Review by Wei Si Nic Yiu 姚煒詩, University of California, Los Angeles
Publisher: University of California Press, 2023
Length: 288 pages
In Elena Shih’s pathbreaking book, she uncovers and offers a layered analysis of the moral economy of low-wage women’s work through a global ethnographic exploration of the rescue industry within the international movement of anti-trafficking. This wonderfully rich book contributes to anti-trafficking scholarship and activates diverse strategies for reading and understanding the moral economy of low-wage women’s work and notions of freedom in anti-trafficking discourse, which shifts anti-trafficking discourse of rescue and rehabilitation, to a focus on how these projects obscures worker exploitation. Drawing from her fieldwork of two American organizations that provides vocational training as a path out of sex work in China and Thailand, Shih’s readings serve as an opening to critically interrogate and reflect on “the larger ideological schisms [and disconnects] within the global movement to combat human trafficking” (p. 8). I am indebted to Elena Shih’s critical scholarship on the anti-trafficking movement, low-wage women’s work, sex work, and complication of rescue in this book. In this innovative and impressive book, Elena Shih adds complexity to women workers’ stories, which were previously compressed to conveniently market ‘slave-free goods,’ and sketches out stories of resilience or ambivalence to thwart notions of ‘freedom’ and ‘dignity’ that organizations use to justify ongoing extraction of women’s work.
This book offers a grammar for critically considering what Elena Shih calls “racialized redemptive labor,” which describes how anti-trafficking vocational programs use narratives of redemptive labor to position themselves as ‘rescuers’ who save ‘victims’ [former sex workers] to reaffirm “a racial order of moral righteousness and division of low-wage labor” (p. 4). Chapter One examines the contemporary anti-trafficking movement transnationally through an analysis of the American movement’s prioritization of rescue and rehab over workers’ rights. Tracing the commodity chain of “slave-free good,” Shih points to how manufactured narratives of victimhood add value to these goods by catering to American consumers’ desire of ethical consumption. Simultaneously, it bolsters profitability and salvific evangelism through extracting low-wage women’s work in rehabilitation programs.
In Chapter Two, Shih looks at two organization’s rehabilitation programs to examine how white Christian anti-trafficking activists use notions of virtuosity and repentance to encourage labor productivity, which creates a transnational moral economy of low-wage women’s work. Shih looks at how differences of socio-economic and political contexts in Thailand and China informs the governments’ differing approaches to American Christian missionary efforts.
Chapter Three looks at how each organization co-opts worker resistance and justifies social control through a maternalist narrative of moral rescue, which governs women workers’ private lives after the workday. Shih artfully reveals how anti-trafficking programs engage in these practices under the name of moral reform to police women’s personal lives based on the organization’s conceptualization of im/moral behaviors. Shih argues that rehab is bad for workers when “it allows moral notions of redemption to do the work of justice” (p. 109).
In Chapter Four and Five, Shih shifts to a critical analysis of Chinese and Thai local politics around migrant, labor, gender, and sexual rights must be considered alongside discussions of the global anti-trafficking movement as well as larger migrant and sex worker struggles. Shih engages an impressive array of analysis to reveal the collaborative efforts and tensions of transnational anti-trafficking movement and the state in China and Thailand.
Chapter Six moves us towards the underexplored afterlife of rescue and rehabilitation for women workers who have left the vocational training programs to complicate notions of freedom. While workers’ decision to quit is often registered as an individual effort, Shih convincingly argues how it is “one of the most active yet invisible acts of resistance” (p. 161). By focusing on workers who left and workers who return, Shih maps the successes and failures of rehab programs and complicates the linearity of quitting rehab programs to show the larger social problem of work. As Shih eloquently writes, “a broad-based push to create a larger social safety net that prioritizes decent work across the labor market would decrease migrants’ vulnerability to trafficking and labor abuse” (p. 180).
Throughout her book, Shih dexterously examines global policy, nation-state politics, and women workers’ personal politics. Shih incisively points to how the global anti-trafficking movement, which illustrates new enunciations of American empire, informs migrant workers’ lives and struggles with labor locally in China and Thailand. Shih thinks transnationally and insists that readers must understand market-based approaches to managing working-class women’s labor as situated in “global policy goals and nation-state politics of anti-trafficking efforts” (p. 4). From the macro to the micro, Shih offers a grammar for considering the interconnectedness of local labor relations and larger macroeconomic, socio-political, and legal contexts that structure labor and sexual politics in America, China, and Thailand.
Elena Shih’s brilliance exceeds her writing and manifests in her relationships with the women she writes about and with. Manufacturing Freedom is a testament to Shih’s ability to build bridges of relationality, bridges made of histories, food, pain, shared space, and care. We can see this throughout her book and specifically in her methodological appendix of the book where she details her positionality and ethnographic approach. As if her scholarly writing is not vast and impressive enough, Elena Shih’s invaluable erudition also appears in The New York Times and Providence Journal. A true multihyphenate, Elena Shih is also a core collective member of Red Canary Song, a grassroots collective of Migrant Massage Workers, Sex Workers, and Allies of Asian Diaspora, base building in Flushing, NYC and organizing transnationally. This book is essential for anyone who wishes to think more deeply about notions of freedom, the problem with work and neoliberal racial capitalism, sexual politics, low-wage women’s work, consumption politics, Chinese authoritarian state power, Thailand’s market-based and vigilante humanitarianism, and the national and transnational geopolitical impact of American anti-trafficking movements.
Wei Si Nic Yiu 姚煒詩 (They/ Them) is a PhD candidate in the Department of Gender Studies at the University of California, Los Angeles. Their broad research interests include gender and migration, race and class, work and labor, and care. Yiu’s dissertation explores the gender, racial, class, and labor politics in the U.S. massage work industry by focusing on the lived experiences of Chinese women massage workers. They have published in the Journal of Lesbian Studies and Rethinking Women’s and Gender Studies Volume 2. Their article "Dance as Queer Neoliberal Critique: Choreographing Beyond Disposable Representations of Migrant Domestic Workers" is forthcoming in Women’s Studies: An Interdisciplinary Journal.