The Machine at Home. Carceral Feminism, FOSTA-SESTA, and the Suppression of the Sex Worker Rights Movement in the United States. A Theoretical Synthesis

This paper develops a theoretical synthesis of the suppression of the sex worker rights movement in the United States and argues that the country is not merely an exporter of carceral anti-trafficking power, as a companion paper on Southeast Asia showed, but its laboratory of origin. Bernstein's (2018) concept of carceral feminism, which the Southeast Asia paper located extraterritorially in the US Trafficking in Persons Report, was itself developed through ethnographic engagement with domestic US anti-trafficking activism. Drawing on Chateauvert's (2014) history of the movement, on the legal scholarship on FOSTA-SESTA (Chamberlain 2019; Albert, Brundige and Lee 2021; Fuentes et al. 2025), and on biographical and organisational documentation of individual activists, the paper makes three claims. First, federal prosecution of movement founders - most visibly Robyn Few's 2002 arrest under Patriot Act-era federal authority - has historically produced rather than suppressed organising capacity. Second, FOSTA-SESTA (2018) functioned as a domestic rescue machine: legal scholarship and a systematic review of nine empirical studies (Fuentes et al. 2025) document reduced income, increased violence risk, and the loss of digital and physical assembly space, exemplified by the 2019 cancellation of the Desiree Alliance conference under fear of liability. Third, the movement's own history has never been free of internal marginalisation along lines of race and gender identity: Gloria Lockett's founding of CAL-PEP in 1984 arose from an explicit critique of COYOTE's focus on white and higher-status sex workers, a line of critique that continues in the present through Monica Jones's Outlaw Project and Akynos's Black Sex Worker Collective. The paper closes the arc of a four-part series by showing that the rescue machine was tested at home before it was exported.