Rethinking the Boundaries: Towards a Butlerian Ethics of Vulnerability in Sex Trafficking Debates

Sex trafficking remains one of the most widely and vehemently contested issues in feminist debate. On one side are abolitionists, who see the problem as one of male violence against women, and hence define all sex work as exploitation (see, e.g., Barry, 1979; Pateman, 1988; Jeffreys, 1997, 2009; Miriam, 2005). On the other are labour and migration rights activists, who define the problem as one of labour exploitation, and argue for migration and labour rights for sex workers (see, e.g., Kempadoo and Doezema, 1998; Doezema, 2001, 2010; Agustin, 2002, 2007; Sharma, 2005; Andrijasevic, 2010). The entrenched argument has resulted in a set of overly simplistic stereotypes of either helpless victims in need of rescue or wilful sex workers expressing their agency. This, as a number of commentators have now pointed out, has been less than productive in addressing the complex and varied needs of those who find themselves objects of trafficking practice, discourse, law and policy (Agustin, 2007; Andrijasevic, 2007; Briones, 2008; Segrave et al., 2009). Indeed, extensive qualitative research shows that many tread a fuzzy boundary between voluntary and forced sex work, moving from one position to another as they look for opportunities to travel and adequate means of making a living (see, e.g., Agustin, 2002, 2007; Jayasree, 2004; Bandyopadhyay et al., 2007; Briones, 2008; Parrenas, 2008; Mai, 2009; Andrijasevic, 2010; Cheng, 2010; Yea, 2012; Chin, 2013). In this article I suggest that one pathway through the impasse could be to undertake a more theoretical exploration of the ways in which the concepts of victimhood and agency have been defined within the debate, and the ways in which these concepts implicitly propagate particular models of the relationship between self, body and vulnerability. Doing so here, I then suggest that Judith Butler's work may provide a useful approach, precisely because it offers alternative ways of thinking about the relationships between exploitation and bodily vulnerability.

Several researchers have questioned the victim/agency dichotomy. Julia O'Connell Davidson in her classic study of prostitution (1998) argues for a more nuanced understanding of power than that found in the victim/agent opposition, pointing out that both ‘abolitionist’ and ‘pro-sex worker’ positions, in spite of their differences, tend to use a comparable understanding of power as subjugation, disagreeing merely over whether the relevant oppression comes from clients and pimps, or from the state control of prostitution. She argues instead for a recognition that prostitution is a social practice, and as such is embedded in multiple relations of power that impact on it in varied and contextual ways. Further empirical studies make similar points. Cheng (2010: 23) in her study of Filipino migrants working as entertainers in South Korea maintains that ethnographies have shown a more complex picture of agency than that offered by the polarised debate, one that shows both ‘global and local structures of inequalities that engender marginalization and violence’, as well as ‘women's creative responses to their subordination’. Comparably, Andrijasevic (2010: 4), studying migrant sex workers in Italy, argues that the concept of ‘trafficking’ is unhelpful for understanding ‘the complexity of desires and decisions behind women's migratory projects, the interdependency of structural and personal forces that sustained the conditions of exploitation and the multiple social positions and identification that women took up in relation to prostitution’. She calls for

The fact that the dichotomy persists in spite of these interventions suggests a need for rethinking theoretical assumptions. Here I undertake to unpack the implicit bodily ontologies that underlie abolitionists’ perspectives. I argue that the abolitionist perspective constructs a normative body, and subject, whose well-being is dependent on secure, uncompromised borders, while the ‘victimised’ sex worker is depicted as both physically and subjectively violated by the invasion of bodily borders that sex work is taken to enact. This implicit understanding of the relationship between body and subjectivity works to epistemically invalidate sex workers and their advocates, who are forced to debate on terms that reproduce a similarly bounded and separated version of autonomous liberal subjectivity. I then explore Judith Butler's work on consent, vulnerability and precarity in an effort to find an alternate bodily ontology and a way to think through the binary between victim and agent. In spite of her interests in sexuality, identity, speech and gender, Butler's work has not often been used in relation to trafficking (Carline, 2011 is one exception). Here I argue that her proposal of an ethics based on vulnerability as constitutive of, rather than antagonistic to, human agency allows a more complex understanding of the precarious agency of those whose best choices involve sex work, an understanding in which neither the exercise of choice nor the experience of violence positions someone outside the field of ethical significance. While I do not propose that a Western scholar such as Butler is ‘the answer’ to the issue of trafficking, I am proposing that for Western feminists, using Butler to challenge the liberal, Western assumptions that so far underpin the mainstream debate might help to open up a space where the alternate perspectives of sexuality and self that underpin sex work in disparate global locations may be more easily perceived and engaged.

