Carceral politics as gender justice? The “traffic in women” and neoliberal circuits of crime, sex, and rights

Abstract

This article draws upon recent works in sociology, jurisprudence, and feminist theory in order to assess the ways in which feminism, and sex and gender more generally, have become intricately interwoven with punitive agendas in contemporary US politics. Melding existing theoretical discussions of penal trends with insights drawn from my own ethnographic research on the contemporary anti-trafficking movement in the United States—the most recent domain of feminist activism in which a crime frame has prevailed against competing models of social justice—I elaborate upon the ways that neoliberalism and the politics of sex and gender have intertwined to produce a carceral turn in feminist advocacy movements previously organized around struggles for economic justice and liberation. Taking the anti-trafficking movement as a case study, I further demonstrate how human rights discourse has become a key vehicle both for the transnationalization of carceral politics and for the reincorporation of these policies into the domestic terrain in a benevolent, feminist guise. I conclude by urging greater and more nuanced attention to the operations of gender and sexual politics within mainstream analyses of contemporary modes of punishment, as well as a careful consideration of the neoliberal carceral state within feminist discussions of gender, sexuality, and the law.

What do we want? A strong trafficking law! When do we want it? Now!

–Call and response cry at National Organization for Women rally for New York State Trafficking law which would increase criminal penalties against prostitutes’ customers, New York City, February 1, 2007

Trafficking is not a poverty issue. It’s a law enforcement issue.

–Gary Haugen, Director of the International Justice Mission (quoted in Landesman 2004: 30)

When we govern through crime, we make crime and the forms of knowledge historically associated with it—criminal law, popular crime narrative, and criminology—available outside their limited original subject domains as powerful tools with which to interpret and frame all forms of social action as a problem of governance.

–Jonathan Simon, Governing Through Crime, 2007: 17

In recent years, a diverse array of social theorists has endeavored to explain the rise of mass incarceration in the United States (and, to a lesser extent, Western Europe) since the 1970s, linking contemporary carceral strategies of social governance to the spread of neoliberal economic agendas, to late modern “cultures of control,” to new modes of racial domination, and to the emergence of new political paradigms of “governing though crime.”¹ In their groundbreaking 1992 article, “The New Penology,” law and society scholars Malcolm Feeley and Jonathan Simon (1992) first identified the series of interrelated shifts in penal ideology that began to transpire in the 1970s and 1980s, noting in particular the increased social reliance upon the imprisonment of entire populations deemed dangerous, as opposed to the apprehension and rehabilitation of particular individuals. Since that time, successive waves of scholars have sought to understand the broader significance of mass incarceration as a strategy of social control in light of Michel Foucault’s earlier prediction that the modernist institution of the penitentiary would likely give way to more diffuse modes of governance (Foucault 1979). Whatever explanations they have offered for the surprising arc that modes of punishment have taken, most theorists have tended to agree with Foucault’s more general assertion that the study of penal policy is of paramount significance to an understanding of the organization of power more generally, and must therefore move from the margins to the center of contemporary social theory.

Concurring with this assessment, numerous feminist theorists have begun to trace a parallel history of the evolution of punishment, one that foregrounds the role played by sex and gender in processes of penal transformation. They have described the social implications of rapidly accelerating incarceration rates of female offenders (Sudbury 2005; Schaffner 2005; Haney 2004) as well as the control over women’s lives and bodies that is increasingly exercised at a cultural level through a gendered and ubiquitous “fear of crime” (Madriz 1997; Wood 2005).² Intriguingly, they have also explored the surprising ways that feminist activism itself—especially in its hegemonic, US guise—has often served to facilitate, rather than to counter, the carcerally controlling arm of the neoliberal state. Scholars of domestic violence and rape, for example, have traced the rise of carceral politics within second wave feminism (Gottschalk 2006; Bumiller 2008; Coker 2001; Guber 2007; Halley 2008a; Halley 2008b), describing the ways in which feminist campaigns against sexual violence have not only been coopted by, but in fact been integral ingredients to the evolution of criminal justice as an apparatus of control.

This article draws upon recent works in sociology, jurisprudence, and feminist theory in order to assess the ways in which feminism, and sex and gender more generally, have become intricately interwoven with punitive agendas in contemporary US (and by extension, global) politics. Melding existing theoretical discussions of penal trends with insights drawn from my own ethnographic research on the contemporary anti-trafficking movement in the United States—the most recent domain of feminist activism in which a crime frame has prevailed against competing models of social justice—I elaborate upon the ways that neoliberalism and the politics of sex and gender have intertwined to produce a carceral turn in advocacy movements that were previously organized around struggles for economic justice and personal liberation. Taking the anti-trafficking movement as a case study, I further demonstrate how human rights discourse has become a key vehicle both for the transnationalization of carceral politics and for folding back these policies into the domestic terrain in a benevolent, feminist guise.

The discussion of carceral feminism that I present below is in no way intended to suggest that all existing feminisms—much less, feminists—are committed to a carceral agenda. For example, even within the mainstream of contemporary US feminism, a liberationist vision still prevails around issues such as reproductive rights, the flagship issue of the liberal-left end of the political spectrum.³ Around questions of sexual violence, however, including but not limited to the issue of human trafficking, a carceral agenda has indisputably prevailed. As the cultural theorist Roger Lancaster has observed in his recent book, Sex Panic and the Punitive State, since the 1960s, feminists and other liberals have steadily moved rightward on questions of punitiveness and criminal justice, particularly around issues of sex (Lancaster 2011, p. 211).

The analysis that follows derives from a review of the sociological and feminist literatures on sex, gender, and carcerality as well as my own multi-sited ethnographic research at state- and activist-sponsored policy meetings, conferences, and strategy sessions. Between 2005 and 2009, I attended 72 events with an ideologically diverse sample of both secular feminist and evangelical Christian anti-trafficking activists in Washington DC and New York and conducted 28 in-depth, face-to-face interviews with movement leaders. While my focus in this essay is primarily upon the secular feminist groups that have been most influential in recasting sexual commerce in terms of the “traffic in women,” the analysis presented also draws from my longstanding scholarly and political engagement with sex worker activists who reject the trafficking frame and who address issues of migrant sexual labor under different political rubrics (see e.g., Agustín 2007; Ahmad 2005; Jagori 2005).⁴ Finally, my argument is informed by a decade of prior ethnographic investigation that I conducted with a broad sample of sex-workers, clients, and state agents throughout the late 1990s and early 2000s (Bernstein 2007b), which demonstrated that the rubric of “trafficking” is inadequate to describe sex workers’ highly diverse experiences of work and exploitation, a finding consistent with a growing body of social scientific inquiry (see, e.g., Brennan 2004; Kempadoo 2005a; and Cheng 2010).

In the sections of this essay that follow, I first trace the broad connections between carceral politics and neoliberalism that have been articulated in several influential texts in recent sociological and jurisprudential theory. Next, I pull out the undertheorized gender and sexuality dimensions of these arguments through discussions of the contributions of a new wave of feminist socio-legal scholars and of my own ethnographic work on the contemporary anti-trafficking movement in the United States, tracing the emergence of what I term carceral feminism—a cultural and political formation in which previous generations’ justice and liberation struggles are recast in carceral terms.⁵ I conclude by urging more nuanced attention to the operations of gender and sexual politics within prevailing theorizations of contemporary modes of punishment, as well as a more careful consideration of the neoliberal carceral state within feminist discussions of gender, sexuality, and the law.

