The Trafficking Victims’ Protection Act of 2000 has been presented as an important tool in combatingthe exploitation and abuse of undocumented workers, especially those forced into prostitution. Through a close reading of the legislation and the debates surrounding its passage, this article argues that the law makes strategic use of anxieties over sexuality, gender, and immigration to further curtail migration. The law does so through the use of misleading statistics creating a moral panic around “sexual slavery,” through the creation of a gendered distinction between “innocent victims” and “guilty migrants,” and through the demand that aid to victims be tied to their willingness to assist in the prosecution of traffickers. As a result, the legislation is less a departure from, than of a piece with, other recent antisex and antiimmigrant policies.

No abstract

This article discusses engagement, complexity, and contradiction as resources for, rather than simply impediments to, good research. Drawing on examples from her own work of the past three decades on body image, commercial sex, and the medical use of marijuana, the author examines the benefits of, as well as some of the challenges presented by, this approach to scholarly practice.In her 2008 Pacific Sociological Association Presidential Address, Jodi O'Brien opened a conversation about contradiction and engagement within sociology and within our lives as sociologists. In her remarks, she observed that "tensions in our own understanding of ourselves," "contradiction in the methodologies and theories we generate," and "personal engagement" with those conflicts should be seen as resources for, rather than impediments to, good scholarship and should be brought "more systematically into our collective discourse" (O'Brien 2009, 6-7). As one whose work has always been marked by a personal investment in the subjects I have studied and by a deep appreciation

No abstract

No abstract