Mobile Orientations: An Intimate Autoethnography of Migration, Sex Work, and Humanitarian Borders

Abstract

Mobile Orientations: An Intimate Autoethnography of Migration, Sex Work, and Humanitarian Borders sits in the emerging traditions of critical trafficking studies and sex work ethnographies. Yet this book is, at its core, a book about migration, “sex/gendered regimes,” and Global North neoliberal governmentality, not a book on sex work per se. In service of new concepts that support his larger theory of “sexual humanitarianism,” author Nicola Mai recounts two decades of diverse data collection, interwoven with strong theoretical grounding. His is a serious intellectual engagement with socio-philosophical questions of sex-gender and the politics of prostitution neo-abolitionism. Whether hanging out with Moroccan men in the streets of Seville, Spain or hanging out with Albanian and Romanian men in central Rome (who refer to exchanging sex for money as “fucking fags,” drawing complex lines around their own sexual selves) or interviewing women in the UK from Moldova and Romania who the government officially declared as victims of trafficking, Mai outlines migrants’ varying forms of agentic and errant mobilities—often young migrants, often with dreams of money and success. These narratives are emblematic of how powerful and how problematic the sexual democracy trope is today.