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i

Rewriting the Victim

ii
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iii

Rewriting the Victim

Dramatization as Research in
Thailand’s Anti-​Trafficking Movement

Erin M. Kamler

1
iv

1
Oxford University Press is a department of the University of Oxford. It furthers
the University’s objective of excellence in research, scholarship, and education
by publishing worldwide. Oxford is a registered trade mark of Oxford University
Press in the UK and certain other countries.

Published in the United States of America by Oxford University Press

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© Oxford University Press 2019

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

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above should be sent to the Rights Department, Oxford University Press, at the
address above.

You must not circulate this work in any other form

and you must impose this same condition on any acquirer.

Library of Congress Cataloging-​in-​Publication Data

Names: Kamler, Erin (Erin M.), author.
Title: Rewriting the victim : dramatization as research in Thailand’s
anti-​trafficking movement /​Erin M. Kamler.
Description: New York, NY : Oxford University Press, [2019] |
Includes bibliographical references and index.
Identifiers: LCCN 2018031075 (print) | LCCN 2018046593 (ebook) |
ISBN 9780190840105 (Updf) | ISBN 9780190840112 (Epub) |
ISBN 9780190840099 (hardcover : alk. paper)
Subjects: LCSH: Social work with prostitutes—​Thailand. |
Human trafficking—​Thailand—​Prevention. | Musicals—​Social aspects—​Thailand. |
Feminist theory. | Non-​governmental organizations—​Thailand. |
United States—​Relations—​Thailand. | Thailand—​Relations—​United States.
Classification: LCC HQ412.55.A5 (ebook) | LCC HQ412.55.A5 K36 2019 (print) |
DDC 306.3/​6209593—​dc23
LC record available at https://​lccn.loc.gov/​2018031075

9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

Printed by Sheridan Books, Inc., United States of America

v

This book is dedicated to the migrant women of Burma,

and to every artist who envisions a better world.
vi
vi

CONTENTS

Acknowledgments  ix
Prologue  xi

Introduction  1
1. Theorizing Dramatization as Research   19

PART ONE: The Field Research Phase

2. Setting the Stage: National Identity and the Trafficking of Women in
Thailand  43
3. “Smart Raids” and the Victim-​versus-​Criminal Narrative   69
4. NGOs and the Rescue Narrative   84
5. Community-​Based Organizations and the Narrative of Resistance   101

PART TWO: The Creative Phase

6. Building the Characters   117
7. Finding the Story   132
8. Embodiment   147

PART THREE: The Production Phase

9. Articulating NGO Narratives   161
10. Restorative Justice and Reconciliation: NGO Subjectivities   180
11. Articulating Migrant Narratives   189
12. Recollection, Mourning, and Witness: Migrant Subjectivities   202
13. Articulating Artist Narratives   210
14. Rupture and Hospitality: Artist Subjectivities   225
Conclusion: Dramatization as Research: A Feminist Communication
Intervention  236

Appendix A: Phase One Methodology   247

Appendix B: Phase Two Methodology   250
Appendix C: Phase Three Methodology   252
vi

