Thinking trafficking, thinking sex

GLQ

Volumn 17, Issue 1, 2011, Pages 135-143

  Vance, Carole S ^a  

^a NONE

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EID: 78751653616     PISSN: 10642684     EISSN: 15279375     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1215/10642684-2010-024     Document Type: Article

References (30)

1. Thanks to Heather Love and the University of Pennsylvania for organizing and supporting the conference "Rethinking Sex" at which this paper was given. For encouragement and suggestions regarding this essay, thanks to Heather Love, Gayle Rubin
2. Ann Snitow, and the editorial staff of GLQ and Duke University Press. Thanks to Alice Miller for a decade of conversations.
3. Gayle Rubin, "Thinking Sex: Notes for a Radical Theory of the Politics of Sexuality," in Pleasure and Danger: Exploring Female Sexuality, ed. Carole S. Vance (Boston: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1984) 267-319;
4. Rubin, "The Traffc in Women: Notes on the 'Political Economy' of Sex," in Toward an Anthropology of Women ed. Rayna Reiter (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1975) 157-210.
5. At the end of a long list of acknowledgments, Rubin thanks "Emma Goldman for the title" (Goldman, "The Traffc in Women," in Anarchism and Other Essays [New York: Mother Earth Publishing Association, 1910], 183-200; hereafter cited by page number).
6. Gretchen Soderlund, "Covering Urban Vice: The New York Times, 'White Slavery,' and the Construction of Journalistic Knowledge," Critical Studies in Media Communication 19, no. 4 (2002): 438-60;
7. Mark T. Connelly, The Response to Prostitution in the Progressive Era (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1980);
8. Judith R. Walkowitz, City of Dreadful Delight: Narratives of Sexual Danger in Late- Victorian London (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992).
9. The International Agreement for the Suppression of the "White Slave Traffc" (1904); the International Convention for the Suppression of the White Slave Traffc (1910); the International Convention for the Suppression of the Traffc in Women and Children (1921); and the International Convention for the Suppression of the Traffc in Women of Full Age (1933) address "women and girls" as the victims of traffcking, although the 1921 convention also applies to "children of both sexes." It is not until the Convention for the Suppression of the Traffc in Persons and of the Exploitation of the Prostitution of Others (1951) that the victim is imagined as a "person" ("procures, entices or leads away, for purposes of prostitution, another person").
10. For example, the International Convention for the Suppression of the White Slave Traffc (1910) states: "Whoever, in order to gratify the passions of another person, has procured, enticed, or led away, even with her consent, a woman or girl under age, for immoral purposes, shall be punished" (Article 1), www1.umn.edu/humanrts/instree/ whiteslavetraffc1910. html. Similar language is found in the International Convention for the Suppression of the Traffc in Women and Children (1921); The International Convention for the Suppression of the Traffc in Women of Full Age (1933); and the Convention for the Suppression of the Traffc in Persons and of the Exploitation of the Prostitution of Others (1951).
11. For this reason, some social purity reformers attacked state licensing or regulation of brothels, without necessarily supporting criminal laws that targeted prostitutes. As the strength of the social purity movement grew, however, this nuanced strategy was overtaken by more comprehensive programs to eliminate prostitution using any and all available tools.
12. Antitraffcking laws remained a powerful tool for persecution and selective prosecution. In the United States the federal Mann Act (1910), aimed at stopping the interstate or foreign traffcking of women for "immoral purposes," was used to prosecute the African American boxer Jack Johnson, the actor Charlie Chaplin, and the University of Chicago sociologist William I. Thomas, widely viewed as payback for their violation of racial and sexual conventions. See David J. Langum, Crossing over the Line: Legislating Morality and the Mann Act (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994).
