Manufacturing Freedom: Sex Work, Anti-Trafficking Rehab, and the Racial Wages of Rescue (Hardcover) (ISBN-13: 9780520379695)

Sex worker rescue programs have become a core focus of the global movement to combat human trafficking. While these rehabilitation programs promise freedom from enslavement and redemptive wages for former sex workers, such organizations actually propagate a moral economy of low-wage women's work that obfuscates relations of race, gender, national power, and inequality. Manufacturing Freedom is an ethnographic exploration of two American organizations that offer vocational training in jewelry production to women migrants in China and Thailand as a path out of sex work. In this innovative study, Elena Shih argues that anti-trafficking rescue and rehabilitation projects profit off persistent labor abuse of women workers and imagined but savvily marketed narratives of redemption.

Author: Elena Shih
ISBN-10: 0520379691
ISBN-13: 9780520379695
Publisher: University of California Press
Language: English
Published: 04/11/2023
Pages: 288
Format: Hardcover
Weight: 1.15lbs
Size: 9.10h x 6.00w x 0.90d

Review Citation(s):
Choice 12/01/2023