Abstract
The spaces of trafficking for sexual exploitation have profound effects on the embodiment of women who are forced to live within them. This article argues that the spaces of human trafficking can be understood as abject spaces, and as such, they trouble multiple boundaries including those between hidden and exposed, domestic and commercial, and public and private. This article provides a theoretically speculative engagement with notions of abject space and mimicry to add a further dimension to the debate on the nature of the spaces of trafficking. These abject spaces, and the sexual exploitation that takes place within them undermines women’s notions of bodily integrity, yet I argue there is agency to be found in the loss of embodied identity. The basis for this engagement is an analysis of a series of documents written by women who were trafficked from post-Soviet countries to Israel. It will conceptualise the ways women survive in such a space by challenging bounded notions of the body.
Introduction
After that the pimp moved me to another flat where there was only a radio, bed and a closet and bars on the window so I couldn’t run away. The sun would barely come in. The pimp would often forget to bring me food . . . I had about 15 clients a day and my physical and mental health was going, I was deteriorating. I got to a stage where my brain, my soul was separate from my body. I didn’t feel what he was doing to my body. (Alina)
Human trafficking is defined as the recruitment, transfer or harbouring of people through means of threat, force or deception for the purpose of exploitation. 1 The United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime says human trafficking is the fastest growing international crime. 2 The International Labour Organization estimates that there are 2.5 million people in sexual or labour exploitation worldwide at any one time. Responses to human trafficking are happening at multiple levels, ranging from international criminal justice legislation to local civil society activities. In research, human trafficking for sexual exploitation (the focus of this study and hereafter simply trafficking) 3 is a subject that has been widely written about in the context of legality, trafficking routes and destinations, 4 migration and exploitation, 5 intersection of trafficking and prostitution policy 6 and health consequences of trafficking for sexual exploitation. 7 Despite significant media, political and academic engagement with trafficking, very little work has been done to understand the spatial aspects of this phenomenon, and to date, very little research has examined the everyday spaces of trafficking. These are the spaces where women who are trafficked and forced to sell sex will spend the majority of their time. It is in these spaces they are forced to find ways to survive their ordeal and to adapt to their embodied experiences of sexual violence.
The spaces of trafficking for sexual exploitation are, as yet, under-researched. Often living areas and spaces of trafficking are shared with spaces or areas of sex work, further blurring the lines of definition. Studies have examined the geographies of red light districts and their interaction with other spaces. 8 Yet, very little has been written on the internal, domestic settings of the sale of sex despite calls being made to explore the ‘cultural role of privacy and discretion; the possible meanings of domesticity as a sexual setting’. 9 In addition, spaces of trafficking often act as spaces of containment, prisons for some women, as well as living spaces and places where sex is sold.
The spaces of trafficking resist binary notions of hidden or visible and trouble distinctions between public and private. They call for further analysis to make sense of them and to understand their effects on the women contained within them. As we can see in Alina’s quote that begins this article, the spaces of trafficking have profound effects on the women who have to live within them, often for many months or years. This article argues these spaces contribute to the enduring effects of trafficking on women’s relationships with their bodies. To explore this argument further, this article begins by exploring ideas of body boundaries and their contribution to embodied identity. This analysis enables an examination of the effects of trafficking and its spaces on the experience of those boundaries.
To understand the spaces of trafficking as spaces of boundary tension, this article utilises notions of abjection. It argues that to understand the effects of trafficking on embodied identity, the spaces of trafficking should be conceptualised as abject spaces. It is not the intention of this article to suggest abjection is an end point for any individual’s identity. 10 Spaces create feelings of abjection and the concept abjection can help us understand the lived experience of embodied effects of certain spaces. To explore the embodied responses of being held indefinitely in an abject space, the concept of mimicry is examined as one response to bodily and spatial abjection.
In the sample analysed, the spaces of trafficking are destination spaces: brothels, private flats or hired rooms, 11 as well as spaces along the journey – the border crossing spaces of surveillance and uncertainty. The spaces where women live and are forced to sell sex are experienced as a space of containment where they are rarely free to leave or to define their own routines. They are spaces that trouble the boundaries between domestic and commercial spaces, private and public, hidden/interior contrasted with exposed/visible and exterior. Women are hidden away from their families and the police but often are under surveillance and never allowed privacy. They are often ‘inspected’ and forced to wear specific clothing that makes them hyper-visible and hyper-sexualised. It is this blurring of boundaries that evokes the notion of abjection. I argue that if we conceptualise the spaces of trafficking as abject spaces, we can begin to understand the subtle and embodied ways women respond to being highly visible yet contained and hidden within marginal spaces and how this impacts their sense of self.
Methods
The data analysed in this article are part of a larger research project that combined document analysis of visa applications, interviews with non-governmental organisation (NGO) workers and web-based research into the representations of human trafficking. The named quotes featured in this article are taken from a collection of 12 free text sections referred to as letters that make up part of the application for a 1-year visa (the Right to Remain), written by women who have been trafficked from the former Soviet Union to Israel and forced to sell sex either without their consent or in conditions that were not consented to. From 2005 onwards, individuals who have been trafficked to Israel can apply for a temporary 1-year visa to remain in Israel and work legally. These are now known as rehabilitation visas but were previously referred to as a Right to Remain visa. In 2008, the Israeli government issued temporary visas for 27 sex trafficking victims and 17 forced labour victims rising to 111 visas in 2015.
