11th European Feminist Research Conference

Description

Forced labour in supply chains: Rolling back the debate on gender, migration and sexual commerce

Abstract - he new strand of scholarship that has become the analytical and political hub for debates on unfree labour –that of forced labour in supply chains-- has developed into an area of inquiry separate from sex trafficking and distanced itself from sexual labour. This is despite decades long transnational feminist and migration scholars’ political and theoretical efforts to challenge views of human trafficking for sexual exploitation as a distinctive form of forced labour and to show the similarities in forms of control and exploitation between migrant sex work and other labour-intensive forms of work. This paper argues that the prevailing focus of the supply chain literature on industrial labour has inadvertently posited sexual labour as the ‘other’ of industrial labour thus obfuscating how the legal blurring of boundaries between industrial and service labour is engendering new modalities of the erosion of workers’ rights that are increasingly resembling those typical of sex work. The theoretical implications of identifying elements of commonality between industrial and sexual service labour are in making visible, as Anna Tsing (2009) has demonstrated, how ‘supply chain capitalism’ mobilizes difference to structure global production processes and extract value from labour. The aim of this paper therefore is to advance the debate on unfree labour both conceptually and empirically. Conceptually, it will highlight the relevance of social reproduction in understanding forms of labour unfreedom. Empirically, it will demonstrate the similarities in forms of control and exploitation between sex work and industrial work by illustrating how debt and housing operate in both settings.

Keywords

Human trafficking for sexual exploitation, informalization, social reproduction, supply chain capitalism, unfree labour

Period	15 Jun 2022 → 18 Jun 2022
Event type	Conference
Conference number	11
Location	Milan, ItalyShow on map
Degree of Recognition	International