TrafWcking Women’s Human Rights

This page intentionally left blank

TrafWcking Women’s
Human Rights

Julietta Hua

University of Minnesota Press | Minneapolis | London

The University of Minnesota Press gratefully acknowledges Wnancial assistance
provided for the publication of this book from the OfWce of Faculty Affairs and the
College of Humanities, San Francisco State University.

A version of chapter 2 was published previously as Julietta Hua and Holly Nigorizawa,
“Sex TrafWcking, Women’s Rights, and the Politics of Representation,” International
Feminist Journal of Politics, Special Issue: New Directions in Feminism and Human
Rights 24, no. 4 (2010), www.informaworld.com.

Copyright 2011 by the Regents of the University of Minnesota

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a

retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical,
photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior written permission of the
publisher.

Published by the University of Minnesota Press

111 Third Avenue South, Suite 290
Minneapolis, MN 55401–2520
http://www.upress.umn.edu

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Hua, Julietta.
Trafficking women’s human rights / Julietta Hua.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 978-0-8166-7560-9 (hc : alk. paper)
ISBN 978-0-8166-7561-6 (pb : alk. paper)
1. Human trafficking. 2. Human rights. 3. Women’s rights.
4. Women—Legal status, laws, etc. 5. Feminism. I. Title.
HQ281.H82 2011
323.3'2949—dc23
2011016428

Printed in the United States of America on acid-free paper

The University of Minnesota is an equal-opportunity educator and employer.

18 17 16 15 14 13 12 11 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
Contents

Preface vii
Acknowledgments xi

Introduction: The Legal Stakes

of Human TrafWcking xiii

1. Universalism and the Conceptual Limits

to Human Rights 1

2. Speaking Subjects, Classifying Consent: Narrating

Sexual Violence and Morality through Law 27

3. Front-Page News: Writing Stories of Victimization

and Rescue 49

4. Seeing Race and Sexuality: Origin Stories

and Public Images of TrafWcking 71

5. ReWguring Slavery: Constructing the United States

as a Racial Exception 95

Conclusion: Considering the Transnational

in Feminist Actions 121

Notes 127
Index 147
This page intentionally left blank
Preface

The police protect; the police terrorize. NGOs provide im-

portant services to people who need them; NGOs reproduce inequal-
ities and hierarchies. Laws like the Victims of TrafWcking and Violence
Protection Act (VTVPA), which actualize human rights, extend aid
and help to positively alter life circumstances; laws like the VTVPA do
not aid but further criminalize immigrants. These seemingly opposi-
tional either–or statements capture the different perspectives from
which to understand social relations; the police either protect or they
terrorize.
For my students, whose optimism and perpetual dedication to Wght-
ing to make the world a better place continue to humble me, Wnding
the causes of injustice is a key aspect to strategizing change. Thus in
the classroom we often discuss whether laws, social services, and NGOs
work in negative or positive ways: Are they helping or hurting? Are
they the cause of injustice or are they the remedy? From my colleagues
who teach literature and visual culture classes, I have learned that the
desire to locate positive and negative representations is also often the
Wrst instinct in analyzing art, Wlm, novels, and so on. Part of this instinc-
tive desire to frame understandings of social and cultural artifacts as
either positive or negative comes from both the ideological tools read-
ily available to us—like those anchored in capitalism that privilege see-
ing the world through cost-beneWt analyses—and from the relative ease
that comes with a framework that provides clear-cut choices, either–or
choices that allow us to situate ourselves on one side or another. After
all, solutions are easier to locate when we have a clearer sense of how
social issues have negative or positive impacts.
What I hope this book will do is challenge the privileging of the
either–or framework. I want to move away from simply quantifying
and qualifying through positive and negative terms to resituating analy-
sis to focus on how we come to privilege certain lenses and frameworks.

vii
viii Preface

For example, NGOs both provide important resources that fundamen-

tally make lives better even as they also reproduce and further embed
structural inequalities. As the seven women members of the organiza-
tion Sangtin eloquently demonstrate in their collaborative writing Play-
ing with Fire, the same NGO that helped bring food, water, and other
resources to Uttar Pradesh, India, and that helped Sangtin meet to
“envision and rebuild [its] interconnected worlds,” also reproduced
social inequalities within the NGO hierarchy and attempted to silence
and own the work of the collective.1 The works of the Sangtin Collec-
tive and Richa Nagar, the INCITE! collective, Deborah Mindry, Nancy
Naples, and Manisha Desai, among many others, crystallize the ways
NGOs are neither good nor bad institutions. Rather, they are complex,
contradictory mechanisms that help shape our understanding of the
world around us. These authors remind us that the important point to
consider is not whether the impact of NGOs is positive or negative, but
how the contradictions embedded in NGO-ization (the “processes by
which development ideology is reproduced in the resistant spaces of
political action”)2 point to the complex and multiple ways power works
to shape social realities—both the social realities that oppress and that
empower.
By using human rights, many people around the world have found
a strong justiWcation for advocating improved living conditions (for
instance, in Bolivia, where people have organized to maintain public
access to water by using human rights as a means to frame the signiW-
cance of this move). Yet the mobilization of human rights arguments
also justiWes neocolonial and uneven global relationships, for instance,
by deploying “the concept of ‘third world’ non-European ‘backward-
ness’ to explain why the ‘third world’ lacks human rights,” as Inderpal
Grewal articulates.3 Human rights help and hinder; human rights are
deWned through top-down mechanisms even as they are also shaped
through localized actions. This is the premise where the book begins
as it endeavors to understand the multiple and varied mechanisms of
power and knowledge at work in shaping the reality of antitrafWcking
efforts—efforts that provide invaluable recognition and aid even as they
might also inXict their own forms of violence.
The questions that drive this book also come out of personal frus-
trations with the ways feminist and antiracist language, arguments, and
actions are often also enabling antifeminist and racist ends. For example,
 Preface ix

the legislative decision for afWrmative-action programs to help address

the historical embedding of structural inequalities, while imperfect,
nonetheless attempted to reorganize social relations in antiracist terms.
Yet afWrmative-action claims have also enabled outcomes like Univer-
sity of California Regents v. Bakke (1978), which used the language of
equal protection to protect white privilege by striking down the Univer-
sity of California, Davis, medical school’s special admissions program
“designed to assure the admission of a speciWed number of students
from certain minority groups,” according to Justice Powell.4 Similarly,
the use of certain kinds of feminist arguments (namely, those labeled
“liberal feminisms”) to justify war in Afghanistan and Iraq after 9/11
made strange bedfellows of politically radical feminist organizations
and politically conservative government entities. These examples are
often described as moments of appropriation; I see them also as symp-
toms of something else. Thus this project is also driven by a desire to
understand how such appropriations are made possible—of what are
these moments of appropriation symptoms? There is something in the
way that we frame arguments and the way we see situations that allows
for the appropriation of feminist and antiracist language for ends that
neither support feminist or antiracist goals. The many political and intel-
lectual arguments and actions we call feminism are more complex than
simply being either antipatriarchal or not. Feminisms are both eman-
cipatory and they are not. How discourses of feminism have been shaped
and deWned, how they have been conceptualized and thought out, have
everything to do with why feminist frameworks can be both emancipa-
tory and also repressive.
It is certainly less complicated to see things through an either–or
lens, especially when it comes to human rights. However, when we re-
shift the lens so that the questions are posed differently, we can begin
to see the myriad complex ways structural and discursive mechanisms
work to help shape our understandings of the world around us. I believe
this is a necessary and important intellectual exercise, even at the risk
of seeming too abstract or ungrounded. The intellectual and concep-
tual exercise of understanding how we come to see and know something
as such is important because the conceptual conditions tied to how we
know a thing are directly tied to our understandings of (and therefore
ability to alter) what we call the material, or real. As M. Jacqui Alexander
and Chandra Mohanty note, “We literally have to think ourselves out
x Preface

of these crises through collective praxis and particular kinds of theoriz-

ing.”5 How we come to know a thing is thus crucial to the so-called mate-
rial reality of that thing. In other words, addressing the materiality of
human rights violations, poverty and inequality, gender-based violence,
and so on is at the heart of this work, but this materiality is shaped into
particular forms through discursive mechanisms that help us see and
know a thing one way and not another. It is from these premises that
the book begins my effort to try to show how the more abstract, con-
ceptual conditions very much shape the so-called real aspects of human
rights and gendered violence.
Acknowledgments

The University of Minnesota, Humphrey Institute of Public

Affairs, Program for the Study of Race, Gender, and Public Policy pro-
vided an academic year of support to enable writing and publication.
Samuel Myers Jr. and Sally Kenney, as program cofounders and direc-
tors, and Sudha Shetty were especially generous with their professional
guidance an d mentorship. My fellow comrades in the program, Vera
Fennell and Roxanne Ornales, provided great intellectual and emo-
tional support.
Thank you to Yen Le Espiritu, Laura Kang, Richa Nagar, David Pel-
low, Denise Ferreira da Silva, and Lisa Yoneyama for their continued
support over the years, and Pieter Martin and Kristian Tvedten at the
University of Minnesota Press. Lisa Park provided especially genera-
tive and inspirational feedback; most of what is good about the book
is thanks to her and the other anonymous reviewer. I especially thank
Neda Atanasoski and Grace Kim for many years of talking with me
about the broader issues behind the book and for reading drafts.
My colleagues in Women and Gender Studies at San Francisco State
University, Nan Boyd, Deb Cohler, AJ Jaimes Guerrero, Kasturi Ray, Jil-
lian Sandell, and Lisa Tresca, as well as the exceptional dean of the col-
lege, Paul Sherwin, have provided a wonderful working environment,
without which the book would never have been Wnished. The presi-
dent’s ofWce at SFSU also provided a semester of paid leave, which
enabled me to focus on writing. At SFSU, I met and brieXy employed
the best research assistant I could never have imagined, Holly Nigori-
zawa, whose long hours tracking down trafWcking prosecution case Wles
made possible chapters 2 and 3, much of which is reprinted from our
coauthored article for International Feminist Journal of Politics.

xi
This page intentionally left blank
Introduction:
The Legal Stakes of Human TrafWcking

What is at s take in understanding certain issues as

human rights concerns and not others? How, why, and to what effect
does the deWning of women’s human rights through the stories and
images of Latin American, African, and Asian women—“other” women
in other places—have on the idea of human rights and the project of
feminism? What is the legacy of the modern epistemologies informing
notions of rights, humanity, and the law? In what ways do they continue
to shape contemporary discussions of human rights? This book inves-
tigates why certain forms of violence come to be deWned as human
rights violations while others do not. Examining how dominant deWni-
tions and meanings come to be attached to the terms of human rights
is an important exercise because “creating a name for a problem is one
of those subtle cultural technologies that deWnes an issue and channels
responses to it.”1
The question of who counts as human has as contested a history as
the question of what counts as rights. Philosophers, scientists, clergy,
and politicians alike have struggled to answer whether there is a uni-
versal deWnition that can capture the essence of humanity and whether
making claim to the category ensures a set of entitlements that can be
recognized and respected across linguistic, historical, national, and cul-
tural difference. These difWculties continue to shape contemporary
human rights discourses, where both critics and advocates of human
rights Xag the universalizing tendencies that can sometimes privilege
so-called Western agendas and lenses in human rights talk. TrafWcking
Women’s Human Rights traces the intellectual and philosophical origins
of the concept of human rights and asks to what extent human rights
can serve as a productive site to address global gender violence given
this tendency to sometimes universalize so-called Western priorities.
Looking speciWcally at the ways sex trafWcking has been legally and
culturally shaped as a human rights violation in the United States, this

xiii
xiv Introduction

book traces the ways human rights works as a modern epistemology or

body of knowledge. Understanding how sex trafWcking is represented
in mainstream U.S. discourses as a women’s human rights issue also
reveals how meanings around national belonging are implicitly con-
veyed through campaigns to address human rights violations assumed
to take place elsewhere.
How we come to deWne human rights speaks volumes about the val-
ues and perspectives privileged in human rights talk as well as demon-
strates how efforts to address human rights are already prescribed by
the ways we see and deWne the problem and its subjects. This book has
four main aims: Wrst, understanding the discursive processes through
which we come to know a thing as a human right or a human rights
violation; second, understanding the ontological conditions—condi-
tions tied to being—through which humanity constitutes, circumscribes,
and confers subjectivity; third, demonstrating how taking for granted
the ontological conditions tied to humanity reproduces the uneven
conWgurations of power that once informed the period of European
empire building and the transatlantic slave trade; and fourth, illustrat-
ing how our understandings of human rights and the global are inti-
mately connected to domestic discourses of race relations and national
belonging.
These aims are explored through a look at the rise of sex trafWck-
ing as a global and national human rights issue in the late 1990s and
into the 2000s. Sex trafWcking offers a unique site for engaging in the
more abstract questions around how to deWne rights and humanity for
several reasons. As a human rights violation, trafWcking has a clear ori-
gin in terms of when it became a documented, legislated human rights
concern for both the United States and the United Nations (2000). This
does not mean that the activities now deWned as trafWcking did not
exist before its political and legislative birth; rather, trafWcking activi-
ties were named such, criminalized, and institutionalized into the for-
mal legal structures of the United States at a speciWc moment. Having
this moment of origin makes it more straightforward in some ways to
trace how state, NGO, media, and academic players worked together
to delineate what activities would count as trafWcking and what it would
take to claim victimization. Second, deWning trafWcked subjects through
lenses that posit victimization against agency (coercion against choice)
makes sex trafWcking a particularly rich site where the conditionality
 Introduction xv

of human rights can be explored. One of the arguments this book

makes is about the conditional nature of claiming rights, tied in large
part to the modern and liberal principles taken for granted in much
of the talk around human rights. These assumed and naturalized val-
ues and frameworks work to constrict the ways victimhood can be imag-
ined; for instance, sex trafWcking victims must be distinguishable from
illegal aliens or prostitutes, whose assumed consent writes them as
criminals and not victims. Finally, the way trafWcking has been com-
pared to eighteenth- and nineteenth-century activities of transatlantic
slavery makes it a unique site where international discourses of human
rights are informed by and help inform U.S. national discourses of race
relations.
Although there is a strong body of literature aimed at describing
trafWcking activities based on ethnographic research—for instance,
Laura Maria Agustin’s work on global sex work—the goal of this book
is slightly different. It looks at how human trafWcking has been talked
about in media, in research, by the state, and by nongovernmental orga-
nizations to understand how the making of sex trafWcking into a human
rights concern reveals the racial, gendered, and sexual discourses at
work in shaping a national sense of identity and belonging. Rather than
focus on the question, What is trafWcking? this book asks, How does
trafWcking get talked about? How do the ways we talk about trafWcking
speak to broader questions about the limits of human rights and the
racialized and gendered processes of policing national belonging? The
book is interested in making visible the process through which certain
activities become understood and included under the category and
label of trafWcking, and in making visible the impact of such processes
on how national and human rights subjectivity is imagined. Working
from the criticisms and insights authored by a small body of feminist
scholars interested in sex trafWcking and prostitution (Laura Maria
Agustin, Beverly Balos, Wendy Chapkis, Julia O’Connell Davidson, Jo
Doezema, Kamala Kempadoo, Gretchen Soderlund, Kay Warren), the
book situates trafWcking within the broader scope of discursive pro-
duction and meaning-making around human rights projects.
How we have come to understand sex trafWcking as a human rights
violation, speciWcally one that enacts gendered violence and imag-
ines victimhood in particular ways, points to the ontological condi-
tions—the conditions through which being is imagined and conferred—
xvi Introduction

circumscribing the concept of human rights. While calls to humanity

and human rights are envisioned as the ultimate form of establishing
freedom and universalism, humanity and human are vexed terms pro-
duced through a constitutive negation in the conceptual and ontologi-
cal formation of modern knowledge. As Saidiya Hartman demonstrates,
the conferring of humanity, though deWned as that which emancipates
subjects (particularly the enslaved), is in fact a more complicated pro-
cess that acts also to “tether, bind and oppress.”2 Understanding the
contradictions through which we deWne human rights and humanity
is a necessary intellectual exercise if we are interested in maximizing
the promise of human rights.
Human rights concerns like sex trafWcking are not just about pro-
viding aid to those in need; they are also about the very ways we have
come to know and understand what and who counts as human. Address-
ing the real violences inXicted on people who Wnd themselves in socially
vulnerable positions requires understanding the frameworks and par-
adigms used to understand social issues like human trafWcking. This
is because how responses are imagined is inevitably tied to how the
problem is framed. By looking at the ways one human rights violation
has been deWned and made into a pressing social issue through both
law and culture, this book presents the mutually constitutive ways race,
gender, sexuality, and nation work to organize regimes of knowledge
that then explain and naturalize uneven relationships of power. Un-
derstanding and being attentive to these underlying frames can help
in shaping productive responses to migration, displacement, violence,
and exploitation.
Taking to heart both the project of feminism and the concerns of
what is often categorically referred to as the postcolonial critique, this
book examines the production of sex trafWcking discourse as a unique
site where the tensions, contradictions, and convergence of human
rights and identity politics in the U.S. political Weld are made explicit.
Mapping a discourse also means creating an archive; this book thus
looks to government documents including a range of congressional hear-
ings, trafWcking reports and studies; presidential addresses; transcripts
from antitrafWcking cases; media sources, including news media cover-
age, journalist narratives, and public service announcements; and non-
governmental organization literature, studies, and research. The archive
 Introduction xvii

also includes observations, informal interviews, and informational mate-

rials gathered at public antitrafWcking conferences sponsored by local
San Francisco and Minneapolis/St. Paul advocacy organizations. These
conferences are funded in part through government-allocated resources
established through the Victims of TrafWcking and Violence Protection
Act and are directed toward social service providers and concerned
citizens to raise awareness of trafWcking activities. The texts and archive
of knowledge produced through these multiple sites help shape dom-
inant ways of understanding trafWcking and its subjects. Together, the
knowledge produced through these sites constructs truths about traf-
Wcking that then work as regulatory norms. This book seeks to under-
stand how such regimes of knowledge are actually constructed and
expose how they shape reality, rather than simply explain it—a neces-
sary and pressing task for expanding human rights as a positive tool
for human betterment.

The Making of Sex TrafWcking

With the passage of the TrafWcking Victims Protection Act (TVPA) in
2000, human trafWcking became a legal reality in the United States.
Packaged with the Violence Against Women Act (HR 3355), designed
in part to extend protections to battered noncitizen dependents, the
Victims of TrafWcking and Violence Protection Act (VTVPA; Public Law
106-386, HR 3244) explicitly made an international human rights issue
(as recognized by the United Nations) into U.S. law. The law was passed
to address the estimated 50,000 victims, mostly women and children,3
who Wnd themselves trafWcked into the United States every year for
various kinds of labor, including “commercial sex acts, debt bondage,
and involuntary servitude.”4 Signed into law by President Bill Clinton on
October 28, 2000, and sponsored by New Jersey Republican represen-
tative Christopher Smith, the law is generally recognized as a bipartisan
success and has experienced little resistance in subsequent reautho-
rizations in 2003 (HR 2620), 2005 (HR 972), and 2008 (HR 7311).
The initial law passed the Senate 90–5 (with 5 abstaining) and the
House 371–1 (with 62 abstaining).5
The law deWnes the context of trafWcking as one that foregrounds
sexual exploitation of women and children and enumerates several spe-
ciWc activities into which victims are trafWcked, including “prostitution,
xviii Introduction

pornography, sex tourism, and other commercial sexual services.” 6 The

deWnition of trafWcking adopted by the law identiWes “severe forms of
trafWcking in persons” as follows:
A. Sex trafWcking in which a commercial sex act is induced by force, fraud
or coercion, or in which the person induced to perform such an act has not
attained 18 years of age; or
B. The recruitment, harboring, transportation, provision, or obtaining of
a person for labor or services, through the use of force, fraud, or coercion for
the purposes of subjection to involuntary servitude, peonage, debt bondage,
or slavery.7

Coercion is also speciWcally deWned in the law as:

A. Threats of serious harm to or physical restraint against any person;
B. Any scheme, plan, or pattern intended to cause a person to believe that
failure to perform an act would result in serious harm to or physical restraint
against any person; or
C. The abuse or threatened abuse of the legal process.8

These deWnitions point to the severity of the activity in inXicting harm,

and the law further points out that this harm is often gender based,
where women, as a result of their “low status” (in the words of the law)
and thus disproportionate burden of poverty in many places around
the world, are more susceptible to Wnding themselves victims of trafWck-
ing. Hot spots for the trafWcking of women in particular include, in
order, Asia (particularly South and Southeast Asia), Eastern Europe
and the former USSR, Africa, and Latin America. The initial version
of the law focuses on the trafWcking of persons across national bor-
ders, but the 2008 reauthorization stresses intrastate or domestic traf-
Wcking as another aspect of these activities.
Although the activities that are now described as trafWcking have
existed before being named as such, the passage of the VTVPA helped
to materialize trafWcking, and especially sex trafWcking, as a reality. This
materialization happened through various VTVPA-initiated activities,
including the establishment of the OfWce to Monitor and Combat Traf-
Wcking chaired by the secretary of state, annual country reports issued
by the Department of State that provide an assessment of trafWcking
worldwide, the withholding of nonhumanitarian aid for countries not
meeting the minimum standards to combat trafWcking, establishment
of programs and initiatives abroad to assist in reintegration and reset-
tlement of victims, money to help victims and prosecute trafWckers and
 Introduction xix

johns, increased penalties for trafWckers, and the 2002 establishment

of a special T visa for victims of trafWcking. In essence, the VTVPA cre-
ated an infrastructure and bureaucracy tied to addressing and combat-
ing trafWcking that spans multiple government agencies.
However, as an underground activity where “all estimates are unre-
liable,” 9 the Wrst hurdle for the new infrastructure was, and continues
to be, materializing the nebulous, often unquantiWable problem that the
bureaucracy was created to address.10 In other words, because trafWck-
ing is deWned as elusive and difWcult to track according to the very doc-
uments and entities created to remedy it as a problem, the Department
of State and the OfWce to Monitor and Combat TrafWcking are under
constant pressure to provide proof that the problem really does exist,
that trafWcking is in fact widespread, and that there are real bodies
involved, however difWcult they are to count and identify. Creating some
sense of what trafWcking is and then being able to point to speciWc
instances of trafWcking as well as speciWc persons who are victimized by
it helps justify the millions of dollars—an estimated $375 million be-
tween 2001 and 200511—allocated every year to antitrafWcking efforts.

Discourse and the Policing of National Belonging

In a short statement, noting the ways language like sex worker used to
refer to potential victims of trafWcking can rationalize trafWcking activ-
ities and demean victims, former ambassador and director of the OfWce
to Monitor and Combat TrafWcking John Miller gestures to an impor-
tant discussion around the politics of representation and the production
of knowledge:
Language is as important in Wghting modern-day slavery, also known as human
trafWcking, as it was in Wghting historic slavery. . . . People called “sex workers”
did not choose prostitution the way most of us choose work occupations as
pointed out by President Bush’s Directive issued four years ago. . . . To abolish
modern-day slavery we must not be afraid to call slavery by its real, despicable
name.12

The language, images, and conceptual frames—discourse—that de-

scribe and convey a phenomenon like sex trafWcking not only circulate
between sites such as government documents, media coverage, academic
studies, and nonproWt, nongovernmental literatures, but also estab-
lish discursive parameters—that is, the frameworks and narratives that
xx Introduction

demarcate and deWne a phenomena even as it is being described. The

fact that global sex trafWcking is a phenomenon described by former
United States district attorney of Minnesota Rachel Paulose as difWcult
to quantify, deWne, and track13—difWcult to know because of its hid-
den and widespread nature—begs the question of the signiWcance of
the production and circulation of knowledge. That is, if as Michel Fou-
cault illuminates, knowledge and discourse are sites of power where
what is purportedly described in discursive sites (for instance, sexually
deviant behaviors) is actually produced through the very discourses that
claim to discover and diagnose, then examining the ways discourses
deWne, describe, and address its subjects can reveal important aspects
of the workings of power in the shaping of realities.
Language is important not only in shifting mind-sets and perspec-
tives, as Miller notes, but also as a component in the broader discourse
circulating about human rights and gender violence that sets condi-
tions as to which activities can be recognized as women’s human rights
violations and who is then legible as the subjects of those activities.
Discourse works to set what Laura Kang terms the “compositional con-
ditions” that shape how we understand an issue like global sex trafWck-
ing. Rather than “unveiling some truth that has been misrepresented,”
this book considers sex trafWcking in order to “foreground the particu-
lar historical circumstances, ideological suppositions, and methodologi-
cal tactics that enable and constrain [the] compositional instance.”14
Miller’s call to be more attentive to the way we describe trafWcking is
a major part of this book. However, while Miller draws attention to
the fact that language shapes how we see and understand trafWcking
victims (whether we feel they are simply sex workers or whether we rec-
ognize them as slaves), what this book addresses are the ways mainstream
institutions like the government, news media, nongovernmental orga-
nizations—some of the major institutional stakeholders and players that
help shape antitrafWcking policies—participate in setting the terms
through which the public comes to know and understand trafWcking
as a human rights violation. These terms hide and naturalize assump-
tions and understandings of gender, sexuality, race, and nation. Partic-
ular scripts and narratives get attached to sex trafWcking, and these
can reveal the ideas and assumptions that gain political and cultural
salience in the debate around citizenship and human rights.
TrafWcking is about immigration as much as it is about human rights
 Introduction xxi

and gender violence. Looking at the images, language, and frameworks

through which a national discourse of sex trafWcking is produced can
make clear the ways gender norms and racial stereotypes naturalize par-
ticular Wgures of the national subject and citizen. As Eithne Luibheid,
Martha Gardner, and others illustrate, the history of immigration law-
making and enforcement is one where particular expectations of gen-
dered behaviors and expressions of sexuality were at once produced
and policed as central to deWning desirable citizenry. These gendered
expectations and expressions of sexuality further helped deWne the
racial parameters of the national body, where race was understood as
inheritable and therefore always about sex—about miscegenation and
marriage, and about sexuality and gender norms. While the VTVPA is
seemingly primarily about human rights, it is also equally about immi-
gration and the policing and shaping of citizenry, both in terms of the
potential victims who are given the opportunity to become legal resi-
dents and citizens and in terms of the construction of the U.S. citizen
who helps combat trafWcking through gendered and racialized terms.
This might explain why there is particular fervor, especially when it
comes to state actors, over trafWcking for sexual labor, because issues
of immigration and citizenship have historically always been accom-
panied by anxieties over the notion that the “wrong” bodies are re-
producing national subjects (an anxiety manifest in 2010 debates over
repealing the Fourteenth Amendment out of fears of “anchor babies,”
for example).
The danger of ignoring the productive power of discourse is evident
in the double bind placed on victims who are usually identiWed as third
world, mostly women. These women must argue their own victimization
to an economically corrupt, morally backward culture of patriarchy in
order to be legible to government ofWcials, law enforcement, and social
service providers as trafWcked subjects. Becoming legible is necessary
to garnering aid like legal status, food, and shelter. Not only does the
discourse of sex trafWcking risk reproducing the troubling dichotomy
of third world backwardness and United States progressivism, as Inder-
pal Grewal notes,15 but victims must also often reiterate this construc-
tion in their attempts to become legible to government ofWcials and law
enforcement as deserving of aid. What are the terms through which
subjects can become legible as victims of trafWcking? What do these
xxii Introduction

terms tell us about the ways gender, sexuality, and race are working to
help shape notions of national and global belonging?

Feminist Stakes, Human Rights, and Modern Conditions

The complicity of human rights projects and many feminisms (some-

times labeled liberal or Western) in furthering and reproducing trou-
bling, uneven relationships of power is symptomatic of a continued
investment in modern notions of humanity and emancipation estab-
lished through Enlightenment and post-Enlightenment texts—episte-
mological conditions through which contemporary notions of human
and woman are produced that have yet to be adequately deconstructed
by human rights scholars. Thus, even while this book is critical of the
ways feminisms can and do remain complicit with nation-building proj-
ects, it is with a feminist lens that the book approaches women’s human
rights, trafWcking, and the limits of emancipation.
Like the concept of human, the category woman is vexed by the fact
that it is by deWnition a broad term used to refer to quite a number of
people who may have very different relationships to the category. The
use of such broad and ambiguous terms like woman has not been with-
out political and social advantages, as large numbers of people have
been able to stage political claims calling for more attentiveness to patri-
archy, for instance, by uniting under the banner of women. After all,
there is power in numbers, especially when it comes to agitating for
institutional or structural change. Yet the trouble with categories like
human and woman is that despite (or because of) their ambiguity, they
nonetheless need to gesture to a particular way of being—a way of being
that is always already prescribed at the conceptual moment of modern
knowledge. At once referring to universality, concepts like woman con-
vey a sameness and sharedness even while the category is itself deWned
through a particularity and difference from what it is not (man). This
is the central paradox of human rights and global feminisms: such terms
necessarily convey a particular set of deWnitions (sometimes multiple
deWnitions) even while they imply nonparticularity and universality.
This paradoxical operation is what lies at the center of human
rights debates: how and what gets deWned as a human right is not in
fact always as universal as the term might imply. What for one commu-
nity is a human right may not be for another. This has been particularly
 Introduction xxiii

vexing for feminists who Wnd that nationalisms depend on the priori-
tizing of heteropatriarchy, yet are unable to critique the global scope of
patriarchal investments without risking accusations of universalizing so-
called Western notions of gender and human rights. Thus, coming to
a global consensus around what rights count as human rights continues
to be a contentious exercise and one that is implicated in a long global
history of uneven relationships of power, where the project of deWning
human rights acts as yet another site where colonial relations of power
Wnd renewed life. As scholars like Sally Engle Merry point out, the legacy
of the European Enlightenment cannot be separated from the concept
of rights and human rights. Some human rights scholars like John Charvet
and Elisa Kaczynska-Nay work from the premise that this liberal tradi-
tion at the center of human rights is something to be embraced rather
than questioned.16 This book takes the position that such liberal tradi-
tions, which arise from epistemological frameworks established in En-
lightenment and post-Enlightenment texts, are exactly the reason why
human rights threaten to reestablish so-called old hierarchies. How
can we address the fact that gender violence does indeed seem to have
a global resonance without rehearsing troubling dichotomies of West-
ern progressivism and third world backwardness? How useful is human
rights as a site through which to address global gender violence, given
the fact that human rights talk threatens to resurrect these colonial con-
Wgurations of power? Moving beyond the question of human rights as
both potentially positive in altering material conditions and negative
in reafWrming (neo)colonial hierarchies requires consideration of the
conceptual paradox and epistemological terms that frame the notion
of human rights.
The questions that circulate in debates around the efWcacy of human
rights—questions having to do with who establishes what counts in a
universal set of principles—resonate with more domestic debates in
the United States regarding post–civil rights politics advocating inclu-
sion of difference and the eradication of racism. One of the strongest
critiques of human rights has come from actors identiWed with the so-
called third world who are critical of the ways the human rights agenda
often reasserts Western privilege and priorities. One strategy used to
respond to these concerns involves including those “other” voices into
the dialogue, in a sense translating across difference to Wnd common
ground. A similar strategy characterizes the successes of the civil rights
xxiv Introduction

era, which were organized primarily around responding to the prior

strategy of assimilating and/or eradicating difference by advocating
inclusion and (equal) representation.17
The struggle for the civil and political rights of historically disen-
franchised populations has been staged in terms of inclusion and rep-
resentation on the basis of the acknowledgment that these populations
can speak for themselves about what they need and want. Yet while elect-
ing women into political ofWce is a necessary and invaluable project,
the fact that representation enables the marked body (which signiWes
difference) to stand in for the correcting of racism and patriarchy is
deeply troubling. Under this paradigm for understanding difference
and power, the visibility of the marked physical body provides, to bor-
row Rachel Lee’s words, a racial alibi signaling the progressive end to
all those things (racism, patriarchy, xenophobia, religious fundamen-
talism) that are seen as roadblocks to emancipation.18 Emancipation
is deWned here as the ultimate nonexclusionary position. The “surely
we are not racist, for we accept a black man as president” logic has thus
too often been used as a panacea for the still-vibrant landscape of Amer-
ican racism that deWnes U.S. social relations. As Chandra Mohanty
and Jacqui Alexander expertly note, it is deeply troubling when the
physical body (as a signiWer of difference) is assumed to stand in for
the correcting of a body of knowledge: “ Token inclusion of our texts
without reconceptualizing the whole white, middle-class, gendered
knowledge base effectively absorbs and silences us.”19 For Radhika
Coomaraswamy and other feminists interested in making the terms of
women’s human rights a decolonizing (rather than colonizing) tool,
remedying the tokenizing of third world women’s voices can take place
through better dialogue: “What we need today is internal dialogue, Wrst
among women in third world societies and then between the women
and the larger community. Outsiders must promote and aid this dia-
logue, giving their support so that such a dialogue is open, rich, and
transformative.”20 Yet there is the risk of tokenism whenever an out-
side and inside community is assumed. This book takes tokenism as a
symptom of the modern ontological conditions through which human-
ity and difference are written and explores the extent to which inclu-
sion through dialogue offers a productive human rights tool.
ConXating physical bodies (demarcated as different) with bodies of
knowledge that address difference is one of the overarching concerns
 Introduction xxv

of this book. This conXation enables the (visible) inclusion of certain

speaking bodies to act as an alibi that allows us to reassure ourselves
that we are moving forward—moving beyond. Yet this function of in-
clusion, which enables the myth of universality, does not disrupt or
question the underlying conditions of subjectivity established in Enlight-
enment and post-Enlightenment texts. Women’s human rights is impli-
cated in this progressive, modern narrative as the so-called Wnal global
site where the resolution of all those roadblocks impeding emancipa-
tion must be addressed, and it is the “othered” bodies of the women
victim to human rights violations that are signiWed as the last and latest
subjects awaiting freedom, writing the third world, female body “as the
Wnal frontier—as [representing] our temporal and global end.”21 This
representational effect is explored through an examination of sex traf-
Wcking as one discursive site where Enlightenment legacies and their
contradictions shape how trafWcking is deWned and who is legible as
trafWcked subject.

Chapters

Human rights is confronted with the fact that, rather than offering ref-
uge to the disenfranchised global subject, it can act as another scene
of violence. Chapter 1 considers the conceptual terms through which
human rights is framed in order to tease out the epistemological and
ontological premises that prescribe human rights mechanisms like the
VTVPA. The Universal Declaration of Human Rights, drafted in the
post–World War II moment, is often cited as the cornerstone and origin
of contemporary human rights. Rather than situate temporal origins,
this chapter considers the epistemological origins of the contemporary
concept of human rights in order to situate strategies like translation
that are touted as a means to discover truly universal principles. Thus
chapter 1 considers the debates around translation and cultural rela-
tivism that continue to shape human rights debates and focuses on the
role of the law in naturalizing certain assumptions about human rights.
These debates indicate how the idea of human rights is framed prima-
rily through the notion of representation—of representing humanity
and representing fairly different cultural deWnitions of universal prin-
ciples. The political desire to frame human rights through the ques-
tion of representation is not surprising; nor is it without its beneWts.
xxvi Introduction

However, the framing of human rights through the question of accu-

rate and fair representation limits its potential by postponing efforts
to address the paradox of universalism. Chapter 1 considers the para-
dox of universalism, strategies of translation, and the politics of repre-
sentation in order to situate the remaining chapters, which map the
cultural and legal scripts that get attached to trafWcking.
Chapters 2, 3, 4, and 5 look speciWcally at the case of sex trafWcking
in order to map the ways that the making of sex trafWcking into a legal
and cultural reality establishes assumptions about humanity, morality,
and difference that are then taken for granted and constrain the ways
we can imagine human rights. Together, these chapters consider the
naturalizing of certain gendered, sexual, and racial scripts and the im-
pact of taking such scripts for granted. Chapter 2 situates U.S. anti-
trafWcking law within the historical context of both sexual violence and
immigration laws. The law and the legal space is one place where par-
ticular scripts of victimization are produced and validated, becoming
the institutional standard through which potential trafWcking subjects
(mainly victims and perpetrators) are judged. Institutionalizing meth-
ods used to validate victims, including the requirement that victims
testify in instances where their trafWckers are prosecuted, means that
victims must make their stories Wt into preexisting expectations and
narratives in order to be legible as victims (rather than prostitutes or
illegal aliens). This chapter thus also considers the ways the strategy of
speaking for oneself and claiming voice have obscured the relationship
between speech and the speaking subject, allowing us to assume a false
transparency between the speaking subject and her words.
The victim narratives the U.S. government assumes are the most
common and natural narratives that should accompany the violence of
sex trafWcking are not only produced through studies funded by fed-
eral grant dollars and government publications, but also circulate in the
literature of nongovernmental organizations and the news media. The
circulation of these victim narratives between sites is sometimes a direct
relationship where funds made available through the VTVPA Wnance
the research of nonproWts and nongovernmental organizations. Even
when these relationships are indirect, no site is insulated from the oth-
ers. Chapter 3 looks at the ways journalistic accounts naturalize a par-
ticular narrative of victimization, one that is surprisingly similar and
not surprisingly resonates with other familiar narrative tropes like the
 Introduction xxvii

American Dream. This chapter works to understand how telling the

story of sex trafWcking does more than identify or disidentify potential
victims; it frames trafWcking through moral tropes of rescue and re-
demption that ultimately work to naturalize an understanding of cul-
tural difference that reafWrms troubling frameworks of development
and progress.
Chapter 4 considers how these developmental frames help make
and depend on gender and sexual discourses that naturalize the idea
that behavioral and cultural proclivities can be read on the physical
body. By focusing speciWcally on various visual images used to promote
antitrafWcking efforts (including campaigns sponsored by the Depart-
ment of Health and Human Services, Immigration and Customs En-
forcement, and the United Nations OfWce of Drugs and Crime) as well
as state and NGO research into explaining geographical and cultural
origins to sex trafWcking, this chapter considers the ways antitrafWck-
ing efforts in the United States both echo and help shape understand-
ings of race, nation, gender, and sexuality. SpeciWcally, this chapter
considers the juxtaposition of the Eastern European to the Asian vic-
tim in order to consider the racial conditions of inclusion through
which sex trafWcking narratives are articulated.
Looking at the productive power of sex trafWcking discourse illumi-
nates the racial, gendered, and national stakes tied to making distinc-
tions between human bodies—between the victims in need of human
rights and the human rights enacting subject. For the most part, dis-
cussions of human rights have to do with how to deWne universal prin-
ciples and how to enact and enforce such principles. There is much
generative debate around the issue of whether it is possible to outline
principles that can be applied universally. While many postcolonial and
feminist human rights advocates are critical of the ways androcentric,
Euro-American, or Western values are taken for granted as universal,
the question of race remains relatively marginal as difference is artic-
ulated through the language and frame of culture and nation. The lit-
erature on race and race relations is one that often centers the national,
and global studies of race tend to compare one national formation to
another. By drawing out the connection between what is often consid-
ered a domestic issue tied to identity politics in the United States (race
relations) and the question of universalism and cultural relativism that
is central to discussions of human rights, chapter 5 considers how talk
xxviii Introduction

around human rights in the United States is necessarily informed by the

national context. Conversely, the language and framework of differ-
ence, inclusion, and pluralism central to domestic discourses of race
have found their way into international forums like the United Nations.
Domestic discourses around difference and race, while seemingly dis-
tanced from debates around human rights, are in fact two conversations
that enable each other. That is, contemporary national discourses of
racial difference, particularly multiculturalism and postracialism, are
made available through the concept of human rights and global diver-
sity. Alternately, contemporary human rights discourses share much of
the language, frameworks, and strategies for understanding difference
that U.S. civil rights–era activisms articulated. Chapter 5 looks speciW-
cally at the ways sex trafWcking references the language and history of
transatlantic slavery and argues that such uses work to consolidate mul-
ticultural and postracial narratives of racial and gender progress in both
the national and global context. Sex trafWcking thus works to consoli-
date a national narrative of exceptionalism that universalizes the U.S.
condition.
The conclusion considers these questions of knowledge, power, and
human rights through a transnational feminist lens. Transnational fem-
inism can offer a useful methodological tool to mapping how power
works to shape social norms and realities by pressing for the need
to deconstruct and understand the relationship between nation mak-
ing and the production of discourses of difference. By understanding
race, gender, sexuality, and nation as conceptual tools that work co-
constitutively (the concepts and categories help deWne each other),
feminist methodologies can do more than simply describe experiences;
they can help map the ways regimes of knowledge—concepts, frame-
works, and discourses—help make social realities.
By looking at how sex trafWcking is talked about and what assump-
tions are naturalized in talking about it in a particular manner, this book
suggests many alternative ways of seeing that go unheeded. The chapters
in this book are interested in interrogating the gendered and racialized
nation-making work women’s human rights agendas like sex trafWcking
perform in order to fully consider whether (given the ways the sex
trafWcking discourses circulating in the United States rehearse neo-
colonial power dynamics and rely on liberal notions of rights) women’s
human rights can offer a generative and useful site through which to
 Introduction xxix

address the global complexion of gender violence. In doing so, the dis-
cursive analysis suggests various alternative ways of reading sex traf-
Wcking texts. This is not to suggest that there is any one correct way of
understanding sex trafWcking as a human rights violation or the impact
it can have on the people who experience and live it. Rather, the book
poses a variety of alternative readings in order to demonstrate what
can get lost or ignored when we are not attentive to the assumptions
and premises at work in naturalizing narratives as “the sex trafWcking
narrative.”
Undoubtedly human rights have offered a productive mechanism
through which to confront modern maladies, and certainly there are
people all over the globe who Wnd use in human rights as a tool for
addressing injustice. Yet human rights as a modern discourse is not im-
mune from the very modern maladies it hopes to confront. This is why
understanding the onto-epistemological roots of human rights is cru-
cial, and it is by looking to sex trafWcking that the racial, sexual, and
national stakes tied to particular ways of knowing and being can be
made clear. Excavating the intellectual traditions and modern premises
established in the philosophical debates around natural law, humanity,
and rights is a necessary exercise in considering how the concept of
human rights can be recuperated as a useful political tool, given the
fact that human rights is always overdetermined by this modern geneal-
ogy. Looking at how certain activities are produced and deWned as sex
trafWcking reveals the implicit ways our discussions of human rights
fall back on assumptions about subjects, their “others,” and deWnitions
of freedom and rights that reafWrm the ideas of humanity set forth in
seventeenth- and eighteenth-century European philosophical texts on
man. Understanding these philosophical limits is crucial to the task of
rethinking human rights.
This page intentionally left blank
1. Universalism and the Conceptual Limits
to Human Rights

In t he p o s t–worl d war i i cold war context of 1948,

the recently formed United Nations adopted a Universal Declaration of
Human Rights (UDHR) to help instill a global sense of community
founded in the principle of humanism. Yet even before its formal adop-
tion, the idea of any UDHR was confronted with questions of how to
know a universal tenet of human rights from a particular cultural ex-
pression. While this post–World War II–era context provides the for-
mal origin of contemporary human rights language and frameworks,
the concept of universal principles evoked in the UDHR echoes the
philosophical and political projects of empire building that deWned
the nineteenth century, rooted in modern regimes of knowledge. The
question of universalism at the heart of contemporary human rights
debates is informed by this legacy of empire and colonialism, which
naturalized the so-called progressiveness of certain political, economic,
and epistemic principles under the banner of the universal.
Despite the displacement of formal colonial governments and the
rise of independence movements during the early twentieth-century
human rights era, the systems of knowledge that enabled colonialism,
transatlantic slavery, and Euro-American empire building remain intact.
This is evident in the way human rights agendas continue to fall into
the trap of reproducing troubling representations of “others.” This
operation of human rights has been critiqued as taking place in vari-
ous human rights sites, from the plight of the Roma in Europe,1 to the
representation of African women in debates concerning female geni-
tal surgeries,2 to the veiling of Muslim women.3 The representational
impact of colonial logics and frameworks continues to plague inter-
national discourses from development to human rights. This chapter
attempts to answer why human rights continues to offer a site where
(neo)colonial relationships of power are rehearsed and suggests that
the reasons are embedded in the conceptualizing of universalism against

1
2 Universalism and the Conceptual Limits to Human Rights

a notion of cultural relativism, where (cultural) difference becomes

both the condition of universalism’s possibility and a threat to its exis-
tence. Universalism is deWned here as a distinctly modern concept that
regulates descriptions of both social and scientiWc life.
This problematic of difference lies at the crux of human rights
debates around how to deWne universal principles and how to repre-
sent the varied victims of abuses. Both the question of how to ensure
respect for (cultural) difference and how to keep from reifying con-
structions of third world backwardness have been answered in part by
inclusionary strategies like translation and cross-cultural dialogue that
advocate representation of all so-named culturally particular views and
previously marginalized players. However, the crux of the problem of
difference comes before the question of accurate and equal repre-
sentation; it lies rather at the moment of the conferring of subjectivity
and humanity, a moment that (ontologically) precedes representation,
though the representational moment helps constitute the conditions
attached to the conferring of subjectivity.
Inclusion reproduces, though not without contradictions, the con-
ditions of subjectivity instituted in modern, post-Enlightenment regimes
of knowledge. These conditions of subjectivity establish an enabling
negation—an “other” against which the modern man is constituted.
Modern regimes of power are also instituted through the juridical realm
and continue to inform contemporary understandings of humanity,
subjectivity, and the law. Representation and inclusion are thus strate-
gies limited in their ability to intervene in the workings of power that
produce (neo)colonial regimes because these strategies assume univer-
sality; that is, these strategies assume that with greater representation
and more inclusion, we will be able to more accurately locate universal
principles of humanity. Rather, universalism itself needs to be denatu-
ralized and understood as a modern concept that helps structure how
we know and understand human rights.
Human rights seem unable to leave behind the onto-epistemological
conditions that result in the re-presentation of colonial logics casting
third world peoples and practices as less advanced and therefore less
capable of enacting human rights principles. This chapter addresses the
conceptual and theoretical workings of the writing of human rights and
its subject. By situating feminist debates grappling with the question of
whether and to what extent the notion of women’s rights can serve as
 Universalism and the Conceptual Limits to Human Rights 3

the basis for a shared international agenda, the chapter establishes the
paradox of universalism. Last, the chapter situates this paradox within
an epistemological context that confers universality through the juridi-
cal frame, which then works to naturalize colonial logics. Understanding
and examining how we come to know what we know is, in other words,
central to addressing the paradox of human rights that leaves human
rights rehearsing and reifying, rather than addressing and correcting
uneven relationships of power.

