2025/02/22 by Rosa Campbell, Ana Stevenson · 1 voice
Social Sciences · Business, Management and Accounting · #Sex work and related issues #Global trade, sustainability, and social impact #African Sexualities and LGBTQ+ Issues
paper · doi:10.1080/01436597.2025.2460652
This article traces the development of feminist thought about sex work through the International Feminist Network Against Female Sexual Slavery (IFNAFSS). IFNAFSS was a radical feminist network that framed all sex work as ‘sexual slavery’. This understanding of sex work was indebted to complex racialised ‘anti-white slavery’ campaigns of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. While discourses of white slavery infuse global anti-trafficking legislation today, we suggest that it was radical feminism that first drew on these earlier campaigns. We highlight the crucial role the United Nations World Conferences on Women, particularly the 1980 Copenhagen conference, played in the development of IFNAFSS and the global spread of the idea of female sexual slavery. IFNAFSS was also contested at this conference, particularly by the International Network for Wages for Housework (WfH). We discuss the first IFNAFSS meeting in Rotterdam in 1983, to demonstrate how female sexual slavery was taken up and transformed by feminists in the Global South. These feminists accounted for female sexual slavery not only through patriarchy, but through a complex analysis that brought patriarchy into dialogue with other oppressive forces. This article demonstrates how the meaning of ideas are never fixed but can be repurposed and tempered across contexts.