Sedentary Meanderings

ourcatastrophe:

terror-incognita:

I noticed that the info page for Occupy Melbourne on Facebook has now added this paragraph: 

Isn’t Australia being illegally occupied already?

Is certainly is. When European settlers first declared ownership of the continent of Australia, it was declared “Terra Nullius” or “land belonging to no one”, despite the fact that millions of people already sustainably occupied the continent for tens of thousands of years prior to European arrival and settlement.

Occupy Melbourne recognises that this demonstration will take place on the land of the Wurundjeri people, of the Woiwurrung language group, of the Kulin nation, who are the traditional owners of the land upon which Melbourne occupies. We encourage Melbourne’s indigenous community to join in our efforts to unite and share the common goals and grievances of all Australian peoples.

I’m happy it’s been added, especially as the Occupy Australia and other city pages don’t mention colonisation at all. 

But it still doesn’t say anything about sovereignty or challenge the idea that democracy legitimates occupation, which is the stated justification for so many invasions and occupations around the world. 

People keep telling me that I’m just taking issue with the word “occupy” but I think it goes far beyond that, to a general sense of entitlement and restoration of justice. As Felix said, a lot of the sentiments around OWS are more about the privileged losing the wealth and status to which they are accustomed. 

The Occupy Sydney page is particularly yuck in that respect:

“It is time to take back whats yours, this is your country, your money, it is not the property of a private cartel and you will not be intimidated!”

I find the uncritical populism of “99%” problematic too. Even if “we are the 99%”, the income of most Australians puts them in the top 5% of the world according to globalrichlist.com (using a median equivalised disposable household income of $36000). 

There have been countless reports of racism at the protests in the US as well (leonineclaire has been posting a few) and other stuff.

I also feel like the growing imperative for globally consistent branding on these protests and also Slutwalk kind of worrying - media attention is a tactic, not the objective. And even though it’s inspired by the Arab Spring protests, this movement now feels really centred on Occupy Wall Street and I fear that sometimes we’re too keen to make our activism legible to North America.

I feel like I have to emphasise that I support a lot of the things it’s trying to do and I am trying to articulate what I want to see it become rather than stop it. I also feel annoyed that I have to say that because some protests don’t like criticism.

Anyway, I’m in Malaysia and I will be at Occupy Dataran this Saturday.

1.  I am stuck on the language of “occupation” as well, and I’m normally on the “don’t get too hung up on language” side of the fence.  I think I’m stuck because the language of occupation is becoming more and more characteristic of the radical fringe of left social movements in the Anglophone world, particularly anarchists. see the popularity of the slogan “demand nothing, occupy everything” (also older slogans like “whose streets? our streets!”).  it’s really necessary to critique the model of social movement that’s based on demanding concessions from outside authority, and it’s also necessary that that critique be well-grounded in, among other things, a consciousness of Indigenous sovereignty and resistance.  the radical fringe being this reactionary is dangerous, although I hasten to add that it’s not unexpected. for example, at Occupy Brisbane a lot of people were arguing against an acknowledgement that the land belongs to the Jagera and Turrba peoples.  this kind of acknowledgement is pretty standard lefty boilerplate in Australia, it’s often a mumbled rote phrase in the middle of housekeeping, and they didn’t even want to make that pathetic token gesture.  because they had anti-border and anti-capitalist politics and “the land belongs to no one”.   w h a t  

2.  I, too, really really don’t love the globally consistent branding thing, I think it’s a huge cultural cringe issue.  and I think it makes rhetorical equations between the situation in the states and the situation in other places that are hard to sustain and hurt the credibility of the local movement.  I would like to see locally relevant movements develop, and the drive for a globally consistent movement is not super compatible with that.  on the other hand, it’s undeniably mobilised people who want to feel like part of what they’re reading about on the net.  lots of the people in key organising roles at occupy melbourne have never been involved in a social movement before, never organised any kind of public space action.  so there’s that. 

3.  in my view the 99% rhetoric encourages people who are losing their grip on material comfort they had felt entitled to to align themselves with people who have less, with the working classes and global poor, rather than attempt to get their class privilege back.  sometimes it gets clumsy or cringe-worthy, but I think it’s been quite successful, especially in the US. In Australia I think it’s been less successful because there hasn’t been the same gutting of the middle classes and, as the movement has had a focus on being part of OWS gone global, there’s been less space to articulate how capitalism (or “corporate greed” if you like) should be an Australian concern. 

colorblinding:

ardhra:

colorblinding:

What I honestly find most infuriating about ardhra’s most recent reblog is that it completely discredits all of the experts who are actually working in the field, conducting research, talking to women and girls who are sex slaves, and actively working in anti-trafficking and anti-modern day slavery organizations and creating programs and global initiatives for advocacy and rehabilitation.  

The complete devaluation of their incredibly important work, the disavowal of the need for such work, and the poorly researched, unprofessional response that cited blogs, news articles found through Google, and research conducted by academics who are not experts in the field, whose work is not considered relevant or actually important by international experts, is quite frankly appalling and academically irresponsible. The kind of damage it does is unbelievable. (There is a part of me that cannot help but be oddly amused at the complete lack of citation of even a single credible expert, but mostly I’m just horrified.)  

I will be reaching out to a number of international experts in the field who actively work in both research and activism focused on ending sex trafficking and slavery, and will also conduct real interdisciplinary research that does not rely upon Google. 

I would not even be doing this if not for the high visibility of this post, which necessitates a responsible response. 

To return to the actual topic of the post: Sometime in the coming weeks, I will be organizing a campaign against this (and other similar products) to try and get it off the market, or at least create some kind of a viral campaign that will force retailers to pay attention. 

So, on the strength of your word, you claim that Laura Agustin, Jo Doezema and Wendy Chapkis, (all researchers who’ve been working in the field for years, and have worked with sex worker advocacy organisations through many international channels) and actual sex worker organisations based in Asia aren’t “experts in the field”? That’s a ridiculous claim without some back-up evidence. Who is it who questions their expertise or methodology?

I didn’t cite the articles based on a Google search; I follow the work of the local sex worker organisation in my area and collect the important information they circulate. Once I get some more free time, I’ll post a bibliography and further links. I think this is too important an issue to rely on casual Google searches, given the level of dodgy methodology in trafficking research.

You’re the one who used a media source, and only a media source, to back up your claims.

Chapkin, whose article was the only academic article you cited parenthetically, is not tenured at an R1 institute that backs huge global initiatives in anti-trafficking and/or “actual sex worker organizations based in Asia.” (And she also is not considered an expert in the field, nor is her work even relevant given the fact that she’s never written an actual book, and has only ever presented at one major conference in the field.) The rest of the articles you cited all came from online media. This is a problem because you attempted to frame your argument as an academic one. Now, there is a lot wrong with the fact that you are even now mentioning Agustin and Doezema.  Doezema’s project does not deal with the reality of actual sex trafficking; she is more concerned with Western feminist’s depiction of the “third world prostitute” as an injured body that requires Western intervention. That being said, she is not discussing trafficked women nor is she discussing sex slavery. She is specifically focusing upon prostitution as a profession whereby “third world women” (which is a term she deploys very uncritically throughout her work) actively choose the profession, therefore demonstrating agency through a will to self and will to power. Her concern is largely based upon the notion of Western feminism’s attempts to “save” these injured bodies (as coded by Western feminists). What is important to Doezema is ultimately agency: Western feminists need to make the distinction between prostitution as an active choice and demonstration of female agency and prostitution as slavery. 

Agustin’s work deals with the problematic notion that all migrants who happen to enter voluntarily into sex work in Western nation-state requires rescue and rehabilitation. Her book, Sex at the Margins, interrogates the way in which we think about the sex industry and migrants who actively participate within it by choice. The conflation of these migrants with sex slaves (migrants who are forced into sex work without consent) is at the crux of Agustin’s inquiry. Ostensibly, this conflation strips migrant sex workers of their own agency in entering into the work, marginalizes them as victims, and ultimately denies them of any self-autonomy over their bodies. 

