Redemptive capitalism and sexual investability

Abstract

In recent years, the issue of human trafficking has become a key component of a growing number of corporate social responsibility initiatives, in which multinational corporations have furthered the pursuit of "market based solutions" to contemporary social concerns. This essay draws upon in-depth interviews with and ethnographic observations of corporate actors involved in contemporary anti-trafficking campaigns to describe a new domain of sexual politics that feminist social theorists have barely begun to consider. Using trafficking as a case study, I argue that these new forms of sexual politics have served to bind together unlikely sets of social actors - including secular feminists, evangelical Christians, bipartisan state officials, and multinational corporations - who have historically subscribed to very different ideals about the beneficence of markets, criminal justice, and the role of the state.