Before continuing I will make a couple of points about framing and terminology. First, it is important to note that not all trafficking is for the purposes of sex work, and that not all trafficked workers are female. This is simply and empirically not the case; as Dennis (2008) points out, male and trans-sex workers are common and visible—but not in trafficking discourse. These blindnesses are arguably a product of trafficking discourse's beginnings in moral panics over the ‘white slave trade’ (see Doezema, 2001, 2010), and have been reinforced by the radical feminist emphasis on women as victims (even though the 2000 United Nations Protocol to Prevent Suppress and Punish Traficking in Persons, Especially Women and Children (United Nations, 2004) does explicitly acknowledge trafficking of men and for other forms of labour). In addition, feminist debate has continued to associate, if not always equate, the question of trafficking with that of sex work in general. As this article is engaging with the feminist debate about trafficking rather than the problem of trafficking per se, it reproduces these associations, in which the question of trafficking and the question of voluntary sex work become largely inextricable.

Second, there is debate over the appropriate terminology to describe those who exchange sexual services for money. The abolitionist perspective is explicit in its use of the term ‘prostitution’, arguing that other terms are euphemisms that implicitly validate the activity (Jeffreys, 2009). On the other hand, those coming from a labour and migrant rights perspective use the term ‘sex worker’ to emphasise and legitimise the status of ‘worker’. In this article I will mostly use the term ‘sex worker’, in part to acknowledge my support for the labour rights perspective. However, when addressing specifically the representations constructed by the abolitionist perspective, I use the term prostitute—referring to the constructed stereotype produced by this perspective rather than its intended referent.

I want to begin by outlining radical feminist abolitionists’ articulations of the vulnerable feminine body, on which their opposition to sex work is based. However, since many of these articulations are explicitly opposed to ‘liberal’ models of sex work, it helps to briefly state Nussbaum's (1999) influential, and classically liberal, approach to sex work. Nussbaum argues, via a series of comparisons to other occupations, that there is nothing oppressive about sex work that cannot also be found in other forms of work, including nightclub singing, factory work, teaching of philosophy and the hypothetical role of ‘colonoscopy artist’: someone who is paid for allowing the testing of colonoscopy equipment on her own body. Thus, Nussbaum concludes that the criminalisation of consensual sex work is irrational, since it can be understood as a contract between individuals, based on free consent and exchange. The focus of feminists should thus be on working towards ensuring such free choice in the form of better opportunities, rather than on criminalising sex work and leaving sex workers without a job. Nussbaum's (1999: 298) conclusion is thus in line with liberal, pro-capitalist discourse—she concludes that we should have ‘more studies of women's credit unions and fewer studies of prostitution’. In accordance with this liberalism, Nussbaum emphasises that her conclusion is based on the assumption that the sex work in question is consensual—governed by contract. She explicitly condemns and wants to criminalise cases involving kidnapping or child prostitution. This approach to sex work, then, requires that the sex worker be able to argue for her autonomy, agency and consent as an independent being, and this is what many who organise around sex workers’ rights do. Nonetheless, it is worth noting that these very concepts—autonomy, agency and consent—are the flagships of the concept of the liberal individual. As Jacobsen and Skilbrei (2010) remind us, this model of subjectivity has long been differentially allocated according to race, class, nationality, sexuality and gender. Nussbaum does not address the histories of colonialism that differentially allocate access to such subjectivities, the mutual dependencies that may drive women towards sex work in order to meet responsibilities to family and other people, or the question of how work and sex work may be understood differently in non-Western cultural contexts.