Such conflation is dangerous and requires interrogation and rethinking. Agustin’s project is focused upon rethinking the relationship between sex work and migration, as the dominant discourse on this relationship tends to focus upon trafficking. 

Now, I do not know if you simply lack reading comprehension or if you just chose to ignore this huge fact that xoericxo and I have continued to attempt to force you to recognize: all of the above deals with the consensual entrance of women into sex work and the problem with paternalistic rhetoric that denies these women any right to that consent. At no point are Doezema or Agustin saying that these women are actually, in fact, sex slaves or trafficking victims. What they are saying is that it is a problem that these women are always coded as sex slaves and trafficking victims when they are not. There is a difference between talking about consensual sex work and sex slavery. I have been saying this since my very first response to you. 

On a final note, I used a media source because it cited US State Department figures in a coherent manner, and was also very recent. Now I will be reaching out to experts in the field who are at the forefront of the field whose object of inquiry is not consensual sex work, but sex slaves and trafficking victims. 

It is in this way that neither Doezema nor Agustin are actually considered experts in the field, because their field is actually not human trafficking/sex slavery. Their field is consensual migrant sex work. In case you are not aware, your specialization is what designates your field expertise in academia and research. 

Wrong again.

The specific U.S. State Department figures you quoted have been seriously questioned, and even considered invalid, by international academics. This is after estimated figures were revised three times in consecutive Trafficking in Persons (TIP) reports (which only recently started publishing its methodology, and which still leaves a lot to be desired).

Indeed, the number of trafficking victims entering the United States has been revised at least three times: down from 45,000 to 50,000, a figure reached by the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) in 1999 (O’Neill Richard, 1999), to 18,000 to 20,000 victims reported in 2003, and even further down to 14,500 to 17,500 quoted in the 2004 TIP report. Each time an improved methodology was cited as a reason for these new figures. Charles Keely, Professor of International Migration and Demography at Georgetown University, comments that any estimate of trafficking in the United States (or in any other country) requires a reliable source of data, presumably a partial count, and then a justified basic rule with which to extrapolate and estimate from this basic data. Given that “neither government nor NGOs have a sufficient overview or a data source for extrapolation that allows for a national estimate” in the United States, he believes that the US State Department figures are merely “guesstimates.”

(source)

The latest figures from the U.S. State Department quote from the International Labour Organization cite that there are:

• 12.3 million adults and children at any time, in forced labor and sexual servitude
• 1.39 million victims of sex trafficking, both national and transnational

These figures aren’t cited anywhere in ILO reports. The ILO doesn’t publish annual figures on human trafficking, but it estimates that 2.4 million people are trafficked annually.

That’s rather a lot of variation. Because there’s no consensus on methodology, and different countries collect different statistics, a lot of data isn’t comparable.

I never “attempted to frame [my] argument as an academic one”. My argument is a social justice argument about marginalised people based on evidence. (A minute ago I wasn’t Asian or female or economically marginalised enough; now it seems I don’t have enough degrees - please, make up your mind.) I never attempted to pass myself off as an expert or pretend that academics have all the answers. If you have better evidence than what I have, present it. But so far, the evidence you’ve presented has been (a) spurious, and (b) non-existent, while making extreme, unsupportable claims, so excuse me if I’m sceptical.

With the caveat that I don’t think academics are necessarily the be-all and end-all for judging evidence, expertise, or rigour, I call your bluff about academic expertise. You never specified the field of expertise you were referring to. This argument has been all about “whores”. Your fantasy that “whore” only means “sex slave” aside, this is about all people in the sex industry, consensually or not. Your assumption that sex trafficking and migration for sex work can be neatly separated between “consensual” and “sex slavery” betrays your ignorance on this issue. The fact that you’ve consistently ignored the actual trafficked people I quoted doesn’t bode particularly well for your being able to find “experts” when you ignore the people with the most expertise - the people experiencing the thing we’re talking about. How you can make claims like “most Asian women who do sex work in America do not do it of their own volition but because they were brought here and forced into sexual slavery,” which are unsupported and unsupportable by evidence, and then turn around and claim to be “horrified” by the actual words of Asian women who have done sex work and been trafficked is beyond me.

Re: Chapkis

She certainly is tenured, has written a book and presented at major conferences in the field.

But apart from that, the article I quoted is one of the more widely cited on the topic of trafficking. So apparently her academic peers are okay with her level of “expertise,” even if you’re not.

Re: Agustin & Doezema

Both have worked with the Global Alliance Against Traffic in Women (GAATW) on international policy and advocacy, they’re also both affiliated with the Global Network of Sex Work Projects, the international peak body for sex workers. The article I quoted by Doezema was published in Feminist Review (which is quite apparent on the webpage if you bothered looking - I only linked to the web version because only quoting academic literature that’s behind a paywall is just elitist and I’d rather avoid it).

“Consensual” migration for sex work and trafficking are intimately connected because trafficking is a form of migration. Expertise in one area necessarily shades into expertise in the other. When writing papers, I actually had to struggle to find research on migrant sex workers that didn’t take as its starting point the importance of demonstrating that migrant sex workers aren’t all trafficked, when I wanted to get beyond that to look at other issues in relation to migration and the sex industry.

Elimination of trafficking is framed by many groups, mainly feminist and religious groups, as requiring the abolition of all “prostitution” (the Coalition Against Trafficking of Women exemplifies this, and includes many prominent white radical feminists among its proponents). These groups often consider all “prostitution” as “slavery,” and impossible to consent to. Thus, all migration for sex work is a form of “sex slavery” according to these groups. They misrepresent the nature of trafficking and sex work in order to further their anti-sex-industry agenda.

Anti-trafficking legislation has thus frequently criminalised all sex work. Even where it hasn’t criminalised sex workers, it drives the sex industry underground and makes sex work more dangerous. It also necessitates the criminalising of migrant sex workers, since they’re migrating into an industry which is criminalised. Paradoxically, it increases the exploitation of migrant sex workers by making the industry more unsafe.

These definitions of trafficking also erase the fact that sex workers are trafficked - people who intend to work in the sex industry and migrate to do so, but because they’re poor, use brokers, false papers, and get into debt in order to travel for work. Many of the coercive and exploitative practices present in the sex industry are erased, or normalised, because of the focus on dehumanised bodies and extreme suffering similar to chattel slavery. The human suffering of migrant sex workers bears no mention because it’s assumed that sex work should be dangerous, exploitative and coercive. I.e. abolitionist discourse blames the victim. Abolitionism fetishises non-consent. The discourse hinges on obscuring what people consent to and what they don’t, and on selectively, paternalistically, claiming they can’t consent, and punishing them if they did consent to sex work.

Agustin’s ethnographic research for Sex at the Margins actually does include fieldwork with people who would be considered trafficked, amongst other research participants in various circumstances, all involving migration and the sex industry. But what Doezema and Agustin have both published and researched is the anti-trafficking industry over the course of the 20th century. They’re experts in the socio-economic and historical basis of abolitionist activities, among other things. What they both show is that the abolitionist anti-trafficking industry has its roots in moral panics about the “white slave trade” (i.e. working class European women migrating to colonised places for work, including sex work), and the attempts of middle-class European women to enter public life by participating in a socially worthy cause (rehabilitating “prostitutes”). Abolitionist discourse has always been about the insecurities of middle-class white women.

Abolitionist “solutions,” on the other hand, strengthen the institutions most abusive to marginalised and migrant women - the state, the police and borders. I’ve already described what these institutions do: they blackmail, detain, assault, confiscate belongings, force testimony, humiliate, force labour, and endanger. I think finding out about these abuses were what really convinced me that bad things happen when you ignore a person’s agency, and you assume your form of solidarity is welcome in their lives.

Harm comes to people when you assume that their suffering is your suffering.

