Description

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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.

About the Author

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Elena Shih is Manning Assistant Professor of American Studies and Ethnic Studies at Brown University, where she directs a human trafficking research cluster through the Center for the Study of Slavery and Justice.

Praise For…

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"Elena Shih…makes an important contribution to critical studies of anti-trafficking. . . . an insightful read for criminology and sociology students and instructors interested in a critical approach to anti-trafficking activism."
— Journal of Human Trafficking

"An important contribution to the scholarship on human trafficking, Manufacturing Freedom reveals how market-based, anti-trafficking movements bolster the US empire and white supremacy, China’s authoritarian state power, and Thailand’s global market supremacy. . . . Highly recommended."
— CHOICE