This liberalism is what abolitionist Miriam (2005: 2) sees as the source of the problem in addressing sex work. She calls on feminists to ‘theorize power and agency outside a liberal framework’ (emphasis in original). Her objection is that liberal notions of contract and freedom position the body as property—freedom is understood as the right of the individual to have sole ownership and control of the body, as with other forms of property. Situations where another person might have use of this body are governed by contract, whereby the two parties consent to the exchange, on the assumption that both parties’ freedom to own ‘property in the person’ remains intact. The problem, in Miriam's view, is that the body is not property. Drawing on Pateman's (1988) critique of the liberal contract, she argues that what takes place under the fiction of labour power is actually a process of alienation. And because such separation between body and person is not actually possible, when a man buys sex, he buys not just use of the woman's body, but use of her self. Her gender, as an integral part of herself, is also part of the deal, and is effectively equated with selfhood: ‘Womanhood, too, is confirmed in sexual activity, and when a prostitute contracts out use of her body she is thus selling herself in a very real sense’ (ibid.: 207). Miriam (2005: 4) concludes that what the prostitute sells is not her labour, but ‘command over her body’ (emphasis in original). For abolitionists such as Miriam and Pateman, then, sex work is understood as a practice of alienation and domination; indeed, Miriam argues that this, rather than a specific ‘service’, is what the client wants to purchase.

I agree with Miriam's point that the liberal perspective on sex work remains, like much liberal philosophy, effectively disembodied, and I think this is a problem in such a clearly embodied context. But there are also problems with the abolitionist understanding of sex, self, body and autonomy as so deeply intertwined as to be effectively the same thing. To unpack further the implications of this view of the relation between self, body, sexuality and vulnerability, it is interesting to turn to the work of Dworkin. Dworkin is certainly not the only influence on radical feminists’ understandings of the body, but she has one of the most articulated perspectives. Her work arguably constructs an image of women's bodies as constitutively violable. Her writing style is complex and she herself does not commit to a conclusion about whether ‘intercourse’ might, in a world without male domination, emerge as a non-violent act. But, echoing Pateman's equation of sexual identity with self, she is clear that under contemporary gender arrangements, women's bodies in their permeability are by definition prone to violent assault:

O'Connell Davidson (1998) has noted that Dworkin in such passages constructs intercourse as a matter of territorial invasion, in which the broaching of bodily boundaries is taken to be equivalent (always) to aggressive colonisation, and that this produces very simplistic understandings of sexuality and power. Indeed, it is this vision of the body as requiring unpenetrated boundaries that I hope to complicate below. For now, though, I want to notice that invocation of ‘bare, true, real existence’. It is arguable that Dworkin is describing a representation of gender relations that is observably culturally present in much popular discourse, even in the ‘post-feminist’ age, and it is possible to read much of Dworkin's work of this style as ironically addressing patriarchal constructions of women, rather than as describing any essentialised version of actual womanhood (and phrases such as ‘the God who does not exist’ surely encourage an ironic reading). But in this passage she explicitly problematises any reading of the bodily permeability she describes as being a social construction, instead wondering whether women's vulnerability may not in fact be an ‘intrinsic’ feature of their anatomy. At this point the argument shifts to an ontological level, and whatever Dworkin's intent, it is evident that this slippage into the ontological has been taken on board by anti-trafficking discourse. Doezema (2001) argues that the radical feminist position tends to reproduce quite precisely the objectifying gaze that it hopes to challenge, reiterating and reifying the objectification by describing the victims as if they had categorically become nothing but the objects of the pornographer's gaze, for instance by comparing sex workers’ vaginas to garbage cans (Hoigard and Finstad quoted in Doezema, 2001: 26), or stating that sex workers are ‘ “interchangeable” with plastic blow-up sex dolls’ (Barry quoted in Doezema, 2001: 26). Dworkin for one, is quite explicit that this is what she means.

Encoded within this vision is a particular version of the ‘integrity’ that is lost when the female body is invaded: it is based on a self defined as ‘private’ (Dworkin uses this term often), a space marked by a whole and unviolated boundary and occupied by only one person. This unviolated self, in discussions such as the one above, is a self because it is unviolated, and only to the extent that it remains unviolated. The terms ‘private’ and ‘freedom’ used by Dworkin also suggest that there is a remnant of liberal concepts of choice at work here, however embodied the story has become. Thus, Dworkin's slippage into the ontological also performs the universalisation of particularly Western models of subjectivity and self. To position this model of self on the level of ‘bare, true, real existence’ is a colonising move that becomes all the more insidious when applied to contexts in which racialised dynamics of exploitation are a significant dimension of the problem at stake.

