Social Politics 2014 Volume 21 Number 3
The Paradoxes of Neoliberalism: Migrant
Korean Sex Workers in the United States
and “Sex Trafficking”
Sealing Cheng1,* and Eunjung Kim2
This article examines the paradoxes of neoliberalism through two migrant sex
workers’ negotiation of the transnational disciplinary regimes of morality, national
security, and humanitarianism. We take as our point of departure their active resistance to the label of “victims of sex trafficking.” From a close analysis of their migration journey and their experiences in the United States, we come to understand
these women as defiant neoliberal subjects. We argue that global anti-trafficking
initiatives as they have taken shape in the twenty-first century are part of neoliberal
governance. The women’s sexual labor subjects them to the scrutiny and penalty
of the state. Yet they see themselves as self-sufficient, self-responsible, and selfenterprising individuals. We locate these tensions within three paradoxes of neoliberalism: the apparent amorality of neoliberalism and its facilitation of a conservative
moral agenda; the depoliticization of social risks and the hyperpoliticization of national security; and the continuous creation and ravaging of vulnerable populations
coupled with the celebration of humanitarian/philanthropic responses from governmental and NGO sectors. Juxtaposing these women’s self-making projects with
the transnational state apparatus to combat “sex trafficking,” we gain insights into
how individual pursuits and state practices intersect at this neoliberal moment—
despite their different purposes.
Jin and Sealing had never met before. In 2007, an activist from an antitrafficking organization in New York City serving Asian women made the
introduction after learning about Sealing’s research on Korean women
working in the intimate service sector in the United States. Jin agreed to be
interviewed about her experience of migrating from South Korea to the United
States to work in massage parlors. Meeting at a busy street corner in Flushing,
New York, Jin, a petite woman in her early 40s, approached Sealing with a
1
Department of Anthropology, New Asia College, The Chinese University of Hong Kong, Shatin, Hong Kong
Department of Gender and Women’s Studies, University of Wisconsin-Madison, Madison, WI, USA
*[email protected]
2
socpol: Social Politics, Fall 2014 pp. 355–381
doi: 10.1093/sp/jxu019
# The Author 2014. Published by Oxford University Press.
All rights reserved. For permissions, please e-mail: [email protected]
Advance Access publication August 21, 2014
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S. Cheng and E. Kim
knowing nod and the faintest smile. They walked for another 20 minutes back
to her apartment, passing rows of shop with signboards first in Chinese, and
then in Korean. Jin had taken over the lease for the seventh-floor apartment
in a relatively new and well-maintained building from another Korean woman
in late 2004. Sipping green tea in the sun-drenched studio apartment that afternoon, they sat at the counter of her open kitchen and talked for the next
2 hours.
Sealing had been asked to do interviews by a privately funded research
project on Korean women “victims of sex trafficking” in five global sites: South
Korea, Japan, Australia, and the East and West Coasts of the United States. The
project, part of the rise of corporate humanitarianism,1 was jointly organized
by the International Organization for Migration in South Korea and the
Bom-bit Foundation, a nongovernmental organization (NGO) set up by Jeong
Hae-won, the wife of the CEO of the biggest insurance company in South
Korea. Ms. Jeong had been concerned about the barrage of news reports that
were circulating both in and outside of Korea about the trafficking of Korean
women into forced prostitution overseas.2 Many Koreans and Americans wondered how South Korea, one of the biggest economies in the world, could be
among the countries exporting female “sex slaves.” This was particularly puzzling as the South Korean state introduced its 2004 anti-prostitution laws in
the name of combatting human trafficking, and a burgeoning wave of NGOs
and initiatives has emerged to address the issue both domestically and internationally. The Bom-bit research in turn assumed that South Korean women
engaged in prostitution overseas were necessarily “victims of sex trafficking.”
The survey questionnaire, which was given to all researchers to use in the different sites, was laden with assumptions about coercion, violence, and sexual
abuse. For example, it asked, “What did the person who is watching you (employer, “mama,” manager, husband, etc.) do to force you to do things you
didn’t want to do?”3
Back at Jin’s kitchen counter, the questionnaire became increasingly irrelevant to Jin, as Sealing attempted to make her way through the pre-scripted
interview questions. Jin had worked on and off as a masseuse in different
massage parlors along the East Coast through introductions by her friends and
co-workers. She described her work as follows:
JIN:
SEALING:
JIN:
SEALING:
JIN:
Some people only come in for table showers, massage, and chats.
Are they the good clients?
No, they are not.
So who are the good clients?
Those people who finish quickly, they are the good ones. Those who
take a shower and then have sex and go. They are the best.
This response exploded the entire premise of the research, which assumed that
sexual labor for women was inherently victimizing and that women’s agency in
Paradoxes of Neoliberalism
357
migration into sex work was impossible. For Jin, men who demanded sex
rather than conversation were the good clients, if they got themselves clean
before having sex, finished quickly, and left immediately after sex. Jin situated
sex squarely within a repertoire of other physical and emotional work, and she
identified sex as more efficient (“quick”) in providing a return for her labor.
She made between $11,000 and $22,000 per month. Similar to Jin, none of our
interviewees identified themselves as victims of trafficking, and only one of
them reported an incident of physical violence in the workplace. Another
woman volunteered to share her experience of intimate partner violence,
though it was not a topic of discussion in the questionnaire. As researchers, we
concluded that the chasm between the project’s assumptions about migrant
women’s sexual victimhood and the women’s own responses demanded a
much more careful engagement with these women’s stories.4
This article examines the making of defiant neoliberal subjects by analyzing
the stories of two women—Jin and Kyungmi (both are pseudonyms)—who
refused the label of “victims of sex trafficking,” even though their migration
trajectories and the site of their labor would seem to invite it. While mainstream culture—the media, abolitionist advocates, and popular discussion—is
prone to portray them as damsels in distress, law enforcement agencies are
more disposed to see them as criminals for selling sex. These contradictions
condition their modes of self-representation and strategies of resistance. We
situate these struggles within what we identify as the three paradoxes of neoliberalism: its a/morality, its de/politicization, and its non/humanitarianism.
We developed our analytical framework through a close reading of Jin and
Kyungmi’s narratives in relation to an existing body of work on neoliberalism,
gender, and sexuality. We chose to focus on these two women because they explicitly criticized the anti-trafficking initiatives that were intended to “protect”
them. We were also intrigued by their aversion to the law enforcement efforts
and humanitarian interventions that claimed to offer them “rights.” To understand this contradiction, we locate their migration trajectories, aspirations, and
discontent within broader trends of neoliberal development in South Korea
and the United States. As women who carefully strategized around their immigration and labor conditions as sex workers—in what some of them call their
own “construction projects”—they embody the sexual limits of neoliberalism.
While they may personify the values of self-reliance, self-governance, and free
markets (Brodie 1996), they violate the neoliberal ideals of relational
heterosexuality and middle-class femininity (Bernstein 2012). Even though the
anti-trafficking movement hails women’s human rights, gender justice, and
protections afforded by the state, its operation relies mainly on framing sex
work as a crime while reinforcing gender, class, racial, and global inequalities.