12
These applications were given to the author with permission for use in this research by the authors of the applications via the NGO.
13
The largely conceptual aims of this project were outlined to the NGO, making it clear they were free to decline participation. The quotes used in this article provoke a theoretical discussion and hopefully open dialogue for further engagement with the spatial aspects of human trafficking. The value of social artefacts, documents and ‘unobtrusive methods’ or ‘non-reactive’ methods has a long history of use within social sciences and more so in the arts and humanities.
14
In the case of the Right to Remain letters, the data have already been collected, and as such, this research does not contribute to the re-traumatising process that can be caused by interviewing. It also ensures that the data are fully utilised and have served multiple purposes, further justifying its collection. However, data collected by another organisation, rather than first hand, must be examined for its ethical implications and its bias. I must also question why I was offered these letters, much as I might like to think it was based on a rapport built with the NGO, and what version of human trafficking they portray that the NGO who supplied them might want to make public.
15
As Kelly
16
reflects,
The good intentions of NGOs are rooted in a belief that by viewing women as ‘forced’, this will in turn mean they are seen as ‘deserving victims’ by the community, and reintegration will be unproblematic. This optimism is not supported by what we know about other forms of violence against women . . . [it is also to] circumvent the increasingly ambivalent, if not hostile, attitude amongst Western governments to migrants and asylum seekers. But ‘special cases’ have to be ‘special’ – different from the majority. In the process, some trafficked women will be designated as ‘deserving’ and others less so.
Indeed, Jobe 17 has argued that the way women obtain help is through a repetition of the dominant narrative, whether it fits their experiences or not. Despite this, the Right to Remain letters do appear to express other forms of resistance, agency and individuality, which distance the women from the dominant homogenised view of human trafficking.
While no ontological truth could be found in these documents, the writer’s purpose was clear. This made it easier to explore the narratives of trafficking that were being employed to achieve Right to Remain status. The orientation within the research data must be recognised and should not be read as without recognising the narrow discourses of victimhood that may be required by this application process. However, we can examine these letters as a version of trafficking, a narrative of self-representation undertaken by women who felt the need to migrate for multiple reasons. 18
The applications in this analysis were written in interaction with an Israeli NGO; however, the open letter section was written with little assistance due to concerns the applications could become ‘scripted’ and be rejected (which had happened previously). Many of the authors of the applications have testified against their traffickers; thus, names, ages and countries of origin have been anonymised to protect the safety and anonymity of the authors. All of the authors have self-identified as ‘trafficked’, and it is only by doing this that they can apply for leave to remain and to work legally in Israel. 19 Ethical clearance was provided for this research by the Faculty of Arts, Humanities and Cultures, University of Leeds. The ethical integrity of this project was paramount as it involved vulnerable trafficked individuals and organisations who work with them offering support in confidential locations. Names of individuals and organisations have been anonymised.
Body boundaries and abject spaces
To understand the effect of abject space on bodies subject to sexual violence, we must interrogate the boundaries transgressed in this context – the most intimate of which are body boundaries. While the Western body is often conceptualised as ‘individuated and discrete’, 20 the body can be universalised through a framework of conceptions of inside and outside and troubled by ‘the liminal places where the exteriority and interiority of bodies merge’. 21 The female body can be conceptualised as a bounded space, which naturally troubles normative demands for closed off boundaries by its lived experience. 22 Thus, ‘the notion of hardness and impenetrability’ of the idealised normative heterosexual male body presents bodily openings as a ‘site of danger and pollution for the social system represented synechdochally by the body’. 23
Trafficking distances women from this normative understanding of boundaries through a process I describe as ‘becoming abject space’. Women who have been trafficked negotiate a complex relationship with space, including the body, which cannot be explained through recourse to simple binary divisions of private and public which feminist geographers have long shown to be ‘continually constructed, challenged and redefined’. 24 This reading of the effects of space also challenges transformative accounts of the radical breakdown of boundaries demonstrating that in the Right to Remain applications a need to preserve some sense of boundary is expressed for an individual to survive trafficking. Women’s relationships with space and body boundaries can be understood as a process of the deconstruction and reconstruction of boundaries.
Abject space
Abject space is a spatial application of Kristeva’s 25 use of abjection which highlights the abject’s ability to trouble and threaten boundaries. It is space that, through its existence at the margin, troubles notions of integrity. It has been cast out as a means to reassert a sense of integrity, but the very need to cast it out questions the integrity of the boundary. It is peripheral and marginal but informs us about what notions and values the centre is constructed upon, based on what it disavows. 26 Abject space operates in multiple ways; while I will divide it into three categories for ease of analysis, each instance of abject space informs the others. First, it is space that is ignored and marginalised by society unless it encroaches on mainstream social spaces. Yet through its existence, the margins of society are troubled, thus creating its abject status. Second, it is space that hides and renders inaudible those within it by placing them outside the spatial ordering of society and through this outside the ‘usual’ rules or behaviours of that society. This form of abject space is evoked by Isin and Rygiel 27 when they describe the politics of space in extraterritorial detention centres. This type of ‘abject space’ is defined because of the effects it has on the individuals within it, rendering them abject. Svetlana expresses this when she describes her time in the brothel: ‘it hurt me that I was like a slave without basic rights’. Third, and the primary focus of this analysis, ‘abject space’ is defined by the qualities of that space incorporating the previous two types of abject space. It is the space between private and public which simultaneously hides and renders visible the individuals it contains. It is ill-defined space that resists ‘place-making’ activities to make it meaningful. 28 It is spaces that are ill-defined and troubling to boundaries – spaces that resist the imposition of boundaries which then threatens an individual’s sense of integrity.
