In Denmark, human trafficking has emerged as a central issue within the policy field of prostitution during the last decade. Taking a Foucauldian approach from a historical perspective, understanding the policy field of prostitution as a discursive terrain, the article analyses the thinking that lies behind policies on prostitution by identifying ruptures and discursive struggles which lead to transformations of the policy field. In particular, this article investigates how the problematization of human trafficking has created space for a feminist discourse breakthrough within the policy field of prostitution during the last decade. Asking how/where this 'problem' has been produced, what ways of speaking are permissible, and what is silenced, the article discusses limitations and possibilities within this policy field.
By bringing love to the fore as an unfixed category, this article analyses the highly complex lives of female Thai migrants who sell sex in Denmark. In doing so, the article challenges the static and rather normative binary categories of "sex work" versus "prostitution" and "empowered woman" versus "victim of human trafficking" that are produced in the literature on sex work and prostitution. This binary approach is likely to portray the lives and subject positions of female migrants who sell sex in a rather one-sided way. The article argues that the category of love is highly relevant in studies of transnational sex work if we want to grasp the complexity of the lives of female migrants who sell sexual services.
The objective of this article is to investigate how Thai migrant sex workers in Denmark understand normative heterosexuality and femininity/masculinity as they are reproduced in the Danish sex industry. To do so I analyse the ways that gender plays a part in sex work and the ways in which sex work plays a significant role in how Thai migrant sex workers understand their gendered subject positions in the spaces away from their sex work. Whether Thai migrant sex workers become intelligible gendered subjects depends on different spaces. Based on two case stories I focus on the space of domesticity, the space of sexual consumption and the quasi-public space of leisure.
By investigating the case of female Thai migrants selling sexual services in Denmark, I argue that ‘the victim’ versus ‘the empowered subject’ is an undesirable binary for analysing how female migrants perform gendered subject positions in their everyday life. The article suggests a poststructuralist feminist perspective, arguing that looks and bodily practices, based on different constellations of gender and sexuality and race and nationality, are important for the research situation. Bringing in two different examples, the article analyses the field relations, and the implied power relations, - between the researcher(s) and the studied subjects that are constituted through gender, sexuality, race and nationality. These relations form the premises for producing material.
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