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by Elena Shih (Author)
Sex worker rescue programs have become a core focus of the global movement to combat human trafficking. While these rehabilitation programs promise freedom from enslavement and redemptive wages for former sex workers, such organizations actually propagate a moral economy of low-wage women's work that obfuscates relations of race, gender, national power, and inequality. Manufacturing Freedom is an ethnographic exploration of two American organizations that offer vocational training in jewelry production to women migrants in China and Thailand as a path out of sex work. In this innovative study, Elena Shih argues that anti-trafficking rescue and rehabilitation projects profit off persistent labor abuse of women workers and imagined but savvily marketed narratives of redemption.
Back Jacket
Manufacturing Freedom is a profound, wide-ranging, and deeply researched ethnography of the global anti-trafficking movement. Elena Shih weaves together insights from across the social sciences with extensive fieldwork in the United States, China, and Thailand to upend the taken-for-granted morality of commodified efforts to 'rescue' sex workers. A powerful and compelling contribution to scholarship on gender, markets, labor, and transnational social movements.--Rene Almeling, author of GUYnecology: The Missing Science of Men's Reproductive Health
"Sharply argued and deeply ambitious, Manufacturing Freedom provides an unflinching and sustained confrontation with the convergence of sex, labor, humanitarianism, and capital in anti-trafficking campaigns, as well as with workers' efforts on their own behalf."⏤Mimi Thi Nguyen, author of The Gift of Freedom: War, Debt, and Other Refugee Passages
Author Biography
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.