We argue that global anti-trafficking initiatives as they have taken shape in the
twenty-first century are part of neoliberal governance, grounded in populist
campaigns, racial codes, culture wars, and sex panics that justify the repression
of those who are outside the norm (Duggan 2003).
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The larger Bom-bit project was initiated under the assumption that South
Korean women who engage in prostitution overseas are victimized. The
researchers were asked to recruit Korean women who worked in the sex trade
in order to respond to a questionnaire that reflected this assumption.
Specifically, our focus was on Korean women who immigrated to work in
massage parlors and in the hostess clubs known as “room salons”—venues
known for providing men with female company and a range of intimate services that may include massage, conversation, singing, stripping, and other
types of emotional and entertainment work, as well as—but not necessarily—
sex for pay. To recruit the interviewees, we initially placed online and print
advertisements in Korean community newspapers and posted flyers in
restrooms in Korean restaurants and karaoke bars (see note 4). We also relied
on snowball sampling, after some respondents referred us to their friends or
coworkers. A total of thirteen women agreed to take part; twelve were working
in room salons and one in massage parlors. Both of us had extensive research
experience with marginalized women in South Korea, including adult and
teenage sex workers. We believe that these experiences and our knowledge of
the workings of the Korean sex industry, communicated to Jin and Kyungmi
during the interviews, heightened our sensitivity to their position and to some
extent bridged some of the social distance between researcher and subject. We
understood what they told us as “situated knowledges” rather than a singular
narrative of “truth” (Haraway 1988).
Even though the respondents spoke of their sometimes circuitous and dangerous routes to the United States, their sometimes difficult working conditions, and their sense of insecurity and uncertainty as undocumented aliens,
their narratives strike a sharp contrast to popular ideas of widespread coercion
and forced prostitution of migrant women both globally and in America.
Researchers on the team in other locations produced similar findings. Yet
these individual reports were included only on a CD-ROM given out at the
press conference, and not the printed final Bom-bit Foundation report.
Despite the failure to substantiate claims of widespread trafficking of Korean
women into forced prostitution, in the final report the principal researcher
suggested that sexual slavery was widespread and emphasized the pronounced
danger of human trafficking: “The result of this research shows that many of
the women are living in conditions similar to sexual slavery or sexual exploitation. . . . Thus, Korean women’s entry into prostitution overseas should be
approached with an emphasis on the danger of human trafficking” (Bom-bit
2008, 52). This insistence on the threat of human trafficking contrary to the
research findings was no accident. Echoing UNESCO findings that the
numbers and claims about trafficking in persons worldwide are based more in
myth than fact (UNESCO 2011), we see this as an example of the production
and circulation of knowledge about trafficking that is rooted in ideological
convictions, the pressure to conform, and spurious authority.
Paradoxes of Neoliberalism
359
Throughout this essay we put “sex trafficking” in quotation marks not
because we doubt that trafficking into forced sexual labor exists but because we
seek to emphasize the ambiguous and uncertain meanings of this widely circulated term. Depending on the speaker and the circumstance, “sex trafficking”
can mean simply prostitution, movement into prostitution, the experiences of
violence and exploitation in the sex industry, or entry into forced prostitution.
Notably, the 2000 United Nations Protocol for the Prevention, Protection, and
Punishment of Trafficking in Persons defines human trafficking as coerced
labor in all work sectors (not just prostitution), and provides no separate definition of “sex trafficking.” The U.S. Trafficking Victims Protection Act of 2000
(TVPA) does define “sex trafficking” as “the recruitment, harboring, transportation, provision, or obtaining of a person for the purpose of a commercial sex
act” (§103 (9)). Significantly, this definition does not include coercion but
equates “sex trafficking” with prostitution and its mediation. It is also a legally
non-operational term because it has no criminal penalties or immigration benefits attached to it (Peters 2009). Only trafficking into forced prostitution or
the prostitution of minors is defined as part of “severe forms of trafficking” in
the TVPA (§103 (8)), and only “victims of severe forms of trafficking” qualify
for social and immigration assistance. As Alicia Peters, who has studied the
TVPA and its implementation, points out, “The moral panic over ‘sex trafficking’ distorts the notion of trafficking as an issue of forced or coerced labor or
service by framing it purely as an issue of sexual violation” (2001, 20; emphasis
in original). Laura Agustı́n (2006) also argues that unlike other forms of migration flows, a woman’s migration for sex work immediately negates her identity
as “migrant”; she belongs entirely to the growing discourses of “trafficking”
that justify stricter border control and further criminalization of the sex trade.
We therefore view “sex trafficking” as a discursive device anchored in a particular way of thinking about and managing licit/illicit sex and lawful/unlawful
migration with specific gender, class, and racial effects.
“Sex Trafficking”: Between Technologies of
Subjection and Subjectivity
We explore the neoliberal conditions that propelled the migration of South
Korean women into the U.S. intimate services sector, and their subjectification
as “victims of sex trafficking” within a transnational anti-trafficking regime.
Neoliberalism as deregulation and risk-taking thus converges with neoliberalism as law enforcement. Both are products of neoliberal state practices that
span the Pacific in the new millennium (Bernstein 2012; Choi 2013; Chuang
2006; Lee 2005, 2007; Park et al. 2013).
Neoliberal restructuring of South Korea’s economy set the stage for women’s
migration overseas in search of employment opportunities. Following the historic IMF bailout in 1997, flexibility became the model for labor management in
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South Korea, resulting in significant gender and age gaps in unemployment, as
well as the spread of irregular employment and early retirement. Temporary
workers, short-term contract workers, contingent workers, workers hired from
temporary help agencies, and day laborers constituted 51.6 percent of the total
labor force in 2002; in 2005, the total earnings of such irregular workers were
only 50.9 percent of that of regular workers (Kim and Park 2006, 444–6).
Employability and self-sufficiency came to define the emergent welfare policies
of the South Korean state (see Song 2009). Women bore the brunt of this shift,
as they have always been the chief reserve labor army in South Korea. In 2002,
66.9 percent of women were either day laborers or temporary workers, while the
figure for men was between 35 and 41 percent (Kim and Park 2006, 447).
Furthermore, according to OECD statistics, in 2005 the female employment rate
in South Korea, 52.5 percent, was below the OECD average of 56.1 percent. The
wage gap between Korean women and men—more than 40 percentage in
2007—is the highest in all OECD countries (OECD 2011a). The gendering of
unemployment repeated itself in the 2008 economic crisis. The Korea Labor
Institute found that between November 2008 and May 2009, 98 percent of the
jobs cut were held by women, and during this period a total of 877,000 women
in their 30s lost their jobs (Yoon 2009). Young people have suffered from the
lack of job opportunities and job security as companies scaled back their recruitment of new employees, preferring experienced workers. In this context, going
overseas for work has become an attractive option for some of the women in
their 20s and 30s, who—even for those with college degrees—have great difficulties finding jobs at home.
Some of these Korean women have entered the intimate services sector in
Europe, the United States, and Australia. The possibility of returning to South
Korea with an amount of money large enough to enable them to start a new
life convinced the women that their risks and hard work would be short term
and thus can be managed (and, if necessary, concealed). Being overseas also
offered the illusory promise that they might pursue other ambitions, such as
studying, pursuit of a profession, or marriage. However, restrictions on immigration forced the women to seek assistance with illegal means of entry.5 In the
simplest of terms, the decision to migrate was often experienced as a choice
between unemployment or underemployment at home and insecure but possibly life-changing opportunities overseas.
