Disposable Women in Postcolonial Narratives of Sexual Trafficking/Abduction

224 Pages·2015·1.39 MB·English

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English Dissertations Department of English
Spring 4-12-2012
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Maria Laura Barberan Reinares
Georgia State University
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Barberan Reinares, Maria Laura, "Commodified Anatomies: Disposable Women in Postcolonial Narratives
of Sexual Trafficking/Abduction." Dissertation, Georgia State University, 2012.
doi: https://doi.org/10.57709/2765958
This Dissertation is brought to you for free and open access by the Department of English at ScholarWorks @
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COMMODIFIED ANATOMIES:
DISPOSABLE WOMEN IN POSTCOLONIAL NARRATIVES OF SEXUAL
TRAFFICKING/ABDUCTION

by

M. LAURA BARBERAN REINARES

Under the direction of Renée Schatteman

ABSTRACT
This dissertation explores postcolonial fiction that reflects the structural situation of a genocidal
number of third-world women who are being trafficked for sexual purposes from postcolonial
countries into the global north—invariably, gender, class and race play a crucial role in their
exploitation. Above all, these women share a systemic disposability and invisibility, as the
business relies on the victim’s illegality and criminality to generate maximum revenues. My
research suggests that the presence of these abject women is not only recognized by ideological
and repressive state apparatuses on every side of the trafficking scheme (in the form of
governments, military establishments, juridical systems, transnational corporations, etc.) but is
also understood as necessary for the current neoliberal model to thrive undisturbed by ethical
imperatives. Beginning with the turn of the twentieth century, then, I analyze sexual slavery
transnationally by looking at James Joyce’s “Eveline,” Therese Park’s A Gift of the Emperor,
Mahasweta Devi’s “Douloti the Bountiful,” Amma Darko’s Beyond the Horizon, Chris Abani’s
Becoming Abigail, and Roberto Bolaño’s 2666, concentrating on the political, economic, and
social discourses in which the narratives are immersed through the lens of Marxist, feminist, and
postcolonial theory. By interrogating these postcolonial narratives, my project reexamines the
sex slave-trafficker-consumer triad in order to determine the effect of each party’s presence or
absence from the text and the implications in terms of the discourses their representations may
tacitly legitimize. At the same time, this work investigates the type of postcolonial stories the
West privileges and the reasons, and the subjective role postcolonial theory plays in overcoming
subaltern women’s exploitation within the current neocolonial context. Overall, I interrogate the
role postcolonial literature plays as a means of achieving (or not) social change, analyze the
purpose of artists in representing exploitative situations, identify the type of engagement readers
have with these characters, and seek to understand audiences’ response to such literature. I look
at authors who have attempted to discover fruitful avenues of expression for third-world women,
who, despite increasingly constituting the bulk of the work force worldwide, continue to be
exploited and, in the case of sex trafficking, brutally violated.

INDEX WORDS: James Joyce, Therese Park, Mahasweta Devi, Amma Darko, Chris Abani,
Roberto Bolaño, Sex Trafficking, Abduction, Kidnapping, (Forced) Prostitution, Postcolonial,
Neocolonial, New Historicism, Capitalism, Anti-capitalism, Development, Transnational,
Feminism, Orientalism, Ideological State Apparatus (ISA), Repressive State Apparatus (RSA),
White Slavery, Military, Comfort Women, Sex Slaves, Immigration, Femicides, Kamala
Kempadoo, Jo Doezema, Kathleen Barry, Donna Hughes, Hugh Kenner, Katherine Mullin,
Ivette Trochón, Gerardo Bra, Andrés Carretero, Cynthia Enloe, Cathy Caruth, Anne McClintock,
Frantz Fanon, Edward Said, Gayatri Spivak, Homi Bhabha, Chandra Mohanty, Inderpal Grewal,
Caren Kaplan, Gloria Anzaldúa, Fregoso Rosa Linda, J. K. Gibson-Graham, Fredric Jameson
COMMODIFIED ANATOMIES:
DISPOSABLE WOMEN IN POSTCOLONIAL NARRATIVES OF SEXUAL
TRAFFICKING/ABDUCTION

by

M. LAURA BARBERAN REINARES

A Dissertation Submitted in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of
Doctor of Philosophy
in the College of Arts and Sciences
Georgia State University
2012
Copyright by
M. Laura Barberán Reinares
2012
COMMODIFIED ANATOMIES:
DISPOSABLE WOMEN IN POSTCOLONIAL NARRATIVES OF SEXUAL
TRAFFICKING/ABDUCTION

by

M. LAURA BARBERAN REINARES

Committee Chair: Renée Schatteman

Committee: Ian Almond
Marilynn Richtarik

Electronic Version Approved:

