Embodiment and Abjection

Abstract

Research into human trafficking for sexual exploitation often conceptualises the experience through the lens of migration and/or sex work. Women's bodies are often politicised and the corporeal experiences of trafficking are neglected. The gendered stigma attached to women who have been trafficked for sexual exploitation is clearly evident across cultures and requires further analysis as part of wider societal responses to sexual violence.Through the analysis of letters written by women who have been trafficked and sexually exploited from post-Soviet countries to Israel, this article argues that conceptualising women's bodies as bounded spaces allows an investigation of the transgression of those boundaries and opens up a thought-provoking framework for theorizing experiences of, and social responses to, sexual violence, stigma and social exclusion. It explores themes of pollution and dirt as ways to communicate social exclusion through references to boundaries crossed and spaces rendered abject.Utilizing the theory of abjection, women's narratives of trafficking are examined and the embodied effects of sexual violence and body boundary transgression are elucidated. This analysis shows that the women in this study articulate an embodied narrative of trafficking that is experience in relation to body boundaries and expressed through motifs of dirt, smell, disgust and pollution.