From victim to subject: dramatization as research in Thailand's anti-trafficking movement

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Content From Victim to Subject:
Dramatization as Research in Thailand’s Anti-Trafficking Movement
By
Erin Michelle Kamler
A Dissertation Presented to the
FACULTY OF THE USC GRADUATE SCHOOL
UNIVERSITY OF SOUTHERN CALIFORNIA
In Partial Fulfillment of the
Requirements for the Degree
DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY
(COMMUNICATION)
August, 2015
Copyright 2015 Erin Michelle Kamler
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Acknowledgements

This project was made possible with the support of a fellowship from the University of
Southern California Graduate School’s Office of the Provost, as well as support from the
USC Wallis Annenberg Chair in Communication Technology and Society, the USC
Annenberg School for Communication & Journalism Doctoral Program, the USC Center
for Feminist Research, the USC Annenberg Center on Communication Leadership &
Policy, the USC Annenberg Center on Public Diplomacy, the USC Dornsife Department
of Sociology, the USC School of Cinematic Arts and the USC Diploma In Innovation
Program. I would like to thank, fundamentally, my advisers Manuel Castells and Larry
Gross for their ceaseless support and belief in my work, as well as committee members
Rhacel Parreñas, Patricia Riley, J. Ann Tickner, and Ted Braun. Additionally, I wish to
thank professors Helene Lorenz, Geoffrey Cowan, Mina Yang, Sarah Banet-Weiser,
Nicolas Cull, and Meredith Drake Reitan for their guidance. Furthermore, I thank Prawit
Thainiyom, Zhaleh Boyd, Sahra Sulaiman, Samantha Sahl, Ann Marie Campian and
Christine Lloreda for their assistance, as well as my father, Howard Kamler, for being my
intellectual ally. I also wish to thank the artists who lent their talents to this project, in
particular: Jennie Kwan, Melody Butiu, Amanda Kruger, Yardpirun Poolun, Ann Fink,
Marisa Mour, Kimiko Broder, Joan Almedila, Kerri-Anne Lavin, Katy Tang, and Lowe
Taylor. Additionally, I extend my deepest gratitude to the Kachin Women’s Association
of Thailand, Shirley Seng, Jessica Nhkum, Moon Nay Li, Sengbu Ban, Thwel Zin, N.
Seng Nu, Apoh, Ursula Cats, Cindy Wilkenson, We Women Foundation, Stephan Turner,
The Gate Theater Group, Chalermpon Poungpeth, Duncan McCargo, Kevin McLeod,
Kate Stayman-London, Gregory Franklin, Franklin Theatrical Investors and the
numerous migrant laborers, NGO employees, community activists, U.S. government,
U.N. officials, Thai authorities, and others who participated in my research. Finally, I
thank my husband, Rick Culbertson, for being my champion.

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This project is dedicated to the migrant women of Burma,
and to every artist who envisions a better world.

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Table of Contents

Abstract 6

Introduction 7

Chapter 1. Theorizing Dramatization as Research 24

Chapter 2. Methodology 52

PHASE ONE: Preliminary Research on Thailand’s Anti-Trafficking Movement

Chapter 3. Constructing the Problem: Thailand’s National Identity Project,
the U.S. Abolitionist Project and the Trafficking of Women in Thailand 65

Chapter 4. Constructing the Narrative: NGOs, Moral Performance
and the Power of Culture 96

Chapter 5. Constructing the Solution: The (Not So) “Smart Raid” Policy 117

Chapter 6. Cultures of Resistance: The Role of Community-Based Organizations 136

PHASE TWO: Developing “Land of Smiles”

Chapter 7. Conceptualizing the Musical “Land of Smiles” 152

Chapter 8. Developing the Script 167

Chapter 9. Getting It on Its Feet 183

PHASE THREE: Production in Thailand

Findings
Chapter 10. NGO Discourses 193

Chapter 11. Migrant Discourses 214

Chapter 12. Artist Discourses 230

Discussion
Chapter 13. Restorative Justice and Reconciliation: NGO Subjectivities 246

