Trafficking Women’s Human Rights

2011
Author:

Julietta Hua

How images of sex trafficking produce notions of race, sex, and citizenship

Trafficking Women’s Human Rights maps the ways in which government, media, and scholarship have described sex trafficking for U.S. consumption. Uniquely broad in scope, this work considers the laws of human trafficking in conjunction with popular culture, drawing attention to the ways in which notions of racialized sexualities form our ideas about national belonging, global citizenship, and, ultimately, human rights.

Julietta Hua provides a fresh, vital account of the fundamental pitfalls of human rights policy. This is an engaging and provocative book that frames important questions in productive and generative ways. It is a beautiful example of how sophisticated, interdisciplinary analysis can push our thinking and our actions towards true social justice. And, as this book attests, it is never easy.

Lisa Sun-Hee Park, author of Consuming Citizenship: Children of Asian Immigrant Entrepreneurs

The history of human beings bought and sold, forced into lives of abject servitude or sexual slavery, is a story as old as civilization and yet still of global concern today. How this story is told, Julietta Hua argues, says much about our cultural beliefs. Through a critical inquiry into representations of human trafficking, she reveals the political, social, and cultural strains underlying our current preoccupation with this issue and the difficulty of framing human rights in universal terms.

In Trafficking Women’s Human Rights, Hua maps the ways in which government, media, and scholarship have described sex trafficking for U.S. consumption. As her investigation takes us from laws like the Victims of Trafficking and Violence Protection Act to political speeches and literary and media images, it uncovers dark assumptions about race, difference, and the United States’ place in the world expressed—and often promoted—by such images. The framing itself, exploiting dichotomies of victim/agent, rescued/rescuer, trafficked/smuggled, illustrates the limits of universalism in addressing human rights.

Uniquely broad in scope, this work considers the laws of human trafficking in conjunction with popular culture. In doing so, it constructively draws attention to the ways in which notions of racialized sexualities form our ideas about national belonging, global citizenship, and, ultimately, human rights.

Julietta Hua is assistant professor of women and gender studies at San Francisco State University.

Julietta Hua provides a fresh, vital account of the fundamental pitfalls of human rights policy. This is an engaging and provocative book that frames important questions in productive and generative ways. It is a beautiful example of how sophisticated, interdisciplinary analysis can push our thinking and our actions towards true social justice. And, as this book attests, it is never easy.

Lisa Sun-Hee Park, author of Consuming Citizenship: Children of Asian Immigrant Entrepreneurs

Hua... offers a compelling analysis of how western conceptualizations, interpretations, and legislation concerning sexual trafficking reflect and reproduce US cultural and political domination of international human rights priorities.

Choice

Dr. Hua presents a delightfully rigorous theoretical framework, careful interpretation of proffered data, and poignant illustrations.

New Books in Political Science

Contents

Preface
Acknowledgments
Introduction: The Legal Stakes of Human Trafficking

1. Universalism and the Conceptual Limits to Human Rights
2. Speaking Subjects, Classifying Consent: Narrating Sexual Violence and Morality through Law
3. Front Page News: Writing Stories of Victimization and Rescue
4. Seeing Race and Sexuality: Origin Stories and Public Images of Trafficking
5. Refiguring Slavery: Constructing the United States as a Racial Exception

Conclusion: Considering the Transnational in Feminist Actions
Notes
Index

UMP blog - New bill shines a light on how the law looks at sex trafficking

With the implementation of Senate Bill 1037 beginning in January, Illinois will add to its existing anti-trafficking laws to extend protections to victims. The bill will give persons arrested for prostitution an opportunity to vacate the charge if they can prove they are victims of trafficking. In many ways an outcome of victims-rights advocacy that has called for better attention to the ways prostitution charges often unfairly criminalize individuals who are better served by measures that are not solely punitive, the Illinois bill demonstrates the ways human trafficking discourses have shifted the lenses through which law enforcement approaches sex work, prostitution, and labor exploitation.

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