Citizenship on the Edge: Sex/Gender/Race

By Nancy J. Hirschmann and Deborah A. Thomas

What does it mean to claim, two decades into the twenty-first century, that citizenship is on the edge? The questions that animate this volume focus attention on the relationships between liberal conceptions of citizenship and democracy on one hand, and sex, race, and gender on the other. Who "counts" as a citizen in today's world, and what are the mechanisms through which the rights, benefits, and protections of liberal citizenship are differentially bestowed upon diverse groups? What are the relationships between global economic processes and political and legal empowerment? What forms of violence emerge in order to defend and define these rights, benefits, and protections, and how do these forms of violence reflect long histories? How might we recognize and account for the various avenues through which people attempt to make themselves as political subjects?

Citizenship on the Edge approaches these questions from multiple disciplines, including Africana Studies, anthropology, disability studies, film studies, gender studies, history, law, political science, and sociology. Contributors explore the ways in which compounding social inequalities redound to the conditions and expressions of citizenship in the U.S. and throughout the world. They give a sense of the breathtaking range of the ways that citizenship is controlled, repressed, undercut, and denied at the same time as they outline people's attempts to claim citizenship in ways that are meaningful to them. From university speech policies, to labor and immigration policies, to a rethinking of the security theatre, to women's empowerment in the family and economy and a rethinking of marriage and the family, we see slivers of possibility for a more inclusive and less hostile world, in which citizenship is no longer so in doubt, so on the edge, for so many. As a whole, the volume argues that citizenship cannot be conceptualized as a transcendent good but must instead always be contextualized within specific places and times, and in relation to dynamic struggle.

Contributors: Erez Aloni, Ange-Marie Hancock Alfaro, Nancy J. Hirschmann, Samantha Majic, Valentine M. Moghadam, Michael Rembis, Tracy Robinson, Ellen Samuels, Kimberly Theidon, Deborah A. Thomas.

• Language: English
• Publisher: University of Pennsylvania Press
• Release date: Jan 4, 2022
• ISBN: 9780812298284

Book preview

INTRODUCTION

Citizenship on the Edge: Sex/Gender/Race

Deborah A. Thomas and Nancy J. Hirschmann

What does it mean to claim, two decades into the twenty-first century, that citizenship is on the edge? In the United States in 2020, police violence against women and men of color, the rolling back of voting rights, the strengthening of the glass ceiling, ongoing resistance to marriage equality, and the persistence of sexual violence are but a few recent examples of the ways citizenship is stratified by race, gender, and sexuality. Globally, labor outsourcing, ethnic conflict and war, sexual trafficking, antigay legislation and violence, inequitable access to health care and public spaces, and the repression of pro-democracy movements all reflect the complex dynamics and interrelations of class, gender, race, ethnicity, nationality, disability, and sexuality as these relate to political, social, cultural, and intimate forms of belonging. Anti-immigrant sentiment in the United States and Europe has swept far-right politicians and coalitions into office, where they have legislated new immigration restrictions. Undocumented immigrants are being deported from the United States with renewed vigor, and those seeking to enter the United States have encountered delays, confinement, and separation from their children. Despite this rising nationalism and hostility to immigrants across the world, capitalism is increasingly dependent on globalized and mobile labor, production, and markets.

Given the current conditions of political violence, economic insecurity, and scarcity of opportunities worldwide, how can we productively reckon with the limits of liberal notions of citizenship? Who counts as a citizen in today’s world, and how might we recognize and account for other avenues through which people attempt to make themselves as political subjects? This volume explores the ways in which compounding social inequalities redound to thinking, conditions, and expressions of citizenship in the United States and throughout the world. It also reckons with the ways citizenship itself is being reformulated, and with emergent technologies that are challenging definitions of citizenship previously bound by nation or geographic area. While these technologies have the potential to create new parameters for the rights and responsibilities of citizenship, they also create the means for circumventing both.