Chapter 14. Recollection, Mourning and Witness: Migrant Subjectivities 255

Chapter 15. Rupture and Hospitality: Artist Subjectivities 265

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Conclusion. Dramatization as Research: A Communication Intervention 281

Bibliography 292

Appendices 326
- Appendix A: Figures, Tables and Illustrations 326
- Appendix B: Interview Respondent Key 329
- Appendix C: Interview Questions – NGO Employees 332
- Appendix D: Interview Questions- Female Migrant Laborers 334
- Appendix E: “Land of Smiles” Script 336
- Appendix F: Interview Questions- Artists 337
- Appendix G: Focus Group Moderator Guide- NGO Employees 339
- Appendix H: Focus Group Moderator Guide- Migrants 341
- Appendix I: Focus Group Moderator Guide- Artists 343
- Appendix J: Focus Group Demographics 345

“Land of Smiles” Script 347

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Abstract

This dissertation combines 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, activists, NGO employees, and other members of the anti-
trafficking movement, I seek to present one of the dominant stories about human
trafficking, and show that the voices of the people, most often women, can illuminate the
problems and highlight the difficulties in finding solutions. This artistic project is
designed to facilitate communication between stakeholders in the anti-trafficking
movement in Thailand and to prime a dialogue to explore the policies, practices, and
outcomes of actions in this environment. Through researching, writing and producing the
musical for the individuals on whose experiences the story of the musical is based, I show
how the arts can be used as a communication intervention and a vehicle for human rights
witnessing. I situate this endeavor within a new mode of inquiry, which I call
Dramatization as Research, or DAR.

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Introduction

“We need new words to speak to each other, words that describe our similarities and our
differences in much more complicated ways, words that will allow us to account for the
inevitability that what we say will only partly be heard.”
– Jill Dolan (1998: 440)