Appendix D: Phase One Interviewee Identification Chart   256

Appendix E: Focus Group Demographics   258
Notes  261
References  267
Index  279

[ viii ] Contents
ix

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

The research for this book was made possible with the support of a fellowship from
the University of Southern California Graduate School’s Office of the Provost, as well
as support from the USC Wallis Annenberg Chair in Communication Technology
and Society, the USC Annenberg School for Communication & Journalism Doctoral
Program, the USC Center for Feminist Research, the USC Annenberg Center
on Communication Leadership & Policy, the USC Annenberg Center on Public
Diplomacy, the USC Dornsife Department of Sociology, the USC School of Cinematic
Arts, and the USC Diploma in Innovation Program. I wish to thank, foremost, my
PhD advisers Manuel Castells and Larry Gross for their ceaseless support and belief
in my work, as well as committee members Ted Braun, Rhacel Parreñas, Patricia Riley,
and J. Ann Tickner for walking through this journey with me and cheering me on
at every step. Additionally, I thank Gwendolyn Alker, Sarah Banet-​Weiser, Geoffrey
Cowan, Nicolas Cull, Meredith Drake Reitan, Sofia Gruskin, Helene Lorenz, Arlene
Luck, Duncan McCargo, Philip Seib, and Mina Yang for their guidance; as well as
Zhaleh Boyd, Samantha Sahl, and Prawit Thainiyom for their research assistance; and
Ann Marie Campian, and Christine Lloreda for their administrative support. I also
thank the outstanding, brave artists who lent their talents to this project, in partic-
ular: Joan Almedilla, Melody Butiu, Ann Fink, Amanda Kruger, Jennie Kwan, Kerri-​
Anne Lavin, Marisa Mour, Yardpirun Poolun, Katy Tang, Lowe Taylor Cunningham,
and Kimiko Warner-​Turner. And I extend my deepest gratitude to those in Thailand,
Burma, and the United States who played supportive roles, including the Kachin
Women’s Association of Thailand, Shirley Seng, Moon Nay Li, Mai Nhkum, Ban
Sengbu, N. Seng Nu, Hkaw Myaw, Apoh, Ursula Cats, Cindy Wilkenson, We Women
Foundation, Stephan Turner, Wan Muangjun, The Gate Theater Group, Eleonore
Chaban Delmas, Christy Humphry, Jeff Lynn, Ben en Vadrouille Berimbau, Sydney
Holofcener, Mike Griffiths, Chalermpon Poungpeth, Kevin McLeod, Kate Stayman-​
London, Gregory Franklin, Franklin Theatrical Group, Kirk Solomon, John Wall,
Lester Cohen, Scott Liggett, Kay Alden, Vern Nelson, Sue Cleereman, Rick Sparks,
Rosalba Messina, Nancie March, Robert Loza, Rebecca Loza, Michael Holbrook, Eli
Villanueva, David O, Leslie Stevens, Ren Hanami, Kerry K. Carnahan, Jamie Drutman,
Marjorie Poe, Meg Irwin-​Brandon, Adrienne Geffen, Ellen Monocroussos, Fringe
Management, Michael Blaha, Nigel Miles-​Thomas, Thomas Turner, Thomas Ruiter,
Matt Garrett, C. Raul Espinoza, Lynn Marks, Meg Miller, Terry Kamler McManus,
x

the Wisconsin Chapter of the P.E.O. International Sisterhood, the Edinburgh Fringe
Festival production crew, Ajan Chayan Vaddhanaphuti, and Chiang Mai University.
I could not have written this book without the generosity of the migrant laborers,
NGO employees, community activists, U.S. government and U.N. officials, Thai
authorities, and others who participated in my research. I thank them for giving me
their time and their truth. I also owe an enormous debt of gratitude to the anony-
mous reviewers whose feedback helped strengthen the manuscript, and to the in-
valuable contributions made by readers Howard Kamler and Min J. Kim. To Sahra
Sulaiman, my preeminent intellectual ally who combed through these pages with
laser-​sharp precision, thank you for always pushing me to be a better writer. To OUP
series editors Laura Sjoberg and J. Ann Tickner, copyeditor Brooke Smith, and my
editor, Angela Chnapko, thank you for your enduring support, patience, and insight,
and for guiding this manuscript through to the finish line.
I wrote this book in Thailand, revised it in Burma, and am, at long last, seeing
it published in the United States. A tribe of friends and colleagues came and went
along the way, helping keep my spirits lifted and my sanity intact. Thank you Nicolas
De Zamaroczy, Meryl Alper, Ritesh Mehta, Cynthia Wang, Laurel Felt, Katrina
Pariera, Alexandrina Agloro, Yasuhito Abe, the ASCJ Doctoral Student Cohort of
2010, Naomi Leight-​Giveon, Mike and Kathryn Sweeney, Stephanie Winters, Adam
Dedman, Matthew Walton, Guy Horton, Brian Eyler, Tracy Ravelli, Stella Naw, Don
Linder, Wannida Jiratha, Alex Soulsby, Jennie and Peter McGuire, Stuart Land,
Jennifer Leehey, Feliz Solomon, Fiona MacGregor, Rob and Meriem Gray, Kyoko
Yokosuka, Gry Hjeltnes, Kaori Ishikawa, Maria Suokko, Cate Buchanan, Jenny
Vaughan, Heather Barr, and Khinyadanar Oo.
Finally, I thank Rick Culbertson for our transformative years of partnership, and
for being my unwavering champion.

