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Based on ethnographic fieldwork with female migrants in the United ArabEmirates, the focus of this article is on the confluence of human trafficking discourses, gendered migration, domestic work and sex work in the UAE. I explore three main findings. First, domestic work and sex work are not mutually exclusive. Second, women choose to enter sex work in preference to domestic work because of poor working conditions in the latter. Third, global policies on human trafficking that seek to restrict female migration have inspired female migrants in the Gulf in search of higher wages and increased autonomy to look for employment in the informal economy. Employing a theoretical lens that emphasizes structural violence, the article chronicles the individual and macro social factors structuring the transition of female migrants from the formal economy of domestic and care work into the informal economy of sex work.

This paper investigates interactions between issues of labor, gender, sexuality, migration, and statehood through the lens of Dubai’s unskilled foreign migrant workers. Using ethnographic research methods, including participant observation and in-depth interviews, this paper explores the conflation of discourses on trafficking, migration, and sex work through migrants’ narratives. The study is organized around three central questions: 1) What are the social, economic, and political circumstances and structures that make Dubai a major migration and trafficking destination? 2) How do policies about global migration and trafficking, written and brought to fruition in Washington, DC, contrast with lived experiences of migration and forced labor in different countries with different social and political topographies? 3) How do cultural norms about gender, sexuality, morality, and migration influence the implementation of anti-trafficking policy and legal enforcement in Dubai? This study aims to question and deepen our understandings of labor, migration, and socioeconomic development in a rapidly changing, urbanizing environment while contributing to differing discourses on migration, trafficking, and prostitution in the Gulf countries.

This paper examines the sexual and social practices of young people in contemporary Iran. Young people in urban areas live under the rubric of a fundamentalist, Islamist regime which restricts social freedoms such as premarital heterosexual contact, homosexual encounters, dancing, alcohol consumption and large group gatherings. Drawing on close focus research and individual and group inteviews, this paper seeks to analyse young people's responses to these constraints. Findings suggest that many young adults use their 'rebellious' social behaviour to make political statements against a regime that dissatisfies them; saying, in their own words, that they are enacting and bringing about a 'sexual revolution'.

This paper focuses on the perceived racialisation and resultant spatialisation of commercial sex in Dubai. In recent years, the sex industry in Dubai has grown to include women from the Middle East, Eastern Europe, East Asia and Africa. With the increase in sex workers of different nationalities has come a form of localised racism that is embedded in structures and desires seen within specific locations. The physical spatialisation of sex work hinges on perceived race and produces distinct income generating potential for women engaged in the sex industry in Dubai. The social and physical topography of Dubai is important in marginalising or privileging these various groups of sex workers, which correlates race, space and place with rights and assistance. I begin with a description of the multidirectional flows of causality between race, space, place and demand. I then discuss how these various groups are inversely spatialised within the discourse on assistance, protection and rights. The findings presented here are based on ethnographic research conducted with transnational migrants in the UAE in 2004, 2008 and 2009.