In this dissertation, I seek to connect two seemingly disparate realms: the realm of
international human rights research and the realm of the dramatic arts. In so doing, I seek
to explicate the processes by which both research and dramatization—that is, the
unearthing of knowledge about the social world and the creative process of developing a
theatrical story narrative—work together to inform new realms of discovery and heal
wounds within the psyche and the community.
Feminist scholars conducting international and intercultural research have
critiqued the application of positivist methodologies to these contexts, arguing that such
approaches rely on neo-colonial tropes and incomplete frameworks for “knowing”
(Alcoff, 1991-1992; Harding, 1998; Hegde, 2011; Mohanty, 1991; Tickner, 2001;
Tuhawai Smith, 1999). One of the problems with a positivist approach to research is that
it stems from liberal assumptions that homogenize the potentiality of the individual.
Liberalism assumes experience can be measured according to abstract assumptions that
often “flatten” the lived realities of women in the developing world (Parreñas, 2011),
while reifying the value systems of the Enlightened West (Hesford, 2011).
By contrast, as Donna Haraway (1988) explained, “Feminists have stakes in a
successor science project that offers a more adequate, richer, better account of a world, in
order to live in it well and in critical, reflexive relation to our own as well as others’
practices of domination and the unequal parts of privilege and oppression that make up
all positions” (p. 579). Therefore, to responsibly advance the project of feminist
international research, those of us working in such contexts are tasked with engaging
alternative epistemological frameworks, and becoming attentive to horizontal
relationships between researcher and the “subjects” of our studies.
Arts-oriented practice based research offers an alternative framework for projects
that require such attention. Its emphasis on subjectivity, positionality, embodiment and
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experience work well with feminist research methodology, as this mode of inquiry is also
premised on the refusal of positivist abstraction. Such a refusal is important in
international contexts because of dilemmas centered around the binary concept of self
versus other and the problem of inequality between researcher and subject. Researchers
from the West who wish to conduct their work ethically cannot “measure” the experience
of the “other” effectively without also engaging reflexively in our own subject positions.
Arts-oriented practice based research embraces the ethic of reflexivity.
I address these concerns through my work as both scholar and artist. My goal is to
understand how musical dramatization, as a feminist practice, can disrupt a dominant
discourse and, in so doing, re-orient the agenda of research. As an embodied practice of
communicating the “situated’” knowledge described by Haraway, I argue that music al
theater has the ability to interrupt binary categorizations that have been cemented into a
discourse and trouble the epistemological claims that inform that discourse. As an inroad
into a new type of “knowing,” I seek to build a theoretical and methodological approach
to engaged international research through the preliminary data collection, creative writing
and performance of a musical theatre piece for the community about whom the musical
was written. I call this methodology Dramatization as Research, or DAR.
The vehicle for this project is “Land of Smiles,” a two-act, fifteen song musical
inspired by field research that includes over fifty interviews with sex workers, activists,
NGO employees and other members of the anti-trafficking movement I seek to present
one of the dominant stories about human trafficking, and show that the voices of the
people, most often women, can illuminate the problems and highlight the difficulties in
finding solutions. This artistic project was designed to facilitate communication between
stakeholders in the anti-trafficking space in Thailand and to prime a dialogue to explore
the policies, practices, and outcomes of actions in this environment.
My questions engage the problems of inter-cultural and international research; the
politics of transnational movements seeking to address human rights concerns; the social,
psychic, and political power of musical theater; the production of a musical as a
mediating tool for discourse; and the effect of the visibility of that practice on
participants. I focus on members of the anti-trafficking movement and their
corresponding “beneficiaries”: NGOs and the female migrant laborers and sex workers—
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often migrants from Burma—who the movement constructs as “victims” of a supposed
organized criminal network that sells women into the sex industry against their will. In
my preliminary data collection phase (Phase One), I analyze and problematize the
relationships--often characterized through binary constructions of self versus other, West
versus East and, indeed, positivism versus subjectivity—that, I argue, characterize the
anti-trafficking movement as a discursive field. Through the process of conceptualizing,
writing, and staging the musical (Phase Two), I explore the ways in which dramatization
and research act as reflexive processes, and discuss the ways in which discoveries made
in research contexts and the creation of dramatic narratives are co-constitutive. In
analyzing the discourses generated among audiences following the production in
Thailand (Phase Three), I bring additional subject positions to the fore, and discuss the
experiences of the artists as well as my own position as artist-researcher.
At its core, this project responds to the problematic issue of visibility of the
discursive subject in the anti-trafficking movement. As other scholars have pointed out,
the “trafficking victim” is a problematic subject position in the ever-contested discourse
on trafficking (see Doezema, 2000; Empower Foundation, 2001; Parreñas, 2011). Often,
anti-trafficking actors such as the U.S. Department of State, NGOs, and other advocates
construct identities of victimhood to serve the purpose of upholding their organizations’
