The terms ‘neoliberalism’ and ‘globalisation’ both describe economic policies that were promoted by a range of institutions, including some governments, corporate entities, and multilateral development banks, in the wake of the economic crises in the West during the 1970s. The set of policies proposed under the aegis of ‘free trade’ would lower tariffs on the movement of commercial goods across international borders, making it cheaper for companies to manufacture goods in places where wages were lower and trade unions weaker. At the same time, ‘free trade’ promoted ‘deregulation’: the curtailment of any single government’s ability to regulate aspects of the economy, like wages, prices, and profits.
While it is far beyond the scope of this chapter to summarise the relationship between ‘neoliberalism’ and the economic crises through which it emerged,1 it is worth noting that ‘free trade’ was seen as a solution to prevent an energy crisis like those of the 1970s from recurring. This context for ‘free trade’ is relevant here for two reasons. First, it shows that what we call ‘free trade’, ‘neoliberalism’, or ‘globalisation’ has its roots far earlier than the early 1990s, when some of the first ‘free trade’ agreements were being signed. That the very concept of ‘free trade’ dates to eighteenth-century Europe and the era of high colonialism is also beyond the scope of this chapter. However, noting the history of ‘neoliberalism’ highlights the political and historical milieu that produces ‘free trade’ as a viable economic path. Second, the context for understanding ‘neoliberalism’ also shows that ‘free trade’ potentially benefits relatively few individuals and entities, because it is crafted not only in the wake of economic crises, but also in response to the measured successes of trade unionism. In this context, ‘free trade’ maintains an unequal economic status quo in which trade unions are weak and unable to influence wages, and profits, as well as they might.
Because what ‘neoliberalism’ describes is actually a number of economic policies, which are undertaken at different points in time, it is important to clarify to which policy or point in time one is referring when using this term. It is also important to note that the effects of ‘neoliberalism’ are highly varied across countries and regions, and a general discussion of neoliberalism cannot capture this geographic specificity. For present purposes, two aspects of ‘neoliberalism’ are especially pertinent. First, the ways in which free trade policies facilitate and reward paying the least wages possible for industrial labour are pertinent, because this occurred in tandem with weak growth in to the number of stable manufacturing jobs in a few countries, and stagnating or declining growth in employment almost everywhere else. For unskilled and impoverished workers, this means a decline in job opportunities on a generational scale, where young people may have fewer options for economic survival than their parents or grandparents had. This kind of decline does not describe a particular part of the world but rather, it describes any place that has lost manufacturing jobs and experiences economic stagnation, such as the ‘rust belt’ in the American Midwest. This critique of ‘neoliberalism’ –that, in its current form, the policies under its aegis contribute to economic stagnation or decline in real wages – has a direct link with the expansion of informal economies, and therefore with sexual commerce; these links are elaborated below.
The second pertinent aspect of ‘neoliberalism’ for our purposes is to be found in the regime of heightened border surveillance and control that has developed during the past thirty-odd years of ‘neoliberal’ economic policies. It is more than a little ironic that borders should be more highly regulated within a policy regime that claims to make borders more porous to manufacturing and trade. As trade is ostensibly deregulated, the space for advocating the rights of workers has become more constrained, with trade unionism being targeted in particular.2 As people travel both within their countries of origin and across international borders in order to move toward places with higher wages, greater economic opportunities, and more State-level protections for workers from exploitation and harassment, border controls have tightened and become more militarised, with the twinned rationales of needing to shore up security and prevent human trafficking.
Numerous scholars have pointed to the ideological problems that are apparent in arguments regarding the contested and sometimes conflicting definitions of ‘human trafficking’,3 pointing out that, historically, the term has been used to indicate ‘prostitution’, and that its utility as an analytic tool has suffered from its conflation with sexual commerce. This conflation is not accidental: rather, the conflation between ‘trafficking’ and ‘prostitution’ has been encouraged by anti-prostitution activists, who seek to abolish prostitution altogether. Especially since the adoption of the Palermo Protocol, advocates have worked to conceptually prise ‘trafficking’ and ‘prostitution’ apart, showing that many of the extreme forms of unfree and coerced labour that the ‘trafficking’ framework aims to address occur in sectors other than sexual commerce, including domestic work, construction work, and some factory-based manufacturing, including textile manufacturing. The primary argument in these critiques is that conflating ‘prostitution’ with ‘trafficking’ misses many forms of violence and exploitation is a range of informal economic sectors, while misidentifying violence and exploitation among sex workers whose needs do not conform to the remedies that the anti-trafficking framework ostensibly provides.