[ x ] Acknowledgments
xi

PROLOGUE

When we—​members of the privileged West—​see her picture, we pity her. We can’t
help it. Her dark skin, her obvious youth, her fragile frame. Her eyes are turned
downward, in the direction of her fallen face. Rather than hearing her voice, we focus
on her image, static and subdued. Rather than listening to her story, we imagine
the worst.
It was never supposed to be like this, we think. She couldn’t have believed such
a thing would ever happen to her. Or if she had seen it coming—​well then, that’s
another trauma altogether. The burden she wears on her face has been caused, we
think, by something that happened to her long before we were invited to gaze at
her. Something downright sinister. She’s consumed by the knowledge that she was
tricked. Consumed by her past—​a past in which sex and slavery were bound to-
gether; a past we imagine as a blur of relentless violence, something we can hardly
comprehend because it will never touch us the way it touched her.
We don’t see ourselves watching her. Or if we do, we quickly rationalize that in
fact, it’s our obligation to watch her in order for her to heal. Our witnessing, we
reason, is the first step to her recovery. Not only that—​we believe that without us,
she may never be able to go on.
But we are not the saviors we imagine ourselves to be. And this girl—​this woman,
from an origin so unknown to us it must mean she is not known by anyone—​she is
not the victim we imagine her to be.
We can’t know that, of course. Because to know that would mean admitting too
much about ourselves, and the things we want to believe we see.
Who is this girl then, this supposed victim? More important, who are we to look
at her at all?
xi
1

Introduction

We need new words to speak to each other, words that describe our similarities and our differences
in much more complicated ways, words that will allow us to account for the inevitability that what
we say will only partly be heard.
—Jill Dolan (1993: 417)

I n this book I bring together two seemingly disparate—​but actually very intercon-
nected—​realms: the realm of international human rights research and the realm
of the dramatic arts. In doing so, I illuminate the processes by which both research
and musical dramatization—​that is, the unearthing of knowledge about the social
world and the creative process of developing a theatrical musical—​work together
to inform new modalities of discovery and heal wounds within the psyche and the
community.
The richness and complexity of our lived experience defies our ability to commu-
nicate it. Yet communication demands that we do exactly that. Theater, and particu-
larly musical theater, as a “higher octave” of communication, can radically interrupt
the limitations and divisions that are inherent in this struggle. Characters sing “what
cannot be spoken” (Krywotz, 2011); “liveness” connects audience members somati-
cally, engaging our bodies, as well as our minds. In the theater, individuals come to-
gether in a room—​our lives simultaneously and deliberately interrupted—​to listen,
feel, and grapple with the meaning of our collective experience. In the process, we
become present, awake, willing to undergo rupture and transformation—​if only for
an evening or an afternoon.
Knowing the power of this medium, playwrights, composers, actors, and other
theater artists have long searched for ways to use our crafts to unearth, navigate,
and heal social justice concerns. We’ve done this in local as well as international
contexts—​on stages, in streets and other found environments. We’ve wondered
whether our work will move people—​whether the stories we tell, stories that have
been buried or silenced or for whatever reason have gone unheard will invoke em-
pathy, and maybe even social change. Theater, in its various forms, has always
2

