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Theor Soc (2012) 41:233-259
DOI 10.1007/sll 186-012-9165-9
Elizabeth Bernstein
Abstract This article draws upon recent works in sociology, jurisprudence, and
feminist theory in order to assess the ways in which feminism, and sex and
gender more generally, have become intricately interwoven with punitive agen-
das in contemporary US politics. Melding existing theoretical discussions of
penal trends with insights drawn from my own ethnographic research on the
contemporary anti-trafficking movement in the United States - the most recent
domain of feminist activism in which a crime frame has prevailed against
competing models of social justice - I elaborate upon the ways that neoliber-
alism and the politics of sex and gender have intertwined to produce a carceral
turn in feminist advocacy movements previously organized around struggles
for economic justice and liberation. Taking the anti-trafficking movement as a
case study, I further demonstrate how human rights discourse has become a
key vehicle both for the transnationalization of carceral politics and for the
reincorporation of these policies into the domestic terrain in a benevolent,
feminist guise. I conclude by urging greater and more nuanced attention to
the operations of gender and sexual politics within mainstream analyses of
contemporary modes of punishment, as well as a careful consideration of the
neoliberal carceral state within feminist discussions of gender, sexuality, and
the law.
E. Bernstein (1 £3)
Department of Sociology, Barnard College, Columbia University, 3009 Broadway,
New York, NY 10027, USA
e-mail: Eb2032@columbia.edu
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The final speaker at the event is Angela Lee from the New York Asian Women's
Center. Fashionable and fortyish, dressed in a black leather jacket and fitted
slacks, she makes no mention of the role played by global poverty in the
dynamics of trafficking or prostitution, instead framing the issue in terms of
the sexual integrity of families. "This is a family issue," she declares outright,
"especially as Chinese New Year approaches and there are so many victims'
families who won't be able to celebrate."9 Lee goes on to link the dangers faced
by trafficking victims to New York's State's lack of success thus far in imposing
a law that would provide severe enough criminal penalties for traffickers and
pimps. She concludes her speech with the emotional declaration that "We need
to punish the traffickers and set the victims free!"
-From my fieldnotes, February 2007, New York City
Although a decade of feminist research and activism has addressed the role of the neoliberal
state in criminalizing the survival strategies of poor women, and of poor women of color in
particular (see, e.g., Davis and Shaylor (2001); Davis (2003); Schaffner (2005); Sudbury
(2005); Haney (2010)), the significance of feminism's own widening embrace of the
neoliberal carcéral state has only begun to come into focus. Two recent genealogies of
second wave feminism by political theorists Marie Gottschalk (2006) and Kristin
Bumiller (2007) have sought to shed light upon this trajectory, providing important
elaboration and grounding for Jonathan Simon's observation that feminism - and in
particular, recent feminist activism around questions of sexual violence-has
been a crucial enabler of the late-capitalist carceral turn. "The contemporary
women's movement in the United States helped facilitate the carceral state," explains
Gottschalk, noting that some of the very same historical and institutional factors that
made the US women's movement relatively successful in gaining public acceptance
(including its firm foothold in elite politics, the absence of competing Marxist currents,
and a strong national tradition of political liberalism) were important building blocks for
the carceral state that emerged simultaneously in the 1970s (p. 115). Arguing that the
neoliberal carceral imperative has had a devastating impact upon the ways that feminist
engagement with questions of sexual violence have come to be framed, Bumiller (2008)
suggests that the reciprocal is also true: once feminism became fatally inflected by
neoliberal strategies of social control, it could serve as an effective inspiration for
broader campaigns for criminalization (such as the war on drugs).
While Gottschalk and Bumiller single out US feminism as an exceptional case,
scholars such as Ticktin (2008), Kempadoo (2005b), and Kulick (2003) have pointed
to similar trends within an array of different national contexts. Writing about the
confluence of French feminism and anti-immigrant sentiment, for example, Miriam
Ticktin notes that contemporary feminist concern with issues of sexual violence "is
often recognized only through the framework of racial, cultural, and religious
9 Such claims disregard a body of social scientific evidence that has found that women and girls often enter
into prostitution at their families' behest, so as to provide better for their parents and children; see, e.g.,
Montgomery (2001); Agustfn (2007); Bernstein (2007b).
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16 Other events at which strikingly similar stories were told include the CATW's "End Demand" conference
at the U.N. 's Commission on the Status of Women meetings on March 2, 2007, the CATW "Abolishing
Sexual Slavery from Stockholm to Hunts Point" conference held at the New York City Bar Association on
November 6, 2008, and the conference on "Sex Trafficking and the New Abolitionists," held at the
Brooklyn Museum on December 13, 2008.
17 Although by some estimates trafficking for domestic work has been found to be more prevalent than
trafficking into the sex sector (see, e.g., Feingold 2005), the former is more compatible with professional-
class women's gendered interests in the home.
There is an abundance of critical feminist scholarship that demonstrates the contrary; see, e.g., Bernstein
(2007b); Agustin (2007); Chapkis (1997); Brennan (2004).
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According to a US Department of
investigations conducted between
trafficking, 85% were sex traffick
62% of confirmed sex trafficking
suspects were Hispanic/Latino) (US
trafficking laws is also heightened
pimping can now be given 99-year
(versus the prison sentences of sev
migrant sex workers are themselves
their protection" (Chapkis 2005; Be
domestically and globally, US anti-
unprecedented police crackdowns
street-based sexual economy (inclu
they have facilitated a sharp reversal
sexual labor that prevailed up unti
contemporary anti-trafficking cam
embodiment of neoliberalism's join
of family values and crime contro
justice and "women's human rights
Conclusion
If the postmaterialist politics tends towards good and evil, crime is a natural
metaphor for evil.
-Theodore Caplow and Jonathan Simon, Crime and Justice (1999, quoted in
Gottschalk, 11)
This article has sought to synthesize and push forward arguments made by
recent social theorists concerning the emergence of the carceral state and its
relationship to more general patterns of cultural and political transformation.
Drawing upon diverse accounts of the relationship between neoliberalism and
the turn towards punitive modes of justice in contemporary social policy, I have
highlighted the implicit gendered dimensions of this shift as well as its dispa-
rately raced and classed impact, melding theories of carcerality and punishment
with insights drawn from my own empirical research on campaigns against sex
trafficking. I have sought to show how an understanding of recent transformations
within feminism, and within the politics of sex and gender more generally, is critical
to the broad-sweeping analyses of the neoliberal carceral state that theorists such as
Garland, Wacquant, and Simon have formulated. Via successive encodings of issues
such as rape, sexual harassment, pornography, sexual violence, prostitution, and
trafficking into federal and now international criminal law, mainstream feminists
have provided crucial ideological support for ushering in contemporary carceral
transitions (Halley 2006, p. 21). Most recently, the burgeoning discourse of ''women's
human rights" has served to re-circuit feminist attention from the domestic spheres of
home and nation to an expanding international stage, asserting carceral versions of
feminism on a global scale.
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Elizabeth Bernstein is Associate Professor of Women's, Gender, & Sexuality Studies and Sociology at
Barnard College, Columbia University. She is co-editor of Regulating Sex: the 28 Politics of Intimacy and
Identity (New York: Routledge 2005) and the author of Temporarily Yours: Intimacy, Authenticity, and the
Commerce of Sex (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2007). Her current book project, Brokered
Subjects: Sex, Trafficking, and the Politics of Freedom, explores the convergence of feminist, neoliberal,
and evangelical Christian interests in the shaping of contemporary policies around trafficking and
prostitution.
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