The result is an epistemic invalidation. It is one thing to say that a body's integrity has been violated, and another to say that a person has lost the capacity for integrity, a phrasing that suggests that the loss continues although the physical occupation may cease. Hence, the argument here is that male violence succeeds in violating the personhood of the victim so thoroughly that the abolitionist can no longer recognise her as an integral, self-defining person. This is a problem not only because, as many third-wave feminists have pointed out, it leads to an equivalence between the categories of women and victim. It is also a problem because in this construction body and self are equated to the point where a victimised body is taken to be an inadequate speaking subject. The abolitionist argument that it is not possible to choose sex work then becomes circular and a self-fulfilling prophecy: the very fact that a person claims to have chosen sex work is taken as evidence that s/he is unable to make valid choices. The result, in spite of the Coalition Against Trafficking in Women's ¹ protests to the contrary, is to render sex workers as deluded victims of the patriarchy even, in fact especially, when they claim not to be victims. This is what Butler (1997) in Excitable Speech would have called implicit censorship: a setting of the terms of debate that makes certain statements unspeakable, and in doing so positions those who would speak them as outside the realm of recognisable speaking subject and of grievable life.

Cheng (2010) provides a telling example of the effects of such epistemic invalidation in her story of seven Filipino entertainers in Dongducheon, a military camp town in South Korea, who ran away from an abusive working situation, sought safety in a Catholic refuge, testified as ‘Victims of Trafficking’ and had their employer arrested, and then received death threats from other club employers in the camp because of their actions. In spite of this tale of vulnerability, at their first opportunity they left the refuge and returned to the military camp to see their GI ‘boyfriends’. This failure to live up to the image of traumatised victims resulted in hurt accusations of ingratitude and manipulation from both their former employer and the charity workers. Meanwhile, in spite of their status as Victims of Trafficking, the South Korean state summarily deported them with stamps in their passports preventing their return for three years. In seeking to continue their migration adventure despite having run into trouble, they lost any sympathy for the victimisation they had encountered.

In response to this effectively compulsory construction of sex workers as victims, sex workers’ rights advocates, and those researchers who work with them, often emphasise the agency of sex workers, even those who may be defined as trafficked. Agustin, for example, concludes that a focus on trafficking, and even a focus on workers’ rights, is inadequate in understanding the experience of such women:

Perspectives such as this do not disavow the existence of exploitation altogether; they frequently note inadequate labour protection, police violence and migration restrictions as sources of suffering and victimisation for sex workers. Nonetheless, some commentators have reported to me off the record that the very relentlessness of the sensationalised anti-trafficking industry prevents them from reporting hardship when they do find it. The implication is that the very intensity of the abolitionist argument forces polarisation of debate, as if any mention of suffering would render invalid the perception of agency. Hence, sex workers’ rights activists, even if they would prefer not to, are forced to negotiate within the ever-present binarised opposition between agency and suffering, as if one could not exist in the presence of the other. As Yea (2012: 55) notes, the sex worker rights position has tended to be ‘derivative’ of the abolitionist definition of violence: ‘the sex worker rights perspective has defined itself against and in relation to arguments around force, leaving little room to manoeuvre with regard to conceptualising what is voluntary’. The result is often a very liberal vision of the ‘choosing’ sex worker, expressing her free will in her choice of careers and clients. As Jacobsen and Skilbrei (2010: 196) put it, ‘Because of the bifurcating structure of the debate, women have to exclude most traces of agency from their self-representation in order to be recognized as victims and most traces of victimhood to be recognized as agents’. The problem here, of course, is that, as all sides admit, most of those who choose to migrate for sex work are choosing in circumstances that are not entirely free, and under conditions that are not entirely under their control. Moreover, as Doezema points out, the division between ‘willing’ and ‘unwilling’ sex workers reconfigures old dichotomies between innocent virginal victims and willing, deserving whores. The result is that anti-trafficking efforts, inevitably enacted through law and order measures, often result in further police harassment and less safety for those ‘women of ill repute’ constructed as having ‘chosen’ sex work (Doezema, 2010). At the same time, those who may not have chosen may go unnoticed by police unless they fit the stereotype of illegal migration, physical violence and false imprisonment (O'Connell Davidson, 2006). Doezema (2010: 24) thus laments that ‘The “choice” question in writings and debates about prostitution just will not go away’.

