Reconstruction 7.1 (2007)


Return to Contents, Capital, The state, Family, Gender»

 

Transnational and Intimate Crossings: The 'Threatening Body' of the 'Migrant Sex-Worker' [1] / Melissa Autumn White

 

Abstract: This paper introduces the rubric of the "migrant sex-working body" in order to theorize the affective and geopolitical valences of power 'threatened' by such bodies. The everyday and affective labours of migrant sex-workers whose bodies have been positioned as a 'threat' to the imagined community of the nation and to Hetero Factory's (Rossi 2003) family are fetishized in a Marxian sense in order to make an exploration of the collusion of transnational "structures of feeling" and border security regimes possible. In other words, the focus of the paper is not on or about the "migrant sex-working body", but rather on the epistemological, affective, and geopolitical ruptures the movements of such bodies invoke. Critical citizenship studies and Kristeva's notion of the abject (1982) along with insights drawn from queer theory underpin the analytic approach of the paper.

 

 

Thought as such is already in conformity with a model that it borrows from the State apparatus. --Deleuze and Guattari (1987: 374)


<1> The 2003 Slovenian film Reservni Deli (Spare Parts), directed by Damjan Kozole, documents the growing friendship of two men who work together smuggling 'displaced persons' across borders after the collapse of the former Yugoslavia. One of the opening scenes in the film depicts the awful, if predictable, sexual coercion of a young woman migrant desperate for money and medicine for her ill boyfriend, at the hands of the 'smugglers.' The banal mixes with the eternally unsettling as the film documents by now commonplace (recognized) oppressions of those forced into migration, and offers a familiar instance of the specific vulnerabilities of women migrants and displaced persons [2]. What the film does not offer is the story of capitalist socio-economic and political relations, militarization, imperialism, and Hetero Factory (Rossi 2003) that contextualize the narratives of contemporary transnational migrations in locationally specific ways.

<2> The connections between transnational migration and the sexual exploitation of womenandchildren [3](to borrow Cynthia Enloe's amalgamation) has become somewhat spectacularly visible through the predominance of international anti-trafficking campaigns, headed up by such organizations as the United Nations (UN), the International Organization for Migration (IOM), the Global Alliance Against Traffic in Women (GAATW), and the Coalition Against Trafficking in Women (CATW) (a group in which, incidentally, Janice Raymond, author of the rabidly transphobic The Transsexual Empire, is active) . In the Canadian context, the Department of Justice has launched an awareness campaign that includes posters depicting victims of trafficking, with slogans such as "People for Sale in Canada? The Answer Will Shock You" [4]. The Canadian campaign also includes a booklet entitled "Don't Become a Victim in the Illegal Trade in Persons", which has been translated into fourteen languages for distribution in Canadian missions and non-governmental organizations abroad [5].

<3> This spectacular visibility of cross-borders sexual trafficking, however, has had the effect of obscuring systems of power that render some bodies more vulnerable to exploitation - the 'traffic in persons' - than others. Rendered invisible are gendered and racialized systems of power structured through and by colonial histories that put some bodies into the position of dependency on so-called 'smugglers' or 'traffickers' in order to make their movement a possibility (Sharma 2003: 60). As Nandita Sharma (2003) has argued, for many would-be migrants, the facilitation of movement by a third or mediating party is the only means available to cross borders, particularly in a post 9/11 moment marked by ever more punitive and restrictive access to countries in the Global North [6] (e.g. Fortress Europe, Fortress North America, Fortress Australia).

