sexing borders | Re-public: re-imagining democracy

Gendering border crossings – part IΙ

In our personal histories, border crossings may evoke very different and often conflicting memories, feelings and experiences. Against the repetitive security rhetoric of border crossings that threaten the safety of the nation, the state or the people, the articles in the first part of this special issue pointed towards diversity and ambivalence. In this context, border crossings become the site, where sexuality, identity and movement are re-articulated and re-negotiated. Diversity and ambivalence cannot obscure, however, the fact that there is violence in the policing and crossing of borders. Furthermore, they cannot silence the fact that this violence is sexualized and normalized as a necessary and unavoidable “rite of passage” for all strangers. In that respect, the violence of border crossings goes far beyond the personal experiences of each one of us, and is omnipresent in gender power relations within borders too.

Eithne Luibhéid and Bridget Anderson – Gendering borders: An exchange

In this exchange, Eithne Luibhéid and Bridget Anderson are invited to discuss the rising interest on the issue of gender and migration in academic and policy circles, the increasing association of women’s migration with sex trafficking, and the significance of domestic workers and sex workers movements.

Mireille Miller-Young – Can the ho’s speak? Black sex workers and the politics of deviance, defiance and desire

How can we begin to understand the lives of sex workers when our analyses of sexual labor remain limited by a multiplicity of borders? The feminist debates of the last thirty years have usually centered around discussions of sex work as labor versus exploitation, and sex workers as agents or victims of violent abuse. These either-or analyses tend to foster binary thinking about sex, sexual exchanges, and the role of sexuality in all of our lives. Moreover, they do little to deconstruct the complexities of gender, sexual, and racial boundaries, invisibilities, and silences in society.

Rutvica Andrijasevic – Gendered migration and differentiated inclusion

Rutvica Andrijasevic criticises anti-trafficking campaigns as just one of the elements of a larger management of migration. The traditional feminist approach of sex trafficking in terms of organized crime and violence tends to ultimately support state policies of strengthening the borders and immigration controls and, as a result, has a negative impact on migrant women’s lives.

Anti-trafficking policies and initiatives have grown in number at the international level at an extraordinary rate since the UN Protocol to “Prevent, Suppress, Punish Trafficking in Persons, Especially Women and Children” (hereafter the Trafficking Protocol) was finalised in 2000. By contrast, there are relatively few detailed assessments of the impact of different anti-trafficking interventions and policy responses. For this reason, last year the Global Alliance against Trafficking in Women issued a report titled Collateral Damage: The Impact of Anti-Trafficking Measures on Human Rights around the World in which it called for a comprehensive review of anti-trafficking efforts, stating that “Seven years after the UN adopted its Trafficking Protocol, it is high time that all levels of anti-trafficking work were evaluated and their impact assessed”.

The Norwegian government has proposed a law banning the purchase of sexual services. The aim of the new law, which if passed by the parliament will take effect January 2009, is according to the Propositions to the Odelsting to combat prostitution and human trafficking (Ot.prp.nr.48). In the introduction to the Propositions the Ministry of Justice explicitly refer to international obligations as a State party to international agreements such as the UN Protocol to Prevent, Suppress and Punish Trafficking in Persons, Especially Women and Children (UNODC), but also other international agreements addressing trafficking. Human trafficking as well as pimping is a crime in Norway and regulated respectively by the penal code article 224 and article 202. While article 224 and article 202 regulates the third part – the trafficker and the pimp, the aim of the proposed law is to reduce or eliminate the demand side of prostitution and in so doing protect women (and men) from being forced into prostitution and human trafficking.

Susanne Hofmann – Coyote and sex worker: Women seeking opportunities at the US-Mexican border

The San Diego-Tijuana entry is the most frequented border crossing point in the world. Thousands of Mexicans commute on a daily basis to the United States for work, studies, shopping or to visit family members. Many thousand American tourists enter Tijuana to benefit from cheap prices at the modern local shopping malls or to stroll along Aveninda Revolución, Tijuana’s famous tourist mile that offers both family amusement and sexual distraction. Tijuana’s red light district, which locals call ‘la zona norte’, is located in direct proximity to the border fence. It spans a relatively small area of approximately 1.5 square miles, with Tijuana’s arch, ‘El Pircing’ (at the crossroads between Avenida Revolución and Avenida Puente Mexico – the pedestrian border crosser’s route) as its entry point.

Emilia Nielsen – Unfulfilled promises: Troubling trafficked women in “Eastern Promises”

Recent cinematic interest in portraying the “real life” problem of human trafficking is affirmed by critically-acclaimed films such as: Human Trafficking (2005), Trade (2007), and Eastern Promises (2007). Controversial Canadian filmmaker David Cronenberg (The History of Violence (2005); Crash (1996); M Butterfly (1993); Dead Ringers (1988); Videodrome (1983), who has garnered notoriety for his unsettling depictions of violence, not to mention “body horror,” now turns his lens to the trafficked woman in Eastern Promises via his exploration of the Russia mafia in London, UK.

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