Carceral politics as neoliberal governance: a theoretical overview

Although there have been numerous works across the spectrum of the social sciences that have situated recent transformations in criminal justice in terms of the broader social significance of these trends, for purposes of my discussion in this article I begin by considering three highly influential texts that have emerged within contemporary social theory to interpret the late twentieth century “carceral turn” in US and Western European politics: David Garland’s The Culture of Control (2001a), Loïc Wacquant’s Punishing the Poor (2009b), and Jonathan Simon’s Governing Through Crime (2007). While other commentators have focused primarily upon the political and social consequences of mass imprisonment (Western 2006; Manza and Uggen 2006; Garland 2001b), on mass incarceration as a project of racial domination (Peterson, Krivo and Hagan 2006; Davis 2003; Tonry 1995), or upon articulating and advancing policy alternatives (see, e.g., Jacobson 2005; Petersilia 1998; Davis and Rodriguez 2000), I have chosen to focus upon the three aforementioned volumes because each one aspires to a broad theorization of the relationship between contemporary modes of punishment and more general trends within late-capitalist culture and political economy—including those that pertain to gender and sexuality.

David Garland’s 2001 volume, The Culture of Control: Crime and Social Order in Contemporary Society, still figures amongst the most ambitious and influential works in this vein in its bold assertion that the pattern of social, economic, and cultural relations that emerged in America, Britain, and elsewhere during the last three decades of the twentieth century ushered in “a cluster of risks, insecurities, and control problems that have played a crucial role in shaping our changing response to crime” (p. viii). Taking law, discourse, and policy together as his multi-faceted object of analysis, amongst Garland’s key contributions is to catalogue exhaustively the emergence of similar trends within two distinct national contexts, the US and the UK, challenging prevailing assumptions of American exceptionalism and illuminating shared, underlying patterns of structural transformation. According to Garland, an array of social dislocations common to late modernity has contributed to heightened disorder and to crime, as well as to a stark reorientation in penal trends away from social remedies and towards politically conservative versions of “expressive justice.” In the ascendant worldview that characterizes this trend, crime is not regarded as a problem of economic deprivation but rather of inadequate social controls, in which human beings are naturally inclined to commit crimes unless inhibited from doing so by social authorities. It is this shared, conservative understanding of the root causes of crime that has inclined politicians and publics towards a revival in punitive sanctions such as the death penalty, as well as towards forms of expressive justice like the public naming and shaming campaigns that currently circulate, in particular, around sex crimes (p. 9).

Garland’s discussion grants special attention to the professional middle classes who have abandoned their prior allegiance to rehabilitative penal welfarism, noting that those who were formerly its staunchest advocates have done little to oppose the contemporary drift towards punitive policies. Reconfigured norms of gender and sexuality are understood by Garland to play a significant role in this shift, including the privatization of middle class family life and the entry of middle class women into the domain of the paid workforce. These changes have not only produced a new, objective vulnerability to crime, in Garland’s view (with empty and isolated homes producing increased opportunities for crimes to occur), but also a sense of middle class precariousness, “ontological insecurity,” and a desire for compensatory forms of social control (p. 155). Although Garland’s claims here are contentious ones (about which I have more to say below), his analysis usefully points towards the cultural underpinnings of punitive politics and a widening embrace of the carceral worldview, particularly amongst the affluent middle classes.

While seeking to explain a similar set of trends within contemporary culture and in emergent paradigms of criminal justice, Loïc Wacquant’s Punishing the Poor (2007b) makes a more pointed causal argument about the political roots of these recent wide-sweeping transformations. According to Wacquant, what underpins contemporary trends in punishment and incarceration is not the host of cultural attributes that Garland associates with “late modernity,” but rather neoliberalism as a specific political and economic strategy in which the carceral state supplants previous regimes that were organized around the provision of material welfare. For Wacquant, neoliberalism does not represent a shrinking state apparatus as is often assumed, but rather a shift in the predominant form and functions of the state in which new penal policies are a core feature. Because neoliberal economic strategies redirect public moneys away from the provision of goods and services, they in fact require an enhanced penal apparatus to contain newly disenfranchised populations. It is for this reason, Wacquant argues, that wherever neoliberalism reigns ascendant, carceral politics will too, an analysis that helps to explain the rise of carceral politics throughout much of Europe as well as in the United States.⁶

Wacquant maintains that this is a shift with broad social implications that extend far beyond the economic, with the gendered nature of the transition from one state form to another constituting a key component of his argument. Neoliberalism, in his view, can best be described as a remasculinization of the state in which its soft “social bosom” is transformed into a hard “penal fist,” one that dictates that poor women transition from welfare to workfare while their male counterparts are relocated from ghetto to prison. In addition to accounting for the divergent fates of differently raced, classed, and gendered bodies under conditions of neoliberalism, Wacquant also considers the operations of gender in symbolic as well as material ways. For Wacquant, the discursive production of the “sex offender” in contemporary politics and culture—a singularly demonic figure whose threat to ideals of familial domesticity plays a critical role in legitimating the new penal order—exemplifies the former, in addition to the productive aspects of contemporary crime discourse more generally. As Wacquant argues, noting how the specter of the sexual predator successfully relocates sexual menace outside the confines of the nuclear family, “The hyperbolic execration of the stranger pedophile on the public stage … serves to symbolically purify the family and reassert its established role as a haven against insecurity even as accelerating neoliberal trends in the culture and economy undermine it” (p. 235). In a full chapter devoted to the symbolic efficacy of sex crimes, Wacquant seeks to demonstrate how the moral abjectness of the sex predator “provides an urgent and perpetually refreshed motive for the … turn to fierce neutralization and vengeful retribution that has characterized U.S. penal policy since the late 1970s” (p. 214).

Whereas both Garland’s and Wacquant’s explanatory models highlight the relationship between neoliberal economic policies, the increased social disenfranshisement of the poor, and rising rates of incarceration, Jonathan Simon’s theorization of contemporary crime policies highlights the impact of such policies upon white middle class lives that are themselves increasingly sequestered within fortress-like gated communities and SUVS that resemble armored Humvees. Simon emphasizes the structural similarities that have emerged across boundaries of race, class, and ethnicity to justify carceral strategies of social control, whether that confinement occurs within the walls of one’s own suburban home or through literal imprisonment. In this view, mass incarceration is revealed to be not so much a new social strategy for the domination of African Americans or the disciplining of the labor force (which should be regarded as effects, rather than causes, of contemporary crime policies) but rather “as a policy solution to the political dilemmas of governing through crime” (p. 159). For Simon, it is the emergence of governing through crime as a political strategy that is of primary importance for social theorists to consider; the building of prisons, as well as the procurement of particular bodies to fill them, are but secondary and derivative phenomena.

