Rights Talk and Domestic Work
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Sex for the Middle Classes by Elizabeth Bernstein
Drawing from fieldwork and interviews with middle-class sex workers, this essay considers the relationship between the class-privileged women and men who are increasingly finding their way into sex work and more generalized patterns of economic restructuring. How has the emergence of new communications technologies transformed the meaning and experience of sexual commerce for sex workers and their customers? What is the connection between the new ‘respectability’ of sexual commerce and the new classes of individuals who now participate in...
read moreUNRISD Research and Policy Brief: Religion, Politics, and Gender Equality
Contrary to modernist predictions that religion would retreat into a private zone of worship and practice, recent decades have seen religion become increasingly salient on the political stage worldwide. Does this matter? From the point of view of women’s rights and gender equality, much is at stake. UNRISD research shows that politicized religion impinges on women’s rights in problematic ways. The challenge to gender equality comes not just from fundamentalist agendas, but also from those who instrumentalize women’s rights for political...
read moreMilitarized Humanitarianism Meets Carceral Feminism: The Politics of Sex, Rights, and Freedom in Contemporary Antitrafficking Campaigns by Elizabeth Bernstein
During a blusteryNew York City winter in the final weeks of 2008, two very different cinematic events focused on the politics of gender, sexuality, and human rights stood out for their symmetry. The first event, a benefit screening of Call and Response (2008), a just-released “rockumentary” about human trafficking made by the Christian rockmusician- cum-filmmaker Justin Dillon, showed at a hip downtown cinema to a packed and enthusiastic mixed-gender audience of young, predominantly white and Korean evangelical Christians. The second...
read moreProtecting HIV-positive women’s human rights: recommendations for the United States National HIV/AIDS Strategy by Aziza Ahmed with Catherine Hanssens and Brook Kelly
To bring the United States in line with prevailing human rights standards, its National HIV/AIDS Strategy will need to explicitly commit to a human rights framework when developing programmes and policies that serve the unaddressed needs of women. This paper focuses on two aspects of the institutionalized mistreatment of people with HIV: 1) the criminalization of their consensual sexual conduct; and 2) the elimination of informed and documented consensual participation in their diagnosis through reliance on mandatory and opt-out testing...
read moreHIV and Women: Incongruent Policies, Criminal Consequences by Aziza Ahmed
UN Women must take an aggressive role in the standardization of laws and policies at the global and national level where their incongruence has negative and often criminal consequences for the health and lives of mean and girls. The is article focuses in on thee such examples: opt-out testing for HIV, criminalization of the vertical transmissions, and the new World Health Organization guidelines on breastfeeding. HIV and Women
read moreFeminism, Power, and Sex Work in the Context of HIV/AIDS: Consequences for Women’s Health by Aziza Ahmed
This paper examines the involvement of feminists in approaches to sex work in the context of HIV/AIDS. The paper focuses on two moments where feminist disagreement produced results in favor of an “anti-trafficking” approach to addressing the vulnerability of sex workers in the context of HIV. The first is the UNAIDS Guidance Note on Sex Work and the second is the “anti-prostitution pledge” found in the Presidents Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief. This article also examines the anti-sex work position articulated by...
read moreTransgressing the Nation-State: The Partial Citizenship and “Imagined Global Community” of Migrant Filipina Domestic Workers by Rhacel Parrenas
Located in more than 130 countries, migrant Filipina domestic workers have settled in the cities of Athens, Bahrain, Rome, Madrid, Paris, Toronto, New York, Los Angeles, Hong Kong, andS ingapore. Dispersed among a multitude of industrialized nations, they have come to constitute a diaspora- more precisely, a contemporary female labor diaspora. A particular result of global restructuring, this labor diaspora is a product of the export-led developments trategy of the Philippines, the feminization of the international labor force, and the demand...
read moreWHAT‟S THE BORDER GOT TO DO WITH IT? HOW IMMIGRATION REGIMES AFFECT FAMILIAL CARE PROVISION—A COMPARATIVE ANALYSIS by Hila Shamir
The current wave of international migration is larger than ever before. It is also “feminized” both in that approximately half of the world‟s migrants are now women and in that the work that many of them engage in is traditional “women‟s work” such as cleaning; taking care of children, the elderly, and the disabled; and sex work. The workers migrate to the “receiving” countries through formal (legal) as well as informal (illegal) routes, some temporarily and others with the hope of settling permanently. While these jobs do not...
read moreAbout The Project
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We are a group of scholars, activists and practitioners from a range of professional backgrounds including law, anthropology and sociology. Though with different political views, we share a commitment to social justice involving labor, migration and human trafficking. We also share a concern that public debate, particularly on trafficking, is too often simplistic, failing to take account of human aspirations, agency and experiences. With this website we seek to provide access to the best scholarship, activism and reform efforts involving...
read moreAziza Ahmed, Northeastern University School of Law
Professor Ahmed teaches reproductive and sexual health and rights, international health law, and property. Her research areas include health and law (international and domestic), human rights, and sexual and reproductive health and rights. Professor Ahmed′s scholarship is interdisciplinary, and often draws from both public health and legal methodologies and literature. Alongside her work on public health, Professor Ahmed also writes about the changing global landscape of Muslim minorities after 9/11. Professor Ahmed holds a law degree from...
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