Trafficking1

During the first two decades of the twenty-first century, a bevy of antitrafficking laws and policies would come to equate all prostitution with the crime of human trafficking and to rhetorically capture both of these activities under the rubric of “modern slavery.”² These laws were pushed forward by a remarkably diverse array of social activists and policy makers—a coalition spanning from left to right and comprising secular feminists, evangelical Christians, human rights activists of diverse stripes, and a cadre of prominent celebrities and corporate officials. Despite notorious disagreements around the politics of sex and gender, these groups came together to advocate for harsher criminal and economic penalties against traffickers, prostitutes’ customers, and nations deemed to be taking insufficient steps to stem the flow of trafficked women.³ This chapter traces the resurgence of “trafficking” as a political discourse at the turn of the twenty-first century, providing a critical genealogy of its circulations through multiple activist communities and spaces of governance.