One of the CATW core beliefs is: “Prostitution affects all women, justifies the sale of any woman, and reduces all women to sex.”

Abolitionist thinking is about the fears of middle-class women. That they’ll be subjected to the things marginalised women are subjected to, and therefore marginalised women need to be forcibly ejected from their life circumstances. This is clear in how they project certain harms onto people in the sex industry (assuming that the ‘real’ problem is of being “reduced to sex”), while obscuring and normalising the abuses of labour rights, migration rights, and human rights that actually do go on as a result of the sex industry being criminalised, sex work being stigmatised, and migration being controlled and policed.

This is what you were doing in your OP: projecting the problems you have with exotification, cultural appropriation, and sexualised stereotypes (which I always agreed were significant problems - I’m also a middle-class diasporic Asian cis woman) onto people more marginalised than you.

Which is why I find your claim that you “will also conduct real interdisciplinary research that does not rely upon Google” slightly ridiculous. (1) I never claimed the information I presented was “real interdisciplinary research”. (2) Given that you’re doing research to confirm your biases, and that you “would not even be doing this if not for the high visibility of this post, which necessitates a responsible response” I doubt anything you produce would be rigorous. Doing “real” research just to one-up someone on the internet is pretty extreme though, so I guess I admire your thoroughness on that score.

But it does beg the question: who are you responsible to? Your tumblr clique that treats social justice discussion like an FPS video game? Academic peers who also do research to confirm their biases? An institutional ethics process divorced from the reality of the lives of people in the sex industry? At what point do you get held accountable by people in the sex industry for the impact that academic research has on their lives?

So, here’s the bibliography that I promised. I can only say that these sources have informed my views, not that they’re comprehensive. I’d say, though, given that they’re more extensive than anyone else talking about this on tumblr has presented, that it’s worth at least considering.

Academic books & articles:

Agustín, Laura María. 2007 Sex at the Margins: Migration, Labour Markets and the Rescue Industry. London & New York: Zed Books.

Agustín, Laura María. 2007 “The Sex in ‘Sex Trafficking’.” American Sexuality Retrieved (http://nsrc.sfsu.edu/article/sex_trafficking).

Aoyama, Kaoru. 2009. Thai Migrant Sex Workers: From Modernisation to Globalisation. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan.

Aradau, Claudia. 2004. “The Perverse Politics of Four-Letter Words: Risk and Pity in the Securitisation of Human Trafficking.” Millennium - Journal of International Studies 33(2):251-277.

Bandyopadhyay, Nandinee. 2008. Streetwalkers Show the Way: Reframing the Global Debate on Trafficking from the Sex Workers’ Perspectives, Institute of Development Studies Working Paper 309, available at: http://www.ids.ac.uk/files/dmfile/Wp309web.pdf.

Bastia, Tanja. 2006. “Stolen Lives or Lack of Rights? Gender, Migration and Trafficking.” Labour, Capital & Society 39(2):20-47.

Bindman, Jo. 1997. Redefining Prostitution as Sex Work on the International Agenda, report for Anti-Slavery International, available at: http://www.walnet.org/csis/papers/redefining.html.

Boris, Eileen, and Rhacel Salazar Parreñas. 2010. Intimate Labors: Cultures, Technologies, and the Politics of Care. Stanford, Calif.: Stanford Social Sciences.

Chapkis, Wendy. 2003. “Trafficking, Migration, and the Law: Protecting Innocents, Punishing Immigrants.” Gender and Society 17(6):923-937.

Chew, Dolores. 2006. “Gender, Migration and Trafficking — An Introduction.” Labour, Capital & Society 39(2):1-18.

Davidson, Julia O’Connell. 2006. “Will the Real Sex Slave Please Stand up?” Feminist Review (83):4-22, available at: http://www.palgrave-journals.com/fr/journal/v83/n1/pdf/9400278a.pdf.

Ditmore, Melissa Hope, Antonia Levy, and Alys Willman. 2010. Sex Work Matters: Exploring Money, Power, and Intimacy in the Sex Industry. London: Zed Books.

Doezema, Jo. 2005. “Now You See Her, Now You Don’t: Sex Workers at the UN Trafficking Protocol Negotiation.” Social & Legal Studies 14(1):61-89.

Doezema, Jo. 2010. Sex Slaves and Discourse Masters: the Construction of Trafficking. London ; New York: Zed Books.

Ehrenreich, Barbara & Hochschild, Arlie R., 2004. Introduction. In B. Ehrenreich & A. R. Hochschild, eds. Global Woman: Nannies, Maids, and Sex Workers in the New Economy. New York: Henry Holt and Company.

Gaber, Sherief. 2009. Verbal Abuse: Anti-Trafficking Rhetoric and Violence against Women. Audre Rapoport Prize-winning paper, available at: http://www.utexas.edu/law/centers/humanrights/get_involved/writing-prize09-gaber.pdf.

Kelly, Liz. 2003. “The Wrong Debate: Reflections on Why Force Is Not the Key Issue with Respect to Trafficking in Women for Sexual Exploitation.” Feminist Review (73):139-144.

Kempadoo, Kamala, 2007. The war on human trafficking in the Caribbean. Race & Class, 49(2), pp.79-85.

Kempadoo, Kamala & Doezema, Jo, 1998. Global Sex Workers: Rights, Resistance, and Redefinition, New York: Routledge.

Kempadoo, Kamala, Sanghera, J. & Pattanaik, B., 2005. Trafficking and Prostitution Reconsidered: New Perspectives on Migration, Sex Work, and Human Rights, Boulder, Colo.: Paradigm Publishers.

Lie, J., 1995. The Transformation of Sexual Work in 20th-Century Korea. Gender and Society, 9(3), pp.310-327.

Pyle, J., 2001. Sex, Maids, and Export Processing: Risks and Reasons for Gendered Global Production Networks. International Journal of Politics, Culture, and Society, 15(1), pp.55-76.

Robinson, L.S., 2006. Sex in the City: Prostitution in the Age of Global Migrations. Labour, Capital & Society, 39(2), pp.48-77.

Sandy, Larissa. 2007. “Just Choices: Representations of Choice and Coercion in Sex Work in Cambodia” Australian Journal of Anthropology 18(2): 194-206.

Scambler, Graham. 2007. “Sex Work Stigma: Opportunist Migrants in London.” Sociology 41(6):1079-1096.

Seshu, Meena, Nandinee Bandhopadhyay, and Cheryl Overs. 2009. “How the Development Industry Imagines Sex Work.” Development 52(1):13-17.

Singh, J. P., and Shilpa A. Hart. 2007. “Sex Workers and Cultural Policy: Mapping the Issues and Actors in Thailand.” Review of Policy Research 24(2):155-173.

Soderlund, Gretchen. 2005. “Running from the Rescuers: New U.S. Crusades Against Sex Trafficking and the Rhetoric of Abolition” Feminist Formations 17(3):64-87, available at: http://legacy.lclark.edu/~eyoung/Migration/Readings/soderlund%20running%20from%20rescuers.pdf.

Weitzer, Ronald. 2007. “The Social Construction of Sex Trafficking: Ideology and Institutionalization of a Moral Crusade” Politics & Society 35(3):447-475, available at: http://www.gwu.edu/~soc/docs/Weitzer/Social_Construction.pdf.

Reports by Sex Worker Organisations:

Ditmore, Melissa & Sex Workers Project (New York) 2009 The Use of Raids to Fight Trafficking in Persons, available at: http://www.sexworkersproject.org/publications/reports/raids-and-trafficking/.

x:talk project (London) 2010 Human Rights, Sex Work and the Challenge of Trafficking: Human rights impact assessment of anti-trafficking policy in the UK, available at: http://www.xtalkproject.net/wp-content/uploads/2010/12/reportfinal1.pdf.

EMPOWER Foundation (Thailand) 2003 A report by Empower Chiang Mai on the human rights violations women are subjected to when “rescued” by anti-trafficking groups who employ methods using deception, force and coercion, available at: http://www.nswp.org/sites/nswp.org/files/Empower%20report%20on%20forced%20rescue.pdf.