The notion of citizenship being on the edge has an intentionally ambiguous meaning for this volume. First and foremost, it refers to the precarity of belonging and security for populations across the globe. It addresses the ways in which individuals outside the circle of the state struggle for but are denied citizenship status, those peering over the edge but denied entry, such as immigrants, refugees, and migrant workers. It also refers to the ways in which citizenship rights are precarious for or altogether denied to individuals already within the circle of the state, such as the incarcerated, those who face employment or housing discrimination (and who are not eligible for public housing), and those who rely on welfare benefits or on publicly funded student loans for higher education. Being on the edge of citizenship also means being subject to ongoing state surveillance, a condition shared by those within or outside the circle of the state. Though public assistance agencies in the United States, for instance, may no longer conduct man in the house surprise checks, newer measures such as workfare, family caps, and financial incentives for Norplant, not to mention the reams of paperwork required to file for financial assistance, entail a degree of surveillance unimaginable to more economically secure citizens. At the same time, we know that citizenship is always tracked through documents like the census or immigration papers, and that these documents both afford and frustrate access to the infrastructures of health care, education, and the workforce and are therefore also always modalities of surveillance.

Citizenship on the edge also refers to the 100 million missing women, to use Nobel Prize winner Amartya Sen’s (1990) formulation, who are denied state protection, education and economic resources, and independence, and even a right to exist through sex-selective abortion and higher rates of female infant mortality. Sexual harassment and assault still prevail around the world, and women frequently have diminished access to legal systems, which nevertheless fail to respond adequately at all levels—from police to the courtroom to legislative bodies. LGBTQ+ individuals are likewise subjected to violence and intimidation and are denied access to rights of intimacy and family that are granted to their heterosexual and cisgender counterparts. And across the globe, racial profiling and anti-Black state violence prevail.

While the concept of citizenship is the normative modality through which the relationship between individual and state is made legible, it is not only a legal category but also a social, economic, and political one. The relationship between the state and something usually understood as civil society is therefore neither clear cut nor static. Today’s context draws attention to the fundamental contradiction of liberal citizenship, which is that it emerged within and has been reproduced through historical-ideological and onto-epistemological phenomena that produce whiteness, maleness, and Europeanness as the apex of humanity (Wynter 2003), the epitome not only of transparency and universality but also of determination and causality (Ferreira da Silva 2007, 2017). That modern citizenship—and its handmaiden, liberal democracy—was grounded through Indigenous dispossession and African slavery in territories throughout the Western Hemisphere is a disavowed reality within political contexts that privilege perfectibility and slow, incremental change. Yet the moment we imagine rights and truths to be universal and self-evident, we turn our backs on the historical reality that rights have only ever been partially (and often begrudgingly) granted to people of color, women, immigrants, and other groups that have been marginalized within the social and political body of the state (Pateman 1988; Hirschmann 1999, 2008). Citizenship, therefore, cannot be conceptualized as a transcendent good, but must always be contextualized and critiqued within specific places and times, and in relation to dynamic struggle. Citizenship is, at its base, a practice and process of boundary making, one that is riven by what Adriana Petryna and Katerina Follis have framed as fault lines that disturb normative understandings of citizenship as progressively inclusive (2015, 403).

Within the United States, the relations among sexism, racism, and xenophobia are perhaps most obvious in the 2019 attacks on U.S. congresswomen Ilhan Omar, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Rashida Tlaib, and Ayanna Pressley. The send her back chants directed first at Omar and later the others (all of whom are U.S.-born American citizens) and the insult that President Trump directed at them to clean up the messes in the countries they came from (Rogers and Fandos 2019) clearly operationalize the xenophobia of the anti-immigrant movement to express in new and vitriolic ways the familiar hostilities of racism and sexism. Indeed, the rhetoric of these movements, while exemplifying the long histories of racism, misogyny, and xenophobia in the United States, also dovetails with other kinds of hostilities toward women and racial and ethnic minorities. New and creative ways to suppress the right to vote, for example, hit at the most basic entitlement of citizenship and undermine its status. And the ongoing phenomena of police violence, the glass ceiling, resistance to marriage equality, transgender rights, and sexual harassment provide constant reminders of, if not threats to, the tenuous connection of women, sexual minorities, and people of color to the state protections that citizenship is supposed to afford. Moreover, the persistence of sexual assault and sexual violence and the failure of the legal system to reduce its incidence, protect its victims, and successfully exact retribution tell women in clear and certain terms that their citizenship is worth less than that of the men who attack them.

The questions that animate this volume thus focus our attention on the relationship between liberal conceptions of citizenship and democracy, on the one hand, and sex, race, and gender, on the other: What is the relationship between global economic processes and political and legal empowerment? What are the mechanisms through which the rights, benefits, and protections of liberal citizenship are differentially bestowed on diverse groups? How is legal citizenship defined through legislated norms related to race, gender, sex, and the small-scale social institutions that instantiate them, such as schools and family? What forms of violence emerge in order to defend and define these norms? How do violations of these norms reflect past histories, and how do they shape future visions? What is at stake, across the world, when those who have been marginalized by the states in which they live claim expanded rights and privileges in relation to legal and social belonging?