Yet this outflow of Korean women overseas has come under scrutiny under
the growing concerns of “sex trafficking.” The constant and unending efforts at
both global and local levels to introduce legislation, strengthen law enforcement,
and offer victims protection and rehabilitation in order to combat the traffic in
women has generated a growing population of potential or certified “victims.”
In South Korea, the Act on the Punishment of Procuring Prostitution and
Associated Acts (or the Punishment Act) and the Act on the Prevention of
Prostitution and Protection of Victims Thereof (or the Protection Act) were
passed by the National Assembly in March 2004 to replace legislation first passed
Paradoxes of Neoliberalism
361
in 1961, the Prevention of Prostitution Act. The new laws claimed to protect the
human rights of women in prostitution.
From the perspective of the South Korean and the U.S. governments, as well
as concerned groups in Korean civil society, women such as Jin and Kyungmi
are potential “victims of sex trafficking.” The high-profile crackdowns every year
since 2004 have reaffirmed the state’s commitment to curb “violations of
women’s human rights” and restore social and moral order. Research by Cheng
has found many women like Jin who realized that the laws were not protecting
them and who had no access to or interest in the “self-sufficiency” programs
offered to victims of prostitution (Cheng 2011a). In fact, the new South Korean
laws fall far short of their goal of protecting the human rights of women in prostitution. Those who do not satisfy the conditions that make them victims—such
as women who are employed in brothels and room salons despite having no
debt, or work independently outside of brothels, or manage other sex workers
and sell sex at the same time—are considered criminals. The new laws thus offer
protection only for “authentic” victims, reinforce the stigma of prostitutes, and
thereby translate the protection of women’ human rights into “the protection of
feminine virtues” (Cheng 2011a). Nevertheless, the new laws gained South
Korea an enviable position in the global competition to combat trafficking. After
a one-year spell as a “Tier 3” country in the first Trafficking in Persons Report
issued by the U.S. Department of State (2001), indicating its failure to comply
“with the minimum standards of combating trafficking in human beings,”
South Korea has been a “Tier 1” country ever since 2002. In fact, in 2005 South
Korea was named an example of “international best practices,” as the 2004 laws
were cited as a global model for combating trafficking in women and children.
It is therefore interesting to see in the same period a mounting number of
reports about Korean women in the United States who either had been trafficked into sexual exploitation or were spa and brothel owners sexually exploiting their compatriots. Since 2005, a few high-profile successful raids against
“sex trafficking” have targeted Korean-run spas and massage parlors. The best
known of them was Operation Gilded Cage, which first identified more than
one hundred Korean women in San Francisco in July 2005, with twenty-seven
arrests, and then led to the arrests of forty-two Korean women in Dallas
(Gambacorta 2007). In 2006, federal agents raided Korean-run massage
parlors on the East Coast—in New York; Baltimore; New Haven, Connecticut;
Washington, DC; and Philadelphia. Eighteen venues were raided, thirty-one
people were arrested, and sixty-seven Korean women were rounded up to
determine whether they were forced into prostitution (Lengel 2006).
Departing from the prevalent idea that South Korean women are duped and
coerced by transnational trafficking organizations into overseas sex trade (as
state and activist discourses maintain), or that crackdowns on the sex trade
inside South Korea drove sex workers overseas (as media reports suggest), we
argue below that this migration flow and its attendant anxieties about “sex trafficking” are part of the processes of the making of South Korea as a neoliberal
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nation-state. Juxtaposing women’s experiences with the Korean state’s policies
that identify and protect them as victims of trafficking, we gain insights
into how individual pursuits and state practices intersect at this neoliberal
moment—despite their different purposes.
The Paradoxes of Neoliberalism
Neoliberalism is understood here as the intertwined political, economic,
and cultural reconfiguration of relationships between the state and the individuals that unfold within a set of paradoxes.6 Broadly speaking, neoliberalism
refers to the rise of the free market and the concomitant withdrawal of the state
from the social sector, encouraging policies of deregulation, privatization, and
labor flexibilization. The neoliberal state further asserts its power by defining
its governable subjects as self-managing, self-sufficient, and self-advancing. Yet
neoliberalism’s history, manifestation, and effects can vary so greatly in different locations that its utility as an analytical category is limited (Ong 2006). For
example, contrary to the trend of de-democratization observed in the United
States (Brown 2006), neoliberal reforms coincided with democratic reforms
and the rise of civil society in South Korea in the late 1990s, following four
decades of military and authoritarian rule. In 1997, Kim Dae Jung was
democratically elected president just before a major financial crisis, and South
Korea received the largest ever bailout of $55 billion in the history of the
International Monetary Fund (IMF). The president established the first
National Human Rights Commission and the Ministry of Gender Equality,
while supporting an emerging wave of civic organizations. At the same time,
policies of structural readjustment ensured that flexible employment relations
would increase, trade unions would weaken, and policies requiring workfare
would strengthen, forcing many into more precarious lives as underemployed
or unemployed (Song 2009). Neoliberalism and its empirical operations as
lived by Jin and Kyungmi thus reveal the specific paradoxes and contradictions
of the South Korean context.
Paradox One: The A/Morality of Neoliberalism
Kyungmi was in her late 20s when Eunjung met her in a Chicago suburb.
She was trained as a teacher but failed to find a teaching job after graduation.
While in college, she visited the United States on a tourist visa during summer
break and a friend in the business introduced her to work in a room salon; she
was employed there for one month. She “quite enjoyed the experience,” so she
went back to work there for two weeks on another visit. At one point, she met
a client who gave her $10,000 for her tuition and kept in touch with her after
she returned to Korea. After graduation, she spent three months in New York
and one month in Atlanta; the work was profitable and she incurred no debts.
Paradoxes of Neoliberalism
363
But when she next returned to the United States with the intention of staying
longer, she was turned away at the border because her record of frequent visits
raised suspicions. She found a broker who got her into the United States; a
room salon that she contacted prepaid the brokers’ fee of $14,000. Since that
time she has worked in a circuit of Korean room salons across different regions
of the United States.
Though Kyungmi had paid off her debt well before the interview took place
she continued to work in room salons, contrary to the popular belief that women
stay on in sex work only because of debt bondage. She made clear, however, that
her case was an exception, as she knew of women who had accrued enormous
debts, become addicted to drugs, and gotten ill because of the job. “People said
that I set the record by paying off the debt so quickly without the help of a customer. I paid it off by working.” She distinguished herself from others by being
smart and successful in her occupation. Kyungmi had initially planned to go back
to Korea after accumulating large savings, but she had since changed her mind
and now wanted to become a legal resident in the United States in order to start
her own business. Through a broker hired by her boyfriend, she managed to get a
driver’s license, which gave her great mobility.