Like Wacquant, Simon emphasizes the symbolic and productive (rather than simply repressive) dimensions of contemporary crime control policy, and disputes David Garland’s assertion that rising incarceration rates are due to an actual acceleration in crime. Yet in contrast to Wacquant, Simon maintains that crime and governance are not primarily about the control and domination of a racialized underclass. Instead, challenging views of power that extend in clear, straightforward lines from the social center out to the periphery (p. 18), Simon argues that new versions of liberal, middle class “freedom” are secured not against but precisely through the domain of contemporary penal policy. As Simon notes, one important vehicle of middle class governing through crime has been the rise of the paradigmatic “victim subject.” Highlighting the growing political centrality of the contemporary victims’ rights movement, Simon argues that the crime victim has supplanted the rights-bearing citizen as the idealized legal subject of our time.

Finally, Simon observes that feminism has itself played an active role in advancing the new tough-on-crime frame, particularly around the issues of rape and domestic violence. In this regard, he embraces legal theorist Ada Gruber’s insight that the raped woman as crime victim has emerged “as the idealized political subject of second-wave feminism” (p. 108). Following Gruber and other feminist critics, Simon notes how the feminist anti-rape and domestic violence movements, which were previously oriented towards grassroots and social service remedies, have increasingly turned to the terrain of criminal justice (as emblematized by the passage of the 1994 Violence Against Women Act) to pursue their political goals.

Although Simon’s analysis is a provocative one in its attunement to the interplay between contemporary gender and carceral politics, his simultaneous implication that carceral strategies are a reaction to second-wave feminist social transformations (a perspective that is shared by Garland and Wacquant), and something that feminists have themselves actively fought for, raises a number of intriguing questions. Why, in both Simon’s and Garland’s interpretive frames, would feminists respond in reactionary ways to the very social changes that their own activism had wrought? And why, viewed through Wacquant’s theoretical lens, would feminists themselves be advocating for a shift from the “soft maternal bosom” to the masculinized penal state? What, in other words, is feminists’ own stake in the sexual and carceral politics of neoliberalism?

Although Simon, Garland, and Wacquant rightly identify gender and sexuality as important galvanizing factors in the changing modes of governance that they describe, they fail to theorize their operations in systematic or sufficiently nuanced ways. Despite the varying perspectives these theorists offer, in all three texts the advent of the remasculinized penal state is rendered as a neoliberal reaction to a vague set of “social anxieties” wrought by new economic conditions as well as by feminism, a perspective that dovetails with the authors’ tangible nostalgia for the sets of gendered social and economic relations that characterized a prior era of modern-industrial capitalism. Although each of the three theorists under consideration observes that contemporary carceral politics are enabled through the specter of sexualized violence (whether or not they grant feminists a pivotal role in the construction of this framework), they neglect to explain why the threat of sexual violence is a uniquely effective cultural vehicle for ushering in this transition. Despite the vast theoretical contributions that these theorists make in foregrounding the role of carceral politics in neoliberal reconfigurations of state power, and the authors’ frank acknowledgment that new configurations of sex and gender are also integral to these transitions, there is still much to be explained about how and why contemporary sexual and political-economic transformations intersect.

To fill in the blanks that their work has left vacant, we need to delve more deeply into the intersections of neoliberalism, the carceral state, and the politics of sex and gender. Why have carceral feminist frameworks gained prominence while previous welfarist and liberationist feminist visions have declined? How do feminist versions of sexual and carceral politics get conjoined to drown out other social visions? To unravel these dilemmas, I turn now to an emergent body of scholarship on the carceral turn in second wave feminism as well as to my own ethnographic research on contemporary campaigns against the “traffic in women”—the most recent domain of feminist activism in which a crime frame has gained rapid ascendance, both within the United States and transnationally.

Carceral feminism confronts the “traffic in women”

On a cold and windy February afternoon, I approach the fifth in a series of lunchtime rallies on behalf of a new New York State law that would stiffen the potential criminal penalties against men who are convicted of patronizing a prostitute, from 90 days to a year in prison.⁷ When I arrive at Foley Square, I encounter a group of fifty or so women (mostly White or Asian, and all conspicuously middle class as indicated by their stylish attire and educated patterns of speech) as well as a gathering pool of journalists and onlookers. Present too are several influential City and State-level political figures who have been invited by the organizers to speak.

Women from the rally’s two sponsoring feminist organizations (NOW-NYC and Equality Now) as well as a smattering of other groups are gathered on the steps behind the speakers, holding up signs from their respective organizations and handing out press packets. Periodically, they coax the rest of the crowd to join together in a chant: “What do we want? A strong trafficking law! When do we want it? Now!” Or, “Elliot Spitzer, take the lead! A strong trafficking bill is what we need!”⁸

In their depictions of the sex industry, all of the speakers at the rally deploy the new anti-trafficking buzzwords (“victim,” “predator,” “perpetrator,” “exploiter”), along with stock anecdotes of innocent women having their papers confiscated, being forced to sell their bodies, and being trapped and tricked. The narratives of women’s victimization are coupled with an insistence upon the need to “focus on demand” and to pursue aggressively the perpetrators of sexual violence. Criminal law is rendered as a surprisingly powerful and effective deterrent to men’s bad behavior: “We need to have laws that will make men think twice about entering the commercial sexual exploitation business,” one passionate City Council member explains.

The final speaker at the event is Angela Lee from the New York Asian Women’s Center. Fashionable and fortyish, dressed in a black leather jacket and fitted slacks, she makes no mention of the role played by global poverty in the dynamics of trafficking or prostitution, instead framing the issue in terms of the sexual integrity of families. “This is a family issue,” she declares outright, “especially as Chinese New Year approaches and there are so many victims’ families who won’t be able to celebrate.”⁹ Lee goes on to link the dangers faced by trafficking victims to New York’s State’s lack of success thus far in imposing a law that would provide severe enough criminal penalties for traffickers and pimps. She concludes her speech with the emotional declaration that “We need to punish the traffickers and set the victims free!”

–From my fieldnotes, February 2007, New York City

Although a decade of feminist research and activism has addressed the role of the neoliberal state in criminalizing the survival strategies of poor women, and of poor women of color in particular (see, e.g., Davis and Shaylor (2001); Davis (2003); Schaffner (2005); Sudbury (2005); Haney (2010)), the significance of feminism’s own widening embrace of the neoliberal carceral state has only begun to come into focus. Two recent genealogies of second wave feminism by political theorists Marie Gottschalk (2006) and Kristin Bumiller (2007) have sought to shed light upon this trajectory, providing important elaboration and grounding for Jonathan Simon’s observation that feminism—and in particular, recent feminist activism around questions of sexual violence–has been a crucial enabler of the late-capitalist carceral turn. “The contemporary women’s movement in the United States helped facilitate the carceral state,” explains Gottschalk, noting that some of the very same historical and institutional factors that made the US women’s movement relatively successful in gaining public acceptance (including its firm foothold in elite politics, the absence of competing Marxist currents, and a strong national tradition of political liberalism) were important building blocks for the carceral state that emerged simultaneously in the 1970s (p. 115). Arguing that the neoliberal carceral imperative has had a devastating impact upon the ways that feminist engagement with questions of sexual violence have come to be framed, Bumiller (2008) suggests that the reciprocal is also true: once feminism became fatally inflected by neoliberal strategies of social control, it could serve as an effective inspiration for broader campaigns for criminalization (such as the war on drugs).

