Books by Jennifer Suchland (she/her)
Recent human rights campaigns against sex trafficking have focused on individual victims, treatin... more Recent human rights campaigns against sex trafficking have focused on individual victims, treating trafficking as a criminal aberration in an otherwise just economic order. In Economies of Violence Jennifer Suchland directly critiques these explanations and approaches, as they obscure the reality that trafficking is symptomatic of complex economic and social dynamics and the economies of violence that sustain them. Examining United Nations proceedings on women's rights issues, government and NGO anti-trafficking policies, and campaigns by feminist activists, Suchland contends that trafficking must be understood not solely as a criminal, gendered, and sexualized phenomenon, but as operating within global systems of precarious labor, neoliberalism, and the transition from socialist to capitalist economies in the former Soviet Union and Eastern Bloc. In shifting the focus away from individual victims, and by underscoring trafficking's economic and social causes, Suchland provides a foundation for building more robust methods for combatting human trafficking.
Reviews of Economies of Violence (2015) by Jennifer Suchland (she/her)
Politics of Sex Trafficking asks readers to step outside of liberal discourses that critique sex ... more Politics of Sex Trafficking asks readers to step outside of liberal discourses that critique sex trafficking as individual aberrations and singular cases, and step into an economic analysis of the webbed conditions that enable sex trafficking. She argues for sex trafficking to be understood as a systemically orchestrated product of global capitalism and demands an evaluation of how the precarious labor of transnational sex trafficking is debated. Precarious labor is defined as the (in)formal work necessary to capitalist expansion " shaped by race, ethnicity, nation, gender and sexuality … [wherein] people are vulnerable to exploitation, lack rights, and are undervalued " (p. 5). Attention to precarious labor situates sex trafficking as an economic symptom of capitalism's need for cheap and often unregulated labor. Following the 1970s' feminist " sex wars, " the 1989 fall of the Berlin Wall, accompanied by the collapse of socialism, and today's renewed Cold War tensions, this book offers a timely reconsideration of habituated feminist approaches to sex trafficking. Opposed to liberal feminist approaches that center on identification of victimized actors in sex trafficking, Suchland suggests critiquing the socioeconomic structure of capitalism, which produces the precarious labor of sex trafficking. She holds institutions, including governments and international organizations, accountable for fostering environments where sex trafficking operates through the discourse of " transition " from socialism to capitalism. Suchland exposes sociohistorical roots of violence as integral to capitalism and analyzes the rhetorical decoupling of development and violence in capitalist societies, specifically in Russia's transition, to suggest that counterhegemonic transnational feminist coalition and theorization must take place outside of liberal capitalist praxis. Methodologically oscillating between genealogy and ethnography, Suchland traces Russian victims' rights discourses proffered by government and nongovernment agencies through the transition toward capitalism. While the fall of the Berlin Wall is often discussed as a watershed moment for global capitalist order, Suchland argues against inevitable transition rhetoric that suggests there is no alternative to capitalism. For Suchland, 308 BOOK AND MEDIA REVIEWS
of law such as police documents, cross examinations, modes of argumentation, and court judgments,... more of law such as police documents, cross examinations, modes of argumentation, and court judgments, Baxi returns to the technical aspects of adjudication. In this way, her approach differs from much recent law and anthropology. However, what is at stake in the technicalities Baxi observes is not how the rule is applied, but rather, as she shows, nothing less than the bodies of women upon which the rape trial is built. The book imbues mundane technologies with an urgent, ethical charge. The book therefore makes an important contribution to feminist legal studies by powerfully demonstrating the quotidian manifestations of patriarchal-state power and how doing things with feminism involves not grand juridical declarations but calls for a clawing against the everyday.
Articles by Jennifer Suchland (she/her)
Gender, Place & Culture , 2018
In Europe ‘homoemancipation’ has played a significant role in
legitimating anti-multiculturalism ... more In Europe ‘homoemancipation’ has played a significant role in
legitimating anti-multiculturalism and broader Islamophobia.
