The productive incoherence of "sex trafficking"

Abstract

In the late 1990s and early 2000s, the specter of global sex trafficking swept across the globe, transforming social policy and public discourse at local, national, and transnational levels. Spurred by growing concerns about accelerated cross-border migration, within a short span of time governments and governmental agencies were soon drawing up political commitments to “fighting trafficking” to justify a wide array of agendas: from crackdowns on labor migration to border control and surveillance to the erection of a protective wall on the southern border between the United States (US) and Mexico. Why did the rubric of “sex trafficking” travel so well across national and international borders, despite gathering evidence that this framework was neither descriptive nor ameliorative in terms of the lived experiences of women, men, transgender and gender-nonconforming people who engage in sexual labor? 1 What work has this framework done in different national contexts to shore up specific gender agendas, as well as neoliberal commitments to privatization, incarceration, border control, and surveillance? And how have global legal frames and language interfaced with local debates around gender, sexuality, citizenship, and nationhood in the configuration of state apparatuses of control?