wrestled with these questions; artists have always tried to answer them. My project,
and this book, follows that long tradition.
But I won’t spend too much time talking about that tradition here. Because though
artists have always moved between creative and social justice spaces, international
researchers have not. In fact, looking at these questions of engagement through the
lens of social science casts them in a wholly different light. As an artist who is also
a feminist scholar working in the developing world,1 my inquiries sit at the nexus of
these realms. They are questions dealing with what it means to uncover, recover, and
articulate lived experience. Questions dealing with the positionalities of Western
researchers and the “subjects” of our studies. They are epistemological and meth-
odological quandaries that bind together the seemingly inexplicable but ultimately
intimately connected realms of performance and feminist international research.
Feminists conducting international and intercultural research have critiqued
the application of positivist methodologies to these contexts, arguing that such
approaches rely on neocolonial tropes and incomplete frameworks for “knowing”
(Alcoff, 1991–​ 1992; Harding, 1998; Mohanty, 1991; Tickner, 2001; Tuhiwai
Smith, 1999). Positivism, as an epistemological approach to research, is rooted in
a traditional masculinist social science framework that relies on detached, suppos-
edly quantifiable observation, rather than subjective—​or what we may call more
“human”—​experience. One of the problems with this objectifying, positivist ap-
proach to research is that it stems from liberal assumptions that homogenize the
potentiality of the individual. Liberalism—​ a construct that pits the “rational”
(read: male) human against the “subjective” (read: female) “other”—​is premised on
the notion that human experience can actually be measured according to abstract
assumptions. Some feminists see this paradigm as being oppressive to women, as it
can “flatten” the lived realities of women in the developing world (Parreñas, 2011),
while reifying the value systems of the enlightened West (Hesford, 2011).
In contrast, as Donna Haraway (1988) explained,

Feminists have stakes in a successor science project that offers a more adequate,
richer, better account of a world, in order to live in it well and in critical, reflexive
relation to our own as well as others’ practices of domination and the unequal parts
of privilege and oppression that make up all positions (p. 579).

So in order to responsibly advance feminist international research, those of us

working in these contexts need to engage alternative methodological and epistemo-
logical frameworks that refute the limitations of positivism. This way, we can be-
come attentive to cultivating more equitable—​or, “horizontal”—​relationships with
the subjects of our studies.
Feminist epistemologies help us intervene in what scholars in the field of liber-
ation psychology have called “social catastrophe.” Social catastrophe is the break-
down of the ability of a community to respond collectively to its own trauma. Such
breakdowns create a kind of rift in our sense of self-​identity. Martin-​Baro, speaking
about these kinds of breakdowns, suggested that they augment systemic social
inequalities, as we are no longer able to recognize the conditions of oppression that

[2] Introduction
3

bind us (1994). Rather than coming together as “witnesses” who collectively identify
with the trauma and seek to restore the community’s health by claiming our own part
in it, we instead remain “bystanders,” watching the trauma unfold from a distance
without taking ownership of our own role within it (Watkins & Shulman, 2008).
Social catastrophe takes many forms. It appears in spaces where we feel powerless
to change the conditions around us. This sense of powerlessness can create divisions
between communities and individuals—​divisions that permeate even the most seem-
ingly socially conscious sites—​for example, human rights movements themselves.
To respond to these breakdowns, creative interventions are needed—​interventions
that force us to recognize the roles played by all community members in a given
human rights crisis; interventions that engage feminist ways of comprehending
the richness and complexity of lived experience, and shed light on alternative ways
of “knowing.” Interventions that are what we might call “liberatory” (Watkins &
Shulman, 2008).
In this book, I draw from a wide array of philosophies and literatures to show
how theater, and in particular, musical theater can unearth the lived experiences of
those who have been marginalized and subjected to a given human rights crisis, and
bring their experiences into the consciousness of those who—​often unknowingly—​
are complicit in their marginalization. Specifically, in this book I look at the issue of
human trafficking in Thailand, and show how musical theater can be a vehicle for
articulating the experiences of those caught in a social catastrophe in new and mean-
ingful ways. In doing this, I illuminate a “praxis”—​that is, a theoretical model that is
then applied and realized, designed to unearth and convey lived experience through
feminist, liberatory means. I call this praxis Dramatization as Research, or DAR.
DAR is a feminist, liberatory praxis that combines creative dramatization with
feminist international research, and engages reflexive, co-​constitutive approaches
to each of these modalities. DAR is dedicated to the uncovering, recovering, and ar-
ticulation of lived experience through the powerful medium of musical theater. It
relies, at its foundation, on feminist epistemologies in research—​that is, feminist
ways of knowing lived experience; participatory methodologies—​that is, methods
that involve the reorientation of the researcher-​subject relationship; and evaluative
measures that emerge from a liberatory ontological framework—​that is, a frame-
work dedicated to restoring the health of the entire community involved in the
given social catastrophe. In the context of international development practice, DAR
responds to a need for more creative, innovative types of interventions—​ways of
responding to a social catastrophe that are more meaningful for people who have
been marginalized, and for their advocates. DAR thus draws on the intersections be-
tween the process of making dramatic work and the process of uncovering meaning
in the social world, and interrogates the learning that is achieved at their nexus.
I approach this endeavor through my work as both a scholar and an artist. Having
embarked on this project as a mid-​career playwright and composer with over 20 years
of experience and achievements already behind me, my goal was to push my artistic
abilities even further, and unite them with my work as a social scientist. I wanted
to understand how musical dramatization could disrupt a dominant discourse and,
in the process, reorient the agenda and the outcome of social science research.