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To understand citizenship on the edge is also to capture the ways in which the concept itself has been theorized and mobilized by scholars across disciplines. The chapters of this volume highlight, from a number of vantage points, how citizenship is uncertain, unstable, and precarious within the United States and throughout the world. The authors published here also offer new and different perspectives on what citizenship means, how it is constituted, and how people have attempted to animate it in meaningful ways.

We approach these questions from the disciplinary frameworks of the editors, specifically political science and anthropology, which serve as the lenses through which we also engage gender studies, Africana studies, film studies, and disability studies. Classic accounts of sovereignty and citizenship within political science and political philosophy would typically reference the Treaty of Westphalia, Thomas Hobbes or John Locke, Wilsonian notions of democracy, and perhaps figures like Max Weber and Carl Schmitt. The political science literature on citizenship is rife with competing definitions, and political scientists often take an almost technocratic approach to the concept, focusing on how it is achieved, whether through birth, naturalization, or heredity (called jus sanguinis, or right of blood, where descendants of immigrants can claim citizenship from their ancestral nation). However achieved, other scholars focus on what citizenship means to the persons who have it, what it looks like both conceptually and practically. For instance, legal scholar Linda Bosniak has identified four key aspects of citizenship that are broadly accepted: legal status, rights, political participation, and identity. Citizens in different nations experience and exercise these four aspects to different degrees, and the difference in degree can open up a host of contentious questions about whether a citizen is really a citizen (Bosniak 2006). Many progressive scholars have highlighted the gaps between formal citizenship and how it is practiced; as sociologist T. H. Marshall (1964) pointed out in his argument about social citizenship, sometimes the rights of citizenship are seen as valid entitlements, but in many cases they are given as alternatives to citizenship, such as welfare payments, which generally curtail people’s abilities to access membership in a state.

As feminist and critical race scholars in political science, law, and philosophy have pointed out repeatedly, white women, men and women of color, and poor persons are often subject to exactly the kinds of treatment that Marshall identified, being denied de facto many basic rights of citizenship to which they are and should be entitled de jure. Referred to as second class citizenship experienced by those who are not economically privileged heterosexual white men, and even third class citizenship (Hirschmann and Linker 2015) produced by intersecting vectors of marginalized identities, the question of what citizenship means in practice is always shifting. Certainly the vast literature in feminist political science in the battle for women’s suffrage (Banaszek 1996; Teele 2018; Terborg-Penn 1998; Wells 2020)—not to mention abolition, the Fourteenth Amendment, and the Fifteenth Amendment, giving Black men the right to vote (Gillette 2019; Sanchez-Eppler 1993)—suggests that African Americans and (at least feminist) women have long recognized the hypocrisy of their relationship to the concept of citizenship. But feminists and critical race theorists have pointed to how this denial of citizenship is enacted in ways not often seen as citizen rights per se. Whether being denied access to a domestic violence shelter because she does not speak English (Crenshaw 1991); or being considered the object of property (Williams 1992); or having the social contract between a citizen and her government be subverted by and dependent on a prior sexual contract that unilaterally subordinates women to men; or being purged illegitimately from voter registration roles or having to wait for hours in line to cast a ballot because one lives in a district that is populated primarily by African Americans (Garisto 2019); or having voting rights rescinded because of a felony conviction or having to overcome substantial obstacles to vote because one is homeless (Ruth, Matusitz, and Simi 2017): these kinds of exclusions push many citizens to the edge of democratic practices, institutions, and cultures. The citizens in these scenarios are people who are or should be entitled to the full legal range of rights and entitlements that attach to legal citizenship, but are denied for political and social reasons that pertain directly to the valuation of identities along intersecting vectors of gender, race, sex, class, and ability.