The Conditions of Universality

The UDHR established and enumerated the rights all persons are en-
titled to by virtue of being human. Drafted by eighteen members of
the United Nations Commission on Human Rights, chaired by Eleanor
Roosevelt, and written in response to the atrocities of World War II,
the declaration is described by the United Nations as a “living docu-
ment” that has “stood the test of time and resisted attacks based on
‘relativism.’”4 One year before the 1948 adoption of the UDHR, the
board of the American Anthropological Association released the fol-
lowing statement regarding the challenge of relativity associated with
drafting the UDHR:

Respect for differences between cultures is validated by the scientiWc fact that
no technique of qualitatively evaluating cultures has been discovered. . . . Stan-
dards and values are relative to the culture from which they derive so that any
attempt to formulate postulates that grow out of beliefs or moral codes of one
culture must to that extent detract from the applicability of any Declaration of
Human Rights to mankind as a whole.5

Coming out of the relativist turn, the statement of the Anthropological

Association afWrms the work of Franz Boaz that attempted to shift evo-
lutionary notions of human difference (as racial science and the science
of man) away from seeing difference as innate and biological to seeing
difference as cultural. Advocating an understanding of difference that
foregrounded culture as a matter of consciousness, the relativist turn,
established through Boaz’s work and crystallized in the Anthropolog-
ical Association’s statement, maintains universalism but locates it in
the universal existence of culture and cultural systems. In essence, uni-
versalism is deWned as both the many cultural systems differentiating
4 Universalism and the Conceptual Limits to Human Rights

peoples and as more than the sum of these cultural systems. Mindful of
the importance of cultural relativism, the authors and supporters of
the UDHR thus emphasize that the document’s articles are not reXec-
tive of the “beliefs or moral codes of one culture” but are instead uni-
versal; it is a document that “belongs to all of us” in similar ways that
all of us belong to culture.6
The historical signiWcance of these two documents reveals how talk
around human rights emerges with and through discussions regarding
cultural relativism. As the drafters of the UDHR worked to conceptu-
alize a statement of rights that was broad and yet also applicable to a
variety of national, legal, and cultural contexts, they also contributed
to an important conversation around Eurocentrism and representa-
tional ethics. For the Anthropological Association, the risks of any Dec-
laration of Human Rights rest in the possibility that under the guise of
the universal, the declaration would implicitly evaluate cultures against
the cultural norms represented in the declaration. In other words, the
concerns of the Anthropological Association were about whether a
universal declaration would be able to maintain relativism. This con-
text deWnes human rights and universalism as concepts constituted
through difference and particularity. That is, the idea of universalism
for both cultural relativists and advocates of a universal declaration is
deWned by the equitable representation of (cultural) differences, leav-
ing universalism in the paradoxical position of inventing and maintain-
ing (culturally particular) “others” while also needing to absorb them.
Thus one way that the drafters of the UDHR attempted to address
the need for cultural relativism was to include and represent a variety
of rights that would together make up a set of universal principles. The
articulation of these principles begins with a Wrst generation of rights
modeled after (and both theoretically and linguistically similar to) the
tradition set forth in the English Bill of Rights (1689).7 These state-
ments read in familiar ways to the United States Constitution, naming
rights to which individuals are entitled by virtue of being reasoned and
self-conscious:

Article 1. All human beings are born free and equal in dignity and rights.
They are endowed with reason and conscience and should act towards one
another in a spirit of brotherhood. . . . Article 2. Everyone is entitled to all the
rights and freedoms set forth in this Declaration, without distinction of any
kind, such as race, colour, sex, language, religion, political or other opinion,
 Universalism and the Conceptual Limits to Human Rights 5

national or social origin, property, birth or other status. . . . Article 3. Every-

one has the right to life, liberty and security of person.8

Built on the Enlightenment tradition of rational law, these rights are

framed in terms of protections from state interference and encroach-
ment on individual freedoms. Other articles include the right to equal-
ity before the Law (Article 7), the right to be considered innocent until
proven guilty (Article 11), and the right to own property (Article 17).
Given that these Wrst twenty or so articles are derivative of a liberal,
Euro-American tradition, the framers of the UDHR included a second
set of rights derived from socialist revolutions as well as a third set of
articles that are more aspirational in nature.9 These second and third
groupings of rights are framed in positive terms and require state in-
tervention. Rather than envision a rights-bearing individual in need of
protection from state encroachment, these rights—the right to social
security (Article 22), the right to rest and leisure (Article 25), the right
to education (Article 26), and so on—are framed in terms of state re-
sponsibilities toward its citizenry. Furthermore, the third set of rights
moves away from even the framework of the state by naming commu-
nity as the organizational unit—for instance, the right to participate
in the cultural life of community (Article 27) and community duties
essential to free and full development (Article 29). This move away
from the Enlightenment language and traditions of liberal individual-
ism and the social contract is evidence of the compromises the framers
made to ensure that they avoided “formulat[ing] postulates that grow
out of beliefs or moral codes of one culture,” as the Anthropological
Association warned.
Yet even as it seeks to represent in a relativist manner several dif-
ferent approaches and ideologies to principles of humanity, the UDHR
also seeks to absorb these different approaches into a universal stan-
dard that privileges the dominant perspectives of the modern liberal
traditions of the social contract (dominant even in terms of the num-
ber of articles that privilege this frame). Advocating the UDHR as “a
common standard of achievement for all peoples and all nations,” the
ultimate goal of the document is to enumerate and uphold a univer-
sal standard against which “all peoples and all nations” should strive.
Whether the UDHR succeeds in capturing a set of rights that do not
grow out of the “beliefs or moral codes of one culture” was and continues
6 Universalism and the Conceptual Limits to Human Rights

to be a hotly contested question, especially given that Article 1 deWnes

human beings as “endowed with reason and conscience . . . born free
and equal in dignity and rights, precisely the deWnition established
through Enlightenment texts.”
Furthermore, enforcing a global rule of law to ensure the princi-
ples of the declaration is not an easy task. Assuming that controversy
over how the document deWnes human rights is resolved, such measures
to address violations still face the fact that there is no extrastate insti-
tution that can enforce the document. Indeed, one key limitation of
the United Nations lies in its inability to do more than place political
pressure on states that choose not to comply. Thus, almost by default,
the UDHR and other human rights vehicles ultimately rely on individ-
ual state mechanisms for operationalization. In the case of trafWcking,
despite the U.N. Protocol on Human TrafWcking and the frameworks,
lenses, and concepts it deploys to deWne activities as trafWcking, states
provide the units through which the protocol is mechanized. In the
United States, this mechanism is the VTVPA. The degree to which the
spirit of the protocol is maintained (and whether it is even adopted into
state legislation at all) remains under the purview of the state, though
NGOs play an important role in convincing “powerful audiences . . . that
the right deserves acceptance.”10 It is the state’s claim to the force of
law that gives the state the legitimacy it needs to both deploy violence
and restrict freedoms necessary in the policing, prosecution, and pun-
ishment of activities like trafWcking in protecting human rights.
The law offers both a tool and legitimizing force to the state, and
it can only do so because the concept of the law is one mythologized
around the fact that the law “transcends society yet is of society.”11 Like
the concept of universalism, the law is mired in a contradiction where
it is both an institution made by men even as it also surpasses human
creation. Men make the law, yet the law exists as a thing beyond man’s
creation. Such a formulation is a hallmark of the modern epistemolo-
gies established through Enlightenment and post-Enlightenment texts.
As Bruno Latour catalogs, the dual constitution of politics (the social)
against nature (science) is accompanied by a second operation whereby
science hides the fact that it is a construct of man and politics hides the
fact that it is treated as a force of nature.12 This formulation, according
to Latour, deWnes the modern. To understand the (modern) predica-
ment of human rights, subsequent sections of this chapter consider the
 Universalism and the Conceptual Limits to Human Rights 7

ways politics and the law are deWned as social products even as they func-
tion as forces of nature. This continued working of law and politics,
following Latour, places contemporary human rights and trafWcking
squarely within modern frames.
Philosophers like John Locke rationalized a distinction between the
transcendent force of law that makes it above all men and the rational
application of that force that is the product of society. Rendering human
development a teleology that casts man in a linear story from a savage
state of nature to the moment of the social contract and onward into
the unfolding of civilization, the tradition Locke helped instill estab-
lishes a project of modernity, one where the subject is constituted over
and against his nonmodern “others.” The law emerges as a force that
is known through reason and accepted by the reasonable subject as
transcendent—transcending any particular social or political context.
Global “others” who did not grasp this fact were simply cast as behind.
Thus at the heart of human rights are questions pertaining to the uni-
versality of the law. The concept of universality, deWned as more than
the sum of its particular components—a something that captures every-
thing, institutes the particular even as it is also threatened by it. De-
Wned in opposition to the particular, universality cannot exist without
the concept of the particular where “no assertion of universality takes
place apart from a cultural norm.”13 The universal operates as a mod-
ern strategy of power that continues to write the “others” of the globe
as “not yet,” thereby naturalizing the modern regimes of knowledge that
privilege the self-knowing and rational subject. The project of human
rights becomes one where those not yet exercising the freedoms asso-
ciated with human rights simply need to reform cultural values, eco-
nomic relations, and legal institutions—reformatory outcomes of the
actualization of the kind of being (subjectivity) produced in the post-
Enlightenment text.

Representational Limits: The Paradox of Women’s Human Rights

The early 1990s saw the rise of the concept of women’s human rights
in the international political arena, most notably with the 1995 United
Nations Beijing Conference on Women. The 1995 conference is re-
membered as a milestone event that marked the ascendance of women’s
human rights on both national and international agendas, and as an
8 Universalism and the Conceptual Limits to Human Rights

event that evidenced the growing global call for the celebration of
human diversity. Yet the project to deWne women’s human rights has a
long history predating the 1995 conference—a history marked not only
by the United Nations’ Decade of Women, but myriad nongovernmen-
tal and grassroots organizing. These political and social projects that
focus on addressing gender violence on a global scale inform and are
informed by intellectual debates around feminism and the study of
women. That is, academic and intellectual projects like the disciplin-
ing of Women and Gender Studies that are interested in understand-
ing the category woman and the concepts of gender and sexuality have
been both an important outgrowth of political organizing and social
movements as well as an important venue where political concerns gain
ground.
The idea that there should be better attention to women’s human
rights in part arose out of feminist critiques of human rights discourses
that, these critiques argued, worked from androcentric assumptions
about the subject of rights. Arguing that existing human rights para-
digms are formulated from an unacknowledged gender and sexual
bias, feminist critics argued the need to amend these frameworks to
better capture gender-speciWc human rights violations like “rape (in-
cluding marital rape and rape during war), domestic violence, repro-
ductive freedom, the valuation of childcare and other domestic labor
as work, and unequal opportunity for women and girls in education,
employment, housing, credit, and health care.”14 Feminist human rights
scholars like Susan Okin, Hillary Charlesworth, and Charlotte Bunch
identify a possible solution to issues of androcentrism as the inclusion
of women’s voices and experiences. As Charlesworth notes, “We must
work to ensure that women’s voices Wnd a public audience, to reorient
the boundaries of mainstream human rights law so that it incorpo-
rates an understanding of the world from the perspective of the socially
subjugated.”15 Coinciding with the critiques of human right’s Western
(cultural) bias, these feminist critiques argue that centering women’s
experiences can highlight the ways androcentric and Eurocentric
assumptions inform the deWnitions of human from which the idea of
human rights works.
The focus on experience, while incredibly generative, has nonethe-
less left open the question of whether there is any generic woman’s
experience. As calls to center women’s experiences within human rights
 Universalism and the Conceptual Limits to Human Rights 9

violations and gendered violence brought forth a wide variety of expe-

riences, debate around the universalizing of the category (woman)
brought to the forefront an old dilemma: To what extent can the cate-
gory woman work as a universalizing tool through which to gain polit-
ical strength? The idea of a common category can work to emphasize
the need for a shared agenda across national, cultural, racial, and eco-
nomic differences. At the same time, the use of woman as a tool through
which to make common claims also emphasizes differences, where
such a move might simply rehearse a “politics of virtue” where help is
not “freely given; there must be . . . some evidence that those receiving
help are in fact deserving of help,” a move that exposes the uneven
relationships among women that enable some women to speak for all
women.16 Women’s human rights thus simultaneously connotes the
promise of solidarity across difference and the reimposition of colonial
relationships, where “‘American’ feminists [are situated] as saviors and
rescuers of ‘oppressed women’ elsewhere within a ‘global’ economy
run by a few powerful states.”17
Patriarchy may be global in its scope, yet it is not universal in form.
This has made deWning women’s human rights difWcult, as the project
straddles the fact that what women’s human rights might mean for
women may differ from context to context even while the driving im-
petus is one that recognizes that women can share similar experiences
under patriarchy. Thus third world feminists have continued to take
issue with global feminisms that uncritically assume all women should
desire similar goals (usually tied to freedom and other monolithic con-
cepts deWned through Euro-American, often liberal, philosophical tra-
ditions). Even so, third world feminists also stress the importance of
recognizing the potential power of organizing around the global aspects
of gender-based violence. As Vasuki Nesiah notes, the human rights
framework “has been an enabling framework, internationalizing rights
discourse and thereby opening space to engage with the struggles of
‘Third World’ women. On the other hand, it has been restrictive. The
struggles of ‘Third World’ women have been conceptualized only
within the narrow vocabulary and institutional framework of rights
discourse.”18 Not recognizing the ways patriarchies are racialized and
differentially constructed, or the ways feminisms can work to free some
women at the cost of others enables human rights to further reassert
neocolonial relationships.
10 Universalism and the Conceptual Limits to Human Rights

Human rights and feminisms grapple with this paradox—catego-

ries of difference like woman cannot help but impose sameness across
the category, even while there is a desire to recognize the particulari-
ties of experiences within the category. On the one hand, such cate-
gories are not arbitrary. They have been historically deployed in such
ways as to create sameness and shared experiences (evident, for exam-
ple, in the experience of the transatlantic slave trade that racialized
people from all across Africa as black). On the other hand, Wghting
against the workings of power that homogenize difference (into a uni-
form, categorical understanding of women, for example) has often
taken the form of emphasizing the heterogeneity within such cate-
gories of difference, of demonstrating precisely the arbitrary nature of
the imposition of these categories. Put a different way, the concept of
universality is constituted through that of particularity, even as the con-
cepts are deWned in opposition to each other. Hence conceptualizing
claims to universality necessarily require the concept of particularity
(against which universal claims are deWned) even as claims to univer-
sality must disavow the particular. The result of this paradoxical oper-
ation is evident in claims to global diversity that desire to recognize
and protect difference and particularity, even as they advocate that these
particularities are subordinate to a broader order of universality.
Gender violence has a global resonance, yet calls for women’s
human rights or even claims made against patriarchy cannot account
for the multiplicity of ways rights, patriarchy, and even woman as a cat-
egory are understood and inhabited. However, abandoning calls for
recognition (of women, of women’s rights) across national and cultural
differences diminishes the wide-reaching impact of gender violence.
Shefali Desai perhaps poses the dilemma of feminisms and human rights
best when she notes:
In evaluating an Afghan woman’s refugee and asylum claim, feminist theory
can embrace neither cultural relativism and send the claimant back to her
country thus implying that the Taliban’s laws regulating women’s lives are merely
an expression of culture, nor universalism that would grant the claimant ref-
ugee status but fail to question the universality of internationally established
women’s human rights standards. The former addresses critiques of feminism
as merely another form of imperialism, but leaves feminism without a standard
by which to “condemn abuses of women throughout the world.” . . . Meanwhile,
the latter solution declares that all women suffer from patriarchal oppression
and that the way out of this oppression is by applying an established set of
 Universalism and the Conceptual Limits to Human Rights 11

human rights to the asylum claim. It offers “the promise of uniting women,”
but risks the oppressive essentialism that feminist theory seeks to combat.19

Articulating a tension that lies at the heart of feminist theorizing, orga-

nizing, and activism, Desai ponders the conundrum of universalism
and relativism that operates on multiple scales—from the academic fem-
inist debate around identity, experience, and difference to the concerns
of human rights organizations working to forge connections across
and between borders without privileging Western cultural lenses and
priorities.
Desai’s interest in refugee and asylum claims also points to the sig-
niWcance of human rights as a potential site where feminist interventions
and concerns might positively foster actions that reduce the day-to-day
impact of gendered violence. At the same time, it opens and encour-
ages theorizing of the extent to which “woman as human” is a useful
claim and the extent to which any claim or call that assumes a univer-
sal standard can address questions of violence. The conundrum for
feminist theorizing that Desai articulates grapples with the necessity of
addressing both a material violence—for Desai, one that is signiWed
through the example of “the Taliban’s laws regulating women’s lives”—
and a representational and epistemic one that threatens to rehearse
the troubling operations of power that characterize and enable impe-
rialism, colonialism, orientalism, essentialism, and so on.
Neither a claim to universal principles nor a claim to cultural rel-
ativism adequately addresses the global aspect of gendered violence.
Echoing concerns articulated by feminists like Uma Narayan about
the inadequacy of both “the imposition of Sameness”—that is, univer-
salizing claims that sisterhood is global—and an “insistence on Dif-
ference” that characterized the colonial encounter,20 Desai cautions
against any uncritical acceptance of feminism as divorced from impe-
rial and colonial projects. However, recognizing the ways feminism can
act as another site of imperial/colonial power “leaves feminism with-
out a standard by which to ‘condemn abuses of women throughout the
world.’” One suggestion Desai offers to manage this dilemma is to lis-
ten and hear “Afghan women’s voices . . . while concurrently contextu-
alizing the experiences being heard,” where Afghan women’s voices
are heard even as they are contextualized as “occupy[ing] relatively
privileged positions because they were in a situation where they could
12 Universalism and the Conceptual Limits to Human Rights

be heard.”21 While the importance of including and recognizing voices

previously excluded cannot be understated, hearing and including
“other” voices cannot alone serve as an end-all strategy for social jus-
tice. One of the reasons why inclusion is an incomplete strategy is cap-
tured in Desai’s recognition that “although more and more voices are
becoming a part of women’s human rights discourse, there are voices
that have not yet been heard and some that may never be heard.”22
For one, representational strategies pose difWculties in terms of
mechanization because there is no end to the multitudinous voices
waiting to be heard, as Desai acknowledges. These strategies of rep-
resentational inclusion also defer interrogations into the paradox of
universality that ultimately limit human rights projects. By maintaining
the distinction between speaker and listener, the strategy of hearing
voices risks being reduced to claims of authenticity. If the multitude of
voices can never be heard, then there is a need to establish authentic
voices that might be representative of a given experience. Under such
assumptions, dissenting voices can easily be labeled less authentic and
therefore relegated to less importance. For example, what happens when
Afghan women speak both for and against Taliban practices? What
happens when it is one voice that simultaneously supports and rejects
the Taliban? Such positions often become untenable or dismissed as
uninformed, disingenuous, or inauthentic. Thinking of these voices
as simply misguided or censored is too simplistic an answer to the
dilemma Desai poses. One side may argue that certain laws imposed
by the Taliban regime inXict gender violence, while another side may
argue that such a view comes from an ignorant position that does not
appreciate different cultural norms. Both claims are true, and both sides
can produce “native speakers” who attest to the validity of each side.
Where, then, are human rights and feminist critiques left?
Negotiating the dilemma of human rights—the dilemma of univer-
salism—through the institutional recognition of the individual voice,
where one woman’s deWnition of gender violence can differ from an-
other without taking away from the idea of the global aspect of patri-
archy privileges liberal principles of individualism. While it is admirably
diplomatic to suggest that conXicting claims around gender violence
can be equally true (the Taliban inXict gendered violence, the Taliban
protect women), such privileging of individual experiences and claims
can stiXe arguments about the broader-reaching mechanisms of power
 Universalism and the Conceptual Limits to Human Rights 13

that work by homogenizing and impacting communities rather than

individuals. When Afghan women critique U.S. military intervention
justiWed by the project of spreading women’s rights or when Afghan
women support the Taliban, how can we understand these positions
without reducing them to matters of individual perspective that fore-
close arguments about the global inXection of gendered violence and
neocolonial relationships? Answering such a question requires decon-
structing the conceptual principles that are more often than not taken
for granted in human rights talk, conceptual principles that privilege
modern, post-Enlightenment understandings of humanity, difference,
and the law.

Translating Human Rights: Negotiating Relativism

While feminist discourses have called for attentiveness to difference,

this very call has then been turned around and used to reinforce the
status quo, to justify patriarchal practices beneath claims to cultural
relativism. For example, in the case of the Taliban, the call for diversity
and attentiveness to cultural relativity has been used to justify prac-
tices that inXict gendered violence. At what point is the claim to cul-
tural relativism simply a rhetorical device used to maintain harmful
practices? At what point are claims to cultural relativism valid in their
critique of biases hidden within calls for universal principles and human
rights? These questions regarding the role of relativity and particular-
ity to human rights are often answered through the advocating of trans-
lation as a means to respect cultural particularism while also generating
a set of universal principles.
A strategy related to inclusion translation, as a means of uncover-
ing shared principles across different (cultural) contexts, is limited be-
cause it addresses a moment that comes too late. The fact that “trans-
lation by itself can also work in full complicity with the logic of colonial
expansion when translation becomes the instrument through which
dominant values are transposed into the language of the subordi-
nated,”23 is an effect of the conceptual terms established in the taking
for granted of universalism. In other words, that translation “can also
work in full complicity with the logic of colonial expansion” is a symp-
tom of the modern conditions of knowledge and subjectivity through
which the very notion of universality is constituted.
14 Universalism and the Conceptual Limits to Human Rights

What remains to be considered is the fact that the strategy of trans-

lation is already circumscribed by the very conditions of power produc-
ing “others” as signiWers of difference (as global particulars). Translation
already assumes a kind of transparency, between the speaking subject
and the act of speech—an assumption that misses the fact that speech,
and strategies of representation in general, is always already mediated
by the discursive conditions through which subjectivity is conferred,
exempliWed most vividly in the desire to elicit the testimonies of traf-
Wcking victims. In other words, the language of the subordinated is
always already shaped with and through dominant values; there is no
pure language of the subordinated. Rather, the language of the sub-
ordinated needs to be understood as situated within a discursive land-
scape shaped through the dynamic and dialectical relationship between
what gets labeled as subordinate and dominant.
Translation is thus an instrument that enables universality, and
universality is that which underwrites modern regimes of power. Thus
strategies of translation and questions of translatability come too late
in the sense that they assume the very conditions of power they hope
to challenge. In the example of debates surrounding Islamic law, trans-
lation becomes a way to protect the idea of Islamic law (as a cultural
particular) while still condemning its speciWc application. This is one
way to negotiate the need to uphold cultural particularities like Islam,
which shape societies as different, while still condemning this very par-
ticularity for being different and thereby insisting on universalism. For
example, in a 2001 congressional hearing held just after the attack on
September 11, House representative Ileana Ros-Lehtinen (R-Fla.) artic-
ulates the issue of Islam and cultural relativism this way:
In 1996, a heavy shroud was placed on the people of Afghanistan when the
Taliban captured Kabul. Since then, the Taliban has taken the peaceful and
sacred scriptures of the Prophet Muhammad, and distorted them into a rule-
book of terror. . . . The Taliban is far from being students of the true Muslim
faith. . . . The U.S. role is not to dictate what a post-Taliban government will
look like. Our role is to empower and enable, in order to ensure that the true
and unfettered voice of the Afghan people is heard loudly and clearly.24

Ros-Lethinen’s framing keeps from vilifying Islam as a whole by sug-

gesting that the Taliban regime distorts the “peaceful and sacred scrip-
tures.” Here the cultural particularities of Islam and Islamic law are
perverted in the Taliban’s speciWc translation and interpretation of
 Universalism and the Conceptual Limits to Human Rights 15

the Qur’an. Playing on the idea of authenticity, Ros-Lethinen’s framing

negotiates particularity by implying that the true voices of the Afghan
people remain unrepresented and unheard as a result of the Taliban.
By suggesting that regimes like the Taliban simply translate the Qur’an
in patriarchal and repressive ways, translation arguments can defer the
paradox of universality by simultaneously condemning particularity
while also upholding it.
The desire to maintain universality and a conception of universal
human rights, and the conXict it faces in the midst of claims to rela-
tivism, thus informs the move to (re)cast the issue of particularity as
a matter of dialogue and translation. In another example, Abdullahi
Ahmed An-Na’im notes that maintaining an international system of
order situated within a (diverse) landscape of localities means that

the norms of the international system should be validated in terms of the values
and institution of each culture, and also in terms of shared or similar values
and institutions of all cultures. This can be achieved, I suggest, through what
I call “internal discourse” within the framework of each culture, and “cross-
cultural dialogue” among the various cultural traditions of the world.25

Like many others, the solution that An-Na’im proposes is one prem-
ised on the belief that proper “internal” and “cross-cultural” dialogue
“among the various cultural traditions of the world” will yield a more
accurate sense of universal principles. For An-Na’im, each culture must
engage in “internal discourse” discussing what values should be vali-
dated. The inclusion of “other” voices is key here in bringing to the
forefront (of their own cultures and governments, as well those of the
rest of the world) those values or cultural traditions that should or
should not be deemed universal. Thus critiques of cultural practices
begin within the cultural community.
This is a powerful strategy in the ways it attempts to recenter de-
bates around human rights and universalism on those communities that
in the past had been marginalized in such decisions and discussions.
However, it is also a strategy that works only with the assumption that
so-called cultural communities are discrete and bounded entities, an
assumption the limits of which are well documented by anthropologists
and legal scholars critical of the use of culture as a (legal) defense.26
This position does not have a way to address the fact that concepts,
frameworks, and value systems are not bound to (cultural, geographic)
16 Universalism and the Conceptual Limits to Human Rights

communities. In fact, so-called cultural actors (whether so-called in-

siders or outsiders) deWne a cultural community or tradition as such
through a dynamic process that works through both what is perceived
to be “our” cultural tradition and what is perceived as “theirs.”
While an understandable desire, these calls to discover or establish
universal principles by attempting to more accurately represent the
various “contesting norms that constitute the international Weld,” work
from the already presupposed and taken for granted notion of univer-
sality. Rather than interrogate the production of the very concept of
the universal, calls to locate universality can never adequately consider
the regimes of knowledge that have instituted the universal within
both the realm of transparency and the juridical frame. The solution
of dialogue operates to ensure the mythic quality of universality; uni-
versal principles and values guiding human rights are constructed as
coming out of the social process of dialogue, even while that dialogue
must already be in line with a preexisting notion of universal princi-
ples. The revelation of this mythic component is subsumed into its very
narrative unfolding; the notion of dialogue ensures that the threat of
relativism to universal rights is rendered a moment in the issuing of uni-
versality. The dilemma here is that the values validated through cross-
cultural dialogue are exactly those values that enable cross-cultural
dialogue. Universal principles are assumed to be transcendent; they
are simply reafWrmed as universal by being reXected back through inter-
nal dialogue. While this moment of mirroring and reiteration can be
read as holding the potential of “contamination and displacement”27
of the original term or terms being translated, the conditions of con-
tamination and displacement are already constricted. Thus, altering
existing paradigms, frameworks, and mechanisms is always a rather
slow, contested process of negotiation.

Modern Foundations: Human Rights and the Limits of Law

The desire to locate universal principles through translation—dialogue

between different groups—presupposes the conditions of difference
that are assumed to impede human rights projects. The presupposition
of particularity/difference takes for granted the operations of power
that write universality as a real and discoverable object rather than as
a conceptual mechanism and myth that structures how human rights
 Universalism and the Conceptual Limits to Human Rights 17

can be framed and understood. This is why debates around how to de-
Wne human rights continue to replay the same conversations. How do
we represent difference and different cultural values while still uphold-
ing universal principles? How can we avoid establishing universal prin-
ciples that normalize or take for granted a dominant (often Western)
perspective? How do we avoid reestablishing colonial relationships in
the quest to ensure human rights? Questions such as these, important
and valid as they are, are outcomes of the taking for granted of the
principle of universality as a transcendent aspiration in opposition to
the (sometimes clouded) operations of particular cultural values.
The modern regime of power established in the Enlightenment and
post-Enlightenment projects that sought to explain the nature of man
and his difference from things, animals, and slaves posited the notion
of humanity as universally deWned by his capacity to reason, his ability
to exist as self-conscious, and his recognition of the rule of law. These
three aspects determined the conferring of subjectivity between men as
well as distinguished men from nonhuman things. As the philosophers
of man reasoned about those attributes distinguishing man, they were
most concerned with describing the conditions around them: the con-
dition of Europe.28 The most complex society, handled by the most
rational of men and demonstrating the rule of law, was located in ex-
actly that place where these philosophers of man were situated: Western
Europe. The writing of this subject as the model of humanity envisioned
this subject as universal—a standard against which all other conscious-
nesses and subjectivities could be measured. Thus one key hallmark of
the modern episteme, of the paradigms of knowledge established in
Enlightenment and post-Enlightenment texts on man, is an understand-
ing of man (the human) as he who knows his difference from what he
is not (his “others”), a formulation memorably accounted in Hegel’s
reconciliation of the subject with his constitutive outside.29
Reason, in these accounts, enables self-knowing by governing (and
producing) the interior mind of man, where man is situated as a self-
knowing subject in his recognition of himself over the course of time
(temporal scene) and against what he is not (spatial scene).30 Thus sub-
jectivity is constituted, in Hegel’s work, for instance, through the inte-
riority of the rational mind, which can distinguish himself from his
past and future self, and through the exteriority of the distinction he
can make between himself and the (nonhuman) things of nature. As
18 Universalism and the Conceptual Limits to Human Rights

Denise Ferriera da Silva catalogs, these premises established modern

subjectivity through a moment of consolidation when man realizes that
the things outside him signal a moment in the actualization of his self-
consciousness and mind. It was Hegel’s rationalization of those other
things of nature that enabled modern (European) men to reconcile the
existence of the nonrational others of Europe (natives, slaves, colonial
others) as “enabling others” that only existed to afWrm the humanity
of the self-knowing subject. Hence non-Europeans were established as
the less rational “others” of Europe, who exist within this Wguring only
to enable the actualization of modern, enlightened rationality: “A cen-
tral promise of Enlightenment and Western modernity is that conXicts
between knowledge and power can be overcome by grounding claims
to and the exercise of authority in reason. . . . [Reason] operates iden-
tically in each subject and it can grasp laws that are objectively true.” 31
This writing of the post-Enlightenment European subject as a univer-
sal standard of mankind is enabled through the conceptualizing of the
rule of law as both a product of men’s actions (social) even as it exists
above and beyond the scope of the society of men (transcendent). So
long as the law and reason are transcendent and all, even global “oth-
ers,” are subject to them, the particular project of European moder-
nity could write its own legal systems as global models.
The universalizing of the project of European modernity can also
be apprehended by understanding the ways the law negotiated the con-
tradictions of the social contract and freedom. For Locke and others,
the absolute state of freedom or nature is always imagined to be in con-
stant negotiation with the desire for peace—a peace that cannot be
instituted without governance (which draws its legitimacy from Law).32
Natural rights are thus always sacriWced to some extent to ensure civil
society, whether this sacriWce happens out of fear of anarchy or out of
desire for peace. This understanding of society establishes the law as
crucial to negotiating civil society, to negotiating freedom for peace
(or mutual freedom). The law’s mythological aspect as universal and
beyond man’s creation ensures the idea of freedom; man is subject to
the law, but because the law is not man’s creation, he remains free. At
the same time, man’s laws are necessary to maintain peace, for instance
to keep men from killing each other, which cannot happen without sac-
riWcing freedom. Thus the law restricts freedom to ensure freedom. His-
torically, this contradiction of freedom at the heart of social contract
 Universalism and the Conceptual Limits to Human Rights 19

theories has justiWed slavery and colonialism, where the freedoms of

some (the enslaved, the colonized, the native) were viewed as necessar-
ily repressed or forfeited for the beneWt of peace. In other words, slav-
ery is not necessarily antithetical to freedom, given the contradiction
of freedom instituted through modern knowledge. Thus the story of
the social contract hinges on the simultaneous writing in and writing
out of an “other” that represents a state of man before the reasoned
apprehension of laws.
The majority of work on human rights generated out of disciplines
like political science and international relations deWnes human rights
in terms of the struggle and negotiation of the state (civil society) with
natural law/rights (human rights). In this context, human rights are
deWned as universal, moral, ethical, natural rights—rights that extend
beyond the state or the contracts of the civil society. Charlotte Bunch
describes human rights “as inalienable,” rights that “no one can volun-
tarily abdicate . . . since those are rights which we have by virtue of
being human.” 33 In this sense, human rights as natural rights are beyond
the legitimate governance of the state where the state can only ensure
their protection, but cannot restrict their exercise. Human rights thus
produce a global context beyond the boundaries of the state and always
already assume the human as subject to (state) juridical governance.
The law thus works as the precondition to global civil society, and
it is the function of the law as simultaneously man’s creation and not
man’s creation that institutes human rights as a modern project. In
order to reconcile the “contradiction between [law’s] autonomy and
law’s social dependence,” the law must be elevated to the realm of myth
and given a mythological quality in its “transcendence of its own myth
of origin where it is imperiously set against certain ‘others’ who con-
centrate the qualities it opposes.”34 The move to rationalize law as both
a socially interpreted set of rules as well as a universal force necessi-
tates a Wgure (an “other”) that stands before the law, both in the tem-
poral and epistemological sense. The possibility that this premodern
enabling other might eventually learn to properly apprehend human
rights and join global civil society reconciles the law as both particu-
lar (social) and universal (transcendent).35 It is the possibility of the
“other’s” inclusion into the (correct) legal systems—into civilization
and human rights—that makes possible the contradictory aspects of
the law. Thus the conditions that enable the “other” are not dismantled
20 Universalism and the Conceptual Limits to Human Rights

in the inclusionary moment; rather, the inclusionary moment is simply

another chapter in a modern regime of knowledge. Problematic rela-
tions of power and privilege remain because the strategy of inclusion
cannot dismantle, because it is a part of the actualization of, the very
operations of modern subject formation that constitute difference/par-
ticularity in the Wrst place. Even while the law is deWnitive to the modern
narrative and enables the power and authority of modern knowledge,
it is also able to hide this constitutive relation. It is the universal and
transcendent deWnition of the law that operates to deWne human rights
as a moral matter beyond reproach, while the social/practical deWni-
tion and deployment of the law is seen as that which must be changed
(in certain cultural circumstances). So long as deWnitions of human
rights assume a framework that dichotomizes it as a matter of moral law
posited against culturally particular interpretations and legal systems
that may or may not protect human rights, it remains limited in its abil-
ity to address justice.
In the context of human rights, the law is often assumed a universal
tool (that is, a tool that all humans recognize) that can, when perverted,
violate human rights, or, when deployed, properly protect them. This
fundamental assumption about the transparency of the law is one that
also restricts understanding the limits of the law itself. So long as human
rights assumes the frame of the social contract and natural law (law as
surpassing human creation), which is posited against rational law (law
as human creation), it remains decidedly trapped to rehearse and re-
enact (neo)colonial relationships. So long as human rights assumes a
framing that deWnes universalism as both the sum of and more than the
sum of its particular (cultural) components, it remains mired in the
modern condition, left to ask the same questions again and again: “Is
this universal? Can we discover universal principles through translating
across particular cultural contexts?” What needs to be better addressed
in discussions of human right is the way human rights assumes and in-
stitutes modern regimes of knowledge and subjectivity. This chapter
attempts to make a compelling argument for why such work is necessary.

Attending to Absences
These conceptual foundations are evident in the ways they structure rep-
resentations of human rights abuses like sex trafWcking. To demonstrate
 Universalism and the Conceptual Limits to Human Rights 21

the ways assumptions around human rights enacting subjectivities

are reXected in the framing of antitrafWcking representations and are
shaped by such representations, the chapter concludes by considering
an antitrafWcking United Nations OfWce of Drugs and Crime–produced
public service announcement (PSA), “Open Your Eyes to Human Traf-
Wcking” (2008).36 The most recent of a series of antitrafWcking an-
nouncements (“Cleaning Woman,” 1998, 2003; “Work Abroad,” 2001;
“Better Future,” 2002; “Telephone,” 2003), “Open Your Eyes” was re-
leased as part of the Global Initiative to Fight Human TrafWcking, and
it demonstrates the ways the taking for granted of modern and liberal
principles restricts the ways human rights can be represented.
“Open Your Eyes” begins with an image of an older white man walk-
ing down the streets of an outdoor marketplace. The speciWc locale of
the marketplace is ambiguous, though it is represented as a multicultural
space where white, black, and brown bodies provide the background.
The white male protagonist is shown shopping at the various market
stalls. His Wrst encounter is one where he sees an overweight white man,
standing and eating french fries and a sandwich in a greedy manner,
as food falls onto the sidewalk. This man is presented as unkempt, from
the food stains on his clothes to his unshaven face. Behind him are two
men, one white and one black, both skeletal in frame, lifting and mov-
ing boxes. The camera pans suggest that the two men working in the
background work for the overweight man in the foreground. As the
scene shifts, the two skeletal men are depicted eating the dropped food
left on the sidewalk by the now absent overweight man.
In the next encounter, the announcement depicts the protagonist
smiling at a young black boy, who is sitting on the sidewalk panhandling.
The protagonist then nods to acknowledge another older white man
whom he passes as he walks down the street. After nodding back to the
protagonist, this other white man forcefully grabs the arm of the sitting
black child as he scoops the money into his plate and takes the boy away.
In the protagonist’s Wnal encounter, he watches from a distance another
older white man in a business suit talking to a woman in the doorway of
a small business. Inside the building is a younger woman sitting on a
chair, looking forlorn. Both women are nonwhite, perhaps Central South
Asian. As the protagonist looks on, the other white man exchanges bills
with the woman and walks into the room with the girl, closing the door
behind him. While the earlier scenes present the protagonist smiling
22 Universalism and the Conceptual Limits to Human Rights

and enjoying himself, in the Wnal scene, he glances over his shoulder
with a concerned look, suggesting that he has Wnally opened his eyes.
The announcement ends in a white screen with text reading “open your
eyes to human trafWcking,” leaving the viewer to wonder what, if any-
thing, the protagonist might do. The announcement contains no dia-
logue, and the only text that accompanies it reads, “It’s a hidden crime.
It’s happening all around us,” ending in the Wnal sentence, “Open your
eyes to human trafWcking.” The music accompanying the announcement
is the refrain to “Wonderful Life,” a 1987 song by British pop band
Black, which sings, “No need to run or hide; it’s a wonderful, wonder-
ful life. No need to laugh or cry; it’s a wonderful, wonderful life.”
Creating a clear distinction between the (human rights) actor hold-
ing the potential for change and the passive victims waiting for help,
viewers are assumed to identify and sympathize with the white older
man who is the announcement’s protagonist. That the protagonist is
marked (through race, mobility, dress) as similar to the trafWckers and
victimizers allows the announcement to draw a moral distinction be-
tween the at-Wrst-unaware protagonist and his criminal counterparts.
The victims depicted in the announcement represent the widely circu-
lated assumptions around the different kinds of victims trafWcked for
different forms of labor: men trafWcking for bonded labor, children
trafWcked for various types of exploitation, and women trafWcked for
sexual labor. It is the Wnal moment, when the announcement’s protag-
onist witnesses the girl trafWcked for sex, that he begins to question
what he has been looking at but not seeing. The announcement, which
never suggests what leads the victims into their condition as trafWcked
subject, works to prioritize the moral lens in representing and under-
standing trafWcking, which asks the privileged presumed Wrst world
traveler to “open his eyes.”
While there is only one female victim represented in this announce-
ment, read together with the other PSAs, particularly “Cleaning Woman”
and “Telephone,” the signiWcance of the racial and national frames
distinguishing female victims of sex trafWcking implied in the announce-
ments points to the conditions attached to how human rights subjec-
tivities can be framed. “Cleaning Woman” is an announcement similar
to “Open Your Eyes” in that it is directed toward white, presumed Wrst
world subjects (whether they might potentially help rescue victims or ex-
ploit them).37 It appeals to a sense of moral obligations among women
 Universalism and the Conceptual Limits to Human Rights 23

to help save (racially, nationally) other women who are victimized

through sex trafWcking. “Telephone” is the only PSA directed toward
the trafWcked subject and depicts three characters, one African, one
Asian, and one Latin American woman, who are sex-trafWcking victims
breaking free and calling a United Nations help line. “Cleaning Woman”
and “Telephone,” as PSAs speciWcally addressing sex trafWcking, were
aired on American Forces Network, a television station dedicated to
U.S. armed-service personnel stationed abroad in places like South
Korea. This message is in line with U.S. Department of Defense docu-
ments that chronicle the efforts undertaken to implement a zero toler-
ance policy on trafWcking, which includes “training . . . for every mili-
tary person that goes overseas, educating him on this [trafWcking for
sexual labor] issue.”38 Amid criticism that militarism abroad partici-
pates in, rather than combats, trafWcking activities by fueling demand
for sexual services, the U.S. Department of Defense has undertaken
this high-proWle zero-tolerance campaign issued in 2002 by President
Bush.39 As part of these measures, the effort in South Korea is coupled
with the U.N. public service announcements.
While there is much to laud about the DOD’s recent efforts to
combat the soliciting of sexual services by service personnel stationed
abroad, these efforts in large part focus on reforming individuals, a
message also represented in the U.N. announcements that focus on
white male and female rescuers or nonwhite individual victimized
women. Rather than question the structural mechanisms behind mili-
tarism that operate on and help perpetuate heteronormative regula-
tory ideals around masculinity and the necessity of (state) violence,40
DOD responses to military prostitution and intimate and sexual vio-
lence focus instead on reforming the moral obligations of individual
soldiers (that is, good men protect women’s sexuality). Further, as Meg-
hana Nayak points out in her examination of DOD efforts since the
late 1980s to address sexual violence (for instance, relationship vio-
lence, harassment, and rape), these efforts actually “limit sociopolitical
recognition [of sexual violence] in several ways. First, sexual violence
only matters to the extent that it interferes with the military’s progress
in being ‘mission-ready.’ . . . Second, the actual experiences of all sur-
vivors of military violence are not represented [in the existing military
mechanisms to address such violence]. . . . Third, the responses fail to
thoroughly and diligently understand why sexual violence occurs.”41
24 Universalism and the Conceptual Limits to Human Rights

In the U.N. anti-sex-trafWcking announcements, the female vic-

tims are represented through their sexualized vulnerability as sex slaves
marked also through their racial difference as not white. Because there
is no gesture to suggest the conditions that lead to trafWcking (only the
moral frame distinguishing criminals from victims and potential res-
cuers), the announcements keep viewers from questioning the role of
structural factors like militarism and global circulations of capital in
enabling trafWcking. The victims in “Telephone,” “Cleaning Woman,”
and “Open Your Eyes” are all suggested to be victims in part because
they are not allowed to work as formalized members of the economy
and therefore have no formal means to ensure protection from labor
abuses (they are undocumented laborers, panhandlers, and sex work-
ers). Coupled with the representation of criminals and exploiters as
individuals (the overweight man, the other white man, the woman run-
ning the brothel, and the man in the business suit), “Open Your Eyes”
fails to implicate corporate capital and businesses as also enabling traf-
Wcking activities. Furthermore, this framing does little to trouble the
fact that undocumented labor (labor with no legal protections), whether
coerced or not, has been a necessary feature that has historically en-
abled capital accumulation and proWt. Put another way, if “Open Your
Eyes” suggested more strongly that the protagonist’s participation in
the multicultural marketplace is not so distanced from that of his
antagonist counterparts who trafWc, exploit, and solicit, the represen-
tation of trafWcking might shift to implicate a different set of questions:
How do global mechanisms of capitalism enable and shape trafWcking
activities? How do they naturalize certain forms of labor over others?
How does capital accumulation depend on undocumented and unreg-
ulated labor of all kinds? What makes some work legitimate but not
others? Is migration ever a choice?
Thinking about trafWcking through lenses that focus on interro-
gating existing (legal, human rights) paradigms for understanding
migration threatens to question the structural ways current political,
legal, and economic modes of relations institutionalize the need for
less formal and therefore less regulated kinds of work. Rather, the
focus of “Open Your Eyes” around the difference between the unaware
traveler and consumer who might potentially be a rescuer and his
various knowing yet morally corrupt counterparts makes trafWcking a
matter of suspect cultures and individual moral capacities. The register
 Universalism and the Conceptual Limits to Human Rights 25

of race that is sometimes used to distinguish the protagonist from the

trafWcked victims (and in the case of sex trafWcking, the brothel owner
negotiating with the white male john) works to gesture to the absent
yet implied presence of the cultures from which the victims were traf-
Wcked. While the criminal trafWckers and johns are represented in the
announcement, “Open Your Eyes” suggests the there are other crimi-
nals left unrepresented: people or contexts that enabled the victims to
be trafWcked in the Wrst place, whether they are family members or cul-
tural conditions that leave victims little choice.
These “culpable cultures” are signiWcant in that they reveal the con-
ditions of inclusion and the conditions of universality42—conditions
that require a difference against which subjectivity can be conferred.
The victims in the announcements must be saved in order to ensure
the inclusionary impulse of modernity’s universality. Yet the conditions
of subjectivity offered through the announcement require an enabling
negation, an “other” against which the human rights–enacting subject
can be deWned. If the trafWcking victims do not represent this enabling
negation, their cultural counterparts back home do. The visual logic
linking these victims to the cultural community from which the traf-
Wcking narrative originates ties the victims to the very cultures (of patri-
archy, of poverty) that lead to victimization, thus establishing the need
for outside rescue. By rendering trafWcking a matter of moral law and
human rights, the inclusion of the global “others” negotiates the fun-
damental dilemma of liberal theories of rights and law—the tension
between universality and particularity. The “other” Wgures enable the
recuperation of the myth of universality by marking the inclusion of
particularity even while her victimization to a (deviant) culture (of patri-
archy, of poverty, of corrupt values) signals a particularity that must be
disavowed. The question is not whether and how the universal can be
truly universal in the sense that it reXects more accurately the multi-
tude of differences. The strategy of Wnding voices or of acknowledg-
ing the multitudinous nature of speech in an effort to uncover or even
redeWne universals that are shared across difference fails to interro-
gate and deconstruct the distinction between listener and speaker, and
between universal and particular, which is the fundamental epistemo-
logical issue constraining human rights projects.
One signiWcant drawback to connecting the limits of human rights
and the law to epistemological foundations is that this approach can
26 Universalism and the Conceptual Limits to Human Rights

seem hopeless. It is not realistic to simply ignore the conditions of

knowledge that shape how to know; ignoring these conditions leaves
us with the same dilemmas, of human rights claims being used to reify
neocolonial relationships, of the law working to naturalize develop-
mental narratives of progress and backwardness, and of feminisms work-
ing against deconstructing power relations. Yet if there is no outside to
knowledge—in other words, if these regimes of knowledge always already
establish the parameters through which subjects act—then changing
such conditions seems an impossible task. The remaining chapters of
this book acknowledge these difWculties; however difWcult and seem-
ingly hopeless, altering the epistemological conditions through which
we know the “real” is not an impossible task. It is a task that requires
acknowledging the ways in which what is often categorically dismissed
as theoretical, abstract, and ungrounded is in fact a necessary compo-
nent to the so-called grounded realities of daily life. Thus how we come
to know trafWcking as such, and what assumptions and frameworks
shape conventional understandings of trafWcking, are questions the
remainder of this book considers.
2. Speaking Subjects, Classifying Consent
Narrating Sexual Violence and Morality through Law

Du rin g a con gre s s i onal hearing on human trafWck-

ing held in 2007, Zipora Mazengo, an immigrant from Tanzania who
was awarded a T visa, testiWed to her experiences as a victim of trafWck-
ing. She stated that her employers (diplomats) held her for four years,
withholding pay and her passport and not allowing her to venture out-
side their home. Mazengo describes her experience this way:
Once when I did not prepare her [employer] breakfast she hit me on the face
and sent me in my summer clothes to stand outside in the snow. She told me
that if I complained, “blood would fall on the Xoor.” . . . When my toe became
infected [my employers] did not take me to a doctor. My feet bled until I could
not wear shoes, but [my employer] made me go outside to shovel snow in bare
feet. . . . I agreed to come today to speak to you because I do not want what
happened to me to happen to anybody else.1

Narratives like Mazengo’s proliferate in trafWcking documents, though

direct testimonies are rarer than representative stories loosely based
on true events with Wctional victims. Such narratives help illustrate the
various contexts of trafWcking and help outline victim proWles even
when they are Wctionalized accounts. For the U.S. Department of State
and prosecutors, having victim stories helps to identify and make a
case against trafWckers. While the kinds of scripts that gain currency
in courtrooms and public media are important in validating experi-
ences like Mazengo’s, it is also important to examine how some scripts
and stories become privileged over others. In part because trafWcking
is deWned as an ambiguous and hidden activity, creating stories that
are representative of trafWcking abuses is a necessary part of seeing
and identifying victims. Yet there is more going on in the production,
circulation, and validation of trafWcking stories than simply exposing a
hidden truth; the ways in which certain scripts gain currency can im-
pose a different form of violence on trafWcked subjects, one that is
symbolic or representational. For example, in the 2005 United States v.