<4> There is of course a marked difference between the definitions of 'smuggling' and 'trafficking', where according to the Department of Justice Canada: "Trafficking in persons is not migrant smuggling. Smuggled migrants are usually free once they arrive at their destination; trafficking victims are not" [7]. Underpinning this commonsense distinction is a gendered logic - within a patriarchal social order, the distinction between 'smuggling' and 'trafficking' is a highly gendered one. As a political discourse, the smuggling and trafficking distinction often reinforces the agency of men and the victimization of women: male migrants are smuggled, and womenandchildren are trafficked (Ditmore, 2005). Further, the conflation of sex work as symptomatic of trafficking evades a nuanced understanding of the complexities of contemporary migration. As Melissa Ditmore has put it, "[e]quating sex work and trafficking leads to an overly simple analysis that neglects the core issue of trafficking, namely migration, while refocusing discussion on other problems" (2005:107) [8]. Indeed, the lurid conflation of cross-border sex-work with "trafficking" not only fails to attend to the structuring relations of power that shape migrations, but also reinforces this logic of gendered power. Male migrants are assumed the agency to enter into illegalised assisted migration, while female migrants who make their migrations possible through sex-work are assumed to be victims of exploitative, coerced, and forced migration.

<5>This is a gendered logic of power that is nevertheless subject to subversion in particular instances. Given that migrants who rely on being 'smuggled' - i.e. those who 'choose' to migrate, by assisted and illegalized means - face detention and deportation if apprehended by authorities, those who are accepted as 'victims' of 'trafficking' in the North American context may apply for and receive a special permit for residency or work visas, provided that they testify against the 'trafficker' and secure a case against him/her/them (Sharma 2003: 59; and see Chapkis 2003). In the context of cross-borders sex-work, the distinction between having been 'trafficked' or having been 'smuggled' becomes even more nebulous. Given the 'double' criminalization of illegalized migration and illegalized sex-work, "a woman can not say that she knew full well that she was coming to the U.S. or Canada to work as a sex worker without admitting her guilt at committing a criminal offence. Only by claiming to have been kidnapped, lured, or misled into working as a sex worker can she expect any help from most women's organizations or the state" (Sharma 2003:59).

<6> While the distinctions underlying the classification of migrants as 'trafficked' or 'smuggled' are important on a number of levels, not least because cross-borders sex-work is often conflated with 'trafficking', I want to open other channels of analysis by introducing the rubric of the "migrant sex-working body" [9]. This rubric allows for a focussed articulation of the specificities of the challenge that such migrant workers pose to transnational systems of power, striated as they are along the lines of national borders, and structured as they are through regimes of im/migration that serve to create not only bodies external to the nation-state, but also internal others who may live, work, and die within a geopolitical zone without ever being formally recognized by the state as members of its citizenry (Chan & Sharma 2006). That is, "migrant sex-working bodies" pose a threat to the politics of containment that nation-states rely on for their consistent re-production precisely because their affective labour -i.e. erotic, sensory, and reproductive - crosses the borders of national security as well as the intimately guarded perimeters of the dominant, heteronormative family structure so integral to national and capitalist regimes of power.

 

"Threatening" Bodies

<7> What makes some bodies "threatening"? If we consider the processes - epistemological, affective, and geopolitical - by which the labour of certain bodies come to take on the ontological status of being a "threat" to the nation-state and to Hetero Factory's family, then we may be able to pose the question this way: How has the migrant sex-working body come to matter in the contemporary moment in particular ways? This is a way of asking about the kind of conditions in which the "migrant sex-working body" has become an object both of and for thought. The question of how this body has come to matter relies on the double-sense of "matter" that Judith Butler draws attention to in her queer volume Bodies That Matter: On the Discursive Limits of 'Sex' (1993). In other words, the question has simultaneously to do with how the very materiality of the body hailed by the rubric "migrant sex-working body" has come into 'being' in a context of global capitalism's national immigration regimes, and how this body has come to 'matter' in an affective and cultural sense, by way of being coded and thus intelligible within structures of social and cultural recognition through discursive practices (see Hall 1997) [10].

<8> The source of the 'threat' is not located in the bodies themselves, but rather is produced as a constellation of effects through the bodies' labour that works as a disruption of systems of power that often remain naturalized, obscured through familiarization. The "migrant sex-working body" is a body that threatens the nation as an imagined community (Anderson 1983) of 'citizens' while simultaneously disrupting the "structures of feeling" (Williams 1961) that define affective dimensions of the socio-political, by way of posing an implicit challenge to the family as it is organized through the machineries of the Hetero Factory.

