Stopping the traffic in women: Power, agency and abolition in feminist debates over sex-trafficking

Journal of Social Philosophy

Volumn 36, Issue 1, 2005, Pages 1-17

  Miriam, Kathy ^a  

^a NONE

Author keywords

[No Author keywords available]

Indexed keywords

EID: 33745853237     PISSN: 00472786     EISSN: 14679833     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1111/j.1467-9833.2005.00254.x     Document Type: Article

References (39)

1. The so-called "pro-sex" (AKA "sex radical") version of the debates is represented by Pleasure and Danger: Exploring Female Sexuality, 2nd ed., ed. Carole Vance (London: Pandora, 1992).
2. The radical feminist anti-pornography version of the debates is well represented by The Sexual Liberals and the Attack on Feminism, ed. Dorchen Leidholdt and Janice G. Raymond (Tarrytown, NY: Pergamon Press, 1990).
3. For an overview see Andrea M. Bertone, "Transnational Activism to Combat Trafficking in Persons", College Park Scholars International Studies 10, no. 1(2004):9-22.
4. For a good representation of both positions see Niki Adams (English Collective of Prostitutes), "Antitrafficking Legislation: Protection or Deportation?"
5. and Liz Kelly, "The Wrong Debate: Reflections on Why Force Is Not The Key Issue with Respect to Trafficking in Women for Sexual Exploitation" in "Dialogue", Feminist Review no. 73(2003):135-9.
6. For an overview and critique of the protocol see Barbara Sullivan, "Trafficking in Women: Feminism and New International Law", International Feminist Journal of Politics 5, no. 1(2003):67-91.
7. See Carole Pateman, The Sexual Contract (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1988)
8. and Pateman, "Self-Ownership and Property in the Person: Democraticization and a Tale of Two Concepts", The Journal of Political Philosophy 10, no. 1(2002):20-53.
9. Pateman, The Sexual Contract, 194.
10. Donna Hughes, "Men Create the Demand, Women Are the Supply", Lecture on Sexual Exploitation, Queen Sophia Center, Valencia Spain (November 2000). Available at
11. I'm following Alison Jaggar's definition of "liberal feminism" in Feminist Politics and Human Nature (Totowa, NJ: Rowman and Allanheld, 1983).
12. Pateman, "Self-Ownership", 27, author's emphasis.
13. Here Pateman follows C. B. MacPhereson's Political Theory of Possessive Individualism from Hobbes to Locke (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 1962).
14. Julia O'Connell Davidson, Prostitution, Power and Freedom (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1998), 9.
15. Kamala Kempadoo attributes the "invention of sex work" as a category to Carol Leigh AKA Scarlet Harlot. Kempadoo, "Introduction: Globalizing Sex Workers' Rights", in Global Sex Workers: Rights, Resistance, and Redefinition, ed. Kempadoo and Jo Doezema (New York: Routledge, 1988), 8.
16. Cynthia Enloe, Bananas, Beaches and Bases: Making Feminist Sense of International Politics, updated edition with a new preface (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2000).
17. Moreover, "candidates for this license could be expected to complete some number of college-level courses on human sexuality from the perspectives of biology, psychology, history, medicine, and so on. " Shrage, Moral Dilemmas of Feminism (New York: Routledge, 1994), 159.
18. Scott A. Anderson, "Prostitution and Sexual Autonomy: Making Sense of the Prohibition of Prostitution", Ethics 112, no. 4(2002):748-81.
19. SeeGAATW website
20. Quoted in Kempadoo, "Introduction: Globalizing Sex Workers' Rights", 9.
21. Josephine Chuen-Juei HO, "Self-Empowerment, and 'Professionalism': Conversations with Taiwanese Sex Workers", Inter-Asia Cultural Studies 1, no. 2(2000):283-99.
22. Charles Taylor, "Aims of a New Epoch", in Hegel (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1977).
23. This point is made by Seyla Benhabib, Critique, Norm and Utopia: Foundations of Critical Theory (New York: Columbia University Press, 1986).
24. HO, "Self-Empowerment, and 'Professionalism': Conversations with Taiwanese Sex Workers", 284.
25. I'm following Nancy Fraser's formulation of a "politics of recognition. " "From Redistribution to Recognition?" in Justice Interruptus: Critical Reflections on the "PostSocialist" Condition (New York: Routledge, 1997).
26. Gayle Rubin, "Thinking Sex: Notes for a Radical Theory of the Politics of Sexuality", in Pleasure and Danger: Exploring Female Sexuality.
27. Bell quoted in O'Connell Davidson, Prostitution, Power and Freedom, 110.
28. Susan Bordo, "Feminism, Postmodernism, Gender Skepticism", in Unbearable Weight: Feminism, Western Culture and the Body (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993), 226.
29. Adams, "Anti-Trafficking Legislation: Protection or Deportation?" 141.
30. Kelly, "The Wrong Debate: Reflections on Why Force Is Not The Key Issue with Respect to Trafficking in Women for Sexual Exploitation", 141.
31. Amy Allen, "Pornography and Power", Journal of Social Philosophy 32 no. 1(2001):512-31.
32. Ibid., 515. Similar criticisms of MacKinnon have been made by Drucilla Cornell and Wendy Brown. See Cornell, Beyond Accommodation: Ethical Feminism, Deconstruction and the Law (New York: Routledge, 1991): 119-164
33. and Brown, States of Injury: Power and Freedom in Late Modernity (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1995), chap. 4.
34. Fraser, "Beyond the Master Subject", Justice Interruptus, 227.
35. Allen, "Pornography and Power", 515.
36. R. W. Connell, Masculinities (Berkeley and Los Angeles, California: University of California Press, 1995), 71.
37. Adrienne Rich, "Compulsory Heterosexuality and Lesbian Existence", in Powers of Desire, ed. A. Snitow, C. Stansell and S. Thompson (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1983): 177-205.
38. Katherine K. Baker, "Once a Rapist? Motivational Evidence and Relevancy in Rape Law", Harvard Law Review 110:563.
39. Kelly makes this argument in Surviving Sexual Violence (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1987).