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.
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.
“Manufacturing Freedom stands out for its important and impassioned argument, and for its superb trans-disciplinary method and approach, fluidly integrating political economy, ethnography, human rights and feminism. . . A brave critical work.” —Stephen J. Rosow, IDSS Book Award Committee Chair, State University of New York at Oswego (Emeritus)
"Manufacturing Freedom is a profound, wide-ranging, and deeply researched ethnography of the global anti-trafficking movement. Elena Shih weaves together insights from across the social sciences with extensive fieldwork in the United States, China, and Thailand to upend the taken-for-granted morality of commodified efforts to 'rescue' sex workers. A powerful and compelling contribution to scholarship on gender, markets, labor, and transnational social movements."—Rene Almeling, author of GUYnecology: The Missing Science of Men's Reproductive Health
"Sharply argued and deeply ambitious, Manufacturing Freedom provides an unflinching and sustained confrontation with the convergence of sex, labor, humanitarianism, and capital in anti-trafficking campaigns, as well as with workers’ efforts on their own behalf."⏤Mimi Thi Nguyen, author of The Gift of Freedom: War, Debt, and Other Refugee Passages
"Deeply insightful and profoundly relevant, this is a must-read for anyone curious about what it means to 'rescue' women in the global South from sex work. Manufacturing Freedom reveals the centrality of religious conversion and rigid patriarchal gender scripts to rehabilitation, and the ways that these rehabilitation projects repeat racialized tropes of white saviors and Asian sex slaves and reinscribe US imperialism."⏤Kamala Kempadoo, coeditor of White Supremacy, Racism and the Coloniality of Anti-Trafficking
“Manufacturing Freedom shows us that seemingly well-known social issues may be dangerously construed. Shih takes us into the world of human trafficking and offers surprising explanations for what is going on and what to do about it. The view from the global North has privileged the trope of 'modern-day slavery' and benefited the anti-trafficking industrial complex. What would happen, Shih asks, if we listened to those too long ignored in the anti-trafficking movement? What would happen if we studied and took seriously the experiences and expertise of those dealing with human trafficking at close range in their own countries? The answers are novel and needed.”—Frederick F. Wherry, Professor of Sociology, Princeton University
"Shih's multi-sited ethnography makes groundbreaking contributions to the scholarship on caring labor and race. Manufacturing Freedom is a must-read for its methodological innovation, empirical richness, and theoretical sophistication."⏤Sharmila Rudrappa, author of Discounted Life: The Price of Global Surrogacy in India
288 pp.6 x 9Illus: 20 b/w photos
9780520379701$29.95|£25.00Paper
Apr 2023