While it is difficult to generalise about the role of ‘neoliberalism’ in scholarship on sexual commerce, we may observe that the term ‘neoliberalism’ is usually deployed critically, in order to highlight the impoverishment and vulnerabilities of poor working migrants. This chapter evinces a different perspective, in pointing out that, whereas sexual commerce is an illegal or semi-legal strategy for generating income engaged by poor migrants, it should be understood as one of a range of activities that people who are designated as ‘unskilled workers’ engage in in informal economies. This is not to say that informal sector work and poverty describes all sex work; it is to say that those who are seen to be those iconic, powerless migrants in discourses of sexual commerce and human trafficking may also be understood as belonging to the vast numbers of people who attempt to survive from informal sector labour. Here, ‘informal economy’ and ‘informal (economic) sector’ reference that part of any economy where people are living at or below the poverty line, being paid in cash, and living hand-to-mouth. In the Global South, and in some parts of the Global North, the informal economy consists of construction workers, domestic workers, miners, and day-wage labourers. Illegal and semi-legal activities have generally been precluded from the purview of scholarship on economic informality; however, in the author’s ethnographic monograph, Street Corner Secrets,4 the author shows that sexual commerce is part of a range of activities, including construction work and piecework, in which some women engage in order to survive, and which is contextualised by the rubric of economic informality. In order to understand this link between the informal sector, sexual commerce, and neoliberalism, we must consider the problem of scale.
‘Globalisation’ and scale
The problem of scale in social science research, and in social critiques, is fairly straightforward: it is the problem of drawing conclusions about individuals or localised social groups based, in part, on generalised statements about global or large scale historical processes. Framing the problem of articulating the link between ‘neoliberalism’ and ‘sexual commerce’ as one of scale is a way to specify the problem mentioned earlier regarding the need to be clear about which process or processes relating to ‘neoliberalism’ are meant when this term is used. Specifying the relationship between a macro process like ‘neoliberalism’, itself a fairly generalising term, and the micro or individualised context for negotiating a livelihood requires an understanding of how we may make these two vastly different levels of critique relate to one another, without reducing one to the other.
In 1995, Marilyn Strathern said the following about the problem of scale for cul
tural anthropology:
Scale has been a headache for anthropology. If anthropology routes its knowledge through persons, the individual person appears to have its own scale, a ‘small’ entity by comparison with everything we know about society.5
In 2000, geographer Sallie Marston extended this concern:
In these recent social theoretical studies, the fundamental point being made is that scale is not necessarily a preordained hierarchical framework for ordering the world – local, regional, national and global. It is instead a contingent outcome of the tensions that exist between structural forces and the practices of human agents.6
While it is true that the present realities of sexual commerce are connected to global economic processes which produce migration as a necessary strategy for survival, this statement could be made of any number of activities that people engage in, in both formal and informal economies. Linking the local, and especially the local at the scale of the individual, to the idea of the ‘global’ requires a certain degree of generalisation, such that the link between the individual and the ‘global’ may become generalisable to all individuals. For example, it would be one thing to explain that an individual worker lost her job in an automotive manufacturing plant because a certain process was mechanised. It would be another matter to claim that an individual worker lost her job because of ‘mechanisation’ in general, a statement which would then be applicable to countless workers in countless work contexts.
The question here is not, therefore, how sexual commerce is uniquely impacted by ‘neoliberalism’, but which processes demarcated under the aegis of ‘neoliberalism’ impact people who sell sexual services, and how these impacts are manifested. Here, we are particularly interested in how poor people, including poor migrants, are affected by policies that have been enabled within the regime of ‘free trade’, and whether these effects are best understood within the rubrics of power/powerlessness, or choice/force. Just as a kind of irony is manifested by the fact that the migration of people became more difficult after ‘free trade’ policies began to be adopted in the US and Western Europe, for example, another kind of irony is manifested in the fact that, when it comes to questions of sexual violence or sexual commerce, the question of scale seems to evaporate altogether. This is ironic, because, like any informal sector economic activity, or any economic process at all, sexual commerce is also produced by global economic developments. As national economies fluctuate in relation to one other, so too do the fortunes of those dependent on sectors within those economies for their survival. However, when it comes to sexual commerce, the discursive trend has been toward individualising sellers of sexual services as well as the economic processes to which they are subject. For example, ‘poverty’ and ‘globalisation’ may be referenced as if they were individual agents of exploitation, rather than as large scale social and economic processes. In this mode, combating poverty and countering individual acts of violence become the same thing. The author has previously made this argument7 and cited a 2003 Swedish Government report which illustrated the process by which individual ‘traffickers’ are conflated with structural ‘poverty’:
People become the victims of human traffickers mainly due to inequitable resource allocation and the absence of viable sources of income. Families have no assets and incomes are inadequate. In the countryside, agriculture is less profitable than formerly and land has become increasingly scarce.8