Abject space is not only space which is outside of the normal spatial ordering but also space which troubles that division of inside/outside through its existence. Speaking to the first category of abject space, the abject spaces of trafficking can be understood to be the marginal or peripheral spaces of society, places that are difficult to spatially locate: the illicit border crossings or the ‘back street’ brothels. However, I would argue these spaces are often constructed as marginal to disavow their existence within morally normative society. If the notion of marginality is considered through a literal reading of visibility, often spaces where sex is sold or where undocumented migrants work are very visible spaces. Brothels exist on high streets, yet they are often only rendered ‘visible’, in the media or public consciousness, when they are raided or shut down. Sanders 29 uses the phrase ‘visible yet hidden’ conceptualising the ambivalent spaces of commercial sex.
It should be acknowledged that marginal spaces are often utilised by those people who cannot occupy a central position (usual due to their legal status in society) as a means to exist in a society. The sex industry, as well as some forms of manual labour, is often casual cash-based industry that is less regulated than other employment. This status can often attract undocumented migrants because their marginal legal status is maintained and not exposed by the ‘hidden’ nature of these spaces. Yet, poor pay and exploitative working conditions can also mean individuals become indebted and trapped in these occupations; thus, they can be both spaces of agency and oppression. To further extend the concept of abject space and to show how the first and second categories of abject space can merge, Willen 30 suggests an illegal status in a country carves out abject spaces for an individual because they cannot participate visibly in society. They are forced into the margins through their illegality. Natasha writes she is ‘scared to go out without documents’. Her identity as ‘trafficked’ meant she was hidden and her identity as an undocumented migrant means she is still spatially confined as she must attempt to remain hidden from the state. Her mobility was greatly restricted by her traffickers and now she has exited that situation her illegality (pending visa application) serves to continue to restrict her mobility as public spaces increase the chance she may be stopped and questioned by the police.
The spaces of trafficking are, in the majority of cases, off street spaces where sex is sold. They can vary from well-known city brothels to private flats or rooms in homes. The latter spaces are the less visible population of sex workers whose work is often subsumed into debates about street prostitution. 31 Very few trafficked women are reported to be forced onto to the streets to sell sex. 32 The reasons for this are twofold: first women would have more chance of being seen by the police, questioned and arrested, and, second, they would have more chance to escape if they were not spatially contained. We must then understand the spaces of trafficking as spaces created by a desire to contain, to control and to observe the women as well as to hide them from the gaze of the state.
For Isin and Rygiel, 33 the second category of abject space is exemplified in ‘extraterritorial space where international and national laws are suspended’. They argue abject space is a specific spatial arrangement designed to transform the people within it. It is used by states ‘to indicate that those who are constituted through [abject spaces] are rendered as neither subjects nor objects but inexistent insofar as they have become inaudible and invisible’. 34 This abject space can create an environment that contributes to the disempowerment of the individual as a subject of sovereign power. Isin and Rygiel 35 utilise the example of the camp from Agamben 36 where a person is so reduced that ‘no act committed against them could appear any longer a crime’. They argue suggesting the camp is not ‘simply an external space’ but rather ‘the logic of the camp is its immanence’. 37 Thus, they argue that although these spaces appear to be outside of the ‘juridical order’, they are actually part of it because they have been excluded by it, and they are politicised and agentic spaces when the body is often the only way to express one’s political identity (e.g. during hunger strikes). 38
In this way, the spaces of the sex industry can be read as part of society due to their marginalisation. Yet as Agamben 39 argues, the margin becomes indistinct from the centre, the exception can become part of the rule and the abject spaces become an accepted part of society. Thus, we ‘find ourselves in the presence of a camp every time a space is created where it becomes impossible to distinguish between fact and law, exception and rule’. 40 This sentiment reflects the debt bondage most women find themselves in where they are told there is an amount that they need to repay before they can be ‘free’ or before they can earn money. However, this amount increases through the often arbitrary addition of interest, fines and exaggerated living and working costs.
Magdalena writes that when she began earning money, she had to pay for condoms and make-up out of the money she earned, and ‘make-up was obligatory’, she states. This is a clear way her traffickers gave her a sense of participating in her own exploitation allowing the exception of the situation to become part of the rules of her existence perpetuating the state of exception found in abject space. Thus, her traffickers pay her but then make certain outgoings obligatory, so the only way for her to keep any money is to not use condoms, risking her health.
