No serious transformative social change can come about without knowledge of the existing social contradictions.
Teresa L. Ebert, Ludic Feminism and After
After traveling to a small village in Cambodia, a New York Times journalist and a videographer “became slave owners in the twenty-first century in the old fashioned way: [they] paid cash in exchange for two slave girls and a couple of receipts. The girls were then [theirs] to do with as [they] liked” (Kristof and WuDunn, Half the Sky 35). To their audiences’ relief, these men only intended to “rescue” the girls from the brothels to prove that sexual slavery exists today and show how easily one can buy a sex slave. The results of their experiment, together with compelling testimonies from once-victimized and now empowered third-world women, are narrated in Half the Sky: Turning Oppression into Opportunity Worldwide (2009). Here, Pulitzer-prize winners Nicholas D. Kristof and Sheryl WuDunn attempt to bring awareness to sex trafficking and other appalling forms of female oppression in the third world, showing concrete avenues for people (a first-world audience, clearly) to help overcome these evils.
Despite its well-intentioned message, Kristof and WuDunn’s book can raise as many questions as the presence of the chosen journalists and celebrities endorsing it on its back cover (Angelina Jolie, to name one). Just looking at Jolie’s photograph for the 2011 Louis Vuitton campaign shot in Cambodia—one of the most notorious countries in the world for sexual slavery—can astonish one. The “Core Values” campaign, as it was called, shows the actress sitting barefooted on a typical wooden Cambodian boat, looking pensive with a large Louis Vuitton bag by her side. Admittedly, Jolie will “donate a significant amount” of the money earned, rumored to be ten million dollars, to charities (Badat). While the actress, like our good journalists, obviously wants to “help” the third world, I want to reflect upon the paradoxes inherent in the Louis Vuitton shot because it exemplifies the type of consumerist “feel-good” philanthropy Slavoj Žižek describes when analyzing the success of the current capitalist model, while it fails to account for the causal (and crucial) relationship between extreme wealth and extreme poverty (“Nobody Has to Be Vile”).1 Global corporations such as Starbucks, Nike, just to name a notorious few, rather than, for example, raise their third-world employees’ low salaries in the first place, through brilliant marketing strategies invite those of us in the global North to consume more because in that very act we are allegedly helping the third world by sharing a (minimum, tax-deductible) percentage of our purchase with populations in need. More important, through our purchase/donation, we are implicitly absolving corporations from the exploitation of third-world people and environments in which they actively participate.2
Similarly, Kristof and WuDunn’s book praises the efforts of such champions of development and consumerism as the World Bank, Goldman Sachs, and the Nike Foundation for their attempts to overcome gender inequality and help to eradicate sex trafficking (even the Pentagon gets favorable reviews, as the military has understood that “[e]mpowering girls, some in the military, [ … ] would disempower terrorists”) (Kristof and WuDunn, Half xx–i). But what Žižek has observed about the billionaire/philanthropist George Soros, for example, could be easily extrapolated to a global investment banking firm such as Goldman Sachs. Žižek explains: “He [Soros] stands for ruthless financial exploitation combined with its counter-agent, humanitarian worry about the catastrophic social consequences of the unbridled market economy” (“Nobody”). In the case of Goldman Sachs, the inconsistency of its humanitarian stance in the crusade against sex trafficking is even more troublesome as, ironically, the firm was involved in a sex trafficking scandal that came to light in 2012, after the publication of Kristof and WuDunn’s book.3 A visibly mortified Kristof later wrote about this news in the New York Times, where he acknowledged that “the biggest forum for sex trafficking of under-age girls in the United States appears to be a website called Backpage.com”—and one of the website’s owners was none other than Goldman Sachs, “with a 16 percent stake” (“Financiers and Sex Trafficking”). Half the Sky was later turned into a PBS documentary, released in 2012, with the show counting Goldman Sachs and the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation as some of its benefactors. The film features Kristof and WuDunn along with appearances of politicians, NGO leaders, and celebrities such as George Clooney (both a favorite humanitarian and People magazine’s 2006 “sexiest man alive”) in their combined efforts to bring attention to sex trafficking, rescuing third-world girls from appalling brothels while emphasizing subaltern women’s entrepreneurial potential—if only given the chance by the more affluent global North.4
Understandably, many assume rescue work as “the noblest response” to the very real atrocities inflicted upon young girls, yet this approach has generated “mixed results” (Thrupkaew 13). In “The Crusade against Sex Trafficking: Do Brothel Raids Help or Hurt the ‘Rescued’?” Noy Thrupkaew observes that this type of action “rips [the girls’] lives out of context, so that an approach that might be suitable, if still controversial, in a country with reliable law enforcement and criminal justice systems is applied in a country where those systems are more likely to be part of the problem than the solution” (13). Central to my analysis, Thrupkaew further objects that rescue policies skirt “the economic and social problems that make recovery so difficult for the ‘rescued’” while, critically, they fail “to address the economic inequalities that would replace the rescued girl with another victim” (13). With startling shortsightedness, then, Kristof and WuDunn state in their book that “this is not a case where we in the West have a responsibility to lead because we’re the source of the problem. Rather, we single out the West because, even though we’re peripheral to the slavery, our action is necessary to overcome a horrific evil” [my emphasis] (24–25).5 Although I agree with their passionate impulse to eliminate such “horrific evil” (as evidenced in their book’s carefully documented pages), their actions and rhetoric worries me. The authors seem to encourage their Western audiences to, once again, “take up the white man’s burden” and “rescue brown women from brown men.”6
Sex Trafficking in Postcolonial Literature is about these contradictions: about an overwhelming number of third-world women trafficked for sexual purposes, whose abject existence benefits ideological and repressive state apparatuses (in the form of national governments, financial enterprises, military establishments, etc.), but whose rights and presence, paradoxically, have often been erased from such state-sanctioned institutions’ consciousness. When we do hear about trafficked women, the news frequently comes disguised in paternalistic discourse or xenophobic rhetoric that often has little to do with these women’s benefit, but far more with neo-imperialistic economic interests.7 Ultimately, by denying or downplaying these women’s presence, the current economic system can continue growing undisturbed by ethical imperatives.8 I argue that the postcolonial fiction addressed in this volume interrupts the hegemonic representations of sex trafficking disseminated by the mainstream media, which focuses primarily on (generally foreign) cruel traffickers and abject victims, but takes for granted the neoliberal economic model based on exclusion and inequality that generates this trafficking. In so doing, and despite its good intentions, such discourse in the long run ends up having a counterproductive effect, creating the (comforting) impression that rescue work, charities, and nongovernmental organizations’ (NGOs’) support alone will solve the trafficking crises, without questioning and, more importantly, seeking to change the root cause of the problem: the predatory neoliberalism that perpetuates sex trafficking.9 The postcolonial narratives here analyzed—James Joyce’s “Eveline” (1904), Therese Park’s A Gift of the Emperor (1997), Mahasweta Devi’s “Douloti the Bountiful” (1995), Amma Darko’s Beyond the Horizon (1995), Chris Abani’s Becoming Abigail (2006), and Roberto Bolaño’s 2666 (2004)—highlight such tensions by showing subaltern women with little or no agency who fall into trafficking (or could fall into it) precisely because of their systemic “worthlessness.”10 These narratives thus instigate a critique of the socioeconomic circumstances that lead the women to be trafficked in the first place and, in turn, challenge the coherence of the current model of global capitalism.