That women working in room salons are self-enterprising and self-managing
subjects is captured in the term kongsach’ida, “scheming a construction project,”
a term commonly used by sex workers in Korea. In the United States, such
schemes ensure that clients return and enable the women to extract money from
these regular clients beyond their standard fee by performing intimacy alongside
the abjectness of victimhood in exile. Kyungmi explains:
It goes like this. “My mother is sick. My sister is sick. I need to send
money home. I really don’t want to work in a place like this. It is so hard
to drink alcohol and my liver is damaged, but I need to work hard to send
money home.” And you cry hard and drink a lot. Then (when the client
becomes a regular) you sleep with him, telling him you need a certain
amount of money. That is how to do a “construction project.” Ripping
money off the customers.
In other words, the “construction project” is a woman’s strategy to build an intimate relationship with a client and appeal to his sense of pity by playing the
role of a “damsel in distress,” for the purpose of gaining a lump sum of cash
from him. Kyungmi told the interviewer that she did not give in to clients’
requests for or expectations of sex easily, and could always find a way out.
Women in room salons mainly earned money not through sexual intercourse
but through emotional labor embedded in the gendered performance of a particular femininity, using their youth, physical beauty, and status as exiles in
order to invoke moral obligations. Sometimes, a relationship with a customer
could lead to long-term intimacy; Kyungmi’s boyfriend was a client who told
her to stop working in the salon. To refer to this emotional labor as a “construction project” is a feminization of Foucault’s idea of homo œconomicus—an
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“entrepreneur of [her]self, being for [her]self [her] own capital, being for
[her]self [her] own producer, being for [her]self the source of [her] earnings”
(Foucault 2008, 226).
As a self-fashioning entrepreneur, Kyungmi was an exemplary neoliberal
subject—except that her product was sexual and intimate labor in the room
salon. Kyungmi was emphatic about the autonomy she had in her job. She
identified with hwaryugae yŏin (female entertainers, a term roughly equivalent
to “ladies of the night”) and said she felt no shame about her occupation. She
said that she could give up the tip and leave the room if her customer behaved
nastily. She talked about her workplace as a “dream team”; the women collaborated to increase customers’ consumption of alcohol while protecting their
own bodies, by furtively spitting out their alcohol into beer bottles or pouring
it into ice buckets, which were then quickly removed by the waiters. In asserting her enterprising mentality and the amount of control she had in her
working environment, Kyungmi was at the same time taking aim against the
stigma and shame attached to women working in room salons. Refusing to be
governed by the shame associated with sex work, Kyungmi saw her “construction projects” and high income in room salons as proof of her success—in the
sense of a competitive, self-enterprising neoliberal subject.
Kyungmi’s narrative exemplifies her struggle within a major paradox of
neoliberalism: the apparent amorality of neoliberalism and its facilitation of a
conservative moral agenda. Despite its apparent moral disinterest in how one
accumulates profit, neoliberalism is certainly not free of moral judgment—as
Wendy Brown puts it, “There is both its availability to utilization for governance aims such as law-abiding behavior or protection of the traditional family
form, and there is its figuration of the subject as entrepreneur and normative
promulgation of entrepreneurship itself.” Yet this reconfiguration of moral
values and the moral self assume the guise of “amorality” by taking distance
“from conventional moral discourse in its affirmation of a wholly instrumental
rationality: it affirms market strategies across all fields of life and is formally indifferent to the ends for which these strategies are employed” (Brown 2006,
711 fn5).
The deployment of market principles to reconfigure the relationship
between sovereignty and citizenship not only remakes economic, political, and
cultural life but also transforms citizen-subjects into entrepreneurs and consumers. The South Korean government and society have since the 1990s laid
claim to being a “globalized nation:” consumption, production, travel, and the
presence of migrant workers all constitute grounds for a cosmopolitan identity.
New discourses of human development have focused on personal ability, responsibility, style, and consumption as indexes of success. Nancy Abelmann,
So Jin Park, and Hyunhee Kim (2009) argue that this newfound sense of personal freedom obscures growing structural inequalities in South Korea. At the
same time, other scholars argue that this new neoliberal subjectivity has
gendered repercussions. Women’s pursuit of beauty through practices of
Paradoxes of Neoliberalism
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consumption such as plastic surgery has deepened the split in their subjectivity
as they are expected to be both free, independent, and successful women and
respectable, married, and yet dependent wives (Cho 2009). Similarly, single
women’s struggle for an independent living space against the heteronormative
housing market inadvertently reinforced the ideal selfhood of the neoliberal
labor market (Song 2010). In this context, neoliberalism produces a new set of
“desiring subjects” (Rofel 2007) who are free, self-reliant, willing to take risks,
and see their possibilities as unlimited.
While market competitiveness is idealized as the engine that advances all,
labor competition is circumscribed for particular groups (e.g., migrants are
prevented from accessing certain jobs, rights, and benefits) and in specific ways
(e.g., only certain sectors of the labor market, which include neither sex work
nor surrogacy, are legitimate). Concomitantly, the discourse of national competitiveness and collective welfare pushes forward a conservative moral agenda
in the face of these changes. While the neoliberal citizen-subject is primarily a
desiring subject who has the freedom to pursue a range of entrepreneurial and
consumerist choices (Comaroff and Comaroff 2001; Rofel 2007), improper
choices and desires are policed and a differentiated citizenry is produced.
These transformations are reflected in the changes of the Korean state
policy on prostitution. Before 2004, women who sold sex were “fallen women”
(yullakyŏsŏng) according to the 1961 Act to Prevent Immoral Behavior. As
moral failures, they were the main targets of policing and punishment. Also
known as “women who need protection” (yobohoyŏsŏng), they were sent to
“protection facilities” for one year, and effectively “protected” with imprisonment. These “protection facilities” were notorious for their cruel and inhumane treatment of its residents until well into the late 1990s (Moon, 1997;
Won 2010). Won Mihae also found that detention centers arranged marriages
between detainees and disabled men (Won 2010). In other words, detention
aimed at either cordoning off “fallen women” from larger society or containing
them within the domestic sphere by partnering them with men who are also
marginalized with insufficient social benefits and no state-provided care.
The 2004 laws replaced the term “fallen women” with “victims of sex trafficking/prostituted women,” ostensibly shifting from a moral discourse to a
rational discourse of rights. To protect the “rights” of women in prostitution,
the state supports a network of women’s NGOs to help “prostituted women”
access formal education (mostly for young women) and vocational training to
clean, cook, drive, and haircut, etc. The goal is to let them be “self-sufficient”
working-class women outside of sex work. By seeing “prostituted women” as
victims and not criminals, the neoliberal regime presents them with the opportunities to become “honest workers” who need not depend on the state
(through detention or welfare).7 However, the class and gender assumptions of
this “self-sufficiency” policy rendered these training programs irrelevant to
Kyungmi and other women with tertiary education and middle-class aspirations who remain unemployed or underemployed.