While Gottschalk and Bumiller single out US feminism as an exceptional case, scholars such as Ticktin (2008), Kempadoo (2005b), and Kulick (2003) have pointed to similar trends within an array of different national contexts. Writing about the confluence of French feminism and anti-immigrant sentiment, for example, Miriam Ticktin notes that contemporary feminist concern with issues of sexual violence “is often recognized only through the framework of racial, cultural, and religious difference” (2008, p. 865). As Ticktin demonstrates, by “fighting sexism with racism,” feminist campaigns around sexual violence have become increasingly powerful accessories to French state interests in border control and policing (Razack 1995, p. 72, quoted in Ticktin 2008, p. 865).

Another recent domain of feminist activism in which the carceral turn has become apparent has been in gathering political and cultural attention to the “traffic in women.” Until the mid-1990s, an incipient sex workers’ rights movement had sought to decriminalize and to destigmatize women’s sexual labor and to gain rights and protections for sex workers from within a labor frame, but in more recent years these efforts have been undercut by a bevy of new federal, state, and international laws that equate all prostitution with the crime of “human trafficking” and which impose harsh criminal penalties against traffickers and prostitutes’ customers. As the legal scholar Alice Miller has noted, in the late 1990s, this pivot first occurred within the context of transnational feminist organizing at the United Nations, an attention that brought with it “a focus on crime control methods and rescue, to the detriment of the promotion of the full range of rights needed by trafficked persons.” According to Miller, the 2000 UN Protocol Against Trafficking in Persons created international law “in the context of crime control—not human rights or labor protections” (Miller 2004, p. 32). Within the United States, although some anti-trafficking activists continue to the pay lip service to the goal of decriminalizing and securing economic rights for sex workers, the overwhelming thrust of current feminist attention has been similarly oriented towards widening—rather than eliminating—the sphere of criminal justice intervention in the sex industry.

Although “trafficking” as defined in international protocols and in current federal law could conceivably encompass sweatshop labor, agricultural work, or unscrupulous labor practices on military bases in Iraq, it has been the far less common instances of sexually trafficked women and girls that have stimulated the most concern by feminist activists, the state, and the press. In the 2000 UN Protocol Against Trafficking in Persons, for example, “trafficking” is understood to include “the exploitation of the prostitution of others or other forms of sexual exploitation, forced labour or services, slavery or practices similar to slavery, servitude or the removal of organs (United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime 2000).” Yet as Miller points out about the Protocol definition, “prostitution occupies an asymmetrical place in the list” as distinct from the specific criteria for force or coercion that qualify other forms of labor. Miller shows how in this context, two intertwined themes emerge: “the site of sexual exchange as a priority for state intervention and a criminal response as the main response to exploitation” (2004, p. 32).

Feminist anti-trafficking activists have themselves acknowledged that a focus upon sexual violation, rather than the structural conditions of exploited labor more generally—in addition to their strategic partnership on this issue with evangelical Christians—has been crucial to transforming it into a legal framework with powerful material and symbolic effects (Bernstein 2007a; Bernstein 2010; Chuang 2010). At events such as the February 2007 anti-trafficking rally that I attended at Foley Square in New York City, the political efficacy of conjoining the threat of sexual violence with calls for an expanded carceral state apparatus was apparent, with political leaders and feminist activists in strong agreement that human trafficking was primarily an issue of family values, sexual predation, and victimized women and children.

Commentators who have critically assessed the rise of the anti-trafficking movement in the United States have often attributed its ascendance to what they perceive to be the moralistic sexual politics of its two principal groups, “radical feminists” and conservative Christians.¹⁰ They have argued that both groups harbor “archaic and violated visions of femininity and sexuality” (Saunders 2005), a sexual ideology that is “pro-marriage” and “pro-family” (Weitzer 2007), and that they share an antipathy towards nonprocreative sex (Soderlund 2005). As the political scientists Dorothy Buss and Didi Herman (2003) have further demonstrated, by the late-1990s, feminists and evangelicals were well-poised to forge transnational alliances around this issue, as a greater reliance upon NGOs by the UN encouraged many newly formed evangelical NGOs to enter into the international political fray.

Other critics have pointed to the strong parallels between feminist uprisings around sex trafficking in the current moment and those that surrounded the White Slavery scare in the postbellum years of the last century, which similarly derived their impact through tropes of violated femininity, shattered innocence, and the victimization of “womenandchildren” (see e.g., Kempadoo 2005a, b; Foerster 2009; Agustín 2007; Doezema 2010). Commentators such as Roger Lancaster (2011) and Carole Vance (2010), meanwhile, have situated contemporary mobilizations again trafficking in terms of successive waves of “sex panics” that have occurred at periodic intervals in the United States through the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. The marked historical resonance between the current US anti-trafficking campaign and the Meese Commission anti-pornography hearings that took place during the 1980s (in which conservative Christians and a segment of the feminist movement once gain joined forces for the sake of sexual reform) has also been explored (Weitzer 2007; see also Vance 1997; Duggan and Hunter 1995).

Although ample critical attention has been devoted to the conservative legacy of feminist sexual politics that underpins contemporary anti-trafficking campaigns, most accounts have stopped short of looking at another sociologically significant linkage between the feminist and evangelical Christian activist constituencies that has catapulted the “traffic in women” to its current position of political and cultural prominence—specifically, a carceral and far from historically inevitable paradigm of state engagement, both domestically and internationally. Left unaddressed by most commentators are the questions of why a vision of sexual politics that is premised upon a version of (feminist) family values should reign ascendant at this particular historical moment, or how these values might couple with broader sets of political and economic interests. Whereas theorists such as Garland, Wacquant, and Simon astutely describe the rise of the carceral state but provide only a partial sketch of the dynamics of sex and gender that have facilitated its emergence, an equally significant deficit resides in analyses of sexual politics that fail to consider adequately feminist activists’ newfound and nearly ubiquitous insistence upon carceral versions of gender justice.¹¹ In contemporary anti-trafficking campaigns as in neoliberal governance more generally, the “left” and “right” ends of the political spectrum are joined together in a particular, dense knot of sexual and carceral values. A consideration of the rise of carceral feminism alongside other dimensions of neoliberal governance will allow us to unravel this tangle of factors.

Neoliberalism’s (feminist) family values

In the 1970s our feminist goal was “liberation”: liberation from discrimination at work, liberation from sexual constraints, liberation from forced sex, forced pregnancy and forced domestic service…. Our focus was less violence per se, than the function of violence in keeping us down. Feminist marches … were not about punishing men or protecting women; if anything, we denounced .punishing women and protecting men. We were determined to occupy our cities, our jobs, our homes, our lives in courageous defiance of punitive—or protective—curfews and controls. We knew our movement was transgressive and, thus, dangerous, but we had no illusion about the sanctity or security of home.