27
28 Speaking Subjects, Classifying Consent

Trakhtenberg case, prosecutors brought charges against alleged traf-

Wckers on the basis of evidence that included statements to the police
provided by a witness and victim referred to as Eva Petrova. During
prosecution proceedings, Petrova refused to testify in court, asserting
that her initial statements to the police, which describe her experience
as one of victimization, were obtained under threat of deportation.
Contesting the limited terms of representation, Petrova elected to
return to Russia before the trial and responded with the following let-
ter to the court (authenticated by a Russian lawyer):

The authorities’ reps had forced me to develop a hostile stand with defendants
in order to portrait [sic] myself as a victim. . . . Many events were presented
incorrectly and were grossly exaggerated. . . . They [U.S. law enforcement]
told me that if I am not going to cooperate with them, I am going to be charged
with alleged illegal entry into the U.S. . . . and that I will be placed in the immi-
gration jail for a long period of time and then deported.2

According to Petrova, she and four other women from Russia were
smuggled into the United States with the intention of performing sex
work in New Jersey and New York. Petrova writes that she does not see
herself as a sexually trafWcked victim, though she was identiWed as such
by law enforcement.
While there are a plethora of reasons as to why Petrova would feel
the need to qualify her statements to the police and law enforcement,
what is interesting about her letter is the fact that even though it is evi-
dence that she refuses to see and narrate herself as a victim, her refusal
and retraction are nonetheless used by the courts to justify her rescue.
Law enforcement initially refused to accept a statement from Petrova
that did not portray her as a victim, according to her complaint, and
the court ultimately rewarded her $4,280 in restitution as a victim of
sex trafWcking despite her decision to Xee the United States to avoid
providing further testimony.3 The way in which Petrova’s concerns were
simply cast aside in the Wnal ruling suggests that her objections to her
alleged coerced testimony were perceived as simply an insincere at-
tempt to retract as a result of trauma or fear of retribution from her
alleged trafWckers. Whether this was in fact the case is never an issue
the court or law enforcement took up with Petrova. In an ironic turn
of events, Petrova stated in a different letter to the court: “I was forced
to provide inaccurate and imprecise information about the defendants
 Speaking Subjects, Classifying Consent 29

and certain events. . . . The U.S. authorities’ reps instructed me on how

to construct conversations in order to obtain statements that authori-
ties needed.”4 Furthermore, Petrova stated that incessant threats made
by U.S. authorities to narrate a particular kind of victim narrative
caused her to have a nervous breakdown, which certainly calls into ques-
tion exactly to what circumstances Petrova is victim.
Petrova’s case demonstrates the need to situate and analyze exist-
ing notions of violence and rights and to reexamine the legal mecha-
nisms in place to “rescue” trafWcking subjects. TrafWcking prosecution
cases like Trakhtenberg help shape “individual and collective images of
victims and victimization” that work as part of the discursive landscape
through which the courts, law enforcement, advocates, and trafWcked
subjects navigate.5 Such collective images shape legal and cultural sto-
ries that not only help identify sex trafWcking, but also deWne the rhe-
torical parameters through which trafWcked subjects like Petrova can
become legible where “meanings [are] created in the courtroom for a
larger public.” 6 This chapter considers the ways the Victims of Traf-
Wcking and Violence Protection Act (VTVPA) has worked to establish
a proWle of the trafWcked victim in order to consider the ways anti-
trafWcking activities might actually impose their own form of violence
even as these activities also provide aid and relief. Petrova’s case thus
illuminates the need to consider not only how victim status is deWned
and conferred, but whether including potential trafWcked subjects
into the realm of legally recognized, rights-bearing subjects (as the U.S.
state currently imagines it) can be taken as a singular and universal
goal toward justice and redress.
This chapter considers how trafWcking victims come to be deWned
and represented through legal and state mechanisms by situating the
VTVPA within a historical context of sexual violence and immigration
laws. Given that the VTVPA passed as a bill that combined the Traf-
Wcking Victims Protection Act ( TVPA) with an updated version of the
Violence Against Women Act (VAWA originally passed in 1994), sex
trafWcking is considered within the broader legal frame of sexual vio-
lence and can be read as a different kind of rape story, one that impli-
cates illicit border crossings while hiding state violence in policing
national borders. How the category of trafWcked victim comes to be
deWned and represented is part of a broader historical process of polic-
ing and producing the boundaries of citizenship–processes that are
30 Speaking Subjects, Classifying Consent

informed by and help shape racial meanings and gender/sexual norms.

The chapter considers the impact of linking justice to a trajectory of
subjecthood that moves from silenced victim to speaking subject. Given
that the courtroom and the stories told there both reXect and help
shape cultural understandings of citizenship, this chapter begins to
map how a particular victim narrative is shaped through legal and cul-
tural sites, an effort undertaken in subsequent chapters as well.

TrafWcking and Sexual Violence

TrafWcking, particularly as it is deWned in its primary deWnition as

forced or coerced sexual labor, works within existing legal frameworks
for understanding the role of consent in intimate and sexual violence
crimes. The long U.S. legal history of regulating sex and morality
(through marriage, rape, inheritance, obscenity, pornography, prosti-
tution, child care, and other related laws) has worked to establish and
ensure patriarchal, economic, and racial privileges.7 Sex trafWcking,
insofar as it conjures the image of a victim “chained to a bed in a
brothel,” 8 invokes gender, sexual and racialized discourses of morality,
criminality, and vulnerability that have also shaped sexual and intimate
violence laws, particularly rape laws. While the case-by-case litigation
strategies and outcomes vary widely in the many types of crimes labeled
sexual and intimate violence, providing the broad strokes of how sex-
ual violence gets framed through the law can establish a useful context
to understanding legal and state measures undertaken to separate sex
trafWcking from other forms of sexual violence. In particular, how the
legal components of force and (lack of) consent (and to a lesser extent
mens rea or criminal intent) help frame rape as a criminal matter can
provide context and demonstrate the contrasting gendered, sexual,
national, and racial assumptions that work to inform sex trafWcking
subjectivity.
Feminist and antirape activists and advocates have drawn attention
to the discrepancy in social and legal measures to address rape given
its prevalence, and they link rape and its relative disregard by the law
to the institutionalizing of sexual violence and power.9 The legal and
criminal deWnition of rape deWnes it as sexual intercourse by force
and without consent.10 Traditionally, the courts have privileged physi-
cal force as an indicator of lack of consent, and silent compliance has
 Speaking Subjects, Classifying Consent 31

amounted to consent if there was no proof of threat of bodily harm.11

Legal reforms during the late 1970s ensued in part as a result of fem-
inist and antirape movement activisms. These reforms sought to make
rape more visible, particularly “private rape” taking place among non-
strangers. These changes to the law were implemented in an effort to
make prosecuting intimate violence and rape crimes easier.12 SpeciW-
cally, changes to rape law at the state level (in all states) relaxed the
ways consent and resistance were deWned to allow for reasonable resist-
ance (so a victim does not need to actively Wght off an assailant), which
tempered traditional approaches that equated resistance to the use of
force. While the extent to which individual states deWne or even re-
quire proof of resistance varies, overall changes are aimed at allowing
greater Xexibility in considering what constitutes resistance and force.
Other reforms included repealing corroboration requirements, shield
legislation that limits the instances when sexual character could be
introduced as evidence, opening up the possibility of marital rape, and
eliminating prompt complaint requirements.13
As Catharine MacKinnon, Carole Pateman, Meghana Nayak, and
others make clear, the public/private frame that operates as a corner-
stone of Western legal traditions shapes what forms of violence can be
legally recognizable.14 Historically, this has worked to establish certain
relations as private and therefore outside or tangential to so-called pub-
lic matters of law and politics. Many of the crimes that currently fall
under the umbrella of sexual violence have been (and continue to be)
difWcult to litigate despite legal reforms due to the continued preva-
lence of the private/public frame as well as the presumption of the
reasonable person taken for granted in jurisprudence, evident, for in-
stance, in the historic inability of wives to make any claims of sexual
violence against husbands as a result of legal and cultural attitudes that
such matters were private. Thus, “in the context of intimate violence,
the impulse behind feminist legal arguments [is] to redeWne the rela-
tionship between the personal and the political, to deWnitively link vio-
lence and gender,” particularly when it comes to domestic violence and
marital rape where notions of marital privacy have posed challenges
to addressing the role of family structures in enabling violence.15 How-
ever, the notion of marital privacy has been unevenly applied, and this
is especially true when considering historical instances when so-called
private matters between wives and husbands became public concerns,
32 Speaking Subjects, Classifying Consent

notably when such matters threatened existing racial, class, and gender
relations.16
One feminist theory of rape that gained salience during the 1970s
and 1980s rape-reform activisms thus attempted to deWne rape as a
crime about power and dominance, making rape a public matter. For
instance, Susan Brownmiller’s work asserts that “although rape involves
sex . . . it is not a sex crime but a crime of power and aggression. . . .
Through rape or threat of rape, men control women.”17 What was often
left unaddressed in these approaches were the ways racial power works
to differentiate the context of rape, for example, in cases where the
threat of rape has historically allowed white women to control non-
white men. Thus despite efforts to reform rape and sexual violence laws
so that they better recognize and address gendered violence, the per-
sistence of racialized scripts of feminine vulnerability to masculine
aggression are left largely unaddressed due to the court’s insistence on
a so-called color-blind and neutral approach to the law, which makes
the court unwilling to address the ways an “entrenched racism frames
the criminal-justice system.”18 One result of this is a “signiWcant gap
in the enforcement of crimes committed against [black versus white
rape victims],” which is tied both to the underreporting of rape by black
women, “prosecutors[’ decisions to] decline to pursue black women’s
rape allegations for a variety of reasons, ranging from their own prej-
udice to the prejudice of juries that may render such cases unwin-
nable,” and the overenforcement of the law in the criminalizing of black
perpetrators. 19 Thus the persistence of particular kinds of rape stories—
“a plausible story that not only Wts with the [presented] facts, but also
resonates with the juror’s life experience”20—in the courtroom helps
shape and validate, and also reXects, racialized understandings of gen-
der/sexual norms, making some rape cases more publically compelling
than others.
The salience of certain kinds of rape stories both in the cultural
and legal realms—interracial rape, rape of white women, stranger rape,
rape accompanied by beating—plays on and helps perpetuate racial-
ized understandings of sexuality. For instance, following the work of
Angela Davis, Valerie Smith’s examination of the cultural narratives of
high-proWle interracial rapes situates cases like the 1989 Central Park
jogger within the discursive frames established through slave owner
property right legacies, lynching and antilynching arguments, and the
 Speaking Subjects, Classifying Consent 33

antirape feminist movements of the 1970s to show how the linking of

“sexual violence with racial oppression continue[s] to determine the
nature of public responses to them.”21 Contrasting this well-publicized
case, which involved a young white woman who was allegedly raped
and beaten by a group of Puerto Rican and black men while jogging
through Central Park, to the treatment of rape cases like Tawana
Brawley’s, which involve black female rape victims, Smith suggests that
the hypervisibility of certain cultural narratives and rape stories are
tied to a historical, ideological legacy “that protected white male prop-
erty rights by constructing black males as rapists, constructed black
women as sexually voracious” and white women as sexually vulnerable,
where “the rape of a black woman becomes a contradiction in terms.” 22
Relatedly, the circulation of rape stories in both nationalist and colo-
nial ventures has worked as a metaphor for colonial relations where
“either the Native woman is taken up as a helpless [rape] victim of her
own people in need of rescue by the superior white men, or white
women, presumably endangered by the presence of racialized men, is
the catalyst for intervention by white men. In any case, rescue narra-
tives revolve around the presumed weakness of women, whether Native
or European, and the moral superiority of white men.”23
Legal deWnitions and mechanisms help shape cultural understand-
ings of intimate violence and rape, where scripts of victimization de-
velop through both the arguments and testimonies validated in the
courtroom and through media and cultural sites, which help shape and
are shaped by courtroom scripts. The way the courts and legal pro-
ceedings help validate certain kinds of racial and gendered scripts is
evident in the media focus on both “stranger rape” and rape through
physical force. Echoing these more traditional and sensational repre-
sentations of rape and sexual violence, the VTVPA deWnition of traf-
Wcking speciWes that coercion is primarily indicated through physical
restraint and abuse or the threat of it.24 Thus popular representations
of sex trafWcking work from similar assumptions around force and
nonconsent as leaving physical (and emotional) indications on victim’s
bodies, privileging the image of a woman “chained to a bed in a brothel,”
which can pose difWculties for trafWcked subjects hoping to gain legal
recognition but fall outside this picture. As Dina Haynes points out,
when law enforcement “ofWcials subscribe overtly or covertly to unhelp-
ful myths about the nature of victims and criminals,” they risk treating
34 Speaking Subjects, Classifying Consent

“trafWcked persons as criminals, particularly when the victim does not

Wt into the expected mold of being rescued after being found chained
to a bed in a brothel.”25 Furthermore, the fact that the legal mecha-
nism put in place through the VTVPA requires that victims be certiWed
and found by government ofWcials neglects to consider that “most vic-
tims of human trafWcking are not ‘rescued’ by anyone . . . [but] Wnd
their own way out of their situation.”26
Rape laws provide a vexing yet rich site for feminist legal critics
interested in exposing the conceptual limits of the U.S. legal mecha-
nism and framework. For one, the basic assumptions taken for granted
in rape laws already assume a passive, racialized female subject vulner-
able to an active (aggressive) male one.27 The element of mens rea adds
to this aspect by focusing on the mind and intentions of the alleged
perpetrator to be measured against the principle of the reasoned per-
son; thus the intentions of the accused are often pitted against the
physical state of the victim’s body, further reinforcing gendered notions
of aggressiveness and passivity. That is, the legal treatment of rape plays
to and naturalizes gendered expectations (passive femininity, aggres-
sive masculinity), which makes it difWcult to consider rape through
contexts that fall outside a heteronormative lens, thus privileging rape
stories where women are victim to men. The criminalizing of rape also
hinges on an implied innocent victim who is at least more innocent
than the alleged perpetrator. This makes it difWcult to see, let alone pros-
ecute rape, among criminalized populations—for instance, the rape of
prisoners, undocumented persons, sex workers, and the homeless and
transient, as well as in cases where alleged perpetrators are associated
with law enforcement.
Sex trafWcking provides a rape story that implicates undocumented
immigration but hides stories of border-patrol rape. Given that sex
trafWcking narratives focus predominantly on nonnational victims, the
hypervisibility of sex trafWcking as a rape narrative hides the fact that
rape among undocumented persons (and those who fall outside state
legal protections in general) is virtually ignored (at least legally) in all
other situations. For instance, rape committed by border-patrol per-
sonnel can be considered a form of militarized “national security rape”
that remains unrepresentable because of the criminalizing of undocu-
mented persons as well as the taken-for-granted legitimacy of state vio-
lence.28 Sex trafWcking as a rape narrative implicating undocumented
 Speaking Subjects, Classifying Consent 35

victims is more easily represented, even when it involves trafWckers and

perpetrators who are associated with law enforcements (for instance,
involving United Nations peacekeeers or U.S. military personnel), in
part because trafWcking has been framed through the prism of human
rights over that of national security. Yet sex trafWcking and border-patrol
rape stories are both about policing and shaping national borders.
Like rape stories, narratives of sex trafWcking highlight the need to
construct victims as innocent and worthy, and the privileging of the
rational person principle—of an individual legal subject deWned by her
capacity to consent, choose, and eventually testify. Because sex traf-
Wcking stories implicate Asian, Latin American, and African (as well as
Eastern European) victims, these narratives shift racial scripts around
the unrapeable, oversexed nonwhite female that have historically cir-
culated in rape cases and resulted in a cultural discrepancy between
representations of rape cases involving white versus nonwhite, especially
black victims. Similar to the treatment of rape, sex trafWcking works by
assuming and producing a subject who is victim precisely because of
his or her lack of consent, though in contrast this lack of consent is/
need not be not proven in court as with rape cases, only validated by a
Health and Human Services ofWcer through a process that takes place
outside the court. In fact, once such validation takes place, as the case
of Eva Petrova demonstrates, it is difWcult to retract even during court
testimony and proceedings. Aware of what it takes to gain recognition
as a victim, trafWcked subjects often recount narratives that Wt into
already accepted scripts. Thus testimonies reveal more about the con-
ditions under which they are given than anything else.

Sex TrafWcking or Prostitution? Policing National Belonging

Assumptions about the moral and sexual character of the individual

play a key role in the process established to certify genuine trafWcking
victims from illegal immigrants. The U.S. government uses the term
smuggling to refer to individuals who consent to cross into the country.
In such cases, those being smuggled are considered responsible for
breaking the law, while in cases of trafWcking, victims are not. Because
authenticated victims are offered the possibility of applying for legal
status, who gets to claim this status is a question wrought with anxieties
concerning who can make claim to the nation. Though reauthorizations
36 Speaking Subjects, Classifying Consent

of the VTVPA emphasize that domestic trafWcking takes place in stag-

gering numbers, the kind of moral panic tied to trafWcking across
national borders is one that has made trafWcking of undocumented
persons hypervisible.
The anxieties surrounding foreign bodies as potential trafWcking
subjects has historical resonance with the general fear of the threat
of moral and sexual degeneracy of immigrants. For example, as Jo
Doezema notes, the speciWc panic around “white slavery” during the
Progressive Era was tied to the fear of “foreign impurities” (notably
Chinese American men) to white racial purity.29 Such sentiments helped
pass the Mann Act (also known as the white slavery act) in 1910 but
are also discernible in the much longer history of immigration law dat-
ing to the Page Act of 1875, which assumed that the physical body
produced visible markers of morality (again, notably targeting Chinese
immigrants). Similarly, the VTVPA also reproduces links between the
body, racial otherness, and sexual deviancy, resulting in the sorting of
worthy victims that reinscribes assumptions of sexual character in racial-
ized terms.
Conceptualizations of who can make claim to the nation have since
the nation’s founding been anchored in claims to morality and Wtness,
where the perceived sexual morality of women in particular served
as the gauge for determining the conditions of entry and citizenship.
This is true both in terms of immigration laws and the policing of
ports of entry,30 as well as the state’s investment in validating certain
kinds of marriages to help uphold both the color-line and gender
norms.31 Before the turn of the twentieth century and the panic around
white slavery, the term sex slave was used as a derogatory slur directed
at the supposed moral depravity of Japanese and Chinese women seek-
ing entry. Fear of racialized sex slaves helped to direct and justify ex-
clusionary immigration policy from the enforcement of the Page Act
to the eventual overturning of the Gentleman’s Agreement over fear
that Japanese prostitutes were gaining entry disguised as wives.32
This fear during the turn of the twentieth century—that Asian
women would gain entry as fake wives—not only implies that such sus-
pect women are prostitutes, but also Wnds resonance in some of the con-
temporary trafWcking literature that implicates the mail-order-bride
business as possible fronts for sex trafWcking. Both the mail-order-bride
business and trafWcking grapple with similar issues tied to globalization,
 Speaking Subjects, Classifying Consent 37

citizenship, and gender/sexuality, 33 as acknowledged by the U.S. Depart-

ment of State, which has included a small section on mail-order brides
in the 2008 and 2009 TrafWcking in Persons Report. It is certainly possi-
ble that individuals Wnd themselves in trafWcked situations under the
guise of marriage. It is equally possible that mail-order brides fully con-
sent and agree to marriage arrangements and are not trafWcked. What
is interesting in the desire to implicate mail-order brides as potential
sex trafWcking victims is that it illuminates the ways policing of mar-
riage through moral appeals (rather than legal ones) uphold regula-
tory norms of marriage as love-based relationships. In other words,
seeing the mail-order-bride industry as potentially hiding sex trafWck-
ing works to afWrm assumptions about marriage as primarily entered
into out of a notion of love, cultivated through interactions that span
a respectable time frame and include face-to-face meetings (which many
mail-order marriages do). This is not to undermine the troubling as-
sumptions of patriarchy, commodiWed sexualities, and global capital-
ist relations that naturalize uneven distribution of resources on which
the mail-order-bride industry operates. Rather, it is simply to demon-
strate another way the sentiment of respectable and legitimate marriage
as based on love (however unrealistic) works as a regulatory norm to
police national borders and the boundaries of citizenship.
The policing of borders through the practice of sorting marriages
as legitimate (love based) or illegitimate has a long history, where U.S.
immigration ofWcials sorted suspect marriages from “real” ones in a
manner that was informed by ofWcial’s preexisting racial and cultural
biases and that helped create discourses of sexual and moral delin-
quency as a racial matter. For example, in the case of Chinese immi-
grants during the nineteenth century, even when wives had proper legal
paperwork recognizable to U.S. ofWcials that validated their marriages,
they were still subject to various techniques, including medical exami-
nations and interviews, through which immigration ofWcials conWrmed
the validity of marriage certiWcates. Women hoping to enter as wives
essentially needed to prove their respectability.34
Derogatory usage of the term sex slave to indicate immigration
fraud was used initially to refer to Asian women, and it played on the
unrapeable aspect of women of color in a moral appeal to block entry
of Asian women.35 However, by the Progressive Era (1890–1920), the
landscape of racial formation and immigration shifted signiWcantly to
38 Speaking Subjects, Classifying Consent

allow sympathy for some “white ethnic” immigrants and some poor and
working-class whites.36 During this time, the term sex slave lost its previ-
ous derogatory meanings and was used instead to refer to the potential
(rape) threat to white women. For the Wrst time, “the use of ‘slavery’
to characterize the arrival of ‘white’ women” helped distinguish who
could make claim to the category white, as well as cemented the “as-
sumption that prostitution could be linked to racialized ethnic cate-
gories.”37 The passage of the Mann Act to protect white sex slaves was
one of several state documents (including the Dillingham Commission
Report) that helped racialize whiteness as sometimes including “white
ethnic” immigrants, racialized white femininity as deserving and capa-
ble of reform, reafWrmed gender norms that naturalized white women’s
dependent and vulnerable status, and reasserted heterosexual, mono-
racial marriage as a regulatory norm.
In similar ways, even while the language of the VTVPA shifts to
seem less exclusionary and xenophobic when compared to historical
predecessors, trafWcking discourse continues to produce national sub-
jectivity through the idea of moral and sexual Wtness. The deWnition
of trafWcking acknowledges that there are many forms of labor in which
victims Wnd themselves, yet sex trafWcking takes a front seat in both
media attention and the law; sex trafWcking is, after all, the Wrst deW-
nition of trafWcking enumerated in the VTVPA. TrafWcking can take
place under myriad conditions; however, one particular image of the
woman or child trafWcked into sexual labor remains hypervisible in
mainstream representations of trafWcking.38 Sex not only sells, but it
also has a long legal history tied to both moral panic and enforcement
of procreative sex. This history of legislation around sex has helped to
construct the idea of sex as mutually exclusive of work, where sex work
is constructed as abhorrent and thereby criminalized.
Rather than recognize sex work as a form of legitimate labor and
exchange, enforcement of the VTVPA takes a prohibitionist stance that
links prostitution to trafWcking.39 This prohibitionist stance has been
enforced to greater and lesser extent, usually depending on the polit-
ical leanings of the presidential ofWce. For example, during the Bush
administration, an organizations’ ability to qualify for both VTVPA
funds and USAID was tied to a requirement that these organizations
make a public declaration opposing sex work and prostitution. DKT
International v. United States Agency for International Development is one
 Speaking Subjects, Classifying Consent 39

case where refusal to make a public declaration condemning sex work

led to the retraction of USAID funds. DKT, a nongovernmental orga-
nization in Vietnam that provides family planning and HIV/AIDS pre-
vention programming, argued that a public prohibitionist declaration
would stigmatize clients, many self-identiWed sex workers, with whom
the organization works. Heard in 2007 during the Bush administra-
tion, DKT lost its case. The prohibitionist stance of the VTVPA in part
explains why the Bush administration and conservative Christian inter-
ests have joined with traditionally more liberal political factions in mak-
ing sex trafWcking a bipartisan women’s human rights issue of national
concern.40 As a result, transitions between Republican and Democratic
administrations and majorities have been relatively smooth in terms of
antitrafWcking policy.
The VTVPA approach to trafWcking emphasizes sex trafWcking and
wrestles with the impulse to read all sex work as potential trafWcking
cases and with controlling borders (including moral ones) as part of
regulating immigration and citizenry. The tension between the desire
to read all prostitution as sex trafWcking while also regulating citizenry
and immigration results in the at once liberal extension of rights and
restrictive requirements for authentication. The authentication process
thus implicitly creates and relies on a distinction between worthy vic-
tims and unworthy prostitutes even while the VTVPA is anchored in
frameworks of prostitution that link it to trafWcking.41 This implicit
distinction separating out respectable and worthy victims is one reason
for the relatively low numbers of recorded victims actually aided by the
law in comparison to estimates of the number of individuals who are
trafWcked in the United States.42 Potential victims are evaluated through,
and thus help normalize, certain “gendered images of vulnerability”
that “[focus] on women and [foreground] their vulnerability along with
children’s vulnerability.”43
The VTVPA institutionalizes a certiWcation process to authenticate
real from false victims. The process begins with local law enforcement
and concerned community members, including social service providers
like health-care professionals, counselors, teachers, and vigilant individ-
uals. These individuals bring suspicious activities and potential victims
to the attention of district attorneys, who then inform the Department
of Health and Human Services (DHHS). DHHS ofWcials investigate
trafWcking claims alongside local law enforcement and issue certiWcation
40 Speaking Subjects, Classifying Consent

letters to anyone the DHHS deems is a victim of trafWcking. CertiWca-

tion letters enable individuals to apply for aid like temporary shelter
and food assistance (the same assistance and terms granted to refugees).
Letters also allow individuals to apply for formal immigration status
through Homeland Security. Victims generally apply Wrst for continued
presence (CP), which extends temporary approval to remain in the
United States. They then have the opportunity to apply for a special T
visa (or another visa), which allows long-term stay with the possibility
of naturalization. Without CP or approved visa status (T or otherwise),
individuals are detained and processed for deportation.
States, with the funding made available from the VTVPA, are also
increasingly looking at trafWcking as issues of local legislative concern.
A number of state and local governments have passed their own anti-
trafWcking laws and ordinances. In addition, local police departments
and nonproWt organizations continue to be successful in winning grants
for training and programming to combat trafWcking and aid victims.
These grants are one aspect of the antitrafWcking activities enabled
through VTVPA funds that look to Wnd victims and trafWckers assumed
to be otherwise hidden from view. To this end, the Department of
State has provided resources to “identify and help trafWcking victims”
by “looking beneath the surface” (the name of one Department of Heath
and Human Services antitrafWcking campaign), which includes a list
of questions to ask potential victims as well as “indicators [that] Xag
potential victims.” These indicators suggest that the underlying assump-
tions informing trafWcking discourse are that victims show signs of
physical and emotional abuse, including bruising or signs of depression,
that they are nonnative English speaking or cannot speak “on [their]
own behalf,” and that they lack documentation like a passport.44
Making claim to the category of trafWcking victim is by no means
an easy process, in part due to the paperwork and, until 2008, the hefty
cost necessary for Wling this paperwork ($340 in 2007).45 As scholars
like Wendy Chapkis, Julia O’Connell Davidson, Jo Doezema, Dina Fran-
cesca Haynes, and Kamala Kempadoo argue, existing legal mechanisms
restrict rather than expand deWnitions of trafWcking victimization.46
Laws like the VTVPA apply a forced or free, worthy or unworthy di-
chotomy that is characteristic of the history of sexual violence laws in
the United States.47 The consent of victims operates as the key distin-
guishing feature separating sex slaves from prostitutes and trafWcking
 Speaking Subjects, Classifying Consent 41

victims from illegal aliens. The VTVPA implicitly posits the trafWcking
victim, who lacks consent, against the criminalized sex worker or un-
documented migrant. Such a move not only upholds a moralizing frame-
work where sexual virtue is judged as a primary indicator determining
whether an individual is deserving of future citizenship, but it simpli-
Wes both categories. In the Wrst instance, the law recalls earlier exam-
ples from immigration law that equated visual and physical cues with
sexual deviancy, where medical, biographical, and visual data were com-
piled to prove “a distinct prostitute physiognomy” that claimed “the
faces of prostitutes looked more degenerate and more mannish, and
their genitalia became visibly altered.”48 Such practices are problem-
atic in that they naturalize a link between moral virtue (inner capac-
ity) and the physical body (exterior expression). This is the kind of
logic that justiWed racist practices at the border and elsewhere, as well
as racist ideologies like those behind eugenics. In the second instance,
the dichotomizing of the trafWcking victim against the prostitute or
illegal alien assumes that consent can be easily identiWed and that the
categories are mutually exclusive, establishing “a system that celebrates
the mobility of capital and some bodies, while the bodies of others face
ever-growing restrictions and criminalization.”49
One of the ways that law and government antitrafWcking activities
negotiate the tension between the historically exclusionary tendencies
of immigration law and the historically abolitionist bent of prostitu-
tion laws is to insist on trafWcking victims as subjects of repatriation
who desire return to countries of origin. Even while reauthorizations
of the law take pains to point out domestic trafWcking as a potential
activity that needs equal attention, trafWcking across national borders
remains the focus of most government-sponsored antitrafWcking activ-
ities. For example, one major part of the Department of State’s services
include the Return, Reintegration, and Family ReuniWcation Program
for Victims of TrafWcking, established in 2005, which provides “for traf-
Wcked persons who elect to return to their home countries . . . safe re-
turn and reintegration assistance . . . [which] may include pre-departure
assistance, travel documentation, transportation, reception, tempo-
rary shelter, health care, training and education, and small grants for
income-generating activities.”50 Thus, in cases involving nonnationals,
the line between sex worker and trafWcking victim is often blurred,
where even when victims identify to the contrary, as in Petrova’s case,
42 Speaking Subjects, Classifying Consent

they are nonetheless read as trafWcking victims. In this way, the question
“who is a prostitute” and the criminalizing of sex work also informs
the parameters of antitrafWcking law.51 The premise on which this pro-
gram of the Department of State rests is one where prostitutes are
assumed as more likely to be domestically born, while trafWcking vic-
tims are more likely to be nonnationals, where part of the violence of
trafWcking stems precisely from the forcible crossing of national bor-
ders. This assumption does more than hide domestic trafWcking activ-
ities; it helps to construct a national narrative of progress toward greater
pluralism and therefore emancipation (explored in chapter 5).
The fact that antitrafWcking policy in the United States focuses
on repatriation also has the impact of “discouraging [some] women’s
mobility” and “conveying a simple message: to keep the ‘native’ at
home.”52 Ultimately, the VTVPA has two competing interests, one that
is framed through human rights and one that privileges the control of
borders, evident in the effort of the U.S. state to maintain distinctions
between smuggled individuals who break the law and trafWcked vic-
tims who do not. While tightening border control is acknowledged as
one method of tracking and discouraging trafWcking by narrowing the
avenues through which people can legally migrate, the tightening of
borders ironically leads to greater numbers of undocumented migrants
who are more vulnerable to abuse and trafWcking conditions because
they fall outside the purview of the law.53
As an issue tied to immigration and potential citizenry, sex traf-
Wcking plays on the anxieties and fears of who reproduces the national
body. While the anxieties of opening up immigration through human
rights–oriented laws like the VTVPA can be used to understand the
need for a process of authentication and the need to distinguish the
worthy from the unworthy, the moral premises upon which authenti-
cation rests deploy a troubling “politics of virtue,” where help is not
“freely given; there must be, it is argued, some evidence that those
receiving help are in fact deserving of help.” 54 Further, the particular
focus on trafWcking for sex and the ways in which sex trafWcked vic-
tims are distinguished from sex workers demonstrates the continued
state investment in imagining (potential) citizenry through moral
frameworks that deWne “good moral character” through heteronor-
mative, patriarchal, and racialized ideals of female sexuality.
 Speaking Subjects, Classifying Consent 43

Gendering Expectations, Privileging Speech

Creating a proWle of potential victims predisposes law enforcement,

government ofWcials, and social service providers to see some bodies as
more likely to be potential victims than others. As such, potential vic-
tims must selectively navigate which testimonies they use to demonstrate
their victimization, largely aware that this may be the only opportunity
to participate in the determination of their future legal status. Poten-
tial victims of trafWcking are often given only a single interview in which
they must prove to authenticating ofWcials that they are indeed victims.
Many tailor their stories to appeal to what authorities expect to hear
so that their victimization should take precedence over their status as
undocumented or their status as sexually and morally suspect.
Several early trafWcking prosecution cases provide insight into the
kinds of assumptions around victimization that are expected and natu-
ralized as markers of trafWcking, establishing a link between narrativity
and violence.55 For example, in United States v. Rosales-Martinez, Immi-
gration and Customs Enforcement ofWcials raided a New Jersey apart-
ment complex and initially detained thirty female Honduran nationals.
According to court records, the Honduran nationals were promised
employment in restaurants but forced into sex work in order to repay
a $15,000 transportation fee. Of all the initial detainees, federal ofW-
cials determined that only ten of the women were genuine victims of
sex trafWcking. The other twenty detainees were processed for depor-
tation. One of the authenticated women was deemed a victim on the
basis of testimony that she was “forced to ingest pills designed to induce
a spontaneous abortion” and on the following day “had given birth to
a live, female infant who died shortly thereafter.”56 Such statements, in
playing to both the horriWc imagery of abuse as well as antiabortion
sentiments that might play well to particular political audiences, demon-
strate the desire to cast victims as incapable of helping themselves, jus-
tifying “rescue” by U.S. authorities as a moral imperative.57
Key physical indicators like size and age are often used in enforce-
ment and legal proceedings to prove that victims are incapable of help-
ing themselves. The case United States v. Babaev involved three women
who traveled from Azerbaijan to the United States. According to court
records, upon arrival in New York, the women were told that they each
owed more than $24,000 in fees and were allegedly forced to prostitute
44 Speaking Subjects, Classifying Consent

themselves in Brooklyn massage parlors to repay the debt. During court

proceedings, federal prosecutors stated:

The Third Victim was a vulnerable victim based not only on her age, but on
her diminutive physical stature . . . and extreme emotional vulnerability; . . .
she is very childlike in her demeanor, manner, and thought process. She is
approximately 5 feet tall, and weighs around 100 pounds. On the numerous
occasions that the victim was subjected to physical and sexual abuse by [the
trafWcker] . . . she was physically unable to defend herself.58

The prosecutor conXates the physicality of the Third Victim with psy-
chological development where the Third Victim’s “emotional vulnerabil-
ity” is linked to her “diminutive physical stature,” used as evidence of her
victim status. This linking of “demeanor, manner, and thought process”
is troubling insofar as it recalls a “paradigm [that] found expression in
the various strands of ‘scientiWc’ studies of ‘race,’ as well as in sexology
and criminology,”59 where the physical body was assumed to be a reli-
able indicator of intellectual capacity and psychological comportment.
Further, the description of the Third Victim, who was seventeen years
old at the time of trafWcking, as “childlike” not only “coupl[ed] vulner-
ability with the female gender and dependent children,” thereby provid-
ing “very potent imagery for the construction of worthy victims,”60 but
it also reinforced gendered constructions of femininity as dependent.
Victim status is thus tied to the successful construction of claimants
as incapable of helping themselves, whether due to physical stature,
infantile thought process, and/or cultural culpability, as chapter 3 ex-
plores. Thus many “anti-trafWcking initiatives are infantilizing women,
especially third world women, who are regarded as lacking the capac-
ity to reason or choose.” 61 While this construction of the victim as inca-
pable of exercising agency is initially necessary in the legal procedure
to authenticate victims, this construction enables a teleology of sub-
jecthood that works from silent victim to speaking agent, where agency
is exclusively tied to both choice and speech. While the “emphasis on
agency is certainly preferable to the paternalistic portrayals of passive
victims,” Michelle McKinley points to the limits of such a dichotomous
victim–agent framework applied “especially in situations of structural
violence,” where agency is linked to dissent and exit so as to ignore
“strategic uses of victimhood narratives” by victims who “frame their
experiences in the agreed-upon script to gain [legal recognition].” 62
 Speaking Subjects, Classifying Consent 45

The conWguring of agency as linked and demonstrated through the

enactment of self-aware choice and self-representation through speech
is rooted in liberal, post-Enlightenment constructions of the political
subject as both self-conscious and rational, where freedom is tied to
the (mind’s rational) ability to choose. Thus in characterizing vic-
tims in antitrafWcking legal cases as initially unable to exercise choice,
whether due to physical stature, mental incapacity, and/or cultural or
economic conditions, the legal process creates a teleological trajectory
deWning authentic victims as moving from silence and victimhood to
(court) testimony and agency. This rather reductive notion of agency
implicit in the legal structuring of authenticating trafWcking subjects
fails to consider the ways agency is a negotiation, “a capacity for action
that speciWc relations of subordination create and enable.” 63
The process of authenticating victims is layered onto this trajec-
tory, where courtroom testimonies offer the venue for victims like
Petrova and Third Victim to tell their stories and reclaim their voices,
though neglecting consideration of the way their voices “are discursively
legitimate only to the extent that they address [expected] issues.” 64 The
Department of State OfWce to Monitor and Combat TrafWcking’s Traf-
Wcking in Persons Report links this reclamation of speech to justice:

Cooperation of victims cannot be bought or forced, but through the consistent

provision of assistance that is not tied to performance in court, victims assured
of their rights regain the conWdence to speak out for themselves. When this
balance is struck effectively, everyone wins—the state, the victim, and soci-
ety—as a victim Wnds his or her voice and an exploiter is rendered speechless
as justice is handed down.65

Acknowledging the potential controversy of requiring authenticated

victims to testify in any legal cases brought against trafWckers, espe-
cially in light of legal scholarship and advocacy tied to the harm that
can ensue when survivors of violence are forced to confront those re-
sponsible for inXicting harm in often unfriendly courtroom settings,
the Department of State report nonetheless links justice for victims to
their self-actualization as speaking subjects, where testimonies offer
potential legal evidence in trafWcking cases. Such self-actualization is
enabled here through state mechanisms that bestow onto (worthy) vic-
tims both assistance and rights.
46 Speaking Subjects, Classifying Consent