It seems now an understatement to say that Western capitalist economies have thrived at the expense of third-world economies. The new worldwide economic configuration, the widening chasm between rich and poor as a result of globalization, has only deepened the problem. As the Nobel Prizewinner economist Joseph E. Stiglitz powerfully denounced in Globalization and Its Discontents (2003), global capitalism necessitates vast inequality and thus becomes an active instrument in third-world economies’ collapses through regulatory institutions such as the World Bank, the International Monetary Fund (IMF), and the World Trade Organization (WTO)—all three dedicated to the promotion of international capitalism with a clear agenda in favor of Western capital.11 Stiglitz served as chief economist for the World Bank between 1997 and 2000 (at the beginning of East Asia’s economic crises and Russia’s transition from communism), so he had the opportunity to witness “firsthand the devastating effect that globalization can have on developing countries, and especially the poor within those countries” (ix). In a balanced assessment, Stiglitz explains:
I believe that globalization—the removal of barriers to free trade and the closer integration of national economies—can be a force for good and that it has the potential to enrich everyone, particularly the poor. But I also believe that if this is to be the case, the way globalization has been managed, including the international trade agreements that have played such a large role in removing those barriers and the policies that have been imposed on developing countries in the process of globalization, need to be radically rethought. (ix–x)
Indeed, Sex Trafficking in Postcolonial Literature assumes neoliberal globalization as a crucial part of the sex trafficking problem, and therefore seeks to ‘radically rethink’ the approaches to represent and address the crime and consider the responsibility of the current macroeconomic context in enabling it.
As Karl Marx predicted in Das Kapital, the world is now witnessing a simultaneous polar accumulation of immense wealth and massive misery: “The gap between the first world and the rest,” Sankaran Krishna explains, “has widened since 1820 and has further intensified over the past three decades; this is one of the inescapable realities of the contemporary world” (60).12 The “early nineteenth century,” Krishna continues, “marked the industrialization of the Western world,” and, since then, the world has become inexorably polarized (60). Sheldon X. Zhang observes that “[income] disparities between developed and developing countries have widened in recent decades as a result of a globalized economy in which production of goods and market transactions can take place in the most efficient manner” (9). While “efficient” seems a rather evasive word choice in the context of this book, Zhang acknowledges that “[h]alf of the current world population [ … ] lives on less than $2 a day” (9). The situation is even more dire in countries like Mexico, for example, whose economy “was seriously weakened during the financial meltdown of 1994–95” (9). In his analysis, Zhang states that according to “the World Bank, half of the 104 million residents in Mexico live in poverty and one-fifth in extreme poverty (defined as living on less than $1 a day)” (9).
But some are benefiting from this utter inequality, and here female sex trafficking is a case in point. Although trafficking for prostitution is not a new phenomenon, the present macroeconomic context has intensified a problem that especially affects increasing numbers of women in the global South with limited capacity for mobility because of their structural circumstances. Anne McClintock already pinpointed in Imperial Leather (1995) “the paradox of abjection as a formative aspect of modern industrial imperialism,” stressing that under “imperialism[,] certain groups are expelled and obliged to inhabit the impossible edges of modernity: the slum, the ghetto, the garret, the brothel[.] Abject peoples are those whom industrial imperialism rejects but cannot do without: slaves, prostitutes, the colonized, domestic workers, the insane, the unemployed and so on” (72). Reminiscent of Žižek’s argument in Violence (2008), Etienne Balibar’s La Crainte des Masses (1997) similarly identifies “the objective (structural) violence that is inherent in the social conditions of global capitalism” through “the automatic creation of excluded and dispensable individuals” (qtd. in Žižek, “Nobody”). Spivak, for her part, has contended elsewhere that devastated economies most adversely affect those at the bottom of society: poor women of color, restricted by their class, gender, and race (“Woman in Difference” 82). From an economic standpoint, then, sex trafficking is not simply a result of poverty, but a symptomatic byproduct of the gendered economic inequality created, sustained, and normalized by the current hegemonic model of global capitalism.13
Despite the difficulties of arriving at exact numbers for this “hidden population,” we can confidently say that over two million women and children are trafficked into prostitution around the world annually (probably a conservative estimate), with the compass pointing to the global North as a frequent final destination (Tanneeru).14 Zhang notes that most human trafficking activities now “originate in countries in Asia, Africa, South America, and Eastern Europe and move to western Europe, Australia, and North America” (16), while statistics show that, because of the global economic configuration after decolonization, the “past three decades have seen female sex trafficking becoming one of the fastest growing criminal activities” (Samarasinghe 56). To this day, human trafficking remains “the third largest criminal industry [ … ] behind only drugs and firearms trafficking, with profits reaching billions of dollars each year” (Zhang 106). Sociologists have written extensively about this crime, and, thanks to some nongovernmental organizations’ efforts to raise awareness about trafficking and its consequences, governments have begun to take more consistent action.15
From an overview of the most current relevant studies on female sex trafficking, one can conclude the following: first, the numbers are staggering and the projections on eradicating it worrying; second, women are subjected to slavery-like conditions, often undergoing physical and psychological torture and having little or no agency; third, transnational traffic generally originates in so-called third-world, post-colonial, and post-socialist countries, with developed nations standing out as the major destination sites, while movement within third-world countries tends to occur from rural areas to urban centers or to other third-world countries that experienced rapid development; and fourth, the exponential revenues and the astounding impunity with which the traffickers operate continue to allow these activities to remain under the radar and proliferate—in fact, there is “every indication that the trafficking industry grows stronger each year, and that the recruitment is widening” (Farr xvii).16 This trend reveals the need for a better understanding of the way the crime is carried out, since too often the police target the victim who, under the law of the host country, becomes an illegal alien involved in prostitution (a criminalized activity), while organizers and consumers time and again escape practically unaffected, sometimes even protected by their states.17
Regarding main destination sites, although exact patterns are difficult to establish, some sources identify the “United States of America [ … ] as the world’s second largest destination/market country (after Germany) for women and children trafficked for the purpose of sexual exploitation in the sex industry” (qtd. in Schauer and Wheaton 146). Other sources position Spain and Greece as top destination (and later transit) countries, which of course reflects the fluctuations of the world economy.18 What investigators generally agree on is that transnational trafficking moves from impoverished country to more affluent one, so it sounds credible that, among other developed nations, the US would rank high as a destination, especially for Mexican women and children (Acharya 25). Despite this fact, researchers in the field observe that its citizens seem unconcerned, “almost to the level of national denial—as if slavery, which is the essence of human trafficking, could not possibly exist in this democracy” (Logan 4). One could then propose that, in a schizophrenic cycle, the global North desires and imports these women illegally, but expels them from consciousness by labelling them undocumented criminals (and therefore invisible).