Durbar Mahila Samanwaya Committee (India) webpage about their anti-trafficking project, which has been going for more than 10 years: http://durbar.org/html/anti_trafficking.asp.

Jeffreys, Elena 2009 “Anti-trafficking Measures and Migrant Sex Workers in Australia” Intersections: Gender and Sexuality in Asia and the Pacific 19, available at: http://intersections.anu.edu.au/issue19/jeffreys.htm (Elena Jeffreys is the president of the Scarlet Alliance, the national sex worker advocacy organisation in Australia)

quixotess:

…not so good at critical thinking.

Oh have I ever been there. I really don’t want any of you to read anything I wrote three or more years ago. I had this blog with “critiques” of “Baby Got Back” and Fiddler on the Roof and oh it was bad.

There’s like this whole “critique mode” that people like the teenager I was go into. The whole idea is to prove our point and our thinking becomes just…anti-rigorous. Our shit is almost never supported by any background reading, or if it is, it’s something we read and don’t understand well enough to defend—if someone brings up a counterargument, we wouldn’t know how to respond. That’s because a huge chunk of our “worldview” has not been subjected to rigorous critical thinking and is not based so much on “a framework of underlying principles and experiences” as “a bunch of things we heard or read that sounded good.”

You gotta rip that shit down. Tear it all away. Forget what you think you know. Build it back up from the beginning.

What’s really painful, I mean the part where I cringe, isn’t how palpably the writer did not think things through, although that does hurt. It’s how they’re following a really common “mode” of “social justice critique” that you can learn at any big progressive or feminist blog.

1. Something happened in my life/I’ve seen something that bothered/affected/hurt me personally.

2. So that thing that happened was bad. *Identifies the precise aspect about it that they think was bad, which may be near the mark but which is probably overgeneralized to a wider swath of experiences than they can really speak to.*

3. So no one should do that thing any more.

4. *Complete ignorance of relevant rigorous & creative discussion/history.*

5. *Strong resistance to the idea that their experiences and Social Justice Rules may not be applicable where they want them to be.*

6. *Self-satisfaction.*

I mean, hell, why shouldn’t they think this is how it works? Plenty of people have made careers out of this.

… especially academic experts in their fields.

colorblinding:

TW: RAPE AND SEX TRAFFICKING

To continue from my last post. In the event that you will not simply take my word for it, and require that I substantiate my argument, this is from an article by Meredith May written in 2006: 

Many of San Francisco’s Asian massage parlors — long an established part of the city’s sexually permissive culture — have degenerated into something much more sinister: international sex slave shops.

Once limited to infamous locales such as Bombay and Bangkok, sex trafficking is now an $8 billion international business, with San Francisco among its largest commercial centers.

San Francisco’s liberal attitude toward sex, the city’s history of arresting prostitutes instead of pimps, and its large immigrant population have made it one of the top American cities for international sex traffickers to do business undetected, according to Donna Hughes, a national expert on sex trafficking at the University of Rhode Island.

“It makes me sick to my stomach,” said San Francisco Mayor Gavin Newsom. ”Girls are being forced to come to this country, their families back home are threatened, and they are being raped repeatedly, over and over.”

Because sex trafficking is so far underground, the number of victims in the United States and worldwide is not known, and the statistics vary wildly.

The most often cited numbers come from the U.S. State Department, which estimates that 600,000 to 800,000 people are trafficked for forced labor and sex worldwide each year — and that 80 percent are women and girls. Most trafficked females, the department says, are exploited in commercial sex outlets.

Relying on research from the Central Intelligence Agency, the State Department estimates there are 14,500 to 17,500 human trafficking victims brought into the United States each year.

You can disagree with me all you want, but you can’t disagree with the truth. It’s good that you have empowering notions of sex work (I am not being ironic here); and I do think that sex work is something that can be a wonderful and positive experience for many sex workers — especially if they consent! If it is their choice! If they want to do it! But when I am trying to discuss the notion of how Chinese  and APIA women are coded a certain way — and this way tends to be within a certain discourse of whoredom as constructed by Western male consumers, it is really fucked up and wrong of you to have come into my discussion and attempt to derail it by saying I was somehow making a whorephobic claim without thinking about the reality of what it means to be a “Chinese whore” in America. 

My reaction to you, as someone who was, in fact, forced briefly into sex work (I don’t think I can even call it that because it was against my will and I was briefly held captive by my rapist), was a combination of outrage, due to your complete dismissal and call for the erasure of the violent reality of sex slavery and APIA women’s fraught relationship with it insomuch as we are coded within that discourse and field of intelligibility — and trauma, because of the way in which you tried to say we (APIA women) needed to stop talking about exotification as though it is a bad thing; that sex work does not make people feel worthless; that the notion of buying a human being does not strip that individual of his or her humanity and agency. It made me feel like you were indirectly and unknowingly erasing my own experience and my rape, and the fact that I am still to this day being virtually raped by men who pay to view those images of my rape and its aftermath and gain sexual gratification by looking at those images. 

My humanity and agency was stripped from me that day, and every day of my life I must live knowing that somewhere on the internet, another piece of it is ripped from me without my consent. It was stripped from me because the man who raped me and made those images of me and distributed them over the internet did not think I was human. And because all those men who would pay to see images of a 14 year old child being raped clearly do not think I am human, either. Therefore to them, there is nothing human about my body, which is just a body, a yellow body, an exotic body, an Asian body which exists as a cheap sex commodity solely for the purpose of their own gratification.

And it is in this sense that I approach the notion of what it means to be coded as an Asian whore in America. 

I’m truly sorry that this discussion is triggering and re-traumatising for you. I am. I’ve been very careful in how I’ve responded to you because I know that what you’ve said comes from your own experiences of racist sexual violence, which is why this will probably be the last thing I have to say to you on this topic.

First of all, let me make this clear: I agree with you that the costume is racist. Sexual racism and exotification are harmful to people of colour.

Given all the other blogging I’ve done, and that it’s pretty clear that we’re both diasporic Asian women talking about this amongst ourselves, I think this can be taken as given, without question. The people who accuse me of dismissing these issues are clearly too stupid to click a button and read any of the things I’ve blogged in the past on this topic.

My only point is this:

While you and other people have experienced racist sexual violence, might even have been called “whore”, treated like a “whore”, or “coded as an Asian whore in America” that doesn’t make you actually a sex worker, who has to live with the consequences of whorephobia every day, and a whole slew of other possibilities besides. These include (in the words of actual trafficked Asian sex workers):

• We lose our savings and our belongings.
• We are locked up.
• We are interrogated by many people.
• They force us to be witnesses.
• We are held until the court case.
• We are held till deportation.
• We are forced re-training.
• We are not given compensation by anybody.
• Our family must borrow money to survive while we wait.
• Our family is in a panic.
• We are anxious for our family.
• Strangers visit our village telling people about us.
• The village and the soldiers cause our family problems.
• Our family has to pay ‘fines’ or bribes to the soldiers.
• We are sent home.
• Military abuses and no work continues at home.
• My family has a debt.
• We must find a way back to Thailand to start again.

The abuses that non-sex workers suffer are not the same abuses as those experienced by sex workers.

I’ve explained before about how suspect the methodology of the source you cite is. Trafficking is an incredibly difficult issue to get accurate statistics about. I don’t deny that it happens, only that western media, NGOs and governments represent it accurately. All of these sources have a vested interest in misrepresenting trafficking.

While information about sex trafficking is difficult to validate, what is very clear is that many economically marginalised Asian women make a deliberate choice to migrate to do sex work. And because they’re migrants, working in a stigmatised occupation which is often illegal or heavily regulated, they are subject to a lot of state and institutional abuse. Governments want to restrict their movement, and NGOs want to make a buck from “liberating” them.