While the ability to tell one’s story is an incredibly important exer-

cise, it is also one that is not transparent or freely given. Rather, telling
one’s story and reclaiming one’s voice, even freely, is an act embedded
in discursive conditions, from the language and imagery available to
speakers for articulating their narratives to the existing paradigms and
preconceptions through which listeners comprehend the narratives
being told. As Gayatri Spivak explains, the act of speech itself already
produces the subaltern as a subject effect—an “other” of the (assumed)
subject. Thus the very act of naming the subaltern produces her as a
subject under the discursive conditions set forth by the conceptual and
ideological mechanisms taken for granted in the effort to represent.
The position that beings with “the oppressed can know and speak for
themselves . . . reintroduces the constitutive subject on at least two lev-
els: the Subject of desire and power as an irreducible methodologi-
cal presupposition; and the self-proximate, if not self-identical, subject
of the oppressed.” 66 The constitutive subject is precisely that subject
assumed in the post-Enlightenment philosophical texts, which framed
subjectivity through desire and power signiWed through a subject effect
(“other” or subject of the oppressed). The very conceptual mechan-
isms (including the grammatological) through which representation
is sought must therefore also be deconstructed.
Speech, like agency, is contingent, and the “evidence of experience”
is limited in its conceptual need to assume a subject who preexists dis-
course rather than allow for the understanding of subjects as shaped
with and through discourse.67 In other words, testimonies and self-
speech should not simply be taken as truth statements because “the evi-
dence of experience, whether conceived through a metaphor of visibility
or in any other way that takes meaning as transparent, reproduces,
rather than contests given ideological systems.” 68 When the mostly third
world, mostly female trafWcked subjects speak to their experiences, their
inclusion in the dialogue can simply reify existing paradigms of third
world backwardness, a move that in fact imposes another form of vio-
lence on such subjects. Agency and testimony must therefore be under-
stood as a negotiation more than as a transparent act; it is never
“power-free” or “without interference by entrenched presumptions, sen-
sitivities and preconceived ideas.” 69 Yet the conditions tied to claiming
victim status hinge on the assumption that speech is transparent and
that it is a fundamental marker of the meting out of justice.
 Speaking Subjects, Classifying Consent 47

While including and recognizing the trafWcked subject through the

acceptance of her act of self-speech is an invaluable tool for addressing
some of the violence inXicted through trafWcking, understanding the
conditions tied to representation and the circumscribing of speech
within broader discursive conditions is key to ensuring that the act of
inclusion does not simply serve as an alibi for questions into the un-
even relationships of power continuing to inform the writing of global
politics and human difference. Eva Petrova’s case thus provides a tell-
ing voice where the limits of uncritical inclusion are laid bare: Petrova
failed in her attempt to speak against the story of victimization imposed
on her. Even if she had not opted to leave the United States, and even
if she had sought and won permanent legal status, whether that is ade-
quate redress, whether redress is even the term under which to under-
stand the violence of trafWcking, and whether the United States should
reenvision what justice might mean for trafWcked subjects are questions
to which trafWcked subjects like Petrova are never asked to comment.
In Petrova’s case, one might consider the signiWcance of her decision
not to testify in court.
What Petrova’s case offers is an opportunity to examine the ways
subjectivity is shaped through the interplay of various citational acts.
Agency is thus not simply the ability to choose; rather, it is “the double-
movement of being constituted in and by a signiWer.”70 In the example
of trafWcking discourses, the agency of trafWcked subjects can be found
not in their enactment of positive rights or their choice, but in multi-
ple mechanisms through which the scripts and narratives of trafWck-
ing are written and rewritten, told and retold. TrafWcking subjects are
trafWcking subjects not only because of their experiences, but because
their experiences are recognizable as trafWcking violences. These vio-
lences are made recognizable through a discursive and representa-
tional negotiation between expectations, testimonies, and validations.
Thus when trafWcked subjects like Petrova testify to their experi-
ences, they do more than validate or reject existing expectations and
deWnitions of victimization and violence. They help produce and repro-
duce the boundaries of their subjectivity. After all, as Avery Gordon
states, “The stories people tell about themselves, about their troubles,
about their social worlds and about their society’s problems are entan-
gled and weave between what is immediately available as a story and
what their imaginations are reaching toward.”71 It is this weaving that
48 Speaking Subjects, Classifying Consent

can provide a strategy for reconsidering the productive power of sig-

niWcation and representation that help shape the parameters of how
people may exist. The act of self-speech can offer the possibility of ex-
posing the tensions, contradictions, and effacements that take place in
the work of producing trafWcked subjects as victims. Thus the testi-
monies offered by women like Petrova offer the possibility of exposing
the limits and boundaries of human rights and antitrafWcking mecha-
nisms if such testimonies are considered as negotiating a broader Weld
of discourse.
3. Front-Page News
Writing Stories of Victimization and Rescue

The house at 1212½ West Front Street in PlainWeld, NJ, is a conventional

midcentury home with slate-gray siding, white trim and Victorian lines.
When I stood in front of it on a breezy day in October, I could hear the cries
of children from the playground of an elementary school around the corner.
American Xags Xuttered from porches and windows. The neighborhood is
leafy, middle-class Anytown.
—Peter Landesman, “The Girls Next Door,” New York Times,
January 25, 2004

Sex trafficking cases are front-page news, and the ways

in which accounts of trafWcking are narrated both by news media and
government sources shows the discursive and political investment in
certain ways of seeing human rights and certain ways of understanding
violence, victimization, and agency. The pervasiveness of journalistic
accounts similar to the one provided in Peter Landesman’s New York
Times series, where the conventionality of Anytowns like aptly named
PlainWeld hide a grisly underworld of trafWcking, demonstrates how
particular narrative tropes are taken for granted and naturalize the
relationship between narrative and violence, where violence is only rec-
ognizable as such because of its narrative markers. These news stories
work with legal scripts to establish dominant cultural narratives of sex
trafWcking that naturalize gendered notions of citizenship and human
rights enactment.
Rather than take for granted these stories of trafWcking violence,
this chapter considers the pervasiveness of certain kinds of narratives
in both the media and state documents as providing an opportunity
to explore different kinds of questions into the naturalizing of certain
forms of violence with particular narratives and tropes. As Charles
Briggs suggests, the questions that need to be asked are, “How do we
judge a narrative as being ‘about’ a particular event? What gives us the

49
50 Front-Page News

feeling that it ‘captures’ what ‘really happened’? . . . How can acts of

violence and acts of narration be brought into such an intimate rela-
tionship that stories can be read as forms whose features provide a reli-
able way of knowing acts that are hidden from us—and whose reality
we accept by virtue of their indexical connection to an act of narra-
tion?”1 Identifying narrative indexes that come to shape the sex traf-
Wcking story, as well as tropes like the American Dream through which
such stories are refracted, can illustrate the ways the rescuer and vic-
tim are distinguished through the notion of the ethics and culture of
(legitimate, capitalist) work, which enables the valoration of (neo)lib-
eral principles.
Taking such effects as a narrative violence, this chapter traces the
story of sex trafWcking as told through mainstream media outlets like
the New York Times and the San Francisco Chronicle, both newspapers that
have run special series on sex trafWcking. Additionally, news media
sources like PBS and MSNBC as well as books authored by journalists
identifying the narrative conventions that mark the story as about sex
trafWcking are the focus of this chapter, which suggests that the sex
trafWcking story reveals more about the national subject invested in
Wnding victims ready for rescue than anything else. The storytelling
conventions demonstrated in journalistic accounts of sex trafWcking are
important not because they help reveal a hidden truth about trafWck-
ing, but because they, along with state documents, explain trafWcking
through cultural arguments that reafWrm the need for outside rescue,
reducing human rights to the differential valuation of bodies and nat-
uralizing constructions of the “backwardness” of culpable cultures.
Media pieces work alongside state documents and NGO literature and
research to produce a discourse of trafWcking, where “the strategies of
women’s human rights advocates . . . resonated with a set of convention-
alized journalistic images and associations.”2

Constructing Intimacies in the Journey to Uncover Hidden Truths

In his opening paragraph, Landesman introduces David Miranda, a

cashier working in the neighborhood’s local convenience store, who
describes the suspect comings and goings of the otherwise conventional
home at 1212 ½ West Front Street:
 Front-Page News 51

David Miranda, the young man behind the counter of Westside Convenience,
told me he saw girls from the house roughly once a week. “ They came in to buy
candy and soda, then went back to the house,” he said. The same girls rarely
came twice, and they were all very young, Miranda said. They never asked for
anything beyond what they were purchasing; they certainly never asked for help.
Cars drove up to the house all day; nice cars, all kinds of cars. Dozens of men
came and went. “But no one here knew what was really going on,” Miranda said.
And no one ever asked.3

While Miranda notes that he rang up purchases made by different girls

coming from the house, it is Landesman who directs the reader to the
suspect aspect of what Miranda has observed. Situating himself as the
one who knows better—who knows better than to accept the fact that
“no one ever asked” about the suspicious cars and men coming and
going from the house—Landesman’s piece exempliWes a trend in media
pieces on sex trafWcking where the journalist plays a key role in the nar-
rative of sex trafWcking. Readers identify with Landesman and his keen
eye, even while readers might also identify with Miranda, who sees the
signs but does not yet know—or simply chooses to ignore—their signi-
Wcance. Miranda is ultimately cast as foil to Landesman, who emerges
as one of the heroes of his own story by helping to uncover the hidden
activities of trafWcking.
Beginnings situated in a seemingly conventional setting where traf-
Wcking exists as hidden and journalists who take an active role in the
unfolding of a rescue narrative provide recurring indexes through
which news stories frame their recognizability as stories about sex traf-
Wcking. In doing so, they “transform mere happenings into publically
discussable events.”4 These stories are also recognizable in their foreign
beginnings (Korea, Eastern Europe, Latin America, and so on),5 where
nonnationals play the central role of victim even though trafWcking
need not cross national borders or involve nonnational players. Rarely
do sex trafWcking news items implicate domestic-born U.S. citizens as
victims. When they do, the stories tend to identify these domestic vic-
tims as underage girls and runaways who are usually white and come
from conventional middle-class backgrounds.6 An emblematic exam-
ple of the treatment of domestic trafWcking can be found in New York
Times op-ed columnist Nicholas Kristof’s writing on sex trafWcking,
where he brieXy mentions the “white, middle-class blonde [who] goes
missing,” but only to draw a contrast to the thousands of Asian women
52 Front-Page News

who are kidnapped and trafWcked. The story of sex trafWcking that im-
plicates runaway suburban teens seems to be less compelling (if this is
measured by frequency), and it is certainly less prominent than the sto-
ries told about immigrant victims.7 The recurring conventions found
in news stories of sex trafWcking are important because “news stories
achieve their powerful indexical iconicity by framing themselves as
verbal photographs, if you will, telling the story of their own produc-
tion in such a way as to prove that they were produced through the very
actions that produced the crime story, which itself was produced by
the material and verbal traces of the crime.”8
The wedding of the journalistic exposé with the rescue narrative,
where the journalist becomes a key player enabling the unfolding of
the story, is a crucial index of the story of sex trafWcking. For example,
in the PBS Frontline television special “Sex Slaves,” the journalist’s har-
rowing ethical dilemma resulting from his inability to distance himself
from the story is combined with the rescue narrative of one husband
searching for his wife sold into sex slavery.9 “Sex Slaves” combines the
drama of Viorel’s search for his wife, Katia, who was unknowingly sold
into slavery when Katia traveled to Turkey, with the reporting crew’s own
dramatic journey to uncover sex trafWcking in Ukraine and Moldova
while helping Viorel rescue Katia. Sex trafWcking stories are recogniz-
able as such in part because of their beginnings, where the hidden
dangers and truths of trafWcking implicate innocent victims like Katia,
brutalized by her trafWckers and left to disappear unless rescued. In
these stories, the rescue of victims is enabled through the intervention
of the journalists, who either directly rescue the victim or aid a proxy
like Viorel.10
“Sex Slaves” demonstrates the way news stories of trafWcking depart
from conventional strategies that mark objective journalistic reporting.
While conventional news reporting rests on the establishment of author-
ity through various strategies indicating objectivity, including the seem-
ing emotional distance between the reporter and story,11 it is precisely
the inability of journalists to remain emotionally uninvolved that gives
sex trafWcking news stories their authority. For example, “Sex Slaves”
uses an unseen narrator to explain the facts about trafWcking and frame
the action taking place in the news piece. Yet as the piece unfolds, the
Wlm crew becomes more and more involved with Viorel in his plan to pre-
tend to be a pimp looking for Katia. The story documents the producers
 Front-Page News 53

as they provide Viorel with a hidden camera. When Viorel’s initial in-
teraction with Katia’s captor goes sour, leading to the severing of con-
tact between Viorel and the woman he believes is keeping his wife, the
cameras follow Viorel’s desperate attempts to have producer Felix Golu-
bev pose as an Interpol agent and confront Viorel’s liaison about the
illegal activity she admits to on the hidden recording. Here the story
shifts to focus on the journalists’ ethical dilemma:

narrator: Viorel’s plan has put the production team in an ethical

bind.
ric esther bienstock [producer]: I don’t know if we’re crossing
a line. What do you guys think?
felix golubev: He’s not exactly a rational guy, at this point. He’s
desperate. He wants to threaten them. He thinks it’s going to
work.
ric esther bienstock: Frankly, I think there’s more of a danger
that if they see that, what’s the point of giving up his wife? They’ll
just can hurt her [sic]. . . . I’m just worried that he puts himself
in more danger and that he ends up getting the crap beaten out
of him, if not worse, and that we end up being responsible for
that because we provided the materials for that.12

The story’s voice-over narration inserts the two producers’ debate over
the pros and cons of having one of the Wlm crew pose as an Interpol
agent into the narrative of Katia and Viorel. While Golubev decides not
to concede to Viorel’s request, maintaining his position as separate
from his story and subjects, Golubev’s behind-the-scenes conversation
with the production crew nonetheless becomes part of the story. This
revelatory moment—the exchange and the fact that it plays a signiW-
cant part in the unfolding drama of Viorel’s rescue and Katia’s victim-
ization—also works to establish the journalist’s credibility as an ethical
and compassionate player, an outsider who is central to the eventual
rescue of both Katia and Viorel. Intimacy is established not only between
viewer/reader and journalist, but between the journalist and his or her
story. Unlike conventional news reporting, the narrative of trafWcking
is one where the journalists’ inability to stay above the story works to
provide credibility to both.
News stories are, after all, stories, with settings, plot development,
54 Front-Page News

and central characters. Stories of sex trafWcking are appealing in part

because of the inherent human drama and seemingly clear-cut moral
characters—victims and criminals. Stories of sex trafWcking thus
strongly demonstrate that “the U.S. news narrative is descended from
the quintessential American art form, the western,”13 where the myth-
ical line between so-called objective news reporting and sensationalist
tabloid stories is blurred.14 While serious news outlets in the United
States (and also Britain) demonstrate more closely what Daniel Hallin
and Paolo Mancini describe as the liberal model, where commercial
presses developed with little relative state involvement, leading to a tra-
dition of seemingly politically neutral reporting,15 they and other media
scholars point out the ways traditional news outlets are more editorial
than they may seem at Wrst glance.16 Stories of sex trafWcking are recog-
nizable as such in part because of the way they have been reported and
narrated, even in serious news outlets like the New York Times, through
Wrst-person accounts that often explicitly recount the journalist’s deci-
sion to abandon journalistic conventions of neutral reporting at some
point in the plot’s unfolding.
While in the Frontline report the crew decides to remain objective
observers of the story, in many other accounts journalists choose to pose
as potential solicitors or johns in their search for the hidden activities
and victims of sex trafWcking, a move that places the journalist as a
character within the narrative of the news story. These accounts of sex
trafWcking often elicit an intimacy with the reader, which is posed im-
plicitly against the false intimacy implied in the relationship between
the sex-trafWcked victim and the john. This strategy of the undercover
journalist not only directly inserts and implicates the reporter into the
story, it also allows the story itself to convey an intimacy between jour-
nalist/undercover john and his subject/trafWcking victim, which both
becomes an index of legitimacy and suggests that the lack of intimacy
and compassion of real johns toward victims is an integral part of the
problem.
Any potential question into the validity of the reporting, especially
on an issue that the news stories themselves represent as underground
and hidden, is answered through the strategy of posing as undercover
players or even the abandoned yet contemplated discussion of going
undercover (as in the case of the Frontline report). A tactic employed by
male journalists like Nicholas Kristof of the New York Times, Canadian
 Front-Page News 55

journalist and author of The Natashas Victor Malarek, and the produc-
tion team of MSNBC’s Undercover: Sex Slaves in America, posing as johns
to gain access to the otherwise hidden world of sex trafWcking also
frames the story as one of rescue, where a secondary rescuer like Viorel
or other sympathetic players like the police are ultimately overshadowed
by primary rescuers initially seemingly outside the action and emotion
of the story. The fact that the journalist is unable to keep him- or her-
self outside the story works as an indicator of both the story and the
journalist’s credibility. The impact of linking the story’s credibility to
the journalist’s inability to stay objective and outside the story rests on
the description of sex trafWcking as a crime so abhorrent that anyone
doing “real” reporting would feel compelled to intervene.
The reporter/researcher unable to keep from becoming involved
has become an indexical icon of the sex trafWcking story even when
the stories are not told by journalists. For example, former investment
banker and board member of the NGO Free the Slaves, Siddharth Kara’s
2009 book Sex TrafWcking: Inside the Business of Modern Slavery Wnds the
author recounting his various experiences in brothels in India, Italy,
Thailand, and the United States, where posing as a john enables Kara
to solicit interviews with women he suspects are trafWcking victims
(though the women never self-identify as such). In his book, Kara is
the central protagonist, and in part because there is no claim to jour-
nalistic objectivity, his narrative is written in a more explicit personal
manner, where readers are told of Kara’s thoughts and emotions even
as he describes being part of the action. For instance, when describing
an attempt to discover sex trafWcking victims by posing as a john, Kara
states, “I felt anxious. If anything went wrong, I could not speak Italian
and I was far away from urban safety.” The subsequent encounter with
a Lithuanian teenager who Kara “Wgure[s] . . . had not traveled will-
ingly” based on her age, is almost an afterthought to Kara’s own anxiety
and attempt to provide the teenager with a phone number for assis-
tance.17 While not a formally trained journalist, Kara’s Columbia Uni-
versity Press video promoting the book presents Kara reporting on his
book in a manner reminiscent of television news, on-location report-
ing.18 Close-ups of Kara, dressed in a suit jacket and narrating about
sex trafWcking, are intertwined with stock footage of the book’s cover
and images of various brown bodies depicting life in an unnamed third
world locale (marked as such by visual cues—brown bodies, distinctive
56 Front-Page News

architecture). What is left unexamined in narratives where storytellers

go undercover are the ways such practices, by constructing an “ethical
john,”19 implicitly remove responsibility from johns as participants in
trafWcking’s violence.
The construction of an ethical john can take many shapes: an un-
dercover reporter simply looking to interview otherwise hidden victims
of sex trafWcking, or a john turned boyfriend who is a character in the
story.20 In the latter case, johns become boyfriends or reformed citi-
zens in order to provide the story with a proxy rescuer, a move that
implicitly afWrms the construction of “good” sex as uncommodiWed and
freely given. The ethical john is both explicitly and implicitly contrasted
to the bad john, whose desire to commodify sex is what characterizes
him as bad. In the Wnal installment of a special front-page, four-part
series on sex trafWcking that ran in 2006 in the San Francisco Chronicle,
one victim, You Mi Kim, meets a “28-year-old man, who had weaved in
from a nearby bar where he was drinking away a bad breakup . . . who
didn’t grab at her.”21 This description is in contrast to the bad johns
who bring “pornographic magazines to show You Mi what they wanted
her to do.”22 The ethical john takes Kim out on dates and eventually
helps Kim make the decision to leave sex work: “He took her to the
Golden Gate Bridge and Baker Bridge, and bought her Wrst pair of hik-
ing shoes.”23 Rather than present this ethical john as also complicit in
the purchasing of sex, his initial desire to buy sex is cast through a
compassionate light, where his momentary lapse in morals is explained
through a bad breakup and a night of drinking. Similarly, his purchas-
ing of gifts is cast as an innocent act of giving, rather than part of an
exchange of goods and services.
Though this ethical john plays a part in ending Kim’s story by help-
ing to free her from her decision to remain in sex work, it is Meredith
May’s reporting that draws attention to the fact that Kim’s decision to
remain in sex work was not really a decision at all, but a form of sex
trafWcking’s violence. The series ends with May quoting Kim: “‘Most
customers come into a massage parlor thinking nothing is wrong; that
it’s a job we choose,’ she said. ‘It doesn’t occur to them that we are
slaves.’” 24 It is May who elicits this statement from Kim, suggesting that
the journalist’s insistence over her ten-month interview period is inte-
gral to helping Kim arrive at seeing the truth—seeing the markers of
sex trafWcking and being able to know better. May’s narrative thus not
 Front-Page News 57

only inserts the reporter as a central Wgure in Kim’s story, but also allows
readers to see what they might otherwise never suspect by helping to
establish “narratives [that] enable us to grasp an object that, unless we
witness or participate in the violence, we do not know directly.”25
While male journalists can go undercover as johns, female journal-
ists like San Francisco Chronicle’s May are able to establish credibility
through the implication that women who are sex trafWcking victims
are more willing and more honest in speaking to other women. While
the strategy of posing undercover plays on a sense of intimacy between
male journalists and his subjects and story, and thus intimacy with his
reader, female journalists often play on sentiments of global sisterhood
to elicit intimacy and credibility. In May’s San Francisco Chronicle series,
intimacy is further constructed through the title, “Diary of a Sex Slave.”
This narrative plays on the rhetorically constructed intimacy between
female journalist and source, where May provides the private diary de-
tails of Kim’s ordeal. The notion that women are more likely to share
secrets with other women draws on the assumption of evidentiary expe-
rience as a way to validate truths, where the experience of being women
provides evidence of the fact of that shared difference.26
The notion that female trafWcked subjects are more likely to feel at
ease with female journalists reafWrms the idea of an unnamed universal-
ity to simply being women. The prohibitionist NGO Coalition Against
TrafWcking in Women offers a “Press for Change” guide for journalists
reporting on sex trafWcking. Authored by Julie Bindel, a freelance jour-
nalist who often writes for (London’s) Guardian, the guide includes a
“do” and “don’t” list, which states the importance of “try[ing] to en-
sure that female interviewees are interviewed by women.”27 At the risk
of simplifying the circumstances of different women who Wnd them-
selves trafWcked subjects, such a blanket assumption fails to consider
that in some cases those inXicting harm may also be women, that women
victims may not necessarily be more comfortable speaking to women
reporters, or that female victims may not necessarily see their female-
ness as a primary way of identifying.
The discovery and revelation of the narrative of sex trafWcking posits
the journalist as rescuer and suggests that it is the revelation itself that
can act as a solution to the violence of sex trafWcking.28 Such revela-
tions are also posited as the result of the journalist’s hard work, where
journalists caution against accepting interviews from victims too quickly
58 Front-Page News

and emphasize that real victims are often reluctant to share their sto-
ries.29 The theme of hard work—hard work of the journalists, the proxy
rescuers of the story, and the victims—also serves as an indexical icon
of the sex trafWcking story. This marker, however, does more than make
the story recognizable as a sex trafWcking narrative uncovering hidden
“truths”; it also instills national narratives that help deWne values tied
to “being Americans.”
Principles of individualism and the Protestant work ethic help shape
the narrative core of the story in a manner that ultimately saddles the
blame for trafWcking on “native” cultures. Thus the violence of sex traf-
Wcking exists not just in the reported abduction, coercion, rape, and
abuse of trafWcked subjects, but also in the way the narrativizing of
sex trafWcking’s violence afWrms developmental progress frames that
pit “backward” cultures against the progress of human rights.

Cultural Culprits and Dreams Deferred

The narrative landscape of sex trafWcking deWnes the activity through
the scope of rescue and the uncovering of hidden activities, whether
this is recounted through raids on suspect brothels, stories of ethical
johns, or tales chronicling journalistic ethics. These stories focus on
the moral dilemmas of (ethical) johns, journalists, police, and the read-
ing public where there is little ambiguity in separating good actors
from criminal trafWckers. The moral frame helps to construct cultures
of complicity that resonate with existing notions of third world back-
wardness and U.S. progressiveness, which also frame some political de-
velopment theories. Thus these stories end up providing indexical icons
of the violence and criminal activities of sex trafWcking as well as index-
ical icons of the national character.
These stories reXect, refract, and shape notions of national iden-
tity and character, evident in the ways the rhetoric of the American
Dream works as an organizing frame in the story’s attempt to explain
trafWcking. Just as May begins her “Diary of a Sex Slave” with You Mi
Kim’s credit card debt and Frontline explains Katia’s trip to Turkey with-
out her husband to be a result of economic necessity, the story of sex
trafWcking is driven by what the U.S. Department of State describes as
“women eager for a better future” who are “susceptible to the promises
of jobs abroad as babysitters, housekeepers, waitresses, or models—
 Front-Page News 59

jobs that trafWckers turn into the nightmare of prostitution without

exit.”30 In May’s piece, Kim’s initial desire for the American Dream
puts her in so much debt that she decides to answer an ad to “work in
an American room salon. Make $10,000 a month.”31
Writing to demonstrate Kim’s initial desire to participate (correctly)
in the spirit of capitalism and the Protestant work ethic, May empha-
sizes the lack of economic opportunities for women in South Korea.
The Wrst segment of “Diary” is titled “A Youthful Mistake” and runs
with the line, “You Mi Kim was a typical college student, until her Wrst
credit card got her into trouble.” The segment introduces Kim as “the
perfect victim: a small-town girl in Wnancial trouble” who doesn’t know
any better.32 Kim is represented as youthfully innocent and gullible,
where gendered images of vulnerability evident in state documents and
legal testimonies also circulate in news stories: “A friend explained to
You Mi that she could buy things without cash. A magic card, You Mi
thought.”33 Kim is redeemable precisely because she initially quits school
to work a legitimate service-sector job. When this option shows no sign
of helping her earn enough to begin paying off her debt, she contem-
plates “the unthinkable: sell her body,” but she ultimately decides “she
couldn’t stomach the thought of having sex with strangers for money.”34
She then answers the call for work in the United States as a kind of
waitress, which promises that the job does not include prostitution and
pays signiWcantly more than what she is making in South Korea. Thus
Kim’s decision to immigrate comes from a morally recognizable desire
to work for “a better future” in a job characterized as within the morally
acceptable conWnes of babysitting, housekeeping, waitressing, or mod-
eling—work that ironically often falls under the radar of the formal
economy in ways similar to the sex industry.
Recalling familiar narratives of the American Dream where the
promise of a better life abroad begins the tale of hard work, challenge,
and eventual success, these stories present sex trafWcking as a perver-
sion and therefore a threat to this U.S.-American sense of identity.
While trafWckers are clear-cut criminals and antagonists, the fact that
Kim falls into credit card debit because of her failure to apprehend
principles of thrift—a central tenet of the spirit of capitalism—despite
her college education casts a culture of culpability linked to Kim’s dif-
ference from May and her U.S. reader counterpart.
The signiWcance of cultural culpability in trafWcking is also evident
60 Front-Page News

in state documents, many of which reproduce sex trafWcking narratives

that highlight individual victims in a manner very similar to media
pieces. For instance, even while economic conditions are noted as the
primary reason why women Wnd themselves victims of sex trafWcking,
the moral of these stories suggests that economic conditions can be
overcome with the right kind of values or exacerbated with the wrong
values. This rendering of economic conditions as a backdrop for ques-
tions of whether an individual has the right set of (cultural) values or
is able to learn these values unimpeded by bad cultural culprits and
trafWckers naturalizes economic inequality as something that is un-
alterable. This can be seen, for instance, in the State Department’s
annual TrafWcking in Persons Report from 2003:
Greed and the widespread subjugation of women in much of the world facili-
tate trafWcking. Poor countries have been Xooded with images of wealth and
prosperity beamed in through television or radio and lavish displays of wealth
send powerful messages to impoverished citizens about the beneWts of material
acquisition. More often than not, an “ends justiWes the means” rationale has
taken root within communities to legitimize the source of the wealth, regard-
less of how acquired.35

Here the Department of State identiWes greed and patriarchal attitudes

as primary causes of trafWcking. The attitudes of peoples of “poor coun-
tries” that the “end justiWes the means” not only cause trafWcking but
legitimize it. Similar to the characterization of Kim’s inability to grasp
the correct values of capitalism, leading her into a shopping spree of
“metallic handbags, low-rise jeans, high-heeled boots, skin-care creams,
digital cameras and American-style sneakers,”36 the story of sex trafWck-
ing implicates attitudes lacking in hard work and thrift—attitudes that
simply covet the acquisition of markers of wealth—as the reason why
individuals become victims.
By postponing the question of how some nations come to and re-
main in relative poverty while others do not, the Department of State
makes culture the culprit. The difference of poor countries from wealthy
ones is not about the uneven circuits of capital resulting from colonial-
ism and war, but the immoral, greedy, and patriarchal cultural attitudes
and practices of the people. Reasserting the view that “capitalism can-
not make use of the labour of those who practice the doctrine of
undisciplined liberum arbitrium, any more than it can make use of
the business man who seems absolutely unscrupulous in his dealings
 Front-Page News 61

with others,”37 the Department of State’s position is one that adheres

to a “spirit of capitalism” that distinguishes different modes of acquir-
ing wealth through the assessment of attitudes of hard work.
Furthermore, the lack of “rational capitalistic organization” is not
simply a matter of individual lapses but is an indicator that all of the
cultural community is culpable.38 “Bad” attitudes and values are not
simply individual problems, but cultural and national ones. For exam-
ple, in May’s piece, she situates Kim’s failure to properly apprehend
the mechanisms of capitalism to all South Koreans: “Fashion is a major
cultural preoccupation for South Koreans. . . . Poverty is considered a
mortal sin. Such intense pressure to acquire ‘American luxury goods’
puts the average South Korean family in $30,000 credit card debt.”39
Further, it is South Korea’s lack of “high-paying jobs” for women that
May posits as the broader context resulting in Kim’s victimization.40
Reminiscent of the culture of poverty rhetoric that seeks to explain
poverty as an outcome of a way of thinking about money and work that
fails to apprehend thrift, savings, and hard work, the narrative of sex
trafWcking reasserts the idea of culture as key to understanding why
sex trafWcking originates in certain parts of the globe and with certain
people and not others. For instance, in a report prepared for the Inter-
national Organization for Migration (IOM), sex trafWcking in Russia
is explained as resulting from “severe economic decline” coupled with
“psychological and attitudinal changes of people, especially women”
that comes as a result of “images of glamour and wealth from the West
by the media.”41 This view of sex trafWcking in the Russian Federation
reasserts what the Department of State notes a year later—that trafWck-
ing results from certain peoples’ inability to properly cope with mate-
rial/economic changes (by either accepting their relative poverty or by
participating in legitimate sectors of the capitalist economy). The idea
of individual responsibility for “psychological and attitudinal changes”
works along with the construction of cultures of culpability to cast the
problem of trafWcking as about individuals kept from proper values by
their cultural communities.
Even when the framing of sex trafWcking is attentive to the combi-
nation of globalization, militarism, and colonialism all as reasons for
trafWcking,42 the suggestion is that these political formations simply
exacerbate already present cultural conditions that enable trafWcking.
In May’s piece, the sex industry situated near U.S. military bases “where
62 Front-Page News

Japanese troops built the Wrst brothels after invading the country in
1904” is prefaced with the statement that “the selling of Korean women
goes back to the 15th century.”43 Even while colonialism and militarism
are implicated in creating conditions for sex trafWcking, the narrative
situates these conditions within a more entrenched cultural condition.
Such a move naturalizes the construction of “originating” and “native”
places as always backward in their adherence to cultural practices en-
abling sex trafWcking, despite colonialism, imperialism, and military
occupation. Further, the backwardness of culpable cultures is measured
through adherence to patriarchy, constructing native places as back-
ward precisely because of their inability to grasp feminist principles.
Globalization and immigration thus become a means through which
to explain the resurrection of a backward practice like sex trafWcking
in more so-called developed regions of the world (namely, the United
States and Western Europe).44 Criminal trafWckers and immigrant vic-
tims are narrativized as bringing trafWcking to the United States and
other developed nations. Further, the culture of complicity of those
who solicit from trafWckers is never implicated in the same ways as the
native culture incapable of properly educating victims like Kim to
either the spirit of capitalism or proper gender relations. For instance,
the fact that there are ethical johns suggests that the culture enabling
the illicit soliciting of sex can be overcome, or, as in the case of Kim’s
boyfriend, is a momentary lapse in an overall progressive national cul-
ture. This is in contrast to the construction of the native culture as
always having been culpable in the kind of patriarchal relations that
today enable sex trafWcking.
Attitudes about wealth, poverty, and work—attitudes that collectively
create a culture—provide the key reasoning to explain how poverty re-
sults in trafWcking. This is signiWcant not only in displacing the salience
of the (historical) how and why of economic inequality, but also because
the idea of cultural culpability enables the naturalizing of “backward
others” as also racial others, where backwardness is indicated through
visual readings of the body. Culture thus operates as a rhetorical tool
that names difference even while hiding the historical production and
operation of categories of difference. In other words, while culture often
refers to a group of people distinguished by language and tradition, and
identiWable through visual or aural apprehension, culture refuses to
see how it is tied to the racial terms of difference it hopes to substitute
 Front-Page News 63

and replace. Culture, when it is understood as a Wxed category describ-

ing a shared set of behaviors and beliefs that help identify communities,
helps to instill a “new bigotry—not of types of people but of ways of
being,”45 which serves as a site of racialization.
Cultural failure to grasp so-called correct means of wealth acquisi-
tion is tied to a propensity toward patriarchy, helping to construct native
cultures as backward in their relative modernity. This characterization
often takes the form of implicating rural cultures and small towns (as
in the case of Kim’s story). For instance, rural culture, according to
Human Rights Watch, dictates family structures and community expec-
tations in places like Southeast Asia, where trafWcking is encouraged by
cultural assumptions that normalize the selling of daughters:

Of the 30 girls and women, 11 have been brought into Thailand by family
members. The network for Wnding work in Thailand appears to be well known
in the rural areas of Burma that supply the women and girls. Relatives knew,
for example, to take their daughters or sisters to the “Mekong shop” in Mae
Sai or to a particularly well-known agent or to a certain temple.46

The fact that relatives of trafWcked victims are characterized as know-

ing and willing in the commerce of girls and women suggests a deviant
culture of patriarchy, one that extends beyond the bad choices of any
individual to characterize the culture as a whole. The fact that women
are trafWcked by their own family members, people who should have the
women’s best interest in mind, further characterizes the deviancy and
moral degeneracy of these (Southeast Asian) cultures—not even the
mothers and sisters have the moral capacity to see the selling of family
members as abhorrent, and even if they do, they nonetheless participate
in the activity out of economic desperation. Thus, the solution to traf-
Wcking entails teaching women the moral values necessary to see traf-
Wcking as a bad activity because their cultural conditions normalize and
condone trafWcking, even making it an activity in which family members
participate. Hence, so long as victims come from the same cultural com-
munity as trafWckers, outside rescue remains the only solution.
The implication of patriarchy to the cultural culpability of some peo-
ples and nations deWnes patriarchy as problematic because it keeps
women from awareness and self-determination. This construction of
patriarchy relies on decidedly liberal deWnitions of feminism where gen-
der equity is gauged by women’s ability to make choices for themselves.
64 Front-Page News

The trafWcked woman, insofar as she fails to question the “right of [her]
families . . . to sell them,”47 is not only unable to choose but also unable
to see that she has a claim to her own individual rights. She is thus cast
as part of the problem: she enables the very culture that sells and traf-
Wcs her, rendering her rescue from outside imperative. Hence stories
of sex trafWcking may involve a primary rescuer (a good individual even
amid bad cultural conditions) like a husband or understanding john,
as in Frontline’s story of Viorel’s rescue attempts. However, there is always
also a need for an outside rescuer leaving sex trafWcking stories to posit
the journalist or storyteller (or in the case of state documents, the con-
cerned citizen or state ofWcial) into this role.48 Native cultures culpable
for trafWcking are constructed as never giving victims the opportunity
of knowing, and thus narratives of rescue like that driving the Depart-
ment of State’s antitrafWcking agenda highlight the “‘three R’s’—rescue,
rehabilitation, and reintegration,”49 where prevention and rehabilita-
tion rest heavily on education—in other words, in correcting the cul-
tural beliefs that render trafWcked subjects lacking in awareness of their
individual ability to self-determination.50 Such approaches, while they
may be helpful in some circumstances, take for granted and reafWrm
the rightness of liberal principles of individualism, where self-betterment
out of bad cultural conditions requires the correcting of certain kinds
of consciousnesses.
This framing further enables the bifurcating of the globe into
human rights–enacting states like the United States and those of West-
ern Europe posed against human rights–violating states characteriz-
ing the third world and republics of the former USSR. Sex trafWcking
is thus narrativized as a matter for concern for the U.S. state and citi-
zens insomuch as trafWcking victims and criminal trafWckers enter into
the United States to run prostitution rings,51 and the activities of traf-
Wcking result in a moral lapse (already existing in the nations of origin
and momentary in the destination countries). The problem of sex traf-
Wcking is cast as twofold. First is the soliciting and selling of sex, a behav-
ior that can be remedied through a moral appeal, both to the john
who solicits and the trafWcked woman who sells. Second, the produc-
tion of the conditions that lead certain women into trafWcking that can-
not be altered without the prosecution and sometimes eradication of
the men who enable and perpetuate these traditions. Furthermore,
characterizing trafWckers as individual men who are criminal and/or
 Front-Page News 65

cultures of criminality evident in the implication of Japanese Yakuza,

Chinese Triads, the Russian MaWa and corrupt native governments
works to ignore the ways corporations, businesses (capitalism’s so-called
legitimate players), and even law enforcement and the military can par-
ticipate in and perpetuate trafWcking conditions.

The Violence of Modernity: Universalizing Liberal Traditions

Constructing a culture of complicity and culpability is troubling insofar

as such a framing poses victims of trafWcking as part of the problem.
TrafWcked subjects are always already victimized by cultural condi-
tions that never enable the possibility of knowing better or the possibil-
ity of self-enlightenment without an outside rescuer. These dichotomous
framings of victim and rescuer, failing and successful cultures, back-
ward native and modern subject conceptualize cultural communities
as closed, static, and hierarchically organized in a teleological progres-
sion toward human rights enactment/fulWllment. Thus the narrativizing
of sex trafWcking inXicts its own violence in establishing conditions of
subjectivity—conditions through which trafWcking victims, criminals,
and rescuers can be understood as such—that reafWrm constructions
of Wrst world progress against third world and sometimes second world
inability.
In writing the subjects of trafWcking in cultural terms, cultural com-
munities are cast as “not yet”—not yet realizing feminist potential, not
yet enacting human rights values, not yet as modern or progressive as
their Euro-American counterparts (who are placed in the role of res-
cuer). This writing as not yet recalls a legacy of Enlightenment and
post-Enlightenment humanism grounded in principles of liberalism,
where humanity is deWned by a mechanism of differentiation that writes
a “waiting-room version of history,” which works by “saying ‘not yet’ to
somebody else.”52 The not yet nonetheless offers the possibility of in-
clusion—of becoming a human rights–enacting subject or a culture
deWned by human rights principles. This promise works to universalize
liberal principles of humanism that deWne humanity through rational-
ity, individualism, and self-determination by offering the possibility of
including those not yet, whose consciousnesses are clouded by affectabil-
ity,53 into modern conditions.
66 Front-Page News

Subjects in the trafWcking story are produced through the mecha-

nisms and strategies of post-Enlightenment texts that necessitate an
“other” Wgure to stand against and before the modern subject, making
victim status necessarily absolute. These “other” Wgures are always and
already not yet human rights enacting, in opposition to their already
human rights–enacting counterparts. The writing of subjects as either
“enacting” or “not yet” universalizes an understanding of humanity
grounded in modern principles, where subjects are ultimately deWned
by their exercise of agency and self-consciousness. In liberal terms, this
amounts to the individual capacity to choose and implement rights. Mak-
ing cultures culpable ensures this writing of humanity by leaving some
perpetually not yet able to enact human rights as a result of the ways
these communities are affected by their cultures despite individual at-
tempts at reform.
Further, it is not only in the reiWcation of troubling dichotomies
and stereotypes that the narrativizing of sex trafWcking inXicts vio-
lence. It is also in the ways the story constructs victim subjectivity as
absolute. In May’s narrative, for example, when Kim opts to remain in
the sex industry even after ties to her trafWckers have ceased, she is still
characterized as a victim. May writes that Wve months after being “lured
from her home in South Korea by international sex trafWckers,” Kim
was let go. After gaining her freedom, Kim still faced “a $40,000 shop-
ping debt back home” that she decided would be most quickly paid off
if she remained in the sex industry: “Any kind of job she could get as
an illegal immigrant—cleaning homes or washing dishes in a restau-
rant—wouldn’t pay her debts in time. . . . You Mi felt she had no choice.
On her Wrst day of freedom, she took an unlicensed Korean taxi from
Los Angeles to another illicit massage parlor in San Francisco.”54 Never
quoting Kim, May narrates Kim’s choice to remain in the sex industry
as never really a choice, or a choice born out of desperation and exac-
erbated by her trafWcking. The reader never actually knows whether
“You Mi felt she had no choice.”
Even when victims like Kim act as decision makers and exercise
what otherwise would be considered self-aware choice, the trafWcked
subject is nonetheless rendered victimized. Journalist Victor Malarek
recounts for Frontline: “People have said to me, ‘Well these girls can
run.’ They can’t. They’re taken to these apartments and these houses,
usually in remote areas, and men come in and break them. They make
 Front-Page News 67

her submit to every indignity in front of all the girls. They beat her and
do whatever.”55 While this description of victimization might accurately
describe the experiences of some, the way this image of victimization
becomes an indexical icon for all trafWcking violence is troubling in
that it frames victim status as absolute. Even when the writing of vic-
tims allows for some agency in choosing to remain in sex work, there
is still a general admission that acknowledges the structural conWnes
of patriarchy under which prostitution operates. The question of “which
proportion would choose prostitution as an occupation if society had
offered them any other reasonable option” underwrites sex trafWcking
narratives,56 suggesting that the choice in sex work is ultimately lim-
ited by the larger cultural and economic conditions subjugating women.
Given the absoluteness of the ways victims are described in sex traf-
Wcking narratives, the desire to see that “women need not always be
victims, but can take hold of their own lives, and create a better future
for themselves and their community” is an understandable one.57 How-
ever, reading trafWcked subjects as decision makers and agents does
not necessarily dismantle the operations of power that problematically
produce her as not yet, nor does this move question the universalizing
of liberal principles and modern epistemologies. The ontological frame-
work through which trafWcked subjects are written as not yet remains
in place whether the trafWcked subject is characterized as victim or
agent. This is problematic in that the notion of agency is deWned “within
the realm of individual action that only regards certain types of actions
as agentive and rational. . . . Certain types of action [are] represented
as coercion (victimhood) [which] denounces other actions as expres-
sions of false consciousness.”58
The capacity to read the narrativizing of sex trafWcking for the var-
ious “cartographies of communication” at work not only exposes the
ways “powerful actors . . . determine what will count as silences, lies, and
surpluses, just as they create silences of their own,” 59 but it also reveals
the assumptions around understanding subjects and being that univer-
salize modern regimes of knowledge. Thus the violence of sex trafWcking
exists beyond the activities described by state documents and journal-
ists; it also exists in the way such accounts are narrated: “Newspaper
stories, like narratives told in courtrooms, police stations, and every-
day rumors, raise important issues about how violence gets ideologi-
cally separated from the violence of modernity, extracted from history
68 Front-Page News

and political economy, individualized as products of pathological sub-

jectivities and defective domesticities, and made to represent entire pop-
ulations, thereby naturalizing representations of class, gender, space,
state, and nation.” 60
The violence of modernity can be glimpsed in trafWcking narratives
in the writing of victimization as absolute and the casting of culture as
culpable. This is elucidated in Nicholas Kristof’s New York Times series on
trafWcking. Kristof, a Rhodes scholar whose studies in Arabic and Chi-
nese no doubt helped land him beats in Asia, won his second Pulitzer for
what judges called columns “that gave voice to the voiceless in other
parts of the world.” 61 Attentiveness to how such voices are framed and
the broader discursive landscape these voices help shape, which in turn
helps produce meanings around human rights, can demonstrate the
ways representational violence characterizes sex trafWcking.
Beginning in 2004 and continuing into 2007, the New York Times
ran several of his editorial pieces. In an early piece on sex trafWcking,
Kristof writes about meeting two girls in Cambodia, Srey Neth and Srey
Mom, whom he decides to “free.” Beginning his column with the state-
ment, “One thinks of slavery as an evil conWned to musty sepia photo-
graphs. But there are 21st-century versions of slaves as well, girls like
Srey Neth,” Kristof recounts how he met Srey Neth, who “insisted at Wrst
(through my Khmer interpreter) that she was free and not controlled
by the guesthouse.” Noting that Srey Neth “soon told her real story,”
Kristof continues to write about the story of abuse the two girls pro-
vide. The column ends with the following exchange between Kristof
and Srey Mom:

“Do you really want to leave the brothel?” I ask.