Yet the crime has attained increasing visibility in international forums since as early as the late nineteenth century. The first International Abolitionist Congress, where for the first time sex trafficking was recognized as an international issue, took place in Genève in 1887, but it was only much later, in 2000, that the UN formally presented a (still debated) definition of human trafficking in the Palermo Protocol.19 This legislation provided a landmark in the fight against sex trafficking because, by defining the crime, it endowed governments with the necessary juridical tools to enforce the laws against traffickers. However, its definition generated controversies around the issue of “consented” and “forced” prostitution, already sparked by the earlier attempt to fight sex trafficking globally through the International Convention for the Suppression of the Trafficking in Persons of 1949, which called on governments to “suppress not only trafficking but also prostitution, regardless of whether or not they occur with the consent of the women involved” (qtd. in Zhang 107). Women’s “consent” is thus addressed by these international codes more or less specifically, but both of them deem it irrelevant. Predictably, this has divided the waters between feminists in favor of granting official recognition and rights to sex workers, considering prostitution a chosen form of labor that should be respected (Kamala Kempadoo, Jo Doezema, Lenore Kuo), and abolitionists who regard prostitution as a violation of human rights and, therefore, not a real choice since, according to them, all prostitution is “trafficking” (Kathleen Barry, Donna Hughes, Catharine A. MacKinnon).20
In a clear case of “divide and conquer,” such disagreement negatively affected every side of the debate, separating the “bad” woman (voluntary prostitute) who needs to be reformed from the “good” woman (forced sex slave) who needs to be rescued, while lowering the status of trafficked women even more because it created legal gaps that ultimately benefited traffickers and consumers at the expense of the women coerced into prostitution. Debra A. Castillo observes that the “loaded language of rescue used by many advocacy groups, much of it following from unexplored presumptions about Third World disorder and First World virtue, implicitly [divides] sex workers into nonintersecting groups of evil sinners and innocent victims” (837). Elina Penttinen, for her part, explains that within the prostitution/trafficking discourse, women who prostitute themselves to obtain money to buy drugs become “drug addicts,” just like “trafficked women or foreign prostitutes who sell sex because of economic necessity would not count as prostitutes as they do it out of necessity and not professionally,” unlike career prostitutes who “fight for social recognition of their profession” (18). This labeling of what constitutes legitimate sex work weakens coerced trafficked women’s position: “the silence of the abject is reinforced by the Western professional prostitutes, as the prostitutes’ rights movements do not for the most part speak for the rights of these vulnerable groups and do not recognize what they do as sex work” (18).
In academia, the trafficking/prostitution binary has generated debates over third-world women’s sexuality in terms of “victimhood” and “agency,” still contested arenas in feminist and postcolonial studies (Aradau 43). The feminist anthropologist Carole S. Vance rightfully notes the difficulty of theorizing female sexuality from a feminist perspective given that the “hallmark of sexuality is its complexity[.] It is all too easy to cast sexual experience as either wholly pleasurable or dangerous” (336). While acknowledging this conundrum, Vance suggests that “feminism must reach deeply into women’s pleasure and draw on this energy” (340). At the other end of the spectrum, critics such as Audre Lorde, among others, have assumed issues of ethnicity and class as paramount of any feminist criticism that claims emancipatory aims for all women.21 Indeed, a survey of the most noteworthy contributions in North American and European feminist theory (especially in its most postmodern versions) shows that critics have often celebrated linguistic play through sexuality and the body, but the reality presented by coerced sex trafficked women compels a reexamination of such paradigms because, in this case, sexuality and the body become the material appropriated for exploitation, torture, and often murder—emphatically, not a form of female resistance and emancipation.22 Because of the nature of the topic explored in this book, I will concentrate on fictional narratives where sexuality is (mis)used as a tool for exploitation and not as a source of female pleasure/empowerment. I therefore focus on postcolonial stories of subaltern women in the third world who have fallen victims of trafficking by coercion, abduction, or trickery because their circumstances show a much darker side of “the feminization of superexploitation” that hasn’t been yet effectively addressed in literary studies, possibly because of the conflicting feminist positions on the issue and their emphasis on female agency (Spivak, Outside 113).23 I am not making a moral judgment or suggesting that third-world women who choose to be trafficked for prostitution as a means of emigrating to the West should be denied civil rights, or that they do not end up paying the price of exploitation; their situation at times can be as appalling as that of those deceived or coerced, but it is beyond the range of this work.
According to Stephanie Hepburn and Rita J. Simon, despite “nation-specific differences, the characteristics of human trafficking are remarkably similar worldwide,” since the analogous “traits of the trafficking experience can be seen in any nation regardless of geographical location or whether the nation is considered first, second, or third world” (1). In this analysis, then, I explore six works from diverse contexts in order to examine representations of sexual trafficking/abduction of postcolonial women within a globalized framework. Beginning with the turn of the twentieth century, when sex trafficking became an actively organized global business for the first time legally defined, and leading up to the momentum in gained in the 1990s to the present, I look at selected fictional narratives from different parts of the postcolonial map—Ireland (James Joyce), Korea (Therese Park), India (Mahasweta Devi), Ghana (Amma Darko), Nigeria (Chris Abani), and Chile (Roberto Bolaño)—in order to reflect the evolution and implications of sex trafficking since the so-called “white slavery” period of the early 1900s, to its development within the current neoliberal context. I hope to contribute to the scholarly dialogue with a fresh perspective on a crime that, according to research in a variety of disciplines, overwhelmingly affects racialized third-world women, especially during the past three decades that have seen an increase in female migration in search of work.
I thus identify recurrent motifs that create transnational connections in a crisis exacerbated by the ascendancy of deregulated finance capital, especially after decolonization, when third-world women’s bodies have become readily expendable commodities. Echoing Penttinen’s Foucauldian analysis, I examine “how globalization is inscribed on [ethnicized gendered] bodies and how individuals are subjected by globalization” (xii). The “body in demand in the current globalized world,” Penttinen argues, “is the body of an eroticized exotic woman, who adapts to the rugged landscape and fitness tests posed by globalization processes, by traveling or being trafficked to the West for the purpose of sex work” (xv). The “sex industry” has now become “a global phenomenon linked to the general political, economic, and social developments within societies, regionally and internationally” (Beeks xiii). I therefore approach the topic within those contexts—political, economic, and social—observing how sanctioned institutions have profited from the existence of trafficked women, for example, through the early twentieth-century patriarchal and xenophobic discourses utilized to police women and reinforce ideas of nationhood (in Chapter 1: James Joyce’s “Eveline”), through the military (in Chapter 2: Therese Park’s A Gift of the Emperor), through national governments (in Chapter 3: Mahasweta Devi’s “Douloti the Bountiful”), through the legal system in destination countries (in Chapter 4: Amma Darko’s Beyond the Horizon and Chris Abani’s Becoming Abigail), and through financial institutions regulating transnational capital (in Chapter 5: Roberto Bolaño’s 2666)—invariably, the common thread among such systems is the reliance on disposable third-world women and the silent complicity of those in power who profit from their oppression.
