ABSTRACT
This chapter examines the affective underpinnings of global capitalism as articulated by the moral panics surrounding human trafficking. It reveals love’s role as a necessary operational component of neoliberalism through a close reading of a Department of Homeland Security Public Service Announcement. Public rhetoric against human trafficking, Mitchel argues, offers a simplified account that dovetails seamlessly with the desires of activists, academics, and legislators to understand human trafficking as an immoral aberration of global capitalism, rather than an emblematic function of it. Human trafficking, she concludes, is such a magnet for panic because it shows love to be not outside of capitalism but fundamental to it, the motor that drives it all.
