rescuing brown women
By shag carpet bomb • Jan 14th, 2008 • Category: Books, Radfemz, Sexpox Feminism, Trafficking and Prostitution ReconsideredI forgot to mention that I’d ordered Kamala Kempadoo’s Trafficking and Prostitution Reconsidered: New Perspectives on Migration, Sex Work, and Human Rights. Picked it up at the library yesterday. Our library is the suckage, I’m tellin’ ya. You’d think the Limpdickian libraries would be the worst. Not so. I have library books in, ordered through interlibrary loan or placed on hold, and I don’t get jack in terms of communication about their availability. I have to guess if they’re in apparently. Le sigh.
Kempadoo’s Trafficking and Prostitution Reconsidered is a very clinical examination of the topic, a series of papers edited by Kempadoo along with Jyoti Sanghera and Bandana Pattanaik. They participated in the 2001 meeting of the Global Alliance Against Traffic in Women (GAATW) in Thailand:
This book documents trafficking not as the enslavement of women, but as the trade and exploitation of labor under conditions of coercion and force analyzed from the lives, agency, and right of women and men who are involved in a variety of activities in a transnationalized world.
They have been prompted to write about the issue because, unfortunately, this issue is a lightening rod that pits them, too often, between a radical feminist/anti-prostitution perspective and the sex positive feminist/pro-prostitution perspective. In other words, they feel more than little used and abused by both sides and I don’t blame them there.
As I was reading Jyoti Sanghera’s article, ‘Unpacking the Trafficking Discourse,’ I shook my head at the fact that Sanghera had to actually foreground her section problematizing the concept of children in the trafficking discourse. She had to actually write this at the outset:
Groping in the ‘Grey Zone’ — The Problem of ‘Consent’
This section of the paper attempts to enter a grey zone by complicating the categories of “child” and “consent.” By virtue of its very nature this discussion will consciously stray into a minefield of controversy for the purpose of pushing the boundaries of analysis and thinking. However, from this discussion the reader is cautioned against drawing simplistic conclusions and assuming that this paper (i) advocates support of child prostitution, or (ii) assumes that consent is without limits and boundaries.
I can imagine the beating she probably took during presentations of this paper, events that probably prompted her need to actually have to say the above — which, to me, indicates how unwilling people are to take others arguments in the best light possible. Which, as some of you will recall, is how it came to be that certain assholes in the radfemzone decided I was all rah rah sex with children or some horse shittery.
Anyway, gotta fly –
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“take others arguments in the best light possible” - I’m sayin’.
I don’t see why it’s a problem to give a charitable reading as the default. Apparently that’s perceived as weak in some circles? I don’t know.