<9> Rather than considering the migrant sex-working body as a given, or as a flattened out 'victim' in urgent need of protection, we need to think about the processes through which such bodies become politically, socially, and psychically threatening. Such bodies disrupt the alignments of the state with capital's Empire (Hardt and Negri 2000), and with Hetero Factory's family. Migrant sex-working bodies are deemed 'threatening' precisely because they carry the potential of radically reorganizing transnational and intimate space(s). Indeed, in the Canadian context, for example, sex-workers have been somewhat successful in their efforts of self-organizing to ensure that their rights as workers are protected, and the state has responded by using non-status as a basis upon which to deport non-citizen or 'migrant' sex-workers [11].

 

The State, the Body, and Empire

<10> While a number of scholars posit that the sovereignty and the specificity of nations has been transformed by the forces of globalization and transnational migration (e.g. Appadurai 1996; Ong 1999) others argue that the nation-state remains central to political economy and the ways in which global capitalism continues to expand its emerging Empire (e.g. Hardt & Negri 2004; Sharma 2003, 2006). Neo-liberal discourses of 'globalization' suggest that borders are dissolving, that the world is getting smaller, as if a global community united by the language of capitalism and a shared love of consumption has already emerged. In contrast, critical understandings of 'globalization' might understand the term in a double sense: both extensively, as in the expansion of productive terrain vis-à-vis markets; and intensively, "as the absorption of all of social life within capitalist production" (Negri 1999: 83; Marx 1888) [12].

<11> As Nandita Sharma's research into Canada's "Non-Immigrant Employment Authorization Program" (NIEAP) has demonstrated, the state is implicated in the literal production of a pool of thus-called migrant workers required for global capital (2006). As Sharma's research demonstrates, one of the crucial ways that affluent states relentlessly contribute to global capitalism is through im/migration and border security regimes that actively produce citizens and non-citizens, 'migrants' and 'international travelers', 'international students', undocumented workers, 'illegal' migrants, 'family class' migrants, 'refugees', etc. (2003, 2006). The state, in regulating and categorizing the movements of labouring bodies (particularly racialized, ethnicized [13], ' postcolonial' bodies), and in producing bodies that are outsiders within the space of the nation, secures its own legitimacy as a geopolitical entity, as though borders of 'security' were natural, inevitable, necessary, and therefore justifiable.

<12> The effect of im/migration and border security regimes is the (re)production of a pool of precarious, vulnerable, and highly exploitable bodies, whose labour can then be appropriated for the production of surplus value - key to capital's expansion (Marx 1888; Sharma 2003, 2006; Shah 2005). According to Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri (2004), border controls, in connection with im/migration regimes, have produced a system of Global Apartheid. As they write:

In the global Empire today, as it was before [sic] in South Africa, apartheid is a productive system of hierarchical inclusion that perpetuates the wealth of the few through the labour and poverty of the many. The global political body is in this way also an economic body defined by the global divisions of labour and power (2004: 167).

<13> Deleuze and Guattari (1987), in theorizing deterritorialization-reterritorialization, have also argued that the striation of space - i.e. through geopolitical borders - must be understood not as assemblages that literally stop movement, but rather as mechanisms for the re-organizations of spatialized hierarchies that work through differential inclusions. Differential inclusions are distinct from more explicitly exclusionary processes in that they "organize the paradox that those who have been Othered are within the 'contextual' or physical space occupied by national society, but positioned as definitive outsiders by its legal and social framework" (Sharma 2006: 145; emphasis added). In other words, borders not only striate physical space, but also the 'space' of the social, ordering it in/through valences of domination and differential access not only to 'security' but also to hope and the opportunity for a better, more liveable life (White 2005). In this sense, the migrant sex-working body is not, in any way, external to the nation. It is, in fact, internal to its re-organization and security.

