The Disappearing of a Migration Category: Migrants Who Sell Sex

Agustín, Laura María

doi:10.1080/13691830500335325

Cited by 162 publications

(85 citation statements)

References 25 publications

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“…Moreover, a burgeoning body of feminist scholarship has sought to complicate such simplified renderings by decoupling commercial sex and prostitution from human trafficking (Agustîn 2006;Saunders and Soderlund 2003;Kempadoo and Doezema 1998) and by linking these phenomena to broader economic processes and migratory flows (Koken 2010, 62;Bernstein 2007b;Limoncelli 2009;Andrijasevic 2010). For these scholars, focusing exclusively on whether prostitution is inherently exploitative or whether legalized or decriminalized prostitution facilitates human trafficking blunts exploration of a number of other critical factors that are taking place, chiefly the increased diversification and expansion of the global sex trade (Bernstein 2007b), the proliferation of intimate forms of labor (Boris and Parreñas 2010), and the growth of the transnational antitrafficking rescue industry (Agustîn 2007;Shih and Bernstein 2012).…”

Section: Voluntary Sex Work Versus Forced Sex Trafficking Revisitedmentioning

confidence: 99%

Domestic minor sex trafficking and the detention-to-protection pipeline

Musto

2013

Dialect Anthropol

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Notable discursive changes are afoot with respect to individuals, particularly sex trade-involved youth in the United States. Where once they may have been profiled as juvenile offenders, they are now, thanks to widespread attention to human trafficking, provisionally viewed by law enforcement and their non-state allies as potential victims of domestic minor sex trafficking, replete with traumatic pasts and turbulent family histories that authorize state intervention. This article examines how anti-trafficking policies have been discursively re-imagined to expand policing and rehabilitative interventions for youth. Drawing on in-depth interviews and ethnographic observations, it tracks the discursive sites and spaces in which criminal justice and social justice agendas have coalesced to assist youth and further assesses how attention to domestic minor sex trafficking has simultaneously authorized a multiprofessional detention-to-protection pipeline.

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Section: Voluntary Sex Work Versus Forced Sex Trafficking Revisitedmentioning

confidence: 99%

Domestic minor sex trafficking and the detention-to-protection pipeline

Musto

2013

Dialect Anthropol

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“…Further debate has been generated in feminist circles which remain divided on the conflation of women who have been trafficked and sexually exploited with migrant sex workers (Agustín, 2006;O'Connell-Davidson, 2006) and the response to trafficking as a thinly veiled method for migration control (Andrijasevic, 2003(Andrijasevic, , 2010Aradau, 2008). While trafficking is clearly a form of gender based violence it has not been engaged with theoretically to the extent that other forms, such as rape during warfare, have been (Bracewell, 2000;Campbell, 2007;Diken and Laustsen, 2005).…”

Section: Traffickingmentioning

confidence: 99%

Embodiment and Abjection

Russell

2013

Body & Society

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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.

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“…Many sex work scholars and activists deploy this classical liberal feminist framework to argue that when subject to physical coercion and exploitation, sex workers are slaves, but otherwise they voluntarily contract to sell their detachable bodily property (Cavalieri 2011). The focus on certain interpersonal means-physical force, violence or its threat, and deception-in combination with specific purposes-exploitation-operates to draw the line between trafficking (unfree labour) and free migrant sex work (or free wage labour) (Adams 2003;Agustín 2006;Ditmore 2008;Doezema 2005;NSWP 2011;Mai 2009;Murray 2001).…”

Section: Part Two: Liberal Feminism Migrant Sex Work and Traffickingmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…At the same time, sex worker rights activists and academics have denounced the anti-trafficking response of nation states, international bodies, and radical feminists (or 'abolitionists'). The argument that anti-trafficking law has proven all but useless in assisting victims and has negatively impacted on migrant sex workers in general is now widespread among both sex worker rights activists and scholars, in the UK and beyond (Agustín 2006(Agustín , 2007Bernstein 2010;Doezema 2005;Hill 2011;Gira Grant 2014;NSWP 2011;O'Connell Davidson 2006Scoular and O'Neill 2007;SWAN 2015;x:talk project 2010).…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

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

Cruz

2018

Fem Leg Stud

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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.

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The Disappearing of a Migration Category: Migrants Who Sell Sex

Cited by 162 publications

References 25 publications

Domestic minor sex trafficking and the detention-to-protection pipeline

Domestic minor sex trafficking and the detention-to-protection pipeline

Embodiment and Abjection

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

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