Those governments repeat the same myths you repeated in your OP about the costume. Those myths fuel abuse to migrant Asian sex workers, including governments seizing their property, imprisoning them, border security assaulting them, blackmailing them, forcing them to become witnesses and informants, and forcing them to work in ‘rehabilitation’ factories. Asian women who are treated like “whores” might experience similar stigma, and restrictions on their movement, but not to the degree of what actual sex workers experience.

The costume can’t possibly render a non-sex worker as a “whore” because only people in the sex industry are subject to these abuses. My point is that you don’t need to claim that anything makes you “coded as an Asian whore in America” in order to claim that it’s racist and sexually abusive. You don’t need to project trauma onto other people (and erase theirs in the process) in order to claim that your trauma is real, and has harmed you.

colorblinding:

What I honestly find most infuriating about ardhra’s most recent reblog is that it completely discredits all of the experts who are actually working in the field, conducting research, talking to women and girls who are sex slaves, and actively working in anti-trafficking and anti-modern day slavery organizations and creating programs and global initiatives for advocacy and rehabilitation.  

The complete devaluation of their incredibly important work, the disavowal of the need for such work, and the poorly researched, unprofessional response that cited blogs, news articles found through Google, and research conducted by academics who are not experts in the field, whose work is not considered relevant or actually important by international experts, is quite frankly appalling and academically irresponsible. The kind of damage it does is unbelievable. (There is a part of me that cannot help but be oddly amused at the complete lack of citation of even a single credible expert, but mostly I’m just horrified.)  

I will be reaching out to a number of international experts in the field who actively work in both research and activism focused on ending sex trafficking and slavery, and will also conduct real interdisciplinary research that does not rely upon Google. 

I would not even be doing this if not for the high visibility of this post, which necessitates a responsible response. 

To return to the actual topic of the post: Sometime in the coming weeks, I will be organizing a campaign against this (and other similar products) to try and get it off the market, or at least create some kind of a viral campaign that will force retailers to pay attention. 

So, on the strength of your word, you claim that Laura Agustin, Jo Doezema and Wendy Chapkis, (all researchers who’ve been working in the field for years, and have worked with sex worker advocacy organisations through many international channels) and actual sex worker organisations based in Asia aren’t “experts in the field”? That’s a ridiculous claim without some back-up evidence. Who is it who questions their expertise or methodology?

I didn’t cite the articles based on a Google search; I follow the work of the local sex worker organisation in my area and collect the important information they circulate. Once I get some more free time, I’ll post a bibliography and further links. I think this is too important an issue to rely on casual Google searches, given the level of dodgy methodology in trafficking research.

You’re the one who used a media source, and only a media source, to back up your claims.

xoericxo:

ardhra:

Okay, last thing first: this is obviously a very personal topic for you. And believe me, it’s personal for me as well.

It took a long time for me to come to terms with my own experiences of being sexually abused and exotified. I used to cringe every time I saw any images of sexualisation, and felt instinctively sceptical when hearing people talk about these experiences as potentially enjoyable or valuable.

“Okay, that’s for the few bits of it you can control, but what about the bits you can’t?” would come into my mind, and I’d assume that all experiences of sexualisation came with the same levels of loss of autonomy.

What changed my mind was finding out about the harms that come to people when someone projects their own need for control onto another person’s circumstances. Especially when white people do it to people of colour, or economically powerful people do it to poorer people:

Even sex-trafficked brothel workers reject raids and rescues

The poster below was made by migrant sex workers (they call themselves that) in Chiang Mai, Thailand, at the EMPOWER centre. I have posted it before but so many people are still unaware of the problems associated with Rescue that I like to re-run it. See for yourself the reasons workers at Barn Su Funn Brothel gave for denouncing raids and rescue operations intended to liberate them, whether rescuers are police officers, ngo employees or even celebrities and then think twice about how you will Fix Their Lives so easily.

• We lose our savings and our belongings.
• We are locked up.
• We are interrogated by many people.
• They force us to be witnesses.
• We are held until the court case.
• We are held till deportation.
• We are forced re-training.
• We are not given compensation by anybody.
• Our family must borrow money to survive while we wait.
• Our family is in a panic.
• We are anxious for our family.
• Strangers visit our village telling people about us.
• The village and the soldiers cause our family problems.
• Our family has to pay ‘fines’ or bribes to the soldiers.
• We are sent home.
• Military abuses and no work continues at home.
• My family has a debt.
• We must find a way back to Thailand to start again.

The poster brings us close to a situation many people doubt: that poorer migrants selling sex often prefer to continue what they’re doing to being forcibly rescued by people on anti-trafficking crusades. This is not to cast doubt on many helpers’ good intentions or the genuine rescue of some individuals. But it shows how rescue agents haven’t consulted the prostitutes they want to save first, to find out whether they want to be helped and, if they do, what kind of help would actually be helpful. The poster makes it clear that cutting migrant women off from their source of income has drastic consequences for themselves and their families.

There you have it, in the words of trafficked people, what happens when economically powerful people treat them as having no agency, and paternalistically make choices for them.

You claim:

Do you not realize that in America and around the world, Asians — specifically Southeast Asian — are the number one most trafficked human beings? That most Asian women who do sex work in America do not do it of their own volition but because they were brought here and forced into sexual slavery?

Do you not know that data about human trafficking is incredibly spurious at best, and in fact some of it is completely made up?

The actual situations that are subsumed by the word ‘trafficking’ can include situations where people willingly go into debt to facilitate migration, through to situations where they are duped into the sex industry (although evidence about these things is incredibly suspect, and often up to the researcher’s own biases). But even where someone is unfree, or tied to working in the sex industry for a period of time, they do choose to do so. What also seems to happen a lot, from the many accounts I’ve read, is that the debt escalates and the migrant sex worker is economically coerced into debt bondage through networks of employers and brokers that selectively withhold information. But these kinds issues are workplace issues. They’re not as sensational as shrill headlines with made-up data or embellished stories about the number, nature, age, and experiences of trafficked persons.

Situations where migrants involved in the sex industry (either voluntarily or forced, or in between) are discovered to be undocumented/irregular, and in “trafficking-like conditions” put the person in a double bind. A lot of anti-trafficking legislation in a lot of countries punishes migrant sex workers severely (through incarceration, confiscation of their money, and deportation), and make support services contingent on the person testifying as a witness, or acting as an informant to police/border security, regardless of how that might affect them or their families. This isn’t to mention the violent brothel raids where some people have been brutalised and even killed. Anti-trafficking is part and parcel of racist border security regimes that are about restricting the movement of people from the global south.

in the case of the Trafficking Victims’ Protection Act, language within and surrounding the legislation works to neatly divide “violated innocents” from “illegal immigrants” along the lines of sex and gender. Trafficking victims, described as vulnerable women and children forced from the safety of their home/homelands into gross sexual exploitation, are distinguished from economic migrants who are understood to be men who have willfully violated national borders for individual gain. The law justifies offering protection to the former and
punishment to the latter through the use of three sleights of hand. First, it relies on a repressive moral panic about “sexual slavery” created through slippery statistics and sliding definitions. Second, despite offering symbolic support to the notion that all prostitution is sexual slavery, the law carefully differentiates between “innocent” and “guilty” prostitutes and provides support only to the innocent. And third, by making assistance to even “deserving” victims contingent on their willingness to assist authorities in the prosecution of traffickers, the legislation further seals U.S. borders against penetration by “undeserving” economic migrants.

Wendy Chapkis (2003) ‘Trafficking, Migration, and the Law: Protecting Innocents, Punishing Immigrants’ in Gender and Society, Vol. 17, No. 6, pp. 924-925.