For Magdalena and Alina, the amount is quantified by their pimp, and they begin to count down their payments, aiming to be free of the fictionalised ‘cost’ of their purchase. The fictional amount becomes a real goal, and thus, the exception of debt slavery becomes a rule that is adhered to. In trafficking, the third definition of abject space, which we will take forward from this point, simultaneously renders women acutely visible as sexualised bodies. ‘Bare life’ becomes ‘exposed life’ where they are laid bare, yet their experiences and suffering remain invisible or, inversely, ignored and unacknowledged.
Abject spaces in human trafficking
Visibility and objectification
The abjection of space happens through the blurring of boundaries. The following sections explore the creation of abject spaces through the blurring of boundaries in the operation of visibility, invisibility, privacy and blurring of domestic and commercial spaces in trafficking while critiquing the idea that constant observation will necessarily negate women’s agency or create ‘docile bodies’. A key boundary to be blurred is the one between visibility and invisibility. This is done through surveillance and observation even in the most intimate and private of spaces and activities. It is also created through the tension between social and personal invisibility, hidden away from the police and everyday life, contrasted to the objectification and hyper-visibility of being sold for sex. Women are hidden from legal authorities, yet subject to surveillance by their traffickers throughout trafficking from border crossings to the brothel.
Panoptical regimes of observation 41 exist throughout trafficking from the border to the brothel which should, in Foucault’s 42 theory, produce bodies that police themselves. However, Lefebvre 43 critiques Foucault’s use of space arguing that Foucault does not reflect upon what he means by space nor does he examine the material effects of those spaces. Echoing these sentiments, van Hoven and Sibley 44 argue that we need to ‘give more weight to the agency of prisoners’ 45 than a Foucauldian reading of power and space might allow. Simon 46 also suggests what may appear to be an internalisation of the power that observes may actually be simply a performance of conformity as a means for survival, an argument this article will draw upon later in reference to hiding and mimicry.
I argue that the relationship between the bodies of women who have been trafficked is more complex than a dichotomy of internalisation verses resistance model. Rather than experiencing the external gaze of surveillance on the surface of the body, the process of trafficking, including elements of observation as well as sexual violence, actually breaks down women’s notion of the boundaries of the body as a suitable container for the ‘self’. 47 As French and Smith argue, ‘the body as an individuated container and supposed material substrate of subjectivity is – paradoxically – thrown into question by the very surveillant gaze meant to define and police its borders’. 48
The process of viewing and being viewed is shown to be enacted in situations of power disparity. Viewing and being ‘seen’ function to mean that which is perceived, gazed upon, but I would problematise suggestions that to see is to perceive the seen object in its entirety or to gain understanding of it through sight. In their work on imprisonment, van Hoven and Sibley 49 highlight the ‘complex relationship’ between ‘visibility’, ‘seeing and being seen’ and ‘looking’, while Yar 50 suggests we must question the ‘chain of equivalence (visibility = vulnerability = subjectification)’ and argues ‘there may be more to vision, to seeing and being seen’. To be seen as a body is not necessarily to be understood, nor does it necessarily mean one is rendered vulnerable.
In these narratives, trafficking places an emphasis on visible hyper-femininity, and this obscures other aspects of the individual’s identity. Women are told what to wear and how to look. They wear what the Helen Bamber Foundation
51
describes as their ‘uniform’ making it easy to read them as objects of sexual pleasure and nothing else. A uniform is often a way of hiding the self behind an image and can act ‘as a mask (experienced either positively or negatively)’.
52
Anja reports that once in Israel she was resold by her traffickers. The process of reselling involves her inspection and observation by those who intend to buy her from her original traffickers:
They would take us to their flat. Men came to observe them [other women]. One man took me to his flat for his partner to examine me when I was naked. We were asked to take a shower and put on make-up. Many men would come and choose the one they want.
During trafficking, women will usually only see their pimps, the men who buy sex with them and other women working/forced into prostitution. Their perceptions of their bodies prior to trafficking will have been shaped by numerous external forces, which can rarely be interpreted through their narratives. However, during trafficking, their interaction with the aforementioned three parties will influence how they respond to the experience and how they move on from that experience. Hannah tells us that on her second day in the brothel, ‘the owner came and he said he wants to take pictures of me for the internet so the clients could see my body’. After he has photographed her and another girl, he rapes Hannah and then tells her ‘to put on make-up, get dressed and go down to reception’ where men are waiting to buy sex. In the space where she lives and sleeps, she is photographed, objectified, violated and then the persona is rebuilt through clothes and make-up ready for the next man. She literally adds a new layer onto her skin only for her body boundaries to be violated again in a cycle of constructing a prostitute identity while deconstructing her embodied identity.
Magdalena writes that on several occasions she was told to strip, examined and questioned about the measurements of her waist and bust. She describes the visits of several pimps to the flat she was kept in: one man arrives and ‘started looking’, later two more men arrive ‘and again examined us’. Later, she is driven to a series of cars where she explains, ‘the owner that was trying to sell us ordered us to open our shirts a little . . . others came to look at us, told us to get up, to turn around’. Svetlana records much the same experience where she states, ‘someone else made us strip and looked at us’. For both Magdalena and Svetlana, the process of being sold involves being exposed and examined, gazed upon and rarely spoken to.
