ABSTRACT
I show a movie in my Gender, Labor, and Globalization course to help me teach how the trafficking industry is invisible in mainstream global - ization discourse. A colleague recommended it and I imagine it is a film shown in Women’s and Gender Studies classes around the world. Trading Women (Slotar and Feingold, 2002) is a documentary film that chronicles the relationship between the Thai sex industry and the destruction of Thai agricultural economies due to the spread of western capital and associated ideologies. In a voice leveled by doom and sadness, Angelina Jolie narrates a story of the rural hill tribes in Thailand where young women and girls are vulnerable to sex traffickers due to lack of citizenship and poverty. A particular scene stands out in the film: two local men are identified as traffickers who are known for abducting young women in the hill tribes and selling them in the international slave trade. Several family members of such women are interviewed and express a range of emotions from anger to confusion. Although a major point of this film is to demonstrate the relationships between United States anti-drug lobbying, rural Thai economies that are dependent on the trade of the opium poppy plant, and the sex industry in Thailand, the film’s name suggests it is solely about the trafficking of women.