“I love myself,” she answered simply. “I do not want to let my life be de-
stroyed by what I’m doing now.”
That’s when I made a Wrm decision I’d been toying with for some time: I
would try to buy freedom for these two girls and return them to their families.62

Kristof makes a moral assessment—it is only when Srey Mom proves

to Kristof that she recognizes that her life is being destroyed by her
“slavery” that Kristof decides to buy her freedom. The fact that buying
the girl’s freedom further commodiWes them suggests that this is not
the problem; rather, the problem according to Kristof’s account is in the
ways the girls are kept from living lives of their choosing, evidenced in
 Front-Page News 69

both girls’ eventual acceptance of Kristof’s offer of freedom. When

Kristof later Wnds Srey Mom back at her old brothel (this time refusing
the interpreter’s offer to take her to a women’s shelter), he concedes
that there are “few fairy-tale endings in sexual trafWcking. (I hope the
teenager, Srey Neth, will have one, for she has now built a tin-roofed
shack and stocked it as a grocery, and is proudly earning a living for
herself.)” 63 Contrasting Srey Neth’s success to Srey Mom’s failure, Kris-
tof suggests that working in a brothel ultimately enslaves Srey Mom to
the point where she decides to return to it even when she has the choice
not to return. The title of this segment, “Loss of Innocence,” is telling
in that it suggests both Srey Mom’s lost innocence working in a brothel
as well as Kristof’s own loss of innocence in his realization that there
are “few fairy-tale endings.”
One silence imposed in Kristof’s narrative occurs when he asks
Srey Mom, “Do you really want to leave the brothel?” Srey Mom’s reply—
that she loves herself and does not want her life to be destroyed by
what she is doing now—refuses to answer Kristof’s question. It is un-
clear in Srey Mom’s response if “what I’m doing now” refers to her work
in the brothel, her speaking to Kristof, or any other myriad activities
characterizing her now. Kristof never considers this and instead inter-
prets Srey Mom’s statement as an afWrmative answer to his question.
This exchange can be read as an instance where Srey Mom refuses to
speak on Kristof’s terms, though Kristof’s ultimate narration writes the
exchange as about his decision to buy Srey Mom’s freedom. Here the
violence of trafWcking exists beyond the descriptions Kristof offers of
abuse and “maim[ed] spirits,” 64 but in the ways such violences are nar-
rated and represented. After all, news “is a social resource whose con-
struction limits an analytic understanding of contemporary life” inso-
far as such stories rely on typiWcations and indexes of recognizability,
and on the (political, economic) structures through which news medias
establish themselves as legitimate and professionalized social actors.65
These stories thus help map representational mechanisms and fram-
ing assumptions that dictate both how and at what cost human rights
subjectivity is conferred.
This page intentionally left blank
4. Seeing Race and Sexuality
Origin Stories and Public Images of Trafficking

The vis ual m e an i n g s attached to sex trafWcking, par-

ticularly as they are depicted through ofWcial U.S. government sites,
reveal the ways trafWcking is not only an international issue, but also
one that is deeply implicated in meaning making around U.S. national
belonging. It is in the visual realm that the stakes of specifying the par-
ticular bodies prone to victimization are made explicit. Even though
state documents continually point out that “there are no precise statis-
tics on the extent of the problem and all estimates are unreliable,” they
nonetheless proclaim that “the largest number of victims trafWcked in-
ternationally are still believed to come from South and Southeast Asia.
The former Soviet Union may be the largest new source of trafWcking
for prostitution and the sex industry.”1 Representing potential victims
as hailing from speciWc places and thus looking a particular way not
only threatens to overlook other possible victims, but it also helps repro-
duce connections between ideals of sexual normalcy/deviancy with
national belonging and helps naturalize visual cues with racial cate-
gories and cultural communities.
This chapter is anchored in an examination of visual representa-
tions accompanying state documents in order to make clear the sexualiz-
ing and racializing logic central to producing meanings around human
difference and to connect this meaning making to the conferring of
humanity and U.S. national belonging anchored in liberal notions of
capitalist relations. The chapter opens with a consideration of how the
visual imagery of sex trafWcking constructs racialized and gendered
understandings of national belonging, while the latter sections exam-
ine the signiWcance of juxtaposing Eastern Europe and the former
Soviet Union with Asia as the two most often noted places of sex traf-
Wcking’s origin as conveyed in state and NGO documents. Building on
the previous chapter, this chapter looks at the speciWc meanings at-
tached to the cultures constructed as complicit in trafWcking.

71
72 Seeing Race and Sexuality

By examining the “transnational ways of looking” that visual im-

agery of victims of sex trafWcking elicit,2 the visual logic accompanying
(racial, sexual, national, and labor) regimes of human difference are
made explicit. These logics distinguish the inner (spiritual/intellectual)
self from the outer, physical body presumed to indicate and reXect the
inner soul. Such logics are intimately tied to the philosophical and onto-
logical investments of the Enlightenment and post-Enlightenment texts
on man, where “the racial writes Europeans and the others of Europe
as subjects of exteriority, [which] institutes the body, social conWgura-
tions, and global regions as signiWers of the mind.”3 Examining the
racialized difference of femininities depicted in sex trafWcking imagery
reveals the ways neocolonial conWgurations of power—that is, the kind
of power relations that enabled colonialism and the consolidation of
European Empire during the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries—
continue to inform how human rights works as a site where bodies are
sorted and hierarchized.
State documents disproportionately represent trafWcking victims as
immigrants—nonnationals who are outside the normative parameters
of national citizenship. Along with trafWcking narratives, visual imagery
featuring victims assumed to be nonnationals works to demonstrate
the global and national register of race as well as the racialized ways
U.S. national belonging is imagined. The national and global registers
help to deWne the concept of racial difference, where racial categories
gain meaning through the evocation of a global landscape and national
outside. Race as a concept is deWned with and against the conceptual
register of nation, where differential claims to national belonging work
to give individual racial categories meaning. How this plays out in de-
Wning the parameters of trafWcking victims conceives of human rights
as a site where uneven relationships of power can continue rather than
a site where such uneven relationships might be addressed.

Racializing Sexualities: Asian (American) Racial Formation

The visual mediums through which antitrafWcking campaigns repre-
sent victims demonstrates the way such sites work to create and shape
meanings around race, sexuality, and national belonging. In the Depart-
ment of Health and Human Services’ (DHHS) “Look Beneath the
Surface” antitrafWcking campaign (part of the DHHS Administration
 Seeing Race and Sexuality 73

for Children and Families), a blurred image of a woman in a crowd is

accompanied by text that asks readers to

Look beneath the surface: Human trafWcking is modern-day slavery. A victim

of trafWcking may look like many of the people you help everyday. Ask the
right questions and look for clues. You are vital because you may be the only
outsider with the opportunity to speak with a victim. There are safe housing,
health, immigration, food, income, employment, legal and interpretation ser -
vices available to victims but Wrst they must be found.

Similar to the Immigration and Customs Enforcement’s 2009 public

service campaign “Hidden in Plain Sight,” the DHHS campaign is also
directed at vigilant citizens who might “look beneath the surface” to
identify human trafWcking. The blurry effect of the image suggests the
hidden nature of trafWcking as an activity that cannot easily be seen
without a trained and attentive eye willing to “look for clues.” Lacking
color, the image represents the starkness and anonymity of trafWcking.
The only part of the image in focus and clear enough to be distinguished
is a woman’s face, which appears Asian and is rendered the focal point
by being boxed. Posted in public venues—for instance, city buses and
billboards—across the United States, the poster is available in English,
Spanish, Indonesian, Chinese, Korean, Thai, and Vietnamese.4 In a city
like San Francisco, with a large and historically visible Chinese Amer-
ican population, the DHHS poster campaign does more than appeal
to the Asian (immigrant) victim and (American) potential rescuer. It
helps produce “Asian Americans . . . born in the United States with
formal U.S. citizenship” as “alien citizens” who, despite citizenship,
“remain alien in the eyes of the nation.”5
The fact that “Look Beneath the Surface” is a campaign the DHHS
speciWcally lists as targeting immigrant populations helps to afWrm and
recirculate the racialization of Asian difference as perpetually foreign,
where “the American citizen has been deWned over against the Asian
immigrant ” and where this difference is apprehensible visually through
the body.6 In part due to the persistent focus on trafWcking across
(rather than within) national borders, the poster identiWes the Asian
woman as a likely nonnational victim of trafWcking (Figures 1 and 2).
In doing so, the image works to further racialize Asian difference
through the axis of national belonging, where immigrant status is ren-
dered a more acute part of how some immigrants can identify, and the
Figure 1. Part of the Rescue and Restore campaign launched in 2004 and 2005 by the
Department of Health and Human Services, this antitrafWcking publicity poster
represents a potentially hidden victim of trafWcking.

Figure 2. Department of Health and Human Services publicity poster representing

a young female Asian victim of sex trafWcking as part of the Rescue and Restore
campaign launched in 2004 and 2005.
 Seeing Race and Sexuality 75

category immigrant works on a national scale to connote Wrst and fore-

most Asian and Latino bodies (over bodies identiWable as white, black,
or indigenous). The visible cues conveyed on the body work to mark
the differential claims to national belonging, making racialization always
also about citizenship and national belonging.
The only explicit anti-sex-trafWcking (as opposed to human traf-
Wcking more generally) poster that is part of the DHHS “Look Beneath
the Surface” campaign also features an image of a young Asian woman’s
face. The accompanying caption reads:

Any child engaged in commercial sex is the victim of human trafWcking. Chil-
dren made to work against their will (such as in farm labor, domestic servitude
or sweatshop factories) are victims of human trafWcking. There are safe hous-
ing, health, immigration, food, income, employment, legal and interpretation
services available to child victims, but Wrst they must be identiWed.

Curiously, this poster, even while suggesting that children forced into
labor are victims of trafWcking, also indicates that employment is one
service the DHHS can offer to child victims. The mixed message works
to draw a line between good (state approved/sanctioned) and bad
(forced) work. According to the poster, commercial sex, whether forced
or not, is always a matter of child trafWcking, while farm labor, domes-
tic servitude, and sweatshop work only victimize children when they
are forced into these situations. These images of victims trafWcked for
sex work play on notions of gendered infantilization, and they also re-
call and help entrench the racialized sexuality of Asian difference, which
ties Asianness to sexual deviancy and speciWcally constructs Asian fem-
ininity as hypersexual—as “sensuous, promiscuous, but untrustwor-
thy.”7 Thus meanings around racial difference not only work through a
national register, but they also function with and through the register
of sexuality and gender, where understandings of normative sexuali-
ties cannot be comprehended without also creating meanings around
whiteness.
Whiteness has historically been deWned through the mechanizing
of racial purity ideologies, from eugenics and voluntary motherhood
campaigns to interracial sex and marriage laws. Seeing race as an in-
heritable matter necessarily makes policing the boundaries of racial
categories a matter of sex because race is literally birthed. Maintaining
the color line thus historically necessitated policing sex and sexuality,
76 Seeing Race and Sexuality

particularly reproduction, to keep the idea of racial categories sepa-

rate and whiteness pure. Even in the so-called postracial context of the
twenty-Wrst century, discussions of identity (as “ethnic heritage”) utilize
a logic that both conXates ethnicity with race and quantiWes race, where
one’s identity is described as the sum of multiple discrete racial parts
(part white, part Latino, part Native American, and so on).
Hence racialization, the process of attributing meaning to racial
categories, is inextricably tied up with sexuality and gender. The logic of
race as a visual/physical and biologically deWned marker of discrete cat-
egories (Asian, black, Latino, white) is one that has codiWed the concept
of the one-drop rule, though variably depending on historical, regional,
and situational context. For example, with the Virginia Act to Preserve
Racial Integrity of 1924, keeping track of blood quantum became a nec-
essary part of ensuring that interracial marriages did not take place and
disrupt the racial order. This law helped codify the ordering of society
through heteropatriarchal white privilege by ensuring that interracial
offspring whose blood quantum was not pure enough (“one-sixteenth or
less of the blood of the American Indian and have no other non-Caucasic
blood”)8 were never able to claim whiteness. By policing interracial sex
and marriage differently depending on how the parties involved could
appeal to socially acceptable scripts of behavior, this law also protected
white men’s access to both white women (almost exclusively) and women
of color without the threat of undermining the racial order.9
Sexualized racialization is a process that is relational, where the
meanings attached to normative understandings of sexuality are relation-
ally constructed against notions of sexual deviancy. The racial register
helps to produce some sexualities as deviant over and against others,
thus upholding heteropatriarchal ideologies of white purity by justify-
ing constructions of men of color as sexual threats and women of color
as sexually available.10 Racialization is relational also in the ways under-
standings attached to whiteness, blackness, Asianness, indigenousness,
and Latino difference are constructed with and against each other, as
well as in relation to the historical, political, and social context.11 Thus
understanding the differential representations of trafWcked sexualities
demonstrates the ways racialized understandings of sexuality become
regulatory norms, where whiteness works to anchor sexualities as nor-
mative (evident in the late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century cult
of domesticity, for example).
 Seeing Race and Sexuality 77

These differential representations of racialized sexualities are appar-

ent in the kinds of images included in a Department of State photo gal-
ery. The OfWce to Monitor and Combat TrafWcking in Persons makes
available photographs taken by Kay Chernush to help “illustrate the
State Department’s annual report on ‘TrafWcking in Persons.’”12 The
online gallery of photographs titled “Sexual Exploitation” features nine
images, seven of which either visually or textually feature Asia (three fea-
turing India and Nepal, the others featuring East or Southeast Asia). Of
the other two photographs, the Wrst is an ambiguous image of men stand-
ing outside a strip club (with no identifying caption, but taken in Hong
Kong according to the Wle title), and the second is a photo of the back
of a woman talking to someone in a car with a caption identifying the
site as Western Europe (Figure 3). The caption to the photograph reads,
This woman used in prostitution in Western Europe is forced through threats
and intimidation to give all earnings to her trafWcker. The amount varies be-
tween 200 and 400 Euro ($250–$500 USD) per month. These fees come on
top of a huge bogus “debt” typically about $35,000 Euro ($44,000 USD) owed
by the woman to the trafWcker who brought her, usually from Africa or East-
ern Europe. Wealthy European countries are magnets for sex trafWcking.13

Figure 3. A woman leans into a car in a representation of sexual exploitation.

Photograph by Kay Chernush taken in 2005, courtesy of the U.S. Department of State.
78 Seeing Race and Sexuality

This is the only image in the gallery that explicitly identiWes Europe in
relation to sex trafWcking. The caption situates the image within Europe,
and by doing this evokes white victims even though the photo itself is
ambiguous, neither revealing the face of the presumed victim or any
explicit activity indicating sex. In fact, this is an image that conjures
sex only insofar as the image of a woman leaning into a car is overde-
termined by shared cultural knowledge of women working the streets
and insofar as the caption suggests that the photograph depicts pros-
titution. The juxtaposition of this image, the only one referencing
Europe, with the other images in the gallery demonstrates the relational
construction of femininities.
The remaining eight photographs in the gallery either visually or
in captions refer to Asia. They are not as ambiguously about sex; nor
do they depict women in such modest ways. Figure 4, which follows the
Europe image, states in the caption:
Bar girls, like these young women in Southeast Asia, are typically trafWcked
from impoverished rural communities and neighboring countries. They are
required by the bar’s owner or “mama-san” to entice male patrons to buy drinks
for them. If they do not meet their monthly quota, they may be beaten or bru-
talized. Other girls work in discos and massage parlors where sex is for sale.

Figure 4. Two women perform on stage while a man looks on. Photograph by Kay
Chernush taken in 2005, courtesy of the U.S. Department of State.
 Seeing Race and Sexuality 79

The caption implicates all Southeast Asian women in trafWcking,

whether they are victims or victimizers like the mama-san. In contrast,
the image of sex trafWcking in Europe represents the activity as an indi-
vidual transaction between women working the street and potential
johns spatially distanced by the car; there is no mama-san, and there is
no reference to an organized sex industry (bar girls, massage parlors).
Representing sex trafWcking through the image of the single woman
working the streets (Figure 3) in contrast to an entire organized sector
of the economy that passes as legitimate has the impact of making sex
trafWcking seem like a much more prevalent activity in Asia when com-
pared to Europe.
After this photograph (Figure 4) is one similar to the Europe photo.
While the location of the photograph is not speciWed in any caption,
background cues—lanterns, Asian-looking people—and the fact that
the previous image describes how “young women in Southeast Asia . . .
are required . . . to entice male patrons” suggest that this photograph
also depicts a scene in Southeast Asia (Figure 5). The photo Wle’s identi-
fying title, only visible in downloading the image, does in fact indicate

Figure 5. Two women talk to two white men in a representation of sexual exploitation.
Photograph by Kay Chernush taken in Thailand in 2005, courtesy of the
U.S. Department of State.
80 Seeing Race and Sexuality

that it is taken in Pattaya, a city in Thailand famous for its beach resorts
and its relative proximity to Bangkok. This image, which in many ways
mirrors the sixth photograph in the gallery, depicts another street scene
with two women working the streets, though it is more gratuitous in
conveying sex. The image is not ambiguous: men are clearly soliciting
illicit activities. It coveys this fact by blurring the men’s faces. The two
white men are also in direct conversation with the identically barely clad
backs of two Asian women, and there is no automobile to distance the
parties involved.14
The image’s referencing of white, as opposed to Asian, johns both
makes the transaction being represented seem more elicit in its herald-
ing of interracial sex even while it is also a more palatable elicitness
because the image involves white men with Asian women (Figure 5). The
interracial conWguration of Asian women with white men has been
made more socially acceptable in the United States as a result of the
racializing of Asian femininity as compliant and potentially assimilable
while also desirably exotic.15 As Laura Kang argues, a dense archive of
visual representations of the Asian American female makes this Wgure
legible only in some ways and not others, namely as part of interracial
and heterosexual relationships with white American male Wgures. This
casting suggests that “the only way to project [the Asian American
woman] as American is to render each such visible body as genuinely
desiring and Wnally choosing this particular union [with a white male
Wgure] . . . [though] the Americanization of these women is not fully
secured but projected with struggle and force.”16 These constructions
of Asian femininity with white masculinity have historically helped nego-
tiate race relations domestically, justify U.S. militarism in Asia, and
consolidate U.S. political power in international relations, particularly
during the cold war and civil rights eras, by representing Asian differ-
ence as needing and willing to be domesticated (in contrast to black-
ness).17 Further, the visual archive representing Asian female–white
male interracial relationships also helps to “encode the ‘white male
body’ as ‘American’ by way of its emplotted self-realization through
interracial, heterosexual desire.”18 Thus by implicating white men, the
Department of State image is able to reproduce a sense of American
national belonging anchored in whiteness (over and against the foreign-
ness of the Asian bodies). Hence the message of the image can appeal
 Seeing Race and Sexuality 81

to white and Western audiences by suggesting there is a national and

cultural responsibility to address “our” moral lapses when traveling
abroad.
The very different ways Asian women are photographed in compar-
ison to their European counterparts suggests that the terms for under-
standing victims of sexual trafWcking diverge depending on the regional
and racial identity of the victim, where assumptions about the difference
between the female sexuality of the white European victim to that of
the Asian woman underwrite the associations the images and accom-
panying text convey. It is no coincidence that the images used to depict
the victim of sexual trafWcking hailing from Europe tend to represent
the photographed women in a less overtly sexualized manner than those
depicting women from Asia. It is also no coincidence that the images
of European victims exist alongside those of Asian women.19
While these photographs generally do not directly implicate Asian
masculinity, rather more often depicting white masculinity, as in Figure
5, it is the implicit assumption that the deviancy of Asian masculinity
allows for sex trafWcking to continue to exist that underwrites the two
contrasting frames for understanding sex trafWcking and sexuality. The
largely unrepresented but always present implication that Asian patri-
archy and (failing) masculinity is at the root of sex trafWcking in ways
that white Euro-American patriarchies are not forms the crux of the
relational construction of racial difference. Further, the juxtaposition
of the European to Asian victim also works to racialize Eastern Europe
and the former Soviet Union as white and racially homogenous. While
the whitening of Eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union has been
a process that has taken place within the context of U.S. racial forma-
tion since the late 1800s, the particular ways Eastern European ethnic
difference is racialized through the site of trafWcking demonstrates
the particular political context of the post–cold war human rights
period where gender and feminism operate as acute axes through which
(moral, economic, political) development is assessed.

Racializing Patriarchies, Whitening Eastern Europe

The contrasting of femininities through visual cues offered in state

documents is also elaborated in discussions of origins—discussions of
82 Seeing Race and Sexuality

why sex trafWcking is more likely to occur in Eastern Europe, the for-
mer Soviet Union, and Asia than in other places. These explanations
racialize patriarchies in a manner that constructs Asia as perpetually
bound to patriarchal traditions, while patriarchy in Eastern Europe and
the states of the former Soviet Union are constructed in contrast as
neither traditional nor despotic. This racializing of patriarchies helps
to whiten Eastern Europe and the nations formerly part of the Soviet
Union over and against Asia and other regions racialized as nonwhite.
The whitening of Eastern European and former Soviet ethnicities
echoes theories of civilizational development, where communism in
Europe is cast as having kept these regions from progress and the ful-
Wllment of the spirit of capitalism. It also works to represent these re-
gions as racially homogenous, in contrast to the representation of the
United States as multicultural.20
The difference of patriarchies thus plays a crucial role in framing
sex trafWcking’s narrative of origins, where constructions of Asian dif-
ference link Asianness to despotism and traditional practices of patri-
archy in ways that gauge progress through the (cultural) exercise of
liberal feminist principles. Such representational effects enable human
rights to act as a site of (neo)colonial power. The contrastive and rela-
tional femininities represented in the state department’s image gallery
is further reproduced in state and NGO documents, media, and schol-
arly research explaining why sex trafWcking persists in Eastern Europe,
the former Soviet Union, and Asia.
Victor Malarek, a journalist, and Andrea Bertone, the director of
HumanTrafWcking.org, articulate a claim that appears to be taken for
granted as part of the story of origin accompanying sex trafWcking,
namely that trafWcking for sexual labor Wnds very old origins in Asia,
while only appearing more recently in Eastern Europe and the former
Soviet Union. Malarek states,

The international bazaar for women is nothing new—Asian women have been
the basic commodity for years, and armies of men still Xock to Bangkok and
Manila on sex junkets. Over the past three decades the world has witnessed
four distinct waves of trafWcking for sexual exploitation. This latest trafWc from
Eastern and Central Europe has been dubbed “the Fourth Wave,” and the speed
and proportion are truly staggering. . . . The Wrst wave of trafWcked women
came from Southeast Asia in the 1970s and was comprised mostly of Thai and
Filipino women.21
 Seeing Race and Sexuality 83

Similarly, Bertone notes,

Prostitution has existed for thousands of years in many different societies. How-
ever, South and Southeast Asia are one of the original areas of the world where
sexualized work and sex trafWcking developed. For example, Thailand’s sex
tourism can be traced back through local forms of prostitution and concubi-
nage, and colonial sex trading. . . . After Asia, Eastern Europe and the former
Soviet Union are extremely fast growing markets for young women. . . . Since
the fall of Communism, criminal networks have Xourished.22

Both Malarek and Bertone suggest that sex trafWcking is older in Asia,
and in suggesting that the postconXict situation in Eastern Europe and
the former Soviet Union has enabled “criminal networks to Xourish”
and thus trafWc women into sex work, the authors criminalize Asian
culture, which provides the traditions that enable sex trafWcking. The
understanding that sex trafWcking appears in Eastern Europe and the
former Soviet Union only recently as a result of political and economic
instability after the collapse of the Soviet Union is contrasted to the ex-
planation that sex trafWcking is part of a long-standing historical and
cultural practice linked to prostitution, concubinage, and sex tourism
in Asia. A key Congressional Research Service report similarly states
that “economic dislocations caused by the transition following the col-
lapse of Communism in the former Soviet Union” result in trafWcking
in Eastern Europe, while practices of “favor[ing] sons and view[ing]
girls as an economic burden” explain trafWcking’s prevalence in the
third world, namely Asia.23 In a 1999 congressional hearing on sex traf-
Wcking in Europe, Representative Christopher Smith (R-N.J.), a coau-
thor of the bill that would pass a year later as the VTVPA, echoes such
sentiments, noting,

Although trafWcking has been a problem for many years in Asian countries, it
was not until the end of communism in East-Central Europe and the break up
of the Soviet Union that a sex trade in the OSCE region began to develop. . . .
As trafWckers know very well, other populations of particularly vulnerable
women can be found in conXict and post-conXict settings. 24

These explanations situate sex trafWcking in Asia as “a problem for

many years,” deeply ingrained in the social and cultural landscape of
the region.
The Clinton administration’s initial ofWcial effort into the research
and legislation of trafWcking in the late 1990s coincides with the collapse
84 Seeing Race and Sexuality

of communism in Eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union. Not

surprisingly, trafWcking is therefore a central part of U.S. attempts to
understand this postsocialist context, where the condition of Eastern
Europe and the former Soviet Union after communism is articulated
and rationalized through frames of human rights (failures, for the most
part). What is telling is the lack of any discussion of trafWcking in the
region before 1992. In an International Organization for Migration
(IOM) study on sex trafWcking in the Russian Federation, for example,
precollapse Russia is never part of the story.25 Sex trafWcking, explained
as a result of regional political and economic instability resulting from
the collapse of the Soviet Union, is largely cast as appearing in the
region only after this moment, where “material changes in living stan-
dards” changed the mind-sets of the “people of Russia.”26 In contrast,
another IOM report that examines trafWcking in Cambodia identiWes
cultural precedents as the key reason women are trafWcked into sex
work and remain in that industry. This IOM report focuses on the “semi-
parental relationship” between trafWckers and victims that is used
to “manipulate women and girls” and emphasizes the role of “cultural
norms, such as gender-based norms” in “sustain[ing] trafWcking prac-
tices.”27 While this may be the case—cultural practices can and do
help sustain gender violence—the focus on cultural factors in explain-
ing sex trafWcking in certain places and not others, as well as the tem-
poral frames of progress and modernity implied in such explanations,
does more than help explain trafWcking; it also signals and helps shape
racial, national, and gender/sexual discourses.
This framing of sex trafWcking in Eastern Europe and the former
Soviet Union as a more recent phenomenon assumes that the activity
is momentary and will disappear as economic and political stability is
restored to the region. In contrast, the problem of sex trafWcking in
places like South and Southeast Asia is presented as much more deeply
rooted—rooted in such a way as to make the practice innate and thus a
matter that cannot simply be addressed through good governance. Thus
these contrastive explanations of sex trafWcking suggest that patriarchal
practices are inherent to the peoples and locales of Asia, Wnding deep
historical and cultural roots, and construct Asia’s patriarchy as more
problematic, demonstrated in the fact that old practices (like concubi-
nage) are Wnding new outlets. For instance, as Siddharth Kara explains
with regard to contemporary sex trafWcking activities in Thailand, “the
 Seeing Race and Sexuality 85

history of Thai women being held as male property dates back to the
Wfteenth century. As codiWed in law, men . . . could sell wives as slaves.”28
Unlike Eastern Europe, the existence of sex trafWcking in Asia is cast
as a matter that extends beyond governance and reaches to a cultural
aspect that preexists the state and modern economic relations. This
juxtaposition is suggestive for several reasons.
First, the presumed visual apprehension of culture on the bodies
of Asian trafWcking subjects demonstrates how the language of cul-
ture works to racialize postcommunist states through the lens of white-
ness in contrast to their Asian counterparts. The whitening of Eastern
Europe and the states that formerly comprised the Soviet Union ren-
ders invisible people who might look Asian but who identify culturally,
nationally, and linguistically with Russia and other states formerly of
the Soviet Union. This construction of the former Soviet Union in par-
ticular narrowly understands Russia and other former Soviet states as
more European than Asian, even though the Soviet Union was pre-
dominantly situated on the continent of Asia, an effect that follows cold
war epistemologies. As Jodi Kim traces, during the early post–World
War II period of the cold war, the Soviet Union was initially understood
in U.S. policy documents through an orientalized rationale that racial-
ized it as Asiatic. However, the rise (or fall) of China to a communist
regime in the 1950s shifted the lenses through which U.S. policy mak-
ers framed the cold war and the communist threat. The displacement
of the Soviet Union by China in the imagination of U.S. political doc-
trines and the Sino–Soviet split of the late 1950s rendered the Soviet
Union a European Wgure within a reconWgured cold war framework that
bifurcated the Soviet and Chinese fronts into a largely Euro-American
cold war political dispute between the West and the Soviet East Wgured
against an actual (imperial) military war waged against the “red men-
ace” of Asia.29 Furthering this whitening Wguration of Eastern Europe
and the former Soviet republic erases the historical and ongoing ways
Eastern European and Russian ethnic difference has been constructed
against Anglo-Saxon, Nordic, and Germanic notions of whiteness in
the United States. The constructed and variable nature of whiteness is
thus hidden.
Second, contrasting sex trafWcking in Asia with that in postcommu-
nist Europe works to situate racial difference in geographical terms,
where Asian difference is perpetually linked to an imagined physical
86 Seeing Race and Sexuality

and cultural cohesion deWning, namely East (and marginally South)

Asia. This logic applies beyond categorically constructing Asian and
white/Euro-American difference, and it applies also to the understand-
ing of other racial categories, where, for example, blackness in U.S.
racial formations gains meaning through its tie to an imagined cohesive
geographical (and cultural) outside (Africa). This operation demon-
strates the global complexion of race. DeWning racial difference through
geographical terms works to help construct the United States as a
frontier for race relations and as an exceptional space where such rela-
tions might be overcome through the creation of temporal and spatial
distance between nonwhite bodies and their racial consciousnesses
(the goal of assimilation theories). This racializing work of sex trafWck-
ing discourses is the focus of the next chapter. Finally, the contrasting
narratives of sex trafWcking’s origins also reinstill frames of civiliza-
tional progress that are racialized and afWrm modern regimes of knowl-
edge, where man’s distinction is tied to his ability to progress out of a
state of nature into the rational realms of jurisprudence and social con-
tracts. The framing of man as developing along linear patterns where
more civilized men represent the actualizing of rationality (and capital-
ism) that less civilized men have yet to grasp constructs global others
as “not yet,” a construction that enables the upholding of the promise
of modernity while naturalizing its teleology.
The ways in which cold war and postsocialist constructions of East-
ern Europe and the former Soviet Union situate these regions in be-
tween the civilized and modern West and the tradition-bound third
world is conveyed in sex trafWcking’s narration of origins. Samuel Hunt-
ington most notably revives the sentiments of Max Weber that the Ori-
ent is plagued by despotism, hierarchizing the globe’s civilizations into
a paradigm where Euro-American or Western society represents the
most advanced social organization indicated by the nature of capital-
ism operating in this region. Asia, by contrast, while advanced beyond
African and indigenous regions (where only the possibility of civiliza-
tion exists, according to Huntington), remains unable to inhabit the
civilizational greatness of the so-called West due to its cultural tenden-
cies that pervert capitalism—cultural tendencies that are reproduced
through the literal birthing and social rearing of cultural citizens, mak-
ing this discourse of difference dependent on sex/gender. As Hunting-
ton sums up, “Non-Western civilizations have attempted to become
 Seeing Race and Sexuality 87

modern without becoming Western. . . . They [non-Western civiliza-

tions] will also attempt to reconcile this modernity with their tradi-
tional culture and values.”30 In this schema, Eastern Europe and the
Soviet Union are situated as second world nations momentarily falter-
ing from modernity (as it is captured in the spirit of capitalism) as a
result of adherence to communism. Sex trafWcking narratives that often
contrast geographical origins use this notion of a momentary lapse tied
to communism in order to explain the region’s failure to ensure human
rights, where in a postsocialist context human rights becomes the gauge
of civilizations.
By now well critiqued for advancing reductionist and racist under-
standings of (moral and economic) development, the tendency to under-
stand why sex trafWcking develops in different regions of the globe,
namely Eastern Europe and Asia, nonetheless reveals the continuing
salience of such troubling lenses to explaining global phenomena. 31
This racialized lens of civilizational development alluded to in the di-
verging narratives of origin reveals that while the language and terms
do not necessarily name race, the process and effect of creating and
reasserting the innate and natural difference of “other” places like Asia
nonetheless deploy the very logics, assumptions, and operations of racial
power. Thus racializing discourses need not name race to perform the
same work.

On the Path to Modernity:

Universalizing Liberal Feminisms

The naturalizing of liberal principles through the use of teleological

frames of civilizational development not only reassert racialized under-
standings of modernity and tradition, but also frame the notion of
women’s human rights narrowly in terms of achieving the ability for
self-conscious (and rational) choice, where (neo)liberal and rational
capitalist relations are implied as congruent with women’s human rights.
The ways in which the racial and national registers help frame sex
trafWcking are visually conveyed in a United Nations OfWce of Drugs
and Crimes–produced public service announcement, “Work Abroad”
(2001).32 One of a series of several announcements distributed in the
early 2000s, “Work Abroad” features and addresses women who might
potentially Wnd themselves victims of sex trafWcking.33
88 Seeing Race and Sexuality

The announcement plays on the idea of women going to work

abroad and suggests the dangers of illicit sectors of the economy like
sex work. The initial scene of the announcement presents a young white
woman in everyday clothes looking much like a college student, with
accompanying text reading, “Go work abroad.” She is next presented
in a setting that recalls a dorm room, and as the camera moves into a
close-up of her face, viewers see that the woman is crying. Here the
text reads, “Housing will be provided.” Viewers are then introduced to
the announcement’s second character, an Asian woman, who watches
as a faceless man (conveyed through his hands and a shot of his torso
in a suit and tie) tears her passport in two; accompanying text reads,
“No work permit required.” The following scene depicts the Asian
woman’s head and bare shoulders as she is lying on her back, while two,
large wrinkled, white (presumably male) hands move down her face and
out of frame. The accompanying text reads, “You’ll meet new, interest-
ing people.” In a similar scene that follows, viewers then see a white
man looking into a peephole. The camera shifts to follow the gaze of
the man to reveal the white female protagonist dancing on stage in only
her underwear, with text stating, “Your own comfortable work space.”
The next scene presents the white woman again in her underwear count-
ing bills in her bedroom; the camera moves from the woman to a close-
up of a needle and rubber tube lying on her bed. After this scene, the
Asian woman stands in a hallway with a man, who is taking a roll of
bills away from her; the text reads, “Excellent salary.” In the Wnal scene,
viewers are returned to the Asian woman lying on her back with shoul-
ders bare, though the hands that were touching her before are no longer
visible. Rather, the camera focuses on her face, which is now cringing
to convey discomfort, sadness, and/or pain; accompanying text reads,
“Are you interested?”
The fact that the kinds of jobs available to many young women when
working abroad—au pairs, domestic and care work—might actually
entail the same kind of intimate and affective labor as sex work is left
absent in the announcement, even though it alludes to such connections
through the title. Rather, the announcement draws a Wrm line that estab-
lishes sex work as devoid of intimacy and care by suggesting that such
situations are only entered when women are forced or tricked. Thus the
announcement rests on the assertion that “good” work is formalized
(through wages and taxes) and therefore also a recognizable hallmark
 Seeing Race and Sexuality 89

of the public sphere, while work that falls outside these formal structures
is framed as dangerous in its potential inversion of this public/private
distinction.
The visual narrative of the announcement also references the jux-
taposed stories of sex trafWcking’s origins in the context of Eastern
Europe and the former Soviet Union in contrast to Asia. In the an-
nouncement, whiteness is signiWed as congruent with independent,
autonomous female agents as opposed to the culturally bound, unaware
Asian victim. The white female protagonist is clearly presented in the
opening scene as a woman who has chosen to live and work abroad,
though that choice may be the result of economic desperation or fraud.
The presence of her pimp or trafWcker is only ever implied, and it is
only in the scene that begins with a close-up of a man looking through
a peephole that any single shot in the announcement featuring the white
woman places her in a shared shot with any other characters, though
never a shared frame. While the white woman is the object of the man’s
gaze, she is nonetheless separated from him by both wall and camera.
This is the only scene where the white female character is suggested
to be with a man; all other scenes of her present her autonomously in
frame.
Comparing the scenes featuring the white woman with those fea-
turing the Asian character suggests that even though the white woman
is also a victim, her closest and worst victimizers are the drugs featured
in the scene of her counting money. She is thus represented as having
the possibility of exercising agency—of being able to make the decision
to quit taking drugs. Yet the announcement presents explicit scenes of
the Asian female character being harassed, molested, and threatened
by anonymous male characters. Because the announcement also does
not gesture to any backstory for the Asian female character—she is only
presented as victim, from the scenes of her lying naked on her back to
the various scenes of her in the hands of men (pimps taking away money,
trafWckers tearing up passports)—the announcement suggests that the
Asian woman never demonstrates self-determination or choice, even if
that choice was a bad one leading her into trafWcking. “Work Abroad”
implies the opposite is true for the white female character, where the
opening scene presents the white character as a normal college-age
girl who (innocently or stupidly) decides, according to the accompany-
ing text, to work abroad. The announcement echoes sentiments that in
90 Seeing Race and Sexuality

Russia, “a quarter or half of the sex trafWcking victims had jobs or col-
lege degrees,” as John Miller, the former senior advisor to the Secre-
tary of State on Human TrafWcking, states. 34 This is congruent with the
explanations of sex trafWcking in Asia as tied to cultural adherence to
traditional (not modern) patriarchal practices like selling daughters,
where women are represented as having no sexual autonomy or oppor-
tunity for agency. The racial and national frames work to structure the
announcement in a way that perpetuates the racializing of Asian sexu-
ality as deviant, gauges the development of cultural communities in
terms of patriarchy, and thus reafWrms the kinds of uneven global rela-
tionships that enabled colonialism.
These representations of sex trafWcking’s origins in Asia and East-
ern Europe and the former Soviet Union universalize liberal feminist
understandings of gender equity. This liberal framing of women’s rights
works to ensure that rational capitalist relations provide the exclusive
mechanism through which women’s rights can be achieved. The ques-
tion of whether cultural communities can succeed in achieving women’s
human rights through the apprehension and practice of rational cap-
italist relations is mediated through questions of the extent to which
religion has a hold over those cultural communities. The framing of
trafWcking thus reafWrms assumptions that in places where “practical
rational conduct . . . [has] been obstructed by spiritual obstacles, the
development of rational economic conduct has also met serious inner
resistance.”35
The relative modernity of Eastern Europe and the former Soviet
Union when compared to Asia is measured through the yardstick of reli-
gion and liberal feminist indicators—participation of women in “pub-
lic” life, the ability of women to be self-conscious and rational decision
makers, and women’s demonstration of sexual autonomy. In casting two
different stories of sex trafWcking’s regional origins through frames of
civilizational development and linear progress toward modernity, traf-
Wcking documents construct communism as modern in its formalizing
of gender equity in the political, economic, and social realms, while reli-
gion (namely, Buddhism, Hinduism, and Islam) is posed as a marker
of a tendency toward cultural despotism plaguing Asia.36 For instance,
acknowledging the “progressive” ways communist governments formal-
ized gender equity in the states comprising the former Soviet Union
and Eastern bloc, the IOM report on sex trafWcking in Russia notes,
 Seeing Race and Sexuality 91

“ TrafWcking in women and girls is caused by the compounding factors

of economic collapse and unemployment, the decreasing social status
of women in the transition to a market economy.”37
In contrast, explanations of sex trafWcking’s origins in Asia never
indicate that anything but the low social status of women, tied to reli-
gious practices, has been the norm for the region:
The trafWcking in women and children for prostitution and sex tourism in
Thailand involves the most blatant violations of women’s human rights. Yet
because this phenomenon is under-girded by cultural and religious attitudes,
beliefs, and practices, especially regarding gender roles and relationships, that
legitimate its continuation, it has largely evaded the efforts of international
human rights law to curb its proliferation. . . . Recognition of women’s human
rights is made especially difWcult in Thailand because Buddhist culture views
women as socially embedded in family, kin, and community rather than as self-
determining, independent individuals.38

These explanations deWne women’s freedom in liberal terms tied to

ensuring women as self-determining, independent individuals who par-
ticipate in the legitimate market economy, where sexual autonomy is
deWned as anchored in a woman’s right to individual expression of sex-
uality (protected by the state). While the lack of a liberalized market
economy was negotiated through communist policies of gender equity
in the former Eastern bloc, these policies were destabilized in the period
of collapse where, according to the IOM, “the biggest problem with the
inXux of sexualized glamour [that accompanied the region’s turn to-
ward capitalism] was that few were able to differentiate between liber-
alization and exploitation.”39
In the case of the former Eastern bloc, the region is understood as
historically recognizing women’s capacities for self-determination in
part because of communism’s rejection of religion. The implication to
the IOM account suggests that the return of women’s rights—the re-
turn of women’s social status and the protection of their formal status
as equal members of society—will naturally result once the transition
to economic liberalization has stabilized. In the context of Asia, the
ascension of women’s social status that accompanies rational capital-
ist relations, while positive because it will allow women greater move-
ment outside the realm of “family, kin, and community,” is ultimately
cast as negative because it creates more social pressure on women to
help support the family, thus perpetuating the selling of girls by family
92 Seeing Race and Sexuality

members.40 Here the cultural inability to understand liberal notions of

female autonomy in the Asian context, in part due to the entrench-
ment of (non-Christian) religion, is used to explain why economic lib-
eralization has not necessarily ensured women’s social status but has
rather resulted in the perpetuation of patriarchy and sex work (and traf-
Wcking) in Asia. Thus such explanations further afWrm understand-
ings of economic, political, and cultural development that naturalizes
a linear and singular trajectory of development and modernity, where
despite economic liberalization in Asia, the region is cast as not yet
capable of exercising (modern) human rights principles.
The implicit assumption driving these explanations argues that the
difference of patriarchy—the patriarchal cultural values anchored in
religion and tradition speciWc to Asia—explains why these societies lack
comprehension of the proper principles of gender equality and capi-
talism. Thus the logic follows that catapulting these places into a mod-
ern and rational capitalist economy will only further harm women.
While providing women in Asia the ability to be “self-determined, inde-
pendent individuals” is central to combating sex trafWcking in the re-
gion, the narrative creates a culture of culpability where changing the
broader culture is also framed as necessary to Wghting human rights
violations. However, when taken with the ways these cultural explana-
tions are also racialized, tying traditions to geographies that then make
values, beliefs, and mind-sets visible on the body, changing the broader
culture becomes a self-defeating exercise. The racial frames distinguish-
ing Asian from white victim in the sex trafWcking narrative racialize
the Asian victim as in need of reform from outside the so-called cul-
tural community. The visual cues distinguishing Asian victims as Asian
convey a kind of visual logic that makes cultural reform impossible
insofar as culture is reinscribed through the body.
By considering the visual, representations of sex trafWcking reveal
how the framing of international human rights issues makes it also about
domestic discourses of race, gender, sexuality, and national belonging.
In the images of sex trafWcking, the apprehension of the transnational
cannot take place without reference to national discourses of race and
citizenship. Thus even while there is a tendency to see human rights as
an international concern distanced from the more domestic concerns
of race relations and racism, comprehending one requires referencing
the other. Further, the way sex trafWcking documents also understand
 Seeing Race and Sexuality 93

and explain human rights through liberal feminist frames dismisses

other ways of conceptualizing gender/sexual justice. Assuming the uni-
versality of concepts like women’s human rights and the primacy of the
self-determined individual takes away from the promise of human rights
by allowing human rights to function as a site reproducing the very
relations of power that such projects should seek to dismantle. Thus
imagery and narratives of sex trafWcking’s geographical and cultural
origins demonstrate the continued ways modern epistemologies (of cap-
italist development, economic liberalism, the Protestant work ethic,
and so on) frame and restrict how sex trafWcking is represented as a
human rights violation. Feminist concerns regarding the global reso-
nance of gendered violence thus need to do more than catalog. They
need to map and deconstruct the onto-epistemological frames through
which we come to know women’s human rights issues as such.
This page intentionally left blank
5. ReWguring Slavery
Constructing the United States as a Racial Exception

S ex traf f i cki n g often gets talked about in a way that

not only conXates it with sex work but also with slavery. Given that the
U.S. legal deWnition of trafWcking deWnes victims as those individuals
who lack reasonable choices and/or the ability to consent, the desire
to connect contemporary trafWcking activities with the imagery and lan-
guage of transatlantic slavery is not surprising. What work takes place
when transatlantic slavery is used to understand contemporary traf-
Wcking activities? What kinds of racial discourses become salient by
using the imagery of transatlantic slavery to describe trafWcking? What
is the signiWcance of the fact that a national history (of transatlantic
slavery) comes to inform the contemporary international condition of
human rights?
This chapter looks at the ways evoking the history of transatlantic
slavery to describe contemporary trafWcking activities in state, NGO,
and media documents enables the writing of U.S. national belonging
as a universal aspiration—belonging that all are assumed to desire, and
belonging that is imagined as available to all. In the post–9/11 context
within which trafWcking has become legible as a global and national
human rights concern, the framing of trafWcking through lenses that
historicize U.S. race relations into a progressive narrative works to en-
able a construction of the United States as an exceptional space of
human rights. This construction gauges exceptionalism through the
index of feminism and multiculturalism, which allows the state to claim
that certain nationalist feminist agendas “overcome U.S. parochialism,”1
as well as “allow Americans not only to celebrate progress into a more
inclusive and tolerant people, but also to tell themselves that this is
who they always were.” 2 Multiculturalism is a term used to describe many
racial discourses; here it refers to a way of understanding difference
that champions the celebration and inclusion of difference and that as-
sumes the correcting of structural inequalities by civil rights legisla-
tions that “equates ending racism with eliminating racial reference

95
96 Refiguring Slavery

within juridical discourse and public policy,” thereby imagining a kind

of color-blind future.3
The ways in which a particular notion of U.S. exceptionalism is for-
warded through trafWcking discourses demonstrates the limits of inclu-
sion as a political and signifying strategy. While the Wrst half of this
chapter maps the methods and effects of equating contemporary traf-
Wcking activities to transatlantic slavery, the latter portion considers the
limits of discourses of multiculturalism and nationalist feminism that
such framings enable. Describing trafWcking as a contemporary form
of slavery enables a nationalist feminism that “highlights the dangerous
thematic and rhetorical linkages between ‘progressive’ western femi-
nists and conservative nation-builders.”4 These nationalist feminisms
work with teleological accounts of racial progress that conXate native-
born people of color with immigrants of color; both are written as dem-
onstrating affectable (and thereby needing to be corrected), rather than
transparent (universal), consciousnesses—an effect of modern repre-
sentational strategies.5
Framing trafWcking through transatlantic slavery helps construct
a national project and projection of “the universal force of American
norms and institutions,” enabling “the belief of U.S. policy makers
and public intellectuals that they speak and act on behalf of the entire
world,” as Nikhil Pal Singh articulates.6 Sex trafWcking works as a site
where meanings around U.S. exceptionalism, expressed through a story
of racial inclusion and women’s liberation, are consolidated through
the mythologizing of the history of slavery and its negative effects. The
effect of these racial and gender discourses of national belonging is an
additive understanding of categories of difference that fails to “move
beyond listing how each [race and gender] excludes” subjects.7 The
chapter ends by considering the conceptual groundwork through which
sex trafWcking narratives reafWrm modern accounts of the conferring
of humanity.