–Gail Pheterson, “Tracing a Radical Feminist Vision From the 1970s to the Present” (2008)

As the feminist theorist Gail Pheterson has recently observed, a previously hegemonic feminist critique of family and home has receded at precisely the same time that the movement’s embrace of carceral politics has escalated, with a drift towards punitive or “protective” curfews and controls. Although this latter shift might be explained simply in terms of the “new middle class punitiveness” that David Garland has described, the mainstream feminist embrace of family values and its primary focus upon extrafamilial forms of sexual violence is sociologically significant in and of itself. Such a trend stands in marked contrast to the analyses offered by classic sociological works such as Kristin Luker’s Abortion and the Politics of Motherhood (1985) and Arlene Stein’s The Stranger Next Door (2002), as well as to Thomas Frank’s celebrated journalistic account, What’s The Matter with Kansas? (2005), which posited diverse ways in which the right-wing adhesion to family values could be read as a class-based reaction to the hegemonic sexual cultures of elites. In these volumes, activists’ ideological commitments are underpinned by their material circumstances, with conservative investments in sexual politics attributed to the gendered class strategies of those the global economy has left behind.

Yet as Garland, Wacquant, and Simon have all observed, and as my own research on the contemporary anti-trafficking movement demonstrates, neoliberal carceral politics and the “conservative” sexual politics that are their accompaniment are also increasingly situated within the liberal-leaning, professional middle classes. In a previous article (Bernstein 2010), I argued that in contemporary anti-trafficking campaigns, it is ironically secular feminists who are advocating for family values, together with a new-middle class contingent of evangelical Christians who are engaged in a sexually modernizing project that literally transports them to the furthest corners of the global sex industry. Two recent shifts in feminist and conservative Christian sexual politics have made their current alliance against sex trafficking possible: a secular feminist shift from a focus upon bad men inside the home (sexually abusive husbands and fathers) to sexual predators outside of it (traffickers, pimps, and clients), and the feminist-friendly shift of a new generation of evangelical Christians away from sexually improper women (as prior concerns with issues like abortion suggest) to a focus upon sexually improper men. For both constituencies, the masculinist institutions of big business, the state, and the police are reconfigured as allies and saviors, rather than the enemies of migrant sex workers, and the responsibility for trafficking is shifted from structural factors and dominant institutions onto individual (often racially coded) criminal men. To rework slightly Gayatri Spivak’s famous formulation regarding the gendered logics of postcolonial politics, in contemporary anti-trafficking campaigns, it is white women who have joined forces with key sites of institutional power in order to save brown women from brown men (Spivak 1988).

While secular feminists have no doubt also been drawn towards anti-trafficking advocacy by the opportunities that this work presents for professional advancement and travel (see, e.g., Halley 2006; Grewal 2005; Agustín 2007), important, too, is the potential that contemporary feminists perceive in this issue to symbolically enhance their own power in domestic sphere heterosexual relationships—a power that the global sex industry is understood to erode. “Seeing prostitutes shapes men’s view of what sex is, who women are, and how they should be treated,” remarked one white, middle-class activist at a recent anti-trafficking event that was sponsored by the feminist anti-trafficking NGO, the Coalition Against Trafficking in Women (CATW). “The idea that you can contain the value system of prostitution, and it will only affect those women, or those women in that country, and that it won’t spill over into society as a whole … is an illusion,” suggested another. As the British cultural theorist Jo Doezema has written in regard to western feminists’ “‘wounded attachment’ to the third world prostitute,” “the ‘injured body’ of the ‘third world trafficking victim’ in international feminist debates around trafficking in women serves as a powerful metaphor for advancing certain feminist interests, which cannot be assumed to be those of third world sex workers themselves” (2001, p. 16; see also Brown 1995).

The link between global sex trafficking and the gendered power relations of heterosexual domesticity is also made explicit in a recent collection of essays published by a feminist anti-trafficking NGO entitled Pornography: Driving the Demand in International Sex Trafficking. In one essay, the activist Chyng Sun emphasizes the damage that commercialized sex does to private sphere, heterosexual relationships when it serves as the new standard for how all women “should look, sound, and behave” (2007, p. 245). In another recent feminist collection, Not for Sale, the author Kristen Anderberg (2004) issues a condemnation of the global sex industry after describing how watching pornographic videos with her male lover lead to debilitating body issues and to plummeting self esteem. In the same way that a set of material and symbolic interests in heterosexual marriage undergirded the sexually “puritanical” nineteenth-century feminist battles against White Slavery, abortion rights, and even birth control (see, e.g., Gordon 1982; Walkowitz 1982), so too do contemporary feminist activists harbor a set of investments in “family values” and home that are decipherable in terms of the global interconnections of late-capitalist consumer culture. While contemporary discussions of the impact of the sex industry on normative heterosexual relations have ample historical precedent, the expanding scope and reach of sexual commerce under conditions of globalization, or what one influential anti-trafficking activist has termed “the prostitution of sexuality” (Barry 1995), have served to rapidly accelerate feminist concerns.

For contemporary anti-trafficking activists, one key ambition is to make the institution of heterosexual marriage more egalitarian and more secure by restoring an amative sexual ethic to sexual relations. Although anti-trafficking activists come from both heteronormative, liberal-feminist lineages as well as more “radical” lesbian-feminist traditions (as illustrated, for example, by the alliance between NOW-NYC and Equality Now at the 2007 rally), what binds the two groups to one another, as well as to their evangelical Christian counterparts, is their shared commitment to a relational, as opposed to a recreational sexual ethic (Bernstein 2007b). More pivotal than the heterosexual/lesbian-feminist divide of generations past (see, e.g., Bunch 1972; Morgan 1973; Echols 1989), the conviction that sexuality should be kept within the confines of the romantic couple serves to cement a political alliance between ideologically disparate constituencies. As one feminist activist explained to me in recounting the initial forging of the alliance between the divergent groups that constitute the anti-trafficking coalition, “A whole consortium from the farthest left to the farthest right was in favor of making all prostitution trafficking.… What was really interesting is the coalition of people … a coalition that included Salvation Army and the lesbian-feminist Equality Now, and CATW up in New York and Michael Horowitz who’s very conservative…. That’s new politics. I had never before seen a group like that.”¹²

From the perspective of anti-trafficking feminists, it is thus not the “changing gender roles” wrought by feminist social transformations that have created new social insecurities (contra Garland, Wacquant, and Simon), but rather the sexual revolutions of the 1960s and 1970s that have served to alter the balance of gendered power by creating extra-familial sexual temptations for men. The renowned anti-trafficking activist Donna Hughes thus attributes the existence of human trafficking not only to prostitution, but also to the advent of a culturally liberal and permissive attitude towards sex that generates men’s demand for sexual services (May 2006).¹³ Another anti-trafficking activist that I interviewed about her engagement in the topic similarly sketched her perception of feminists’ sexual dilemma in broad strokes, explaining that “through TV commercials, through billboards, through marketing, the sexuality continuously keeps increasing where there is no … protection anymore over our physical bodies, there are no more parameters, everything is acceptable.” A third feminist commentator who is active in contemporary anti-trafficking debates has expressly attributed the “traffic in women” to the mainstreaming of prostitution, pornography, and sexually explicit mass media (Clarke 2004). These activists are not mistaken in their identification of a new consumer-driven paradigm of sexuality that has co-emerged with other late-capitalist cultural transformations and that might best be defined as recreational, rather than relational in its underlying ethic. What is ironic and surprising is the extent to which feminist anti-trafficking activists have embraced a pro-familial strategy for battling this trend, one that is itself intricately interwoven with neoliberal commitments to capitalism and criminalization.