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Nevertheless, a hierarchy of deserving and undeserving subjects emerges in
this protection of “women’s human rights.” The deserving are women who are
innocent and forced into prostitution, for they can be rehabilitated to the
proper gender and familial order. The undeserving are those who sell sex out
of their own volition and therefore deserve only penalization. This echoes with
Jesook Song’s (2006) analysis of the neoliberal welfare policy that identified the
“deserving” homeless based on their employability and their desire to be
“normal”—narrowing their focus to male breadwinners. Song further showed
how civic leaders, the media, and lay people also take part in the social and
moral governance of neoliberalism. Similarly, the discourse of victimization in
Korean anti-trafficking policies reinforces the moral values of female chastity
and the heterosexual family unit, buttressing the moral hierarchy that marginalizes sex workers in the first place. Its “self-sufficiency programs” aim at channeling women’s labor into gender and class appropriate sites. Under these
rational, universalist, and well-meaning initiatives such as policies for homeless
people and women’s human rights runs a moral undercurrent that shores up
the legitimacy of the family, the market, and the state. These propensities are
also witnessed in the United States, as Elizabeth Bernstein (2012) finds that
states and nongovernmental organizations collude in promoting a racialized
and sexual agenda in anti-trafficking initiatives: the goal is to control female
migrant labor, contain sexual excess, and maintain social hierarchies. In light
of these trends, it is perhaps not surprising that women like Kyungmi
and Jin develop their own “construction projects” as alternative means of
“self-sufficiency.”
Paradox Two: The De/Politicization of Risks
Jin was 41 years old and had worked in the United States for three years
when she met Sealing in 2007. As the conversation quoted at the beginning of
this article makes clear, she took a very practical approach to the performance
of sexual labor in her job as a masseuse in different massage parlors along the
East Coast. A high school graduate, Jin had been making an independent living
as a masseuse, both in Korea and in the United States, since leaving her
husband almost ten years earlier. Her husband was not abusive; in fact, he was
a “very good man.” She held odd jobs in sales before beginning to work in
various massage parlors in the Seoul area. The good money she earned made it
difficult for her to leave the job, despite her difficulties in concealing the truth
about her work from family and friends.
She came to the United States in November 2004, two months after the
introduction of the new anti-prostitution laws. She said that police crackdowns
were the “deciding factor”—specifically, her arrest in her own home by the
Seoul police, who had received information from the owner of the massage
parlor in which she worked in the nearby city of Ilsan. She was released after
Paradoxes of Neoliberalism
367
paying a fine of 580,000 won ($550) for engaging in prostitution. Jin experienced firsthand the new severity in penalizing women. Not being a victim of
forced prostitution, and not seeing any means of livelihood more viable than
sex work, Jin realized that for her the only way out was to leave for the United
States.
In May 2006, she was arrested in a police raid in eastern Philadelphia. Jin
said that she was sent to an “immigration jail” (a detention center run by U.S.
Immigration and Customs Enforcement) but was released after paying a fine
for prostitution:
My employer paid for a lawyer to help me out, then I paid back my employer. I had to pay only $6,500 in fines because I had a good lawyer.
Others had to pay $12,000 or even $16,000. I also had to tell my story
well to get the prosecutor’s sympathy. I can’t say that the employer
forced me because that was not the case. . . . I told the prosecutor that
coming to the U.S. for this kind of job was my only choice for survival. I
added some lies in the hope of getting more sympathy so that I wouldn’t
be fined as much. . . . I was held by the police for five days, and then I
spent seventeen days in immigration jail. The time I spent there was humiliating. It was fine there—you just eat and sleep there. But to be unable
to move around was a humiliation for me.
Jin’s narrative of her encounter with law enforcement in the United States
shows an acute awareness of her delicate positioning between victim and criminal. Facing prosecution for engaging in prostitution, she played up her economic woes and contrived “some lies” to solicit sympathy, but she was careful
not to suggest that she was a victim of forced prostitution. In a radical departure from anti-trafficking discourses that assume sex work to be inherently degrading, Jin experienced life in immigration detention as her most humiliating
experience. In other words, her dignity was founded on her freedom of movement rather than on sexual respectability.
Jin also expressed her aversion to state regulation and control when discussing South Korea’s anti-prostitution laws:
I can’t say that the [anti-prostitution] laws were wrong. But the crackdowns went too far. Korean women who do this kind of work . . . you
can’t think of them as bad people. Don’t we have the saying in Korean,
“Only people who have had toothache know the pain?” So, those who
are born into good families and educated properly by their parents, they
wouldn’t be doing this. Their family and their minds are proper. Most of
the fathers in Korean families are violent, and the mothers sacrifice for
their children. People who grow up in this kind of improper environment, they have already learned a lot of bad things. If I had been brought
up with plenty of love, I absolutely would not be doing this work. My
parents have done many bad things to me. . . . Because I grew up this
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S. Cheng and E. Kim
way, I have no trust in people at all. I don’t trust people. And I don’t
trust myself. I have survived on my own will.
As she reflected on her own experience, Jin offered what was in effect a plea for
understanding her gendered, class, and family vulnerabilities. She knew that
she could not command respectability with her job, but she was not harming
others. Jin reaffirmed that she alone took responsibility for her life—and her
peace of mind. Significantly, Jin did not hold the state or society responsible
for her situation; she simply wanted to be left alone.
Jin’s narrative and experiences of willful survival embody the second paradox
of neoliberalism: the depoliticization of social risks and the hyperpoliticization
of national security. The ideal neoliberal subject is an informed individual—flexible, empowered, experimental, self-inventing, and self-responsible (Rose 1999).
As those aspiring to quick wealth begin to focus on speculative accumulation,
venture capital, and financial investments (Comaroff and Comaroff 2001), both
economic globalization and the “heightened uncertainty” central to neoliberalism make new demands on individual workers, emphasizing their freedom and
their capacity (and need) to manage risk (Harvey 2005; Sassen 2003). As an ethic
of risk-taking is promoted, the social risks of poverty, illness, and unemployment
are displaced onto the individual. The retrenchment of the state from the social
sphere by no means suggests that it is weakened. Indeed, by invoking national
crisis and social danger, states justify intervention and an expansion of powers
through border control and criminalization, as witnessed in the growth of
anti-trafficking policies like the anti-prostitution legislation in South Korea
(Brunovskis and Surtees 2008; Chapkis 2003; Kempadoo et al. 2005; Sharma
2005; Soderlund 2005; Sudbury 2005; Tambe 2005).
Jin’s repeated encounters with law enforcement in both Korea and the
United States took place against a background of the expansion of the carceral
state under neoliberalism. Kamala Kempadoo observes that the anti-trafficking
discourse is “firmly linked in postindustrial areas of the world to the criminalization of women from the Global South, and to greater policing and control
of their mobility, bodies, and sexuality” (2007, 35). Bernstein (2012) found the
women’s movement in the United States playing such a key role in this development that she coined the term “carceral feminism” to capture this phenomenon. The Korean women’s movement was also a main agent in bringing
about the 2004 laws. In subsequent years, evaluations of the laws by the
women’s movement almost always included the call for stronger law enforcement to crackdown on prostitution. Their commitment to using criminal law
to address the issue of sex work has the effect of expanding the punitive powers
of the state. Rather than challenging growing economic inequalities and their
specific impact on women, “family values” have been hailed to fill the gap left
by the state and corporate capital; personal responsibility replaces state obligations in explaining misfortunes like poverty, and the criminal justice system
intervenes to sweep back the excesses of social disorder.
Paradoxes of Neoliberalism
369
Furthermore, the anti-prostitution laws have served as a powerful site for
“the enforcement of borders” (Pickering and Weber 2013, 106). Invoking its
history of slavery, the anti-trafficking campaign by the U.S. government and
civic groups has continuously reiterated that “modern day slavery” is incompatible with the democratic values of the United States and therefore must be
purged. The resources earmarked for combating trafficking have largely gone
into the expansion of border control, cracking down on prostitution, buttressing the security state and intensifying the policing of migrant bodies
(Bernstein 2010; Brennan 2008; Chapkis 2003; Chuang 2010; Sharma 2009).
