Lors des mobilisations associatives et des débats parlementaires en France, la victime de la traite apparaît sous une forme idéale : jeune femme, étrangère, naïve, innocente et vulnérable, elle nécessite protection au nom de la défense des droits de l’homme. Cette victime idéale devient suspecte dès que son statut légal ou son activité sont appréhendés. L’idéalité de la victime est dissoute dans les priorités nationales qui conduisent à se protéger des « indésirables ». La tension entre les priorités du national (...) et les principes universels produit une victime impossible, caractérisée par son absence. L’objet de cet article est d’analyser la production sociale de l’absence de la victime de la traite. La dernière partie de la présente contribution s’attache ainsi à montrer qu’au-delà d’une tension entre l’universel et le national, l’absence de la victime est aussi le résultat d’une relation sociale et des contraintes dans lesquelles sont pris les acteurs dans l’exercice de leur activité.During the mobilization by associations and the debates in the French parliament about the status of victims of trafficking in human beings, an ideal victim was presented. As a young woman – a naive, innocent, vulnerable foreigner – she needs to be protected in the name of human rights. However this victim becomes a suspect once attention shifts to her legal status or economic activity, and the ideal vanishes behind national priorities for protecting the country from « undesirables ». The tension between these priorities and universal principles produces an « impossible » victim, characterized by its absence. How has this absence of the « victim » of human trafficking been socially produced? Besides the foregoing tension, it also results from a social relation and from restrictions on the activities of the police, judges and associations. (shrink)

While the turn to vulnerability in law responds to a recurrent critique by feminist scholars on the disembodiment of legal personhood, this article suggests that the mobilization of vulnerability in the criminal courts does not necessarily offer female drug mules a direct path to justice. Through an analysis of sentencing appeals of female drug mules in England and Wales, this article presents a feminist critique of the dispositif of the person and its relation to vulnerability. Discourses on drug mules’ vulnerability (...) mobilize the trope of the colonial victim in need of protection, which is often translated into legal mercy. But mercy is rather an expression of biopower which inscribes not only fragility onto the bodies of drug mules by figuring them as exemplar paradigms of colonial subjectivity, but also reinvigorates the dispositif of gender implicit in the legal person. In this set-up, it would appear as if law and politics totalize the registers of life, in this case the contours of vulnerable body. The article suggests we must revisit the image of the wounded body in order to carve out a space for resistance. Drawing on Elaine Scarry and Judith Butler, it suggests vulnerable bodies are marked by a semiotic openness, which renders them subject to appropriation but also able to signify the precarity produced by the law through their resistance to representation. (shrink)

This article provides a critical analysis of the manner in which prostitution and trafficking for the purposes of sexual exploitation was ‘framed’ by official discourses in order to support the reforms in England and Wales contained within the Policing and Crime Act 2009. Drawing upon the recent work of Judith Butler, emphasis will be placed on how the schema of the vulnerable prostitute was fundamental to invoking emotional affects, which justified certain political effects, especially the move towards criminalising the purchase (...) of sexual services. However, on closer analysis the article will uncover an agenda influenced by law and order/morality, immigration and a ‘fear of the enemy’. Furthermore, it will be argued that New Labour’s framing of the problematic enabled the State to avoid dealing with the more difficult, but more urgent, issues of the differential distribution of wealth, precarity and the engendering of an ethical and global responsibility for the other. (shrink)

My project here is to argue for situating moral judgments about Indian surrogacy in the context of Reproductive Justice. I begin by crafting the best picture of Indian surrogacy available to me while marking some worries I have about discursive colonialism and epistemic honesty. Western feminists' responses to contract pregnancy fall loosely into two interrelated moments: post-Baby M discussions that focus on the morality of surrogacy work in Western contexts, and feminist biomedical ethnographies that focus on the lived dimensions of (...) reproductive technologies and how they are embodied and negotiated in specific cultural contexts. Both approaches have their shortcomings. Uncritically extending Western moral frameworks (for example, liberal feminist political values) to Indian surrogacy work raises the specter of discursive colonialism; with it, worries arise about how Western normative traditions can distort, erase, or misread non-Western subjects' lived experiences. Feminist biomedical ethnographic approaches correct this, but raise the specter of a weak moral absenteeism; with it, concerns arise about under-theorizing the structural harms and injustices shaping surrogacy worker's lives. I suggest that we might reduce these shortcomings by framing normative and ethnographic engagement with global surrogacy as questions of reproductive justice. (shrink)

After drug and weapon trafficking, trafficking of women is one of the most lucrative businesses in the world. According to sociologists César Rey Hernández and Luisa Hernández Angueira in People Trafficking in Puerto Rico: The Challenge of Invisibility (2010), fifty percent of the victims are women and minors. This translates to 2.7 million women and girls that are enslaved in this inhuman business. Puerto Rico is no exception. One of its main problems is the slavery of Dominican women who, in (...) search of a better life in Puerto Rico, are lured to illegally migrate to the island for better opportunities. However, once in the new territory, they are imprisoned and forced to become prostitutes. In addition, femicide is another world-wide pressing issue. The World Health Organization (WHO) affirms that violence against women, between fifteen and forty-four years of age, is the leading cause of death, more than cancer, malaria, car accidents and war combined, and the report ‘A Gendered Analysis of Violent Death’, compiled by Small Arms Survey Center, fourteen out of twenty-five countries with the highest rates of femicide in the world are in Latin America and the Caribbean. This essay focuses on Life is a Sexually Transmittable Disease (2014) by Wilfredo Mattos Cintron. In this novel, the enslaved-immigrant girls and women constitute an ‘injured body’, a body that is merely diminished. The third-world prostitute’s body is the material side of male-controlled dominance, subjugation and violence. Mattos Cintron’s text denounces the ‘suffering body of women’—rape, kidnapping, beating, femicide, their exclusion from human rights and sexual relegation. Moreover, along with patriarchy’s power and the socioeconomic variables as responsible agents of creating the injured body, globalization and capitalism objectify and make women’s bodies currency of the system. (shrink)

Feminists have celebrated success in gendering security discourse and practice since the end of the Cold War. Scholars have adapted theories of contentious politics to analyze how transnational feminist networks achieved this. I argue that such theories would be enhanced by richer conceptualizations of how transnational feminist networks produce and disseminate new forms of global governmental knowledge and expertise. This article engages social movement theory with theories of global governmentality. Governmentality analysis typically focuses upon governmental power rather than political contention (...) or the collective agency of political outsiders. However, I argue that governmentality analysis contributes to an account of feminist influence on the fields of development and security within global politics. The governmentality lens views politics as a struggle over truth and expertise. Since experts have authority to speak the truth on a given issue, governmentality analysis seeks to uncover the social basis of expertise. Such analysis of expertise can illuminate important aspects of the power of movements. The power of transnational women’s movements lies in production and dissemination of knowledge about women within global knowledge networks. (shrink)