Geographies of Privilege

France Winddance Twine, Bradley Gardener

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• Print ISBN: 9780415519625
• eBook ISBN: 9781135092979
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Discrimination & Race Relations
• Index: Social Sciences

How are social inequalities experienced, reproduced and challenged in local, global and transnational spaces? What role does the control of space play in distribution of crucial resources and forms of capital (housing, education, pleasure, leisure, social relationships)?

The case studies in Geographies of Privilege demonstrate how power operates and is activated within local, national, and global networks. Twine and Gardener have put together a collection that analyzes how the centrality of spaces (domestic, institutional, leisure, educational) are central to the production, maintenance and transformation of inequalities. The collected readings show how power--in the form of economic, social, symbolic, and cultural capital--is employed and experienced.

The volume's contributors take the reader to diverse sites, including brothels, blues clubs, dance clubs, elite schools, detention centers, advocacy organizations, and public sidewalks in Canada, Italy, Spain, United Arab Emirates, Mozambique, South Africa, and the United States. Geographies of Privilege is the perfect teaching tool for courses on social problems, race, class and gender in Geography, Sociology and Anthropology.

PART

I

Privileged Bodies in Pleasure and Leisure Spaces

Sex, Music, and Dance Clubs

CHAPTER

1

The Geography of Sex Work in the United Arab Emirates

PARDIS MAHDAVI

On May 11, 2009, the doors of “City of Hope,” a United Arab Emirates (UAE) based women's shelter, were closed following almost two years of public controversy. Beginning in late 2007, Cheryl,¹ the founder and director of the shelter, was locked in an almost constant battle with locals, the government, and other activists that was staged at the global level through the use of media outlets such as The New York Times, The New Yorker, and the BBC. An American woman who had married an Emirati and created the organization “in her living room,” Cheryl was a very vocal and outspoken activist in Dubai who began with domestic violence as her primary cause, but became passionate about “fighting trafficking” when trafficking became part of a sensationalized media and political frenzy following the passage of the U.S. Trafficking Victims Protection Act (TVPA) in 2000 and, later, its international component, the Trafficking in Persons Report (TIP) (U.S. Department of State 2001). Through conversations with reporters, researchers, and antitrafficking advocates in EuroAmerica, Cheryl publicly castigated the UAE for what she viewed as major governmental shortcomings in the “war on trafficking.”

In early 2007 Cheryl partnered with the Middle East Partnership Initiative (MEPI), a development initiative founded and funded by the Cheney family, which only heightened the negative attention she had been receiving from locals and locally based grassroots activists. Throughout the course of her work with City of Hope, Cheryl worked with several antitrafficking groups from the United States and secured funds from a variety of American development agencies. In 2008 Cheryl was accused of abusing the women in her shelter, selling their children, and often subcontracting their services. Though she dismissed the claims as defamation, several reporters and researchers (myself included) who spoke with the women from her shelter confirmed reports of abuse. In May of the following year she was exiled from the UAE and told that she could never return. Subsequently, the shelter was abandoned abruptly leaving the residents without electricity or running water, in search of a new shelter and assistance.

As one Middle Eastern women's rights activist told me in 2011 reflecting on the story of City of Hope, “Cheryl and her organization are a classic example of the problem with American approaches to development. As an American who had moved to the Emirates and was working to ‘save’ the women there, she fit the script perfectly. So perfectly, that no one thought to look for accountability, to see what she was doing, and what she was doing was wrong. I agree with the locals who feel that the U.S. supported the wrong woman for the job.” City of Hope, which Cheryl promoted as the “first” women's shelter in the Gulf, and a leader in the “fight against trafficking” in the UAE, is a striking example of development efforts constructed from a position of “privilege” or U.S. hegemony and empire, gone terribly wrong. Locals and activists in the UAE agree that not only did Cheryl perpetuate the gendered and racialized rhetoric embedded in the “war on trafficking,” but she actually harmed the people she purported to help.

