Response to Brigitte Steinmann’s review of Bombay Going: Nepali migrant sex workers in an anti-trafficking era, by Susanne Åsman. Lanham: Lexington Books. 2018

Abstract

1 Steinmann’s thorough discussion and detailed review of my book highlights several interesting aspects in a variety of ways. However, broadly speaking, Steinmann’s reading of the book is also coloured by ideologically based preconceptions that impede a more direct dialogue with its materials and arguments. Furthermore, Steinmann’s reading and interpretation fails to recognise the most important purpose and objective of the book, namely, to go beyond the dominating discourses of sex trafficking and the polarised perspectives of the subject by way of a detailed ethnographic enquiry. 2 At one end of the spectrum of the dominant discourses about sex trafficking is the view that women are subject to prostitution, which here is equivalent to sex trafficking. From the neo-abolitionist perspective that guides such a reading, involvement in prostitution can never be connected to ‘free will’. Rather, women are exclusively considered as being victimised and exploited subjects within a male-dominated gendered order. At the other end of the spectrum is a (socio-)liberal sex workers’ rights perspective arguing that sex work must be seen as distinct from sex trafficking because sex/human trafficking involves some kind of force, coercion and/or deception, which is absent from sex work proper. This perspective tends to focus on the ‘free will’ or agency of individual actors. Consequently, not only women, but also men and LGBTQIA persons are considered to be able to sometimes choose sex work, regardless of whether it is legal or not. It is thus not a male-dominated gendered order that is underlined here, but a variety of relations and practices on different levels that involve power, particularly with regard to sex work as work associated with labour rights and human