The High Price of Freedom: Moral Economies of Women’s Work in Transnational Human Trafficking Rescue

• In Event: 301 - Minority Fellowship Program (MFP) Research Session. Issues in Stratification: Health, Politics, Work, and Aging in Domestic and Global Context

Abstract

The global movement to combat human trafficking has provoked new forms of American rescue and rehabilitation and has created new pathways to social action through the market. Drawing on 40 months of multi-sited ethnographic fieldwork with American evangelical Christian anti-trafficking organizations in China, Thailand, and the United States, this talk contextualizes contemporary efforts to rescue victims of human trafficking within the politics of labor, gender, and sexuality. American evangelical Christian missionary organizations in Beijing and Bangkok recruit sex workers to work as jewelry-makers and sell this jewelry through the bustling anti-trafficking movement in the U.S. Arguing that jewelry represents a proxy commodity for freedom from enslavement and a virtuous wage, these programs create a transnational moral economy of low wage women’s work, where traditional exchanges of wage for labor are replaced with affective commitments between First World rescuers and their purported victims in the Global South. Reflective of contemporary trends in humanitarian action through the market, this talk identifies the ways in which circuits of commerce, morality, and labor sustain these new humanitarian manifestations of US empire. Such programs envision a world in which redemptive capitalism is offered as a solution to global poverty and gender inequality, ultimately creating new dependencies on American rescue, aid, and intervention.

Author

• Elena Shih, University of California-Los Angeles