Noticeably, while prostitution has been addressed by countless literary works, postcolonial authors have not dealt with sex trafficking often, and only recently has this subject achieved prominence. I do not wish to imply that sex trafficking disappeared after the early twentieth-century campaign against what was termed “white slavery,” but rather that there followed a gap of time when trafficking was out of public consciousness. Overall, transatlantic sex trafficking gained its initial momentum at the turn of the twentieth century through “white slavery” from Europe to the Americas (and, to a lesser extent, to colonized territories in Asia and Africa);24 new transportation and communication technologies, among other factors, facilitated this illicit movement of women. The two world wars diverted trafficking routes, and other criminal niches emerged as the military demanded prostitutes to service troops engaged in combat. After World War II, colonies gradually gained independence, but while decolonization initially promised prosperity, the subsequent decades proved to be economically disastrous for former colonies as they became bound to developed nations through gargantuan “recovery” loans.25 As a consequence, trafficking patterns reversed: researchers observe that from the second half of the twentieth century onwards, postcolonial countries from Asia, Africa, and Latin America began to supply women to the developed world (Trochón 44–45)—the fictional narratives under analysis will follow this historical trajectory.
The media has also reflected such trends. Through intensive ideological dissemination against white slavery at the turn of the century, moral scare campaigns endeavored to protect white women from dangerous foreign procurers—and prevent them from attempting to gain some independence that would defy established patriarchal orders. After 1920, for example, noticing that not only white women were being trafficked, the US government began to pass several acts aimed at curtailing the immigration of single women from poor countries in an effort to stop the entry of “undesirable” individuals who could threaten the American gene pool of largely Western European origin (as Lauren Berlant observes, “every crisis of immigration in the U.S. history has involved the claim that something essentially American is being threatened by alien cultural practices”) (312). This discriminatory legislation obviously impaired women’s agency and mobility in general.26 As mentioned above, the two world wars pushed the trafficking issue aside until fairly recently, while the laws gave the impression that human trafficking was under control. But in the 1990s, dreadful news started to re-emerge, and the Bush administration launched an aggressive campaign against sex trafficking. The timing was not incidental: “[e]ager to complement his war on terror with a parallel ‘soft-power strategy,’” Thrupkaew maintains, “Bush signed on to the ‘war on trafficking’ with a vengeance” (13). At the same time, Thrupkaew notes that “much of the money went to organizations [ … ] whose interventionist attitude was congruent with Bush’s foreign policy stance, and to groups that believed that prostitution was inherently exploitative and deserving abolishment” (13). In “On the Line: Work and Choice,” Castillo observes the same phenomenon; the critic refers to Gretchen Soderlund’s remarks that “the global ‘War Against Trafficking’ has been largely defined and directed by the United States and was given greater national attention after George W. Bush’s 2003 annual address to the United Nations” (Castillo 837). Like Thrupkaew, “Soderlund sees this address as a familiar bait-and-switch tactic to deflect criticism of the United States war in Iraq,” thus revealing how the sex trafficking issue has often been manipulated for political purposes beyond the welfare of the women trafficked (837).
The jump to the 1990s also reflects the collapse of postcolonial economies after independence because of debt, which dramatically exacerbated global sex trafficking. At the same time, many Western countries developed tougher border and immigration policies to respond to the escalating influx of people from impoverished countries in search of survival opportunities after their own countries could not support them. Since then, laws to control illegal immigration in Western nations have become more restrictive and exclusionary. In 1996, for instance, the US passed the Illegal Immigration Reform and Immigration Responsibility Act restricting “access to healthcare, except for emergency care, for undocumented migrants and further entrenched the border as a militarized zone with increased border patrols and technology,” which has ultimately translated into more preventable immigrant deaths (Segura and Zavella 8). Gradually but steadily, after the terrorist attacks of 9/11, immigration policies in the US have limited the entrance of “undesirable” (racialized and poor) immigrants, predictably pushing traffickers’ criminal activities further underground. The current situation in Europe presents a similar picture, since far-right political parties have gained support and popularity through resurrecting old discriminatory laws meant to keep immigrants from poor nations at bay. Yet criminalizing illegal immigration does not stop traffickers from bringing women into the global North: it only enhances traffickers’ power at the expense of the “imported” women.
Beyond the Pleasure Principle: The Aesthetics of Sex Trafficking
From a literary standpoint, the danger of turning the trauma endured by rape victims/survivors into an erotic spectacle or an aestheticized tableau to be admired from a safe distance poses a challenge to the artist. In her essay “On Style,” Susan Sontag accurately notes that in “the strictest sense, all contents of consciousness are ineffable. Even the simplest sensation is, in its totality, indescribable. [ … ] Stylistic devices are also techniques of avoidance. The most potent elements in a work of art are, often, its silences” (Against Interpretation 36). As will be demonstrated throughout the different chapters, to symbolize the “ineffable” most of the authors analyzed here depict rape through tropes of suffering and torture from the point of view of a victim who frequently elides the sexual violence she has endured from her consciousness. When a rape is explicitly addressed, the narrative tends to stress the aggression inflicted on the victim rather than project an erotic performance. Describing sexual violence thus presents a problem for the artist who wants to put trauma into words without showcasing it as “yet another performance for the voyeur,” while the writer’s focus can compromise the book’s marketability depending on the way the narrative is constructed (Berndt 180). Aestheticizing a rape scene, for example, can dilute the tenor of the aggression without necessarily disquieting readers, while showcasing barbaric torture of a hapless female victim would likely repel most audiences.
But there is evidently a market for these stories, as the popular phenomenon The Girl Who Played with Fire (2006), part of Stieg Larsson’s Millennium Trilogy, proves. The astounding success of this Swedish novel revolving around sex trafficking reveals an uncanny fascination with the topics of forced prostitution and rape. In particular, I want to draw attention to the commercial aspect of the subject matter and its sales potential in the publishing and film industries (even an international clothing brand has profited from the popularity of these novels; as reported in the Guardian, H&M designed in 2011 a collection entirely inspired by Lisbeth Salander, the powerful heroine of the trilogy) (Swash). One obvious reason for audiences’ reverence of Larsson’s character is that Lisbeth has agency: she is an astute and strong avenger who, by herself, survives rape, punishes her rapist, and plays the system to end up with a fortune—in short, she embodies the perfect individualistic feminist heroine of the twenty-first century. Critics such as Kay Schaffer and Sidonie Smith observe that, not surprisingly, the “desire for personal stories often telling of individualist triumph over adversity [ … ] seems insatiable in the West and is expanding with the reach of global media”; after all, “[publishers] and media conglomerates recognize that stories of suffering and survival sell to readers” (24–25).
