ABSTRACT
This chapter aims to trace the resurgence of “trafficking” as a political discourse at the turn of the twenty-first century, providing a critical genealogy of its circulations through multiple activist communities and spaces of governance. During the first two decades of the twenty-first century, a bevy of antitrafficking laws and policies would come to equate all prostitution with the crime of human trafficking and to rhetorically capture both of these activities under the rubric of “modern slavery.” The new focus on human trafficking featured historically old framings that linked “sexual slavery” together with voluntary prostitution, both migrant and domestic. Many sex workers’ rights organizations have objected to the prevailing rubric of “sex trafficking,” arguing that the term analytically separates trafficking for prostitution from circumstances of “human trafficking” more broadly, isolating sexuality as a special case.