<14> States are also implicated in expanding capital's Empire through processes of militarization, which exacerbate or create further global inequities as these are organized through violence, fear, threat of destruction and materialized destruction. Militarization and the spread of actual global terror through networks of violence and the wars the US, for example, is waging in Iraq, Afghanistan, and supporting in Lebanon and against the Palestinians produce the very conditions that put more people "on the move" - as refugees, displaced persons, and the globally 'homeless'. The gross insecurities and processes of violence that global capitalism and imperialist wars produce are simultaneously intrinsic to the emergence of capital's Empire, which requires the vulnerability and precariousness, and indeed, insecurity, of some bodies - namely refugee, non-citizen, displaced, and "Third World looking" (Hage 1998) bodies. As Anna Agathangelou and L.H.M. Ling have compellingly shown, UN peacekeeping missions are, like the state, similarly implicated in contributing to Empire, by way of rebuilding war-torn countries so that they can be more productive in a capitalist neo-liberal world order (2003: 134). As their research has also shown, UN peacekeepers are implicated in the highly racialized and gendered nexus of sex-trafficking, by way of assisting the movement of women across borders into sex-trade work that Agathangelou and Ling term "the desire industries" (2003: 134).

<15> Paradoxically enough, it is the vulnerable bodies produced through and constitutive of capital's Empire that then come to be identified as a threat, either real or perceived. The mechanism through which bodies become 'threats' is without doubt a complex one. What is considered a 'threat' changes over time, in specific historical, geopolitical, and cultural contexts. What is of interest to this discussion is the function of the 'threat'. When a body becomes identifiable as a threat the focus on that threatening body as an object of attention displaces a theorization of the broader contexts that produced that body or brought that body into the possibility of 'being' (as in culturally coded, inscribed, and rendered legible). That is to say, once the body is produced as a threatening body - as the locus of a threat - analytic attention to the structures of power that underpin the cultural legibility of such bodies is obscured. In other words, the organization of capitalist political economy structured through geopolitical borders that produce the bodies as migrants and migrant labourers to begin with, and the structures-of-feeling that push sex-work to the liminal spaces of thought and recognition, are not themselves the objects of thought and analysis. Instead, the 'threatening body' becomes the focus of analysis and intervention.

<16> This focus on the "migrant sex-working body" as the locus of the 'problem' - i.e. as a threat to the geopolitical zone of the nation-state and the affective territory of the heteronormative family - allows for the nation-state to re-produce itself as an inhabitable space that is capable of offering protection to those within its borders. The dominant discourses of the victimized trafficked woman forced or coerced into the sex-trade (discourses with which migrant sex-workers must reproduce themselves in order not to be treated as criminals [14]) allow for the state to take on the disingenuous role of 'saviour' and 'protectorate'. Rather than being reflexively implicated in a capitalist assemblage of power, and as a violent regime of exclusion (vis-à-vis punitive im/migration and border security policies and practices), the state disingenuously positions itself as if it were a protectorate of victimized womenandchildren. This deflects attention from the ways that the state is integral to producing the very global conditions that make migration and sex-work a lived reality for so many of the world's poor. A focus on the 'victims' the state is then put into a position to 'save' (having first produced them as vulnerable/threatening bodies), further ensures that such bodies are not considered as mobile and autonomous bodies, seeking pleasure - and seeking the possibility of a better life - by way of crossing borders and through sex work.

 

Hetero Factory and the Production of Normative Bodies-in-Relation

<17> The title of Helsinki-based Leena-Maija Rossi's book, Heterotehdas (Hetero Factory) (2003), stood in as the title for a recent international conference held at the Museum of Work in Norrköping, Sweden [15]. The subtitle of the conference - "normativity in school and working life" - invited participants to delve into how particular structures of hetero- and homo-normativity are continually wrought through systems of governance, social institutions like the academy, and the organization of labour in a global capitalist context. The imperialism of English as both the language of capitalism and the dominant language of the academy means that the brilliantly titled book of Rossi's had, up until the moment of the conference, a relatively small audience - one capable of reading Finnish.

<18> Her concept of Hetero Factory is important to this analysis for a number of reasons. First it gets at the connections between heteronormativity, heterosexism, and the domination of the heterosexual family as the preferred 'factory' through which the nation-state is re-produced. Second, it intimates a simultaneity between the production of proper-bodied heterosexuals and proper-bodied affective labourers for both capitalism and the state. Finally, it speaks to the mechanistic ways through which processes of normalization unfold, through systems, girders, architectures of power that find their expression through the affective bodies of the subjects first produced through these technologies (machineries) of power [16]. Social and political regimes of power, after all, work on the body in part by coding the body as legible and culturally intelligible, and circumscribing its affect - or, "power to act" (in a Spinozan sense). The inscribing of some bodies in the social as 'threatening' rests on the ways in which they are positioned to disrupt the systems of power that find their alignment at the interface of Hetero Factory, the state, and Empire.