Anthropologists, by contrast, have tended to be compelled by the more diffuse, uncertain, and complex ways people experience their relationships to the state. Confronted with post–Cold War globalization processes, they began to move further away from community-based studies and toward analyses of complex and multiscalar processes like nationalism, state formation, migration, transnationalism, multiculturalism, and neoliberalism.¹ After 9/11, anthropologists also began to turn their attention toward the new ways threats were being mobilized to forge a sense of security and belonging, and therefore to redefine citizenship through affective processes (see, for example, Masco 2014). Stimulated by Michel Foucault’s biopolitics, Giorgio Agamben’s notion of bare life, and Deleuze and Guattari’s rhizomic networks of force and possibility, political anthropologists have borrowed from political philosophy the conceptualization of sovereignty as domination, but have reframed this in terms of process and practice, as performance rather than product (Hansen and Stepputat 2006). In doing so, they have been attuned to the concurrent processes that support, undermine, or contextualize people’s attempts at political legibility, even as these attempts to forge mutual recognition, or to be interpellated by the state, sometimes seem futile.

This has meant that anthropologists have had to take seriously the ways people have attached to abstract and universalist promises of equality while also attending to the various contradictions that have emerged from those attachments, contradictions that reinforce forms of graduated citizenship (Ong 1999). It has also propelled anthropologists to examine what James Holston (2007) has called insurgent citizenship: those forms of collective action that redefine the meanings of, and rights associated with, citizenship. In what ways, anthropologists ask, do people imagine community (Anderson 1983)? What are the means by which notions of community are developed, and in what ways do they both challenge and reinforce broader patterns of inequality and hierarchy? What are the benefits (and pitfalls) of belonging? How have people contended with the afterlives of slavery and imperialism when making claims on the postcolonial state (Hartman 1997; Thomas 2019)? And what juridical and bureaucratic regimes have emerged to channel and challenge citizenship claims (Hale 2005; Hooker 2005; Clarke 2009, 2019)?

In the belief that an interdisciplinary approach to any social problem provides the means by which to develop meaningful insights, the chapters in this volume employ a range of perspectives to explore the conditions and expressions of citizenship in the United States and throughout the world. Many of the authors assess structural phenomena, such as legal barriers to equality, economic empowerment, the right to define our own family relations, and the integrity of one’s own body, while others are concerned with how structures that may exist beyond law create problems of acceptance and access as members in the polity. All of these phenomena, whether eventfully or slowly violent (Nixon 2011), are urgent to an exploration of the precariousness of citizenship in the twenty-first century. Moreover, as several of the chapters presented here demonstrate, what may sometimes seem like isolated incidents illustrate broader long-term trends.

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We begin the volume with Ange-Marie Hancock Alfaro’s chapter on hate speech. State violence here is not only enacted through forms of bodily harm but also instantiated through ongoing debates about (supposedly) constitutionally protected free speech. By limning an intersectional understanding of free speech, Hancock Alfaro encourages us to think through this impact in relation to notions of visibility and public-ness. Free speech doctrine, she argues, locates the power to speak within the individual speaker, which makes the prohibition of words unconstitutional. However, an intersectional analytic frame draws our attention not only to the speaker but also to the audience—also the targets and subjects of speech—placing their rights in an equal relation to the speaker. If speech is both a social practice and a performative action, Hancock Alfaro asserts, then we must pay attention to the impact of racism and racist speech, and the ways that racist hate speech deploys intersectional differences along lines of gender, age, and ethnicity, in order to understand the ways that we think (or do not think) about speech and its potential regulation.

This chapter, therefore, positions intersectionality as a visibility project, and one that highlights the vulnerability of minorities in terms of their ability to access basic human dignity (as a property of personhood). The particular ways in which harms to women of color are made invisible by sympathy for white male perpetrators of harmful speech demands a multilayered analysis of cross-cutting vectors of oppression. Such analysis is generally lacking from legal and theoretical thinking about harmful speech, but it is only through an intersectional analysis that we can see and understand the power relations that both adhere to the proliferation of hate speech and the standard theoretical justifications for regulating it. She urges us to acknowledge and examine the long-term effects of racist and sexist hate speech, not merely its immediate injury but the profound psychological, emotional, and even physical toll such speech exacts on the bodies of marginalized people, and use the understanding gleaned from these examinations to protect the dignity of those most vulnerable to hate speech.