Migrant women face multilayered and multifaceted challenges. On the one hand, they must confront the reality that women who move across borders for employment are often underpaid compared to their male counterparts, and more likely to face abuse in migration (Ehrenreich and Hochschild 2008). Beyond the obvious gender stratification in employment demands and compensation, is the fact that women face increased scrutiny in the form of policies, discourses, and development strategies that aim to “help” or “rescue” them, highlighting the discursive, physical, and structural violence they can be exposed to. The story of Suri, a domestic worker from the Philippines who had migrated to Morocco, exemplifies these myriad challenges in a powerful way.

“I left Morocco because there was no work at home, and my husband had left me with four children and a lot of debt,” she recalled. Because of increased scrutiny the Moroccan women had leveraged on migrant women, however, Suri could not migrate legally due to the increased bureaucracy the Moroccan state had enacted. She had decided to migrate to Dubai to work in the sex industry because she had heard through friends that wages for Moroccan women were high in the sex industry and that she could make a large sum of money quickly and return home. “For me, it was about making money as fast as possible so I could get back to my kids. That was it,” she explained. But one night, after working in Dubai only one month, not long enough to pay back the debt her husband had accrued, she was rounded up on a “rescue mission” that an American based antitrafficking group enacted. She was arrested, raped, and abused in jail, before being deported, still in high debt, and now facing exile from her family.

My research examines the production of race, ethnicity, and sexuality through deeply flawed and highly privileged developmentalist efforts to address “human trafficking” in the UAE. The field of “development,” development studies, and more recently, development anthropology has raised red flags for many anthropologists and been the topic of much commentary and controversy for at least the past two decades (see Escobar 2001). Scholars have critically examined the role of development in the furthering of empire in the neoliberal world order (Agustín 2007, 2008; Escobar 2001; O'Connell Davidson 2006), pointing to ways in which development efforts operate from a presumed position of privilege. While some foreground their concerns in the complicated responses and results of economic development, others focus on the role of “charity,” or as Laura Agustín has labeled outreach efforts, as “the social” (Agustín 2007).

In the wake of the global “War on Terror” there has been increasing examination of the role of “development,” “outreach,” and “charity,” especially as it pertains to the racialization of the Muslim world in the recent climate of Islamophobia.² The “War on Trafficking,” which could arguably be seen as the feminized antidote to the hypermasculinized “War on Terror,” has also generated much controversy, especially within the fields of anthropology, sociology, and geography. Scholars such as Denise Brennan (forthcoming), Carole Vance (2011), and Julia O'Connell Davidson (2006) have pointed out the shortcomings of the trafficking debate and the over-determination of the word trafficking.

The widespread panic about transnational female labor, especially in the commercial sex industry has resulted in an elasticity of the term human trafficking especially as it is marshaled and deployed in policy and international conventions. As many have noted, it is a term that at once claims too much and too little (Constable 2010; Davidson 2006). Like a rubber band, the term trafficking stretches wide enough to encompass all forms of commercial sex work (whether by force, fraud, coercion or not),³ but then shrinks to exclude forced labor outside the sex industry. Born out of an understandable sense of indignation regarding the types of abuse and exploitation that seem all too common in migrant women's worlds, the concept has been expanded beyond reasonable or feasible limits, becoming both conceptually and juristically obtuse, while narrowly gendered, sexualized, and racialized at the same time. Specifically, the misunderstanding that human trafficking refers only to women who are kidnapped by men and forced into the sex industry has, problematically, become the functional definition of the term in policy, media, and discourse. This has altered the way in which trafficking is represented, pursued, and prosecuted. The paradigm of human trafficking as it exists today, and critically, the disjuncture between the legal ambiguity and popular specificity with which trafficking has been defined, offers uncomfortable insight into the complex ways that gender and race permeate popular understandings of victimhood, vulnerability, and power. The wars on “terror” and “trafficking” conspire to produce moralizing rhetoric about those in need of policing and those in need of rescue, carving the world into victims and villains, both of whom require intervention from EuroAmerican forces.⁴

