Captivated: Sex Trafficking, U.S. Evangelicals, and the Promise of Rescue
Open AccessThis dissertation tracks the rise of sex trafficking as an issue of investment for U.S. evangelical concern, mission work, and financial donation in the after the Cold War. I argue that it is the unique political, cultural, and religious climate of U.S. evangelicalism in the 1990s and early 2000s that rendered sex trafficking a legible cause for missionary interest, empathetic compassion, and monetary investment to evangelicals in the United States. I trace the narratives of imagined captivity abroad and longings of rescue as they circulate within cultural products for evangelical audiences designed to raise awareness, galvanize action, or solicit donation. I argue that participation in the fight against sex trafficking guarantees its own kind of rescue for evangelical participants. Whether as a mechanism by which their own faith can be revived, a warning that their sexuality is being scrutinized, or an initiation to join in an adventure abroad, the narratives of sex trafficking with which this project is concerned position evangelicals as the target of transformation. It is to them that rescue is truly promised.Narratives of rescue and redemption within the canon of evangelical storytelling about sex trafficking promise a revival of restless faith, a restoration of broken sexuality, and a remodeling of stale lives devoid of adventure and beauty. By tracing stories of captivity, rescue, and redemption in the evangelical fight against sex trafficking—where both trafficking victims and those who donate to their cause are freed—this project establishes the crucial role that narrative plays in the relationship between religious belief and humanitarian intervention abroad. Racialized bodies operate within evangelical narratives of sex trafficking as the very terrain of transformation. An historical understanding of Asian women's condition is erased through their aestheticization, while an historical understanding of slavery is erased through its de-racialization. Additionally, there is an evacuation of the history of slavery in the universalized language of harm that conjoins trafficking, modern-day slavery, and abolition. Race operates within these narratives to signify innocence or brutality, indicate foreign space as one of danger, and sometimes promising an enticing engagement with fantasies of the exotic, sensual, and authentic that are imagined to exist uniquely abroad.How does the concept of the global sex industry, and of sex trafficking, come to be useful for evangelical transformation in this particular historical moment, after the Cold War, in the United States? Along similar lines, why is the body of the transnational trafficking victim the terrain upon which such a transformation is imagined to be available and possible? In what follows, I examine the role that racialized figures and spaces of abjection abroad play in evangelical imaginings, unthreading the various ways that images, stories, and imaginings of foreign space, and foreign bodies, work within sex trafficking narratives for evangelical audiences. The central argument of this project is that as viewers, readers, donors, or missionaries, evangelicals understand the issue of human trafficking to be transformative, both for victims abroad and for themselves, moved to learn more, give financially, travel abroad, or change their behavior. By examining what has captivated evangelical audiences about sex trafficking, as a real issue but, more crucially for these chapters, as a site of imagined harm, I argue that we learn something valuable about what draws audiences to an issue in which they can imagine themselves to play a central part. Along the way, the role of the State and of intervention are negotiated in specific ways, as humanitarian norms shift toward private responsibility for charity rather than state responsibility for large-scale intervention. I argue that the affective component of this intervention is a pleasure in benevolence that echoes other humanitarian efforts, but for evangelicals has an added religious component in that they experience rescue, redemption, and renewal of their spirituality.
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Schisler_gwu_0075A_13959.pdf | 2018-02-26 | Open Access |
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