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Those concerned with the rise in international human trafficking over the past three decades continue to grapple with how to understand the subject. Attempts to establish trafficking as a discrete issue entail the drawing of lines: between trafficked and ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

As anxieties about globalization and international terrorist networks contribute to worries about border security, states nonetheless treat two of the groups of individuals who transgress borders--sex trafficking victims and labor trafficking victims--in very different ways. A gender lens is essential for understanding how these individuals are understood as threats, not only as men and women, but as certain types of men and women. In investigating the gendered distinction between those trafficked internationally for sex work and non-sex labor, my aim is to highlight the degree to which gender shapes the construction and the combating of border threats, and to suggest a new direction for the feminist literature on trafficking. Such a direction would move away from the debates surrounding the legalization of sex work, which have dominated the literature thus far, and focus instead on how human trafficking understood more broadly relies upon gender norms not only in carrying out illegal activities, but also in combating them. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

War is a potent site for the production and reproduction of gender identities. As Elshtain argues, ?wars destroy and bring into being men and women as particular identities by canalizing energy and giving permission to narrate.?1 This paper is concerned with the dominant messages about female gender identity that have emerged from the US?s 2003 invasion and subsequent occupation of Iraq. Specifically, I am looking at the discourse surrounding Pfc. Jessica Lynch and Pfc. Lynndie England, the female poster girls of American involvement in Iraq, and the focus of much wrangling and hand wringing over what the war has said about women. Ultimately, I argue that the predominant female gender images that were reproduced during and after the Iraq War are of the Woman in Peril (Lynch) and the Ruined Woman (England), and that these images crowded out justice feminist-style arguments that Lynch and England demonstrated that women are every bit as good and as bad as men, and are thus no less or more fit for combat and/or military service. I suggest that this occurred because the justice feminist argument for gender equality faces an already entrenched set of counter-arguments in the American discourse, while the Woman in Peril and Ruined Woman tropes are themselves deeply entrenched in the American discourse, and operate at a less explicit?and thus harder to contest?level. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

How and why did the Bush administration succeed in dominating the debate in the run-up to the Iraq War, and why was the potential political opposition relatively mute? Recent accounts have emphasized that the administration's efforts to inflate the Iraq threat succeeded because of the U.S. executive's inherent advantage in shaping the public agenda, but this overestimates the president's ability to sway public opinion. More importantly, these accounts devote too little attention to the rhetorical implications of the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001. We will explore how, out of the range of possible meanings, a particular interpretation of 9/11 came to predominate and how it reshaped the rhetorical playing field in such a way as to silence those one might otherwise have expected to oppose the administration in its quest for war with Iraq. Theoretically, this paper focuses on the processes by which meanings become established and thus certain interpretations of international events come to seem natural and undeniable. These questions have been marginalized by the constructivist "mainstream," but they should lie at the heart of the constructivist project. ..PAT.-Conference Proceeding [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]