Forced labour in supply chains: Rolling back the debate on gender, migration and sexual commerce

This article makes a conceptual contribution to the broader literature on unfree labour by challenging the separate treatment of sexual and industrial labour exploitation both by researchers and in law and policy. This article argues that the prevailing focus of the supply chain literature on industrial labour has inadvertently posited sexual labour as the ‘other’ of industrial labour thus obfuscating how the legal blurring of boundaries between industrial and service labour is engendering new modalities of the erosion of workers’ rights that are increasingly resembling those typical of sex work. This article advances the debate on unfree labour both conceptually and empirically. Conceptually, it highlights the relevance of social reproduction in understanding forms of labour unfreedom. Empirically, it demonstrates the similarities in forms of control and exploitation between sex work and industrial work by illustrating how debt and housing operate in both settings.

Interaction Rituals and Sexual Commerce in Thailand’s Erotic Bars

This article explores bar prostitution as a distinct sexual arena. Drawing on fieldwork in six red-light districts in Thailand, the article identifies key structural and interactional features of the bars located in these areas. The analysis draws on an “interaction rituals” framework to elucidate scripted encounters between workers and customers, successive ritual chains, and the way departures or “broken chains” help to confirm the existence and vitality of normative chains. I argue, further, that the bars are organized around a distinctive moral economy—a courting-and-dating model—that allows sex workers and their clients to simultaneously downplay their involvement in prostitution and form affective ties with one another. Due to this framing, bar prostitution can be distinguished from most other types of prostitution, where opportunities for destigmatization are either minimal or nonexistent.

Marriage, aging, and women’s pursuit of commercial sex in Japan

A number of scholarly works have observed Western and Japanese women travelers who seek romance and adventure with local “beach boys” in the Global South. Despite the important criticism of geopolitical inequality contained in these works, what is missing is how those involved in such commodified sexual relationships make sense of what they do. This essay focuses on how well-heeled Japanese married women, who are concerned with the meaning and effects of aging, pursue a commodified form of sexual intimacy as a means to rediscover their sense of sexual subjectivity. How do they perceive their own involvement in sexual commerce? What kinds of sexual power dynamics do these women and their younger, precarious male partners shape at the intersection of gender, age, and class? How do these women make sense of the apparently masculine act of paying for sex, which requires them to transgress cultural norms of feminine passivity in sexual matters? By posing these questions, this article provides a fine-grained portrayal of a particular kind of feminist agency.

Mujeres migrantes prostituidas por medio de intermediarios y de modo autónomo en Nevada, Estados Unidos

This article, based on a qualitative methodology including interviews to fifteen women from Mexico and Central America, aims to examine comparatively the situation of migrant women prostituted in Nevada in indoor prostitution, through agencies, and without intermediaries. We conclude that women transported by sex smuggling networks cannot leave employers because they are indebted to them. Paradoxically, women prostituted autonomously feel empowered, since this activity allows them to devote more time to the care of their body and earn more money than in other activities. Moreover, while the former are introduced into sexual commerce as minors, the latter enter into prostitution at higher ages.

“The Place is Gone!”: Policing Black Women to Redevelop Downtown Boston

In the late 1960s and early 1970s, Boston politicians and urban managers sought to reverse the city’s postwar capital drain by luring white consumer dollars and private investment. Their recovery plan featured the Adult Entertainment District (AED), which was established to contain burgeoning sexual commerce while demonstrating the vibrancy and economic viability of the city’s downtown core. At the same time, the changing spatial dynamics of interracial sexual commerce, Black economic isolation, and discriminatory practices citywide drew increasing numbers of Black women onto downtown streets. The presence of Black women in formerly white downtown spaces ignited a powerful law-and-order narrative linking race, sex, and violence. Black women became oversignified with sexual deviance and violent criminality amid the urban crisis. The development of the AED experiment and the raced and gendered crime panic posed unique challenges and opportunities for the Boston Police Department (BPD). Like urban police departments nationwide in the early 1970s, the BPD was embroiled in a battle for its authority. But the deeper motivations of economic turnaround guiding the AED ultimately served to strengthen the BPD’s legitimacy. As the separate goals of political officials and law enforcement authorities converged—to redevelop downtown Boston, and to secure urban authority, respectively—the intensifying policing and spatial banishment of Black women in downtown Boston became central to urban recovery strategies. This history demonstrates that aggressive, racially charged morals policing was deployed to prepare the city for an influx of white capital.

Duplicitous Freedom: Moral and Material Care Work in Anti-Trafficking Rescue and Rehabilitation

Contemporary anti-trafficking narratives exemplify the centrality of family unaccountability as one of the root causes of sex trafficking. Suggesting that human trafficking can be explained by bad family values, or cultural norms that consider girl children to be disposable, facilitates the heroic, paternalist, and “caring” interventions that have now been well-documented by activists and scholars of trafficking. Focusing on the family, these references also expose two conflicting modes of care work that are implicated in contemporary anti-trafficking activism. Building on an extensive scholarship on care work, which has rarely been read alongside critical human trafficking scholarship, this article asks how human trafficking rescue programs expose disparate types of care work deeply connected to sexual commerce. Extending Rhacel Parreñas’ typology of moral and material care work of Filipina migrant domestic workers, this article argues that the shifting contexts of gendered care work under conditions of global migration, development, and humanitarianism, require an acknowledgment of how the moral care work involved in global “anti-trafficking” rescue performed mainly by first world women operates in opposition to the material care work of supporting families and households performed by migrant sex workers who are being rescued. As an additional articulation of material care work, global sex worker activists have also expressed how care work is a vital component of the labor relations of sex work itself—as a way to call for its recognition as a form of labor.