According to this report, economic vulnerability exposes people to individual instances of trafficking, such that the systemic aspects of exploitation and vulnerability fade in the face of an explicit conflation between poverty and traffickers. An example of this was to be found on the now-defunct prostitution-abolitionist Captive Daughters website. As has been noted:
What we do know is that poverty drives sex trafficking, and that sex trafficking as the delivery system for prostitution means that each day scores of young, poor women and girls will turn to sex trafficking and prostitution as a means to provide for themselves, and for their families, because they have no other choice. The hope is that funds earmarked for fighting poverty will eventually fight sex trafficking, too, putting an end to this exploitative practice by offering viable economic options for poverty-stricken women and girls in developing nations who want to work.9
Both of these relatively emblematic anti-trafficking perspectives are rooted in a legal and policy orientation which emphasises combating ‘exploitation’. As the author of this chapter has previously stated:
The discourse that seems to be emerging among various governmental and non-governmental actors concerned with the issue of trafficking is one in which poverty, exploitation, and trafficking are theorized in relation to each other in the relative absence of a discussion about [economic] class or the effects of neoliberal trade agreements in the Global South.10
The problem was, and continues to be, the equating of ‘poverty’ with ‘traffickers’ within an individuated, rather than systemic, rubric of ‘exploitation’. Questions of scale serve as an orientation toward the problematics that a term like ‘neoliberalism’ evokes, and invoke the basic question of how a vast, macro level set of economic policy decisions are manifested on the ground. Where and how, for example, do we understand the connections between changing policies on tariffs and the negotiation for survival among sex workers in Mumbai?
One orientation to questions of sexuality which emerge from a concern with scale is that which sees the ways in which prostitution, as well as sexual orientation and gender identity, are produced as generalised, individuated, and essentially biological phenomena. That is to say, while questions of sexuality are rendered as being individual and individuated questions – of orientation, or interpersonal violence, for example – economic questions are being produced as global, general, macro, except, in many instances, in relation to sexual commerce. One way to explain this dissonance through the rubric of ‘neoliberalism’ is to evoke neoliberalism as ‘globalisation’ –i.e., as a mode for calibrating how ideas travel and resonant, with Hall, Massey, and Rustin’s assertion, in the Kilburn Manifesto,11 that neoliberalism is our current ‘ruling ideology’, serving as a way to mark an era: rendering it a heuristic device for understanding geopolitical and economic power, the widening extremes of wealth and poverty, and the hegemony of certain normative social forms, including reified identitarianism within the rubrics of sexuality, and of gender. In other words, we now live in a world where women are understood to sell sexual services because they were abused as children, not because they are unskilled and landless labourers with no job security, and where gay marriage is a human right because both marriage and gay identity are naturalised ontological forms.
It bears remembering that we have had the problem of ‘nature’ serving as an explanatory frame for sexual commerce, as well as homosexuality. Before human trafficking ascended to its current, albeit unstable, position as the primary mode for understanding sexual commerce as exception-alised violence, we were often contending with ‘hydraulic’ sexuality as a framing device for sexual commerce, and for queerness. As in the past, it is still not uncommon to hear women doing sex work using the theory of hydraulicism to explain why sexual commerce exists, claiming, for example, that it is there to provide men ‘an outlet’ for a fundamental and uncontrollable biological impulse. At the same time, then as now, people working in sexual commerce would be quick to point to the economic and social contexts in which sex work exists. In 2002, an activist who worked with the Durbar Mahila Samanwaya Committee, a large sex workers’ rights organisation and union in Calcutta, explained how she came to Calcutta to do sex work. She began by saying: “When I was little, my mother would always give my brother the fish heads and the best pieces of fish. If we had milk, she would give it to him, never to me”.
The difference between 2002 and the present, it is suggested, is that this sex worker’s statement is even less analytically legible today than it was 15 years ago, because the ideal of freedom of expressi
on with respect to sexuality has made women and girls selling sexual services subject to a discourse in which prostitution is a state of being from which they must simply be rescued. In this discursive trajectory, the idea of sexual commerce as a livelihood strategy is subsumed by, and conflated with, the rubric of violence. As identitarianism has marginalised questions of political economy with respect to queer and transgender politics, so, too, is the conflation of selling sexual services with human trafficking deprioritising and, in some spaces, disappearing the question of survival with respect to selling and trading sexual services. Identitarianism in both of these contexts has fetishised the idea of origins – the moment in which an individual subject knew, came out, was forced, was called into being, within a fixed subjective matrix. At the same time, it has facilitated increased restrictions on crossing international borders for so-called economic migrants, a condition of the contemporary neoliberal mode that has intensified since its inception. The question here is less, why we do or do not support certain positions on questions of sexuality, and more, how and why the zeitgeist on these matters has shifted, and what meanings we may derive from these changes.
Routledge Handbook of Human Trafficking Page 65