Strange Traffic: Sex, Slavery & the Freedom Principle

This article uses the recent prosecution of a sex trafficking case in rural Missouri to argue three points. One, the federal law of trafficking is currently being used in unanticipated ways, including the apprehension of individuals who pay for sex. Two, trafficking invites creative use precisely because it provides prosecutors with a more salient justification for punishment than either legal moralism or harm; a rhetorical plea to anti-slavery that enjoys a longstanding but under-theorized role in criminal law rhetoric. Three, anti-slavery’s recurrence in criminal law rhetoric underscores a larger doctrinal point, namely that H.L.A. Hart’s version of the harm principle missed its subordinate relationship to what J.S. Mill termed the principle of freedom

Konstruksi Pelacur dan Industri Seks di Media

Media adalah salah satu instrumen utama dalam membentuk konstruksi gender di masyarakat. Di Indonesia, citra relasi laki-laki dan perempuan dalam produk media masih mengusung nilai-nilai lama yang konservatif dan patriarki. Ketidakadilan gender dalam media ini semakin terasa saat perempuan dikaitkan dengan industri seks. Dengan adanya stereotip pada kelompok tertentu inilah yang menyebabkan potensi terjadinya konflik sosial di masyarakat semakin meningkat. Penelitian ini kemudian melihat bagaimana media membentuk kontruksi tersebut, dalam peristiwa penutupan lokalisasi Dolly dan Jarak di Surabaya, yang dinilai rawan konflik. Melalui metode analisis wacana kritis milik Norman Fairclough, dengan memfokuskan pada dimensi pertama, yaitu teks, hasil penelitian menunjukkan bahwa media membentuk representasi, relasi, dan identitas pihak-pihak yang terlibat dalam realitas sosial tersebut. Program talk show Primetime News di Metro TV menggambarkan pelacur secara negatif. Selain itu, hubungan presenter dan pelacur digambarkan tidak setara. Hal ini terjadi saat presenter mengidentifikasi dirinya hanya sebagai presenter profesional yang bertugas untuk mewawancarai pelacur sebagai narasumber, namun tidak menunjukkan tingkat kepentingan yang tinggi dari informasi yang disampaikan oleh pelacur tersebut, bagi khalayak

Singing Solidarity: Class Consciousness, Emotional Pedagogy, And The Songs Of The Industrial Workers Of The World

Singing Solidarity looks at songs and song culture in the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW) from its inception to its decline near the start of WWI and examines how IWW songs engaged with, transformed, and directed workers’ feelings to “spur [them] to action” (Gould 47). Songs in the IWW repertoire created a sense of group identity and cohesion, supporting the IWW’s project of class consciousness and working-class solidarity. This solidarity, I argue, was felt rather than theorized. The felt solidarity of the IWW collective was intensified through the act of singing as a group, which was simultaneously an instantiation of as well as a catalyst or “spur” for solidarity. This dissertation argues that IWW songs were an integral part of providing IWW members with a sense of “what [their] feelings are and what they mean” and a way of “figuring out and understanding what they are feeling” (Gould 34). In this sense, IWW songs created and perpetuated what Deborah Gould, in Moving Politics, terms “emotional habitus,” or a group’s “inclinations toward certain feelings and way of emoting” (32). Group members may have a range of affects, or what are pre-conscious feelings that are not yet formed or articulated as specific emotions. An emotional habitus untangles those affects and provides group members with a collective framework for articulating their feelings. In having a common emotional framework, group members feel part of the group. Through “emotional pedagogy,” or emotional education, some feelings are given language and meaning in the habitus while others are not, which emphasizes particular ways of feeling (34). IWW songs helped to create and perpetuate an emotional habitus that responded to members’ feelings of weakness, fear, and discontent and enabled individual workers to recognize those feelings as collective feelings. The songs then provided a sense of how and what to feel, emphasizing feelings of collective power and anger, and mobilized those feelings against employers and the wage system

“I Wanted to Feel Like a Man Again”: Hegemonic Masculinity in Relation to the Purchase of Street-Level Sex

This article examines the narratives of men who purchase sex from street-level providers in a mid-sized city in Western Canada. We explore what men’s stories tell us about how masculinity is constructed in relation to street sex work. These men narrated their purchase of sex as attempts to exercise or lay claim to male power, privilege, and authority; at the same time, research reveals how tenuous this arrangement is for men. Study participants drew on conventional heterosexual masculine scripts to rationalize their actions and behaviors. Their stories reveal that their purchase of street-level sex is motivated by a sense of failure to successfully align with classed and gendered norms of hegemonic masculinity in which the purchase of sex was an attempt to “feel like a man again.” In this article, we move beyond the notion that static “types” of men purchase sex, highlighting instead that sex work customers are complex social actors with multifaceted reasons for purchasing sex but that are nonetheless inseparable from socially valorized forms of masculine comportment. We conclude that hegemonic masculinity is not only injurious to some men, but also to the sex workers on whom it is enacted