ReWguring Slavery

The referential connection made between contemporary human traf-

Wcking and the transatlantic slave trade is a rhetorical move that does
more than draw attention to the devastating effects of human trafWck-
ing. Making these connections evokes and enables a particular way of
 Refiguring Slavery 97

understanding race and racial discord that writes it into a historical

and teleological national narrative. The kind of racial discourse that
this reference to transatlantic slavery enables is one that extends the
scope of the national to the global. It also frames the U.S. nation as
uniquely situated to address trafWcking as a global and international
human rights issue.
The casting of contemporary human trafWcking into the framework
of transatlantic slavery is a common rhetorical strategy, evident in media
accounts, ofWcial state documents, and NGO literatures. For example,
one antitrafWcking NGO based in Washington, D.C., Polaris Project,
names itself in reference to the North Star, which holds signiWcance in
slave narratives as the nighttime guide for slaves attempting to escape
the South. Indeed, Polaris Project describes Wghting “trafWcking and
slavery in the spirit of a modern-day Underground Railroad.”8 Echo-
ing these rhetorical strategies in a 2004 address to the United Nations
General Assembly, President Bush states:
There’s another humanitarian crisis spreading, yet hidden from view. Each
year, an estimated 800,000 to 900,000 human beings are bought, sold or
forced across the world’s borders. Among them are hundreds of thousands of
teenage girls, and others as young as Wve, who fall victim to the sex trade. . . .
Governments that tolerate this trade are tolerating a form of slavery. . . . We
must show new energy in Wghting back an old evil. Nearly two centuries after
the abolition of the transatlantic slave trade, and more than a century after
slavery was ofWcially ended in its last strongholds, the trade in human beings
for any purpose must not be allowed to thrive in our time.9

This framing of sex trafWcking is repeated by myriad other state ofW-

cials and entities, from the U.S. Department of Health and Human Ser -
vices to the Department of Defense, the CIA, the Department of Justice,
and the U.S. Congress, as well as scholars and researchers like Kevin
Bales, president of the NGO Free the Slaves, whose book, Understand-
ing Global Slavery, begins with a discussion of the African slave trade in
the United States in order to situate contemporary human trafWck-
ing.10 Similarly, former ambassador John Miller, of the OfWce to Monitor
and Combat Human TrafWcking, notes, “Most Americans are stunned
to Wnd slavery still exists in the United States, let alone the rest of the
world. . . . We are beginning to understand the tricks of today’s human
trafWckers, which are the same tactics as those used by the slave masters
of old: deception, fraud, coercion, kidnapping, beatings and rape.”11
98 Refiguring Slavery

AntitrafWcking enforcement and litigation is framed through the

rubric of civil and property rights, and the VTVPA is understood as an
extension and supplement to the Thirteenth Amendment, which fur-
ther characterizes contemporary trafWcking activities as part of a legacy
with origins in the transatlantic slave trade and its eventual abolish-
ment. As Senator John Cornyn (R-Tex.) notes in his 2004 opening
statement during a hearing before the Subcommittee on the Constitu-
tion, Civil Rights and Property Rights:

As we continue to Wght to protect the American way of life in our war against
terrorism, we have also been Wghting another war to protect American ideals
and principles, a war against an old evil—human trafWcking and slavery.
Most Americans would probably be shocked to learn that the institutions
of slavery and involuntary servitude, institutions that this Nation fought a
bloody war to destroy, continue to persist today, not just around the world, but
indeed hidden in communities across America.
It has been nearly two centuries since the abolition of the trans-Atlantic
slave trade, and well over a century since the ratiWcation of the 13th Amend-
ment. Yet to this day, men, women, and children continue to be trafWcked into
the United States and coerced into lives of forced labor and sexual slavery. The
stories they tell are tragic, disturbing and heart rendering, and the acts that they
endure are not just unconstitutional, not just criminal, but profoundly evil.
The experiences that we will hear recounted amount to a modern-day form
of slavery. The stories are not easy to hear, but we must hear them and we must
face up to them if we are to Wnish the work of the 13th Amendment and truly
expel the institution of slavery from our midst.12

Characterizing contemporary human trafWcking, and speciWcally sex

trafWcking, as manifestations of a “profoundly old evil” performs sig-
niWcant work in several ways.
Framing human trafWcking as a new expression of an old evil works
to establish a narrative unfolding that, by linking an institution fun-
damental to the establishment of modern racism to an international
human rights issue, casts racism as largely a national problem long
past. Transatlantic slavery recalls the institutionalizing of racism, where
the codifying of the precept of black inferiority sustained and justiWed
the enslavement of some for the beneWt of others.13 Thus reference to
transatlantic slavery also connotes the centuries-old Wght to abolish it,
which includes the Civil War referenced by Senator Cornyn, as well as
civil rights–era activisms aimed at ending institutionalized practices of
racism like Jim Crow. This framing thus allows for the assumption that
 Refiguring Slavery 99

legal revisions like the Thirteenth Amendment and civil rights–era suc-
cesses like the Civil Rights Act of 1964 have solved the problem of in-
stitutionalized racism, which perverted “American ideals and principles”
of equality and liberty, leaving the “American way of life” threatened
now by contemporary human trafWcking.
Yet this desire to situate the institutionalizing of racially based en-
slavement and inequality in the past ignores the ways structural racism
persists and the ways the effects of institutionalized inequality continue
long after legal “corrections.” For example, as George Lipsitz outlines,
despite post–Civil Rights Act legislations to ensure fair and desegre-
gated housing, resistance, refusal, and renegotiation on the part of the
privileged did little to alter the status quo, where redlining practices
maintained segregated neighborhoods. Additionally, the impact of seg-
regated housing has had lasting effects on wealth accumulation that
extend far beyond the passage of the 1968 Fair Housing Act. By the time
families of color had legal rights to fair housing practices in the 1970s,
white families who had taken advantage of Federal Housing Authority
subsidies and tax incentives during the 1940s and 1950s suburban hous-
ing boom had accumulated a generation’s worth of equity and wealth,
demonstrating the continued institutionalizing of the “possessive invest-
ment in whiteness.”14
Further, characterizing contemporary human trafWcking as a res-
urrection of an “old evil,” and linking the Wght against such evils to an
“American way of life,” works to write the struggle against slavery and
institutionalized racism as part of the national, rather than simply an
African American, history—in effect renationalizing black Americans.15
Bush and Cornyn rewrite and reconcile a divisive and contentious his-
tory of slavery, racism, war, and disenfranchisement into part of a shared
and smooth national narrative of origin. By casting transatlantic slav-
ery against “American ideals and principles,” Cornyn’s statement sug-
gests that transatlantic slavery was an aberration—a lapse and error of
judgment that, like terrorism, threatened moral principles by introduc-
ing evil. Thus characterizing contemporary human trafWcking through
the lens of transatlantic slavery helps to construct a national mythol-
ogy centered on the idea of a universally American propensity to Wght
to uphold equality and liberty—a Wght that has enabled a present land-
scape of racial and cultural pluralism. This national mythology also
reconciles the place of U.S. citizens who fought to maintain slavery
100 Refiguring Slavery

and segregation by displacing such individuals to the past. In doing so,

the fact that slavery and the position of slaves as nonhuman, laboring
bodies enabled the institutionalizing of “American ideals and princi-
ples” is reconciled.
The fact that the slave was always deWned against the national citi-
zen (landowning men) and even against the national ward (wives and
daughters of citizens) as a thing never to have claim to the nation and
always conceptually outside “American ideals and principles” threatens
to pull apart this articulation of the national mythology. In other words,
reference to the transatlantic slave trade threatens to expose the fact
that slavery was not a momentary lapse but rather a constitutive condi-
tion to the founding of the nation-state, providing both a labor force
that enabled the accumulation of capital and a conceptual “other”
against which the free national citizen could be deWned. The retelling
of this history through a narrative of sex trafWcking that is about “other,”
non-American lapses of morality works to postpone (by displacing
slavery into a contained past) the threat of exposing the very constitu-
tive role of the transatlantic slave trade in the institutional, ideologi-
cal, and conceptual founding of the U.S. nation. In other words, we
might consider transatlantic slavery not as an aberration, but as a con-
stitutive condition. The contradiction of liberty at the core of the U.S.
nation is thus reconciled through a historicizing and spatializing nar-
rative of progress that moves outward beyond national borders toward
the fulWllment of greater freedoms.
Using the rhetoric and imagery of transatlantic slavery to describe
contemporary human trafWcking helps to construct the United States
as exceptionally situated in global antitrafWcking efforts. These charac-
terizations take a historical phenomenon that had a distinctly national
impact in shaping the U.S. nation-state and equate it with a global and
international humanitarian crisis to appeal to U.S. citizens and, in
Bush’s case, to the United Nations community. If human trafWcking is
the new face of the same kind of evils that enabled transatlantic slav-
ery, then those nations and governments that fought to abolish the “old
evil” are poised also to lead antitrafWcking efforts. Indeed, Bush and
Cornyn imply that the historical experience of Wghting the evils of slav-
ery place the United States in an exceptional and unique position to
lead antitrafWcking efforts. This assumption permeates U.S. state anti-
trafWcking discourses, for instance, in the annual TrafWcking in Persons
 Refiguring Slavery 101

reports, which “rank[s] nations according to their status as importers

or exporters of trafWcking victims” but exempts the United States and
also strongly correlates U.S. foreign policy goals with tier placement.16
In these ways, the United States “has positioned itself as an equally sig-
niWcant [international] force in the anti-trafWcking arena” along with
the United Nations.17
Linking human trafWcking to transatlantic slavery makes possible
the rewriting of a U.S. history of racial discord and exploitation into
a national mythology of progress toward pluralism, equality, and lib-
erty—American principles and ideals—that help legitimate the U.S. role
as leader in the global effort to combat trafWcking and other women’s
human rights abuses. Such a move erases the signiWcance of gender
and racial violences taking place at home, displacing the impact of “vio-
lence, poverty, labor and globalization . . . [on] women of color in our
own, local [U.S.] communities.”18 It also upholds a notion of national
belonging that is universal (all can now make claim), a universalizing
that is furthered through an appeal to a moral law.

Universalizing U.S.-American Principles

Two years after the collapse of the World Trade Center Twin Towers,
President George W. Bush, in an address to the United Nations in New
York, spoke of the necessity of a global war on terror—a war he de-
scribed as “between those who seek order, and those who spread chaos;
between those who work for peaceful change, and those who adopt the
methods of gangsters; between those who honor the rights of man, and
those who deliberately take the lives of men and women and children
without mercy or shame.”19 Articulating justiWcations for United States’
military interventions in Afghanistan and Iraq, Bush’s address shifted
to connect U.S. military involvement to the security of a free and dem-
ocratic globe ensured through United Nations’ commitments to arms
antiproliferation efforts and other shared work to address “humanitar-
ian crises of our time,” including AIDS relief and famine. The other
humanitarian crisis that President Bush stressed was the trafWcking of
women and girls for the global sex trade.
The fact that the President folded the United Nations into the poli-
cies and agendas of not only his administration but the U.S. nation as
102 Refiguring Slavery

a whole worked to establish a “universalizing force” as characteristic

of U.S. institutions and norms. Bush articulated.

The founding documents of the United Nations and the founding documents
of America stand in the same tradition. Both assert that human beings should
never be reduced to objects of power or commerce, because their dignity is in-
herent. Both require—both recognize a moral law that stands above men and
nations, which must be defended and enforced by men and nations. And both
point the way to peace, the peace that comes when all are free.

By bringing together the founding documents of the United Nations

with those of the United States, the president’s speech reconstructs the
“tradition” underlying these documents as one that is deWned by a
shared (national and global) effort to extend and include the rights of
human beings ensured to them by virtue of a “moral law that stands
above men and nations.” Noting that the moral law driving both the
founding documents of the United Nations and the United States asserts
that “human beings should never be reduced to objects of power or com-
merce,” the president refers to the history of the transatlantic slave
trade as well as the “modern-day form of slavery” previously noted in
the address. As Bush’s address describes, sex trafWcking is another shared
agenda between the United States and the United Nations that is part
of a broader global effort to instill peace, order, and moral law even at
the risk of waging war.
The national trajectory that Bush projects reads the history of the
United States (beginning with the establishment of the founding doc-
uments) as one deWned by progress toward greater freedom for all, a
goal that Bush also casts as deWning the United Nations. Thus Bush
frames national belonging as a universal condition; the U.S.-American
history of greater freedoms is one that is both extended to all and
aspired to by all, even those situated outside national borders. This
universalizing of U.S. institutions and norms is also ensured by fram-
ing institutional responses to global humanitarian crises (including sex
trafWcking) through the rubric of a “moral law that stands above men
and nations.” Given the liberal bent of the United Nations Universal
Declaration of Human Rights, Bush is not necessarily wrong in suggest-
ing that there is a shared tradition between the United Nations and the
United States, especially when it comes to “the idea that the state should
respect the human rights of its citizens.”20
 Refiguring Slavery 103

Using the language of moral law and the transatlantic slave trade
enables Bush to expand the scope of U.S. laws and legal institutions.
Conventional ways of deWning human rights do so through the con-
cept of natural or moral law—a law that stands before all mankind—
derived from Enlightenment texts on the nature of man and civil soci-
ety. For example, in deWning the origins of political power, John Locke
establishes a state of nature—the natural state of man—out of which
men reason and decide to enter into social contracts for the mutual pro-
tection of life, health, liberty, and possessions. This state of nature is gov-
erned by natural law, which, according to Locke, “obliges everyone.”21
The tradition of natural law thus appeals to human rights scholars and
advocates precisely because it represents that pristine state before the
formation of individual states and governments; it is the universal state
of mankind that “all men are naturally in,” what for Locke and his
legacy is “a state of perfect freedom.”22 Yet this desire to use the tradi-
tion of natural or moral law and the state of nature to understand and
deWne the force of human rights limits human rights by privileging the
European philosophical traditions of the Enlightenment, out of which
the founding documents of the U.S. nation also stem.
Thus the framing of human rights within the scope of moral law
helps to ensure the universal potential of U.S. norms, laws, and legal
institutions. The national scale of U.S. norms, histories, and institu-
tions is rewritten through a global register, as former Wrst lady Laura
Bush’s joint 2004 address on the “progress in women’s human rights”
demonstrates:
Although Abigail Adams, like many women during her time—and since, I might
add—handled the domestic duties, she believed that women should have an
active role in developing our young nation. . . . Abigail Adams is one of the many
women who helped establish the vitality of our nation. Others, like Elizabeth
Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony, led the determined struggle to gain suf-
frage for women. And, today, their actions continue to inspire women around
the world. . . . The struggle for women’s rights is a story of ordinary women
doing extraordinary things. And today, the women of Afghanistan are writing a
new chapter in their history. . . . We’re making progress toward greater rights for
women in the Middle East and around the world. But still, too many women face
violence and prejudice. Many continue to live in fear, imprisoned in their homes.
And in brothels, young girls are held against their will and used as sex slaves.23

Under the banner of ensuring the freedom and rights of women in

Afghanistan, Mrs. Bush celebrates U.S. militarism abroad and renders
104 Refiguring Slavery

a controversial war less so by tying it to a historical and national his-

tory of mobilization for the civil and political rights of the disenfran-
chised (women) that can be applied to the global, and by describing
women’s human rights violations like sex trafWcking as slavery. Her state-
ments demonstrate the salience of what Deborah Cohler describes as
a nationalist feminism that appropriates “a liberal feminist language
of inclusion by a conservative agenda” that “signals the historical and
structural connections between ‘liberal feminist’ and ‘conservative
nationalist’ discourses of war, peace and nation.”24
By suggesting that keeping women “imprisoned in their homes” is
like holding “young girls . . . against their will and [using them] as sex
slaves,” Mrs. Bush frames freedom through a liberal and gendered lens
that organizes relations through a public/private dichotomy, where
greater rights for women globally are tied to the participation of women
in the public sphere; hence early suffrage activists Elizabeth Cady Stan-
ton and Susan B. Anthony provide hallmarks for the kind of global
feminism that Mrs. Bush proposes. These early suffrage activists were
also often active in abolition movements, allowing Mrs. Bush’s state-
ment to fold the history of white women’s disenfranchisement into a
story of transatlantic slavery, the effect of which is to suggest that the
United States can lead (because of its national past) global efforts to
ensure women’s rights.
Yet her version of global feminism conceptualizes politics on assump-
tions of liberalism, which Wgure women as equally (and sometimes
differently) capable of sharing in a political, cultural, and economic
subjectivity that upholds the idea of the rational, self-determined in-
dividual. Indeed, liberal feminisms center the notion of abstract indi-
vidualism at the heart of modern political theories. These notions of
abstract individualism “express the essence of the human” at the same
time they conceptualize an individual unique from his fellow humans.25
This contradiction between the abstract and the unique individual is
negotiated through difference—where the difference of the individual
from the slave, for example, enabled a sense that certain bodies shared
in their uniqueness as (human) individuals against their constitutive
(slave) “others.” Thus “nationalist feminism polices norms of race, gen-
der, and sexuality as it claims to promote neoliberal gender equity.”26
Further, the writing of women’s rights into a global frame enables Mrs.
 Refiguring Slavery 105

Bush to deWne women’s human rights as a matter for “other” women,

which constructs such “others” as behind and not yet capable of ex-
pressing the kind of human rights–enacting subjectivity housed in the
U.S.-American citizen.

National Mythologies

The universalizing of U.S.-American institutions and norms through

the evocation of moral law and the U.S. histories of transatlantic slav-
ery and white women’s suffrage helps shape a national mythology that
hides and displaces the ways enslavement, exploitation, and disenfran-
chisement continue to be constitutive in the conceptual and institutional
foundation of the U.S. nation-state. Characterizing sex trafWcking
through the lenses of transatlantic slavery, nationalist and liberal fem-
inisms, and moral law renders the issue of difference and nation only
about one conception of the historical struggles for enfranchisement—
speciWcally the struggle for political inclusion narrowly deWned as access
to citizenship, the vote, and (political, economic, social) representation.
These characterizations of sex trafWcking thus establish a narrative of
progress that is anchored in one way of reading the national history,
but that is also framed as universal and global, where the trafWcking of
women for sexual labor signiWes one “last and latest” human rights issue
impeding the full actualization of human freedom. As Dr. Laura J. Led-
erer, director of the Protection Project and senior advisor on TrafWck-
ing for the OfWce for Global Affairs, notes, sex trafWcking is “one of the
last, unfortunately the last, even in the women’s movement the last, of
the issues, but deWnitely not the least, to be examined by our society.”27
The mythologizing of the history of transatlantic slavery and its re-
writing as a national aberration—an evil eventually corrected—rather
than a constitutive moment enables a teleological story of inclusion
told through multicultural frames that stress pluralism and postracial
longings for a color-blind future. In the Bushes’ statements, the narra-
tive that frames their remarks imagines the United States as deWned by
a progressive history moving toward greater freedom and inclusion, a
movement that they see as eventually encompassing the globe. Thus
the history of the United States that was so fundamentally about ex-
tracting the labor of certain bodies without enabling these bodies a
claim to the nation, evident both in the history of slavery as well as
106 Refiguring Slavery

immigration, is sidestepped. What remains is the consolidation of the

history of antiwhite privilege, anticapitalist and antipatriarchal strug-
gles into the mythic discourse of nation that writes the exceptionalism
of the U.S.-American condition in the nation’s ability to adapt to, in-
clude, and celebrate a growing number of racial and national others—
an exceptionalism that is (re)told in the stories of Horatio Alger, sig-
niWed through the Statue of Liberty, and actualized in the election of
a black president.
Both espousing and embodying this national mythology, former
secretary of state Condoleeza Rice notes during remarks presented at
the White House Conference on the Americas in 2007:

What binds us together is the promise that we carry with us: It is the revolu-
tionary promise that life in the Americas would represent an opportunity for
all people—regardless of class or culture, race or religion, blood or birth—to
break with the past and begin life anew: to replace poverty with prosperity,
injustice with dignity, and oppression with freedom. . . . There was a time, not
that long ago, in my lifetime, when whole segments of society were excluded
from their rightful place in our democracy—indigenous peoples, immigrants,
women, the poor, and of course, in my lifetime, blacks, who, at the time of our
founding, were considered 3/5 of a man.
Our history as a nation has taught us humility. It has taught us about our
own imperfections. It has taught us never to take our success for granted, and
to remember always that our success depends on the broader success of our
neighbors in the hemisphere. Most of all, our history, the history of the United
States, has strengthened our resolve to be a good, faithful friend to our part-
ners in the Americas—to all work together to build free and better nations, and
thereby to inspire others far from our boundaries. . . . Today, as in centuries
past, we embody not only the dreams of our citizens, but also the dreams of
people across the globe.28

Here the “revolutionary promise” of the Americas is rewritten as the

ability to offer (capitalism’s) opportunities for all people, though this
is a promise that was not equally accessible and that continues to need
to be ensured. In an inspirational speech, Rice constructs a national
sense of belonging and identity as one anchored in a historical and
ongoing struggle to “replace poverty with prosperity, injustice with dig-
nity and oppression with freedom” that, when fulWlled, will ultimately
include American (hemispheric) neighbors as well as people “across
the globe.” Rice constructs the promise of the United States as one
that moves outward and forward, spatially and temporally, to capture
 Refiguring Slavery 107

the “dreams of people across the globe” and to move from a national
history of disenfranchisement to a global future of freedom.
Oppression and injustice are deWned through exclusion of blacks,
indigenous peoples, immigrants, women, and the poor, thus imagining
freedom through multicultural and inclusionary lenses. Rice universal-
izes the mythology of the United States as a place moving toward greater
multicultural freedom by extending it to all of the Americas and the peo-
ple of the globe. In doing so, she ignores the fact that exclusion was not
the principle determining the writing of the racial in all of the Americas,
most notably Brazil, for example. Reminding the audience twice that the
U.S. history of exclusion was “in my lifetime,” Rice also makes her body
the evidence of “the nation’s transcendence of the racial past.”29 Thus
Rice universalizes both the promise of the “American dream” as extend-
ing to all people, even those “far from our boundaries,” and as including
all—blacks, indigenous peoples, immigrants, women, the poor—who
symbolize both the nation’s exclusionary history and its potential.
The narrative of nation evoked in Rice’s speech writes the U.S.-
American space through ideals of adaptability, perseverance, inde-
pendence, and the spirit of discovery, which produces “the trajectory of
the U.S. American subject as the realization of the transparent I” or
universal subject,30 where the production of the white body both adhered
to and departed from the European consciousness assumed in post-
Enlightenment writings of the (global) subject. The (white) American
subject was in some ways constructed as the actualization of the Anglo-
Saxon European consciousness because its particular American expres-
sion rendered it different from its European predecessor in its ability
to adapt to the ever-changing landscape of human (racial) differentia-
tion.31 This exceptionalism of American Anglo-Saxonism tied to the
geographical context of the United States is conceptualized against the
writing of “Indians, blacks, and Asian immigrants in affectability.”32 That
is, these subjects’ perceived cultural backwardness offered evidence that
such subjects housed consciousnesses (minds, attitudes, and beliefs)
needing to be reformed, a fact that was also expressed through these
subjects’ physicalities. Indians, blacks, and Asians are constructed as
“subject to both natural conditions and to others’ powers,”33 an affect-
ability that is in contrast to the assumed transparency and therefore
universally desired self-knowing and rational consciousness captured
in the white Euro-American body.
108 Refiguring Slavery

This framing and conceptualizing of difference is an effect of mod-

ern signifying strategies established through post-Enlightenment re-
gimes of knowledge, which carry through to contemporary writings
on race relations, notably in early twentieth-century sociologists’ theo-
rizing of immigration and assimilation. These theories worked from
the presumption that the melding of races due to the United State’s
history enabled a unique promise—where overcoming the perceived
negative aspects signiWed through racial difference could be achieved
as a result of temporal and spatial distance from one’s (nonwhite) racial
and cultural origins. One vocal proponent of these theories, Robert
Park, father of the Chicago sociologists, “advocated theories of racial
difference that focused on the divergent consciousness of groups” where
“the physicality of race became secondary to [racial or] cultural con-
sciousness.”34 However, because in some cases the physicality of race
would always be in the way of changing the racial consciousness of both
whites and nonwhites, Park theorized racial amalgamation as a potential
“biological homogenizer,” although cultural assimilation—the chang-
ing of consciousness—was envisioned as sufWcient to end American
race relations.35
Envisioning race as primarily about cultural consciousness meant
racial difference was ultimately a matter of geography, where the differ-
ence of Orientals, for example, was an effect of a consciousness bred
in the physical space of Asia and thus evident on Asian bodies. Hence
Park and other theorists of assimilation saw the distancing of Asians
away from Asia (and in proximity to whites) as part of the solution to
overcoming racial prejudice, where the different cultural consciousness
of Asians might be reformed and allow white citizens to see beyond the
Oriental racial mask and recognize more of themselves—recognize that
the Oriental is not so different on the inside. Thus, not only do multi-
cultural racial discourses applaud the individual capacity of a woman
like Condoleeza Rice to signify a “beyond” race and gender, but they
also work to reWgure the foreign, nonwhite body into the national myth-
ology as one that can help the nation rewrite its contentious racial his-
tory while at the same time universalizing U.S.-American identity.
The assumptions driving Park’s assimilation and race relations
theories are also continued through multiculturalist and postracial dis-
courses that assume the overcoming of racism through (white) Amer-
ica’s conscious choosing to look beyond race. What characterizes these
 Refiguring Slavery 109

racial discourses are their ability to advocate a visible move toward plu-
ralism and diversity while simultaneously supplanting the idea of race
(as visible readings of the body) with culture (which references behav-
iors and practices as distinguishing peoples), where aesthetic markers
come to signify racial difference. The effect of these national mytholo-
gies, which frame U.S.-American racial consciousness as moving beyond
race, is a kind of emptying of racial categories so that they no longer
gesture to histories of struggle and inequality, but work only to indicate
a cultural difference among peoples—differences in cuisine, language,
religion, and so on: “ To the degree that multiculturalism claims to reg-
ister the increasing diversity of persons, it precisely obscures the ways
in which that aesthetic representation is not an analogue for the mate-
rial positions, means, or resources of . . . populations.”36
Multicultural discourses (re)deWne racism as either individual acts
of bias that assume a visual logic of reading the body, or as overt insti-
tutional calls to exclude on the basis of physical features. By limiting
racism to these instances, multicultural discourses can imagine a post-
racial future where the “ethno-racial component in identity would loom
less large than it now does . . . and in which afWliation by shared descent
would be more voluntary than prescribed in every context.”37 While
this desire to appreciate the multitudinous expressions of human exis-
tence without seeing difference as marked on the body is understand-
able, the racial discourses linking physical traits to intellectual capacities
cannot be so easily abandoned. Without an understanding of the ways
race continues to operate as a signifying strategy that then helps ex-
plain, justify, and situate difference and inequality, multiculturalist dis-
courses simply implicitly reference racial categories while distancing
them from the histories and politics that accompany and help deWne
them.

Intersecting Narratives, Racial Alibis

The mythology of U.S. multicultural exceptionalism is one that is

enabled with and through narratives of gender and sexual liberation.
The signiWcance of having a black female Wgure like Condoleeza Rice
espouse the multicultural exceptionalism of American institutions and
history enables a reading of Rice’s body as evidence that the nation is
moving beyond its racist and sexist history, where having “black people
110 Refiguring Slavery

stand in for the nation at large” presents a “powerful way to represent

the political universality of the U.S. nation-state.”38 Such a move ignores
the “unWnished struggle for black civil rights,” as Nikhil Pal Singh dem-
onstrates, and displaces patriarchy as a matter concerning other places.
Rice both speaks and embodies a particular multicultural national
mythology.
The irony and contradiction of “enlisting blacks in the story of the
nation’s transcendence of the racial past” is that while this move “per-
petuates the idea . . . that visible racial difference remains the real deW-
cit and obstacle to be overcome,”39 this exemplary national subject is
at the same time also only captured by the visibly marked body like
Rice’s that signiWes an individual propensity to overcome adversity. Thus
these racial discourses work with narratives of progress toward greater
gender and sexual liberation, and they privilege neoliberal understand-
ings of citizenship. The visible racial difference to be overcome is often
rendered a matter of racial consciousness (bad racial thinking exer-
cised on the individual level that results in Klan memberships, for ex-
ample); it is not a displacement of the racial knowledges that work to
help conceptualize the U.S.-American subject and citizen, nor is it a
displacement of the relations of power that Wgure and necessitate such
difference. The fact that multicultural discourses both reject nonwhite
subjects as housing affectable consciousnesses and welcome them as
symbolizing a future potential demonstrates that “there will always be
a tension between difference as benign diversity and difference as con-
Xict, disruption, dissention.”40
The national mythology of exceptionalism enabled through Rice’s
speech and sex trafWcking discourses reconciles the narrative of Amer-
ican Anglo-Saxonism with a narrative of racial pluralism. Even while
the Anglo-American subject continues to signify the transparent and
universal national consciousness, writing the U.S. space as housing the
capability of affectable consciousnesses to overcome—to potentially
reach the kind of universal consciousness signiWed through the white
body—enables the United States also to be imagined as a space of
racial pluralism where a black woman like Rice can achieve access into
elite political spaces. In immigration terms, this principle drives assim-
ilation theories as well, where immigrants’ differential consciousnesses
can be reformed to reXect a generic national one, though the success
of such reform is already prescribed on the body. Thus the desire to
 Refiguring Slavery 111

include and assimilate black, brown, and Asian bodies into formal
aspects of political and cultural citizenship neither addresses the insti-
tutionalizing of inequalities nor alters the ways racial power signiWes
differential consciousnesses, where the universality of the national sub-
ject is written with and through whiteness. Rather, inclusion and rep-
resentation often end in an empty symbolic gesture, evident in Rice’s
speech, where physical bodies stand as racial alibis. Thus, even while
the work of civil rights–era activisms have been invaluable in address-
ing inequality in some aspects, the work of addressing racial and gender
power continues.
The principle focus on inclusion and representation as political
strategies to address racial and gender inequality provides a key limita-
tion to the identity-based politics that have come to shape contemporary
national understandings of difference. The logic behind identity-based
political activisms enabled disenfranchised subjects to argue a shared
experience of exclusion and disenfranchisement. The accounts of the
lived experiences of people who identify as disenfranchised on account
of their race and gender provide powerful tools in legislating changes
to the existing institutional and epistemological structures. Because
these political interventions stress, out of necessity, inclusion into exist-
ing structures and practices, they articulate their political claims around
(equal or just) representation. Thus the visible inclusion of female bod-
ies of color can be read as commensurate with the eroding of racism
and sexism in society.
Representational strategies, while important, are limited in the ways
the “hailing of ‘women of color’ [acts] as a synecdoche”41 for the intel-
lectual and epistemological project of understanding the operations
of power that produce categories of difference. How on a conceptual
level the notion of (racial, gender) difference enables a particular for-
mation of knowledge—one that Wnds roots in the Enlightenment and
conceives of subjectivity in particular ways, namely, through operations
of negation—is connected to, but is not the same as, how the writing
of this difference plays out. Representational strategies address how
the writing of difference has historically played out; they do not ad-
dress the onto-epistemological privileging of certain ways of knowing
and being: “ The domains of political and linguistic ‘representation’ set
out in advance the criterion by which subjects themselves are formed,
with the result that representation is extended only to what can be
112 Refiguring Slavery

acknowledged as subject.”42 The fact that Rice holds a prominent seat

of political power works as a symbolic index indicating the social less-
ening of both racism and sexism. The representational work of Rice’s
body demonstrates the limits of inclusion as a sole strategy for address-
ing uneven relationships of power. It also demonstrates a reliance on
an additive understanding of categories of difference that many femi-
nist scholars have long critiqued.43
This conXating of bodies—physical ones with bodies of knowledge
through which the world is interpreted—not only enables a racial alibi,
but also allows for the conXation of immigrants of color with native-
born people of color as well as the literal understanding of differences
as intersecting on one’s body. With regard to the latter, the racial index
and gender index are compiled so that a black female body signiWes
the ultimate position of exclusion as well as the ultimate nonexclu-
sionary position. Under the logic of addition, “woman of color” repre-
sents the position of double exclusion (as woman and as person of
color) as well as a position of nonexclusion, where she represents the
“Wnal frontier—as our temporal and global end” to racism and patri-
archy,44 a logic that posits her inability to enact racism or support patri-
archy by virtue of her body. These logics, which see woman of color as
the ultimate position of exclusion and the embodiment of a multicul-
tural promise, take the term intersectional quite literally.
Such logics enable Condoleeza Rice to perform, simply by being
visible, the symbolic function of reassuring a teleological narrative of
progress that deWnes freedom as nonexclusion. The logic enabling read-
ings of Rice’s body as a symbolic index of progress also sidesteps the
intellectual contributions of self-identiWed feminists of color who theo-
rized an intersectional approach as an alternative to additive under-
standings of power. These scholars, working from Kimberle Crenshaw’s
early work, call for an understanding of the ways the production of cat-
egories of difference like race and gender happen simultaneously and
in a co-constitutive manner. This understanding of intersectionality
works to map how the writing of racial difference depends on certain
sexual logics that naturalize particular ideals of gender.45 As Valerie
Smith’s work exempliWes, attention to intersectionality is not about “cen-
tering . . . black women’s experience as such,” but about “the practice
of reading intersectionally to question the implications of ideological
and aesthetic liminality”—a method of analysis and strategy of reading.46
 Refiguring Slavery 113

The national mythology of pluralistic progress also establishes false

analogies between transatlantic slavery and sex trafWcking, and between
U.S.-born people of color and immigrants of color. The former anal-
ogy makes it difWcult to consider the activities that fall under trafWcking
through other lenses. For instance, the analogies established through
the use of language like “slavery” and the “American Dream” suggest
that the problem of sex trafWcking is about individual moral lapses—
a lapse for some individuals and cultures that leads to bad human rela-
tionships (like that between master and slave) that pervert the principles
of humanity. On the other hand, sex trafWcking could be considered
through a lens that centers labor and capital, which would understand
exploitative labor relationships (trafWcking activities) and informal econ-
omies (like the sex industry) as necessary to ensuring and naturalizing
capitalist relations. It is the supposed absence of consent of “victims”
and slaves that makes the analogy possible. Yet equating the two activ-
ities postpones debates on whether consent should matter in determin-
ing whether a situation is trafWcking.47
In the latter analogy, immigrants of color stand in for the domestic
history and politics of race. Immigrants of color certainly become peo-
ple of color in the United States as they navigate the national racial
landscape and their bodies are read into U.S. racial formations. How-
ever, assuming an uncomplicated sameness between U.S.-born people
of color and immigrants, who in their racialization into the category
“people of color” shift and redraw the parameters of the category itself,
ignores the long, constitutive history of a national racial struggle—of
Asian American, black, Latino, and indigenous people’s struggles to
make both political and cultural claim to the nation. Failure to con-
sider the different discursive space (one that nonetheless overlaps with
that of the U.S.-born person of color) through which the immigrant
of color is interpellated also allows for a Xattened notion of immigra-
tion, one that erases the circumstances prescribing immigrants’ arrival
and entry like access to wealth, and one that fails to comprehend the
global register of racism where dark African immigrants racialized as
black in the United States might disidentify from black Americans out
of a desire not to be conXated or identiWed with the stereotypes circu-
lating around African Americanness. As Chandra Mohanty and Jacqui
Alexander note, women are “not born women of color, but become
women of color here [in the United States].”48
114 Refiguring Slavery

What Alexander and Mohanty refer to—the way racial formation

in the United States reads a black body as African American regardless
of whether that body actually identiWes with the term—is a process that
at once signals the speciWc national terms of U.S. racial formation even
as it exposes the global axis through which national understandings of
racial categories are understood. U.S. racial categories have deWned
themselves in part through an extranational imaginary, one that links
being black in the United States to the continent of Africa (hence Afri-
can American) or that understands being Asian American through
the concept of an Asia that is outside the U.S. nation. Here is what is
at stake: as a native of Somalia and a Dutch citizen, best-selling author
Ayaan Hirsi Ali’s body signals “woman of color” in the United States
(where she spent time as a fellow at the conservative think tank the
American Enterprise Institute). Yet this category is one with a particular
national racial formation behind it, one that recalls the work of people
like Gloria Anzaldua, Angela Davis, bell hooks, and Cheri Moraga. It is
also a category that connotes a kind of political consciousness about the
ways race and gender work together to produce meanings tied to U.S.
identities. Hirsi Ali’s body signals this history of woman of color even
while she herself might espouse political goals that are in direct opposi-
tion, thus jeopardizing the political and intellectual goals that are about
understanding the history of exploitation based on differential under-
standings of the human body. While Hirsi Ali might not identify as a
woman of color, the circulation of her body and text within the United
States nonetheless reads her into the history of national racial forma-
tion and struggle, making U.S. political and racial formation a part of
her personal life whether she sees it as such or not. If second-wave fem-
inists organized under the banner “the personal is political,” women
of color feminists demonstrate how the political becomes personal.
The danger of not seeing the different symbolic function and sig-
nifying work that a nonnational body like Hirsi Ali’s performs in con-
trast to one like Condoleeza Rice, whose blackness is not distanced from
the national history of slavery in the same way as Hirsi Ali, rests in the
ways multicultural discourses import foreign signiWers of difference in
order to empty racial categories of the national context of history and
politics while using these signiWers in the rewriting of a national racial
history. The importing of foreign signiWers of difference enables the
inclusion of racial/cultural difference that, because of their distance
 Refiguring Slavery 115

from the national history of racial inequality and unrest, poses less
threat in exposing such histories. The signiWcance of trafWcking dis-
courses to these national mythologies is that its characterization as an
activity that victimizes mostly nationally “other” women means that traf-
Wcking offers a place where multicultural mythologies of national ex-
ceptionalism can be fulWlled. Characterizing sex trafWcking as “one of
the last, unfortunately the last, even in the women’s movement the last,
of the issues, but deWnitely not the least, to be examined by our soci-
ety” situates women’s human rights into a teleological narrative where
“saving” nonnational victims also enables the fulWlling of multicultural
national narratives.49 Nonnational victims who are saved and can be-
come U.S. citizens come to symbolize both the mythology of U.S. suc-
cess as a global human rights leader as well as the related U.S. success
as a multicultural and pluralistic society.
Sex trafWcking thus acts as a site where the black body is renational-
ized, and this renationalizing takes place through the insistent signifying
of the nonnational female body of color as the last and latest disen-
franchised subject waiting to be included in the global dialogue. It is
the rewriting of the role of blackness to the nation—a rewriting that
enables the (tokenistic) gestures that allow a black woman, a former
secretary of state, to speak of things getting better—that resigniWes
American blackness in a way that deploys racial power. The form and
conWguration of racial power enabled through the consolidation of
global feminist claims and civil rights agendas into the state are not the
same as the kind of expression of racial power that reigned during the
period of slavery or even after. Racial discourses shift and racial mean-
ings change. What remains constant is the deployment of racial power—
racial power that privileges certain forms of knowing and being, namely,
those (modern) regimes that centered and universalized the white, Euro-
American body as that which captures proper (national) subjectivity.
These national mythologies racialize whiteness as owning the pro-
gressive spirit that makes a better future without racism, sexism, or xeno-
phobia possible. The white American body is rendered the progressive
agent through which exceptional and universal U.S.-American ideals
can be ensured even while they are actualized through the nonnational,
racially “othered” female bodies being saved. Perhaps this is most evi-
dent in the reWguring of whiteness that accompanies outside efforts to
rescue, evident in the story of New York Times columnist Nicholas Kristof,
116 Refiguring Slavery

who writes about buying the freedom of two Cambodian teenagers

he meets in local brothels, Srey Mom and Srey Neth, discussed in chap-
ter 3. Taken into consideration with his general references to slavery,
Kristof’s decision to buy the girls’ freedom cannot but connote a his-
tory of white liberal desire, also evident in the mission of the NGO
Free the Slaves, which allows individuals to “give the gift of freedom”
through online donations.50 Kristof notes that “readers started sending
me frantic e-mails along the lines of: I’ll wire you some money if you’ll
free one for me, too.”51 Recalling both the troubled abolitionist desires
like those captured in Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin and
also the missionizing impulse of late nineteenth-century feminists like
Jane Addams of Hull House fame, the story of sex trafWcking and its
rewriting of slavery is part of this legacy. Ironically, the buying of free-
dom only recommodiWes those being bought while ignoring questions
into the uneven distribution of labor markets, wealth, and power.
The impulse to buy the freedom of a sex slave is in part an effect of
the rhetorical framing of contemporary human trafWcking through the
imagery of the transatlantic slave trade and proliferates beyond Kris-
tof’s personal desire to a wide range of organizations, including Eman-
cipation Network, which lists hosting “Shop for Freedom” parties as
one way to help combat trafWcking.52 Emancipation Network works to
“improve the lives of slavery survivors” by offering education and jobs,
where support for the organization comes in part from the selling of
“unique fair trade jewelry, bags, and gifts” designed and created by sur -
vivors.53 While it is possible that the survivors whom Emancipation Net-
work aids do Wnd their conditions bettered through the work of the
organization, the organization nonetheless also participates in the
uneven circuits of capital and labor that sustain the drastic global wealth
gap. An organization founded by American Sarah Symons and her hus-
band (a former investment banker), the organization’s beginnings are
described by Symons this way:

During a tour of the shelter [established by an antitrafWcking organization in

Nepal], we came upon a small room piled high with sparkly purses and beaded
jewelry which were being made as part of the informal education program.
Well, it was obvious what to do! I brought a few hundred dollars of samples
home and showed them to all my friends and family. My husband John came
up with the idea of selling the products at home parties, because this would
also allow us to raise awareness about human trafWcking.54
 Refiguring Slavery 117

Forwarding a sense of global sisterhood (Symons has been featured in

women’s magazines like Redbook, and the organization was linked to the
Lifetime Television human trafWcking miniseries running in 2005 and
featuring actress Mira Sorvino),55 these efforts, despite the individuals
they may help, nonetheless reafWrm troubling constructions of white-
ness tied to Wrst world economic privilege. Here women’s human rights
works as a site through which national mythologies of U.S.-American
exceptionalism conWgure and naturalize neoliberal practices as that
which enables human rights enactment.
The desire to buy freedom for slaves helps write a national mythol-
ogy that inscribes freedom through neoliberal principles and univer-
salizes this deWnition of freedom. The fact that Kristof is a son of an
Eastern European immigrant, and the fact that black, Asian, and Latino
Americans can also participate in the purchasing of freedom for a sex
slave, simply reafWrms a story that reads: “Once only whites, now all
Americans.” This story further inscribes the United States as an excep-
tional space where the past (institutional) lapses of morality are pre-
sumably corrected to ensure that even those whose difference is marked
on their bodies can nonetheless access the kind of transparent subjec-
tivity and citizenship captured in the white Euro-American body. Thus
the fact that Latina/os, blacks, and Asian Americans are able to rescue
the nonnational Latina/o, black, and Asian trafWcked subject demon-
strates the exceptional ability of the U.S. space to distance the non-
white subject from the negative aspects of their cultural difference—a
difference that with enough temporal and spatial distance can begin
to be corrected (though never fully). Thus these multicultural discourses
are not necessarily better but only different in the ways they help shape
understandings of race, and their difference lies mainly in the univer-
salizing aspect that helps write national understandings of race through
a global landscape of human rights.

