The Gender of Trafficking, Or, Why Can’t Men Be Sex Slaves?

• In Event: 380 - Section on Sociology of Sexualities Refereed Roundtable Session and Business Meeting
  In Refereed Roundtable 60min: Table 05. Sex Work

Abstract

Although the United Nations Protocol to Prevent, Suppress and Punish Trafficking in Persons, Especially Women and Children does not explicitly preclude the idea that men may be “trafficked,” the title of the protocol explicitly directs member nations away from such a possibility. Within the United States, very little media attention on “trafficking victims” focuses attention upon men or male youth, and women and girls remain the primary exemplars of both “sex trafficking” and “sexual slavery.” Here I examine not only why men and boys have historically been excluded, but also how these discourses act as gendered and gendering formations more generally, relying upon a melodramatic form of narrative that positions (predominantly white) womenandchildren in one manner, and men and boys in another. Following this explication, I critically examine the recent turn toward the inclusion of boys as victims, arguing that the implicit gendering of the sex trafficking frame makes it less useful as either a tool of analysis or of service intervention than it may first appear. Whereas gendered melodramas tend to oversell particular types of harms pertaining to a small subset of individuals, an alternate narrative should move toward complex and multifaceted analysis that makes experiential diversity visible. While the inclusion of men offers a progressive-seeming challenge to gender binaries, the actual need is to dismantle the melodramatic narrative of sex trafficking entirely, replacing it with a frame that is more responsive to the manifold realities of the sex industry.

Author

• Kerwin Kaye, Wesleyan University