This trend Schaffer and Smith identify is not confined to Western media. Scholars such as Saba Mahmood, for instance, have signaled a similar inclination in feminist studies addressing the subaltern. Mahmood rightfully notes that “even in instances when an explicit feminist agency is difficult to locate, there is a tendency among scholars to look for expressions and moments of resistance that may suggest a challenge to male domination” (536). As an example, Mahmood refers to Lila Abu-Lughod’s self-criticism when she admits that
[in] some of [her] earlier work, as in that of others, there is perhaps a tendency to romanticize resistance, to read all forms of resistance as signs of ineffectiveness of systems of power and of the resilience and creativity of the human spirit in its refusal to be dominated. By reading resistance in this way, we collapse distinctions between forms of resistance and foreclose certain questions about the workings of power [Mahmood’s emphasis]. (qtd. in Mahmood 536)
Similarly, postcolonial scholarship has been particularly invested in “looking for and highlighting moments of resistance within colonial discourse” (R. Young 43).27 Both schools have traditionally relied upon determining moments of subaltern power and autonomy, yet I argue that in some extreme cases (such as the coerced sex traffic this volume explores), to insist on looking for rhetorical instances of resistance and agency where the broader context suggests that they are clearly minimal can efface more serious political and philosophical debates about the structural circumstances enabling the crime, the human rights violations perpetrated and, perhaps more worryingly, the imperative to address them.28 Of course, I am not implying that coerced trafficked women have no agency at all (which in most cases can be found) but that such agency is trivial in the broader context of exploitation and that, in privileging literary/textual agency, we downplay the material realities facing these women, or could even unintentionally naturalize the exploitation. If what one is trying to change is the ideological perception of the crime and the public’s response to it, by stressing the victims/survivors’ generally insignificant moments of autonomy at the expense of understanding the workings of power, one runs the risk of staying within the discursive realm postcolonial studies have been often criticized for (i.e. being too postmodern, too theoretical, too Anglo-American, too commodified, too market-friendly—too irrelevant?).29 In a provocative move, most of the stories this work examines will complicate issues of subaltern women’s agency by showing no “happy” endings or “truly” empowered heroines. Unlike Larsson’s protagonist, some of the postcolonial women here analyzed will probably never motivate much commercial celebration as their capacity to achieve autonomy and realize their own interests is nil.
Despite such a grim backdrop, in her 2005 article “Twenty-first Century Global Sex Trafficking: Migration, Capitalism, Class, and Challenges for Feminism Now,” the English and gender studies professor Marjorie Stone highlights the striking absence of analyses of sex trafficking in “literary and cultural studies ‘post feminist’ contexts,” when, according to her, the problem has reached dramatic proportions (33). The critic further judges that “more attention to sex trafficking by literary and cultural critics is needed” because “work in these fields can contribute in significant ways to understanding and grappling with the intractable complexities of this issue” (36).30 Stone wonders:
If economic globalization has in fact brought an explosion in the numbers of children, girls, and women sold into sexual slavery, what does this say about the impact of feminism in our time? How are contemporary writers, dramatists, and film-makers using the resources of their art to explore the nature of trafficking or the subjective experience of being trafficked into sex slavery, and how might such cultural representations contribute to developing effective anti-trafficking strategies? What can history and literature teach us about why attempts to grapple with sex trafficking succeed or fail? Are there significant parallels between the so-called “white slave trade” of the late nineteenth century and early twentieth century and what is now seen as the “new” global sex trade? [ … ] How do feminist theories of agency play out in the contexts where the only free choice may be between submitting or the prospect of beatings, torture, death, or retaliation against relatives?
These valid questions will inform my exploration of the selected postcolonial works addressing sex trafficking. In interrogating the narratives named above, I look at the victim-trafficker-consumer triad in order to determine each party’s presence or absence from the text and the implications of these authorial decisions in terms of the discourses these representations legitimize. As mentioned above, postcolonial studies have often come under attack for their perceived shortcomings.31 I then ask what role postcolonial theory can play in overcoming subaltern women’s exploitation within a neocolonial context. Above all, I examine how postcolonial literature can help (or not) to promote social change, and if literature and theory can generate fruitful social interventions beyond the level of academic discourse.
When looking at the female victims/survivors, then, I compare their representations in terms of their agency or lack thereof, the way in which the violence committed against them is elaborated in the text, and the purpose they serve as literary depictions of third-world women. Graham Huggan notes that postcolonial works are often marketed precisely through showcasing the characters’ marginality, thus creating a “postcolonial exotic” by appropriating the “Other” while domesticating it. In so doing, the “exoticist rhetoric of fetishized otherness and sympathetic identification masks the inequality of the power relations without which the discourse could not function” (14). Schaffer and Smith for their part warn that “markets feed” Western audiences’ insecurities regarding the subaltern Other “and provide commodified stories through which readers can reinvent imagined securities. Some readers may respond to insecurities by enacting empathetic identification [with the Other] into their more familiar framework of meaning[, which enables them] to dispel the fear of otherness by containing it” (25). Against such a narcissistic appropriation of a “distant suffering,” I ask in particular if these narratives generate a sympathetic awareness of the position of a vast number of postcolonial women in order to improve their dreadful situation, or if they evoke paternalistic pity while providing the type of relief that orientalizes the Other and reinforces the superiority of the developed West (as Kristof and WuDunn’s book implies) in terms of its treatment of women—how lucky “we” are not to be like “them.”32 In other words, I question if these postcolonial stories could be fetishizing women for a political/sensationalistic purpose, since, predictably, all the narratives under analysis are woven together by the common thread of sexual violence, actual or potential. Female victims in these stories are abused, raped, tortured, and/or murdered. Yet, along with Sontag’s reflection on the power of silences, the depiction of that violence often moves from suggestion to complete elision. I therefore look at the way in which authors deal stylistically with the violated female body in order to avoid delving into erotica or voyeurism, how they create “art” from rape, how they resist glamorizing it in a way reminiscent of W. B. Yeats’s “Leda and the Swan” or Ovid’s Metamorphoses, and how they approach the difficulty (futility?) of representing sexual violence.33
Regarding the perpetrators of these crimes, I examine the degree to which their portrayals demonize them as the only visible faces of sex trafficking or orientalize them as problematic aliens (the Jews, the Asian mafias, the corrupt Africans, the Mexican drug dealers, etc.). Along these lines, I analyze the purpose the criminals in these narratives serve in the context of white ethnocentric discourse. As Kamala Kempadoo observes in Trafficking and Prostitution Reconsidered (2005), the US redefined organized crime from “white collar and corporate activities” in the early twentieth century, to “organized criminal conspiracy led by gangsters, ‘unassimilable’ immigrants and ‘undesired’ aliens” by mid twentieth century, which in turn legitimized the imperative to restrict immigration from poor nations.34 I then consider the possibility of traffickers becoming the “tip of the iceberg” of a crime that has far broader political, economic, and ethical implications, since, according to the most current data on sex trafficking, men from developed nations encompass a great portion of the buyers and consumers of sex from trafficked third-world women.35
Interestingly, in media representations, the demand side often remains absent from the narrative. The “cruel” trafficker and the “illegal” prostitute regularly turn into sensationalist news material while the reason why they exist in the first place is kept safely under the rug. As Castillo explains, trafficking “analysis generally focuses on rescue of the women—a moral good—while paying much less attention to the reprehensible role played by the First World clients who purchase these services, men only slightly less exploitative than the traffickers” (841). Ironically, the sex industry “is [still] structured in such a way that the male customer enjoys the privilege of being anonymous in a socially stigmatized activity, while the prostitute[,] whether ‘free’ or trafficked, is often exposed to the contempt of society” (Samarasinghe 9). Along with reflecting on the symbolic invisibility of the trafficked woman, perhaps one should pay more attention to the opportune invisibility of the male customer. The fact that prostitution continues to be regarded as a “necessary evil” since “men will be men,” while the women who satisfy their demand are scorned and debased, speaks of the resilience of patriarchy today. When we do hear in the media about the men involved, Kempadoo remarks that profiteers “appear almost exclusively as networks of foreign men, and trafficked persons in these scenarios become poor brown or black women from Asia, Africa, and Latin America, or young women from Eastern Europe or Russia” (xvii). In this way, the demand side generally escapes the headlines, when, in fact, “without assistance from ‘legitimate’ businessmen, lawyers, police and other law enforcement officials, politicians, and CEOs of large corporations [ … ] organized crime is unsuccessful” (xviii). Coinciding with this trend, in the texts analyzed, most of the men consuming sex slaves are elided; when present, they are generally kept anonymous, or a few barely developed ones synecdochically represent a larger group. Yet I argue that their anonymity in this case fulfills a different aesthetic purpose: it does not intend to protect the client but, on the contrary, it functions as a strategy to both privilege the woman’s point of view and avert the perpetrator’s exploitative gaze.