The recognition Hancock Alfaro’s analysis offers of the ways injury is embodied and how this compounds in the various dimensions of a person’s life relates to what some have called intimate citizenship, referring to the rights, responsibilities, and recognitions associated with, as sociologist Ken Plummer puts it, the "most intimate spheres of life—who to live with, how to raise children, how to handle one’s body, how to relate as a gendered being, how to be an erotic person" (2003, 202). The late modern world offers a plurality of options for living these intimate aspects of life at the same time as it creates new kinds of citizens (for example, trans citizens, embryotic/fetal citizens) and new arrangements of intimacy (for example, gay marriages, blended families, polyamorous relationships). But it also creates disciplinary practices to compel conformity to existing notions of citizenship, ranging from health promotion efforts to antigay legislation and violence. Indeed, some would claim that the extension of marriage rights to same-sex couples is an effort to control sexual difference and channel it through conservative institutional frameworks, in the process denying the legitimacy of other sorts of family arrangements.

It is important to note as well that marriage equality has not diminished the extension of gendered inequalities in relation to economic rights. In his chapter, Erez Aloni is interested in how, even after Obergefell (the landmark Supreme Court case), marriage perpetuates masculinist concepts of wealth accumulation and transfer because states allocate particular forms of financial rights, protections, and benefits through the institution of marriage. Traditional forms of marriage are economically rewarded while other forms of intimate associations are penalized. Moreover, because wealth escalators such as retirement plans, Social Security retirement benefits, and estate planning tools and services that minimize tax liability, discriminate against both married and unmarried women, same-sex married couples, and even many dual-income heterosexual couples, he argues, marriage unequally distributes economic citizenship in racist, sexist, and heterosexist ways by perpetuating and rewarding traditional heterosexual gendered divisions of labor within a household. Aloni elaborates a notion of wealth masculinity, by which he means to signal the convergence of wealth accumulation and liberal, Euro-American middle-class ideas about gender. In the chapter, he traces shifts in masculinity across the twentieth century to arrive at the current dominance of neoliberal masculinity, a formation that has marginalized previously dominant blue-collar versions of masculinity and notions of the breadwinner that ignore the economic precarity of poorer and working-class men, particularly men of color, and the increased participation of women in the economic labor market. Aloni argues that men in lower economic strata are caught in a double bind of persistent traditional breadwinner expectations and persistently decreasing economic opportunities. In circular fashion, this makes them less and less successful on the marriage market because they do not hold wealth, thereby preserving the articulation of marriage with full economic and social citizenship, in turn making wealth accumulation more difficult. This triangulation of wealth, masculinity, and marriage, Aloni argues, therefore creates obstacles to equal economic citizenship for men who are not already economically privileged, as well as for women of all classes.

Family law, as well, perpetuates hierarchies in relation to both racial and sexual difference. Tracy Robinson’s chapter traces the postcolonial regulation of sex in the Anglophone Caribbean, examining what she calls the new-old laws: laws that demonstrate a continuity with colonial rule while also attempting to distinguish Caribbean nations from the West in ways that might be seen as progressive—such as recognizing differences in the ways West Indians organize social life (and in particular, family)—but that can also serve in ways that serve repressive agendas. She argues that while laws related to sexual offenses must reflect twenty-first-century realities, they must also be attuned to local cultural orientations that may be different from those of the United States, the United Kingdom, and Canada. Robinson examines the criminalization of buggery alongside postcolonial family law, arguing that family law legislates not only the kinds of intimacies that are protected but also the distribution of economic goods such as property. She is interested in how law becomes sacralized, a fetish, part of nation building despite the continuity of colonial statutes. Family law, for Robinson, emerges as a foundational dimension of nation building, with the process of lawmaking as a rite of nationhood within the modern Caribbean, one that centers women’s bodies and both questions and reiterates social hierarchies. She argues that if we examine these processes closely, we must rethink assessments of Anglophone Caribbean states as backward and homophobic, while also understanding woman-focused postcolonial legal reforms as forms of containment.

Legal reforms and political representation are also at the center of Valentine M. Moghadam’s analysis of women’s status within Middle Eastern and North African countries. She argues that in Algeria, Morocco, and Tunisia, changes in family law have accompanied an intensification of women’s political representation. The question she asks is whether these changes signal a shift from what she understands as a neopatriarchal gender regime to a modern one. For Moghadam, within MENA countries, there is a difference between political and legal reforms, on the one hand, and economic reforms, on the other. As with other postcolonial nation-states, structural barriers to women’s empowerment are maintained through the continued capitulation to global neoliberal political economic policies, and in particular through growth strategies that emphasize the production of hydrocarbons. Advancement in political participation and representation, in other words, is important but alone does not lead to broader forms of empowerment.

