Manufacturing Freedom: Sex Work, Anti-Trafficking Rehab, and the Racial Wages of Rescue

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Elena Shih

Manufacturing Freedom

Sex Work, Anti-Trafficking Rehab, and the Racial Wages of Rescue

Elena Shih

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English

University of California Press
20 July 2023

Social issues & processes; Sociology: sexual relations; Crime & criminology; Sexual behaviour

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 propagating a transnational moral economy of low-wage women's work that obfuscates relations of race, gender, national power, and inequality.

By: Elena Shih
Imprint: University of California Press
Country of Publication: United States
Dimensions: Height: 229mm, Width: 152mm, Spine: 20mm
Weight: 363g
ISBN: 9780520379701
ISBN 10: 0520379705
Pages: 288
Publication Date: 20 July 2023
Audience: Professional and scholarly , Undergraduate
Format: Paperback
Publisher's Status: Active

Elena Shih is Manning Assistant Professor of American Studies and Ethnic Studies at Brown University, where she directs a human trafficking research cluster through the Center for the Study of Slavery and Justice.

Reviews for Manufacturing Freedom: Sex Work, Anti-Trafficking Rehab, and the Racial Wages of Rescue

""Elena Shih…makes an important contribution to critical studies of anti-trafficking. . . . an insightful read for criminology and sociology students and instructors interested in a critical approach to anti-trafficking activism."" * Journal of Human Trafficking * ""An important contribution to the scholarship on human trafficking, Manufacturing Freedom reveals how market-based, anti-trafficking movements bolster the US empire and white supremacy, China’s authoritarian state power, and Thailand’s global market supremacy. . . . Highly recommended."" * CHOICE * “Manufacturing Freedom offers an incisive ethnographic analysis of the anti-trafficking humanitarian industry in China and Thailand. Shih’s book is a powerful contribution to the sociology of race and labor, shedding light on how anti-trafficking interventions are implicated in the exportation of lowwage women’s labor under the guise of rescue and rehabilitation.” * Sociology of Race and Ethnicity * ""Elena Shih’s study of the global antitrafficking movement, weaves together insights relevant to a wide range of sociological literatures—from ethical consumption, to morality and markets, to interrogations of global, racialized capitalism and colonialism, to religion."" * American Journal of Sociology *