My graduate research investigates the intersections of race, ethnicity, gender, and sexuality in relation to class formation and national identity. I am particularly interested in how these intersections figure within the governing discourses of globalization and late-stage capitalist expansion. I invite a closer scrutiny of the assumptions of rationality behind wage work, markets and monetary exchanges, and raise questions about approaches to sex work that reinforce views of the market as uniformly autonomy-enhancing, which are highly problematic in the case of migrant sex workers.
In Outside, Hidden, and In Between: Locating the Migrant Exotic Dancer in Canadian Legal Discourse and Regulatory Practice (2010), I examine how new objections to commercial sex in Canada, which can no longer be categorized as a debate between religious and secular moral stances, converge with broader restrictive trends in Canadian immigration policy. In two conference papers, “Reflections on Thinking and Writing Dangerously: Refractions of Public/Private in the Regulation of Inter-Racial Commercial Sex,” (2012), presented in a panel entitled at Osgoode Hall’s Critical Race Symposium, and “Toil & Trouble: Migrant Exotic Dancers as Labour’s and Rights’ Misfits,” at the 5th Annual Toronto Group Conference, I analyze the symbolic significance of migrant women sex workers in Canadian anti- trafficking policy discourse and the material exclusion of foreign workers (especially sex workers) from the ambit of rights and social protection.
I take this scrutiny a step further in Profiteers of the Bump and Grind: Contests in Commodification (2014), where I look at convergences between the state regulation of migrant sex workers’ labour and private regulatory practices of the industry. I frame my analysis within the context of a transformation that emerged in the 1990s in the modes of performing work and earning income in strip clubs. Examining labor rulings that eventually facilitated the classification of stripping as “independent contracting,” I trace how increasing restrictions and modes of surveillance used to discipline exotic dancers, which are essential to the industry’s new business model, developed alongside its growing reliance on, and preference for, a primarily migrant labour force.
In “Baring and Veiling: Sex, Politics and national Identity in Canadian Legal Discourse” (2017), a chapter from New Intimacies and Old Desires: Law, Culture and Queer Politics in Neoliberal Times (D. Jain and O. Sircar, eds.), I hone in on how the regulation of women’s bodies figures prominently in state responses to conflicting pressures under the neoliberal order. This chapter shows how the unabashedly economic goals behind Canada’s immigration policy require a steady supply of cheap foreign Iabour, while imagined threats to sovereignty and cultural purity provide a rationale for adopting tighter immigration regulation and other restrictions that heighten the precariousness of sex work. It looks at shifts in the regulation of stripping, analyzing the categorization of foreign sex workers as ‘trafficking victims’ and takes into consideration the ban on women’s religious headscarves and facial coverings. In both cases, women’s bodies have served as a default site for managing public anxieties about immigration. As objects of regulation, the women at the receiving end of regulation are cast as abject victims who lack autonomy, but also as foreigners and as threats. Ensuing restrictions not only limit their mobility but result in their exclusion from the polity.
While my research in Canada focuses on the regulation of migrant labour, my earlier work, such as “Conflicts & Interests: Trafficking in Women and the Policies on Migration and Trafficking in the Philippines” (2006), which was published as a chapter in Global Sex Trafficking (Karen Beeks et. al. eds.), examined contrasting regulatory labour migration frameworks from the vantage point of a major labour-exporting nation, the Philippines. My research spans other areas of gender and racial justice, such as the history of Canadian immigration regulation and feminist political economy, with a focus on Canadian feminist social reproduction. I have also published work on Sexual and Reproductive Health issues, sexuality, sex trafficking, family law, and Indigenous rights in the context of mining and environmental sustainability. My LLM thesis at the University of Toronto was on the legal regulation of abortion in the Philippines.
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