How can Butler help? To begin with, like Miriam (2012), she has recently offered a critique of liberal discourses of consent. But Butler's critique does not depend on a normative vision of the embodied self as coherent, integral and unviolated—quite the opposite. Considering public debate over the age of consent, she points out that a liberal model of consent is not very helpful in understanding what takes place in a sexual encounter, whether for adults or children. This is because both sides of the debate perpetuate a certain model of the consenting subject. While differing about where children fit on the scale, they assume that there is such a thing as a subject who can know her own desire in advance. For Butler this is simply unrealistic, given the difficulties that even adults often have in knowing their desire, because of:

In other words, the discourse of consent makes no allowance for the likelihood that a subject's desires may change, that s/he may not be fully aware of what the experience will be like, or that the relationship itself may affect the consenter's subjectivity in unpredictable ways. Consent, under liberal understandings of the subject, is (a) assumed to be a decision made by a transparent, self-understanding subject that has full knowledge of its own desires, and (b) understood as a single act, rather than as a way of entering into an ongoing relationship. Butler gives familiar examples here of cases where people may give consent to sexual activities with the best of intentions, only to discover later that they are unable to tolerate these actions in practice. What Butler calls for, then, is a critique of the implicitly self-transparent subject that underpins liberal debate on consent.

To what extent can these insights be applied to the context of debates over consent in sex work? Here, also, we might say that we are asked to imagine the subjectivity of sex workers in one of two stereotypical ways: first as those who are incapable of knowing their own minds, and second as those who are fully knowing, not only of their own minds and desires, but of the circumstances and consequences of their choices. It may be the very implausibility of both of these visions that keeps the debate so firmly entrenched and so productive of discomfort on all sides, since the first position must inevitably be confronted by the prospect of the speaking, willing sex worker, and the second by the prospect of the disempowered, ignorant prostituted child.

In order to rethink such an impasse, it is necessary to rethink the image of the liberal subject that continues to underwrite the debate. Is it possible to think about sex work and trafficking in ways that do not reproduce these terms? In Precarious Life (2004) and Frames of War (2009), Butler outlines her vision for an ethical foundation for progressive politics, based on a consideration of the inevitable vulnerability, the precariousness, of human life. Butler argues that we need a

The ‘new bodily ontology’ Butler proposes is based on an understanding of the relationship between self and vulnerability quite different from that offered by abolitionists, and also quite different from the liberal individualist foundations of Nussbaum's argument. The basis of Butler's proposal is that injurability and precariousness can be understood as a minimal shared condition of life, and this is not only because all life inevitably leads towards death, but because life is fundamentally social. The apprehension of the precariousness of life, in Butler's vision, reminds us that the other is vulnerable to our actions, as we are to theirs, and that precisely because of this exposure and dependency, we are responsible to this other. The apprehension of life as precarious thus acts as a call to ethics. It is in recognising the vulnerability of another that we register them as someone to whom we are responsible, someone whose life registers as ‘grievable’ (Butler, 2004, 2009).

This focus on precariousness reconfigures the vision of a bounded body under the threat of invasion that we have encountered so far.

It is not that the body in Butler's view is immune to violence, that it cannot still be invaded, hurt, appropriated or exploited. But this vulnerability is no longer the antithesis of the body's viability—its survivability—but instead its condition. Without a certain physical permeability of boundaries, a certain openness to its material and social environment, this body is not a living body and its life is not a life. Here, as Butler intends, we are no longer in the domain of the body as private property and the self as individual sovereign whose claim to the body must be free from all impingement. Rather, we are living with and as a body that is defined by its ability to be impacted upon by the world around it.

What does this mean for sex work and trafficking? To begin with, the mere fact of being ‘penetrated’ no longer necessarily constitutes violence, or if it does then all life (not just female life) exists under the threat of violence, since all life must be to some extent open and vulnerable. Hence, ‘penetration’ certainly, under particular conditions, may constitute an abuse, but this is not inevitable, even if the penetration takes place under conditions that are not entirely secure or under the body's control, since such conditions are the conditions of life. This perspective does not exclude the possibility of an analysis of gendered power relations; in fact, it may often lead towards it, but it does not require an a priori assumption that this is the only applicable frame through which to approach sex work.

In addition, this shift from an image of bodily vulnerability distributed according to fixed and binary conceptions of gender to one that sees vulnerability as a contingently shared condition can help to counter the epistemic invalidation of sex workers. Butler's (2004: 20) question ‘what makes for a grievable life?’ draws our attention to the dynamics that make ethical relations dependent on the recognition of the other as a life that counts as a life, a life whose loss would require mourning. Through drawing attention to shared precariousness, Butler pursues not ‘recognition’ according to preconceptions of what a human (and therefore grievable) life looks like, but ‘apprehension'—a more tentative, less exacting mode of experiencing the presence of another. Such an apprehension, Butler hopes, would not be foreclosed by the ‘failure’ of the other to perform according to established norms as a bounded and unviolated self; indeed, it is possible to imagine that the other's failure to perform as a coherently narrated and consistent self might be precisely what inspires the apprehension of her vulnerability and hence an ethical response (see Butler, 2005 for an extended exploration of such dynamics).