Similarly, political homophobia in Russia plays a significant
role in (re)defining the contested meaning of the nation after
the demise of the Soviet empire. While acknowledging the
repressive and violent impact of contemporary anti-LGBT
legislation and public discourse on LGBT people, this essay
analyzes how the discursive refusal to affirm non-normative
sexuality is constitutive of an ethno-national project in post-
Soviet Russia. This analysis goes beyond the Cold War binary of
east/west that oversimplifies Russian political homophobia as
in opposition to Europe. By doing so, it is argued that Russia is
not just an illiberal state, but entangled in Eurocentric projects
that define national (racialized) boundaries through sexual
politics. Consequently, challenging political homophobia
in Russia requires attending to intersectional strategies and
approaches to sexual politics. An intersectional approach to
solidarity will situate sexual rights within national and global
ethno-national, racialized, and colonial projects.
European Journal of Cultural Studies
The image of the trafficked woman from a former state socialist country has come to symbolize the... more The image of the trafficked woman from a former state socialist country has come to symbolize the global crisis in sex trafficking. The 'Natasha' image is also a referent for the failure of state socialism. This article provides an analysis of the film Lilya 4-Ever (dir. Lukas Moodyson, 2002) to show how both sex trafficking and postsocialism are framed in representations of sex trafficking. The film presents the problem of sex trafficking in two covertly problematic ways, narrowing the issue to prostitution and illegal migration. While the film avoids voyeurism of sexual violence, this is replaced by voyeurism of postsocialist abjection. Postsocialist abjection is aesthetically captured as an eternal state of collapse. Thus, the tragedy of sex trafficking is the result of and a symbol for the failure (post-)state socialism.
JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, a... more JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact [email protected].
ABSTRACT. Focusing on the issue of sexual harassment, I argue that comparative gender studies sho... more ABSTRACT. Focusing on the issue of sexual harassment, I argue that comparative gender studies should go beyond tracking changes to laws that are presumed to be equivalent in meaning across political landscapes. The 'facts' that amount to the harm of sexual harassment are tied to ...
Book Chapters and Edited Volumes by Jennifer Suchland (she/her)
philoSOPHIA, 2018
Introduction to philoSOPHIA special issue.
Abstract ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------... more Abstract ------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------ ------------- This essay introduces the Special Issue theme, gender violence and hegemonic projects. We discuss why re-thinking the relationship between gender violence and ...
Feminist Formations, 2013
ABSTRACT In the influential work Bananas, Beaches and Bases: Making Feminist Sense of Internation... more ABSTRACT In the influential work Bananas, Beaches and Bases: Making Feminist Sense of International Politics (1990), Cynthia Enloe argued that "feminist analysis has had little effect on international politics" (3), a statement that arguably may still be true in terms of the interventions feminists have hoped to make, but is no longer accurate in discussing the instrumentality of women in international political discourse. In the United States, the Muslim woman has become a strategic sign of the need for militaristic intervention, as politicians incorporate "feminism-lite" into their discussions of the ways that women can be at risk under militaristic and fundamentalist states. If one of the raisons d'être of feminist scholarship is making injuries to women visible, feminist scholarship also explores the discursive effects of gender as a principal sign of state power, vulnerability, and futurity. Such feminist interrogations have resulted in a long intellectual tradition of critiquing war, violence, and political conflict (Elshtain 1987; Enloe 1990; Giles and Hyndman 2004; INCITE! 2006; Yuval-Davis 1997). In recent years, with the proliferation of US military hegemony and volatile shifts in political and environmental systems, scholars have argued that an intersectional approach is vital to investigating the operations and impact of state attacks on women, of war, environmental "disasters," and political upheavals (Abdi 2007; Eisenstein 2007; Riley 2006; Ruwanpura 2008). Enloe (2008), Jasbir K. Puar (2007), and other scholars (for example, Cole 2008) have examined how gender, sexuality, race, class, and nation are deployed as part of the US post-9/11 political machinery and attendant systems of violence. Feminists have also questioned the environmental determinism of so-called natural disasters, and exposed how reactions to disaster are embedded in structures of gender, race, and class in places as varied as Sri Lanka (Hyndman and de Alwis 2003; Ruwanpura 2008), the polar