Rewriting the Victim

Abstract

Abstract This book unites feminist international research with the writing, composing, and production of a musical designed to critique the discourse about the trafficking of women in Thailand. Through writing and producing “Land of Smiles,” a two-act, fifteen-song musical inspired by field research that includes over fifty interviews with female migrant laborers, sex workers, community-based women’s rights activists, non-governmental organization (NGO) employees, and other development actors in Thailand’s anti-trafficking movement, playwright, composer and feminist scholar Erin Kamler presents one of the dominant stories about human trafficking and shows that the voices of the people, most often women, can illuminate the problems and highlight the difficulties in finding solutions. This project was designed to serve as a platform for dialogue among stakeholders in Thailand’s anti-trafficking movement through a three-phase process of uncovering, recovering and articulating the lived experience of the “subject”—the trafficking “victim”—who the movement seeks to rescue, as well as the NGO employees who are embedded in the social catastrophe that underscores this movement. Through researching, writing and performing the musical for the communities on whom its story is based, Kamler shows the importance of lived experience as a framework for understanding social catastrophe, and the power of musical theater in conveying that understanding through a feminist, liberatory praxis. She calls this praxis Dramatization as Research, or DAR.