Paper short abstract:

The contemporary nexus between migration and the global sex industry is the outcome of transformations of established geopolitical, economic and moral orders and of the associated forms of subjectivity. Against the scenario of victimisation emphasised by anti-trafficking rhetoric and policies, many migrant young men and women work in the global sex industry in order to negotiate their economic-psychological autonomy from ‘home’ and to sustain more transnational, diasporic and cosmopolitan lifestyles and identities. By engaging with original ethnographic and interview material, I will analyse the ways in which essentialist gender, ethnic and sexual normativities are both reproduced and challenged through embodied practices, such as migration and sex work, rather than through verbalised discourses. In doing so, I will de-construct hegemonic understandings of young migrants’ involvement in the global sex trade in terms of ‘trafficking’ and ‘exploitation’ to show how the (anti)trafficking logic of ‘humanitarian intervention’ provides forms of solidarity and support which are paradoxically enforcing the demarcation of moral, economic and geopolitical forms of subalternity.

Paper long abstract:

The contemporary nexus between migration and the global sex industry is the outcome of transformations of established geopolitical, economic and moral orders and of the associated forms of subjectivity. Against the scenario of victimisation emphasised by anti-trafficking rhetoric and policies, many migrant young men and women work in the global sex industry in order to negotiate their economic-psychological autonomy from 'home' and to sustain more transnational, diasporic and cosmopolitan lifestyles and identities. By engaging with original ethnographic and interview material, I will analyse the ways in which essentialist gender, ethnic and sexual normativities are both reproduced and challenged through embodied practices, such as migration and sex work, rather than through verbalised discourses. In doing so, I will de-construct hegemonic understandings of young migrants' involvement in the global sex trade in terms of 'trafficking' and 'exploitation' to show how the (anti)trafficking logic of 'humanitarian intervention' provides forms of solidarity and support which are paradoxically enforcing the demarcation of moral, economic and geopolitical forms of subalternity.

The talk will be preceded by the screening of an excerpt from NORMAL, an experimental documentary film I made out of the made of the combined interviews with four young migrants, who are impersonated by actors. The four characters explain how they came to see their involvement in the sex industry as NORMAL and how their notion of normality evolved with their life experiences. At the same time, their life trajectories do not conform to the victim/villain stereotypical opposition which dominates current debates about sex trafficking.