To be seen and hyper-visible yet not to be understood or really perceived by those who see you is a damaging feeling for many of the women. They begin to feel their sense of self fading into the background. Often this denial of their identity renders them inaudible objects for consumption and nothing else. In line with Scarry’s
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argument that certain kinds of suffering cannot be articulated, that pain destroys language and collapses one’s world, Patricia demonstrates how she loses the ability to express herself and starts to close down upon herself, beginning the process of changing and becoming abject space:
After a month, I started closing within myself. I stopped talking to people.
A similar event happens to Nina where the brothel owner wants to have sex with her; she told him she did not want to and he told her ‘to shut up’ before raping her. The ability to express agency and assert body boundaries is negated by her situation and the spaces she occupies; her pain is silenced.
To be perceived as a sexual object is one form of violence, but to be physically interacted with based upon that perception is a more intimate violence of the self. This then provokes the desire to hide in response to what is experienced as the inversion of ‘the crucial relationship’ between ‘visibility and empathy, recognition and identity’. 54
Tension emerges from the conflicting desire to hide while also being told that for self-preservation one must work and attract clients or risk being hurt or resold into worse conditions. Magdalena writes, ‘whoever wasn’t to their [the pimp’s] satisfaction would be hit and cursed and threatened that they’d be sent to a different place where the women are beaten up’. They are then forced to make her bodies visible for sale so as not to face worsening conditions when to hide would be to reduce the amount of men paying for sex with her.
Privacy and domesticity
The surveillance of the brothel is a specific form of gaze that can be conceptualised as part of the panoptical regimes of trafficking, where usually private spaces, such as showers and bedrooms, become spaces of surveillance. Foucault 55 suggests panopticonism ‘thrives where there are opportunities for the practice of constant surveillance of individuals’. It is rare that an individual would be constantly observed in any other situation, yet the Right to Remain applications contain expressions of the idea of relentless observation. Holliday and Thompson 56 argue that all bodies are subject to surveillance to some degree. However, the surveillance that operates within the brothels and apartments is an enhanced version of the visibility of the worker. It is a surveillance that seeks to regulate, control and adapt even the most intimate bodily acts.
The eradication of privacy through surveillance during trafficking creates a constant assault on the boundaries of the body. Privacy, as sacred space, 57 is transgressed through surveillance. Within the massage parlour, Svetlana is not hidden, rather she is constantly observed. Her door must remain open when she gives the ‘details to customers 58 . . . so he [her pimp] could make sure that I was doing everything the customer wanted’. She desires to close the door: to be unobserved but her body cannot be hidden as it is commodified. For Magdalena, her privacy is further undermined by the conditions she must live in and the constant assault on her senses. She writes that when she tried to sleep ‘there was noise until the very end [of business] no one cared if there was a woman there who wanted to rest’. Even when she is no longer directly observed, her body is ‘being breached by noise’. 59
Feminists have increasingly called for the private and domestic spaces of women’s lives to become subject to public debate and awareness. 60 In the applications, abject space occurs when the categories of space become blurred and the domestic setting is used for commercial purposes. Magdalena writes, ‘when we finished a shift we had to go and sleep on the same bed we were receiving clients’. The bed is a bed for sex, and yet also a bed for sleep; it is unclean and serves as a constant reminder of her purpose in the minds of the men she interacts with. It renders the spaces of ‘work’ and ‘sleep’, ‘public’ performance and ‘private’ rest indistinct. She also describes the showers at her brothel where she is not allowed to shower in private. When she complains she needs time to shower between clients, she is told she can only shower when a man buying sex is present; thus, again a space of privacy is rendered public and her body is made visible in a space that is usually private. Her testimony evokes Scarry’s writing on the use of the domestic as a weapon of torture. 61 The shower moves from an intimately private space to a space of forced commercial sex, remapping Magdalena’s relationship with her domestic surroundings.
Trafficking calls into question the very fundamental idea that there is some private inner sanctum within each individual. When the boundaries between public and private are blurred, we find the remnants of that boundary ‘porous and disconcerting’. 62 Sheller and Urry 63 argue privacy is ‘as much as a spatial arrangement as a social one’. Yet, to be hidden behind closed doors, in spatial privacy, but denied any personal or physical privacy is truly horrific. As England 64 argues, ‘horror occurs where boundaries are transgressed . . . [and] there is no sanctuary’. This generates feelings of ‘ambiguity, transgression and unease’, creating a sense of abjection. 65
Becoming abject space
In the above sections, it has been shown that trafficking and sexual exploitation create abject spaces. These spaces, I have suggested, erode a sense of inner, private self. The Right to Remain applications articulate a complex negotiation of self and space that can, and often does, result in a detrimental breakdown of boundary between ‘self’ and space. Yet rather than a totalising breakdown of self, it often occurs as part of an agentic attempt to retain some sense of boundary. It can be read as an attempt to preserve a sense of the ‘self’ which does not need to rely upon body boundaries if they are being violated and experienced as insufficient. To be able to preserve an inner core of ‘self’ from the objectification and hyper-visibility of the body results in a rejection of the body as the site for the self.
Through the concept of abject space, I argue that clear divisions of interior and exterior only begin to explain the complex relationship between individuals and certain spaces. However, I also refute Grosz’s 66 claims that the radical breakdown of distinction between individual and environment is necessarily a move to psychosis. Rather, I would argue, it is important not to speak about individual’s relationship with space in such absolute terms and to recognise the reciprocal relationship between bodies and space.
