Thinking beyond the Category of Sexual Identity: At the Intersection of Sexuality and Human-Trafficking Policy

Abstract

“Intersectional analysis,” or “intersectionality,” is a concept that is widely used in various academic disciplines to explain and articulate the oppressions faced by the “multiply minoritized” (Vidal-Ortiz 2006), those marginalized by their sex, gender, sexuality, race, class, and national identities. We are concerned that “sexuality” as an identity used in intersectional analysis is perhaps overly reductive, sometimes telling nothing more than whether someone is “straight” or “gay,” rather than leaving room to interrogate the complicated, diverse landscape that is at the intersection of gender, sex, and sexuality. In this essay, we apply a queer-theory critique of intersectionality to demonstrate how human-trafficking policy, particularly as it relates to sex trafficking, is productive of what Valentine (2007) calls culturally constructed and deployed identity categories, resulting in inclusion of some and exclusion of others. We aim to show how social science research that relies on normative identity categories can lead to incomplete intersectional analyses.

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