If one thinks of the relative scarcity of literary representations of sex trafficking by postcolonial writers in comparison with works about prostitution, the more recent media exposure comes to mind, while, as suggested before, the feminist disagreements on the trafficking/prostitution agency debates can account for the inadequate scholarly response to the issue. Lack of aesthetic analyses of this topic highlights a critical gap that, as Stone points out, literary studies and feminist theory must address in order to generate productive interventions for trafficked women today. With such intention, this work will connect postcolonial literature with a number of interdisciplinary sources both in English and Spanish from sociology, anthropology, philosophy, trauma theory, history, journalism, and economics. My decision to explore the topic as interpreted in postcolonial literature while in conversation with all these different fields derives from its capacity to generate a fruitful ethical debate in the humanities. By ethics, I imply an “ethics of liberation” as understood by the Argentinean-Mexican philosopher Enrique Dussel, “from the perspective and in the interests of the immense majority of humanity excluded by globalization throughout the world” and not that of the “hegemonic dominating minorities [ … ] that own the resources, the words, the arguments, the capital, the armies” (xx). Indeed, in the study of literature, discussions about context, ethics and empathy are central, granting the debate a perspective lost in numbers, media manipulations, or even in journalistic testimonials that, because of the emotional shock value of the accounts (as Bertolt Brecht warned), may end up desensitizing audiences and depoliticizing the issue, thus no significant epistemic shift occurs.36
True, the reception of these stories will always vary according to the different readers who pick them up, and no one can be certain of any results.37 But despite its limitations, the literature is worth examining because, depending on how one reads it, the narrative carries the potential for positive change. Sharing a hopeful view of the power of the humanities, Spivak argues that
the teacher can try to rearrange desires noncoercively [ … ] through an attempt to develop in the student a habit of literary reading[,] suspending oneself into the text of the other—for which the first condition and effect is a suspension of the conviction that I am necessarily better, I am necessarily indispensable, I am necessarily the one to right wrongs[.] (“Righting” 532)
At the risk of sounding too optimistic, and in agreement with Spivak, I believe that in response to the hegemonic neoliberal capitalism that creates our desires, in the study of the humanities, we have the ability to critically undermine those desires. The (less coercive) forum of the transnational classroom offers a fertile ground for rethinking our approach to this issue and move from focusing solely on third-world evil traffickers and (empowered or disempowered) victims to addressing as well the predatory capitalism that generates trafficking in the first place. The challenge, perhaps, lies in abandoning the position of Western readers as charitable “saviors”—which maintains old colonial hierarchies intact—and assuming instead the role of implicated global citizens with an ethical responsibility towards fellow human beings.38 With this in mind, I will examine the literature through the lenses of multiple theorists, some of whom engage in postcolonial, feminist, psychoanalytic, and/or Marxist criticism, because combining these theoretical frameworks can shed light on the current sex trafficking crisis. In turn, these approaches will illuminate the ethical response the global North owes to these women on whom it continues to build its development, but who it conveniently refuses to acknowledge.39
NOTES
1. Noticeably, during the current world economic crises that has begun to impact countries in the global North, it is the middle and lower classes that have been most adversely affected, while companies selling luxury items (such as Louis Vuitton, Tiffany’s, Porsche, etc.) have reported exponential increases in their sales. See the animation by Mariana Santos in this bibliography.
2. See Juliana Rincon Parra (2011) and Debora Spar (2002) in this bibliography.
3. Sheryl WuDunn, co-author of Half the Sky (and Kristof’s wife), worked for Goldman Sachs as a private wealth advisor. See Sneed in this bibliography.
4. As mentioned above, the book and the documentary address other forms of female oppression in the third world, not only sex trafficking. I refer to sex trafficking exclusively as this is the focus of my book.
5. Even when it comes to the trafficking of girls for domestic work, some of the solutions Kristof offers may disconcert readers: “One way to fight such human trafficking,” Kristof proposes, “would be to provide free and accessible birth control, so that women like [the Haitian girl’s mother he writes about in the NYT] don’t end up with 12 children that they struggle to feed” (“A Girl’s Escape”). Of course, the option of free and accessible birth control in Haiti would be helpful, as it would be in any country in the world. But the suggestion that this would be a way to fight human trafficking without considering root causes of the problem is troubling, as it seems to put the burden (blame?) on the women and not on the system of inequality that generates trafficking in the first place. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak criticized such type of rhetoric about third-world women’s reproductive rights at the International Conference on Population Development (Cairo, September 1994).
6. I am quoting Rudyard Kipling’s poem “The White Man’s Burden” (260) and Spivak’s A Critique of Postcolonial Reason (287).
7. Here, I echo Ian Almond, who, in agreement with Žižek and Spivak, highlights “the manner in which Western hegemonic agendas appropriate feminist/humanitarian concerns to justify their ‘interventions’” (The New Orientalists 133). Joseph Slaughter’s seminal Human Rights, Inc. (2007) makes a similar point: human rights “violations are often committed in the Orwellian name of human rights themselves, cloaked in the palliative rhetoric of humanitarian intervention, the chivalric defense of women and children, the liberalization of free markets, the capitalist promise of equal consumerist opportunity, the emancipatory causes of freedom and democracy, etc.” (2).
