Methodological Challenges with Research in Trafficked Persons by Denise Brennan
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...
Read MoreEnding Forced Labor by Securing Immigrant Workers’ Rights by Denise Brennan
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. Ending Forced Labor by Securing Immigrant Workers...
Read MoreCompeting Claims of Victimhood? Foreign and Domestic Victims of Trafficking in the United States by Denise Brennan
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...
Read MoreWhat’s Wrong with Prostitution? What’s Right with Sex Work? Comparing Markets in Female Sexual Labor by Elizabeth Bernstein
This article stems from an interest in some of the recent debates in American feminist theory over sexuality and empowerment. By the late eighties, participants in the already polarized “sexuality debates” had formed two clearly demarcated camps around such policy issues as pornography and prostitution, and around the underlying questions of power, resistance and the possibility of female sexual agency under patriarchy. While the figure of the prostitute has served as a key trope...
Read MoreThe Transformation of Sexual Commerce and Urban Space in San Francisco by Elizabeth Bernstein
Despite the frequent equation of “prostitution” with “the oldest profession,” what many of us typically think of as prostitution has not existed for very long at all: large-scale, commercialized prostitution in the West is a recent phenomenon, emerging out of the dislocations of modern industrial capitalism in the mid 19th century. For social scientists, legal scholars, and feminists (not to mention state actors) who have been attentive to the issue of prostitution, a key question has...
Read MoreThe Sexual Politics of the “New Abolitionism” by Elizabeth Bernstein
On Sunday, February 18, 2007, 5,800 Protestant churches throughout the United States sang the song “Amazing Grace” during their services, commemorating the two-hundredth anniversary of the abolition of slavery in England. As the congregants sang the lyrics of John Newton, the British ship captain turned abolitionist, they were simultaneously contributing to a growing political movement and to the promotion of a justreleasedfilm. The film, Amazing Grace, which focuses on the role played by...
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