To illustrate how this perspective helps in approaching the experiences of women involved in migration for sex work, we can return to Cheng's (2010) example. Cheng writes reflexively of her own surprise at the seven Filipinos’ decision to return to the military camp from which they had so spectacularly escaped. But her extended analysis of the culture of the camp shows how the women, embedded in various competing discourses as well as their attempts to escape them, can hardly be expected to behave as coherent and unitary subjects. On the one hand, these women are pursuing Filipino models of good womanhood, often working to support their families in the Philippines. On the other, they are well aware that as Filipinos and as ‘entertainers’, understood and expected to be prostitutes, they fall outside those definitions of good womanhood. This represents both a source of guilt and a freedom; in Korea they can pursue forms of gendered self-expression that they would not be able to present at home, even as these activities render them vulnerable to exploitation. Their positions at the wrong ends of classed, raced and gendered hierarchies result in oppression, and at the same time they skilfully use these positions to present themselves as exotic victims in the hope that their clients will seek to ‘rescue’ them. Thus, they constantly negotiate the nuances of self-representation without any secure place in which to stand, for instance through seeking ways to distance themselves from imagined ‘bad’ women who prostitute solely for money or for pleasure. One way they manage this is to present their relations with men as inspired by romantic love; they do not have clients or Johns, but ‘boyfriends’. And indeed, in Cheng's case studies several boyfriends ultimately become husbands.

What Cheng presents, then, is a picture of these women as caught within multiple discourses, each of which offers them a fixed subject position, usually an unliveable one. Their efforts to become American wives can be read as ‘self-making project[s]’ (Cheng, 2010: 5) in which they pursue, with precarious odds of success, the few liveable identities visible on their horizons. But to characterise this in neat liberal terms as the action of a sovereign subject choosing between possibilities is to miss something about the role of these projects. The women would be better characterised as in pursuit of a living situation in which it is possible to become such a subject. They quite vocally aspire to the kind of secure and bounded identity that would be compromised by sexual violation, at the same time as myriad dimensions of structural oppression position them as those who by definition have no entitlement to such an identity, and at the same time as their best pathway towards it involves opening themselves to more relationships based on raced, gendered and classed exploitation. It should be no surprise that they cannot be neatly pigeonholed as either victimised objects or agentive subjects. To require them to speak and act as such is precisely to miss the multiple structures through which their speech and acts are always already constructed as illegitimate.

One way to conceptually approach this is to simply say that they are ‘both’ agents and victims or that they have ‘constrained choice’ (Sandy, 2006 cited in Yea, 2012: 43). But such formulations tend to leave the founding constructions of agency and victimhood as opposites intact. More productive, in my view, is to think about the ways in which their agency is precisely enabled by their vulnerability. They are vulnerable because they are in relationship—to their families and children, their employers and traffickers, and their clients. But paradoxically their decisions show their awareness that it is by opening themselves to such relationships that they can best manage that vulnerability and turn it into a liveable, grievable and hopefully less precarious life. It might be possible to say that their pathway into liberal individualist subjectivity and self-making is one that takes place through bodily exposure and vulnerability.

I do not intend to suggest that these particular women are to be taken as ‘typical’ cases of trafficked sex workers. As O'Connell Davidson (1998) points out, sex work operates in varied contexts, with vastly varied power dynamics and levels of freedom. But what I hope this example shows is that paying attention to the enmeshment of agency and vulnerability, rather than treating them as a zero-sum game, not only produces a more accurate understanding of the women's experience, but also opens up opportunities for making sense of their speech and actions even if they are not carried out from a position of authoritative consistency secured by an epistemically unviolated body. They are not entirely free and self-consistent in their explanations of their actions, but neither do they know nothing about their situation; indeed, both their speech and actions, when understood as performative statements, articulate quite precisely the positions they are in.