Containment in space that resists attempts to assert boundaries can create a disjuncture between embodied identity and space. England 67 argues the boundaries of the self ‘dissolve in abject spaces, resulting in the confusion of categories and apprehension’. In this way, the brothels and apartments of trafficking are abject space, space which troubles and resists boundaries and troubles other boundaries that it interacts with.
An alternative explanation of abject space is utilised by Karen Bermann, 68 who although not using the term ‘abject’ discusses the nature of the spaces occupied by Anne Frank and her family when they were in hiding from the Nazis. In many ways, Isin and Rygiel’s 69 abject spaces are the same as Bermann’s. They are spaces that are inhabited in response to the actions of the state, spaces where individuals are removed from society, hidden and rendered ‘inaudible and invisible’ but participating politically by surviving. 70 In Bermann’s 71 example, the intention is to hide and vanish from any form of detection, coupled with a desire that the integrity of the hiding space remains to protect the people within from exposure.
In trafficking, spaces hide women away from the state that may deport them or harm them, much like Bermann’s account. In trafficking, there is a desire to respond to the hyper-visibility of the sexualised body and to find a space within which something private of the self may be contained away from the radically exposing process of trafficking. According to Bermann, 72 the more ill-defined the space, the better it is to hide within, until the ‘self’ can become lost in the desperate quest to hide. Women find themselves contained in a space that is both compliant in their need to hide and yet also contributes to their disorientation and loss of sense of embodied self. As Alina states in this article’s opening quote, occupying a hidden and forgotten space results in deterioration of the sense of self in the body, where she tells us ‘my soul was separate from my body’.
Through an analysis of the embodied effects of abject space, we can understand that spatial boundaries are blurred in trafficking and this problematises body boundaries because women’s lived spaces, which would be used as a way of orienting the self and establishing boundaries, are instead indistinct and insufficient to separate public and private, domestic and commercial, and hidden and visible. Bermann 73 argues the most successful hiding places are ones where the person becomes the space; they lose themselves, their identity to the space and are no longer perceived as existing there. The ill-defined spaces of trafficking ring true with this definition. They are flats that are not really homes and resist home-making activities, beds used only for sex and kitchens converted to client waiting rooms. Some women exist in basements only brought up to be used and then returned, to be taken to faceless hotels and collected before they can step fully onto the street. 74 These are unnamed spaces, back rooms of takeaways and even back rooms in churches. 75 They are spaces to hide the self and to forget the self through its neglect but, simultaneously, to protect the self from exposure and defilement. They are spaces that are used by traffickers to maintain women in a state of liminality between being hidden and exposed, to deliberately confuse and disorient women so that they can be more easily controlled. As Knott 76 suggests, ‘space is utilised, often ingeniously, by dominant groups in the exercise of power. It is used to contain, even to obliterate others’. It could be argued that women are both contained and the self is obliterated in the process of becoming the abject space; however, obliteration suggests finality, it does not reflect the future orientation of the applications. It does not do justice to the desire to survive these experiences and the agency that can be found in blending in.
Mimicry
Abject space is a recognised way of conceptualising certain spaces of unequal power. 77 Equally to describe certain individuals as abject has a theoretical underpinning in psychoanalysis, despite being a problematic assertion explored elsewhere in this article. 78 What we are lacking is a way to theoretically approach understanding the experiences of those people who begin to embody abject space. The theory of mimicry enables us to further understand how the loss of embodied self may be an agentic act of self-preservation which is unintentionally self-destructive. To examine in what way an individual may ‘become abject space’, I will employ the theories of Roger Caillois 79 on Mimicry and Legendary Psychasthenia but contribute my own critique of his theories to re-embody what eventually becomes a theory of psychosis.
Mimicry can be understood as a subtle integration of spatial themes with embodied symptoms. The term mimicry has been used to explore power dynamics at work in colonised societies where the coloniser uses discourse that places the colonised as in-between the self and the colonial power but never located, 80 to explain the behaviour of those who wish to access power by imitating those with power 81 and to suggest that while mimicry can be a failure to copy or replicate that which is mimicked, it can be subversive and have creative potential. 82 Yet, Rose argues, Bhabha’s optimism towards the inevitable hybrid world erases ‘the felt pain, the embodied violence, of exclusion’ of mimicry. 83 This is where Caillois and Bhabha differ in Caillois’ assertion that mimicry does not alter space in response to a disparity in power; rather, the individual disappears into the space, becomes the space, eroding a sense of self as a form of embodied violence.
Caillois 84 examines mimicry in the lives of animals and claims that it serves little survival advantage. He argues it may be a ‘dangerous luxury’ that causes creatures to engage in ‘collective masochism’ by mimicking their surroundings and becoming lost in those surroundings. 85 It is the loss of sense of self in mimicry that makes it useful to think about the embodied effects of trafficking. He hints towards a more tactile embodied notion of mimicry by suggesting ‘things that have once been in contact remain united’ which evokes Ahmed’s 86 theory of abject, sticky substances that cling when transgressing an ambivalent boundary. If surroundings ‘cling’, they trouble the boundary of the space (as it clings to things) and the body (that they cling to). They pose the threat that one may become part of the other because the boundary between the two merges. The organism becomes not the object of space but ‘no longer knows where to place itself’. 87 This loss of distinction between self and space helps us understand the breakdown of boundaries between inside and outside of the body and understand how containment in abject space can affect the way a person relates to their own body boundaries, even after leaving an abject space.