Juridical and legal reform have presented avenues through which political citizenship has been reformulated, but advances in medical technology have radically changed the landscape of biological existence on many levels as well, including the extension of human life expectancy, technologies related to prenatal testing, and psychotropic pharmaceutical treatments of mental conditions. Discourses and policies concerning persons with intellectual and physical disabilities have similarly changed the ways that medical and rehabilitative treatment of such persons is thought about and conducted. These changes have produced discourses and practices of health and longevity as well as normalization and control. They also raise questions about the boundaries of citizenship, tensions among the rights of different categories of patients, and the medicalization of the conveyance of rights, responsibilities, and punishment.

The medicalization of disability itself, the classification of particular bodily differences as medical conditions or problems, structures its own set of exclusions of disabled persons from the category of citizenship and pushes their claims to membership on the edge. Disability, of course, takes a number of different forms. Michael Rembis’s chapter in this volume engages the articulation of disability studies and madness studies to explore the relationship among race, psychiatric disability, and masculinity. He focuses on one man’s narrative, Malcoum Tate, to bring to light not only the quotidian forms of violence experienced by poor, mentally ill Black men but also the ways narratives like Malcoum’s can be spectacularized in order to serve reform agendas. This spectacularization, for Rembis, is another form of violence, one that justifies further marginalization and control. Ultimately, Rembis asks, what is so offensive about insanity? He argues that we have to generate a much broader understanding of violence and develop an analysis that relates the medical, cultural, and social aspects of mental health to notions of citizenship and practices of social justice. Exploring the ways that disability is defined and evaluated through the lenses of gender, race, and class and how these evaluations instantiate different forms and expressions of violence, Rembis challenges us to think about the various limitations to understanding the complexities of the lives of people with disabilities or mental illness and how these limitations redound to people’s ability to access the protections and rights of citizenship. Rembis asks us, in the end, to consider disability intersectionally.

Ellen Samuels also attends to disability, but by drawing our attention to the relationship between state security and bodies. By examining Transportation Security Administration policy regarding trans and crip bodies, Samuels shows how certain bodies are marked as outside the normalized expectations of TSA agents and the technologies they use. She shows how full-body scanners and the pat downs they trigger expose nonnormative bodies to invasive scrutiny and thus remove the protections of citizenship, especially when compounded by racial profiling. Samuels uses Deleuze and Guattari’s conceptualization of assemblages and Foucault’s notion of governmentality to encourage us to ask questions about how marking transgender, gender-nonconforming, and disabled bodies is part of a broader set of practices related to security and social control. In this case, juridical power circulates within airports as a form of both disciplinary and biopolitical power, in which certain bodies will always trip the security technologies, alerting the humans interfacing with these technologies, who then violate the privacy and arrest the mobility of nonnormative bodies.

The mobility of bodies also emerges as a citizenship concern in relation to both migration and human trafficking. Human trafficking, here, emerges as a transnational phenomenon that brings together economic and political concerns. While often exemplified by sex trafficking of women, the trafficking of men, women, and children for forced labor is increasingly being detected, as is the trafficking of children for armed combat and forced begging. The trafficking of persons is inextricably intertwined with citizenship—or a lack thereof. Individuals without the protection of citizenship are more vulnerable to trafficking, and more than half of all victims of trafficking have been transported across at least one national border. Moreover, trafficking strips individuals of self-determination and basic human rights. Yet, efforts to combat trafficking are not without controversy. Scholars and activists challenge the conflation of sex labor, trafficking, and victimization and charge that antitrafficking efforts ignore women’s agency. Further, the almost exclusive focus on the sex trafficking of women has erased the experience of trafficked men from public discourse and policy.

Samantha Majic’s investigation of antitrafficking campaigns focuses on the U.S. Department of Homeland Security’s Blue Campaign in terms of the narratives it advances regarding human trafficking as modern-day slavery. Majic argues that the narrow understanding of human trafficking’s causes limits the political efficacy of campaigns to stop it. Positioning those who are trafficked as solely and merely victims avoids the complicated realities of the trafficking nexus: many young people cannot identify an individual as their trafficker, and many are not held captive and instead work with networks of people and share the proceeds of their trades. Moreover, economic need and dislocation intensify vulnerabilities to sex and labor trafficking. The victim narrative relies on a neoliberal framing of the issue of trafficking, one that also positions solutions only in terms of government support, law enforcement, and the military. Majic argues that more comprehensive policy solutions could and should be developed, but that this would require a shift in ideologies about the proper role