North (Kafarowski 2009), and post-Katrina New Orleans (David 2008; David and Enarson 2012). At a basic level, all of this scholarship pushes back against various political discourses that (mis)name an emergency or ignore the crux of what actually causes crisis within a community. These interventions are not only made in response to international crises or events that are transparently national emergencies; for example, we need only look to competing debates about incarceration, marriage, education, and disease in African American communities to see how gendered and racialized discourses construct and obscure crises (Cohen 2010; Davis 2003; Wanzo 2011). [End Page vii] Building on and pushing the boundaries of this work, this special issue takes up the concept of states of emergency as an object of analysis. Moving beyond a hegemonic understanding of states of emergency, we question how power is wielded in the context of so-called emergencies, particularly when political actors work to define a moment as a state of emergency in order to mobilize publics, redefine citizenship, or deploy political machinery. At the same time, we include scholarship that names states of emergency made invisible by existing public discourses. The most recent wave of anti-immigration legislation in the United States is an example of how public discourses on national security and economic recession are manipulated in order to foment rhetorics of emergency. But regulation from the state has also produced emergencies in communities that have been named as threats to the state. While feminists have engaged the racialized and gendered politics of immigration and Native sovereignty in the United States (Falcon 2006; Smith 2005), the recent events in Arizona and other US states require fresh analysis (Romero 2011). Katie E. Oliviero provides just such an analysis in her article "The Immigration State of Emergency: Racializing and Gendering National Vulnerability in Twenty-First-Century Citizenship and Deportation Regimes." She argues that, since the founding of the United States, there has been a state of emergency concerning immigration whereby authorities create racialized and gendered laws that determine who belongs within the body politic and who threatens it. For Oliviero, the question is not whether there is an immigration state of emergency, but rather which groups and communities are recognized as threatening. She shows how emergency declarations, such as those in Arizona, New Mexico, and other states, deploy gendered and racialized logics of foreign threat and shape...
Online Writing by Jennifer Suchland (she/her)
Global Alliance Against Traffic in Women, 2020
Uploads
Books by Jennifer Suchland (she/her)
Reviews of Economies of Violence (2015) by Jennifer Suchland (she/her)
Articles by Jennifer Suchland (she/her)
legitimating anti-multiculturalism and broader Islamophobia.
Similarly, political homophobia in Russia plays a significant
role in (re)defining the contested meaning of the nation after
the demise of the Soviet empire. While acknowledging the
repressive and violent impact of contemporary anti-LGBT
legislation and public discourse on LGBT people, this essay
analyzes how the discursive refusal to affirm non-normative
sexuality is constitutive of an ethno-national project in post-
Soviet Russia. This analysis goes beyond the Cold War binary of
east/west that oversimplifies Russian political homophobia as
in opposition to Europe. By doing so, it is argued that Russia is
not just an illiberal state, but entangled in Eurocentric projects
that define national (racialized) boundaries through sexual
politics. Consequently, challenging political homophobia
in Russia requires attending to intersectional strategies and
approaches to sexual politics. An intersectional approach to
solidarity will situate sexual rights within national and global
ethno-national, racialized, and colonial projects.
Book Chapters and Edited Volumes by Jennifer Suchland (she/her)
Online Writing by Jennifer Suchland (she/her)
legitimating anti-multiculturalism and broader Islamophobia.
Similarly, political homophobia in Russia plays a significant
role in (re)defining the contested meaning of the nation after
the demise of the Soviet empire. While acknowledging the
repressive and violent impact of contemporary anti-LGBT
legislation and public discourse on LGBT people, this essay
analyzes how the discursive refusal to affirm non-normative
sexuality is constitutive of an ethno-national project in post-
Soviet Russia. This analysis goes beyond the Cold War binary of
east/west that oversimplifies Russian political homophobia as
in opposition to Europe. By doing so, it is argued that Russia is
not just an illiberal state, but entangled in Eurocentric projects
that define national (racialized) boundaries through sexual
politics. Consequently, challenging political homophobia
in Russia requires attending to intersectional strategies and
approaches to sexual politics. An intersectional approach to
solidarity will situate sexual rights within national and global
ethno-national, racialized, and colonial projects.