Everyday Spaces of Human Trafficking: (In)visibility and Agency Among Trafficked Women in U.S. Military-Oriented Clubs in South Korea

Abstract

Spaces of human trafficking can be perceived as “total,” akin to those of the prison and the detention center, because of the intense surveillance, bodily compliance through discipline, removal of freedom, and restricted mobility they create. Although Foucault's panopticon and Goffman's related concept of the total institution have some merit in conceptualizing these situations, geographical scholarship on institutions and regimes of incarceration has advanced important critiques of prisons as total institutions, arguing among other things for the potential of incarcerated subjects to resist and express agency. Drawing on de Certeau, these arguments focus on agency that is expressed through manipulating and subverting the disciplining gaze of power in highly embodied ways. This article examines these everyday expressions of agency in the context of bars and clubs located around U.S. military bases in South Korea, where many of the female migrant laborers are trafficked entertainers. Despite the growing scholarly engagement with human trafficking, comparatively little research attends to everyday resistance and agency in such situations or what spaces of human trafficking might tell us about the nature and geography of incarceration. In response, this article advances a perspective that centers on shadow play in everyday spaces of incarceration to illuminate the operations of resistance and agency in situations of human trafficking. It also draws attention to some of the limits in understanding resistance in such situations through the models and practices of labor activism derived through a consideration of ostensibly free laborers.