In fact, the dubious statistics about human trafficking serve everyone’s interests but those of trafficked persons. Primarily, they serve the interest of a global, predominantly white, economically privileged, rescue industry:

In order to fuel the rescue industry and ensure the continued existence of their funding, anti-sex work organizations are forced to adopt statistics and numbers based on shaky research and promote them as solid, incontrovertible fact. These numbers are then adopted by politicians, repeated by journalists, and finally accepted as ‘the truth’ by average people, until it seems that the world is overrun by naive, powerless sex slaves in need of our benevolent rescue and rehabilitation. But the problem isn’t just the inflated numbers and misleading statistics, but that the policies enacted based on them are so detrimental to the lives and well-being of sex workers around the world.

The rescue industry is little more than a new kind of colonial feminist missionary project backed and funded by the USA.

These issues are not about either your or my relative oppressions or privileges. They are happening to real people with real lives, quite apart from any language game you want to play with the definition of “whore”. You quoted one article and a whole lot of conjecture about the extent and nature of sex trafficking, as if actual trafficked people don’t have voices, wishes, or lives of their own except for your interpretation of them through your own experiences

I really do not want to invalidate or erase the suffering and violence you experienced, or anyone else experiences. It’s because of my own experiences that I felt the need to actually find out what sex workers were saying about their jobs and their lives, and about what actually happens to ‘trafficked women’, who everyone projects their worst fears onto.

Ouch! Western feminists’ ‘wounded attachment’ to the ‘third world prostitute’

In Burton’s analysis, the construction of Victorian feminist identity through the body of enslaved Indian prostitute proceeded via an interaction between the opposites of identification and opposition: identity was affirmed through, on the one hand, feminine ability to identify with suffering, and on the other, through establishing the superiority of English women to colonized women. For CATW feminists, the ‘suffering body’ of the ‘third world prostitute’ serves the function of marking the contrast between herself and ‘emancipated’ women as well as symbolizing the ultimate ‘injury’ of the identity ‘women’. Through her, abolitionist feminists both western and non-western argue for women’s inclusion in international human rights: the kidnapped, raped, beaten, ill ‘third world prostitute’ stands as a powerful symbol for the exclusion of women from ‘universal’ human rights due to their sexual subordination. The ‘third world prostitute’, oppressed by tradition and religion, exploited by western patriarchal capitalism, carrying the baggage of the colonial legacy of presumed backwardness and sexual innocence, is the perfect figure to hold up to the world as the image of sexually subordinated womanhood. Her victimhood, established by over a century of feminist, abolitionist, and colonialist discourse, is indisputable.

In Brown’s analysis, the desire for protection of injured identities leads to collusion with and intensification of disciplinary regimes of power. The process of identity formation in the work of Barry and CATW is a complicated one. It is constituted out of both identification with the ‘suffering body’ of the prostitute — ‘woman as whore’ — and through the neo-imperial opposition to the ‘backward’ third world prostitute. Through CATW’s complicated process of identification/’othering’, however, it is the discipline of certain bodies that is being sought in the name of protecting all women. CATW’s strategy at the Crimes Commission betrays ressentiment’s desire to identify victims, apportion blame, and support repressive measures in the name of protecting women. It is small wonder that many governments delegations sympathize with their position. While the negotiations are still ongoing, and the outcome is uncertain, there are indications that the Crimes Commission will opt for an approach that aims to ‘protect’ women from prostitution by limiting their freedom. CATW should not be surprised when sex workers the world over appear less than grateful for these efforts on their behalf.

The figure of the ‘third world prostitute’/’trafficked Asian sex slave’ in anti-trafficking discourse is an empty vessel for relatively privileged women’s anxieties about how sexism and sexual violence affects them. These ideas about what migrants involved in the sex industry go through don’t actually have much to do with the experiences or wants of migrant sex workers or trafficked people themselves. In fact, these ideas cause incredible harm to migrant Asian women. They lead to coercive, punitive ‘solutions’ that rely on the greatest source of violence to sex workers: police, border security regimes, and the state.

That’s why they’re whorephobic.

What happened to you was not sex work, sex slavery, or trafficking. It was rape, child abuse, and exploitation, that people have gone on to profit from. The situation you are in is different from that of migrant Asians involved in the sex industry.

This is not about you. Or me. It’s about the consequences of our words and behaviour on people worse off than us.

Equating one experience of abuse with another, because of racial resemblances like ‘Asianness’ doesn’t actually serve anyone’s interests. Violence in all cases doesn’t have the same consequences. In neither of our cases was being exotified part of a process which could end up in us being deported, incarcerated for migration fraud, having our belongings and money confiscated by the state, being forced into working in a ‘rehabilitation’ sweatshop, being raped by police, or blackmailed by police in exchange for protection. But these are the potential consequences for Asian migrants who become involved in the sex industry. Which is why your explanation is whorephobic: you’ve erased all of these experiences and substituted your own.

Which brings me to my final point: is it really fair to ourselves to need to erase other peoples’ injuries and experiences in order to claim the validity of our own? I don’t think it is.

That’s great for all the women who consent to doing sex work of their own free will but just as you believe that we “erase other people’s injuries and experiences in order to claim the validity of our own,” that’s exactly what you’re doing by using your pro-empowered sex worker agenda to invalidate (1) the experiences of girls forced into sex work, which I can’t speak about because I just don’t have the knowledge to discuss that and (2) the history of white colonialism as sexual violence against the bodies of women of color, which is the point of this whole discussion in the first place and which you are shoving aside to talk about something irrelevant to this discussion, i.e. the experiences of women who willfully enter sex work has no relevance to and does not invalidate the problems behind this costume. More power to them, but the fact that many women feel empowered and have positive experiences as sex workers does not mitigate the fact that many women of color, especially Asian women, are victimized by white men and that this costume in particular is part of a long history of that victimization.

p.s. more victim-blaming going around tumblr

So, you have no idea about the connection between people involved in the sex industry “of their own free will” (which, as I’ve explained, is often more complicated than just “free will”), and “girls forced into sex work” is, but you’re still willing to dismiss actual evidence about how the discourse of “victimisation” is harmful to these people. So what exactly are you contributing to this discussion other than your ignorance, conjecture, and a personal attack on me?

I don’t have a “pro-empowered sex worker agenda”. I have a pro sex workers eating and not being blackmailed, incarcerated, or deported for the job they do agenda.

Frankly, it’s disturbing that you’d say that talking about the actual experiences of people in the sex industry is “derailing”. What’s derailing is middle-class Asian American outrage about cultural appropriation that dances all over the oppression experienced by much poorer Asians.

And projecting the problems of cultural fetishism and sexualised racism onto the experiences of both sex workers and “sex slaves” is just wrong, false, unethical, and doesn’t even work for the purpose of explaining how sexualised racism and cultural appropriation are harmful.

The OP is not a sex worker but claims that she’s “codified as a whore” because of a string of fake “facts” about “sex slaves”. That is appropriation. These discourses hurt people. They are not okay.

blackamazon:

madamethursday:

saucy-sarah:

There’s more:

[Image: A young Arab man holding up a photograph of a white person offensively dressed in stereotyped “Sheik” clothing with a pretend bomb duct taped to their chest, holding a plastic cup and smiling. The text says: We’re a culture, not a costume. This is not who I am and this is not okay.]

[Image: A young East Asian woman decent holding up a photograph of a white person dressed offensively and appropriatively in an over-the-top Geisha costume, with their hands pressed together in a prayer-like motion and an exaggerated pouty lip look on their face. The text says: We’re a culture, not a costume. This is not who I am and this is not okay.]

[Image: A young Latino man holding up a picture of a white person offensively and appropriatively dressed in a costume wearing a sombrero, a colorful poncho with an exaggerated long handlebar mustache and a stuffed costume donkey on the front, making it look as if they are riding the donkey while smiling. The text says:  We’re a culture, not a costume. This is not who I am and this is not okay.]

Students Teaching About Racism in Society is a Student Org at Ohio University. I’m the President, any questions… MESSAGE ME! :)

YES THIS! THIS!