8. For a comprehensive discussion of ethics from a non-Eurocentric perspective, see Enrique Dussel’s Ethics of Liberation: In the Age of Globalization and Exclusion (2013). In this work, the Argentinean-Mexican philosopher endeavors “to articulate new possibilities for humanity out of and in light of the suffering, dignity, and creative drive of [ … ] peripheral lives,” exploring the possibility of a system not based on the exploitation and exclusion of other human beings (xiii).
9. For examples of concrete ways to challenge and change the existing model of late capitalism, see Gibson-Graham in this bibliography.
10. The authors I analyze here represent my selection, but other postcolonial writers have addressed female sex trafficking in their fiction, among them Akachi Adimora Ezeigbo, Chika Unigwe, Bhabani Bhattacharya, Saadat Hasan Manto, Bapsi Sidhwa, Nora Okja-Keller, Chang-rae Lee, Simone Lazaroo, Teo Hsu-Ming, Gabriel García Márquez, Mario Vargas Llosa, and Margaret Atwood, to name some.
11. For an analysis of late capitalism from different theoretical angles see Thomas Picketty, Jean Dreze and Amartya Sen, Joseph E. Stiglitz, Eric Hobsbawm, Noah Chomsky, J. K. Gibson-Graham, Neil Lazarus, Nancy Fraser, and Jamie Martin in this bibliography.
12. Also, see Thomas Picketty’s more recent analysis of inequality in Capital in the Twenty-first Century (2014) in this bibliography.
13. When I talk about inequality, I don’t refer only to the economic disparity between the global North and the global South, but also to the income disparity within countries in the global South as a consequence of “development.” India, for example, shows that extreme wealth and extreme poverty coexist within the same country; see Sen and Dreze in this bibliography.
14. In books that analyze sex trafficking, it is almost cliché to read how actual numbers are difficult to establish, though the estimates are certainly depressing (Ebbe 4). Kamala Kempadoo acknowledges in Trafficking and Prostitution Reconsidered (2005) that “[a]ccurate figures about trafficking do not exist” (xx). Karen Beeks and Delila Amir, for their part, explain in Trafficking and the Global Sex Industry (2006) that
[t]he United Nations estimates that 4 million humans, mostly women and children, become victims of trafficking each year and are forced to work in construction, farming, mining, fishing, landscaping, domestic and childcare work, or in the carpet, garment and brick industries. They are also used as warriors and camel jockeys and coerced into drug trafficking, begging, and illegal adoptions. Victims of sex trafficking are forced into prostitution, pornography, sex tourism, marriages, and the mail-order bride trade. (xi)
Other sources provide far more alarming data on modern-day slavery (including trafficking for prostitution, sweatshop labor, etc.) claiming that “estimates range from about 10 million to 30 million” (Tanneeru). Researchers admit the difficulty of determining exact patterns and statistics for sex trafficking because of the crime’s clandestine nature and the understandable reluctance of the victims to come forward due to their fear of traffickers’ retaliation on themselves or their families. The estimate I give here is based on a survey of all the sources on trafficking compiled in this bibliography and it is not intended to offer an exact final number as such number does not exist.
15. Among them, GAATW (Global Alliance Against Trafficking in Women), which considers sex work a chosen form of labor, and CATW (Coalition Against Trafficking in Women), which has an abolitionist agenda.
16. See Ebbe’s “Introduction” and “Chapter 2.”
17. Looking at the consumers’ profile, we can identify “three sets of actors and stakeholders” involved in sex trafficking; the different chapters will reflect upon the representation of each of them:
The core group is the individual male customers. First, are the men who solicit and buy sex, variously known as customers, clients, Johns, curb crawlers and punters[.] The second group is the direct profiteers of trafficking. There are the individuals and groups, consisting mainly, but certainly not exclusively[,] of males. They are recruiters, pimps, brothel owners and managers, criminal gang members, drivers, and corrupt officials who form the immediate link between the customer and the service provider. [ … ] The third group of stakeholders includes institutions and organizations that facilitate the industry such as the tourist and entertainment industries, criminal organizations, the military, and also the state. (Samarasinghe 167)
18. See the “European Commission: Together against Trafficking in Human Beings” report in this bibliography.
19. In the Protocol to Prevent, Suppress and Punish Trafficking in Persons, Especially Women and Children (often referred to as the Palermo Protocol), Article 3 stipulates that
Trafficking in persons shall mean the recruitment, transportation, transfer, harbouring or receipt of persons, by means of the threat or use of force or 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 benefits 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. (2)
This protocol was replicated in 2005 in Article 4 of the Council of Europe Convention on Action against Trafficking in Human Beings (the Trafficking Convention). The Palermo Protocol and other international instruments following it “focus on the three Ps: prosecution of traffickers, protection of victims (which includes compensation) and prevention of trafficking” (Keren-Paz 9). While the Palermo Protocol “focuses on criminalization—only the provisions with respect to prosecution are mandatory, not those with respect to the protection of the victims[; the] Trafficking Convention and the recent 2011 EU Trafficking Directive put more emphasis than the Protocol on victims’ protection” (9). Keren-Paz notes that “the extent to which protection of victims is adequate is debated and the Trafficking Convention does not remedy in full the Protocol’s weakness that the protection provisions are optional” (9).
20. Zhang observes that during the early twentieth century, feminists played a key role in “lobbying government agencies in the Western countries to abolish brothels and all forms of prostitution. Their successful political activism eventually tied prostitution to trafficking and subsequently led to the passage of the United Nations’ International Convention for the Suppression of the Trafficking in Persons in 1949” (107). Later, a new wave of feminists understood prostitution as an option of “survival taken by women” that shouldn’t be penalized (107).
For further clarification on the prostitution/trafficking divide from a non-abolitionist perspective, see Trafficking and Prostitution Reconsidered: New Perspectives on Migration, Sex Work and Human Rights edited by Kamala Kempadoo, Global Sex Workers: Rights, Resistance, and Redefinition edited by Kempadoo and Jo Doezema, and Prostitution Policy: Revolutionizing Practice through a Gendered Perspective by Lenore Kuo. To understand the abolitionists’ side of the debate, refer to Female Sexual Slavery by Kathleen Barry, “Prostitution and Civil Rights” and “Trafficking, Prostitution and Inequality” by Catharine A. MacKinnon, and anything by Donna Hughes. For a general overview on the debate, see Female Sex Trafficking in Asia: The Resilience of Patriarchy in a Changing World by Vidyamali Samarasinghe and Love and Politics: Radical Feminist and Lesbian Theories by Carol Anne Douglas in this bibliography.
