Sex, Slaves and Citizens: Gender and the Politics of Mobility

Dr. Rutvica Andrijasevic, Centre for Labour Market Studies (CLMS), University of Leicester

The paper will address the ways in which current reconfiguration of the modes of governing in Europe are playing themselves out at the level of the subject and the impact they are having on individual experience of gender difference and sexuality. The topic through which these issues are tackled, is that of ‘sex trafficking’. By grounding her analysis in women’s subjectivities and undertaking a detailed investigation of women’s migratory projects, their cross-border journeys, working arrangements with third parties, and tensions that arouse from women’s attempts to identify as victims, Dr. Andrijasevic aims to bring to the fore the relationship between the enactment of mobility at the ‘micro’ level and its unequal distribution at the ‘macro’ level. She will argue that trafficking discourse and anti-trafficking policies normalize a differential regime of mobility through which the EU organizes access to its labour market and citizenship. With its emphasis on criminal organizations and victimized women, the discourse on sex trafficking as the new slave trade depoliticizes the debate on migration and labour. It also closes down the possibility for seeing the ways in which migrant women’s assertion of social positions that are not deemed legitimate for victims of ‘sex trafficking’ presses onto and reshapes citizenship in Europe

Biography:

Rutvica Andrijasevic works at the Centre for Labour Market Studies (CLMS), Leicester University. She is the author of Migration, Agency and Citizenship in Sex Trafficking (Palgrave, 2010, http://www.palgrave.com/products/title.aspx?pid=345860 ) and has co-edited with Bridget Anderson a special issue of the journal Subjectivity entitled Conflicts of Mobility: Migration, Labour and Political Subjectivity. Her academic, policy and activist engagements are with issues of gender, sexuality and citizenship in Europe. She is a member of the editorial collective Feminist Review.

Organiser: Bloomsbury Gender Network hosted by the SOAS Centre for Gender Studies

Contact email: rs94@soas.ac.uk