Militarized Humanitarianism Meets Carceral Feminism: The Politics of Sex, Rights, and Freedom in Contemporary Antitrafficking Campaigns

Abstract

Over the past decade, abolitionist feminist and evangelical Christian activists have directed increasing attention toward the “traffic in women” as a dangerous manifestation of global gender inequalities. Despite renowned disagreements around the politics of sex and gender, these groups have come together to advocate for harsher penalties against traffickers, prostitutes’ customers, and nations deemed to be taking insufficient steps to stem the flow of trafficked women. In this essay, I argue that what has served to unite this coalition of "strange bedfellows" is not simply an underlying commitment to conservative ideals of sexuality, as previous commentators have offered, but an equally significant commitment to carceral paradigms of justice and to militarized humanitarianism as the preeminent mode of engagement by the state. I draw upon my ongoing ethnographic research with feminist and evangelical antitrafficking movement leaders to argue that the alliance that has been so efficacious in framing contemporary antitrafficking politics is the product of two historically unique and intersecting trends: a rightward shift on the part of many mainstream feminists and other secular liberals away from a redistributive model of justice and toward a politics of incarceration, coincident with a leftward sweep on the part of many younger evangelicals toward a globally oriented social justice theology. In the final section of this essay, I consider the resilience of these trends given a newly installed and more progressive Obama administration, positing that they are likely to continue even as the terrain of militarized humanitarian action shifts in accordance with new sets of geopolitical interests.

Why Prostitution Policy (Usually) Fails and What to Do about It?

“…All policy making can be seen as the struggle over the realization of core societal values (Stone 1997), but in many of the advanced democracies of the West, prostitution is currently the subject of fierce debates and frenzied, often far-reaching, legislation. Prostitution is an archetypical example of morality politics (Bernstein 2010;Wagenaar and Altink 2012;Wagenaar et al 2017, chap. 2).…”

Between Scylla and Charybdis: Women’s Labour Migration and Sex Trafficking in the Early Twentieth Century

“…Elizabeth Berstein convincingly argues that present-day abolitionist feminists have "effectively neutralized domains of political struggle around questions of labour, migration and sexual freedom via the tropes of prostitution as gender violence and sexual slavery". 72 However, this is a much older story, and present day campaigners have inherited at least as much as they have created: as this article has helped to show, the depoliticization of women's labour exploitation through the discourses of sex trafficking was present at the very inception of the campaigns against "white slavery". It has proved an enduring legacy.…”

Defending Intimacy against What? Limits of Antisurrogacy Feminisms

“…A family-critical feminist literature on antiprostitution and antitrafficking campaigns has mapped how certain feminisms (themselves relatively uncritical of the family, at least when it comes to the family in the third world), are deployed to neocolonial and neoliberal ends (Agustín 2007;Bernstein 2010;Kempadoo 2015). In Elizabeth Bernstein's account of the rise of sex-workabolitionist antitrafficking discourses, a focus on sexual violation located outside the family, "rather than the structural preconditions of exploited labor more generally, has been crucial to transforming what had previously been of concern to only a small group of committed activists into a legal framework with powerful material and symbolic effects" (Bernstein 2010, 49).…”