Their understanding of sex work and the informal economy revolves around historical ignorance that ignores the social construction of slavery.

Campaigns against female prostitution used slavery as a rhetorical device to characterize the condition of sex workers, and sex work features prominently in contemporary campaigns against “modern slavery”. In both types of campaigning, “the slave” is worked as a symbolic device to represent the abject condition of human beings objectified, controlled by violence or its threat, and stripped of agency and choice. The assumptions and generalizations about prostitution that inform this vision have been extensively critiqued. However, less attention has been paid to the fact that the analogy also rests on a very particular reading of “the slave” and a very partial appeal to histories of Atlantic World slavery. Histories of enslaved people's resistance and flight are entirely overlooked. The latter has recently prompted interest in fugitivity and marronage as analytic concepts, albeit concepts that are defined and deployed in different ways by different scholars and activists. This review asks whether and how they might potentially have theoretical purchase with regard to the contemporary experience (both positive and negative) of sex workers.

Introduction

Those who campaign against female prostitution have long used and continue to deploy slavery as a rhetorical device to characterize the condition of sex workers (Barry, 1984; Jeffreys, 1997; Bindel, 2017). Over the past two decades, female sex workers have also featured prominently in campaigns against so-called “modern slavery” (Bales, 1999; Kara, 2009). Such campaigns often make visual and textual comparisons between what is dubbed “trafficking” or “modern slavery” and the transatlantic slave trade, encouraging audiences to imagine that some or all female sex workers are the modern-day equivalent of enslaved people in the Americas. There many problems with this discourse, not least of which is that Atlantic world slavery was a centuries long and extraordinarily brutal system of domination that was bound up with the development of racial capitalist modernity such that its pernicious consequences still reach into the present (Mills, 1998; Bhattacharyya, 2018; Robinson, 2020). The same cannot be said of sex work per se, even if there are cases in which sex work is, or has been, associated with extreme violence. Those who use the prostitution-slavery analogy diminish the enormity of the horror of Atlantic world slavery and “its legacies of anti-black racism” (Beutin, 2017).

A second problem is that they ignore the extensive research literature empirically documenting the fact that, unlike slavery, sex work is often chosen in preference to available alternative livelihood strategies or forms of employment. The same literature shows that there is an immense diversity in terms of the social relations that surround it, and sex work often resembles other service sector jobs and forms of paid work that involve emotional and embodied labor (to mention but a few, O'Connell Davidson, 1998; Sobieszczyk, 2000; Kelly, 2008; Sanders, 2008; Zheng, 2009; Day, 2010; Piscitelli, 2012; Lainez, 2018; Mai, 2018). A third problem is that the representation of prostitution as slavery prompts interventions into the lives of all those who trade sex that are known to lead to extensive and serious rights violations, including “raid and rescue” missions, heavier restrictions on women and children's mobility, forced “rehabilitation,” and further criminalization of already stigmatized and criminalized groups (Soderlund, 2005; Galusca, 2012; Cruz et al., 2019; Walters, 2020; Agarwal, 2021; Shih, 2021; Vanderhurst, 2022).

In the writings of those who describe prostitution as slavery or as a site of “modern slavery,” “the slave” is worked as a symbolic device to represent the abject condition of human beings objectified, controlled by violence or its threat, and stripped of agency and choice. Though the assumptions and generalizations about prostitution that inform this vision have been extensively critiqued, less attention has been paid to the fact that the analogy also rests on a very particular reading of “the slave” and a very partial appeal to histories of Atlantic World slavery, entirely overlooking histories of enslaved people's resistance and flight. The latter has recently prompted interest in fugitivity and marronage as analytic concepts, albeit concepts that are defined and deployed in different ways by different scholars and activists. This review considers whether they may potentially have theoretical purchase with regard to the contemporary experience (both positive and negative) of sex workers.

Revisiting the wrong of slavery: persons and things

In both antislavery discourse on “modern slavery” and radical feminist analyses of prostitution as slavery, slavery's unique and fundamental wrong is taken to be its treatment of human beings as commodities or “things” that can be bought and sold, reducing them to objects of ownership. This fits with longstanding, liberal, legalistic definitions of slavery that assume the enslaved are first and foremost differentiated, controlled and subordinated by their construction (either de jure or de facto) as objects of property (Allain and Bales, 2012; Bales, 2012). “To determine, in law, a case of slavery, one must look for possession,” and in essence, possession “supposes control over a person by another such as a person might control a thing” (Allain, 2012, p. 376). This persons/things dichotomy maps onto other key binaries of liberal thought, especially subject/object and agent/victim. The “modern slave” and the “victim of trafficking” are described as stripped of free will and agency, objectified, unable to “walk away” from their exploiter (Bales and Soodalter, 2009). This is echoed in religious and radical feminist campaigns against prostitution, where sex workers appear as voiceless objects, helpless victims, commodities, or “things.”

In stressing the objectification and commodification of the enslaved, today's campaigners forget that “slave” was a status, ascribed by the state in Atlantic world societies (O'Connell Davidson, 2016). It is true this status meant human beings could be treated as things or commodities for purposes of accounting and sale, but the enslaved were still persons in law in the sense they were deemed legally and morally responsible for any criminal act they committed (Patterson, 1982; Douglass, 1986). Unlike the live-stock to which they were routinely compared, transatlantic slaves were arrested, tried, and punished for committing outlawed acts, which included refusal to submit to the authority of a master or any white person and any effort to escape. Because enslavement did not literally transform human beings into objects, legal ownership of enslaved people did not, in itself, equip the owner with the power to control them “such as a person might control a thing.” As human beings, the enslaved retained the capacity to refuse, resist, and run from their captors. For slavery to function as a system of domination, it was necessary to ensure that the consequences of so doing were so terrifying that most enslaved people would choose compliance.

It was the legal ascription of “negative personhood” to the enslaved (Dayan, 2001), and the criminalization and grotesquely violent punishment of their independent action, that walled human beings into the prison of slavery, thereby equipping slaveholders with powers of control. Slavery not only reduced a human being to a piece of property, but also designated “a relation to law, state, and sovereign power; a condition of disfigured personhood, civil incapacitation, and bare life” (Best and Hartman, 2005, p. 10). The dual character of the slave as both person and thing was the central ambiguity of New World slavery (Hartman, 1997). The paradox was nowhere more visible than in Fugitive Slave Law in the United States, a body of law that as its name suggests, criminalized enslaved people who attempted to escape. Under Fugitive Slave Law, the runaway slave became criminally liable as a person for stealing herself as a thing or piece of property (Best, 2004). In law, the enslaved were ephemeral beings: “the slave was always a kind of afterlife, a form of legal being that was neither birthed by law, nor extinguished by law, but nonetheless present in the law” (Han, 2015).