Introduction [3]
4

Moreover, I wanted to show the importance of lived experience as a framework for

knowing and understanding social catastrophe, and the power of musical theater in
conveying that understanding through the feminist, liberatory praxis of DAR.
To explicate this praxis, in the chapters that follow I bring together a theoretical
approach to engaged international research with a three-​phase methodological pro-
cess of research, creative dramatization, and performance. On a practical level, these
phases include conducting international field research, writing, and performing an orig-
inal musical. But they also include something much richer: a roadmap for uncovering,
recovering, and articulating the voice of a “subject”—​in this case, the female migrant
sex worker, whom the anti-​trafficking movement in Thailand has labeled a “victim,”
and subsequently silenced through its rhetoric—​as well as the voices of the nongov-
ernmental organization (NGO) employees who are implicated in the social catastrophe
of trafficking and the discourse that surrounds it, and the artists who have stepped
into this discourse as performers, and thus also inform it. Together, these actors form
a “community,” as they all engaged with the intervention, albeit from different vantage
points. It is through understanding their engagement that we may see a new type of
“knowing” emerge about the issues surrounding trafficking. While this knowing is not
necessarily unified—​that is, we cannot say that all of the participants involved in this
project came to the exact same understanding—​it is clear that the types of narratives—​
that is, the discourse—​that emerged from the artistic intervention, when compared to
those that emerged prior to its taking place, were transformed.
Musical theater thus takes on a prominent role in this book. Not only is it a pow-
erful vehicle for communicating experience, it is also the site for understanding how,
what, and why we communicate, and the discoveries we make about ourselves along
the way. As an embodied way of communicating the “situated” knowledge described
by Haraway, theater—​and in particular musical theater—​has the ability to interrupt
binary categorizations that have been cemented into a discourse, and to trouble the
epistemological claims that inform that discourse. Musicals can also serve the some-
times subversive purpose of deflecting an audience’s attention away from overly po-
litical messages through song, dance, and spectacle. These spectacles can take us by
surprise by providing a much-​needed social critique. When this happens, musicals
can become profound tools for political engagement.
The musical at the heart of this project is Land of Smiles, a fictional, full-​length
piece that I wrote and composed about the trafficking of women from Burma2
into Thailand. Inspired by field research that includes 54 interviews with fe-
male migrant laborers (including sex workers), community-​based activists, NGO
employees, members of government, and other development actors working to
combat trafficking, Land of Smiles dramatizes what I call the “dominant trafficking
narrative”: a story told by the anti-​trafficking advocacy community that reinforces
Western moralisms about intimacy, rights, and gender norms, as well as notions of
individualism and a modernization framework that underscores contemporary de-
velopment thinking. As such, Land of Smiles presents a dramatic look at how the
story about trafficking is told, and shows that finding a solution to this problem is
even more complicated than it seems.

[ 4 ] Introduction
5

The story focuses on the aftermath of a brothel raid in Northern Thailand.