<19> One of the effects of Hetero Factory is to naturalize and produce a heteronormative family formation and social organization. These are relations further entrenched through capitalism; as John D'Emilio has argued, expanding capitalism has strengthened the hold of the heteronormative nuclear family bond, "enshrining" it, as he puts it, "as the source of love, affection, and emotional security, the place where our need for stable, intimate human relationships is satisfied" (1983: 108). Affective - i.e. ' feeling', 'sensory', 'emotional' reproductive and erotic - labour, in other words, is to be done within the heteronormative family. Fulfilling erotic and reproductive desire within the context of the organized family is privileged by the state (vis-à-vis taxation, health care, education, etc.) and ultimately works to reproduce the nation's properly embodied workers.

<20> Associated with the intimate, reproductive labour of the family, affective labour is valuable not only to global capitalism, but also to the sustenance of the soul. And when migrant (read 'racialized' and 'ethnicized') workers (read 'victims of trafficking') stand in for this labour of and for the soul, the multiple moral fictions on which contemporary 'liberal' society stands are doubly revealed. Everyone's hands start to feel a little bit dirty, and the "migrant sex-working body" becomes the repository (i.e. target) for containing the threats to society that the excesses of desire and capitalism mobilize (I will return to this point shortly). As I've suggested, the Hetero Factory colludes with global capitalism in re-producing heirarchies of proper labouring bodies, and in the context of the Global North, is also implicated in the reproduction of white supremacy. In 'white-settler' nations haunted by colonial histories and on-going relations of colonization (Gunew 2004) white women continue to be naturalized as the proper 'mothers of the nation', while the racialized, ethnicized 'other' associated with the 'threatening body' of the 'migrant sex-worker' is cast as curiously non-reproductive despite being hyper-sexualized [17].

 

The Abjected Threat

There looms, within abjection, one of those violent, dark revolts of being, directed against a threat that seems to emanate from an exorbitant outside or inside, ejected beyond the scope of the possible, the tolerable, the thinkable. (Kristeva 1982:1)

<21> In a time where global hierarchies of access to hope, opportunity, and the realization of dreams are more deeply stratified than ever before, theorizations of how it is even possible for bodies to be thought of as 'migrant', as 'other', are even more urgent fifteen years following Julia Kristeva's succinct question: "How can one possibly be a foreigner? We seldom think of asking such a question, we are so convinced of being naturally citizens, necessary products of the nation-state" (1991: 41).

<22> The "migrant sex-working body" is, to be sure, a dense body, a site where collective and cultural meanings coalesce, and take repose, the mechanisms of their coalescence disappearing leaving only the implications of effects. The dense body of the migrant sex-worker does a tremendous amount of invisible labour as a repository for negative affects, as a body not only 'other' to the nation, but to the hetero/homonormative family, and even to proper embodiment itself, where the body, particularly through capitalist discourses, is morally conceived as a body like a property, and to be held closed at the doors and windows. The scapegoating of migrant sex-working bodies obscures the extent to which all working bodies are reduced to "property" under capitalist relations. This 'other' body of the migrant sex-worker can be understood as functioning to stabilize and obscure the familiar through a process of abjection, which describes, in Kristeva's terms, the process through which the very border of society or culture may emerge. For abjection - the casting out, the containment of the unsettling - is a response to that which "disturbs identity, system, order. What does not respect borders, positions, rules. The in-between, the ambiguous, the composite" (Kristeva 1982: 4). According to Kristeva, in casting out what unsettles, abjection works affectively to simultaneously secure national identity and subjectivity both (1982; and see Ahmed 2005).