Caillois argues the result is a loss of sense of self in mimicry because the self must be distinct from the surroundings in order to be defined, describing this problematic relationship between self and surroundings as ‘legendary psychasthenia’. It is at this point Caillois
88
moves from a natural phenomenon to a mental phenomenon suggesting this ‘depersonalization by assimilation into space’ is experienced as
The body separates itself from thought, the individual breaks the boundary of his skin and occupies the other side of his senses. He tries to look at himself from any point whatever in space. He feels himself becoming space, dark space where things cannot be put.
89
It is worth noting that Caillois 90 only sees mimicry in this context negatively. He suggests that it is life taking a ‘step backwards’ which ‘does not stop at the surface’. 91 There is no space in his analysis for anything other than life and death, and mimicry is not read in terms of survival to endure a space, yet in any animal example it must surely have a survival benefit. However, his analysis is useful to add a dimension to the analysis of theories of the body as a container. 92 The body (container A) is within the space (container B). If the body begins to mimic the space, (B) then the body (A) becomes an insufficient container for the self. It becomes a container ‘where things cannot be put’. 93 We can ask what this would mean to be the individual who understand their body as no longer a sufficient container for a sense of self because it has been so thoroughly eroded by their experiences of being contained within abject space.
Once again, we see a prioritisation of impermeability and integrity presented as the only way to preserve a sense of self. The problems women have preserving some notion of integrity when faced with sexual violence demonstrate how limiting idealised impermeability of the body can be while also showing how pervasive it is as an idea to the point that it is damaging to women’s sense of self to not be able to establish some form of boundary. If we acknowledge abject space as container, we must also recognise the impact detainment within it has on the body when it is conceptualised as a container for the psyche (Lena), the mind (Michelle) or the soul (Alina) as well as a culmination of factors defined as ‘identity’ – a container that is only seen to function properly when its boundaries are distinct from the space it occupies.
Magdalena’s first impression of the brothel she is forced to live in is of an ‘ugly grey building’ with walls ‘grey from cigarette smoke’, dilapidated and run down. As time passes, Magdalena describes herself as ‘too exhausted to move’; she is both physically run down and unable to move outside the brothel, and this spatial limitation is now experienced in her body. Alina lives forgotten in a flat that doesn’t see daylight and gets ‘to a stage where my brain, my soul was separate from my body’. They enter into a relationship with their environments where bodies ‘reinscribe and project themselves onto their sociocultural environment so that this environment both produces and reflects the form and interests of the body’. 94
Grosz 95 adopts Caillois’ 96 argument to express that ‘mimicry is a consequence not of space but of the representation of and captivation by space’. This statement helps make sense of how a disorienting space for one individual may be a home and a space of orientation for another. However, Grosz 97 takes the position of perception as the most important factor in Caillois’ analysis, suggesting that through mimicry the individual renounces ‘their right to occupy a perspectival point’. 98 This is an inherently problematic reading of mimicry as it prioritises the visual and visual representation and suggests the individual can only ever be subsumed by space and cannot retain their perspective, their gaze, if they are integrating into a space. I would argue quite the opposite. For Grosz, 99 one cannot perceive the space if one has become the space. However, I am arguing for a more nuanced notion of becoming abject space as a transitional process rather than the distinct boundaries between individual and space that Grosz 100 blurs and then reconstructs. Becoming abject space is indeed an erosion of boundaries, yet during the blurring of distinction between self and space, the individual retains their gaze and exercises that gaze as part of their agency. Mimicry, I would argue, can be deployed as a survival trait if it becomes necessary to find ways to allow time to pass and to endure experiences that are too horrific to be fully present.
An example of the active agency of the gaze occurs in Magdalena’s letter. When no one wants to ‘buy’ her, the pimp that currently ‘owns’ her gets angry and she writes, ‘he was really angry and I was afraid even to look at him’. It is as if her participation in being the agent of the gaze would antagonise him. Turning the gaze away from someone is equally an attempt to construct a barrier to reduce further self exposure. 101 This version of looking demonstrates the power Magdalena still has and how she chooses to control it as a means to survive. Looking can be antagonistic and is often regulated by those wishing to ‘keep their heads down’ or to avoid a response from others. Yet, women who are trafficking can also use the power of looking, demonstrating that the ‘ability to look but to remain unseen offers opportunities to overtly beat the system’. 102 Often, they demonstrate this by testifying against their traffickers, giving details of who they saw and what they heard, subverting the gaze of the traffickers to expose the traffickers and their practices. By recording what they have seen in the applications, they bear witness to their experiences and what they have observed.