Office of Graduate Studies
College of Arts and Sciences
Georgia State University
May 2012
iv

Dedication
To the three wonderful advisers in my committee, for their generosity, immense support,
multiple readings, and invaluable suggestions. I want to thank all of you for believing in me and
my project. I couldn’t have done it without you.
To my family in Argentina, who always supported me from afar and gave me the
confidence to pursue and accomplish what I love. To my second family in the US, all the friends
who helped me, understood me, and encouraged me throughout.
All of you contributed to make this process of discovery one of the most fruitful moments
of my life: in helping me find my voice, you helped me find a vision.
v

Acknowledgements
I want to acknowledge the immense help of my dissertation committee: Dr. Schatteman,
Dr. Richtarik, and Dr. Almond. Their insights were critical in the development of this project.
I also want to thank Dr. Matthew Roudané for his advice and support throughout, Dr.
Randy Malamud for his valuable suggestions on one of my chapters, and Dr. Amira Jarmakani
for recommending sources central to the progress of this analysis.
Finally, I want to thank my friends Irasema Huerta, who first talked to me about the
women of Juárez and generated in me the urge to write about them; Ana Bustios-Tuesta, who
gently offered her balanced perspective on the topic; and Alessandra Favoretto, who always
reminded me to keep the faith.
vi

Table of Contents
Acknowledgements ....................................................................................................................... v
1 Introduction ............................................................................................................................... 1
2 James Joyce’s “Eveline” and the Emergence of Global Sex Trafficking in the Early
1900s ............................................................................................................................................. 24
2.1 Like “a helpless animal”? Like a Cautious Woman ............................................................ 30
2.2 Frankly speaking, “The men that is now is only all palaver and what they can get out of
you” ................................................................................................................................... 33
2.3 Conclusion ........................................................................................................................... 54
3 Sex Trafficking, War, and the Military in Therese Park’s A Gift of the Emperor ............ 58
3.1 Camouflaged Procurers: When the Military Runs the Brothel ............................................ 61
3.2 “We were bones to the dogs”: Portrait of a Young Comfort Woman ................................. 66
3.3 “Unspeakable things” (Park, A Gift 27): (Not) Representing Rape ..................................... 73
3.4 Conclusion ........................................................................................................................... 78
4 Sex Trafficking, Development, and the National Government in Mahasweta Devi’s
“Douloti the Bountiful” .............................................................................................................. 84
4.1 “I was born the year after independence”: Whose? ............................................................. 92
4.2 Sex Trafficking and the National Government: When the Sow Eats her Own Farrow ..... 101
4.3 Conclusion ......................................................................................................................... 105
5 Sex Trafficking and the Legal System in Destination Countries in Amma Darko’s
Beyond the Horizon and Chris Abani’s Becoming Abigail .................................................... 109
vii

5.1 Sex Trafficking in Amma Darko’s Beyond the Horizon: “…too illegal and too black for
any proper job” ............................................................................................................... 115
5.2 Sex Trafficking in Chris Abani’s Becoming Abigail: “Imagine how lucky those children
are!”................................................................................................................................. 134
5.3 Conclusion ......................................................................................................................... 147
6 Sex Trafficking, State Patriarchy, and Transnational Capital in Roberto Bolaño’s 2666
..................................................................................................................................................... 151
6.1 The Semantics of Neoliberalism and Subaltern Female Rape .................................................
......................................................................................................................................... 155
6.2 Theorizing Third-world Women in the Neocolonial Context: “A sketch of the industrial
landscape in the third world” .......................................................................................... 170
6.3 Conclusion ......................................................................................................................... 179
7 Conclusion .............................................................................................................................. 183
Works Cited ............................................................................................................................... 201