<23> In other words, the edge of the territory - of the subject, of the nation-state, of the heteronormative family - is marked and established in part by what is driven out, what is excluded from the inclusive, proper, morally contained, space. The "migrant sex-working body", constituted as abject, edges the zone or domain, marking it, and having a role in producing it. The abject is driven out, and in being driven out, comes strangely into being (Kristeva 1982: 6) [18]. But, as such a marker of the edge, it continuously threatens the zone, always threatening to disturb.

<24> The threat of the abject is its return, its refusal to be driven out, once and for all. That it secures the borders of national identity for some time is juxtaposed by the threat it continually poses to those borders with dissolution or rupture. The threatening body of the migrant sex-worker may be contained, but it always threatens to unsettle the containment that allows the systems that brought it into being to be 'forgotten' (White 2005). Abjection is above all ambiguity itself, even as it is mobilized as a guard against the ambiguity it comes to stand in for (Kristeva 1982; Ahmed 2005: 102). As Kristeva acknowledges, "While releasing a hold, [abjection] does not radically cut off the subject from what threatens it - on the contrary, abjection acknowledges it to be in perpetual danger" (1982:9).

<25> Abjection works not only at the level of the psychic subject, but also at the level of the social, and particularly the nation-state. The ambiguity of the abject then points toward the fact that, as Foucault has put it, "Society Must Be Defended" (2003) [19]. What is this society that it requires a persistent and perpetual defence? The force of the must disrupts any possibility that society could be considered 'natural' or 'inevitable', and rather points to the fact that in order to persist, indeed society relies on a complex of defences - many of which are overt (militarization, im/migration regimes, border security), and many of which fail to be acknowledged (affective, melancholic, and psychic levels of defences which structure the national imaginary and heteronormative family in particular ways).

 

Conclusion

<26> In a global imaginary dominated by the striated territories of nation-states and discourses of citizenship as belonging, migrant workers are the epitome of the working "homeless", and are the bodies through which the nation-state re-articulates its borders. Indeed without an 'other' non-citizen body to interdict, stop, arrest, detain, deport, or grant temporary access to or "protect", what would the nation-state as a geopolitical territory of inclusion be? [20] Without the non-citizen 'other', the nation-state would unravel, or burst in at the seams. And that is what no-borders social justice theorists and activists are calling for under the neatly decisive phrase: "No One Is Illegal." What is called for is a jamming of the machineries of citizenship and the technologies of the nation-state, which are mechanisms ultimately in service of expanding global capitalism (Sharma 2003: 54).

<27> The situation of migrants who work in the sex-industries is further exacerbated through affective and heteronormative regimes of power that have been described in this paper, following Leena-Maija Rossi, as productions of Hetero Factory. The fact that sex-work as work is still hotly debated both within and outside the feminist literature, speaks to a refusal to acknowledge that sex-work is integral to how both capitalism and heteronormative reproduction works in the context of nation-states, not external to it (see Agathangelou 2004). The refusal by some feminists to recognize the affective labour that sex-working bodies perform as labour (and not simply as "exploitation") gestures toward a refusal to delve into the complexities of power relations and how they proscribe and inscribe particular bodies in culturally intelligible ways. Racialized, ethnicized, migrant, non-citizen bodies are often put into the position to make difficult, even 'unseemly', decisions. This point relates as well to the overrepresentation of non-white MTF sex workers in the sex-trade. This is not a "dark side of globalization" as Richard Gunde might put it [21]. Rather, it is precisely how "globalization", understood as expanding global capitalism, functions.

<28> The migrant sex-working body is a volatile body (Grosz 1994), moving illicitly across the borders of nations, as well as the borders of morality and proper bodily containment, as defined by capitalism and the normalizing force of the Hetero Factory. These are bodies that spill and transgress, and in so doing, threaten to displace the borders of Empire's imagined - and desired - communities. These abjected bodies, cast as 'in need' of containment or protection, have come into being as bodies that matter in affective and geopolitical ways, and have been constituted as threatening precisely because they transgress and simultaneously reveal transnational and intimate borders of 'security' - of subject, family, and nation.