In this paper I aim to show how antitrafficking discourses constructed in EuroAmerica are raced, gendered, and sexualized while both operating and leading to a moralized type of development or outreach in the name of combating the war on trafficking. This antitrafficking type outreach, produced from a supposed position of privilege (as rehearsed through the rescue rhetoric⁵ that involves “us,” EuroAmericans, saving “them,” the backwards global South) reproduces a racialized morality⁶ on multiple levels.

First, it produces the UAE (and other Muslim majority countries) as “hotbeds” of illegal activity including smuggling, terror, and trafficking, which legitimates EuroAmerican intervention in the name of rescue, force, protection, or invasion. The second result, which can be seen worldwide but which has particular ramifications in constructing the geography of sex work in the UAE, is the production of women as either victims in need of rescue or villains who should be criminalized. Consenting female migrants who may or may not work in the sex industry are cast as villains deserving any fate that might befall them, while “victims” are those whose agentive capacity must be ignored or refuted.

In the case of the UAE, consent and agentive capacity are constructed along racialized and classed lines. Women's perceived complicity in determining their status (one that is assumed rather than based on actual accounts) correlates with the ability to script their subjectivities into programmatic paradigms of “victimhood.”⁷ A closer look at the developmentalist logic that undergirds antitrafficking initiatives reveals the production of gendered, racialized, and sexualized bodies within specific locales but also in the broader construction of empire. The antitrafficking script, constructed within a development framework, casts a trope of appropriate victims and villains which contributes to the production of these very categories.

Four years of extended trips to the Gulf framed ethnographic research with migrant men and women in the UAE (including sex workers, domestic workers, construction workers, and others), as well as those that provide services to them, and assessed the experiences of migrant women and sex workers, labeled as “trafficked” by the international community. Fieldwork in the Gulf was supplemented by nine months of fieldwork in Washington, DC interviewing policymakers and migration activists about discourses, laws, and policies relevant to trafficking, sex work, and migrants’ rights globally.

This essay looks at how racialized and sexualized bodies are produced through the developmentalist logic of antitrafficking initiatives. Building on Foucaultian notions of biopolitics and biopower (Foucault 1978), I show how antitrafficking efforts, as a type of development response in conversation with the “War on Terror,” have produced a kind of “development discipline” wherein certain bodies need to be disciplined through development efforts. I have found Mahmood Mamdani's (2002) concept of the production of the dichotomous “good Muslim” and “bad Muslim” in the post-9/11 climate of discourses on terror and trafficking useful in framing these analyses. I begin with an examination of racialized and gendered discourses about trafficking and the “rescue industry” these have generated, and then move to a discussion of the reverberations of antitrafficking discourses, policies, and development efforts in the UAE. By contrasting discourses about trafficking in the UAE with actual lived experiences and local grassroots efforts, I highlight the shortcomings of discourse, policy, and development, and the ways that the figures of victim and villain are constructed through hegemonic discourses. I conclude with ethnographic narratives of my interlocutors who describe the negative impacts of development efforts on their lives and experiences in the Gulf.

Victims and Villains

The first time I met Ziya she was living with a group of Indonesian and Australian real estate agents in the Jumeirah Beach Residences, a high end housing complex located in the southern, newer part of Dubai that has emerged as the more affluent part of town. “Here, I love. JBR very good,” Ziya told me, referring to her current housing situation. “Me, I'm not liking Bur Dubai. Living on street, living in bus station. Bur Dubai dark, bad. Marina, nice,” she said, contrasting the two very different parts of town she had inhabited since migrating to Dubai in 2007. She walked out to the balcony of her current home to show me the breathtaking view of the Persian Gulf and the accompanying Palm Islands as she settled in to tell her story.