In Korea, there was a similar emphasis on policing over welfare spending. As a
result of the 2004 laws, three new branches of the National Police Agency were
created8 and 20,000 additional police officers were recruited for the crackdown
on prostitution and locating missing children (Seoul Daily June 4, 2004).
Expenditures for policing in 2005 went over the budget by more than 11
billion won (more than 50%).9 The increase in budget for welfare support services for “prostituted women” was 2.441 billion won (from 3.899 billion in
2004 to 6.34 billion won in 2005). In short, five times the amount of money
was spent on policing than on welfare provision for “prostituted women” in
2005 (Women’s Development Fund 2006, 6).
In South Korea, the anti-trafficking laws securitize the symbolic borders of
the nation by reinforcing the idea that prostitution is a “foreign evil.” Firstly,
there is a growing consensus among Korean women activists and scholars that
prostitution is alien to Korean culture. The historiography of prostitution is
one of military aggression and capitalist patriarchy: starting with Japanese colonialism (1910 – 1945), then the U.S. military occupation since 1945, followed
by Japanese imperialism (Kisaeng tourism in the 1960s and 1970s), and most
recently the globalization of western sexual mores and capitalism (Cho 2004,
2005; ref. Cheng 2010a). Voluntary prostitution is not an option for Korean
women, we are told, because unlike women in the West, Korean women are
forced by socio-economic circumstances to sell sex. Therefore, these “victims
of sexual trafficking” are also victims of globalization that has wrought economic woes to the nation (the 1997 financial crisis was known locally as the
“IMF crisis”). The Prostitute thus both becomes an emblem of women’s subordination in Korea and a symbol of the nation’s oppression. Purging the prostitute body is crucial to restoring national autonomy and proper womanhood.
The Prostitute thereby becomes a convenient trope to negotiate the symbolic
borders of the nation.
Secondly, the citizenship of the “prostituted woman” is mitigated by their
violated femininity (Cheng 2011b). In the words of Bridget Anderson, the prostituted woman reproduce the borders between “us and them” in the nation as a
“community of values” (2013, 2). Women in sex work violate the feminine ideal
of chastity and are therefore understood through the frame of the Failed Citizen
(Anderson 2013, 4). They could only be redeemed through “self-sufficiency”
training to acquire not just the skills, but also the values and value of the
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S. Cheng and E. Kim
community. The prostituted women, and its criminal counterpart, the prostitute, function to police “the border within” (Pickering and Weber, 2013, 93).
Paradox Three: The Non/Humanitarianism
of Neoliberalism
Without being prompted, Kyungmi offered to share her thoughts on the
preoccupation with “sex trafficking” at the end of the second interview as she
became uncomfortable with the survey questionnaire’s assumption of coercion
and forced prostitution:
[Sex] trafficking reports on TV tend to exaggerate. “Women have been
arrested, they were trafficked.” It sounds more sensational. Do you know
what happened to those who were arrested in California in 2005
[Operation Gilded Cage]? They were all freed after they paid a fine of
$1700.10 They were not deported. They worked again. They didn’t have
to go back to Korea. . .People come to the U.S. to make money, thinking,
“I will work hard for a year, make a fortune, and then go back.
As an observer on the ground, Kyungmi pointed out not only that reports on
the trafficking of women into prostitution are sensational but also that efforts
at anti-trafficking enforcement such as Operation Gilded Cage are farces if not
travesties of justice, putting on a show at the women’s expense. For Kyungmi,
immigrant women like herself are fighting hard for the chance to make a
fortune; how could this be “trafficking”? She herself chose to undertake a perilous journey to enter the United States. With the help of her broker, she flew
into Mexico City and then traveled from Tijuana into Los Angeles hiding in
the trunk of a car.
We understood Kyungmi’s comments as a criticism of the prostitution abolition project—exemplified by the corporate-NGO humanitarian partnership
of the Bom-bit project for which she was being interviewed. In the final report
for the Bom-bit project, the founder Jeong Hae-won wrote, “Since the 2004
anti-prostitution laws, there is a lot more interest in women victimized by
prostitution in our country. But little is known about the heartbreaking and
painful reality of Korean women victimized by prostitution overseas” (2008, i).
She lamented how a wealthy country like Korea could allow its women to work
overseas as prostitutes: “Our country is the eleventh biggest economy in the
world and a member of the OECD, but we also have the bad reputation of
being a major source country for (women in) prostitution” (Bom-bit 2008, ii).
The Minister of Gender Equality’s Director for the Advancement of Rights,
Lee Gi-soon, was more straightforward with her preoccupation, “As overseas
prostitution became a problem, anxieties are rising about the image of our
nation.” Jeong appealed to all Koreans to join in the fight against prostitution
for the protection of the nation’s “daughters.” Lee reiterated the government
Paradoxes of Neoliberalism
371
commitment in combating prostitution to create “a bright and healthy society
without prostitution” (Bom-bit 2008, iii). Lawmaker Cho Bae-sook expressed
her hope “for the day when prostitutes will completely disappear from our
society” (Bom-bit 2008, v). In contrast, narratives like that of Kyungmi and
Jin’s were included only on a CD-ROM supplement to the printed report.
Jin and Kyungmi rejected the flattening of their experiences into stories of
victimization and national shame by refusing the role of innocent victims that
renders them illegitimate and powerless objects of protection. Kyungmi and
Jin were only too aware that the material and moral “costs of rights” far outweigh the benefits on offer (Choo 2013). In fact, a dominant theme in Jin’s
and Kyungmi’s stories is that of migrant women who capitalize on their femininity and sexuality in pursuit of a better future within a world of growing
desires and shrinking possibilities, finding themselves struggling against neoliberal sexual and carceral projects materialized in a transnational web of antitrafficking measures. An expanding network of laws, media reports, and NGOs
are fueling anxieties about trafficking as primarily a problem of sex crime and
border control, thereby overlooking the intensification of wealth polarization,
gendered inequalities, irregularization of employment, and migrants’ rights
abuses that propel unsafe migration. We believe that these contradictions
embody the inherent ambiguities of neoliberal governance. Therefore, the final
paradox of neoliberalism that we identify is the continuous creation and ravaging of vulnerable populations coupled with the celebration of humanitarian/
philanthropic responses from governmental and NGO sectors.
Kyungmi situated her migration in the context of her jobless generation of
“yi-t’ae-paek” (Yisipdae t’aebani paeksu means “most people in their 20s are
unemployed”)—a term reflecting the toll that South Korean neoliberal
reforms took on its youth since the post-1997 economic restructuring. While
the overall unemployment rate in 2003 was 3.4 percent, it was 12 percent for
the 15 – 29 age group (National Statistics Office 2004). For the 20 – 29 age
group, the number of unemployed in 2006 was 340,000—40 percent of the
total unemployed population of 823,000 (National Statistical Office 2007). In
2011, South Korea has the highest rate of youth not in employment, education
or training as a percentage of the total youth population in OECD countries:
19 percent for the age group 15 – 29 (OECD 2012). A large portion of South
Korean youths with tertiary education have become unemployed and underemployed (OECD 2011b, 14). The number of jobless young women with university degrees hit record high, totaling 196,000, in February 2010 (Lee 2010).
