专业化和权威性发展。     

Abusing Vulnerability? Contemporary Law and Policy Responses to Sex Work in the UK

There has been an exponential rise in use of the term vulnerability across a number of political and policy arenas, including child protection, sexual offences, poverty, development, care for the elderly, patient autonomy, globalisation, war, public health and ecology. Yet despite its increasing deployment, the exact meaning and parameters of this concept remain somewhat elusive. In this article, we explore the interaction of two very different strategies??one in which vulnerability is relied upon by those seeking improved social justice as a mechanism by which to identify, problematise and compel state responses to a universal condition of precarious dependency, and the other in which it is used as a category of neo-liberal governance which legitimates state encroachment whilst constructing ??vulnerable?? individuals as ??risk-managers?? who must behave ??responsibly?? in the face of disadvantage. We suggest that the co-existence of these divergent approaches highlights the fluidity and malleability of the concept of vulnerability. Using sex work as a specific case study, we explore the ways in which vulnerability bears multiple meanings, and has been used in recent times in the furtherance of moralistic and regressive agendas, which collude with, rather than challenge, state power. Without seeking to reject the label or normative import of vulnerability, we call, therefore, for a more circumspect approach to its usage, and a more critical evaluation of recent claims which hail it as a mechanism, preferable to the conventional use of equality paradigms, by which to secure progressive feminist outcomes.