Lipoh, a young Kachin (ethnic minority)3 migrant from Burma, seems to be un-
derage, making her an automatic trafficking victim in the eyes of the law. Emma
Gable, a young, white, American human rights attorney working for an inter-
national NGO, is sent to prepare Lipoh to be a witness in a trial to prosecute
her supposed trafficker. Emma must convince Lipoh to be the person everyone
sees: a trafficking victim. But Lipoh is unwilling to cooperate. She insists that she
is 18 years old and was working in the brothel willingly. Not only that—​she wants
to go back.
What transpires is a journey into Thailand’s anti-​trafficking movement—​a world
burdened with politics, morality, and the rhetoric of human rights. Through hearing
Lipoh’s story, Emma discovers that human rights violations—​including the burning
of villages, torture, forced conscription of child soldiers, portering, and the use of
sexual violence as a weapon of war—​are being committed against Kachin civilians at
the Burmese government’s behest. But these atrocities are being overshadowed by a
narrative about trafficking that puts the ideology of the anti-​trafficking movement
before the needs of the women it is trying to help.
Land of Smiles responds to the crippled policies, practices, and moralisms under-
lying the anti-​trafficking movement by zooming in on Thailand—​a country known,
over the past two decades, for being an “infamous” trafficking hub. The story explores
the way a U.S.-​funded NGO responds to Lipoh, a young Kachin sex worker caught
in the wrong brothel at the wrong time. Trying in earnest to rescue this exploited
“victim,” the NGO is relying on Lipoh’s acknowledgment of her victim status to secure
the prosecution of her supposed “traffickers.” But as the narrative unfolds, we dis-
cover that Lipoh does not view herself as a disempowered trafficking victim. Rather,
she shares emotional, social, financial, and political bonds with both her auntie—​the
woman who helped her cross the border from Burma into Thailand—​and her mama
san—​the owner of the brothel where she worked. In contrast to seeing her situa-
tion as being akin to conditions of slavery, Lipoh finds a clear, albeit complex sense
of strength in her relationships with her supposed “traffickers,” and stands united
with them.
Such a contradictory understanding of experience represents what Scott (1991)
described as a “corrective” to the problem of dismissing women’s perspectives that is
so prevalent in traditional (positivist) research. The musical sheds light on the story
currently being told about human trafficking—​a story used by advocates to reinforce
ideas of Western superiority on the global stage and moralisms about sex work in the
developing world. It also deals with the quintessentially American desire to “rescue”
suffering “victims” in a distant, “third world” environment, and thus prove America
exceptional on the world stage.
Above all, Land of Smiles pushes back against—​or, rewrites—​the normative
tropes of victimhood, rescue, and morality that are commonly used by development
actors working within this movement. These tropes, as I will show, are discursive
acts—​rhetorical moves that reinforce a highly politicized, contested discourse on
trafficking.

Introduction [5]
6

THE DISCOURSE ON TRAFFICKING

Over the past two decades, human trafficking has emerged on the international
stage as one of the most disturbing, complex, and, many claim, pervasive issues of
our time. Often dubbed “modern day slavery” (U.S. Department of State, Office to
Monitor and Combat Trafficking in Persons, 2016), this issue, which many believe
is growing due to globalization and increasing migration across sovereign borders,
became the focus of the 2000 United Nations Convention to Prevent, Suppress and
Punish Trafficking in Persons, Especially Women and Children, also known as the
“Palermo Protocol.” While it was the hope of those attending Palermo that a con-
sensus as to an appropriate definition and subsequent policy response to trafficking
would result, the Convention failed to achieve this outcome (Chuang, 2006). Instead,
the Palermo Protocol managed to cement the ongoing, contested debate in the West
between neo-​abolitionist feminists who see prostitution as inherently linked with
trafficking, and therefore seek its abolishment (see, for example, Barry, 1995; Farley,
2003; Farr, 2005; Jeffreys, 1997; MacKinnon, 1993; Raymond, 2003), and pro-​rights
feminists who argue that trafficking and prostitution are not necessarily synony-
mous, that sex work is a legitimate profession, and that implementing improved
working conditions for sex workers would alleviate the dangers associated with this
work (see Bindman & Doezema, 1997; Doezema, 2000; Empower Foundation, 2012;
Ham, 2011; Kempadoo & Doezema, 1998). This debate, and its critiques, has become
the subject of a highly politically charged discourse.
The roots of this discourse can be seen in earlier historical moments in
U.S. history—​most notably in the culture wars of the 1980s, in which fierce debates
about prostitution and the relationship between women’s sexuality and labor
dominated white, “first world” feminist thought. Radical feminists argued that pros-
titution was a manifestation of male sexual violence against women, while sex rad-
ical feminists saw sex work as a terrain of struggle, and a site for resistance (Chapkis,
1996). The subsequent discourse that was produced during this time represented a
cultural shift in the perception of women’s sexuality and labor. “Sex work” became a
term used by sex radical feminists to suggest that sexual acts can be considered legit-
imate forms of labor, and as such, should be compensated fairly (Nussbaum, 1998).
Conversations about sex work began to incorporate discussions of pleasure (Vance,
1993), creativity, difference, self-​expression, and women’s roles in the public sphere
(Thomas, 1996). Much like the response to the AIDS epidemic of the 1980s, how-
ever, the cultural response to this new way of viewing women’s sexuality and labor
generated backlash. This backlash stemmed from an ongoing and, indeed, age-​old
panic around the “polluted body” of the prostitute—​a fear of promiscuity and the
breaking of social convention that sex workers represent. While sex workers viewed
the claiming of their sexual labor as an act of empowerment, they were nevertheless
still seen by the larger culture as “symbols of suffering and need, of the mythic ma-
levolence of women, of ‘criminals and deviants’ ” (Leigh, 1996), and faced ongoing
stigmatization, scapegoating, and legalized abuse (Alexander, 1996; Leigh, 1996;
O’Connell Davidson, 1998; Rubin, 1993). Thus, during this era, the meaning and dis-
cursive use of the term “sex work” became a terrain of struggle.

