This article focuses on gossip about Dominican womens sexual labor as an entry point into documenting shifting gender relations and ideologies in Sosúa, a sex tourist destination frequented primarily by German tourists. In Sosúas sexscape, new meanings of masculinity have emerged alongside womens earning capacity. While sex workers must temper their displays of monetary gains so as to not compromise their reputations as mothers sacrificing for their children, men openly enjoy freedom from gender ideologies that make demands on them to appear as hard working and sacrificing fathers. In this sexual economy, men even can flaunt their unemployment. Their laziness and/or dependency are recast as macho. Here is one industry where poor Dominican women have the opportunity to make significant earnings and to jump out of poverty, yet their labor strategies do not necessarily ensure a reconfiguration of gender roles and ideologies that works in their favor. Rather, migrant men in Sosúa enjoy such a reworking that lowers expectations for them, while women are caught in a set of increased expectations.
]]>This paper considers how Dominican sex workers and German sex tourists imagine each other across national borders. They meet in a transnational space, Sosuacutea, a tourist town on the north coast of the Dominican Republic. Sex tourism has redirected migration patterns within the Dominican Republic to Sosuacutea, as well as off the island by building new transnational connections to Germany. I examine why Dominican women migrate to Sosuacutea’s sex trade, how they see German men, and what happens when they actually establish ongoing relationships with them—both in Sosuacutea and in Germany. I also look at how German men find out about Sosuacutea, its sex trade, and Dominican women. I focus on forms of communication through which they find out about one another, communication that ranges from word of mouth to newspapers, magazines, and the Internet (in the case of the men only). In Sosuacutea we see the relationship among capitalism’s disruptive, restructuring activities; powerful images, fantasies, and desires (produced both locally and globally) that are inextricably tied up with race and gender; the emergence of young, poor, black, single mothers who are willing to engage in the sex trade; and a strong demand for these women’s services on the part of white, working-class, lower-middle, and middle-class, foreign male tourists.
]]>This article is intended to discuss methodological challenges to conducting research with trafficked persons in the United States. It draws from my experiences as an anthropologist involved in an ongoing book project on life after trafficking.1 By exploring the methodological difficulties and ethical concerns that I have faced as an anthropologist, I hope to lay bare some of the methodological challenges that researchers across disciplines, particularly social scientists who rely on ethnographic research, are likely to confront when examining this issue. The central focus of this article is on the possibilities of collaboration between academic researchers, trafficked persons, and social service providers on advocacy, research and writing projects, as well as on the possibilities of trafficked persons speaking and writing for themselves. It also considers the role trafficked persons can play in building what the media and activists loosely term the anti-trafficking movement and asks what would have to happen for them to move beyond their victim status where they are called upon to provide testimony about trafficking, to participating in the decision making of the direction of the movement. Since it identifies obstacles to trafficked persons (to whom I refer to in this article as ex-captives)2 taking the podium and picking up a pen, it explores ways to mitigate potential problems when researchers speak for ex-captives.
Methodological Challenges in Research on Human Trafficking: Tales from the Field
]]>Immigration reform that protects the rights of all workers in all industries is a critical step toward ending trafficking into forced labor in the United States. Trafficking—labor that involves force, fraud, or coercion—is a particularly violent form of migrant labor exploitation that emerges out of everyday labor practices in places where migrants work.
]]>This article considers how, in the United States, a rhetorical and policy shift that focuses on domestic youth in prostitution affects the broader effort to fight trafficking of foreign nationals in industries other than sex work. Common sense suggests that with resources directed toward finding domestic youth in forced prostitution, fewer efforts will be made to reach foreign workers exploited in work sites outside of the sex industry. The author contends that the low numbers of individuals found thus far in forced (nonsexual) labor nationwide have been, in part, a consequence of not looking. This article also examines a number of factors that prevent migrant workers who have experienced a range of exploitation from coming forward about these abuses. In an environment of undocumented migrants’ increasing distrust of law enforcement, there are many challenges to finding individuals who are subject to forced labor.
Competing Claims of Victimhood Foreign and Domestic ’Victims’ of Trafficking to the United States
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