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Manufacturing Freedom is a profound, wide-ranging, and deeply researched ethnography of the global anti-trafficking movement. Elena Shih weaves together insights from across the social sciences with extensive fieldwork in the United States, China, and Thailand to upend the taken-for-granted morality of commodified efforts to 'rescue' sex workers. A powerful and compelling contribution to scholarship on gender, markets, labor, and transnational social movements."—Rene Almeling, author of
GUYnecology: The Missing Science of Men's Reproductive Health "Sharply argued and deeply ambitious, Manufacturing Freedom provides an unflinching and sustained confrontation with the convergence of sex, labor, humanitarianism, and capital in anti-trafficking campaigns, as well as with workers’ efforts on their own behalf."⏤Mimi Thi Nguyen, author of The Gift of Freedom: War, Debt, and Other Refugee Passages
"Deeply insightful and profoundly relevant, this is a must-read for anyone curious about what it means to 'rescue' women in the global South from sex work. Manufacturing Freedom reveals the centrality of religious conversion and rigid patriarchal gender scripts to rehabilitation, and the ways that these rehabilitation projects repeat racialized tropes of white saviors and Asian sex slaves and reinscribe US imperialism."⏤Kamala Kempadoo, coeditor of White Supremacy, Racism and the Coloniality of Anti-Trafficking
“Manufacturing Freedom shows us that seemingly well-known social issues may be dangerously construed. Shih takes us into the world of human trafficking and offers surprising explanations for what is going on and what to do about it. The view from the global North has privileged the trope of 'modern-day slavery' and benefited the anti-trafficking industrial complex. What would happen, Shih asks, if we listened to those too long ignored in the anti-trafficking movement? What would happen if we studied and took seriously the experiences and expertise of those dealing with human trafficking at close range in their own countries? The answers are novel and needed.”—Frederick F. Wherry, Professor of Sociology, Princeton University
"Shih's multi-sited ethnography makes groundbreaking contributions to the scholarship on caring labor and race. Manufacturing Freedom is a must-read for its methodological innovation, empirical richness, and theoretical sophistication."⏤Sharmila Rudrappa, author of Discounted Life: The Price of Global Surrogacy in India