Rather than regarding the heterosexual nuclear family as another institution of male domination to be abolished (and itself a key incarnation of the “traffic in women”¹⁴) contemporary anti-trafficking discourse situates the family as a privatized sphere of safety for women and children that the criminal justice system should be harnessed to protect. It was thus that one invited speaker at another CATW anti-trafficking event, a young women who had previously worked in the sex industry and who therefore described herself as a “survivor” of sex trafficking, attributed this experience to a combination of “no father figure” and an abundance of sexualized mass media. Conversely, she signaled that she had successfully overcome her ordeal by pointing out that she was now married and working full time at “a good paying, real job.” In contrast to an earlier moment in radical-feminist sexual politics, one that sought to link the sexual exploitation of prostitution to questions of violence against women more generally, including within the home (see, e.g., Morgan 1970; Barry 1979; MacKinnon 1989), in contemporary anti-trafficking campaigns it is specifically non-familial forms of heterosexuality that have become the exclusive political targets.

This commitment to the home as safe haven undergirds what the feminist theorist Inderpal Grewal has described as the “gender of security” in the early twenty-first century United States (2006). A gender-specific emblem of the sequestered middle class lives that theorists such as Jonathan Simon have also evoked, Grewal identifies the figure of the “security mom” as one who seeks to harness the power of a securitized state apparatus to protect herself and her children. Akin to Grewal’s analysis, my ethnographic observations with feminist anti-trafficking activists reveal a specifically gendered set of investments in the neoliberal carceral state, one that is intricately interwoven with activists’ own social locations as racially and class-privileged women. At the meetings with the anti-trafficking activists that I attended, the interlocking of multiple structures of privilege with a prosecutorial bent was manifest in various ways—from the professional settings of the conferences (at the American Bar Association, at the headquarters of the New York County Lawyers’ Association, at assorted white shoe law firms) to the sets of interpersonal connections that activists’ drew upon in their strategizing sessions. “Are there any women judges that are there for us?” asked one activist at the Lawyers’ Association meeting. “Are we on talking relations with the wife of the governor?” queried another. The professional upper-middle class orientation of anti-trafficking activism that I observed in my research is also consistent with research on the class profiles of anti-prostitution activists in other national contexts (see, e.g., Ho 2005; Jeffrey 2002) and of contemporary transnational feminist activism more generally (Eisenstein 2009; Desai 2005).

As members of the class fraction that is most likely to reap strong material and symbolic rewards from marriage, anti-trafficking activists are heavily invested in the maintenance and reproduction of this status and are ready to enlist the state apparatus on behalf of the gendered and sexual interests that are most pertinent to themselves: a version of “feminist family values” that is premised upon liberal understandings of formal equality between women and men, and the safe containment of sexuality within the pair-bonded couple.¹⁵ As with Grewal’s analysis of the “security mom,” these women utilize and promote the carceral state in order to securitize the sexual boundaries of home.

The feminist embrace of carceral politics and the articulation of these politics through a pro-familialist ideal of gender and sexuality were evident at the meetings of the anti-trafficking caucuses of NOW-NYC and the AAUW that I attended between 2006 and 2008. At a November 2006 conference on Violence Against Women that was co-sponsored by the AAUW and other feminist organizations, several hundred professional women, predominantly white, spent the day discussing the necessity of abolishing prostitution for women's equality, while dozens of Black and Latina women dressed in catering uniforms circulated amongst them arranging tables and chairs and serving drinks. The keynote speaker was a lawyer from the feminist NGO, Equality Now, who took the podium after being very graciously introduced as “a former prosecutor of sex crimes and a mother.” Visibly pregnant with a prominent diamond ring on her left finger, this well-coiffed and well-dressed lawyer reminded her audience of the important deterrent effects of the criminal law, and conveyed the horrors of human trafficking as follows:

I’d like to tell you the story of Christina, who … was a victim of human trafficking. She came here as a 19 or 20 year old woman in response to an ad for what she thought was a babysitting job. And when she arrived at JFK airport … she was then informed that the babysitting job wasn’t available anymore…. Of course … she was forced to work in a brothel. And she describes that experience with the same words that any of us would use to describe it. She describes the sex of prostitution as disgusting, as degradation, and profoundly traumatic to her. And what I want to talk to you about is some of the lasting effects are for her, after she escaped the experience. She is infertile. She can never have children. [From my fieldnotes, November 2006]

Nearly identical narratives were presented at the multiple anti-trafficking conferences that I attended throughout the course of my fieldwork, the only significant alteration being the victim’s name.¹⁶ Yet there is much to unpack in this exposition of the harms of trafficking though the presentation of “Christina’s story,” which in its sheer generality suggests that it is at least partially fictionalized and at best a strategically constructed composite case. Particularly notable are the moral and political legitimacy afforded to domestic care work as late-capitalist informal sector employment,¹⁷ the invocation of a single gendered (and uniformly negative) experience of “the sex of prostitution,”¹⁸ and the construal of reproductive failure as the worst possible harm that could result for female victims. While elements of this narrative undoubtedly can and do happen to real individuals, as a representation of human trafficking the scenario described was far from the most empirically prevalent case (Feingold 2005; Kempadoo 2005a; Bales 1999). Even more curiously, according to case files compiled from the United States Department of Justice, no trafficking case matching this description has ever been prosecuted (US Department of Justice 2011). The lawyer’s simultaneous commitments to the carceral state, the capitalist service sector, and the ideology of feminist family values perfectly paralleled the underlying neoliberal logic that united these realms, in which the social inequalities that globalization has wrought are legitimate so long as the sexual boundaries of middle-class family life can be maintained.

At a discussion focused upon “ending demand” for sex trafficking at the Commission on the Status of Women meetings that I attended at the United Nations in March of 2007, the link between sexual and carceral politics was once again revealed. At this meeting dedicated to problematizing men’s “demand” for the services of sex workers, the panelists used the occasion to directly showcase how the carceral state could be effectively harnessed to achieve amatively coupled and sexually egalitarian nuclear families. The opening speaker from the Coalition Against Trafficking in Women (CATW) explicitly hailed the five white, middle class men in the room as exemplars of a new model of enlightened masculinity and urged the audience members to “to bring their husbands, sons, and brothers” to future meetings. The model of prostitution and trafficking that the CATW panelists invoked bore little if any connection to structural or economic factors, rendering prostitution wholly attributable to the actions of bad men: husbands within the family who might appeal to the sexual services of women outside of it, or bad men outside the family (coded as non-white and foreign) who might entice women and girls within it to leave.¹⁹ Although the CATW regards itself as a progressive feminist organization, members displayed no hesitation in their appeals to a punitive state apparatus. As the panel chair repeatedly emphasized during her sharply condemnatory presentation about heterosexual men’s purchase of sex, “The only thing that prevents recurrence is fear of arrest.”

