Sex Slaves and Discourse Masters: The Construction of Trafficking (review)

Over the past 15 years, Jo Doezema has become one of the most important theorists of sex workers’ rights. Her latest book is a rich, theoretically-engaged contribution. It does not offer the ease of ready, melodramatic arcs and moral fireworks of such titles as The Slave Next Door, Invisible Chains, The Natashas, and Not For Sale – a cursory selection of books on trafficking in one Canadian university bookstore. Rather, it provides a complex analysis of the social and political functions of just such trafficking narratives.

Trafficking has long deserved a sharp dissection. As Doezema points out, feminists have been among those at the forefront the push to analyze the power involved in constructing social issues. Yet, with a few exceptions, in the case of trafficking most research has been positivist, seeking to lay out the “facts” about trafficking or touching upon power only as much as it is seen as a cause of the “reality of trafficking.” Doezema examines such constructions and the power dynamics between the “discourse masters” who give meaning to “trafficking in women” in research, media, law and policy, and the overlapping categories of women, migrants and sex workers who become “the object of their concern.” To do so, she investigates the genealogy of trafficking narratives within the “white slavery” panic at the turn of the century in Western Europe and North America. She then puts the elements of the latter in dialogue with the narratives being constructed at the negotiations around the UN Protocol on Trafficking.

Doezema has previously argued that narratives of trafficking have often coupled their arguments for women’s protection with narratives that removed possibilities for women’s agency. However, here Doezema goes a step farther in recognizing that not just dominant but oppositional groups have claimed a stake in constructing trafficking. Indeed, law-and-order groups on the right and anti-globalization groups on the left; anti-migration groups and migrant groups; labour activists and anti-labour corporate lobbies; and evangelical Christians and structural feminists have found common ground in holding up “trafficking” as, in Geoge W. Bush’s words, “a special evil.” In order to account for this complexity and to escape what Doezema terms the rather “bloodless” nature of discourse analysis, she foregrounds the multiple political conflicts at play by turning to theories of myth and ideology.

Doezema does not use myth to signify that individual stories of trafficking are false or that there is some opposing reality or truth to be exposed. The issue is not one of correcting inaccurate statistics, conflations or problematic definitions within trafficking narratives. Rather she seeks to understand myths as the product of (sometimes competing) ideologies. For Doezema, the myth’s interest is sociological not epistemological. She draws her analysis from Laclau’s vision of myths as necessary social phenomena that act as vehicles for expressing social ideals. In this vision, myths can only be countered by new myths. This theoretical framework allows Doezema to enage with trafficking while avoiding reproducing and buttressing the very construct she is taking apart. It also allows her to lay out the “power of political myths” and in this case, “their devastating real-life consequences for migrants and sex workers.” (45)

In applying the concept of myth to ‘white slavery,’ Doezema interrogates both its form and its function. On the level of form, such myths rely on a number of narrative devices, including melodramatic plots, the victims’ whiteness, purity and innocence and the figure of the pimp as a “brutal and sexually rapacious” dark/Jewish/Black man. (85) Implicit in the construction of the innocent victim is her shadow figure, the guilty prostitute, the woman who by virtue of her consent to have sex is both damaged and damaging. Here Doezema begins to weave her second major analytic strand: the way in which consent has been a historically shifting racialized and gendered marker to distinguish between innocent victims and dangerous whores.

On the level of function, Doezema posits...