The book opens with a discussion about the medium of theater, and the social justice concerns that playwrights, composers, actors and other artists have long searched for ways to address. I then turn to a discussion of feminist international relations, its potential for engaging alternative methodological and epistemological frameworks, and introduce the core problem to which the book seeks to seek to respond involving the discourse on trafficking. This discourse, I argue, exists within a contested framework in which trafficking is narrated through the lens of Western advocates seeking to eradicate it, rather than from the perspectives of the women who anti-trafficking policy affects. I introduce “Land of Smiles,” the musical through which I sought to recover the narrative of the presumed “victim”—the female migrant sex worker whom Western advocates seek to “rescue,” and conclude with an overview of the book’s individual chapters.
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