Editorial Note: Special Issue: Migration, Sex, and Intimate Labor

Introduction to the Issue: Trafficking, a Useless Category of Historical Analysis?

When we first sat down to propose this Special Issue, the question of what to call it was foremost in our minds. Eventually, we settled on "Migration, Sex, and Intimate Labor," which we felt captured the nexus of phenomena we wanted authors to explore while avoiding the troubling term "trafficking" which we—initially jokingly—had taken to referring to as a "useless category of historical analysis" (with apologies to Joan Scott). Trafficking, like the term "white slavery" that preceded it and "modern slavery" that has overtaken it in some political discourse, is a historically contingent concept; it is a moving signifier that hides as much as it reveals.¹ At times, "trafficking" signified the illegal movement of people organized by third parties, but the term was also used more vaguely before modern border control and immigration law defined such crimes. Some people who used the term deployed it to directly refer to coercion, others used it as a term that simply described both the consensual and non-consensual movement of women labeled "prostitutes" (or to define such movement as inherently non-consensual). "Trafficking" in international law was a term applied to the illicit movement of people, but was also (especially by the early twentieth century) used to describe the illegal movement of arms, drugs, and art. The malleability of the term in the past can also be found in the present. While organizations and states continue to use "trafficking" as a normative category of law and experience, its precise definition and parameters remain blurry and imprecise. It is this very imprecision that allows states and others to deploy the specter of "trafficking" to enact laws and policies against migration and sex work that focus on criminalization (of migration, of sex work) and rarely address the actual exploitation or harm at hand. This strategic use of the concept has a long history, which forms one of the key themes of this historiographical review.

In this extended introduction to the Special Issue, we want to reflect upon the vibrant and growing field of scholarship on the history of trafficking that, in one way or another, grapples with these terms while attempting to understand the structures, cultures, laws, and lived experiences that underlay them in different times and places. We begin by examining this scholarship's roots in work on women's prostitution in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries and move on to explore particular flashpoints within this historiography: the places where trafficking, used in any normative sense, grows increasingly difficult to pin down and explain. Caught up within racialized concepts of migration, belonging, and citizenship; complex ideas about gender, sex, and labor; and troubling analogies of enslavement, trafficking's history as a term, one could argue, has little useful explanatory power, other than the way it reveals the socio-political contexts in which it was deployed. The articles in this special issue cover the period roughly between 1880 and 1980, taking us from the late nineteenth century, when concepts of trafficking and exploited prostitution were first being articulated and codified, to the late twentieth century and the resurgence of "trafficking" as a subject of concern during a period of geopolitical upheaval and increased migration. This special issue showcases some of the newest work on migration, sex, and intimate labor, and in their own way, all the articles complicate the terms we use to articulate these phenomena not only in the past, but also in the present.

Prostitution, "White Slavery," and the Racialized Other

Despite the contemporary academic and political drive to reimagine trafficking beyond the sex trade and (for certain policy makers) to rebrand this complex nexus of migration, work, and exploitation "modern slavery," it remains the case that the majority of historical scholarship on trafficking has emerged out of histories of sexual labor and prostitution.

Much of the earliest serious historical scholarship from the 1980s and early 1990s examined the history of prostitution's regulation by nineteenth-and early twentieth-century states. This regulation took various forms, but usually involved registering suspected prostitutes...