Echoes of victimhood: on passionate activism and ‘sex trafficking’

2019 ◽  
pp. 146470011988130
Author(s):  
Sealing Cheng
Keyword(s):  
Sex Workers ◽  
Women Activists ◽  
Sex Trafficking ◽  
The State ◽  
Government Policies ◽  
Moral Outrage ◽  
Transnational Activism ◽  
Feminist Discourse ◽  
The Media ◽  
Symbolic World

The sexually violated woman has become a salient symbol in feminist discourse, government policies, the media and transnational activism at this historical juncture. In this article, I seek to understand the conviction of anti-prostitution activists that all women in prostitution are victims (despite evidence to the contrary), and their simultaneous dismissal or condemnation of those women who identify as sex workers. The analysis identifies the centrality of victimhood to the affective logic of women activist leaders in the anti-prostitution movement, and its embeddedness in discourses of suffering and redemption in Korean nationalist historiography. Sexual victimhood thus acquires the power to incite moral outrage, compel consensus and inhibit dissent. Sex workers further come to bear the historical and political burden of righting all that is wrong with the nation, making their elimination essential for the nation’s rescue. Critiques of capitalism and the state become footnotes and silences in this process. In effect, the victimhood of ‘prostituted women’ allows women activists to circulate effectively in the affective economy of the nation as well as in the global anti-trafficking campaign. The passionate activism of anti-prostitution women activists may say less about the state of prostitution than about the activists’ subjectivity as historical and global subjects, and the symbolic world that they locate themselves in.

scholarly journals The Double-Edged Sword of Health and Safety: COVID-19 and the Policing and Exclusion of Migrant Asian Massage Workers in North America

2021 ◽  
Vol 10 (5) ◽  
pp. 157
Author(s):  
Elene Lam ◽  
Elena Shih ◽  
Katherine Chin ◽  
Kate Zen
Keyword(s):  
North America ◽  
Social Welfare ◽  
Human Trafficking ◽  
Sex Work ◽  
Sex Workers ◽  
Interpersonal Violence ◽  
Sex Trafficking ◽  
The State ◽  
Emergency Relief ◽  
Sexual Services

Migrant Asian massage workers in North America first experienced the impacts of COVID-19 in the final weeks of January 2020, when business dropped drastically due to widespread xenophobic fears that the virus was concentrated in Chinese diasporic communities. The sustained economic devastation, which began at least 8 weeks prior to the first social distancing and shelter in place orders issued in the U.S. and Canada, has been further complicated by a history of aggressive policing of migrant massage workers in the wake of the war against human trafficking. Migrant Asian massage businesses are increasingly policed as locales of potential illicit sex work and human trafficking, as police and anti-trafficking initiatives target migrant Asian massage workers despite the fact that most do not provide sexual services. The scapegoating of migrant Asian massage workers and criminalization of sex work have led to devastating systemic and interpersonal violence, including numerous deportations, arrests, and deaths, most notably the recent murder of eight people at three Atlanta-based spas. The policing of sex workers has historically been mobilized along fears of sexually transmitted disease and infection, and more recently, within the past two decades, around a moral panic against sex trafficking. New racial anxieties around the coronavirus as an Asian disease have been mobilized by the state to further cement the justification of policing Asian migrant workers along the axes of health, migration, and sexual labor. These justifications also solidify discriminatory social welfare regimes that exclude Asian migrant massage workers from accessing services on the basis of the informality and illegality of their work mixed with their precarious citizenship status. This paper draws from ethnographic participant observation and survey data collected by two sex worker organizations that work primarily with massage workers in Toronto and New York City to examine the double-edged sword of policing during the pandemic in the name of anti-trafficking coupled with exclusionary policies regarding emergency relief and social welfare, and its effects on migrant Asian massage workers in North America. Although not all migrant Asian massage workers, including those surveyed in this paper, provide sexual services, they are conflated, targeted, and treated as such by the state and therefore face similar barriers of criminalization, discrimination, and exclusion. This paper recognizes that most migrant Asian massage workers do not identify as sex workers and does not intend to label them as such or reproduce the scapegoating rhetoric used by law enforcement. Rather, it seeks to analyze how exclusionary attitudes and policies towards sex workers are transferred onto migrant Asian massage workers as well whether or not they provide sexual services.

