Manufacturing Freedom: Sex Work, Anti-Trafficking Rehab, and the Racial Wages of Rescue

Sex worker rescue and rehabilitation programs have become a core focus of the global movement to combat human trafficking. Manufacturing Freedom offers an ethnographic exploration of two American anti-trafficking organizations that offer vocational training in jewelry production to women migrants in China and Thailand as a path out of sex work. Activists brand this jewelry a "slave-free good" and then sell it to consumers in the United States, generating racialized circuits of commerce and morality centered around promises of freedom from enslavement and redemptive wages for former sex workers—whom these organizations universally label as victims of trafficking. Workers, by contrast, often contest the trafficking label and object to the moral and disciplinary processes that ensnare them in a pernicious global web of anti-trafficking rescue. In this novel study, Elena Shih argues that these anti-trafficking rescue and rehabilitation projects profit off persistent labor abuse of women workers and imagined but savvily marketed narratives of redemption, thereby propagating a transnational moral economy of low-wage women's work that obfuscates relations of race, gender, national power, and inequality.