Rupture and Hospitality

The final chapter examines the way artist participants in “Land of Smiles” began to undergo the passage from rupture to “hospitality”—an ethical contract formed not around “sameness,” but rather, around “encounters with the unknown.” By articulating their experiences of rupture and its complementary process of hospitality, the artist narratives reveal the power of musical theater as a means of breaking down preconceptions and opening new pathways to empathy and trust. It is here that we see the tenets of liberation unfold most dramatically, illuminating DAR’s transformative essence.

Articulating NGO Narratives

This chapter introduces Phase Three of the DAR praxis: The “articulation” phase. Here, I look at the narratives of the NGO employees who attended performances of “Land of Smiles” and show how their participation created a space in which the articulation of experience could be heard and voiced. Returning to the concept of liberation—that transformed state in which members of a community recognize, take ownership of, and begin to heal the wounds brought on by social catastrophe and collective trauma, I discuss four key narratives that emerged among NGO employees in the focus groups following the performances. Linking these narratives to the themes that emerged in the original interviews with NGO employees, I illustrate the process by which these participants moved from passive bystander to active witness; from recollection to mourning; and from a state of rupture to one of hospitality.

Community-Based Organizations and the Narrative of Resistance

In this chapter, I discuss migrant community-based organizations (CBOs) operating in Thailand that work to combat labor exploitation in wholly different ways. Run by ethnic women and operating “below the radar” of the anti-trafficking movement, these organizations address the issue of trafficking from a unique perspective. Rather than pressuring sex workers to enter “rehabilitation” programs, these groups operate in solidarity with female migrants, fostering participatory, rather than top-down approaches to combating trafficking. As a result, these CBOs engage an ethic of “horizontalism”—an organizational approach to social change that is based on partnership, trust, and mutual understanding between the organization and its beneficiaries. I show how, through offering female migrant laborers positive alternatives to the tropes of victimization commonly used by anti-trafficking NGOs, their work is generating more productive results.

Theorizing Dramatization as Research

This chapter explores the range of scholarly and practical approaches that situate Dramatization as Research (DAR) at the nexus of intersecting fields within the social sciences and the arts. I first introduce the concept of social catastrophe—the inability of the community to respond to its own trauma— which suggests a need for new types of creative interventions that prompt a change in awareness among those who are implicated in any given human rights abuse. After exploring some of the arts-based interventions that have been used by others, I then turn to discussion of feminist theory (DAR’s primary epistemological lens); Participatory Action Research (PAR) and Practice-Based Research (PBR) (which guide the DAR methodology); and liberation psychology (which forms its primary ontological foundation). Following a brief overview of my research design, I conclude by setting up the chapters to follow.

Embodiment

This chapter addresses the subject of embodiment—the aspect of the dramatic process in which actors breathe life into the characters they inhabit. I discuss how, through this breathing and this living, a new layer of reflexivity between research and creative practice is uncovered, and I suggest that the liminal act of embodying a character can evoke new questions and lead to the discovery of new epistemological frameworks in research. Discussing the auditions, rehearsals and first staged readings, or presentations of the musical, I show how the liveness of these collaborative processes served as a way of recovering experience—that is, reclaiming it, and taking its meaning to a new level. Focusing on a new group of participants—the actors—I illustrate the contributions that were made to the “Land of Smiles’ production through their own experiential knowing.

NGOs and the Rescue Narrative

In this chapter, I interrogate the experiences of those whose work responded to the supposed trafficking “victim”—the employees of abolitionist anti-trafficking NGOs in Thailand whose organizations provided shelter to former sex workers and advocate for policy change. Through an analysis of interviews, I show how NGO employees narrated the issue of trafficking to members of the public as well as to themselves, and how this “rescue narrative” gave voice—or failed to give voice—to the lived experiences of the female migrant laborers who their organizations were trying to help. I explore five dominant narratives that highlighted the challenges employees faced navigating the intercultural dimensions of their work, and the struggles they experienced trying to implement policies related to rescue. I suggest that these narratives reveal deeper personal struggles encountered by the employees, and consider how such struggles may risk hindering the effectiveness of their work.

“Smart Raids” and the Victim-versus-Criminal Narrative

Drawing on interviews with ethnic migrant sex workers in Chiang Rai, Thailand, as well as employees of local and international NGOs, in this chapter I show how the anti-trafficking movement uses “Smart Raids”—collaborations between NGOs and the Royal Thai Police to raid brothels, karaoke bars and massage parlors—in an attempt to rescue women working as prostitutes against their will. Digging more deeply, we see how this policy traps female migrant sex workers in a binary framework that pits the non-consensual “victim” against the agentive “criminal” in what I call the “victim-versus-criminal” narrative. By doing this, Smart Raids not only fail to achieve their primary goal, they also have detrimental effects on the very women they are designed to help.

Conclusion Dramatization as Research

The book concludes with a summary of the project’s intervention, which sought to articulate the lived experiences of marginalized female migrant laborers—supposed “victims” of human trafficking in Thailand—through the feminist, liberatory modality of musical theater. I offer a discussion of how human rights advocates can further work to break through spaces of bystanding and engage with their beneficiaries as equals; how women at the grassroots, who seldom have a voice in the foreign-driven projects intended for their benefit can engage more productively with Western “experts;” and how can these “experts,” in turn, might adopt new ways of implementing interventions and understanding themselves. I discuss the power and utility of merging the arts with feminist international research, and I suggest ways for the Dramatization as Research (DAR) praxis to serve as a tool for future international development advocacy work.

Finding the Story

This chapter focuses on the creation of the story of “Land of Smiles”—a story designed to push back against the dominant trafficking narrative driving the U.S. Abolitionist Project. I illustrate the process by which I drew on the field interviews of the Phase One research to find the arc of this dramatic story and build it through scenes and songs. I discuss the analytical and intuitive aspects of “power moments”: notable incidents, occurrences, and themes in the interview data that emerged as dramatically significant. These power moments not only steered the arc of the dramatic narrative, but also served as indicators of the power dynamics at play within the anti-trafficking movement itself. I conclude with a discussion of how in the DAR praxis, the unconsciously produced dramatic narrative helps us make new discoveries about the subject of our original research.

Setting the Stage

This chapter provides a context for understanding the problem of trafficking in Thailand by first introducing two fundamental national identity projects—what I call “Thailand’s National Identity Project” and the “U.S. Abolitionist Project.” I show how together, these projects inform the anti-trafficking movement’s response to the constructed idea (i.e., the artificially manufactured notion put in place to deal with a whole complex of other problems) of trafficking, teasing apart how this response acts as a remedy for the deeper cultural, political and economic crisis’ affecting both Thailand and the U.S. Discussing the history of ethnic minorities in Thailand, Burma’s long-running ethnic civil wars, the feminization of migration, neoliberalism, and the historical roots of abolitionism, I show how the U.S. and Thai national identity projects and the narratives they bring about impact all actors in the trafficking arena—but most significantly the female migrant laborers who are caught in their crossfires.