Trafficking Policy, Meaning Making and State Violence

2014 ◽  
Vol 14 (1) ◽  
pp. 145-155 ◽  
Author(s):  
Heather Berg
Keyword(s):  
Sex Workers ◽  
Sex Trafficking ◽  
Meaning Making ◽  
Primary Source ◽  
State Violence ◽  
The State ◽  
Third Party ◽  
Policy Makers ◽  
Trafficking Victims ◽  
Critical Literature

This article reviews critical literature on sex trafficking policy through a cultural studies lens. It argues that the conflation of ‘trafficking’ and prostitution that pervades anti-trafficking policy makes trafficking victims out of sex workers. On another register, anti-trafficking policy creates ‘victims’ through curtailments on mobility and work eligibility that make workers more dependent on third party managers and less able to secure assistance when these parties abuse the power that the state has effectively granted them. The article calls upon policy makers to undertake the policy making process with sex workers’ continued experiences of the state as a primary source of violence and exploitation in view.

Gender and Corruption

Modern China ◽  
2016 ◽  
Vol 43 (1) ◽  
pp. 66-94
Author(s):  
Fang Chen
Keyword(s):  
Discourse Analysis ◽  
Lived Experiences ◽  
The State ◽  
Feminist Perspective ◽  
Digital Ethnography ◽  
News Reports ◽  
Cultural Approach ◽  
Feminist Discourse ◽  
The Media ◽  
Official Corruption

From a cultural approach and a feminist perspective, this article analyzes a gendered narrative of official corruption in China through news reports of “keeping a second wife.” Moreover, it engages the lived experiences and perceptions of the message receivers. Drawing upon feminist discourse analysis, interviews, and digital ethnography, this study shows that a cultural script derived from the Chinese storytelling tradition of “women are a source of trouble” serves as a contemporary narrative of corruption in the state media. Nevertheless, the media narrative has generated a vigorous audience counternarrative, which disconnects the media linkage between “second wives” and corruption.

Pornography, Trans Visibility, and the Demise of Tumblr

2020 ◽  
Vol 7 (2) ◽  
pp. 240-254 ◽  
Author(s):  
Carolyn Bronstein
Keyword(s):  
Sex Workers ◽  
Sex Trafficking ◽  
Critical Role ◽  
Economic Value ◽  
Online Communication ◽  
The Social ◽  
Self Actualization ◽  
Positive Representation ◽  
The Media ◽  
Self Discovery

Abstract The December 2018 adult content ban instituted by the social media and microblogging site Tumblr had far-reaching effects. The ban cost the platform its user base, and its economic value plummeted. Purchased by the media conglomerate Verizon as part of a $4.8 billion acquisition of Yahoo's internet business in 2017, Tumblr was sold in August 2019 for less than $3 million. This article reviews the factors that led to the adult content ban, including Verizon's plan to eliminate pornography to attract more advertisers to Tumblr, heightened concern about sexual harassment lawsuits in the wake of #MeToo and Time's Up, and the passage of two new federal laws, SESTA and FOSTA, aimed at combatting sex trafficking online. It analyzes the critical role that Tumblr played in connecting and supporting marginalized sexual communities, especially trans communities, and others whose livelihood depends on freedom of sexual speech, such as sex workers, and discusses the centrality of online communication to processes of sexual self-discovery and self-actualization. Corporate control of sexual speech, and pornography bans, which are increasing as platforms like Facebook institute ever-tighter community standards, pose a direct threat to queer individuals and limit the possibility for authentic, positive representation of trans bodies and trans sexuality.

scholarly journals Queering the Debate: Analysing Prostitution Through Dissident Sexualities in Brazil

2018 ◽  
Vol 40 (3) ◽  
pp. 525-547
Author(s):  
Amanda Álvares Ferreira
Keyword(s):  
Human Trafficking ◽  
Sex Work ◽  
Sex Workers ◽  
Sex Trafficking ◽  
Large Scale ◽  
Gender Norms ◽  
Related Question ◽  
The State ◽  
Sex Market ◽  
Do So