Shifting Paradigms

Even while the election of Barack Obama as president in 2008 enabled

further framings of difference and national identity through paradigms
of progress and even postracialism, the change in political regime has
also resulted in small but substantial shifts in how the Department of
State discusses trafWcking. These seemingly slight but signiWcant shifts
118 Refiguring Slavery

demonstrate the power of how changing paradigms impact the day-to-

day realities of trafWcked subjects—of how changing the conceptual and
discursive terms alter the material and real.
One of the most notable shifts in language and frameworks insti-
tuted under Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and head of the OfWce
to Monitor and Combat TrafWcking Luis CdeBaca is the explicit denun-
ciation of the practice of those with more means of buying “freedom”
for trafWcking subjects. Pointing out the harmful impact of buying free-
dom, the 2009 TrafWcking in Persons Report notes:
Among the repugnant aspects of human trafWcking is the commodiWcation
of human lives: the assignment of a monetary value to the life of a woman, man,
or child. . . .
Anti-slavery organizations and activists have sometimes opted to pay the
price of victims’ freedom from their exploiters. . . . While this releases victims
from the bonds of modern-day slavery, the implications of this practice are more
complicated.
If trafWcking victims are freed because of a payment or negotiation, the
trafWcker remains unpunished and unrepentant and is free to Wnd new victims to
perform the same service. By “purchasing” a victim’s freedom, well-intentioned
individuals or organizations may inadvertently provide trafWckers with Wnan-
cial incentive to Wnd new victims. While the numbers of victims rescued from
compensated or negotiated releases can seem impressive, it is difWcult to deter-
mine whether they lead to a net reduction in the number of victims.56

Much of the visual and rhetorical framing of trafWcking in the 2009

report remains consistent with previous reports, including seeing traf-
Wcking as “modern-day slavery.” Yet the addition of a small special-topics
section titled “Negotiating or Buying a Victim’s Freedom” shifts anti-
trafWcking efforts away from reafWrming neoliberal practices of con-
sumer activism by pointing out that the practice of buying freedom
commodiWes human life in much the same manner as trafWcking. Here
the report moves out of a simple rescuers–victims–criminals paradigm
by suggesting potential overlap between rescuers and criminals, ena-
bling a more complicated understanding of trafWcking as tied to un-
even distributions of global capital.
Additionally, attention to the vulnerability of stateless persons helps
the report refocus trafWcking on broader issues tied to citizenship and
rights. Pointing out the ways refugees and, by extension, all undocu-
mented peoples (speciWcally named in the report are mail-order brides)
are particularly vulnerable to exploitation because they have no legal
 Refiguring Slavery 119

documentation or status for recourse and protection, the report begins

to blur the distinction between trafWcking victims and illegal aliens.
This slight shift that discusses trafWcking in relation to undocumented
status can have a real effect on changing the paradigms through which
not only trafWcking but also undocumented immigration might be re-
assessed. The blurring of trafWcking victim with illegal alien opens up
the possibility of considering labor standards and protections that are
not contingent on legal immigration or citizenship status. These are
simply two examples of the ways shifting paradigms can open up pos-
sibilities for material change.
Understanding how trafWcking is framed—for instance, through the
language of transatlantic slavery—and what such framings can tell us
about our investments and understandings of national belonging, gen-
der and sexual norms and racial difference is just as important a proj-
ect as documenting exactly what trafWcking is. In fact, the project of
deWning and documenting trafWcking is an effect of, and helps shape,
the conceptual categories and tools through which we imagine national
belonging and human rights subjectivity. The fact that sex trafWcking
discourse enables a construction of U.S. citizenship as (always) univer-
sally attainable demonstrates the ways the conceptual tools and mech-
anisms for understanding human rights subjectivity are informed by
modern signiWcation strategies and post-Enlightenment principles. Thus
shifting the terms of human rights necessitates understanding and map-
ping this conceptual terrain to open up alternative possibilities.
This page intentionally left blank
Conclusion:
Considering the Transnational in Feminist Actions

When I h ave presented various aspects of this work at

conferences and as lectures, the question I always receive, regardless of
whether the audience is mainly students, academic faculty, or advocates,
is, “So what can we do?” The project of cultural critique and concep-
tual mapping is one that is often seen as distanced from the day-to-day
realities of life and the concerns categorically labeled as activist. Thus
while audiences have generally been receptive to the critiques of exist-
ing frameworks offered in this work, there has also been a perceived
disconnect between the conceptual arguments and “real” action. What
I have tried to emphasize in this book, therefore, are the very real ways
conceptual frames delimit how and what gets identiWed as trafWcking,
and who is able to become legible as trafWcking subject, whether vic-
tim, criminal trafWcker, or rescuer. In other words, the concepts shape
and help constitute what we come to know and understand as the “real.”
Focusing on the conceptual side of human rights is a decision I made
precisely because I care deeply about the so-called activist question, “So
what can we do?”
The answers to this question will remain stuck replaying the same
conundrums of reinstituting and taking for granted colonial hierar-
chies and racist ideologies without an effort to question the very prem-
ises of universality assumed in the conceptualizing of human rights.
Thus strategies formulated to remedy human rights’ neocolonial im-
pulse must contend with the conceptual parameters in order to open
up possibilities for using human rights as a tool for betterment. Part
of what we do next necessarily entails looking beyond stated and docu-
mented facts to seeing the processes, assumptions, and frameworks at
work in rendering facts. For instance, it is a fact that victims of sex traf-
Wcking sometimes hail from the states formerly comprising the Soviet
Union and Eastern bloc. This fact is explained through (and thus helps
entrench) racialized and sexualized frames, as well as (neo)liberal

121
122 Conclusion

assumptions that deWne gender freedom through participation in pol-

itics and legitimated capitalist enterprises, the exercise of choice and
female bodily autonomy. Not seeing the processes through which the
facts of Eastern European sex trafWcking naturalize particular frames
and assumptions leaves human rights critiques reasserting problem-
atic hierarchies. Yet it is only because there is already a well-researched
body of sociological literature dedicated to documenting human traf-
Wcking that this book has the luxury of deconstructing the “truths” of
trafWcking.
Mapping the dominant discursive parameters through which sex
trafWcking is produced is only one aspect of the work that needs to
take place to alter the existing paradigms through which human rights
come to be deWned. The other kinds of work necessary to changing
existing paradigms include efforts that are often described as grass-
roots, where those who get written as subjects in need of human rights
challenge, question, and redeWne the very act of being written as “not
yet” or “in need.” For example, the women of Sangtin in Uttar Pradesh,
India, chronicle the debates and discussions that took place among
the seven members, which ultimately enabled them to build an “analy-
sis and critique of societal structures and processes, ranging from the
very personal to the global.”1 As their work demonstrates, through shar-
ing, discussing, and exploring the issues that concerned them, they pro-
duced a compelling critique of the institutional and discursive structures
that the women navigate. They are neither romantic nor cynical about
their positions within the hierarchies of NGOs and human rights
regimes. Further, the writers never assume that their speech is trans-
parent; they resist a reading of their work as an authentic voice and
instead question the desire to authorize their voices, whether for their
own personal goals or for the broader goals of the NGO.
The work of mapping the discursive landscape and the regimes of
knowledge through which a human rights issue like sex trafWcking be-
comes real to U.S. audiences entails a kind of transnational feminist
methodology—a methodology that is attentive to the ways privilege is
consolidated through multiple axes (race, gender, sexuality, nation, and
so on) unevenly and differentially across and within communities. It is
a methodology that is transnational in its attention to the various ways
national power, privilege, and identity are consolidated, and it is feminist
in its insistence on understanding the relational workings of patriarchal
 Conclusion 123

and racial power in shaping social relations. In their seminal discussion

of the stakes of transnational feminist practices and methodologies in
an era of “scattered hegemonies,” Inderpal Grewal and Caren Kaplan
call for feminist political practices that seek to recognize the utility of
linkages offered through the shared and overlapping notions of woman
while also remaining deeply suspicious of any universal impulse. They
call for a feminist methodology that “seek[s] creative ways to move
beyond constructed oppositions without ignoring the histories that have
informed these conXicts or the valid concerns about power relations
that have represented or structured the conXicts up to this point.”2 In
this way, feminist political practices can utilize the beneWts that come
out of a (universalizing) category like woman while also interrogating
how such a category has been constituted. The approach to trafWcking
and human rights that this book takes is thus one that is interested in
understanding and unpacking the multiple ways in which power works
to establish truths about trafWcking, notably the ways constructed oppo-
sitions, which are an effect of modern regimes of knowledge, frame
descriptions of trafWcking and trafWcking subjects in mainstream state,
media, and NGO representations. What I hope the book offers to trans-
national feminist methodologies is a way to also consider race as an ana-
lytical category that is central to any discussion of the transnational.
Deconstructing the work of discursive scripts—the taken-for-granted
narratives that get attached to certain forms of violence and help shape
how such violence is understood—is an important exercise because
these scripts impact the ways those seeking state and nonstate protec-
tions can navigate available avenues for redress (like the T visa). Asylum
is another example where human rights frameworks are mechanized
to provide (one of few) avenues for individuals seeking state protection
from persecution and violence. Yet as Jacqueline Bhabha, Shefali Desai,
Michelle McKinley, Miriam Ticktin, and many others argue, asylum is
about much more than providing an avenue for protection. The poli-
tics of asylum demonstrate how a conceptual “conXict between two
founding principles of modern society—the belief in universal human
rights . . . and the sovereignty of nation-states” shapes social realities
and establishes limits to what the law can do for human rights.3 These
conXicting principles are negotiated through the mythologizing of the
law as both a universal force and a cultural institution—a mythology
124 Conclusion

taken for granted in human rights projects that adhere without ques-
tion to a principle of universalism.
Thus to move away from the conundrums of human rights—for
instance, of providing a site where imperialism and colonialism can be
reafWrmed rather than addressed—requires engaging with the con-
cept of universalism rather than assuming it as a discoverable object.
What makes the concept of human rights such a powerful and imagi-
native one is its (modern) capability to capture both a universal force
and culturally particular meanings. As Sally Merry’s anthropological
work examining the vernacular practices of human rights demonstrates,
human rights captures not only the conventional deWnitions validated
through state and juridical channels, but also the localized actions re-
interpreting and shaping conventional deWnitions.4 The conceptual
conditions tied to universality, which deWne it through and against dif-
ference, are important to understand because they ultimately constrict
how human rights can be used as a political tool even as these condi-
tions also provide the reason why human rights offers almost limitless
possibilities for imagining alternatives.
As a human rights violation, human trafWcking activities inXict vio-
lence on thousands, and while many of the individuals who identify as
trafWcked Wnd their experiences validated and reXected in the narra-
tives and stories offered by the state, media, and NGOs, others do not.
This book considers how certain experiences and narratives gain cur-
rency and validity as representing trafWcking. It also traces the tropes
that serve as narrative indexes of trafWcking, and the assumptions be-
hind validated narratives. Considering how a particular proWle and nar-
rative gets attached to the terms of trafWcking can illuminate what is
left unaccounted for in dominant representations. While these domi-
nant victim narratives can and do help individuals seeking to identify
as trafWcked subjects, they also deWne what and who falls inside or out-
side the parameters of such subjectivity. Thus looking at how trafWck-
ing and its subjects are described (what assumptions and frameworks
are used to sustain such descriptions) is important to recognize those
who fall outside existing categories of victimization and to understand
how race, gender, sexuality, and nation shape human rights subjectiv-
ities and inform contemporary human rights discourse.
Stories and testimonies offered in the courtroom are shaped by and
help shape news media accounts as well as state and NGO research.
 Conclusion 125

These multiple sites write trafWcking scripts one way and not another,
producing discursive conditions through which trafWcking subjectivity
is conferred. These discursive conditions reafWrm the hierarchized sep-
aration of human rights–enacting subjects, human rights–deserving
subjects, and criminals. This triad conWguration of human rights sub-
jectivity is limiting in its disabling of overlap between and among cat-
egories, in essence erasing the ways human rights–deserving subjects
might also be criminalized (in the case of undocumented migrants
who might also be trafWcking victims) and/or enacting human rights
(in the case of victims who are not saved by a rescuer but rather Wnd
their own ways of altering their conditions). Similarly, there is neglect
in considering the ways human rights–enacting subjects are also com-
plicit in human rights violations. Further, the schematizing of human
rights subjectivities and the processes through which certain scripts
gain legal and cultural currency demonstrate the racial, gender, and
sexual discourses salient to national framings of both U.S. citizenship
and human rights subjectivity.
Thus sex trafWcking offers a unique site where the conceptual con-
ditions of human rights can be explored. As a human rights issue made
real within the context of postsocialist and post-9/11 conditions, the
way sex trafWcking narratives frame and articulate race, gender, sexu-
ality, and poverty demonstrate the salience of multicultural, neolib-
eral, and global feminist discourses for understanding the contours
of both national and global citizenship. Furthermore, the articulation
of trafWcking through victimization and agency, culture and morality,
and transatlantic slavery brings to light the paradoxes and contradic-
tions that set the conceptual terms of the debate—terms that make
rights claims always conditional and envision human rights subjectiv-
ity through teleological and dialectical relationships.
To the question “So what do we do?” I hope the book presents
a compelling reason to consider the representational critique as not
disconnected from so-called material action. Mapping the discursive
mechanisms that delineate human rights issues like trafWcking makes pos-
sible the opportunity to see what might otherwise be missed. Through-
out, the book has provided alternative readings and questions that are
hidden in the naturalizing of particular modes of subjectivity and nar-
ratives when describing trafWcking. The fact that there are many alter-
native readings and no clear conclusions is indicative of the complex
126 Conclusion

and contradictory operations of power at work in establishing a human

rights epistemology. I was hesitant to write a conclusion to the book in
part because there are no conclusions or easy answers, only different
and more attentive ways of seeing. It is here, however, that I locate pos-
sibilities for change and social justice.
Notes

Preface
1. Sangtin Writers and Richa Nagar, Playing with Fire (Minneapolis: Univer-
sity of Minnesota Press, 2006), xxi.
2. Ibid., 146.
3. Inderpal Grewal, Transnational America (Durham: Duke University Press,
2005), 129.
4. University of California Regents v. Bakke (No. 76-811, 438 U.S. 265, Wled
23 June 1978). Available at http://caselaw.lp.Wndlaw.com/scripts/getcase.pl?
navby=CASE&court=U.S.&vol=438&page=265 (accessed July 10, 2010).
5. M. Jacqui Alexander and Chandra Mohanty, “Genealogies, Legacies,
Movements,” in Feminism and “Race,” ed. Kum-Kum Bhavnani (New York: Oxford
University Press, 2001), 499.

Introduction
1. Sally Engle Merry, Gender Violence: A Cultural Perspective (West Sussex,
UK: Wiley-Blackwell, 2009), 28.
2. Saidiya Hartman, Scenes of Subjection: Terror, Slavery and Self-Making in
Nineteenth-Century America (New York: Oxford University Press, 1997), 5.
3. These estimates are according to the United States Department of State
(DOS), the main federal agency coordinating antitrafWcking efforts in the
United States. The estimates come from the 2000 TVPA.
4. HR 3244, Section 103.
5. In the Senate, Christopher Bond (R-Mo.), Charles Hagel (R-Neb.),
George Voinovich (R-Ohio), Fred Thompson (R-Tenn.), and Russell Feingold
(D-Wis.) voted against HR 3244. In the House, only Marshall Sanford (R-S.C.)
voted against the bill.
6. HR 3244, Section 102b.
7. HR 3244, Section 103.8.
8. HR 3244, Section 103.2.
9. Francis Miko, TrafWcking in Persons: The U.S. and International Response
(RL30545) (Washington, D.C.: Congressional Research Service, January 19,
2006).
10. Vidyamali Samarasinghe, Female Sex TrafWcking in Asia (New York: Rout-
ledge, 2008), 15–17.

127
128 Notes to Chapter 1

11. These Wgures are according to the Government Accountability OfWce

2006 Assessment of U.S. efforts to combat human trafWcking. Human TrafWck-
ing: Better Data, Strategy, and Reporting Needed to Enhance U.S. AntitrafWcking Efforts
Abroad, Report to the Chairman, Committee on the Judiciary, and the Chairman,
Committee on International Relations, House of Representatives, July 2006
(GAO-06-825), 1.
12. John Miller, “A Statement on Human TrafWcking–Related Language,”
Washington, D.C., December 15, 2006. Available at http://2001-2009.state.gov/
g/tip/rls/rm/78383.htm (accessed February 13, 2011).
13. Rachel Paulose (presentation, Human TrafWcking in Minnesota Con-
ference, Neighborhood House, St. Paul, Minn., Friday, September 28, 2007).
The conference was hosted by several nonproWt advocacy groups from Min-
neapolis and St. Paul. The main organizer was the St. Paul legal advocacy orga-
nization, Civil Society, where Linda Miller is executive director.
14. Laura Kang, Compositional Subjects: EnWguring Asian American Women (Dur-
ham: Duke University Press, 2002), 3.
15. Inderpal Grewal, Transnational America (Durham: Duke University Press,
2005).
16. Charvet and Elisa Kaczynska-Nay, The Liberal Project and Human Rights:
The Theory and Practice of a New World Order (New York: Cambridge University
Press, 2008).
17. Iris Marion Young, Justice and the Politics of Difference (Princeton: Prince-
ton University Press, 1990).
18. Rachel Lee, “Notes from the (Non)Field: Teaching and Theorizing
‘Women of Color,’” Meridians 1, no. 1 (2000): 85–109.
19. Alexander and Mohanty, eds., Feminist Genealogies, Colonial Legacies, Demo-
cratic Futures (New York: Routledge, 1997), xvii.
20. Radhika Coomaraswamy, “Are Women’s Rights Universal? Re-Engaging
the Local,” Meridians 4, no. 1 (2002): 16.
21. Lee, “Notes from the (Non)Field,” 91.

1. Universalism and the Conceptual Limits to Human Rights

1. For example, Neda Atanasoski, “Roma Rights on the World Wide Web:
The Role of Internet Technologies in Shaping Minority and Human Rights Dis-
courses in Post-Socialist Central and Eastern Europe,” European Journal of Cul-
tural Studies 12, no. 2 (May 2009): 205–18.
2. For example, Michelle McKinley, “Cultural Culprits,” Berkeley Journal of
Gender, Law and Justice 24, no. 2 (2009): 91–165; Sally Engle Merry, Gender Vio-
lence (West Sussex: Wiley-Blackwell, 2009), 134–55.
3. For example, Haleh Afshar, “Women and the Politics of Fundamental-
ism in Iran,” in Feminism and Race, ed. Kum-Kum Bhavnani (Oxford: Oxford
University Press, 2001), 348–65; Lama Abu-Odeh, “Post-Colonial Feminism
and the Veil: Considering the Differences,” New England Law Review 26 (Sum-
mer 1992): 1527–42.
 Notes to Chapter 1 129

4. “ The Universal Declaration of Human Rights: A Living Document,”

http://www.un.org/events/humanrights/2007/udhr.shtml (accessed February
13, 2011).
5. American Anthropological Association, “Statement on Human Rights,”
American Anthropologist 49, no. 4 (1947): 539–43.
6. “ The Universal Declaration of Human Rights: A Living Document,”
http://www.un.org/events/humanrights/2007/udhr.shtml (accessed May 16,
2008).
7. Jack Donnelly, Universal Human Rights in Theory and Practice (Ithaca: Cor-
nell University Press, 2003).
8. “ The Universal Declaration of Human Rights: A Living Document”
(accessed May 16, 2008).
9. Beth Simmons, Mobilizing for Human Rights: International Law in Domes-
tic Politics (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009), 42.
10. Clifford Bob, “Fighting for New Rights,” in The International Struggle for
New Human Rights, ed. Clifford Bob (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania
Press, 2009), 8.
11. Peter Fitzpatrick, Mythology of Modern Law (London: Routledge, 1992), 9.
12. Bruno Latour, We Have Never Been Modern, trans. Catherine Porter (Cam-
bridge: Harvard University Press, 1993), 28–29.
13. Judith Butler et al., Contingency, Hegemony, Universality: Contemporary Dia-
logues on the Left (New York: Verso, 2000), 35.
14. Susan Okin, “Feminism, Women’s Human Rights, and Cultural Differ-
ence,” Hypatia 13, no. 2 (Spring 1998): 35.
15. Hilary Charlesworth, “What Are ‘Women’s International Human
Rights’?” in The Human Rights of Women: National and International Perspectives,
ed. Rebecca Cook (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1994), 76.
16. Deborah Mindry, “Nongovernmental Organizations, ‘Grassroots,’ and
the Politics of Virtue,” Signs 26, no. 4 (2001): 1193.
17. Inderpal Grewal, Transnational America: Feminisms, Diasporas, Neoliberal-
ism (Durham: Duke University Press, 2005), 152.
18. Vasuki Nesiah, “ Toward a Feminist Internationality,” in Global Critical
Race Feminism, ed. Adrien Wing (New York: New York University Press, 2000), 44.
19. Shefali Desai, “Hearing Afghan Women’s Voices: Feminist Theory’s Re-
conceptualization of Women’s Human Rights,” Arizona Journal of International
and Comparative Law 16 (1999): 833.
20. Uma Narayan, “Essence of Culture and a Sense of History: A Feminist
Critique of Cultural Essentialism,” in Decentering the Center, ed. Sandra Harding
and Uma Narayan (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2000), 83.
21. Desai, “Hearing Afghan Women’s Voices,” 841.
22. Ibid., 843.
23. Butler et al., Contingency, Hegemony, Universality, 35.
24. U.S. Congress, Afghan People vs. the Taliban: The Struggle for Freedom Inten-
siWes, 107th Cong., 1st sess. (October 31, 2001).
130 Notes to Chapter 1

25. An-Na’im, “State Responsibility Under International Human Rights Law

to Change Religious and Customary Laws,” in The Human Rights of Women:
National and International Perspectives, ed. Rebecca J. Cook (Philadelphia: Uni-
versity of Pennsylvania Press, 1994), 174.
26. For example, Michelle McKinley, “Cultural Culprits,” Berkeley Journal of
Gender, Law and Justice 24, no. 2 (2009): 91–165; Nilda Rimonte, “A Question
of Culture,” Stanford Law Review 43, no. 6 ( July 1991): 1311–26; Leti Volpp,
“ Talking ‘Culture’: Gender, Race, Nation and the Politics of Multicultural-
ism,” Columbia Law Review 96 (October 1996): 1573.
27. Butler et al., Contingency, Hegemony, Universality.
28. Denise Ferreira da Silva, “ Towards a Critique of the Socio-logos of Jus-
tice: The Analytics of Raciality and the Production of Universality,” Social Iden-
tities 7, no. 3 (2001): 421–54.
29. See Denise Ferreira da Silva, The Global Idea of Race (Minneapolis: Uni-
versity of Minnesota Press, 2007), for work that traces the writing of modern
man in Enlightenment and post-Enlightenment philosophical texts as well as
in contemporary sociological literatures.
30. Ibid.
31. Jane Flax, Thinking Fragments (New York: Routledge, 1992), 447.
32. The legitimacy of governance was once simply ensured by the king’s
claim to God. One of the radical shifts in thinking that Enlightenment philoso-
phers like John Locke set forth was to explain the legitimacy of governance
that did not assume a ruler’s claim to God. For Locke, the legitimacy of gov-
ernance came from a social contract drawn out of man’s mutual recognition
for peace—a recognition that came from man’s ability to reason.
33. Charlotte Bunch, “Taking Stock: Women’s Human Rights Five Years after
Beijing,” in Holding on to the Promise: Women’s Human Rights and the Beijing +5
Review, ed. Cynthia Meillon (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 2001),
139.
34. Peter Fitzpatrick, Mythology of Modern Law, 6, 10.
35. Ibid.
36. All United Nations antitrafWcking PSAs are available at http://www
.unodc.org/unodc/en/human-trafWcking/human-trafWcking-public-service-
announcements.html (accessed February 13, 2011) or at http://www.unodc
.org/unodc/multimedia.html?vf=/documents/video/psa/HT_PSA_Tele
phone_2003.Xv (accessed July 1, 2010). Thanks to Grace Kim for drawing my
attention to the PSAs, speciWcally “Cleaning Woman” and “Telephone,” which
she viewed on AFN while in South Korea in 2003–4.
37. With Kasturi Ray, I provide a more detailed analysis of Cleaning Woman
(previously named Cleaning Lady) in “ The Practice of Humanity,” Feminist Media
Studies 10, no. 3 (2010): 253–67.
38. U.S. Congress, House of Representatives, Committee on International
Relations, “Statement of the Honorable John R. Miller,” Combating Human
TrafWcking: Achieving Zero Tolerance, 109th Cong., 1st sess. (March 9, 2005).
 Notes to Chapter 2 131

Available at http://commdocs.house.gov/committees/intlrel/hfa99820.000/
hfa99820_0f.htm (accessed February 13, 2011).
39. U.S. Congress, House of Representatives, TrafWcking in Persons, 109th
Cong., 2nd sess. (Washington, D.C.: Government Printing OfWce, 2007).
40. Cynthia Enloe, Banana, Beaches and Bases (Berkeley and Los Angeles:
University of California Press, 1990).
41. Meghana Nayak, “Interrogations of Democracy, Sexual Violence, and
the U.S. Military,” in Theorizing Sexual Violence, ed. Renee Heberle and Victoria
Grace (New York: Routledge, 2009), 157.
42. In her work, Michelle McKinley traces how cultural culprits are con-
structed in U.S. asylum cases involving female genital cutting. She argues that
these cases demonstrate the way “invocation of ‘culture’ as a ‘cracking factor’
or as a justiWcation for criminal behavior in U.S. courtrooms reinforces an
already widely held assumption about the incommensurability of gender equal-
ity and non-western cultures,” which works to frame arguments through a “sav-
ages–victims–saviors” triad. McKinley, “Cultural Culprits,” Berkeley Journal of
Gender, Law and Justice 24, no. 2 (2009): 95.

2. Speaking Subjects, Classifying Consent

1. U.S. Congress, International TrafWcking in Persons: Taking Action to Elim-
inate Modern Day Slavery, 110th Cong., 1st sess., 2007, S. No. 11-119, 46.
2. “(Eva Petrova’s) Letter to U.S. Authorities Denying Human TrafWck-
ing Victimization,” Trakhtenberg, No. 02-cr-00638, Exhibit A to 141 at 5 (New
Jersey Wled July 6, 2005).
3. Judgment in a Criminal Case, Trakhtenberg, 145 at 5 (New York Wled
June 20, 2005).
4. “(Eva Petrova’s) Letter to U.S. Authorities Denying Human TrafWcking
Victimization.”
5. Jennifer Dunn, Judging Victims (Boulder, Colo.: Lynne Rienner Pub-
lishers, 2010), 4.
6. Charles Piot, “Representing Africa in the Kasinga Asylum Case,” in
Female Circumcision: A Multicultural Perspective, ed. Rogaia Mustafa Abusharaf
(Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2006), 230.
7. See, for example, Mary Frances Berry, The Pig Farmer’s Daughter and
Other Tales of American Justice (New York: Vintage, 1999); A. Cheree Carlson,
The Crimes of Womanhood: DeWning Femininity in a Court of Law (Urbana: Univer-
sity of Illinois Press, 2009); Adrienne Davis, “ The Private Law of Race and Sex,”
in Mixed Race America and the Law, ed. Kevin Johnson (New York: New York
University Press, 2003), 243–53.
8. Dina Francesca Haynes, “(Not) Found Chained to a Bed in a Brothel,”
Georgetown Immigration Law Journal 21, no. 3 (2007), available at http://papers
.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=984927 (accessed February 13, 2011).
9. See INCITE! Women of Color Against Violence, eds., Color of Violence
(Cambridge, Mass.: South End Press, 2006).
132 Notes to Chapter 2

10. Catharine MacKinnon, Sex Equality: Rape Law (New York: Foundation
Press, 2001), 801.
11. Ibid., 817.
12. Nicola Gavey, “Fighting Rape,” in Theorizing Sexual Violence, ed. Renee
Heberle and Victoria Grace (New York: Routledge, 2009), 111.
13. Susan Caringella, Addressing Rape Reform in Law and Practice (New York:
Columbia University Press, 2009), 13–17.
14. MacKinnon, Sex Equality, 12; Meghana Nayak, “Interrogations of
Democracy, Sexual Violence, and the U.S. Military,” in Theorizing Sexual Vio-
lence, ed. Renee Heberle and Victoria Grace (New York: Routledge, 2009), 151.
15. Elizabeth Schneider, “Battered Women, Feminist Lawmaking, Privacy,
and Equality,” in Women and the United States Constitution, ed. Sibyl Schwarzen-
back and Patricia Smith (New York: Columbia University Press, 2003), 199, 201.
16. Mary Frances Berry chronicles many such instances, where the so-
called private matters of married life were central to both civil and criminal
court proceedings, in The Pig Farmer’s Daughter.
17. Dorothy McBride Stetson, Women’s Rights in the USA: Policy Debates and
Gender Roles (New York: Garland, 1997), 310.
18. Janine Young Kim, “Racial Politics and Discretion in Criminal Law,” in
Race to Injustice: Lessons Learned from the Duke Lacrosse Rape Case, ed. Michael L.
Seigel (Durham: Carolina Academic Press, 2009), 164.
19. Ibid., 160.
20. Aviva Orenstein, “Presuming Guilt or Protecting Victims? Analyzing the
Special Treatment of Those Accused of Rape,” in Race to Injustice: Lessons Learned
from the Duke Lacrosse Rape Case, ed. Michael L. Seigel (Durham: Carolina Aca-
demic Press, 2009), 353.
21. Valerie Smith, Not Just Race, Not Just Gender (New York: Routledge,
1998), 5.
22. Ibid., 8.
23. Elizabeth Philipose, “Feminist, International Law, and the Spectacular
Violence of the ‘Other,’” in Theorizing Sexual Violence, ed. Renee Heberle and
Victoria Grace (New York: Routledge, 2009), 177–78.
24. HR 3244, Section 103.2.
25. Ibid., 349.
26. Haynes, “(Not) Found Chained to a Bed in a Brothel,” 351.
27. See Joanna Bourke, foreword to Theorizing Sexual Violence, ed. Renee
Heberle and Victoria Grace (New York: Routledge, 2009), ix–xiii.
28. Sylvanna Falcon, “‘National Security’ and the Violation of Women,” in
Color of Violence, ed. INCITE! Women of Color Against Violence (Cambridge:
South End Press, 2006), 119–37; Eithne Luibheid, Entry Denied: Controlling Sex-
uality at the Border (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2002), 103–35.
29. Jo Doezema, “Loose Women or Lost Women? The Re-emergence of the
Myth of White Slavery in Contemporary Discourses of TrafWcking in Women,”
Gender Issues 18, no. 1 (2000): 23–50.
 Notes to Chapter 2 133

30. Martha Gardner, Qualities of a Citizen (Princeton: Princeton University

Press, 2005).
31. Peggy Pascoe, What Comes Naturally (Oxford: Oxford University Press,
2009).
32. Gardner, Qualities of a Citizen, 60.
33. See, for example, Vidyamali Samarasinghe, Female Sex TrafWcking in Asia:
The Resilience of Patriarchy in a Changing World (New York: Routledge, 2008),
147–52; Felicity Schaeffer-Grabiel, “ The Erotics of Citizenship: Cybermar-
riage, Marriage and the Virtual Imagination across the Americas” (University
of California, Santa Cruz).
34. Luibheid, Entry Denied, 31–54.
35. Gardner, Qualities of a Citizen, 56, 60.
36. The various political, economic, and social shifts taking place at the turn
of the twentieth century that helped extend the category of whiteness beyond
its previous deWnition are explored in David Roediger’s Working toward White-
ness: How America’s Immigrants Became White (New York: Basic Books, 2005).
37. Gardner, Qualities of a Citizen, 60.
38. Wendy Chapkis, “Soft Glove, Punishing Fist,” in Regulating Sex: The Pol-
itics of Intimacy and Identity, ed. Elizabeth Bernstein and Laurie Schaffner (New
York: Routledge, 2004), 51–66; Gretchen Soderlund, “Running from the Res-
cuers: New U.S. Crusades against Sex TrafWcking and the Rhetoric of Aboli-
tion,” NWSA Journal 17, no. 3 (2005): 64–86; Kay Warren, “ The 2000 U.N.
Human TrafWcking Protocol: Rights, Enforcement, Vulnerabilities,” in The Prac-
tice of Human Rights, ed. Sally Engle Merry and Mark Goodale (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 2007), 242–69.
39. Janet Halley et al., “From the International to the Local in Feminist
Legal Responses to Rape, Prostitution/Sex Work, and Sex TrafWcking,” Har-
vard Journal of Law and Gender 29 (Summer 2006): 336–419; H. Richard Friman
and Simon Reich, “Human TrafWcking and the Balkans,” in Human TrafWcking,
Human Security and the Balkans, ed. Friman and Reich (Pittsburgh: University
of Pittsburgh Press, 2007), 8.
40. Soderlund, “Running from the Rescuers.”
41. Samarasinghe, Female Sex TrafWcking in Asia, 4.
42. Julia O’Connell Davidson, “Will the Real Sex Slave Please Stand Up?”
Feminist Review 83 (2006): 4–22.
43. Warren, “2000 U.N. Human TrafWcking Protocol,” 244, 247.
44. U.S. Department of State, “Identifying and Helping TrafWcking Victims:
Fact Sheet,” available at http://www.state.gov/g/tip/c16508.htm (accessed
October 1, 2007).
45. This Wgure is the application fee for Wling for the T visa. Fees until
2008 were $270 plus a $70 biometric fee per applicant. The cost for depen-
dents was $120 plus the $70 biometric fee. Under President Obama, the Wling
fee for the T visa was reduced to $0. Visa application, cost, and instructions
can be accessed at http://www/uscis/gov/Wles/form/I-914.pdf.
134 Notes to Chapter 2

46. Chapkis, “Soft Glove, Punishing Fist,” 51–65; Davidson, “Will the Real
Sex Slave Please Stand Up?,” 4–22; Doezema, “Loose Women or Lost Women?,”
23–50; Haynes, “(Not) Found Chained to a Bed in a Brothel,” 337–81; Kamala
Kempadoo, “Women of Color and the Global Sex Trade: Transnational Femi-
nist Perspectives,” Meridians 1, no. 2 (2001): 28–51.
47. Beverly Balos and Mary Lou Fellows, “A Matter of Prostitution: Becom-
ing Respectable,” New York University Law Review 74 (1999): 1220.
48. Luibheid, Entry Denied, 48.
49. Nandita Sharma, “Anti-TrafWcking Rhetoric and the Making of Global
Apartheid,” NWSA Journal 17, no. 3 (2005): 88.
50. U.S. Department of Justice et al., “Assessment of U.S. Government Efforts
to Combat TrafWcking in Persons in Fiscal Year 2005” (Washington, D.C.: Gov-
ernment Printing OfWce, September 2006), 7, available at http://www.justice
.gov/archive/ag/annualreports/tr2006/assessment_of_efforts_to_combat_tip
.pdf (accessed February 13, 2011). In its Wrst year, the program assisted Wve
certiWed victims of trafWcking in returning to the home countries. The num-
ber of family reuniWcations with victims remaining in the United States is
higher; in the Wrst year, the program aided thirty-three individuals.
51. Samarasinghe, Female Sex TrafWcking in Asia.
52. Ratha Kapur, “Legal Politics and Anti-TrafWcking Interventions,” in Traf-
Wcking in Humans, ed. Sally Cameron and Edward Newman (New York: United
Nations University Press, 2008), 113.
53. Kinsey Dinan, “Globalization and National Sovereignty,” in TrafWcking in
Humans, ed. Sally Cameron and Edward Newman (New York: United Nations
University Press, 2008), 75.
54. Deborah Mindry, “Nongovernmental Organization, ‘Grassroots,’ and
the Politics of Virtue,” Signs 26, no. 4 (2001): 1193.
55. Charles Briggs, “Mediating Infanticide: Theorizing Relations between
Narrative and Violence,” Cultural Anthropology 22, no. 3 (2007): 315–56.
56. Superseding Indictment, Rosales-Martinez, 19 at 14–15 (New Jersey Wled
July 21, 2005). Other trafWcking case taking place in 2005 where women are
documented as having forced abortions include United States v. Carreto (No. 04-
cr-00140, 71 at 5 [E.D. New York Wled March 3, 2005]) and United States v.
Salazar (No. 05-cr-00371, 1 at 6, Wled August 1, 2005).
57. See Soderlund, “Running from the Rescuers.”
58. United States v. Babaev, No. 05-cr-00500, 8 at 4 (ED New York Wled
November 30, 2005).
59. Luibheid, Entry Denied, 47.
60. Warren, “2000 U.N. Human TrafWcking Protocol,” 247.
61. Kapur, “Legal Politics of Anti-TrafWcking Interventions,” 119.
62. Michelle McKinley, “Cultural Culprits,” Berkeley Journal of Gender, Law
and Justice 24, no. 2 (2009): 114–15.
63. Saba Mahmood, Politics of Piety (Princeton: Princeton University Press,
2005), 18.
64. McKinley, “Cultural Culprits,” 116.
 Notes to Chapter 3 135

65. U.S. Department of State, TrafWcking in Persons Report (Washington, D.C.:

Government Printing OfWce, June 2007), 37, available at http://www.state
.gov/g/tip/rls/tiprpt/2007/ (accessed February 13, 2011).
66. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, “Can the Subaltern Speak?,” in Marxism
and the Interpretation of Culture, ed. Cary Nelson and Lawrence Grossberg
(Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1988), 279.
67. Joan Scot, “ The Evidence of Experience,” Critical Inquiry 17 (Summer
1991): 773–97.
68. Ibid., 778.
69. Ien Ang, “I’m a Feminist But . . . ‘Other’ Women and Postnational
Feminism,” in Feminism and “Race,” ed. Kum-Kum Bhavnani (New York: Oxford
University Press, 2001), 396.
70. Judith Butler, Bodies That Matter: On the Discursive Limits of “Sex” (New
York: Routledge, 1993), 220.
71. Avery Gordon, Ghostly Matters (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota
Press, 1997), 4.