Although numerous studies have shown that the arrest of clients serves primarily to drive prostitution indoors rather than to eradicate it (O’Connell Davidson 2003; Brock 1998; Bernstein 2007b), what was at stake for the CATW activists were the broader symbolic effects that a politics of criminalization could offer—not simply in turning the figure of the “sex predator” into a grotesque parody, as Wacquant has argued—but also for delegitimizing markets in female sexual labor and the commercialization of sexuality more generally. As I have argued elsewhere (Bernstein 2007b), the state is thus able to assume a feminist rationale for arresting those who stand in the way of neoliberal agendas of urban restructuring and the removal of race and class Others from public space.

In my fieldwork with feminist activists, the utility of the carceral state for securitizing the middle class family—and more specifically, for domesticating heterosexual men—was also manifest in frequent appeals to the case of Sweden as an exemplar of enlightened anti-trafficking policy. The criminalization of male sex purchasers, a policy model first implemented in Sweden in 1998, is often referred to by transnational feminist activists as the “Swedish Plan” in order to convey its feminist origins and impact, since Sweden is considered by many to be the most gender-egalitarian country in the world. It was thus that at a subsequent CATW panel that I attended on “Abolishing Sex Slavery: From Stockholm to Hunts Point,” the Swedish policy of criminalizing the clients of sex workers was endorsed by speakers who not only applauded Sweden’s reputation for gender equality, but who explicitly referenced the Swedish welfare state’s commitment to “promoting men to be home with their children at a young age.” Left unremarked upon in the transnational dissemination of this carceral strategy is that Sweden itself embraced it only after its hallmark welfare state (which earned it its feminist reputation in the first place) had been seriously weakened in the 1990s (Bernstein 2007b; Hobson 1999).²⁰

In a related vein, feminist theorists of neoliberalism such as Lisa Duggan (2003) and Kate Bedford (2009) have pointed out the ways in which the ideology of “family values” becomes particularly critical when other possibilities for social relations are eclipsed. Marriage as an institution is “grounded in the privatization of social reproduction, along with the care of human dependency needs, through personal responsibility exercised in the family and in civil society—thus shifting costs from state agencies to individuals and households” (Duggan 2003: p. 14). The demise of the welfare state and the ascendance of law and order politics, both premised upon the promotion of “personal responsibility” and the condemnation of public disorder, are thus directly correlated not just as institutional alternatives to managing the racialized poor (as Wacquant has suggested) but via “the dense interrelations” among neoliberalism’s economic and (gendered) cultural projects (Duggan 2003). Whereas Wacquant identifies but does not explain the shift to the “masculine” penal state or the familialist sexual politics that are its accompaniment, Duggan and Bedford demonstrate that the rise of “family values” politics is necessary to fill in the caring gaps that the obliterated welfare state has left vacant. They demonstrate that the neoliberal state can be harnessed to notions of “domesticating men” that operate simultaneously at two different levels: men, particularly poor and working class men, are encouraged to do more care work within the home and to take on the burdens of social reproduction that arise when women themselves move into the sphere of paid work. At the same time, professional middle class men are encouraged to constrain their commercial consumption in ways that are compatible with heterosexual domesticity and amative love.

A neoliberal circuitry of crime, sex, and rights

The above examples serve to illustrate how the rise of a carceral feminist framework is connected to the collapse of a social welfare state in more ways than one—both as a new social strategy for regulating race and class others and as part of a neoliberal gender strategy that securitizes the family and lends moral primacy to marriage. Viewed as such, it becomes clear that as neoliberal economic policies extend their reach around the globe, they will serve to diffuse a new criminal justice-focused social agenda (as Wacquant has aptly demonstrated) in tandem with a new political paradigm of gender and sexuality that is premised upon the (feminist) family value of amative, sexually egalitarian couples. This new paradigm has been disseminated through such disparate means as stepped up laws and controls against sex offenders (including proposals for a new pan-European sex offender registry), the insertion of men into private-sphere caring labor via official World Bank development policy, and burgeoning international campaigns against the “traffic in women.”²¹ Indeed, one of the reasons that anti-trafficking campaigns have become such a galvanizing issue for feminists, evangelicals, and other activists is because the interlinked sexual, carceral, and economic commitments that they comprise can be harnessed to the now hegemonic internationalist discourse of “women’s human rights.” As the political theorist Kristin Bumiller (2008) has observed, “human rights conventions attempt to improve conditions for women by putting pressure on states to promote serious and effective enforcement of criminal laws against interpersonal violence” (p. 136). With “women’s human rights” understood as pertaining exclusively to questions of sexual violence and to bodily integrity (but not to the gendered dimensions of broader social, economic, and cultural issues), the human rights model in its global manifestation has become a highly effective means of disseminating feminist carceral politics on a global scale (see also Grewal 2006; Miller 2004).

Within the context of campaigns to combat the global “traffic in women,” this efficacy has been manifest in the United States’s tier ranking and economic sanctioning of countries that fail to pass sufficiently punitive anti-prostitution laws, in the transnational activist push to criminalize male clients’ demand for sexual services, in the tightening of international borders as a means to “protect” potential trafficking victims, and in the implementation of new restrictions upon female migrants’ capacity to travel (Chuang 2010; Kempadoo 2005b; Ticktin 2008; Chapkis 2005). Feminist anti-trafficking activists have lobbied hard for all of these measures in addition to strongly endorsing the US government’s “anti-prostitution pledge,” which stipulates that NGOs that do not explicitly take a stand in condemnation of prostitution will lose their capacity to receive US funding (Chuang 2010; Saunders 2005; NSWP 2006). Feminists have also offered their support for the vigilante brothel raids that evangelical Christian groups such as the International Justice Mission have conducted in countries such as India and Cambodia in partnership with the local police.²² Although Wacquant, Garland, and Simon neglect to identify the political efficacy of human rights discourse for extending the nationally rooted carceral agendas that they describe, as Bumiller (2008), Halley (2008), Grewal (2006) and other critical feminist scholars have observed, it has become an indispensable tool for spreading the increasingly mainstream paradigm of feminism-as-crime-control internationally.

From the perspective of U.S.-based anti-trafficking advocates, the shift to the international human rights field has also been crucial in relocating a prior set of internecine political debates amongst feminists about the meaning of prostitution and pornography (one thath had divided the US feminist movement throughout the 1980s and early 1990s, and in which liberationist factions were emerging triumphant) to a humanitarian terrain in which the anti-prostitution constituency was more likely to prevail.²³ As one of the founding members of a prominent feminist anti-trafficking NGO explained to me during an interview, framing the harms of prostitution and trafficking as politically neutral questions of humanitarian concern about third world women, rather than as issues that directly impacted the lives of Western feminists, was pivotal to waging the fight against commercial sexuality successfully:

There was an earlier wave of consciousness about exploitation that took both pornography and prostitution almost together as a kind of commercial sexual exploitation of women. And they got battered down by ACLU types… who were the same people who were also against prosecution of rape because it was discriminatory prosecution against people of color…. It wasn’t even just priorities. It was really just a basic understanding of human rights. After that [we] went underground … and then trafficking brought these issues right back.

(From my fieldnotes, December 3, 2008).