But the other important thing to note is that this intrinsic entanglement of vulnerability and agency is not a special case. Butler's (2005) point is that this inability to coherently narrate the reasons for our actions is an effect of the fact that all humans become human through relationship, and in ways that render this process of becoming a subject opaque to that subject. However effectively we pursue it, we remain vulnerable to one another in part because our existence as subjects is not entirely ‘ours’, but is the point at which we are formed in and through relations with others. This ethics, then, is based on a certain symmetry. There is, Butler suggests in Frames of War (2009), an ontological level on which all of us are vulnerable. It is precisely this realisation that calls us to ethics, not because the other is who we expect her to be, but because, like ourselves, she is not, or only partly, only sometimes. In other words, the ethics of vulnerability proposed by Butler is a reflexive ethics; it prevents the colonial feminist move (Mohanty, 2003) in which the Western feminist can present herself as ‘liberated’ in relation to the non-Western ‘others’ she seeks to ‘educate’ or ‘save’ (Doezema, 2001; Yea, 2012. Both note this as a tendency in trafficking discourse).

But of course it is not enough to note these similarities across degrees of oppression. Trafficked workers face particular, and often extreme, levels of precariousness. But Butler (2009) is also concerned to attend to the ways in which vulnerability is inequitably distributed around the globe. While on an ontological level, Butler argues, there is a shared precariousness, there are also social and political structures through which the inevitable insecurity of human life can be redistributed, allowing some the privilege of a claim to security while others struggle in regions of comparative insecurity. This, indeed, is how Butler describes much of contemporary global neo-imperialism. She names this politically distributed and territorialised form of vulnerability ‘precarity’. In Butler's view, such inequitable distributions cannot be maintained without violence; indeed, political violence could be defined as the act of exploiting another's vulnerability in order to bolster one's own immunity. Hence, for Butler, freedom from bodily vulnerability and the impingement of others is not only an impossible dream, but also an unethical one. It should not be surprising that its pursuit leads to the closure of borders and the imprisonment of women. To avoid this we need to understand vulnerability not as an unbearable exception to the norm, but in some way as the norm. Then we might attend to the global dynamics of precarity that reinforce the privilege of those who have other options for earning income or travelling, and which do this precisely by confining those who do not to strict regimes of border control and criminalisation the moment they attempt to move towards regions of greater opportunity. As Segrave (2009) has acutely observed, the border is an ever-present but rarely problematised concept within trafficking discourse, and it would behove feminists to develop approaches that take this into account. One way to do this is to notice how the border works as a way of enforcing particular distributions of precarity.

Hence, an ethics of vulnerability can draw attention to the metaphorical association between bodily borders and national borders that is at work in panics over trafficking. The narrative of the need to ‘protect’ women from the penetration of their bodily borders provides justification for the reinforcement and policing of national borders (Sharma, 2005; Segrave, 2009). This in itself does very little to protect migrant sex workers, and most often in fact increases their vulnerability, as in the absence of legitimate avenues to migration they pursue semi- or entirely illegal ones (Andrijasevic, 2010). But the association between bodily and state borders is not arbitrary: the construction of both body and state as entities that must be protected from invasions from outside rests on a desire to be invulnerable; to shore up the barriers so that ‘I’ can be safe through projecting my precariousness onto ‘you’ and then abandoning you to it. While Butler's ethics may not prevent this from happening, it at least exposes it as an unethical desire, rather than a virtuous attempt to save women from trafficking.

Thus, from this perspective, the ‘problem’ of trafficking is not simply a problem of male violence against women, although this may be part of the problem. Nor is the ‘problem’ purely the discursive and legal stigmatisation of sex workers, although this is also significant. Instead, the problem can be defined as an uneven distribution of precarity, in which those living in certain regions are forced to operate at a higher level of daily risk and exposure than those in others. This level of risk can be neatly and dramatically figured by the image of the vulnerable feminised sex worker of colour, but it is not encompassed by that figure, and the ending of prostitution might reduce the sensationalism and visibility of precarity, salving the consciences of privileged observers, but would not, as commentators on all sides admit (e.g., Nussbaum, 1999; Jeffreys, 2009), solve the underlying problem of inadequate access to a viable life. Examining trafficking in the light of a critique of the distribution of precarity can thus bring into view the extraordinary sleight of hand by which trafficking discourse, built around a vision of the sovereign self and nation, takes sex workers’ efforts to find themselves a liveable life within global raced, gendered and class inequality, and turns it into a problem of border control and crime, with the accompanying ‘solutions’ that such a definition of the problem suggests—solutions that take for granted the right of the privileged to aggressively maintain uneven distributions of precarity.