Activites Regulieres Et Irregulieres Sur Le Marche Du Travail Europeen
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Colloque international Université de Nice Sophia Antipolis, France 6 - 8 décembre 2007 International Conference University of Nice Sophia Antipolis, France 6 - 8 December 2007 NOUVELLES DYNAMIQUES MIGRATOIRES: ACTIVITES REGULIERES ET IRREGULIERES SUR LE MARCHE DU TRAVAIL EUROPEEN NEW MIGRATION DYNAMICS: REGULAR AND IRREGULAR ACTIVITIES ON THE EUROPEAN LABOUR MARKET Jeudi 6 décembre Thursday 6 December Après-midi / Afternoon (14:30-18:00) Industrie du sexe et trafics : une voie pour les migrant(e)s ? Sex Industry and Trafficking : Migrant Opportunities ? Discutants / Moderators Mathilde DARLEY Joanna NAPIERALA Table des matières / Contents Becoming the Border: Women Trafficked Across Europe..................................................................3 Amy M. RUSSELL, University of Leeds The Other and Her Body: Migrant Prostitution, Gender Relations and Cultural Models..................24 Monica MASSARI, PhD, University of Calabria Renate SIEBERT, University of Calabria The Difference Received: Narrative Obscurity, Economic Rationality and Trafficking in ‘White’ Women in an Era of Biopolitical Management..................................................................................43 Jacqueline BERMAN, Berkeley Policy Associates Prostitution, Cyberprostitution, plus qu’un métier. L’immigration féminine camerounaise en région lyonnaise.............................................................................................................................................70 Richard A. LEKOA Trajectoires et logiques de circulation des danseuses de cabaret en Suisse.......................................71 Romaric THIÉVENT, Université de Neuchâtel Femmes migrantes non européennes et secteur du service : travail du sexe/travail domestique, une alternative sans choix ?.......................................................................................................................91 Françoise GUILLEMAUT, LISST/CERS, Université Toulouse le Mirail Nouvelles dynamiques migratoires / New Migration Dynamics Becoming the Border: Women Trafficked Across Europe Amy M. RUSSELL, University of Leeds [email protected] Résumé / Abstract This article is part of a larger research project (+book-length manuscript) on trafficking in east European women in the EU. The empirical, discursive and theoretical analysis is based on field research I conducted in Poland, Germany and Bosnia, 2001-06. This paper will explore the ways in which east European trafficked women’s ‘foreignness’, eastern-ness, white-ness and transgression of and movement across borders accounts for the failure of EU member states to ratify the Convention against Trafficking in Human Beings (May 2005) 1 and provide trafficked persons with protection and assistance as victims of a crime. It will also consider how this failure pivots around a denial of these women’s agency and ability to move across borders to pursue projects of their own. In order to do so, the paper will also consider the Italian case, where a seemingly progressive law to protect victims of trafficking (Article 18 of Italian Law 40, 1998) in practice simultaneously denies these women access to the provisions of the law and reiterates the notion that women and foreigners require state protection. Sex-trafficking —the ‘dirty underbelly’ and ‘dark side of globalization’ — function as one aspect of anti-immigration responses to forces associated with the globalization. Among the ways in which these discourses refer to anxieties about immigration and globalization are the racialization of trafficked women and trafficking criminals. Sex-trafficking discourses tend to focus on the ‘white- ness’ of its ‘victims’. The putative ‘whiteness’ of ‘the new white slave trade’ or of Slavic girls or of ‘blue-eyed blondes’ simultaneously functions to position these women as innocent victims in need of protection and contradictorily, as an internal, indistinguishable threat among ‘us’. The territorial, historical, institutional and ethnic contiguity between the EU and East Europe together render the presence of these ‘trafficked women’ highly disruptive. 