Abstract The aim of this article is to contrast prominent discourses on prostitution and human trafficking to the context of prostitution in Brazil and local feminist discourses on this matter, understanding their contradictions and limitations. I look at Brazilian transgender prostitutes’ experiences to address an agency-related question that underlies feminist theorizations of prostitution: can prostitution be freely chosen? Is it necessarily exploitative? My argument is that discourses on sex work, departing from sex trafficking debates, are heavily engaged in a heteronormative logic that might be unable to approach the complexity and ambiguity of experiences of transgender prostitutes and, therefore, cannot theorize their possibilities of agency. To do so, I will conduct a critique of the naturalization of gender norms that hinders an understanding of experiences that exceed the binary ‘prostitute versus victim.’ I argue how both an abolitionist as well as a legalising solution to the issues involved in the sex market, when relying on the state as the guarantor of rights to sex workers, cannot account for the complexities of a context such as the Brazilian one, in which specific conceptions of citizenship permit violence against sexually and racially marked groups to occur on such a large scale.

The elimination of violence and terrorism in Iraq strategy

2019 ◽  
pp. 375
Author(s):  
Mona Ali Duaij ◽  
Ahlam Ahmed Issa
Keyword(s):  
Civil Society ◽  
Political Institutions ◽  
The State ◽  
Civil Society Organizations ◽  
State Institutions ◽  
Terrorist Organization ◽  
The Media ◽  
Causes Of Crime ◽  
Religious Aspect

All the Iraqi state institutions and civil society organizations should develop a deliberate systematic policy to eliminate terrorism contracted with all parts of the economic, social, civil and political institutions and important question how to eliminate Daash to a terrorist organization hostile and if he country to eliminate the causes of crime and punish criminals and not to justify any type of crime of any kind, because if we stayed in the curriculum of justifying legitimate crime will deepen our continued terrorism, but give it legitimacy formula must also dry up the sources of terrorism media and private channels and newspapers that have abused the Holy Prophet Muhammad (p) and all kinds of any of their source (a sheei or a Sunni or Christians or Sabians) as well as from the religious aspect is not only the media but a meeting there must be cooperation of both parts of the state facilities and most importantly limiting arms possession only state you can not eliminate terrorism and violence, and we see people carrying arms without the name of the state and remains somewhat carefree is sincerity honesty and patriotism the most important motivation for the elimination of violence and terrorism and cooperation between parts of the Iraqi people and not be driven by a regional or global international schemes want to kill nations and kill our bodies of Sunnis, sheei , Christians, Sabean and Yazidi and others.

Political and Economic History of Land-Grabs in India

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Peer Ghulam Nabi Suhail
Keyword(s):  
Economic History ◽  
The State ◽  
Developmental Approach ◽  
Land Grabs ◽  
Indian State ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Media

This chapter begins with tracing the roots of colonialism in India, followed by understanding its various structures and processes of resource-grabbing. It argues, that India has largely followed the colonial approach towards land appropriation. After independence, although the Indian state followed a nationalistic path of development, the developmental approach of the state was far from being pro-peasant and/or pro-ecology. In a similar fashion, hydroelectricity projects in Kashmir, developed by NHPC from 1970s, have been displacing thousands of peasants from their lands and houses. Despite this, they are yet to become a major debate in the media, in the policy circles, or in academia in India.

More or More of the Same: Ownership Concentration and Media Diversity in Egypt

2021 ◽  
pp. 194016122110251
Author(s):  
Zahraa Badr
Keyword(s):  
Public Sphere ◽  
State Ownership ◽  
The State ◽  
Ownership Concentration ◽  
Private Ownership ◽  
Media Diversity ◽  
Content Diversity ◽  
The Media ◽  
The Relationship

The Egyptian media has witnessed various changes in the ownership spectrum after the 2011 revolution. To explore this evolution, and through the Habermasian lens, this study examined ownership concentration in the 2019 media sphere in Egypt by mapping media outlets and their owners. It also investigated the relationship between this concentration and content diversity in a sample of print outlets in the first quarter of 2019. Three patterns of ownership concentration in the Egyptian media were identified: concentrated state ownership, concentrated private ownership, and not concentrated private ownership. Based on these findings, I argue that the media sphere in Egypt is dominated by a few gatekeepers, mostly the state, that influence content diversity and jeopardize the democratic public sphere in postrevolution Egypt.

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