 

Further Reading

29> This paper has proceeded as if the migrant sex-worker was absent. As I suggested in the opening to the paper, the 'fetishization' of the labour of those categorized as migrant sex-workers was purposeful violence, intended to direct theoretical attention to the epistemological, affective, and geopolitical systems of power that underpin and literally produce these bodies as 'migrant' and often as 'victimized' and simply 'exploited.' This said, however, the stories and analyses that migrant sex-workers are themselves putting forward are very powerful and important strategies of disruption. As critical and counter-hegemonic discourses, narratives of sex-workers themselves and those institutions and organizations that do organizing with and for the rights of sex-workers simultaneously challenge the workings of dominant power, particularly and potently by exploding the notion that sex-workers lack agency. For further reading, I suggest that interested readers seek out the writings of sex workers themselves: a couple of volumes include the readily available Whores and Other Feminists, edited by Jill Nagle (Routledge, 1997) and Sex Work: Writings by Women in the Sex Industry, edited by Delacoste and Alexander (Second Edition, Cleis Press, 1998). More obscure but politically astute and provocative work can be found in gendertrash, a Toronto-based zine put out by street active transsexual sex-workers, and edited by Mirha- Soleil Ross (c. 1995). A partial listing of sex-worker organizations in Canada includes the, Maggie's: The Toronto Prostitutes' Community Service Project (http://www.maggiestoronto.ca); Stella and the Coalition for the Rights of Sex Workers/La Coalition pour les Droites des Travailleuses et Travailleurs du Sexe in Montreal (http://www.chezstella.org); and the Sex Professionals of Canada (SPOC; http://www.spoc.ca). Internationally, there's the International Union for Sex Workers (IUSW; http://www.iusw.org) and the International Network of Sex Work Projects (NWSP; http://www.nswp.org).

 

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Notes

[1] An earlier version of this paper was given at the international conference entitled "Hetero Factory" in Norrköping, Sweden (13 - 15 June 2006). I thank Anna M. Agathangelou for her comments on the earliest draft of this paper, and for her incisive work on the global political economy of the "desire industries"; Nandita Sharma for her outstanding theoretical work on the state's literal production of "migrant" and non-citizen labour in a context of Empire, and to whose intellectual labour this paper is clearly indebted; and Dan Irving for sharing with me his research into trans activism, including convergences with sex-work, and for being a tireless comrade and partner. Attentive editorial work by Emily van der Meulen strengthened this paper, and I am grateful for her helpful comments. The funding support of the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council (SSHRC) and the York Center for International and Security Studies (YCISS) is also acknowledged. [^]

[2] The sexual exploitation of vulnerable migrants is generally "known" and, moreover, has become the sensationalized topic of many mainstream accounts of the treacherous (as if exceptional) implications of militarization, on-going imperialism, and global instabilities linked to capitalism. That this is the case has allowed such potentially disruptive knowledge to become banalized to the point of becoming commonplace, and therefore enormously useful to the logic of the state apparatus, which justifies itself in part through first recognizing the plight of these vulnerable bodies and then valorizing its role in protecting these otherwise 'threatening' bodies. [^]

[3] Note that the proper 'victims' of trafficking are routinely identified as 'women' and 'children.' Queer and transsexual migrants who work in the sex-industries are not qualified in the same ways by the state or by feminist anti-trafficking campaigns. This is not coincidental in a global context governed by heteropatriarchal systems of power. [^]

[4] One of the posters goes on to read, "Every year, people like Sonia are deceived or forced into a life that no one would choose - sold into the sex trade, locked up in sweatshops, made to work for little or no pay. They are the victims of human trafficking." http://www.justice.gc.ca/en/fs/ht/pub/poster/poster.html, accessed 28 May 2006. [^]

[5] I would have liked to go into this campaign in much more detail here, because there are a number of key interventions that must be made, but such a discussion is beyond the scope of this particular paper. [^]

[6] The term "Global North" emerges from critical development studies and global social justice literatures, and as a term attempts to signal a politicized recognition of geopolitical patterns of distribution. I use it here rather than the more abstracted (and rehearsed) rubric "the West" or " First World." [^]

[7] http://www.justice.gc.ca/en/fs/ht/index.html, accessed 28 May 2006. [^]