1 As of March 2007, Albania, Austria, Georgia, Moldova and Romania and Slovakia were the only COE member states to have ratified the Convention. The Convention will enter into force with 10 ratifications. Twenty-nine Council of Europe states have signed but not ratified it http://www.coe.int/t/dg2/trafficking/campaign_en.asp (13 April 2007). Jeudi 6 décembre / Thursday 6 December 3 Industrie du sexe et trafics / Sex Industry and Trafficking “They said I wasn’t human but something that can be bought” 2 Introduction The bodies of women are bought and sold on a global scale. Newspapers report on trafficking, listing a catalogue of abuse, trying to shock readers into understanding the plight of these women, or titillating a desire for stories of sexual violence. Those who have experienced trafficking, under pseudonyms as their lives are often still in danger, tell stories of brutality and repeated sexual assault. The traffickers, both male and female, are rarely the focus of these tales. These narratives never seem to reveal much about the women telling the stories, who they are and how this experience has changed them. They are always regressive never progressive, never examining how they see themselves and how they see their futures. The sustained psychological abuse trafficked women face must have enduring effects upon those who have been subjected to it. Yet these women are often viewed as illegal immigrants and deported. They return home to countries ill-prepared to help them or even fully acknowledge the illegal trade its countrymen and women are engaging in. Embodiment This paper demonstrates how far the body as a constructed self, be it as a ‘victim’ of trafficking or a cargo to be shipped and sold around the world, can impact on a person’s life to the point where social construction interferes with the human rights of the individual. In debates over the nature of the body in society, this study acknowledges that the constructionist argument is especially strong when we discuss women. If women’s identities are created through pre-supposed gendered assumptions 3 about their abilities as a ‘female’ body and their behaviour is controlled through concepts of shame and respectability, they are forced to acknowledge that they do not have full control over their bodies, as they have not defined the boundaries they live within. Turner reflects, “One fundamental feature of human society has been that, although women have phenomenological possession of their bodies, they have rarely exercised full ownership.”4 This, he suggests, leads to an “alienation of the body.” 5 We will see this alienation played out in numerous ways in the lives of trafficked women and will consider if Kristeva’s theory of abjection fits with this idea of bodily alienation. Grosz believes “psychoanalytic theory … may be able to provide one of the ingredients of an account of the necessary embodiment of subjectivity.” 6 She argues the body “is the central object over and through which relations of power and resistance are played out.” 7 And to examine this we must scrutinize “the materiality of discourses … [because] the subject is produced, by the 2 ‘Sonja’ in Smith, Joan. ‘They said I wasn’t human but something that can be bought’ The Times , 14 th October 2004. 3 Or gendered ‘knowledges.’ 4 Turner, B The Body and Society, 2nd Edition, (London: Sage, 1996). p. 220. 5 Ibid, p. 220. 6 Grosz, E. ‘The Body of Signification,’ in Fletcher, J and Benjamin, A, (eds), Abjection, Melancholia and Love, (London, Routledge, 1990), pp. 80-103, p. 85. 4 Après-midi / Afternoon (14:30-18:00) Nouvelles dynamiques migratoires / New Migration Dynamics inscriptions of social meanings.” 8 It is these social meanings that can shape identity and equally destroy it if they are lost. The female body is a boundaried space. These boundaries may lie dormant until they are transgressed. It may only be then that they are acutely felt. The vagina is seen as in a perpetual state of liminality as it is both closed and has a boundary with the rest of the body but is also viewed, using preconceived ideas of female genitalia, as a space within, a concave space with the potential to be filled. 9 As Moffett argues biological diagrams “portray the vagina as an empty space - rather like an incomplete jigsaw puzzle, with a penis-shaped piece missing.” 10 It is the potentiality of these boundaries and the potentiality of the vagina that create a sense of tension around the female body. This notion of the vagina as ‘space’ suggests it is a space to be transgressed through sexual intercourse and when giving birth, a channel as well as an interior space. As such, women’s bodies are never truly seen as closed off with secure boundaries. This is illustrated in the work of Douglas who Anttonen paraphrases, “just as the body is an entity with boundaries, the bodily openings are border zones.” 11 This then creates a sense of a woman’s body as a liminal space, a border zone between interior and exterior. It is also the site of menstruation, which historically has been seen as a time of impurity, because of this potential impurity 12 it is also the barrier between pure and impure. I will explore this construction of the female body with specific reference to the bodies of trafficked women. Later in this paper I will be discussing women’s responses to their imprisonment and the sexual violence they experience. I will use the work of Julia