Making Progress: ‘Sex Trafficking’, Sex Work, Temporality, and Im/mobility

Anti-trafficking discourse is built upon and reproduces a series of either/or conceptual binaries (voluntary/forced, consensual/coerced, agent/victim) which obscure the unseen, structural factors that shape the fates of men, women, and children under the economic, social, and political relations of global capitalism, as well as their experience as workers in given countries, sectors, and workplaces. Some sex worker rights activists and scholars have contested its application to prostitution by emphasising that ‘not all sex workers are trafficked’. However, this position also privileges the question of whether an individual voluntarily chose or was coerced by a third party into a given form of work. Drawing on biographical interview data with women in sex work in Brazil that shows how past, present, and hopes for the future are woven together in their sex-work trajectories, this article adds to the literature that critiques anti-trafficking discourse through a focus on temporality. It argues that by following the trajectories of sex working women’s lives over time, it is possible to better grasp both the protean nature of sex work, and the impossibility of fixing people’s participation in it as either forced or free.