Another human rights activist that I interviewed further observed that by the time of the 1995 Beijing World Conference on Women, the frameworks around both trafficking and prostitution had irrevocably shifted: “Beijing is where trafficking as a labor issue was first transformed into a sexual violence and slavery issue.” According to these activists, feminists who had participated in earlier waves of domestic struggle for the state curtailment of prostitution and pornography had initially been hampered by other liberal constituencies (including divergent feminist factions and the ACLU) who were opposed to the potentially discriminatory effects of a criminal justice frame. But by resituating their issues in terms of the “traffic in women” overseas and as a violation of international commitments to women’s human rights, they were able to wage the same sexual battles unopposed.

The most recent twist in the transnational feminist campaign against human trafficking has occurred with gathering attention to so-called “domestic” forms of sex trafficking. The 2005 reauthorization of the US Trafficking Victim’s Protection Act (TVPRA) established the crime of “domestic trafficking” on a moral and legal par with previous cross-border understandings of the crime (United States Department of State 2005). With the aim of shifting enforcement priorities towards street prostitution in urban areas, the TVPRA established $5,000,000 in federal grants to local law enforcement agencies to investigate and prosecute sex trafficking within the United States.²⁴ Some commentators have speculated that the shift from an international to a domestic focus in US anti-trafficking policy has occurred because the US government has consistently failed to identify the overwhelming numbers of transborder victims that it previously claimed existed (see, e.g., Brennan 2008).²⁵

According to a US Department of Justice summation of 2,515 human trafficking investigations conducted between 2008 and 2010, of 389 confirmed incidents of trafficking, 85% were sex trafficking cases, 83% of victims were US citizens, and 62% of confirmed sex trafficking suspects were African American (while 25% of all suspects were Hispanic/Latino) (US Dept. of Justice 2011). The racial impact of anti-trafficking laws is also heightened by the fact that young men who are convicted of pimping can now be given 99-year prison sentences as “domestic sex traffickers” (versus the prison sentences of several months that were previously typical), while migrant sex workers are themselves increasingly arrested and deported for the sake of their “protection” (Chapkis 2005; Bernstein 2007b; Urban Justice Center 2009). Both domestically and globally, US anti-trafficking policies have thus contributed to unprecedented police crackdowns upon people of color who are involved in the street-based sexual economy (including pimps, clients, and sex-workers alike) and they have facilitated a sharp reversal of the trend towards the increasing legitimacy of sexual labor that prevailed up until the late 1990s (see also Day 2010). In this way, contemporary anti-trafficking campaigns can be viewed as an effective, feminist embodiment of neoliberalism’s joint carceral and sexual projects, ushering in agendas of family values and crime control while asserting new understandings of gender justice and “women’s human rights.”

Conclusion

If the postmaterialist politics tends towards good and evil, crime is a natural metaphor for evil.

–Theodore Caplow and Jonathan Simon, Crime and Justice (1999, quoted in Gottschalk, 11)

This article has sought to synthesize and push forward arguments made by recent social theorists concerning the emergence of the carceral state and its relationship to more general patterns of cultural and political transformation. Drawing upon diverse accounts of the relationship between neoliberalism and the turn towards punitive modes of justice in contemporary social policy, I have highlighted the implicit gendered dimensions of this shift as well as its disparately raced and classed impact, melding theories of carcerality and punishment with insights drawn from my own empirical research on campaigns against sex trafficking. I have sought to show how an understanding of recent transformations within feminism, and within the politics of sex and gender more generally, is critical to the broad-sweeping analyses of the neoliberal carceral state that theorists such as Garland, Wacquant, and Simon have formulated. Via successive encodings of issues such as rape, sexual harassment, pornography, sexual violence, prostitution, and trafficking into federal and now international criminal law, mainstream feminists have provided crucial ideological support for ushering in contemporary carceral transitions (Halley 2006, p. 21). Most recently, the burgeoning discourse of “women’s human rights” has served to re-circuit feminist attention from the domestic spheres of home and nation to an expanding international stage, asserting carceral versions of feminism on a global scale.

It is important to understand the underlying gendered and sexual dynamics that have inspired this shift in feminist emphasis and strategy. Assumptions such as Garland’s, Simon’s, and Wacquant’s that late-modern conditions of “gender flux” have led to a reactive embrace of carceral politics on the part of the once liberal middle classes fail to consider the gendered interests that underpin feminist advocacy on behalf of the neoliberal carceral state. Whereas Garland correctly asserts that late capitalist social transformations have destabilized certain aspects of middle class life and fomented middle class punitiveness, he misidentifies not only the reality of criminal threat but also the gendered and sexual instabilities that are the source of this trend. In contemporary anti-trafficking campaigns, it is not “changing gender roles” in the abstract but rather reconfigured norms of male sexuality that are perceived as the greatest threat to middle class feminist and evangelical Christian activists, for which both criminal justice and family values are perceived to be the remedies. Although Wacquant astutely demonstrates the correlation between the eclipse of the welfare state and the advent of the penal state (as well as the pivotal symbolic role played by the sex offender in ushering in these transitions) he fails to account for feminists’ own investment in facilitating this shift. My own ethnographic research in combination with other feminist critiques of sexuality and neoliberalism helps to clarify this allegiance, demonstrating how the intersecting race, class, and gender locations of a prominent contingent of Western feminists have created deep political investments in the contemporary security state and in the middle class family form.

Finally, Simon usefully reveals the ways in which the contemporary security state serves not only to police the poor but also to create middle class understandings of securitized “freedom,” pointing to the important role played by feminism in advancing this project. My research on the contemporary anti-trafficking movement helps to illuminate precisely how and why feminists have reoriented their political aims towards carceral ends, situating ideological transitions in terms of the new political-economic horizons that feminists are confronting. Contemporary feminist commitments to both “family values” and to a law and order agenda are facilitated by a neoliberal state apparatus in which poor as well as middle class lives are increasingly governed through crime, and in which the privatized family is designated as the optimal institution for social support. Under such circumstances, the impetus to find non-economic means to equalize the dynamics of sexual power within the family—such as governing through crime—becomes compelling to many feminist (and evangelical Christian) social justice advocates. Rather than pursuing materially redistributive strategies, the versions of feminism that have survived and thrived are those that deploy the mutually reinforcing sexual and carceral strategies that a reconfigured neoliberal state is likely to support.²⁶

Most generally, this article has shown how attention to social actors’ carceral commitments is pivotal to understanding the politics that have joined together “left” and “right,” and feminists and evangelicals, on sexual issues—and vice versa. I have used the case study of human trafficking to illuminate how neoliberal sexual politics and carceral politics work together, highlighting the cross-ideological alignments that have occurred around both sex and crime. As theorists such as Garland, Wacquant, and Simon have persuasively argued, in the present historical moment, sex is often the vehicle that joins “left” and “right” together around an agenda of criminal justice. My own analysis of contemporary anti-trafficking campaigns has demonstrated how the reciprocal is also true: criminal justice has often been the most effective vehicle for binding feminists and evangelicals together around historically and socially specific ideals of sex, gender, and the family. To fully understand the rise of the carceral state and its relationship to late capitalist social transformations, we need a feminist analytics of neoliberalism that is cognizant of how mutually reinforcing sexual and carceral strategies have come to circulate together.