I want to paste this everywhere and am a bit tempted to print some out and put them around where I live. Especially with Halloween coming up in the area of the world I live in. First year back in the South and I am just bracing for the fail. These are wonderful and a big round of applause to everyone who had a hand in making them. I really, really wish that more organizations would make these types of posters and put them around. 

Also, please let me know if the image descriptions need editing or fixing! 

POST THIS EVERYWHERE

Love these forever.

colorblinding:

zincfingers:

colorblinding:

xoericxo:

colorblinding:

ardhra:

jhameia:

colorblinding:

I probably would be more harsh with you, if not for the fact that you are all fourteen years of age. And when I was fourteen years old, I probably wouldn’t have thought much of the picture, either. So, instead, I am going to explain to you why it is a problem, instead. If any of this is confusing, feel free to ask and I will try my best to be more clear. I’m used to teaching undergrads, so if this doesn’t make sense to you, it’s my fault, not yours. 

1.) Historically, Asian women have been characterized as hypersexual in America. This means that we are stereotyped in a way that makes us seem like exotic vixens at best, or cheap, foreign prostitutes at worst. Because the costume is a cheongsam/qi pao, and it represents the quintessential Chinese takeout box along with imagery on the takeout box on the front of the cheongsam, it is clearly a costume meant to represent Chinese women. This would be considered “cultural appropriation” whereby American manufacturers steal something that culturally belongs to China and exploits the cultural product. In this case, the cultural product is both the qipao/cheongsam and the Chinese takeout box — the modern symbol of Chinese migration to America.

You can imagine a white girl wearing this with chopsticks in her hair and her eyes taped back into slits to make herself look “Asian.” (In fact, in the above image, that’s a white chick with makeup and a wig that makes her more “Asian” looking.) You can further imagine yellowish powder on her face — this is what we would call “yellowface” and it is terribly derogatory and related to the history of minstrel shows in America and blackface culture. Pretty much, the boiled down idea is that because white people think that they own the world, they can therefore steal and appropriate whatever cultures they feel would serve their interests best and make money off those cultures and people, regardless of what injury it does to those populations. The three biggest examples of this in America are the genocide and colonization of Native American people, the slave trade from 17th-19th century, and the exploitative coolie system of indentured servitude where the Chinese built the transcontinental railroad.  

2.) Cultural appropriation aside, look at what is on the costume. Let’s think about this a little. What do takeout boxes represent? Chinese food, right? But this Chinese food is not authentic Chinese food — it is Chinese food produced specifically for an American market that doesn’t know real Chinese food from this weird hybrid. So the largest consumers of Chinese food tend to be non-Asian folks. Now, Chinese food has a price tag on it — it is something  that you buy. Therefore it is what we call a “commodity.” 

The image of the takeout box is reflected on the costume and the body of the woman — this means that it isn’t just Chinese food that is being commodified, but the body of the woman. Because Asian women have, as I mentioned above, been historically defined and stereotyped as exotic whores (to be blunt about it), can’t you see the relationship between the takeout box as something that is produced for and consumed by (mostly) white people, and Chinese woman’s body as something that is also produced by and consumed by non-Asian men?

Considering the fact that the back of the costume says “TAKE ME OUT” suggests a few things: 1.) Chinese women are a commodity to be consumed; 2.) Chinese women can be bought; 3.) Chinese women are whores whose only value is their sexuality. 

Which takes me to my third point:

3.) The most egregious part of the costume is the fact that it says “ENJOY” on her breasts. If we consider that Chinese food is usually considered the food of choice for people who want CHEAP food, in this sense, not only does the Chinese woman whose exoticized and fetishized identity is being appropriated have to THANK the consumer for purchasing her, but she is a CHEAP commodity whose value requires thanking the non-Asian savior for inserting himself between her legs. 

So, what this costume is saying is:

- Chinese women are something to be consumed
- Chinese women are cheap whores
- Not only are they cheap whores, they are Chinese cheap whores
- This means that they are exotic cheap Chinese whores
- They should be grateful that we (non-Asian men who fetishize Asianness) are providing her with salvation 
- But, she can’t really be saved because no one really wants her, they just want to consume her and fetishize her. This is why she is a takeout box: cheap, easily produced, easily found anywhere in just about any city or town in America. 

Now do you see the problem with it?

In case you want to tell me I read too much into it, my job is to teach undergrads this type of stuff. So no, I did not read too much into it. I didn’t have to read at all. It screamed out at me in all of its disgusting Orientalism. 

And it’s on a white model. FFS.

This explanation is really whorephobic.

By which I mean, it relies on, reifies, and normalises, the notion of sex work being an ignoble, worthless, and inherently demeaning occupation. It conflates sex work with “purchasing a person” and doesn’t interrogate why it’s considered contemptible. I mean, it’s really, really telling that colorblinding read sex work into the costume at all - while it’s ‘sexy’ and it basically says feminine Chinese people are a food item to be consumed, I don’t see how that implies sex work (unless you think of all instances of feminine sexuality being commodified, even indirectly, as sex work, which is absurd).

The whorephobic myths colorblinding is repeating are that sex work obviates sexual agency, that being a sex worker involves giving away part of your humanity to anyone who pays you.

There are lots of Asian people who do sex work for a living. I doubt most would see themselves as being “bought” or that their “only value is their sexuality”.

I’m actually really troubled by the relatively privileged diasporic Asian critique of “exotification” that continually repeats this notion that if Asian femininity is exotified, then it means Asian women will be be thought of as a sex workers, and being considered a sex worker is the worst thing ever. It kind of resembles (but not quite) a middle-class concern with feminine reputation and virginity-worship.

Non-sex workers’ problems with the stigma attached to sex work doesn’t even compare to the problems that actual sex workers have with that stigma. And Asian sex workers in particular have specific problems relating to police violence and the anti-migration activities of the anti-trafficking industry.

Now, I’ve dealt with being exotified in my own personal life. And it was part of an abusive and bullying situation I was in - the inherent racism of exotification was part of the abuse. It was a way of taking away my agency, my sexual agency, but agency in other parts of my life as well. So I don’t mean at all to say that sexualised exotification is a non-issue for diasporic Asians.

I just wish there was a way to validate the concerns about sexualisation and exotification that doesn’t rely on projecting all of those concerns onto sex workers and replaying whore stigma in the process. I think that’s really, really unfair to migrant sex workers.

TW: SEX SLAVERY, SEX TRAFFICKING, RAPE

Good god, are you kidding me? Do you not realize that in America and around the world, Asians — specifically Southeast Asian — are the number one most trafficked human beings? That most Asian women who do sex work in America do not do it of their own volition but because they were brought here and forced into sexual slavery? To say my reading is “whorephobic” is to completely ignore the reality of sex trafficking and sexual slavery that so many women and girls under the age of 16 are subject to in America and around the world. And to say that it is whorephobic reeks of undeniable class and social privilege. 

There is no problem with doing sex work. There is a problem with sex trafficking and sex slavery, and it is that particular model of sex work that the vast majority of Asian women are aligned with. To say otherwise is to paint a completely unrealistic picture of what is actually happening today in America and around the world. What you are reifying and normalizing is a conception that sex work is always positive and that the majority of Asian women who “work in sex” (they do not fucking work in sex, they are slaves to it!) in America are actually doing it because they want to.

The fact of the matter is: the vast majority of Asian diasporic women who are sex slaves in America is due to the fact that they are undocumented women who arrived here through snakeheads. A huge amount of those women are from Fujian, China; Cambodia; Vietnam; and Thailand. 

In respects to the costume itself: That you would think it is okay for all Asian American women to be, without their consent, subject to having their bodies appropriated as sexual objects for sale and consumption is, quite frankly, appalling. And I might add it can also be triggering.