The fact that traffickers coerce and threaten the women they traffic but rarely (as far as we know) murder them suggests they believe the crimes they are committing will go unpunished and that the women they exploit will not have the desire or the ability to access recourse or retribution. It can only then be assumed that traffickers believe the women that they traffic will be controlled by them, by their imprisonment, their threats and by the women’s own sense of shame and experiences of social stigma (a further exposure of the ‘truth’ of what has happened to women is often threatened by trafficker). 103
Enduring embodied effects
The radical breakdown of body boundaries in trafficking can be understood as a violation of an individual, even if it is embraced as a way to survive. In situations where the body and privacy are violated, attempts are made to redraw the boundary of the ‘self’ somewhere it may still be protected. The division of body and mind is one of the most common expressions of body boundary transgression in much of the psychological literature on sexual violence. 104 It can be interpreted both as violence inflicted upon a person and as a survival tactic, which preserves the self. The experience of sexual violence is often represented as a fragmentation of a sense of the body as a container for the self, and thus, the body is relinquished and a sense of ‘self’ is disembodied to protect it. As Alina writes, ‘I didn’t feel what he was doing to my body’. However, her description goes on to speak about experiencing ‘shame without end’ as well as ‘pain’ and ‘humiliation’. She is clearly using the language of an acutely felt embodied experience which speaks of body boundary violation and pollution. 105 Thus, her claims to separate the ‘soul’ from the body are better read as a survival technique to convince herself and her audience she did not feel nor experience what was happening to her body. 106 The self is conceptualised as hidden as a means of survival, and disassociation is even encouraged by the nature of the space she is forced to occupy.
Echoing the behaviour of mimicry, Bermann 107 argues, hiding is ‘a form of psychic death – disappearance – becomes a survival technique’. She argues, ‘compliance and resistance are strangely folded into each other, from a binding opposition. To play dead is to stay alive’. 108 The body is conceptualised as ‘dead’ in that it is withdrawn from so that the mind may survive. As Sadeh 109 reports, during trafficking, ‘you become invisible to yourself and you just go on with the routine’. In this statement, he reflects both the active denial that takes place as well as the detrimental effect trafficking has on a sense of self to the degree that it is rendered invisible. The body is withdrawn from, and rendered invisible to, you so that the violence done to it does not have to be recognised. Yet, by its presence at the margin of the self, it constantly troubles women’s attempts to distance themselves from it. It becomes abject to them in that they cannot deny it as part of them, but they wish to distance themselves from it to regain a sense of integrity. 110 Thus, a desire for impermeability, despite its existence being a fallacy in the lives of women, holds women who are trafficked in an impossible position between broken body boundaries and disembodied identity.
Conclusion
Trafficking is an inherently spatial phenomenon; by definition, movement and migration mark its inception, yet containment and detainment are the primary experience of its victims. This article highlights the importance of a spatial analysis of trafficking from the perspective of those people who experience it and the everyday spaces they are forced to endure. It aims to provide a theoretical lens to engage with ideas of spaces that defy conventional boundaries between private and public, domestic and commercial, and hidden and visible. The Right to Remain applications describe experiences where the spaces of trafficking trouble the boundaries of society, privacy and the body, acting as abject spaces. They resist cognitive notions of the container, 111 exposing it to be based upon the masculine idealisation of impermeability which acts as a denial of female embodied experience. These spaces, through surveillance and objectification, erode any sense of bodily privacy. In addition, women are rendered invisible and inaudible as part of their exploitation. This dissolution of personal boundaries results in women striving to retain some sense of self that is often no longer located in the body, responding to their environments in embodied ways. It illustrates how appalling the loss of boundaries can be to an individual, countering claims that there is a liberating or transformative power in total boundary transgression. These accounts question abjection and abject space as an end point for an individual’s identity and demonstrate the harm of such a conclusion. 112 While these narratives reinforce much of the popular discourse on the harms of trafficking and by their nature as applications written for a legal purpose, they reinforce certain narratives of victimhood; they also raise important questions about the agency one can experience in situations of suffering and the spatial effects of containment and what it means to live in a body that is contained in abject space.
In this context, in the spaces of trafficking, the options for survival are limited. These spaces resist boundaries and traditional place making activities such as the designation of domestic purpose or the creation of spaces of privacy. Often women become like the spaces they inhabit as a means to try to endure the suffering they experience. While this process of mimicry is clearly harmful to an individual’s sense of embodied identity, it should not been seen as absolute or without agency. Agency and exploitation can, and do, exist together simultaneously in an individual’s life. 113 Thus, the spaces of trafficking create a unique form of embodied experience that must be recognised as having an enduring effect on an individual’s experience of their body and sense of embodied self.
Footnotes
Acknowledgements
The author thanks Kim Knott, Shirley Tate, Kevin McGowan and Tim Cresswell for their comments and advice on previous drafts of this article.
Funding
The author(s) received financial support for the research from the Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC) [grant number 122196]. The author is very grateful to the European Sociological Association for funding to attend an Academic Journal Writing Workshop in Finland where this article was reviewed by a group led by Elina Oinas, featuring Suse Tönsmann, Nadiya Chushak, Karim Amella, Laura Stefanelli, Liutauras Labanauskas, Hanna Schwander, Fernando Cami, Katya Borozdina, Mari Hannele, Tiina Lasskso, Visnja Vukov, Olga Gromasheva, Aleksandra Zamarajewa, Carlotta Bizzarri, Maria Con Ň and Anna Alanko. Thank you all for your comments and support.