Manufacturing freedom : sex work, anti-trafficking rehab, and the racial wages of rescue / Elena Shih.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Shih, Elena, author.

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

Human trafficking victims--Services for--United States.

Human trafficking victims.

Rehabilitation centers--China.

Rehabilitation centers.

Rehabilitation centers--Thailand.

Pay equity.

Human trafficking victims--Abuse of.

Women migrant labor--Abuse of.

Women migrant labor.

Economics--Moral and ethical aspects.

Economics.

Human trafficking victims--Services for.

China.

Thailand.

United States.

Physical Description:

xiii, 273 pages : illustrations (black and white) ; 24 cm

Place of Publication:

Oakland, California : University of California Press, [2023]

Summary:

"Sex worker rescue and rehabilitation programs have become a core focus of the global movement to combat human trafficking. Manufacturing Freedom offers an ethnographic exploration of two American anti-trafficking organizations that offer vocational training in jewelry production to women migrants in China and Thailand as a path out of sex work. Activists brand this jewelry a "slave-free good" and then sell it to consumers in the United States, generating racialized circuits of commerce and morality centered around promises of freedom from enslavement and redemptive wages for former sex workers-whom these organizations universally label as victims of trafficking. Workers, by contrast, often contest the trafficking label and object to the moral and disciplinary processes that ensnare them in a pernicious global web of anti-trafficking rescue. In this novel study, Elena Shih argues that these anti-trafficking rescue and rehabilitation projects profit off persistent labor abuse of women workers and imagined but savvily marketed narratives of redemption, thereby generating a transnational moral economy of low-wage women's work that obfuscates relations of race, gender, national power, and inequality"-- Provided by publisher.

Contents:

Introduction : Slave-free good

Business of rehab : ethical consumption, social enterprise, and the myth of vocational training

Manufacturing freedom : racialized redemptive labor and sex work

Bad rehab : house moms, shelters, and maternalist rehabilitation

Trafficking benevolent authoritarianism in China

Vigilante humanitarianism in Thailand

Quitting rehab : the promises and betrayals of freedom

Conclusion : Redistribution and possibilities for global justice.

Notes:

Includes bibliographical references and index.

Other Format:

Online version: Shih, Elena Manufacturing freedom

ISBN:

9780520379695

0520379691

9780520379701

0520379705

OCLC:

1345243469