Let me tell you a story. When I was 14 years old, a photographer contacted me because he told me I was a beautiful Asian girl who should be a model. That same photographer ended up raping me, taking photos of me during that process, and spreading them all over the internet on websites that specifically targeted Asian girls. The entire time he was raping me, he told me what a beautiful China Doll I was. I later found out that he only targeted Asian girls; that there were many others just like me — girls between the ages of 12 and 15 who were targeted specifically because we were young and Asian. And the reason why he did so was because he fucking exoticized our Asianness a specific way and was also too broke to go to Thailand, Cambodia, and all those other regions of Southeast Asia where hundreds of thousands of women and girls under the age of 16 are forced into sex slavery. 

If you want to be academic about it and have me divorce my personal experiences and outrage over your completely thoughtless and highly privileged response: I was not deploying the language of sex work; I was deploying the rhetoric of “whore” in particular to represent the kind of discourse that is at work within the minds of men who are reading Asian bodies in this way. And when the discourse of whores (not sex work, which is different from whores — I will explain below) is inscribed onto our bodies without consent, those acts are not only discursively but also epistemically violent. As Monique Wittig says, “Language casts sheaves of reality upon the social body; stamping it and violently shaping it.” And if we consider Foucault’s and Butler’s examples as ones that demonstrate the insidious ways in which language might work, we can understand how dangerous the rhetoric of “whore” can be for many Asian women and for the limits of our bodies — especially as the body inscribed as an Asian whore does not refer so much to the Asian American sex worker as it does to the Asian sex slave. 

That being said, there is a difference between the rhetoric of whore and the reality of sex workers: and what it comes down to is consent. When one is consenting to sex work as opposed to forced into sex work, it could be a potentially positive experience. But to take consent out of the equation shapes that individual’s experience in a very different manner — in precisely the definition you described: ignoble, worthless, and inherently demeaning. Because what it comes down to is that it isn’t a fucking occupation. It isn’t work. It’s slavery. And if you even think it is possible to reframe the language of slavery with the language of work; if you think that it is not true that human bodies and sexualities are being bought, then you are too blind to see past your own privilege. 

To put it another way: when that photographer was raping me and taking pornographic photographs of me without my consent, positioning my body into different ways to get a better shot of young Asian pussy, I certainly wasn’t thinking that what I was doing was work. 

I might add that I also attempted to kill myself repeatedly after this occurred, because I did think that such an experience made me worthless. Not only because I was raped, but also because my naked body was all over the internet. To this day, my body is being sold without my consent, and some men sit from the comfort of their own homes, masturbating to images of my 14 year old self. 

Let’s also not forget that Chinese women have historically been barred from immigration into the United States because it was assumed that all Chinese women were prostitutes.

^ THIS.

^^ THIS indeed. Thank you for your words, colorblinding.

Ironic that ardhra would worry about projecting middle-class concerns onto this issue, because the “all sex work is freely chosen sex work! wooo empowerment!” thing is one of the most annoying and frequently seen (white) middle-class memes brought up in discussions about sex work, particularly in the context of exploitation and trafficking. Not every sex worker is an escort or an actress for a classy alt porn studio—in fact, most aren’t, and yet so many discussions assume that’s the default.

This is what happens when you ignore racial and class-based structural forces at work.

Thank you as well!

You know, for the record, I’m not white. But thanks for projecting your biases onto me and erasing my identity and my experience of abuse. Really. Despite my saying very clearly that I’ve experienced abusive exotification of Asianness and all my previous posts about being a woman of colour. Just cos it’s convenient for you to believe that anyone who disagrees with you is more privileged than you (this is pretty rich coming from someone who teaches undergrads in the USA), doesn’t mean I am.

This is what happens when you ignore racial and class-based structures and just ignore what is in front of you.

I know that not all sex workers are escorts or “actresses” (yeah, not all sex workers are women, either) for “classy alt porn”. I know this because I’m friends with sex workers and I listen to them when they tell me about their jobs. I don’t just repeat sensationalist titillating headlines about trafficking and sex slavery without evidence.

elomis:

At the moment in the US there is a collection of affiliated protests, centred on New York city.  As with all “grass roots” protest movements, some of the protesters are unemployed or students who enjoy shows of unity and demands for change as a recreational sport.  Some of them are people who have found themselves with a low quality of life for no other reason than they have declined to work to improve it.  They see that other people have a high quality of life and are demanding the same.

These groups of people are the minority.  The majority of protesters, and the theme of the protest, is the idea of a (figurative) 99% of America who may or may not be well educated, but work hard, and still have a quality of life that compares better to developing countries than the United States.  Some are drowning in student debts that are all but impossible to service.  Some have been through processes of being laid off or having pay reductions in corporate cost cutting exercises and earn only as much or in many cases significantly less than they did several years ago - while costs continue to inflate.  Many or most have no access to healthcare were they to require it - not being able to afford access to the user-pays American system.

The 99% are real, and it’s frightening.  Young families with $10 left after essentials who are an illness away from bankruptcy, professionals with undergraduate degrees in corporate roles who are choosing between making student loan payments and eating dinner.  One to two generations of Americans who are fed up to hell with an economy that came about largely because of a finance industry which managed to somehow overthrow the rules of capitalism;  an industry that instead of winning or losing based on market supply and demand, took home its profits, and managed to get its debts paid by taxpayers.  The entirety of Wall St is like Nick Leeson, the derivatives trader who worked for Barings making a tonne of highly profitable transactional trades, all the while putting the debts from the disastrous failed trades into an “error account” (numbered 88888) until they totalled $1.4 billion and were discovered.  Barings was sold to ING for £1.00

Australia is different.  Australia is a country with universal subsidised healthcare, subsidised tertiary education with an efficient and fair loans scheme which is paid at an acceptable rate only out of the money you earn, near universal employment and an expansive welfare system that can sustain the unemployed for years if that’s what the situation requires (unlike the US’ time-limited unemployment benefits scheme).

Our banks are strong and to a large extent highly ethical.  The lack of speculative, nonsensical finance products bought and sold in Australia by our highly liquid and well regulated financial institutions, means our economy didn’t only not plunge into recession in the GFC, we largely didn’t even feel its effects beyond those from exposure to overseas markets.  Our average wage is about 150% of the US’, our minimum wage is $15.51 to the $8.00 in Los Angeles.  It’s not perfect but when an Australian retires, they will absolutely have some retirement benefits due to a pension system and the superannuation guarantee.

We have our problems.  We have people who are mentally ill who aren’t getting help.  We have indigenous communities that just aren’t thriving.  We have a nation gripped with an absurd fascination with people who crawl onto our beaches having escaped whatever hasn’t been bombed into a vapour in their home country.  We have a polarised national debate about the global environment and how to minimise our effect on it, and that debate is birthing a sociological crisis in the way groups of Australians interact with each other, their government, and the media.

These problems don’t get fixed with the solutions the Americans are demanding.  “Occupying” Sydney or Melbourne and demanding the “end of corporate greed” is putting a bandaid on your forehead to deal with a headache.  With the lack of relevancy the “occupy” movement has in Australia, the only people left are the unhygienic, mouth breathing Socialist Alliance, Citizen’s Electoral Council and other limpet organisations that try to inseminate their agenda into any group of people larger than about twelve individuals. You want to occupy something in Australia?

Occupy your local member’s office and discuss how the mentally ill can get the help they need.

Occupy a soup kitchen and use your labour to give the homeless that we do have, a hot nutritious meal.

Occupy a dinner party and explain the scope and substance of our “refugee crisis” to your friends in clear, respectful language.

Occupy a talkback radio station for 5 minutes on the phone, and ask the shock jock why it’s a bad thing for the government to make polluting more expensive for companies.

Pretty much this.

Also, I think it’s appalling that it’s anti-poverty week and carers week, but the hipster Trot occupiers are too busy bandwagon-jumping and proclaiming things on behalf of other people to even acknowledge the work of people who’ve been working against inequality for decades. Too busy wanting to be part of a spectacle to actually think about consequences, as is typical of the Trots, who prefer flash-in-the-pan “protests” as more efficient recruiting grounds.

No way are those people 99% of me. I’m disappointed I ever even gave them 1% of my time.