2024: First Place, Audre Rapoport Prize for Scholarship on Gender and Human Rights
Victim, Criminal, Worker, or Lover? The Discourses of Anti-Sex Trafficking & the Lived Realities of Commercialized Sex in Southeast Asia
by Ella Tan
Winner, Audre Rapoport Prize for Scholarship on Gender and Human Rights (2024)
Abstract:
This paper explores anti-sex trafficking as a ‘humanitarian’ concern, arguing that the discourses of ‘rescue’ and ‘rehabilitation’ in the realm of anti-sex trafficking are not simply (failures of) humanitarian intervention to help sex workers, but are part of a neocolonial apparatus aiming to reconstruct women as workers of feminized labor within the neoliberal global economy. By examining the humanitarian laws and policies pursued by the US Government, American NGOs, and other stakeholders in the anti-trafficking industry, this paper demonstrates how the ‘rescue and rehabilitation’ discourse (and its legal, humanitarian, and political manifestations) create a paradoxical existence for the sex worker, who is transformed into a ‘victim-criminal’: simultaneously seen as a victim to be saved, as well as a criminal to be punished. By deconstructing the workings of this imperial and neoliberal apparatus, this paper demonstrates that the discursive and legislative anti-sex trafficking apparatus exists almost entirely separately from the lived experiences of women engaged in commercialized sex. This paper ultimately argues for the need to theorize new frameworks that more fully capture the nuances and complexities of women engaged in commercialized sex. Starting from the well-established framework of sex work, this paper challenges the fundamental assumptions of commercialized sex as work in the first place, and emphasizes the need to understand women’s aspirations for economic or material gain alongside their equal desire for intimacy, love, and connection, in order to create an inclusive and progressive framework of human rights and transborder justice truly beneficial to different communities of women globally.
Keywords: Commercialized sex, American neocolonialism, Gender politics, Southeast Asia, Politics of international aid
About the author:
Ella Tan Ray Ing graduated from Columbia University in 2024 with an M.A. in Political Science, specialising in Comparative Politics. She received her B.A. in History from the University of Oxford. Her research interests span the intersecting areas of postcolonial theory, gender studies, and the politics of human rights. Born and raised in Singapore, Ella has an academic and personal regional interest in Southeast Asia.