One of the reasons for such high rate of youth unemployment is the mismatch
between shifting labor market demands and young people’s knowledge and
skills. Kyungmi explained her decision to migrate to the United States in this
light.
I graduated with a degree in home economics education. I was all prepared for the exams to be a public school teacher. However, the seventh
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round of curriculum reforms incorporated home economics education
into technology education. The textbooks changed. We were no longer
needed. I really wanted to be a teacher. . . . After graduation, I worked at
a private education institute. I made only about 1.5 million to 2 million
[won] a month [about $1,300 to $1,700]. Because I didn’t graduate from
Seoul National University or Yonsei or Korea University, I couldn’t find
many private tutoring jobs. . . . It was so frustrating. I came to the U.S.
thinking that I would just make lots of money and then go back to start
my own business. I made that decision.
As such, a trained female teacher’s migration to become a hostess in the U.S.
needs to be understood with reference to a gap between teachers’ training and
education policy reforms, the job market’s emphasis on educational pedigree, as
well as the broader context of gendered unemployment among South Korean
youths.
Neoliberal developments create vulnerable populations by increasing disparities in resources and wealth, while at the same time supporting a set of humanitarian/philanthropic responses from the state and the NGO sector. Roy
(2012) argues that concerns about poverty have aided the construction of new
forms of market rule. In effect, many humanitarian and philanthropic interventions ultimately support dominant interests, reproducing conservative
gender, racial, class, and national hierarchies and divides (Adams 2012; Fassin
2011; Ticktin 2011). Therefore, their “solutions” symbiotically nourish the
problems they are putatively addressing. As Kyungmi’s criticism attests to, antitrafficking policies and advocacy promote a racialized and sexual agenda that
reproduces the social, moral, and global divide between Western, middle-class
female advocates and the “third world women” for whom they advocate
(Agustı́n 2007; Dozema 2001), without addressing the exacerbation of structural inequalities that is compelling certain groups of women and men to opt
for risky migration.
Defiant Neoliberal Subjects
We have argued that neoliberal reforms have produced the population of
women who migrate from South Korea into the intimate services sector of the
United States, while disciplining them through anxieties around “sex trafficking.” The state, media, and NGOs construe them either as passive victims of
some omnipotent transnational organized criminal network or sexual deviants
who deserve to be punished, invoking the need for state protection or control.
In either case, they facilitate the justification of a conservative sexual agenda,
the fortification of national security, and the rise of state-corporate humanitarianism in neoliberalism. The paradoxes we identify help us understand the
contradictory ways in which migrant sex workers embody and contest neoliberal discourses. Jin and Kyungmi embody some of the core values of
Paradoxes of Neoliberalism
373
neoliberalism: self-reliance, entrepreneurship, and risk-taking. Yet they also
transgress the sexual and gender limits of neoliberalism by migrating for sex
work (rather than domestic work, factory work, or farm work), subjecting
themselves to some of the most vigorous regulatory efforts from the state and
the NGO sector. Locating their struggles within some broad trends of antitrafficking measures, we have identified three paradoxes of neoliberalism: its a/
morality, its de/politicization, and its non/humanitarianism. These paradoxes
capture only some of the struggles that Jin and Kyungmi experience as they
navigate the moral, political, social and sexual landscapes across national
borders, in particular the tension between their own subjectivity as independent and aspiring individuals and their resistance to state and NGO antitrafficking interventions.
We see neoliberal forms of globalization as heterogeneous and contradictory, with different gendered, racialized, and sexualized effects. Our analysis of
Kyungmi and Jin’s narratives highlights the importance of a careful engagement with the experiences of migrant women, and their ways of conceiving
and subverting the scattered but also mutually constitutive hegemonies of
gender, sexuality, state, and nation (Gibson-Graham 1996; Grewal and Kaplan
1994; Kim-Puri 2005; Mohanty 2003; Pratt 2004). Spivak has warned about
the dangers of simplifying migrants’ subjectivities by “focusing on the migrant
as an effectively historyless object of intellectual and political activism” (2000,
354). Processes of globalization are not necessarily an indomitable force ravaging the bodies of “third world women”; they also open up spaces in which
new subjectivities and lives can emerge. Being sensitive to the possibility of alternative self-making projects is crucial to our understanding of what migrant
South Korean women experience in the intimate services sector in the United
States, as they struggle against the web of anti-trafficking discourses that fix
their locations within particular understanding of gender, sexuality, and
globalization.
What is new about these women’s struggles is their quest for upward social
mobility (to become business owners, to fund their education) and for financial and social independence outside the domestic sphere. They are making
money for themselves, not for their families. Furthermore, they actively resist
the stigmatization of sexual labor, and they criticize the hypocrisy of the state
in cracking down on their livelihood and means of independence. The women
find their own “construction projects” to be not only at odds with projects of
the nation-state but also under the intense scrutiny of criminal justice agents,
the media, and NGOs. In the two migration stories that we have recounted, the
desire, ambition, and risk-taking that drive the women derive from neoliberal
transformations that call for citizens to be self-managing, creative, competitive,
and global.
However, Jin’s and Kyungmi’s simultaneous violations of gender, class,
sexual and national boundaries subject them to the regulatory impulses of the
state, of feminist activists, and of producers of culture such as journalists. State
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S. Cheng and E. Kim
practices that render women legible only as “victims of sex trafficking” flatten
them into objects of male sexual desire and reproduce an ideology of femininity that idealizes the domestic realm as women’s proper domain and chastity as
their only valuable feature. Such practices raise further barriers to these
women’s assertion of their sexual autonomy as well as their rights and entitlements as citizen-subjects. The preoccupation with sexual violence renders invisible other forms of vulnerabilities and abuse that harm migrant women.
Discourses and actions about “sex trafficking” have therefore made life more
precarious for women such as Jin and Kyungmi. In promoting the global
agenda of anti-trafficking through a narrow focus on prostitution—and
thereby ignoring labor abuses against migrant workers in other sectors—both
the South Korean and the U.S. governments are only exacerbating vulnerabilities that already exist, particularly for those who pursue the neoliberal ideal of
self-sufficiency by unconventional means.
As Constable suggests in her review of the transnational commodification
and consumption of intimate relations, “[D]iscourses about intimacy are often
intertwined with ideas about gender and domesticity, gifts as opposed to
markets” (2009, 49). To subject Korean women such as Jin and Kyungmi to
the blanket label of “victims of trafficking”—a characterization far from their
own experiences of migration and labor—reproduces the ideological connection between women and domesticity, as well as the distinction between sexuality and the market. Jin and Kyungmi are by no means isolated cases of
Korean women who see their migration into the intimate services sector as voluntary, and their labor as a reasonable though not morally approved strategy of
self-advancement. To understand their logic of gender, sexuality, and work, we
propose rewriting the script of women’s cross-border migration into intimate
labor to open up a space in which diverse narratives and circumstances can
emerge. Marcus has offered an analysis of the “rape script” that describes
“female bodies as vulnerable, violable, penetrable, and wounded” (1992, 398);
similarly, women’s bodies in the “anti-trafficking script” are presumed to be
vacuous spaces that need to be protected from invasion and ultimately contained within the domestic/national sphere. In this understanding, women’s
sexuality is always already passive, simply the focus of men’s consumption and
aggression (Marcus 1992). Female sexual subjectivity and self-making are
thereby foreclosed. By transgressing the roles and space prescribed by conventional gender and ethnic norms, the stories of each woman testify to a new way
of becoming in the throes of neoliberalism—a way that produces and reinscribes one’s sexuality and oneself in the uncertainties but also possibilities of
state retraction and global flows, rewriting the gendered grammar of violence
concerning the mobility of these women that the anti-trafficking script has
instilled in current media, policy, and activist arenas.
