Manufacturing Freedom: Sex Work, Anti-Trafficking Rehab, and the Racial Wages of Rescue"Sex worker rescue and rehabilitation programs have become a core focus of the global movement to combat human trafficking. Manufacturing Freedom offers an ethnographic exploration of two American anti-trafficking organizations that offer vocational training in jewelry production to women migrants in China and Thailand as a path out of sex work. Activists brand this jewelry a "slave-free good" and then sell it to consumers in the United States, generating racialized circuits of commerce and morality centered around promises of freedom from enslavement and redemptive wages for former sex workers-whom these organizations universally label as victims of trafficking. Workers, by contrast, often contest the trafficking label and object to the moral and disciplinary processes that ensnare them in a pernicious global web of anti-trafficking rescue. In this novel study, Elena Shih argues that these anti-trafficking rescue and rehabilitation projects profit off persistent labor abuse of women workers and imagined but savvily marketed narratives of redemption, thereby generating a transnational moral economy of low-wage women's work that obfuscates relations of race, gender, national power, and inequality"-- |
Contents
The SlaveFree Good I | 1 |
Ethical Consumption Social | 26 |
Racialized Redemptive Labor | 53 |
Trafficking Benevolent Authoritarianism in China III | 111 |
Vigilante Humanitarianism in Thailand | 135 |
The Promises and Betrayals of Freedom | 161 |
Other editions - View all
Manufacturing Freedom: Sex Work, Anti-Trafficking Rehab, and the Racial ... Elena Shih Limited preview - 2023 |
Manufacturing Freedom: Sex Work, Anti-Trafficking Rehab, and the Racial ... Elena Shih Limited preview - 2023 |
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activism activists American anti-trafficking anti anti-trafficking efforts anti-trafficking movement anti-trafficking organizations Asia Asian authoritarian Bad Rehab Bangkok Beijing Bernstein chapter China China and Thailand Chinese Chuang claimed combat human trafficking commercial sex Cowboy Rescue Culture economic Empower Foundation ethnography faith-based feminist ficking forms Foxconn Freedom Unchained funding Gender global anti-trafficking global governance global North government’s Human Rights human trafficking humanitarian International Jade jewelry jewelry makers Journal justice labor exploitation labor rights labor trafficking living low-wage manual labor migrant workers mobility moral narratives NGOs offered organization’s outreach participants Ploy political production prostitution racial reality tour religious secular sex tourism sex trafficking sex workers sexual shelter Shih social enterprises social movements Soi Cowboy strategies Studies Thai Thailand tion tourism traf transnational UNIAP United Nations University Press victims of trafficking vocational training volunteer wage women workers workday World Vision