3. Front-Page News
1. Charles Briggs, “Mediating Infanticide: Theorizing Relations between
Narrative and Violence,” Cultural Anthropology 22, no. 3 (2007): 323, 324.
2. Gretchen Soderlund, “Running from the Rescuers: New U.S. Crusades
against Sex TrafWcking and the Rhetoric of Abolition,” NWSA Journal 17, no.
3 (Fall 2005): 69.
3. Landesman, “ The Girls Next Door,” New York Times, January 25, 2004,
available at http://query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpage.html?res=9B04EEDA1439
F936A15752C0A9629C8B63 (accessed February 13, 2011).
4. Gaye Tuchman, Making News: A Study of the Construction of Reality (New
York: Free Press, 1978), 3.
5. In the MSNBC Undercover special “Sex Slaves in America,” for instance,
the program chronicles three stories of sex trafWcking, one featuring Eastern
Europe, the second Latin America, and the third Asia. A key early report on
trafWcking researched in 1999 by an analyst with the State Department’s Bureau
of Intelligence and Research, Center for the Study of Intelligence, states that
“the primary source countries” for human trafWcking activities include “ Thai-
land, Vietnam, China, Mexico, Russia, Ukraine and the Czech Republic. Women
have also been trafWcked to the U.S. from the Philippines, Korea, Malaysia,
Latvia, Hungary, Poland, Brazil and Honduras among other countries.” Sub-
sequent state documents, including the annual State Department publication
TrafWcking in Persons Reports, Government Accountability OfWce reports, and
Congressional Research Service reports, have reiterated this information, not-
ing that most women who Wnd themselves victim to trafWcking in the United
States are nonnationals. Amy O’Neill Richard, International TrafWcking in Women
to the United States: A Contemporary Manifestation of Slavery and Organized Crime,
Center for the Study of Intelligence (Washington, D.C.: Government Printing
136 Notes to Chapter 3

OfWce, April 2000), 3, available at https://www.cia.gov/library/center-for-the-

study-of-intelligence/csi-publications/books-and-monographs/trafWcking
.pdf (accessed June 25, 2010).
6. “ Teen Girls’ Stories of Sex TrafWcking in U.S.,” ABC News (February 9,
2006), http://abcnews.go.com/print?id=1596778 (accessed July 11, 2007);
Nicholas Kristof, “A Heroine from the Brothels,” New York Times, September 25,
2008, available at http://www.nytimes.com/2008/09/25/opinion/25kristof
.html (accessed February 13, 2011).
7. Other news media features (either televised specials, books, or lengthy
newspaper series in papers with national circulation) include MSNBC Under-
cover ’s special, “Sex Slaves in America,” as reported by Meredith Viera (Decem-
ber 3, 2007); a Dateline special on Cambodia’s sex industry, “Children for
Sale”; Nicholas Kristof’s op-ed series on sex trafWcking for the New York Times;
Canadian journalist Victor Malarek’s The Natashas; Scottish journalist Craig
McGill’s Human TrafWc; and the New York Review’s “Women and Children for
Sale,” by Caroline Moorehead.
8. Briggs, “Mediating Infanticide,” 331.
9. “Sex Slaves” (transcript), Frontline (PBS), written and directed by Ric
Esther Bienstock, 2005, available at http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/
slaves/etc/script.html (accessed November 21, 2007).
10. Ric Esther Bienstock notes in an interview, “It is my hope that the Wlm
will inspire people to do something about this [sex trafWcking]. We have also
set up a trust fund so that we can direct some money to the victims who shared
their stories with us.” Frontline interview with Ric Esther Bienstock, “Director’s
Notes,” http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/slaves/making/ (accessed
November 21, 2007).
11. See, for instance, Mark Pedelty, War Stories: The Culture of Foreign Corre-
spondents (New York: Routledge, 1995). Pedelty’s chapter, “ The Narrative Struc-
ture and Agenda of Objective Journalism,” notes that “emotional concern is
anathema to objective journalism” where the guise of writing objectively is in-
stituted through eliminating any explicit reference to values, politics, or emo-
tion (170).
12. Frontline interview with Ric Esther Bienstock, “Director’s Notes.”
13. Pedelty, War Stories, 181.
14. Colin Sparks notes in “ The Panic over Tabloid News,” in Tabloid Tales:
Global Debates over Media Standards, ed. Colin Sparks and John Tulloch (New
York: Rowman and LittleWeld, 2000), 1–40, that deWnitions of what consti-
tutes tabloid news are not clear-cut. While “in the United States ‘tabloidization’
is seen as something coming from outside the world of proper, respectable jour-
nalism,” the distinction between respectable journalism and tabloids cannot
be understood “in terms of a simple binary opposition” (7, 13).
15. Daniel Hallin and Paolo Mancini, Comparing Media Systems (New York:
Cambridge University Press, 2004), 198.
16. For instance, Sparks and Tulloch, Tabloid Tales, and Stephen Bloom,
 Notes to Chapter 3 137

Inside the Writer’s Mind: Writing Narrative Journalism (Ames: Iowa State Univer-
sity Press, 2002), both of which describe the rise of Wrst-person journalism in
the United States, although Bloom also notes that Wrst-personal journalism “isn’t
an excuse for personal indulgence” (viii). Although Wrst-person journalism is
part of serious news outlets and objectivity is itself a myth, there is still a writ-
ing and narrative convention in such sites that privileges the idea of neutral,
value-free, and emotion-free reporting. See also Tuchman, Making News.
17. Siddharth Kara, Sex TrafWcking (New York: Columbia University Press,
2009), 98.
18. Columbia University Press, “Siddharth Kara, Author of Sex TrafWcking,”
YouTube video, available at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QOGf5ml39kA
(accessed June 10, 2010).
19. Julie Bindel, “Press for Change: Guide for Journalists Reporting on the
Prostitution and TrafWcking of Women” (Coalition Against TrafWcking in
Women, 2006), available at http://action.web.ca/home/catw/readingroom
.shtml?x=93526&AA_EX_Session=c22c71d6ffd97deeb9380562b3162f77
(accessed February 13, 2011), 26.
20. An ethical john is part of the MSNBC Undercover program “Sex Slaves
in America.” One of the victims whom the story features, Katya, escapes from
her conditions through a customer who promises to help her and her friend.
Transcripts of the program are available at http://www.msnbc.com/id/220
56066/ (accessed December 6, 2007).
21. Meredith May, “Diary of a Sex Slave: Free, but Trapped,” San Francisco
Chronicle, October 10, 2006, A8.
22. Meredith May, “Diary of a Sex Slave: Life in LA,” San Francisco Chroni-
cle, October 9, 2006, A7.
23. May, “Diary of a Sex Slave: Free, but Trapped,” A8.
24. Ibid.
25. Briggs, “Mediating Infanticide,” 331.
26. See Joan Scott, “Evidence of Experience,” Critical Inquiry 17, no. 4 (Sum-
mer 1991): 773–97.
27. As described by Bindel, “Press for Change.”
28. In Malarek’s The Natashas (New York: Arcade Publishing, 2004), 234–
38, it is his intervention that helps expose corruption within DynCorp, a private
company hiring U.S. police to serve in U.N. missions in places like Bosnia-
Herzegovina. When the police raid to bust a trafWcking ring is called off for
unknown and suspicious reasons, it is Malarek, not the U.N. police ofWcer in
charge of leading the raid whom Malarek shadows, who exposes the incompe-
tence and implied corruption of a DynCorp employee, John Randolph.
29. Bindel, “Press for Change,” 25.
30. United States Department of State, OfWce to Monitor and Combat
TrafWcking in Persons, TrafWcking in Persons Report ( June 2007), 10, available
at http://www.state.gov/g/tip/rls/tiprpt/2007/ (accessed June 20, 2010).
31. Meredith May, “Diary of a Sex Slave: A Youthful Mistake,” San Francisco
Chronicle, October 8, A9.
138 Notes to Chapter 3

32. Ibid., A7.

33. Ibid.
34. Ibid., A9.
35. United States Department of State, OfWce to Monitor and Combat Traf-
Wcking in Persons, TrafWcking in Persons Report ( June 11, 2003), available at
http://www.state.gov/g/tip/rls/tiprpt/2003/ (accessed February 13, 2011).
36. May, “Dairy of a Sex Slave: A Youthful Mistake,” A7.
37. Max Weber, The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism (Los Angeles:
Roxbury Publishing, 1998), 57.
38. Ibid., 21.
39. May, “Dairy of a Sex Slave: A Youthful Mistake,” A7.
40. Ibid., A9.
41. Donna M. Hughes, TrafWcking for Sexual Exploitation: The Case of the Rus-
sian Federation, prepared for International Organization for Migration (Geneva,
International Organization for Migration, 2002), 7.
42. For instance, Alyson Brody, Mantana Veerachai, Sarah Johnston, Siri-
porn Skrobanek, and Vachararutai Boontinand, TrafWcking in Women in the Asia-
PaciWc Region: A Regional Report (Bangkok: Global Alliance Against TrafWcking in
Women [GAATW], 1997); Louise Brown, Sex Slaves: The TrafWcking of Women in
Asia (London: Virago Press, 2000); Leviseda Douglas, “Sex TrafWcking in Cam-
bodia,” working paper 122 (Victoria, Australia: Center of Southeast Asian Stud-
ies, 2003); Patricia H. Hynes and Janice G. Raymond, “Put in Harm’s Way: The
Neglected Health Consequences of Sex TrafWcking in the United States,” in Polic-
ing the National Body: Sex, Race, and Criminalization, ed. Jael Silliman and Anannya
Bhattacharjee (Cambridge: South End Press, 2002), 197–225; Siriporn Skro-
banek, Nataya Boonpakdee, and Chutima Jantateero, The TrafWc in Women:
Human Realities of the International Sex Trade (New York: Zed Books, 1997).
43. May, “Diary of a Sex Slave: A Youthful Mistake,” A7.
44. As noted in the 2007 TrafWcking in Persons Report, the Department of
States argues that “the globalization of markets and labor forces, and the con-
comitant relaxation of travel barriers have spawned new trafWcking scenarios
and routes.”
45. Richard Thomas Ford, Racial Culture: A Critique (Princeton: Princeton
University Press, 2005), 37.
46. Asian Watch, A Modern Form of Slavery: TrafWcking of Burmese Women and
Girls into Brothels in Thailand (New York: Human Rights Watch, 1993), 47.
47. Brown, Sex Slaves, 209.
48. In fact, Gary Haugen, president of the Christian nongovernmental
organization International Rescue Mission, perhaps most vividly captures the
writing of sex trafWcking through the narrative of rescue, as Gretchen Soder-
lund has pointed out in “Running from the Rescuers.”
49. Department of State, OfWce to Monitor and Combat TrafWcking, Traf-
Wcking in Persons Report ( June 2007), available at http://www.state.gov/g/tip
/rls/tiprpt/2007/ (accessed February 13, 2011).
50. For example, Ann Veneman, executive director of UNICEF, noted at
 Notes to Chapter 3 139

the “United Front for Children: Global Efforts to Combat Sexual TrafWcking
in Travel and Tourism” (a conference on trafWcking that operated under the
banner of private-public partnership): “A Bangladeshi woman who was forced
into prostitution in India at the age of 10, who was abused and impregnated . . .
said, ‘My dream is that my daughter does not have the same misfortune that I
have had and that both of my children will go to school. Had I been educated,
I would not have been in this state.’ . . . Education is absolutely key, in my view,
to addressing poverty, to addressing trafWcking, to addressing so many of the
issues that the developing world is confronting today. . . . Some of the world
that has to be done is to reeducate the family itself, to create an acceptance
and understanding it is ok on the part of the child and the family to come back
together.” The focus on education and Veneman’s evocation of the victim nar-
rative assumes that those like the Bangladeshi woman and her daughter would
not Wnd themselves trafWcked into the sex industry if they are educated on
(liberal) feminist values of self-awareness and gender equality. Not only is edu-
cation key to addressing cultural attitudes around gender that lead women like
the Bangladeshi woman into prostitution, but it is also a key component to
combating poverty. Ann Veneman, “United Front for Children: Global Efforts
to Combat Sexual TrafWcking in Travel and Tourism” (transcript), Confer-
ence held at the University of Minnesota, Minneapolis, April 21–22, 2006.
Thanks to Barbara Frey and the Human Rights Center at the University of
Minnesota for hosting, sponsoring, and providing transcripts of the event.
51. Journalists, NGO, and U.S. governmental documents describe trafWck-
ers (primary victimizers) as always already criminal, usually noting how these
men are already members of international criminal syndicates like the Japa-
nese Yakuza, Chinese Triad, and Russian MaWa. See Kathryn Farr, Sex TrafWck-
ing (New York: Worth Publishers, 2005), 59; Craig McGill, Human TrafWc: Sex,
Slaves and Immigration (London: Vision Paperbacks, 2003); Francis T. Miko,
TrafWcking in Persons: The U.S. and International Response CRS Report for Congress
(Washington, D.C.: Congressional Research Service, 2006), 3.
52. Dipesh Chakrabarty, Provincializing Europe: Postcolonial Thought and His-
torical Difference (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2000), 8.
53. Denise Ferriera da Silva, The Global Idea of Race (Minneapolis: Univer-
sity of Minnesota Press, 2007).
54. May, “Diary of a Sex Slave: Free, but Trapped,” A6.
55. “Sex Slaves” (transcript), Frontline.
56. Brown, Sex Slaves, 25.
57. Skrobanek, Boonpakdee, and Jantateero, TrafWc in Women, viii.
58. Michelle McKinley, “Cultural Culprits,” Berkeley Journal of Gender, Law
and Justice 24, no. 2 (2009): 114.
59. Briggs, “Mediating Infanticide,” 328.
60. Ibid., 331.
61. “New York Times Columnist Biography: Nicholas Kristof,” New York
Times, available at http://www.nytimes.com/ref/opinion/KRISTOF-BIO.html
(accessed April 7, 2008).
140 Notes to Chapter 4

62. Nicholas Kristof, “Girls for Sale,” New York Times, January 17, 2004,
available at http://www.nytimes.com/2004/01/17/opinion/girls-for-sale.html
(accessed February 13, 2011).
63. Kristof, “Loss of Innocence,” New York Times, January 28, 2004, avail-
able at http://www.nytimes.com/2004/01/28/opinion/loss-of-innocence.html
(accessed February 13, 2011).
64. Ibid.
65. Tuchman, Making News, 215.

4. Seeing Race and Sexuality

1. Francis T. Miko, Congressional Research Service, “ TrafWcking in Per-
sons: The U.S. and International Response” (Washington, D.C.: Library of
Congress, January 19, 2006).
2. Jillian Sandell, “ Transnational Ways of Looking” (San Francisco State
University). In her work, Sandell discusses the ways a transnational register
informs cultural apprehension of visual imagery in the twenty-Wrst century.
See also Sandell, “ Transnational Ways of Seeing: Sexual and National Belong-
ing in Hedwig and the Angry Inch,” Gender, Place and Culture: A Journal of Feminist
Geography 17, no. 2 (April 2010): 231–47.
3. Denise Ferreira da Silva, Toward a Global Idea of Race (Minneapolis:
University of Minnesota Press, 2007), 29.
4. All campaign posters are available for download on the DHHS Web page,
available at http://www.acf.hhs.gov/trafWcking/about/posters.html (accessed
February 13, 2011).
5. Mae Ngai, Impossible Subjects: Illegal Aliens and the Making of Modern Amer-
ica (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2004), 8.
6. Lisa Lowe, Immigrant Acts: On Asian American Cultural Politics (Durham:
Duke University Press, 1999), 4.
7. Yen Le Espiritu, Asian American Women and Men (Walnut Creek: AltaMira
Press, 2000), 93.
8. Virginia Act to Preserve Racial Integrity, section 5 (1924), available at
http://www2.vcdh.virginia.edu/encounter/projects/monacans/Contempo
rary_Monacans/racial.html (accessed July 10, 2010).
9. Mary Frances Berry, The Pig Farmer’s Daughter and Other Tales of American
Justice (New York: Vintage, 1999).
10. Angela Davis, Women, Race, Class (New York: Vintage, 1983).
11. For example, Tomas Almaguer, Racial Fault Lines (Berkeley and Los
Angeles: University of California Press, 1994), demonstrates the relational con-
struction of racial categories in the context of turn-of-the-century California.
12. “Images of Human TrafWcking” Web page, available at http://www
.gtipphotos.state.gov/ (accessed May 1, 2010).
13. Kay Chernush for the U.S. State Department, “Sexual TrafWcking.”
http://www.gtipphotos.state.gov/.
 Notes to Chapter 4 141

14. The contrastive nature of the images is replicated in the 2007 TrafWck-
ing in Persons Report images. The photographs in the 2007 report featuring
white European women include a head shot of Mara, a woman victim to sex
trafWcking, a photo similar to Chernush’s Western Europe prostitution image
in its blurry ambiguity with informative caption, and a reproduction of a Dan-
ish advertisement featuring a black-and-white head shot of a young, white
female model. These are the only images in the report that reference white vic-
tims. The eight photos depicting sex trafWcking and Asia present women in
the act of negotiating with johns, scantily clad women, and group photos sim-
ilar to the Wnal image in Chernush’s gallery.
15. Espiritu, Asian American Women and Men, 95.
16. Laura Kang, Compositional Subjects: EnWguring Asian/American Women
(Durham: Duke University Press, 2002), 93–94.
17. See Gina Marchetti, Romance and the Yellow Peril (Berkeley and Los
Angeles: University of California Press, 1994), and Robert Lee, Orientals (Phila-
delphia: Temple University Press, 1999), for a discussion of the ways represen-
tations of Asian and Asian American women with white men in popular culture
worked in particular historical and political contexts to “manage” U.S. race
relations.
18. Kang, Compositional Subjects, 94.
19. These trends are evident in other state documents, including the 2007
Department of State TrafWcking in Persons ( TIP) Report. While the 2007 TIP
Report notes that “most uncaptioned photographs in the Report are not images
of conWrmed trafWcking victims, but are provided to show the myriad forms of
exploitation that help deWne trafWcking and the variety of cultures in which
trafWcking victims are found,” the images that accompany the report nonethe-
less help to create a visual reference for sex trafWcking and its victims. U.S.
Department of State, TrafWcking in Persons Report (2007), available at http://
www.state.gov/g/tip/rls/tiprpt/2007/index.htm (accessed June 20, 2010).
20. See Neda Atanasoski, “Afterimages of Empire” (manuscript, University
of California, Santa Cruz).
21. Victor Malarek, The Natashas (New York: Arcade Publishing, 2004), 5–6.
22. Ann Marie Bertone, “Sexual TrafWcking in Women: International Polit-
ical Economy and the Politics of Sex,” Gender Issues 18, no. 1 (2000): 8.
23. Miko, “ TrafWcking in Persons,” 2.
24. U.S. Congress, House of Representatives, The Sex Trade: TrafWcking of
Women and Children in Europe and the United States, 106th Cong., 1st sess. ( June
28, 1999), 2.
25. Donna Hughes, TrafWcking for Sexual Exploitation: The Case of the Russian
Federation (Geneva: International Organization for Migration, June 2002).
26. Ibid., 7.
27. Elaine Brown, The Ties That Bind: Migration and TrafWcking of Women and
Girls for Sexual Exploitation in Cambodia (Geneva: International Organization for
Migration, 2007), 7–8, available at http://www.humantrafWcking.org/uploads/
publications/IOM_trafWcking_report_Aug07.pdf (accessed February 13, 2011).
142 Notes to Chapter 4

28. Siddharth Kara, Sex TrafWcking: Inside the Business of Modern Slavery
(New York: Columbia University Press, 2009), 175.
29. Jodi Kim, Ends of Empire: Asian American Critique and the Cold War (Min-
neapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2010), 37–93.
30. Samuel Huntington, “ The Clash of Civilizations?” Foreign Affairs (Sum-
mer 1993): 49.
31. For instance, Lee, in Orientals, argues that Huntington’s views posit
that “America is threatened by the demand of non-European Americans for
racial equality and social recognition” (207). For Lee, Huntington presents a
worldview of “essentialized cultural difference” that “deWnes Asian Americans
as inauthentic and the potential agents of a dreaded de-Westernization of
American society” (208).
32. The PSA Work Abroad is available for download at http://www.unodc
.org/unodc/multimedia.html?vf=/documents/video/psa/HT_PSA_Work_A
broad_2001_60sec.Xv (accessed February 13, 2011).
33. The other PSAs dealing with human trafWcking produced during the
early 2000s include Cleaning Woman (1998, 2003), Better Future (2002), and
Telephone (2003). All PSAs are available at http://www.unodc.org/unodc/en/
multimedia.html (accessed February 13, 2011).
34. Ambassador John Miller, senior advisor for the Secretary of State on
Human TrafWcking, at the “United Front for Children: Global Efforts to Com-
bat Sexual TrafWcking in Travel and Tourism” conference, April 21–22, 2006,
University of Minnesota.
35. Max Weber, The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism (Los Angeles:
Roxbury Publishing, 1998), 26.
36. Ironically, even though China and Vietnam persist in the literature as
hot spots for trafWcking, the role of the communist state only appears in terms
of government failures to combat trafWcking, and cultural explanations remain
central. For example, in a congressional hearing on trafWcking in China held
in 2006, Steven Law, deputy secretary of the U.S. Department of Labor, points
out that cultural factors (in addition to migration, poverty, and proximity to
other nations where trafWcking is pervasive) such as “forced marriage and the
unique pressures created by the Chinese Governments’ one child policy” con-
tribute to trafWcking in China. U.S. Congress, Combating Human TrafWcking in
China: Domestic and International Efforts, 109th Cong., 2nd sess. (March 6, 2006),
5, available at http://www.cecc.gov (accessed May 1, 2010).
37. Hughes, TrafWcking for Sexual Exploitation, 7.
38. Lucinda Peach, “Buddhism and Human Rights in the Thai Sex Trade,”
in Religious Fundamentalisms and the Human Rights of Women, ed. Courtney How-
land (New York: Palgrave, 1999), 215, 221.
39. Hughes, TrafWcking for Sexual Exploitation, 13.
40. As a Coalition Against TrafWcking in Women (CATW) report notes, a
key factor to promoting sex trafWcking includes “macro-economic policies . . .
that mandate ‘structural adjustments’ in many developing regions of the world,
pushing certain countries (e.g. the Philippines) to export women for labor,
 Notes to Chapter 5 143

making them vulnerable to trafWcking; or to develop economies based on

tourism (e.g. Thailand).” Janice Raymond, Donna Hughes, and Carol Gomez,
“Sex TrafWcking of Women in the United States,” Coalition Against TrafWcking
in Women, March 2001, available at http://www.uri.edu/artsci/wms/hughes/
sex_traff_us.pdf (accessed February 13, 2011), 17.

5. ReWguring Slavery
1. Tani Barlow, “International Feminism of the Future,” Signs 25, no. 4
(2000): 1101.
2. Nikhil Pal Singh, Black Is a Country (Cambridge: Harvard University
Press, 2004), 4.
3. Ibid., 10.
4. Deborah Cohler, “Keeping the Home Front Burning: Renegotiating
Gender and Sexuality in U.S. Mass Media after September 11,” Feminist Media
Studies 6, no. 3 (2006): 245.
5. Denise Ferreira da Silva, Toward a Global Idea of Race (Minneapolis:
University of Minnesota Press, 2007).
6. Singh, Black Is a Country, 4, 33.
7. Silva, Toward a Global Idea of Race, xxx.
8. Polaris Project Web site, available at http://www.polarisproject.org/
about-us/introduction (accessed February 13, 2011).
9. President George W. Bush, “President Bush Addresses United Nations
General Assembly,” United Nations, New York, September 23, 2003, available
at http://www.whitehouse.gov/news/releases/2003/09/print/20030923-4.html
(accessed September 26, 2004).
10. Free the Slaves is a nongovernmental organization that describes its
mission as one “to end slavery worldwide” (http://www.freetheslaves.net;
accessed February 13, 2011). Kevin Bales, Understanding Global Slavery (Berke-
ley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2005).
11. John Miller, “Orange Grove: Slavery Alive and Well in the U.S.,” Orange
County Register, November 15, 2006.
12. U.S. Congress, Committee on the Judiciary, Subcomittee on the Con-
stitution, Civil Rights and Property Rights, “Examining U.S. Efforts to Combat
Human TrafWcking and Slavery,” 108th Cong., 2nd sess. ( July 7, 2004).
13. A. Leon Higginbotham Jr., Shades of Freedom: Racial Politics and the Pre-
sumptions of the American Legal Process (New York: Oxford University Press, 1996).
14. George Lipsitz, The Possessive Investment in Whiteness: How White People
ProWt from Identity Politics (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2006).
15. Singh, Black Is a Country.
16. Gretchen Soderlund, “Running from the Rescuers: New U.S. Crusades
against Sex TrafWcking and the Rhetoric of Abolition,” NWSA Journal 17, no.
3 (Fall 2005): 76. Soderlund discusses the example of Venezuela in 2004,
when it, along with Cuba and North Korea, was one of only ten nations cate-
gorized as tier 3 (the lowest ranking).
144 Notes to Chapter 5

17. Ibid., 67.

18. Maylei Blackwell and Nadine Naber, “Intersectionality in an Era of Glob-
alization,” Merdians 2, no. 2 (2002): 239.
19. Bush, “President Bush Addresses United Nations General Assembly.”
20. Kathryn Sikkink, Mixed Signals (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2004), 5.
21. John Locke, “Of the State of Nature,” Second Treatise of Government
(Cambridge: Hackett Publishing, 1980), 9.
22. Ibid., 8.
23. Laura Bush, “President, Mrs. Bush Mark Progress in Global Women’s
Human Rights,” remarks given on March 12, 2004, available at http://white
house.gov/news/releases/2004/03/pring/20040312-5.html (accessed Sep-
tember 26, 2004).
24. Cohler, “Keeping the Home Front Burning,” 245–46.
25. Joan Scott, “Universalism and the History of Feminism,” Differences 7,
no. 1 (1995): 3.
26. Cohler, “Keeping the Home Front Burning,” 246.
27. U.S. Congress, House of Representatives, TrafWcking of Women and Chil-
dren in the International Sex Trade, 106th Cong., 1st sess. (September 14, 1999), 40.
28. Rice, “Remarks at the White House Conference on the Americas,” Hyatt
Regency Hotel, Crystal City, Va., July 9, 2007, available at http://www.state
.gov/secretary/rm/2007/87996.htm (accessed April 14, 2008).
29. Singh, Black Is a Country.
30. Silva, Toward a Global Idea of Race, 201.
31. Reginald Horsman, Race and Manifest Destiny (Cambridge: Harvard Uni-
versity Press, 1981).
32. Silva, Toward a Global Idea of Race, 204.
33. Ibid., xv.
34. Henry Yu, Thinking Orientals: Migration, Contact and Exoticism in Modern
America (New York: Oxford University Press, 2001), 45.
35. Ibid., 62.
36. Lisa Lowe, Immigrant Acts (Durham: Duke University Press, 1996), 86.
37. David Hollinger, Postethnic America: Beyond Multiculturalism (New York:
HarperCollins, 1995), 129.
38. Singh, Black Is a Country, 17.
39. Ibid., 17.
40. Ien Ang, “I’m a Feminist But . . . ,” in Feminism and Race, ed. Kum-Kum
Bhavnani (New York: Oxford University Press, 2001), 403.
41. Rachel Lee, “Notes from the (Non)Field,” Meridians 1, no. 1 (2000): 86.
42. Judith Butler, Gender Trouble (New York: Routledge, 1999), 4.
43. For example, Kimberle Crenshaw, bell hooks, Valerie Smith, and Eliz-
abeth Spelman.
44. Lee, “Notes from a (Non)Field,” 91.
45. See, for instance, Alys Wienbaum, Wayward Reproductions (Durham: Duke
University Press, 2004); Peggy Pascoe, What Comes Naturally (New York: Oxford
University Press, 2009).
 Notes to Conclusion 145

46. Valerie Smith, Not Just Race, Not Just Gender: Black Feminist Readings (New
York: Routledge, 1998), xv.
47. The deWnition of trafWcking provided in the 2000 United Nations Pro-
tocol to Prevent, Suppress and Punish TrafWcking in Persons differs from the
deWnition in the VTVPA over the matter of consent of victims. According to
the protocol, “The consent of a victim of trafWcking in persons to the intended
exploitation set forth . . . shall be irrelevant.” Rather, the protocol focuses on
the presence of exploitation.
48. M. Jacqui Alexander and Chandra Talpade Mohanty, “Genealogies,
Legacies, Movements,” in Feminism and Race, ed. Kum-Kum Bhavnani (New
York: Oxford University Press, 2001), 492.
49. U.S. Congress, House of Representatives, TrafWcking of Women and Chil-
dren in the International Sex Trade, 106th Cong., 1st sess. (September 14, 1999), 40.
50. Free the Slaves, “How You Can Help,” available at http://www.freethel-
saves.net (accessed February 13, 2011).
51. Nicholas Kristof, “Stopping the TrafWckers,” New York Times, January
31, 2004.
52. Emancipation Network, “Help Us Help Survivors: Made by Survivors,”
available at http://www.madebysurvivors.com/ (accessed February 13, 2011).
53. Ibid.
54. Emancipation Network, “About Us: How We Became Abolitionists Fight-
ing Slavery, Sex TrafWcking, and Human TrafWcking,” available at http://www
.madebysurvivors.com/FoundersStory (accessed February 13, 2011).
55. Nicole Yorio, “Rescuing Girls and Women from the Sex Trade,” Red-
book Magazine, June 2010, 120–23.
56. U.S. Department of State, TrafWcking in Persons Report, Publication 11407
( June 2009), 24, available at http://www.state.gov/g/tip (accessed February
13, 2011).

Conclusion
1. Sangtin Writers and Richa Nagar, Playing with Fire (Minneapolis: Uni-
versity of Minnesota Press, 2006), xxviii.
2. Inderpal Grewal and Caren Kaplan, “ Transnational Feminist Practices
and Questions of Postmodernity,” in Scattered Hegemonies: Postmodernity and
Transnational Feminist Practices, ed. Inderpal Grewal and Caren Kaplan (Min-
neapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1994), 17.
3. Jacqueline Bhabha, “Embodied Rights: Gender Persecution, State Sov-
ereignty and Refugees,” in Women, Citizenship and Difference, ed. Nira Yuval-Davis
and Prina Werbner (New York: Zed Books, 1999), 178.
4. Sally Engle Merry, Human Rights and Gender Violence: Translating Inter-
national Law into Local Justice (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2006).
This page intentionally left blank
Index

Africa, xviii, 35, 114 “Better Future,” 21. See also United
African American. See black Nations, public service
agency, xiv–xv, 44–47, 66–67, 90, announcements
125; and negotiation, 45, 46; Bhabha, Jacqueline, 123
and self–determination, 63–65, Bienstock, Ric Esther. See PBS Front-
89, 91–93, 104; and self–speech, line, “Sex Slaves”
46–48; agent, as subject, 28, 67, black, 10, 32–33, 35, 86, 98, 99,
89, 94 106, 107, 109–15
Agustin, Laura Maria, xv Boaz, Franz, 3
Alexander, Jacqui, xxiv, 113–14 Briggs, Charles, 49–50
Ali, Hirsi, 114 Brownmiller, Susan, 32
American Anthropological Associa- Bunch, Charlotte, 8, 19
tion, 3, 4 Bush, George W., xix, 23, 97, 99–100,
American Dream, xxvi–xxvii, 50, 58, 105; administration, 38, 39, 101–2
59, 107, 113 Bush, Laura, 103–5
An-Na’im, Abdullahi Ahmed, 15
Asia: as geographical location, xviii, Chapkis, Wendy, xv, 40
64, 68, 71, 77, 78, 108, 114; as Charlesworth, Hillary, 8
racialized difference, xxvii, 35–37, Charvet, John, xxiii
63, 64, 73, 75, 79, 80, 82–83, 85– choice, xiv–xv, 25, 45, 47, 63–64,
86, 108; and perceived patriarchy, 66–69, 89, 95, 121–22. See also
81, 82, 84–85, 90, 92; perception consent
of sex trafWcking origins, 63, 82– citizenship, xx, xxi, 30, 41, 72, 73,
86, 87, 89, 90–92; regulation of 75, 105, 110–11, 117, 118, 119,
sexuality, 36–38, 75, 90 125; and national belonging, 71,
Asian American, 23, 73, 80, 113 73, 75, 80, 110–11; citizenry, xxi,
assimilation, xxiii–xxiv, 108, 110–11 5, 39, 42; policing of, xxi, 29, 35–
asylum, 10–11, 123 37, 39, 75–76. See also nation
civil rights, xxiii–xxiv, xxviii; era,
Bales, Kevin, 97 xxiii–xxiv, 80, 98–99, 111; post–
Balos, Beverly, xv civil rights, xxiii, 99
being: onto-epistemology, xxix, 2, “Cleaning Woman,” 21, 22–23, 24.
93, 111; ontology, xiv, xv–xvi, xxiv, See also United Nations, public
xxv, 67, 72; ways of being, xiv, xv– service announcements
xvi, xxix, 7, 67 Clinton, Bill, xvii; administration,
Bertone, Andrea, 82–83 83–84

147
148 Index

Clinton, Hillary, 118 Department of State, xviii–xix, 27,

coercion, xiv–xv, xviii, 24, 30, 33, 36–37, 40, 41, 42, 45, 58–59, 60–
67. See also VTVPA 61, 64, 77, 78, 79, 80, 82, 117;
Cohler, Deborah, 104 OfWce to Monitor and Combat
colonialism, xxiii, xxiv, 1, 18–19, 60, TrafWcking: xviii–xix, 45, 77, 97–
61, 72, 90, 124; colonial 98, 118. See also United States
logic/frame, 1–3, 13; colonial Desai, Shefali, 10–12, 123
relationships, 9, 33; postcolonial- discourse, xvi, xxvii, xix–xx, 13, 46;
ism, xvi, xxvii; Western progres- and power, xx, xxi, xxvii; human
sivism, xxi, xxiii, 1, 58, 62. See also rights, xiii, xv, xxviii, xxix, 8, 12,
neocolonialism 124; national, xv, xxi, xxviii;
color-blind, 32, 95–96, 105, 108–9. racial, 87, 95, 97, 108–9, 110,
See also multiculturalism 115; sex trafWcking, xvi, xxi,
color line, 36, 75–76. See also misce- xxvii, 86
genation; sexuality, racialization DKT International v. United States
of; whiteness, sexual regulation of Agency for International Development,
compositional conditions, xx 38–39
consent, xv, 30–31, 35, 37, 40–41, Doezema, Jo, xv, 36, 40
95, 113. See also choice
constitutive negation, xvi. See also Eastern Europe (and former Soviet
being; enabling negation; Union): as geographical location,
Enlightenment xviii, 64, 71, 79, 121, 122; as
Coomaraswamy, Radhika, xxiv racialized construction, xxvii,
Cornyn, John, 98–99, 100 35, 64, 81–82, 85–86; perceived
Crenshaw, Kimberly. sex trafWcking origins, 61, 81–87,
See intersectionality 89, 90–91. See also whiteness,
culture, xiii–xiv, 5–6, 17, 20, 33, 83, racialization of
89, 107, 113, 125; as culpable, 25, Emancipation Network, 116
50, 58–66, 68, 90, 92; as site of enabling negation, 2, 25. See also
racialization, 63, 85–87, 92; cul- constitutive negation; subject
tural bias, 8, 37, 109; cultural effect
community, 15–16, 25, 90, 92; Enlightenment, xxii, xxiii, xxv, 5, 17,
cultural difference, xxvii, 2, 3–4, 18, 65, 72, 103, 111; modern
10, 109, 114–15, 117; cultural epistemologies, xiii–xiv, 6, 17, 67,
norms, xxvii, 4, 7, 12, 15, 63, 84 93; modern narrative, xxv, 20, 68;
post-Enlightenment, xxii, xxiii,
Davidson, Julia O’Connell, xv, 40 xxv, 2, 6, 7, 45, 46, 66, 107, 108,
Davis, Angela, 32, 114 119
Department of Defense, 23, 97. exceptionalism. See United States,
See also United States exceptionalism
Department of Health and Human
Services, xxvii, 35, 39–40, 72–74, feminism, xvi, xxii, 8, 9, 11, 81, 95,
75, 97; “Look Beneath the Sur- 104; dilemma of, 10, 11, 12;
face” campaign, 72–75. See also global, xxii, 9, 104, 15, 125; lib-
United States eral or Western, 9, 63–64, 82,
 Index 149

90–93, 96, 104; nationalist, 95, IOM (International Organization

96, 104; transnational, xxviii, for Migration), 61, 84, 90–91
122–23; woman of color, 112, 114 intersectionality, 112
Foucault, Michel, xx Islam, 14, 90

Gardner, Martha, xxi john, xviii–xix, 25, 64, 79, 80; “ethi-
gender, xviii, 75, 112; constitutive cal john,” 56, 58, 62; undercover
with sexuality 75, 76; norms, xxi, john, 54–55
29–30, 32, 34, 36, 38, 84, 91, journalist: and objectivity, 52, 54; as
104, 119; violence, xv, xx–xxi, rescuer, 53, 54–58, 68–69, 116
xxvii, xxviii–xxix, 8–9, 10–13, 84,
93, 101. See also patriarchy; Asia, Kaczynska-Nay, Elisa, xxiii
perceived patriarchy; Eastern Euro- Kang, Laura, xx, 80. See also compo-
pean, patriarchal perception of sitional conditions
Golubev, Felix. See PBS Frontline, Kaplan, Caren, 123
“Sex Slaves” Kara, Siddharth, 55, 84–85
Gordon, Avery, 47 Kempadoo, Kamala, xv, 40
Grewal, Inderpal, xxi, 123 Kim, Jodi, 85
Kim, You Mi. See May, Meredith; San
Hallin, Daniel, 54 Francisco Chronicle
Hartman, Saidiya, xvi knowledge, as regime, xvi–xxviii, 1, 2,
Haynes, Dina, 33–34, 40 7, 16, 20, 26, 67, 86, 108, 122, 123
Hegel, G. W. F., 17, 18 Kristof, Nicholas, 51–52, 54–55, 68–
heteropatriarchy, xxii–xxiii, 76 69, 115–17. See also New York Times
human rights, xiii, xiv–xvi, xxiii,
1, 11, 19, 49, 93; deWning what Landesman, Peter, 49–51. See also
counts, xiv, xvi, xxiii, 4, 6, 8, 17; New York Times
limitations of, xv, xxvi, 21, 25, 48, Latin America, xviii, 35, 75
103, 124; paradox of, xxii–xxiii, Latour, Bruno, 6–7
3, 10, 12; violations, xiii–xvi, xx, law, xxvi, 5, 6, 35; antitrafWcking,
xxv, xxix, 6, 8–9, 92, 93, 103–4, xvii–xviii, 42; as modern tool, 17–
124, 125. See also UDHR; univer- 18, 20; immigration, xxi, xxvi, 36,
salism, paradox of 41; interracial sex/marriage, 75–
Huntington, Samuel, 86–87 76; law enforcement, xxi, 28, 32,
33–35, 39–40, 43, 64–65; legal
identity politics, xvi, xxvii–xxviii, 111 scripts, xxvi, 44, 49; limitations of,
immigration, xx–xxi, xxvi, 28, 34, 36– 20, 25, 34, 123; moral/natural,
38, 39–42, 62, 108, 110, 113. See xxv, xxix, 18–20, 25, 101–3, 105;
also law, immigration; United States myth of, 6–7, 18–19, 123–24;
Immigration and Customs Enforce- rape, 30–31, 34; rational, 5, 20
ment, xxvii, 43, 73 Lee, Rachel, xxiv
inclusion: as political strategy, xxii– Lipsitz, George, 99
xxv, xxvii, 19–20, 25, 65, 105, Locke, John, 7, 18, 103; social con-
107, 111, 114–15; limits of, 2, 47, tract, 5, 18–20, 86
96, 112. Luibheid, Eithne, xxi
150 Index

McKinley, Michelle, 44, 123 Okin, Susan, 8

MacKinnon, Catharine, 31 ontology. See being
Malarek, Victor, 54–55, 66–67, “Open Your Eyes to Human Traf-
82–83 Wcking,” 21–25. See also United
Mann Act, 36, 38 Nations, public service
May, Meredith, 56–57, 58–59, 61– announcements
62, 66. See also San Francisco
Chronicle Page Act of 1875, 36. See also immi-
Mazengo, Zipora, 27 gration; law
Merry, Sally Engle, xxiii, 124 Park, Robert, 108
militarism, 23, 24, 34, 61–62, 64– particularism, xxii, 7, 10, 14, 15, 25.
65, 80, 103–4 See also relativism
Miller, John, xix, xx, 89–90, 97–98 patriarchy, xxiv, 9, 10, 12, 37, 67,
miscegenation, xxi, 76, 80; inter- 110, 122; culture of, 15, 25, 60,
racial marriage, 36–37, 75–76; 62–63; racialization of, 9, 15, 82,
interracial sex, 38, 75–76, 80. 90, 92. See also Asia, perceived
See also rape, interracial patriarchy; heteropatriarchy
modern epistemologies. Paulose, Rachel, xx
See Enlightenment PBS, 50; Frontline, “Sex Slaves,” 52–
Mohanty, Chandra, xxiv, 113–14 54, 58, 66–67
multiculturalism, xxviii, 82, 95, 105, Petrova, Eva, 28–29, 35, 41–42, 45,
107–10, 115, 125; postracialism, 47, 48. See also United States v.
xxviii, 76, 105, 108, 109, 117. See Trakhtenberg
also pluralism; color–blind pluralism, 42, 99–101, 105, 108–10,
113, 115. See also multiculturalism
Narayan, Uma, 11 Polaris Project (NGO), 97
nation, xxvii, xxviii, 36, 101–2, 124; prostitution, 23, 39, 58–59, 71, 78,
and national belonging, xiv, xv, 83, 88; prostitute, xv, 36, 40–41,
35, 71, 72, 95, 96, 101, 102, 106, 42, 43–44; and sex work, 28, 34,
119; mythology/narrative of, 97– 38–39, 41–42, 56, 67
101, 105–10, 113, 115. See also
citizenship race, xxvii, 25, 72, 97, 104, 117,
Nayak, Meghana, 23, 31 123; logic of, 41, 76, 85–87, 112;
neocolonialism, xxiii, 9, 121; and race relations, xiv, xv, 80, 86, 95,
power, xxviii–xxix, 2, 72, 82; 108; racial alibi, xxiv, xxv, 111–
neocolonial relations, 1–2, 20, 26. 12; racial formation, 81, 86, 113,
See also colonialism 114; racial science/eugenics, 3,
Nesiah, Vasuki, 9 41, 44, 75–76; racial violence, 72,
New York Times, 49–52, 54–55, 68, 101; racism, 32, 98–99, 109–10,
115–16. See also Kristof, Nicholas; 113, 115. See also Asia, as racial-
Landesman, Peter ized difference; Eastern Europe
nongovernmental organization, xxvi, (and former Soviet Union), as
xxvii, 6, 8, 39, 55, 57, 97, 116, racialized construction; sexuality,
122, 124. See also Emancipation racialization of; whiteness, racial-
Network; Polaris Project ization of
 Index 151

rape, 8–29. See also sexuality, and subject effect, 46

violence Symons, Sarah, 116
regulatory norm, xvii, 37, 38, 76. See
also gender, norms T visa, xviii–xix, 27, 40, 123
relativism, xxv, xxvii–xxviii, 1–5, 11, Taliban, 10–13, 14–15
13–16. See also particularism “Telephone,” 21, 22–23, 24. See also
representation, 90, 124, 125; as United Nations, public service
modern strategy, 96, 105, 109–12; announcements
as violence, 27, 68–69; as visual third world: as location or identity,
imagery, xxvii, 21–24, 44, 71, 72– xxiii, 55–56, 83, 86; construction
73, 75–82, 85, 89, 92; limitations as backward, xxi, 2, 26, 46, 50,
of, 2, 28, 111; politics of, xix, 58, 62, 65; third world women,
xxiii–xxiv, xxv–xxvi, xix, 1, 14, 35, xxi, xxiv, xxv, 9, 44. See also cul-
47–48, 71, 111–12. See also inclu- ture, culpable culture
sion, strategy of Ticktin, Miriam, 123
Rice, Condoleeza, 106–10, 112, 114 tokenism, xxiv, 115
TrafWcking In Persons Report, 36–37,
San Francisco Chronicle, 50, 56–57; 45, 60, 77, 100–101, 118
You Mi Kim, 56–57, 58–59, translation, 13–15, 16
60, 61, 62, 66. See also May, transnational feminism.
Meredith See feminism
Sangtin writers (Uttar Pradesh, TVPA (TrafWcking Victims Protec-
India),122 tion Act). See also VTVPA
“scattered hegemonies,” 123
sexuality, xxi, 23, 24, 75–76, 81, 91, UDHR (Universal Declaration of
104; and violence, 23, 30–33, 40; Human Rights), xxv, 1, 3–6, 102.
racialization of, xxi, 32–33, 36, See also universalism, universal
44, 75, 76–77, 90; sexual norms, principle
29–30, 32, 71, 104, 119. See also United Nations, xiv, xvii, 1, 3, 6, 23,
Asia, regulation of sexuality; mis- 97, 101–2; Decade of Women, 8;
cegenation; whiteness OfWce of Drugs and Crime, xxvii,
Silva, Denise Ferriera da, 18 21, 87; public service announce-
Singh, Nikhil Pal, 96, 110 ments, 21–25, 87–90. See also
slavery: modern day, xix, 73, 98, “Cleaning Woman”; “Open Your
118; sex slave, as historical Eyes to Human TrafWcking”;
category, 36, 37–38; sexual, xx, “Telephone”; “Work Abroad”
24, 40–41, 52, 56, 98, 103, 104, United States: Congress, 97; Consti-
116; transatlantic, 95–101, 105, tution, 4–5; exceptionalism,
116, 119, 125; white slavery, 36 xxviii, 86, 95–96, 100, 106, 107,
Smith, Christopher, xvii, 83 109–10, 115, 117; government,
Smith, Valerie, 32, 33, 112 xix, xxvi, 35, 71; norms, 96, 101–
smuggling, 28, 35, 42 2, 103, 105. See also Department
Soderlund, Gretchen, xv of Defense; Department of State;
South and Southeast Asia. See Asia Immigration Customs Enforce-
Spivak, Gayatri Chakravorty, 46 ment; Department of Health and
152 Index

Human Resources; TrafWcking in 44, 67; victimhood, xv, 44, 45, 67.
Persons Report; VTVPA; VAWA See also agency; representation,
United States v. Babaev, 43–44 visual imagery;
United States v. Rosales-Martinez, 43 VTVPA (Victims of TrafWcking and
United States v. Trakhtenberg, 27–28, Violence Protection Act), xvii–
29. See also Petrova, Eva xviii, xix, xxi, xxv, 6, 29, 33, 34,
universalism, xvi–xxviii, 1–6, 9–18, 36–42, 98. See also coercion
123–24; myth of, xxv, 16, 25, 107;
of U.S. norms, 102–3, 107–8, 117; Warren, Kay, xv
paradox of, xxvi, 4, 10–15, 20; Weber, Max, 86
universality, xxii, 2, 7, 14, 25, 57, “Western” feminism. See feminism
93, 109–10, 121, 124; universal Western progressivism.
principle, xxiii, xxv, xxvii ,1–4, 11, See colonialism
13, 15, 16, 17; universal subject/ whiteness, 75–76, 80, 89, 99, 110–
transparent I, 107. See also femi- 11, 115–16, 117; racialization of,
nism, dilemma of; human rights, 37–38, 81–82, 85; sexual regula-
paradox of; particularism; rela- tion of, 36–37, 75–76. See also
tivism; UDHR Eastern Europe (and former
Soviet Union), as racialized con-
VAWA (Violence Against Women struction; miscegenation; slavery,
Act), xvii, 29 white slavery
victim, 22–38, 40–42, 71–73, 78, 79, woman: as category, xxii, 8, 9, 10,
81, 89, 95; as legible/authentic, 11, 57, 123; woman of color, 37,
xxi, xxvi, 33–34, 35, 39, 40, 43, 76, 101–15. See also feminism;
45, 57–60; child victim, 75; of third world, third world women
rescue, 52–53, 62–63, 65–67, 92, “Work Abroad,” 21, 87–90. See also
125; scripts/narratives, xxvi, 27, United Nations, public service
28, 29–30, 35, 124; status, 29, 40, announcements
Julietta Hua is assistant professor of women and gender studies at
San Francisco State University.