[6] Introduction
7

The heightened debate about whether a woman should—​or even can—​exercise

agency in selling her sexuality, in tandem with the increasing expression, organiza-
tion, empowerment, and radicalization achieved by pro-​rights feminists around this
issue, underscores a larger tension within the culture. This tension is over the way
women’s sexuality and labor is produced and maintained. It echoes broader cultural
conflicts about the social roles of women in society, and the way these social roles
are performed.
Discussing the symbolic aspect of these debates, Gayle Rubin (1993) explained:

Contemporary conflicts over sexual values and erotic conduct . . . acquire im-
mense symbolic weight. Disputes over sexual behavior often become the vehicles
for displacing social anxieties, and discharging their attendant emotional intensity
(p. 267).

In the 1990s, the American culture wars came to a certain (albeit imperma-
nent) resolution, with the more liberal, progressive values of the Left “winning”
the debates on pornography, in particular (Gross, 1991). But the debates about the
relationship between women’s sexuality and labor raged on. These debates became
displaced, finding their way into what was soon to become the U.S.-​based anti-​
trafficking movement. This movement drew its philosophical tenets from the various
camps of feminism—​from pro-​sex positive feminists such as Gloria Steinem who
believed that sexual relations should be based on love and mutual respect (Chapkis,
1996), to radical feminists who, like Catherine MacKinnon (1989, 1993) suggested
that all sex acts between men and women are inherently violating to women. Both
camps conflated prostitution with trafficking, arguing that “commercial” sex was,
for women, inherently devoid of emotional intimacy and, thus, inauthentic and
even violating to women who engaged in it. Abolitionist feminists such as Kathleen
Barry then took this argument further, suggesting that there are no differences
between sex work, sexual slavery, incest, and rape (Chapkis, 1996: 46–​47). It was
these abolitionists who sought—​and ultimately received—​the bulk of U.S. gov-
ernment funding (benchmarked primarily by USAID) to combat trafficking. Thus,
these abolitionist-​oriented anti-​trafficking organizations quickly began to wield the
strongest voices on the international stage.
This move marked the beginning of a decisive foreign policy stance taken by the
U.S. government to eradicate prostitution in the developing world—​a stance that
I will later refer to as the “U.S. Abolitionist Project.” This project, which is maintained
to the present day, encourages the U.S. foreign-​policy funding apparatus to support
anti-​prostitution advocates and initiatives in environments that would be prone to
their influence—​places such as preindustrialized, conflict-​affected countries and re-
gions in which humanitarian aid and “development” work often comes at the cost
of geopolitical influence (if not dominance) on the part of the U.S. government. In
essence, what was once a “cultural” conversation focusing on domestic feminist pol-
itics had now become “exported” abroad through the U.S. foreign-​policy funding
apparatus.

Introduction [7]
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