13. Protocol to Prevent, Suppress and Punish Traffcking in Persons, Especially Women and Children, Supplementing the U.N. Convention against Transnational Organized Crime, G.A. Res. 55/25, Annex II, U.N. GAOR, 55th Sess., U.N. Doc. A/55/383 (Nov. 15, 2000) (hereafter cited as UN Protocol); Traffcking Victims Protection Act of 2000, Pub. L. No. 106-386 §2A, 114 Stat. 1464 (2000) (hereafter cited as TPVA), as supplemented by the Traffcking Victims Protection Reauthorization Act of 2003, Pub. L. No. 108-193, 117 Stat. 2875 (hereafter cited as 2003 TVPRA), the Traffck-ing Victims Protection Reauthorization Act of 2005, Pub. L. No. 109-164, 119 Stat. 3558 (2006) (codifed at 22 U.S.C. §7101) (hereafter cited as 2005 TVPRA), and the William Wilberforce Traffcking Victims Protection Reauthorization Act of 2008, Pub. L. No. 110-457, 122 Stat. 5044 (2008) (codifed at 22 U.S.C. §7101) (hereafter cited as 2008 TVPRA).
14. Ann Jordan, The Annotated Guide to the Complete U.N. Trafficking Protocol (Washington, DC: International Human Rights Law Group, May 2002 [updated August 2002]), 4. www.globalrights.org/site/DocServer/Annotated-Protocol.pdf ?do cI D =2 723.
15. For example, the UN Protocol defnes traffcking as "the recruitment, transportation, transfer, harbouring or receipt of persons, by means of the threat or use of force of other forms of coercion, of abduction, of fraud, of deception, of the abuse of power or of a position of vulnerability or of the giving or receiving of payments or benefts to achieve the consent of a person having control over another person, for the purpose of exploitation. Exploitation shall include, at a minimum, the exploitation of the prostitution of others or other forms of sexual exploitation, forced labour or services, slavery or practices similar to slavery, servitude or the removal of organs."
16. The notion that traffcked persons are crime victims needing social services turns out to be an expensive project. Recognizing the potential cost, the UN Protocol recommends that states provide such services but does not require them to. Similarly, the U.S. Congress, alarmed by the prospect that hordes of undocumented migrants could attempt to claim continued presence and costly services, instituted an onerous vetting process to prove that one was a "victim of severe forms of traffcking," while restricting the number of visas for traffcked persons to no more than fve thousand per year. The narrowness of the eye of the needle is further illustrated by the fact that from 2001-2009, only some two thousand of these visas have been approved. For details about implementation and benefts under the US law, see Alicia W. Peters, "Traf-fcking in Meaning, Law, Victims, and the State" (PhD diss., Columbia University, 2010).
17. Typical melodramatic examples include Nicholas Kristof's many journalistic exposés of traffcking in the New York Times: "Girls for Sale," January 14, 2004
18. "Bargaining for Freedom," January 21, 2004;
19. "Going Home, with Hope," January 24, 2004;
20. "Loss of Innocence," January 28, 2004;
21. and "Stopping the Traffckers," January 31, 2004.
22. See also The Selling of Innocence, an Emmy Award-winning flm depicting the traffcking of girls from Nepal to India (dir. William Cobban, Elliott Halpern, and Simcha Jacobovici [Ruchira Gupta, feld researcher], Canadian Broadcasting Company, 1997), and the two- part television drama "Human Traffcking," with Mira Sorvino and Donald Sutherland, which aired on Lifetime (2005).
23. On the history of melodrama and melodrama as a generic form, see Peter Brooks, The Melodramatic Imagination: Balzac, Henry James, Melodrama, and the Mode of Excess (New York: Columbia University Press, 1985);
24. and James Redmond, ed., Melodrama (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992).
25. For an example of the nineteenth- century deployment of this rhetoric, see W. T. Stead, "The Maiden Tribute of Modern Babylon I," Pall Mall Gazette, July 6, 1885.
26. For an analysis, see chapter 4, "The Maiden Tribute of Modern Babylon," in Walkowitz, City of Dreadful Delight, 81-120.
27. For a more detailed analysis of the work of antitraffcking melodramas, see Carole S. Vance, " 'Juanita/Svetlana/Geeta' Is Crying: Melodrama, Human Rights, and Anti-Traffcking Interventions," Owens Lecture, University of Rochester, December 1, 2006
28. and "Hiss the Villain: Depicting Sex Traffcking," Lecture, School for American Research, Santa Fe, May 2005.
29. Melodrama does not easily incorporate structural analysis: for example, how would the World Bank or U.S. opium- eradication policy (which impoverished Thai farmers and drove their daughters into being traffcked into forced prostitution) appear in the plot? See David Feingold, "The Hell of Good Intentions: Some Preliminary Thoughts on Opium in the Political Ecology of the Trade in Girls and Women," in Where China Meets Southeast Asia: Social and Cultural Change in the Border Regions, ed. Grant Evans, Christopher Hutton, and Khun E. Kuah (New York: St. Martin's, 2000), 183-204.
30. Rubin, "Thinking Sex," 267.