The article examines the migration process of entertainers from the Philippines to Japan. It establishes the conditions of trafficking that leave foreign entertainers in a position of debt bondage and indenture vis-a-vis middleman brokers. Then,it shows how laws established to protect entertainers in the process of migration in fact make prospective migrants vulnerable to trafficking. This is because such protective laws, which are espoused by the culture of benevolent paternalism that surrounds the migration of women in Asia and the rest of the world, preclude the independent migration of entertainers.
]]>After a few months in Tokyo, I became known as ate, meaning big sister, to man of the Filipino contract workers whom I met in the course of my research. Most were in their early twenties, but those older than me, including those who had returned to Japan more than ten times as contract workers and who were now in their late thirties, still called be “big sister.” They did so not necessarily out of respect but because they often forgot their real age, as they consistently have to lie– claiming to be no older than twenty-nine years old– to remain desirable and attractive to customers.
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What constitutes ‘sex’ and defines ‘labor’ has varied across time and space, we have learned over the last 35 years through an explosion of monographs and articles in the history and sociology of sexuality and labor studies. But rarely has the new labor studies, with its attention to gender, race, and ethnicity and its consideration of unpaid as well as paid work, put sexual labors at the center of its focus. Even the rich literature on prostitution more likely has come out of women’s studies than labor studies. Similarly, scholarship on sexuality focuses more on sex acts and identities than on markets, work culture, labor standards, collective action, and occupational segregation – the stuff of labor studies. The referents and literature for these fields stand apart – despite the growth of LGBTQ caucuses in the labor movement, renewed feminist debates over sex work, and the commercialization and proliferation of sexual services and unionization of exotic dancers.
With Eileen Boris and Stephanie Gilmore.
]]>In 2004, the U.S. State Department labeled migrant Filipina hostesses as sex trafficked persons. As the U.S. Trafficking in persons report (U.S. Department of State, 2004: 14) claimed, On arrival at their destination, victims are stripped of their passports and travel documents and forced into situations of sexual exploitation or bonded servitude. . . . For example, it is reported that Japan issued 55,000 entertainer visas to women from the Philippines in 2003, many of whom are suspected of having become trafficked victims. The phrase “trafficked victims” conjures up images of people who are held against their will, shackled, and unfree. Yet the definition of trafficking that has been advanced by the United Nations is more specific but at the same time much broader than enslavement. Trafficking consists of a three-part process: it must entail, first, the transportation of an individual; second, transportation that takes place under conditions of fraud, force, or deception; and third, transportation for the purpose of exploitation, with exploitation broadly meaning sexual exploitation, enslavement, forced labor, or servitude (United Nations, 2000: Article 3).
]]>With Children in the Global Sex Trade, Davidson adds to her growing corpus of works on globalization and prostitution a study on children in the global sex trade.
]]>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 for migrant women to fill low wage service work in many cities throughout the world. As numerous nation-states rely on the Philippines to supply domestic workers and provide care for their populations,t he globalization of the market economy constructs the Philippines as a nation gendered female.
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