Ziya migrated out of Addis Ababa in 2007 after her husband left her with two children and deeply in debt. Having heard from friends that there was an abundance of work in the Middle East and “a lot of money there,” as she said, she decided to migrate to Dubai to pursue domestic work. When she arrived, however, she was placed with a family that was highly abusive toward her. “They burn my clothes, throw cups at me, very difficult,” she explained. Domestic workers in the Gulf States fall outside the protection of labor laws, and due to the sponsorship system in the UAE (kefala) legal residency in Dubai is dependent on the sponsor-employers (problematically collapsed into the same category) who often retain employees’ passports and legal working papers.⁸

When Ziya made the decision to run away from her abusive employers, she not only absconded from her job, but automatically became an illegal alien. “I run away, but no passport, no place to go,” she explained, reflecting on a tumultuous time in her life not six months earlier. Without her passport (which her former employers still retain), legal work permits, or any money, Ziya entered the informal economy, working as a sex worker and sleeping in airport terminals, bus stations, or on the streets of Bur Dubai, the older part of town which is now somewhat of a working class neighborhood populated mostly by migrant workers of South and East Asian origin.

Lining the wide streets of the southern part of Dubai and the Marina area, gleaming skyscrapers are often spaced miles apart to allow for breathtaking views of the Gulf, the Palm, and the Marina. This urban planning contrasts sharply with the narrow winding streets of Old Dubai in the north, which is home to the neighborhoods of Deira, Bur Dubai, and the Bastakiya (or old fishing village) quarter. When making the drive from south to north on Sheikh Zayed road (the main highway connecting most of the seven Emirates), drivers can witness the spaces between buildings narrow incrementally the further north one moves.

After six months of living and working on the streets of Bur Dubai, where she faced regular abuse from clients, police, and sometimes others in the business, Ziya found an informal organization, supported by locals and expats alike,⁹ that provided outreach to street-based sex workers and “trafficked”¹⁰ persons. The members of this informal group mobilized to provide housing assistance for Ziya while they worked to sort out her legal paperwork so that she could procure a new working visa. When I last spoke with her in September of 2009 she had found a job as a nanny for a family in the same building as her temporary home. She laughed as she said, “I am happy to make money now like this to send home to my family. Next time I go home to Ethiopia, I am happy and proud.”

The first time I met Maryam, a high end call girl from Tehran, she was also living in a modern high rise skyscraper overlooking Dubai Marina. By the time I left Dubai in 2009, however, Maryam was sleeping in a half built metro terminal in Bur Dubai (the metro system in Dubai was under construction during the summer of 2009 and had been slated to open the following fall) and trying her best to avoid the authorities, who had a warrant for her arrest. “I guess I'm a rags to riches story, but in reverse,” Maryam told me when I talked with her on the phone shortly before my departure from the field that summer. “Remember when we first met? I was making thousands of dollars a night, living the good life. Now look at me. I can't stay here (in Dubai), I am in debt because of my legal cases, and I can't even go back to Iran. Worse yet, no one wants to help me here,” she lamented. I had initially heard about Maryam through her friends and colleagues in Iran, while conducting field research for a book on sexuality in postrevolution Iran. I had met her friends in Tehran and followed them to Dubai in 2004, where they would make repeated visits to engage in transactional sex.

Women from Iran and Morocco belong to the two highest paid nationalities of sex workers and in h...

Table of contents

• Front Cover
• GEOGRAPHIES OF PRIVILEGE
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Foreword
• Permissions
• Introduction
• PART I Privileged Bodies in Pleasure and Leisure Spaces: Sex, Music, and Dance Clubs
• PART II Privileged Migrants and Post-Colonial Racism: Africans, Europeans, and Transnational Movements
• PART III Unstable Privileges: Class Inequality, Residential Mobility, and Whiteness
• PART IV Gendered Privileges and Gendered Vulnerabilities: Public and Private Spaces
• The Contributors
• Index