21. Early in the 1980s, Lorde observed:
Poor women and women of Color know there is a difference between the daily manifestations of marital slavery [denounced by white middle-class feminists] and prostitution because it is our daughters who line 42nd Street. If white American feminist theory need not deal with the differences between us, and the resulting difference in our oppression, then how do you deal with the fact that the women who clean your houses and tend your children while you attend conferences on feminist theory are, for the most part, poor women and women of Color? (16)
The issue Lorde highlights carries both ethical and political implications. As Barbara Ehrenreich and Arlie Russel Hochschild note, today “tens of millions of western European women are in the workforce who were not before—and there has been no proportionate expansion in public services” (9). The critics further emphasize that first world governments have failed “to meet the needs created by its women’s entry into the work force. The downsized American [ … ] welfare state has become a ‘deadbeat dad.’ Unlike the rest of the industrialized world, the United States does not offer public child care for working mothers, nor does it ensure paid family medical leave” (8).
22. For a comprehensive survey of feminist theory see Kolmar and Bartkowski’s Feminist Theory: A Reader (2013) in this bibliography.
23. Coerced sex trafficking complicates such feminist debates. At times, girls who lack opportunities to support themselves or their families are promised “decent” jobs somewhere else by boyfriends, relatives, or acquaintances, so they enter the sex trade unknowingly. Of those trafficked women who do know that they will be doing sex work, many report that they had no idea about the inhumane way in which they would be treated, so, despite initially consenting to being trafficked for sex work, once these women are in the trade, they can become virtual slaves with limited ability to escape. Still, one must acknowledge that there are women who choose to be trafficked for sex work and maintain a high degree of agency and manage to make a living out of sex work. This analysis understands the complexities of the issue and how the discourse on “trafficked victims” negatively affects voluntary sex workers (see Jo Doezema’s Sex Slaves and Discourse Masters: The Construction of Trafficking in this bibliography). I focus only on coerced trafficked women because of their much higher vulnerability.
24. China, Middle Eastern, and post-socialist countries also traffic women for prostitution, but this work focuses on postcolonial stories only, assuming the term “postcolonial” as understood in academia (colonies under Western European [and Japanese] power from the mid-twentieth century to the present). Following such criteria, I will not analyze sex trafficking in post-socialist nations either, even though they account for a large portion of the sex trafficking market.
25. See Lazarus for further analysis of the economic and political situation of post-colonial countries since 1945 to the present.
26. The US was not alone in this trend. To quote an example from another popular emigration destination that will be analyzed here, Argentina also passed restrictive “leyes de residencia” [residency laws] around the same time, favoring white (preferably educated) immigrants.
27. For an analysis of resistance in postcolonial studies, see Robert J. C. Young in this bibliography.
28. Understandably, a scholar such as Donna M. Bickford, who in some of her excellent work on sex trafficking emphasizes trafficked women’s agency, states:
I do not want to be heard as minimizing or sanitizing the violation of human rights that is trafficking. The fact that in these novels the protagonists are represented in ways that give them individuality, humanity and agency should not and does not detract from the horrors and violence faced by trafficking victims and survivors. But, it is to note that, although most trafficking victims come from positions of very little societal privilege, they are not without some agency. (132–3)
Such claim is of course valid, and I am not arguing that these women have no agency at all, but suggesting instead that in some contexts (such as the coerced sex trafficking explored in this volume) other critical foci can generate more productive interventions. Coerced sex trafficking clearly complicates issues of agency, so it should be not analyzed through the same approaches to address sex work or prostitute migration (so often conflated with “trafficking”).
29. Postcolonial studies have been criticized both from inside and outside the field. For a succinct survey of the debates within postcolonial studies, see Graham Huggan’s “Introduction: Writing at the Margins” in The Postcolonial Exotic: Marketing the Margins (2001). Also, see Ian Almond’s “Anti-Capitalist Objections to the Postcolonial: Some Conciliatory Remarks on Žižek and Context” (2012) in this bibliography.
30. Stone denounces the fact that (white liberal) North American and European feminisms have ignored the issue because these schools have privileged aspects of female individuality, empowerment, and celebratory sexuality to the detriment of subaltern trafficked women who do not necessarily fit those paradigms. The critic refers to Teresa L. Ebert’s Ludic Feminism and After (1996), where Ebert claims that “postmodern feminisms have focused on theories of desire, performativity, linguistic play, difference, and discourse to the relative exclusion of theories and analyses of class, capitalism, oppression, and ‘patriarchy’” (Stone 35). In so doing, Ebert argues that these approaches legitimize “the class politics of an upper-middle class Euroamerican feminism obsessed with the freedom of the entrepreneurial subject’” (qtd. in Stone 35). Like Stone and Ebert, the philosopher Richard Rorty is suspicious of postmodern feminisms’ potential for political action, so he invites feminists to “visualize new practices, as opposed to analyzing old ones” (108). Rorty observes:
It is often said that deconstruction offers “tools” which enable feminists to show, as Barbara Johnson puts it, that “the differences between entities (prose and poetry, man and woman, literature and theory, guilt and innocence) are shown to be based on repression of differences within entities, ways by which an entity differs from itself[.”] The question whether these differences were there (huddled together deep down within the entity, waiting to be brought to light by deconstructing excavators), or are only there in the entity after the feminist has finished reshaping the entity into a social construct nearer her heart’s desire, seems to me of no interest whatever[.] All that matters is what we can do to persuade people to act differently than in the past. The question of what, ultimately, deep down, determines whether they will or will not change their ways is the sort of metaphysical topic feminists can safely neglect. (108)
31. See Huggan’s “Introduction: Writing at the Margins” in The Postcolonial Exotic: Marketing the Margins (2001) and Almond’s “Anti-Capitalist Objections to the Postcolonial: Some Conciliatory Remarks on Žižek and Context” (2012) in this bibliography.
32. See Luc Boltanski’s Distant Suffering: Morality, Media and Politics (1999), and Lilie Chouliaraki’s The Spectatorship of Suffering (2006) in this bibliography.
33. For an interesting article on the recent disturbing media trend (especially in the fashion and entertainment industries) to glamorize corpses and violence against women, see Kira Cochrane in this bibliography.
34. “By the 1960s,” Kempadoo explains, “it was believed [that] foreign elements ‘threatened the integrity of the local government … corrupted police officers and lawyers … infiltrated legitimate businesses … [and] subverted the decency and integrity of a free society,’ conflicting with, or even posing a danger to, the very fabric of society and the state” (xviii).
35. Stephanie Hepburn notes that the
US is one of the top 10 destinations for human trafficking—with tens of thousands of people trafficked into the country each year. There have been reports of trafficking in over 90 US cities. In fact, the US is the most frequent destination for victims trafficked from Latin America [ … ] and one of the top three destinations for persons trafficked from Asia [ … ] for the purposes of forced labor and sexual exploitation. (3)
36. See Donna M. Bickford’s essay in this bibliography.
37. Where and how a narrative is received, for example, could determine whether a story will arouse only sterile pity for a “distant suffering” or mobilize effective interventions (Boltanski). For an analysis of the reception of human rights narratives, see Schaffer and Smith in this bibliography.
38. See Enrique Dussel in this bibliography.
39. I am referring to human trafficking in general as defined by the Palermo Protocol, not only sex trafficking.