[8] Dittmore's article maintains a binary theoretical split in her critique of the state's reinforcement of sexist ideologies that position men-as-agents/women-as-victims, and thus fails to excavate the heterosexist and heteronormative (trans- and queer-phobic) matrix that makes such a straightforward analysis possible. Also see my endnote 3, above. [^]

[9] That this paper focuses on "migrant" sex-workers to the exclusion of "non-migrant" sex-workers is not so much an oversight as it is a strategy to make possible a certain theoretical framework. The moral regulation of sex-workers in Canada who are not simultaneously classified as "migrants" has been taken up by Deborah Brock in her 1998 study Making Work, Making Trouble: Prostitution as a Social Problem. [^]

[10] Note that 'being' and 'matter' are enclosed in scare quotes because both are ontologically troubling terms. To claim that a body comes literally into 'being' through discourses is one of the main bones of contention between Marxian and poststructural analytic modes. The raw materiality (i.e. 'matter' in one sense) of the body was there prior to discourses and thus in a particular sense was always already in a state of 'being' some would argue. However, as Hall's work points out, the socially recognizable and iterable body can only come into 'being' through discursive (and disciplinary) acts of power, that make it 'matter' in an affective and epistemological sense. [^]

[11] A sex-trade resource centre worker in Toronto discussed the self-organizing efforts of a number of dancers fighting for the right to be recognized as employees of the club they worked rather than "independent contractors." This recognition is key to ensuring protection under the employment standards taken for granted by many workers in Canada. The success of these particular dancers' efforts was foreclosed by the fact that two of them were deemed "migrant women" and were deported by the state shortly after launching their legal struggle against the club. (Personal interview by Dan Irving). [^]

[12] In this paper, I mark a distance from the dominant neo-liberal understandings of 'globalization' by substituting "global capitalism", by which I refer to Negri's double-sense of an extensive and intensive process of appropriation. [^]

[13] I use "ethnicized" to refer to the Eastern European, Russian migrant woman who become ethnicized Caucasians in the North American, Western European, and Australian contexts (see Agathangelou 2004). [^]

[14] And see Noulmook Sutdhibhaslip's "Migrant Sex-workers in Canada." Transnational Prostitution: Changing Global Patterns . eds. Susanne Thorbek and Bandana Pattanaik. New York: Zed Books. 2002. P.173-192. [^]

[15] Hetero Factory: Normativity in School and Working Life , Norrköping, Sweden (13-15 June 2006). [^]

[16] Discussion of power as machine can be found in Deleuze and Guattari, 1987. This also reflects Foucault's ideas of bio-power and disciplinary power, whereby power acts on the subject by first producing the subject, and in part as a docile body. See Foucault's History of Sexuality, Volume 1 and Discipline and Punish. [^]

[17] In the Canadian context, there is a long history of racialized, ethnicized bodies being differentially included as non-reproductive/non-citizen - i.e. this is not a contemporary phenomenon limited to sex workers, migrant and otherwise. The on-going colonial history of sterilizing Aboriginal women in Canada as threats to the "white settler nation", and the recent deportation of Wendy Maxwell, an active and long-time queer and feminist political organizer in Toronto, are divergent examples that hinge on the same logic. [^]

[18] In being "driven out", however, the body of the migrant-sex-worker is not always literally driven out, but rather comes to be a body that must be contained through processes of "protection"; the means through which the nation-state comes to position itself as the saviour of the victimized and 'innocent' trafficked woman. [^]

[19] This is the title of a volume of his collected lectures at the Collège de France, 1974-1975. [^]

[20] As Nandita Sharma argues, "In reality, throughout the history of national states there have never existed 'citizens' without the concomitant existence of those who have been Othered as 'non-citizens.' They exist as mutually constitutive state categories." (2003: 57). [^]

[21] Richard Gunde, "The Dark Side of Globalization: Trafficking and Transborder Crime to, Through, and From Eastern Europe." UCLA International Institute, 26 May 2004. Text available at: http://yaleglobal.yale.edu/display.article?id=4400 (accessed 10 June 2006). [^]

 

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