It is only when we part with our essentialist understandings of globalization,
Western/Asian world, and men/women, and our hegemonic notions of female
respectability and innocence, that we can make sense of the “construction
Paradoxes of Neoliberalism
375
projects” of women like Jin and Kyungmi. Their projects are their active negotiation of cultural and material inequalities, and of the gendered violence of nationalism. Their migration and labor offer pathways to independence, but their
desire for self-advancement may reproduce structures of exploitation. Yet they
help us see the instability of the state and of nationalism, and how these seemingly static and homogeneous institutions are also contested and thus must
continually reinforce themselves. It is in this way that the migration of Jin and
Kyungmi into intimate labor and their refusal to be victims powerfully exposes
the sexual limits of neoliberalism. While they may embody the neoliberal
ethics of independence, responsibility, and self-sufficiency without making any
claims on the state for their well-being, their commercial sexual labor subjects
them to the scrutiny and penalty of the state. In other words, rather than
seeing globalization as a linear process of domination or violation, we may
benefit from keeping our eyes open to the mutually constitutive making of
neoliberal subjects and of neoliberal state practices, even in such a seemingly
unambiguous phenomenon as “sex trafficking.”
Acknowledgements
The authors thank Elizabeth Bernstein for her meticulous and patient editorial guidance, as well as the two anonymous reviewers for their encouraging
comments and suggestions for revision. The research for this article was generously supported by the Bom-bit Foundation.
Notes
1. “Corporate humanitarianism” refers here to the charity work initiated by
the business sector, often under the banner of “corporate social responsibility.”
Despite their claims to address human suffering, corporate humanitarianism often
works to promote the image of the private sector while reinforcing injustices in the
global capitalist order. Corporate humanitarianism thus echoes with a body of critical analyses that investigates the political and social implications of humanitarianism beyond the mere desire to alleviate the suffering of others, specifically in its
reproduction of the status quo. For example, Didier Fassin (2010) examined humanitarianism as a “politics of life,” Illan Kapoor (2013) critiqued the “spectacle”
of “celebrity humanitarianism” that depoliticizes inequalities, and Elizabeth
Bernstein (2012) identified the emphasis on criminal justice approach cross-border
anti-trafficking efforts as “militarized humanitarianism.”
2. For example, in 2006 the San Francisco Chronicle featured a four-part series
titled “Diary of a Sex Slave” in which the journalist Meredith May followed the
story of a Korean woman in a San Francisco brothel. Meredith May, Diary of a Sex
Slave, Part 1: San Francisco is a Major Center for International Crime Networks
That Smuggle and Enslave, October 6, 2006; Part 2, A Youthful Mistake, October
8, 2006; Part 3, Bought and Sold, October 9, 2006; Part IV, Sex Slave Freed,
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S. Cheng and E. Kim
Trapped, October 10, 2008, San Francisco Chronicle. Available at http://www.
sfgate.com/sextrafficking/ (last accessed August 14, 2008).
3. This is a direct translation from the Korean questionnaire that our interviewees used.
4. The authors of this article collaborated on the research on the East Coast and
the Chicago regions between May 2007 and April 2008, while other researchers
worked on the U.S. West Coast, Japan, Australia, and South Korea (interviewing
returnees). The Bom-bit surveys were filled out by the respondents themselves or
by us while speaking to them in person or by phone. We interviewed seven women
in depth in one or more conversations lasting 2 –3 hours. All of the interviews and
surveys were conducted in Korean. Jin was interviewed by Sealing Cheng and
Kyungmi was interviewed by Eunjung Kim. Respondents from New York and
Chicago areas made up 13 of the 69 total respondents in the Bom-bit project.
Their demographic composition broadly corresponded with that of the entire
group, though they were older and better educated: 47 percent (6) of our respondents were between 20 and 29 years of age (vs. 60 percent for the total participants), 62 percent (8) had never married (vs. 86 percent), 70 percent (9) were
college-educated (vs. 52 percent), and 77 percent (10) were employed before
coming to the United States (vs. 83 percent). Overall, the women whom we interviewed ranged in age from 23 to 49, with an average age of 33.
5. The need for help with illegal entry shifted to that for undocumented residence following the admission of South Korea into the visa waiver program in
November 2008. South Korean nationals are allowed to travel to the United States
for business or pleasure for up to 90 days without obtaining a visa. While this
reduced the number of illegal entry, the number of undocumented South Koreans
in the United States increased significantly from 170,000 in 2010 to 230,000 in
2011 (Han 2012).
6. Lemke (2002) builds on Foucault’s idea of governmentality to argue that the
development of neoliberal forms of government involves reconfiguring the relationship between the state and its citizens in two different ways. First, empowered
and specialized state apparatuses intervene directly, while also characteristically
devising indirect techniques to lead and control individuals. Second, they use the
indirect strategy of rendering individual subjects (and also collectives, such as families, associations, etc.) “responsible,” as social risks such as illnesses, unemployment, poverty, and life generally in society are transformed into problems of
“self-care.”
7. In her examination of neoliberal governance in post-socialist Vietnam,
Thu-Húóng Nguyê˜n-Võ shows how state agencies claim various forms of expert
knowledge to discipline prostitutes who earn more than their worth and who
spend above their class “in order to present the truth of lower-class women as
honest workers imagined through the global division of labor in terms of class,
gender, and Vietnamese national culture” (2008, 115 – 6).
8. In June 2004, the Victims of Sexual Traffic Emergency Support Center (aka
117 Center) was created (Korean National Police Agency 2005, 123). The Women
and Teenagers Division was first started by the Seoul Metropolitan Police Agency
in 2002, and then run by The National Police Agency in 2005, and other local
agencies also founded their own in subsequent years as a result of the 2004 anti-
Paradoxes of Neoliberalism
377
prostitution laws (National Police Agency 2010, 441). The One-Stop Service
Support Center first started in August 2005 (Korean National Police Agency 2006,
191 – 193) to help and support victims of sexual violence, school violence, domestic
violence or sexual traffic. By 2006, there were fourteen similar centers in the nation
(Korean National Police Agency 2007, 102).
9. The actual expenditure for policing was 31 billion won, while the budget was
20 billion won. Balance from 2004 was carried over (0.74 billion) and reserve fund
was mobilized (11 billion won) to cover the difference (National Police Agency
2006, 26).
10. Kyungmi’s story implies that the women were not found as victims of
trafficking but instead charged with prostitution.
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