abolitionist narratives. In Thailand, the result is that many female migrant laborers who
do not see themselves as victims are nevertheless construed as such, effectively negating
their agency in the discourse. Many NGO narratives about human trafficking utilize
Orientalism and “othering” to reinforce this victim identity among their “beneficiaries.”
Part of the stated concern about human trafficking is the invisibility of women who are
victimized. Ironically, however, it is often the visibility of these women that constitutes
their powerlessness vis-à-vis their victim status.
With this project I ask, “How can musical theater dramatization address these and
other problems within the discourse on trafficking, and how can the creative practice of
dramatization inform further knowledge about the issue?” In answering this question, my
goal is not only to make a contribution to the literature on the discourse on trafficking,
but also to develop a theory and method of communication research that can be replicated
by others who seek to combine interdisciplinary work in the arts and social sciences.
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Research Site
The empirical site for this project is Northern and Central Thailand, with primary
attention paid to anti-trafficking efforts of NGOs, government actors, activist community-
based organizations, and the experiences of migrant laborers (including domestic service,
factory labor and sex work) in Chiang Rai, Mae Sai, Chiang Mai, and Bangkok. Having
been labeled a “source, transit, and destination country” for trafficking in the Mekong
Sub-Region (U.S. Department of State, Office to Monitor and Combat Trafficking in
Persons, 2011), Thailand has gained a reputation for sex tourism, prostitution, and, more
recently, what has come to be thought of as an underground criminal network of
transnational organized crime that fuels human trafficking. Thailand’s reputation for
supporting the sex industry is as old as its diplomatic ties to the United States, dating
back to the “Green Harvest” period on the heels of World War II, in which impoverished
families from the northeast would send their daughters to service American GIs
(Skrobanek, Boonpakdi, & Janthakeero, 1997). A generation later, the Pot Pong district
of Bangkok—a famous commercial sex destination—was created to service American
GI’s in Vietnam visiting Thailand on R&R.
More recently, neoliberal economic policies and a burgeoning tourist industry
have kept Thailand a regional economic hegemon, not coincidentally in tandem with its
reputation as a prostitution hub. Responses from the neo-abolitionist anti-trafficking
movement have sought to “clean up” Thailand by conducting “raid and rescue” efforts in
a stated attempt to “catch” the victims of human trafficking as well as traffickers (See US
Department of State, Office to Monitor and Combat Trafficking in Persons, 2011). I
argue, however, that this agenda is being played out behind the back of a stronger
agenda: namely the neoliberal incentive to keep conditions of women’s migration and
labor unsupported, unstable and exploitative. It is no coincidence, I suggest, that the face
of the anti-trafficking movement works to save the poor “victims” of Thailand’s sex
trade, while all the while, the “race to the bottom” (Harvey, 2005) that has been created
through Western-driven capitalist practices in Thailand grows stronger. Employing a
rhetorical frame that is strengthened and enacted through the performance of paternalistic
and protectionist moralisms (Cheng 2011; Parreñas 2011) the Western anti-trafficking
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movement gains political traction by focusing on “spectacles of suffering” (Hesford,
2011) that distract its audiences away from the “everyday” rights violations of poverty
and other abuses faced by the women who it claims to be rescuing. I show how the
performance of culture, vis-à-vis anti-trafficking policies, practices, and rhetoric,
constitutes the anti-trafficking movement, while I also show how the movement co-opts
(or “trafficks”) culture to normalize the destructive reality it perpetuates.
One of my primary arguments is that sex trafficking in Thailand, as it is currently
understood is largely a construction of the Orientalist imagination (Said, 1979) that, I
argue, problematizes women as a way of deflecting attention away from the grave
realities imposed on them by Western neo-colonial dominance. My conclusions began as
working hypotheses, derived over a two-year period while researching Western and Thai
NGOs and policy makers working to combat trafficking in the Mekong Sub-Region.
Phase One of the research involved conducting interviews with women working in
precarious informal labor situations including sex-work, and some who had become
grassroots activists working outside the purview of the anti-trafficking movement. The
resulting preliminary cross-sectional data indicates that the trafficking narrative, as it is
currently being told by members of the Western-driven anti-trafficking movement, is
largely based on Western subjectivities, and that the actual experiences that get expressed
quite clearly in interviews with women labeled as “trafficking victims” are often
incongruent with the idiom of “modern slavery” (U.S. Department of State, Office to
Monitor and Combat Trafficking in Persons, 2011) that the movement uses to gain
political traction. Furthermore, the women this movement purports to save are often
treated as objects by Western and Thai NGOs and governments, with little attention paid
to their expressed experiences and needs. Such objectification is a familiar problem of
Western policies, particularly those rooted in the “white slave” panic of the early
twentieth century designed to aid women in the developing world (see Ackerly, 2000;
Derks, 2005; Harding, 1998; Mohanty, 2003; Reanda, 1991; Tickner, 2001; Tuhiwai
Smith, 1999).
Phases of the Project
This project draws on preliminary research, conducted in 2011-2012 about the trafficking
of women in Thailand and my skills developed over a twenty-year career working as a
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composer, musician and playwright. My interest in issues of trafficking stemmed from
data collected informally in 2009 and 2010 during my studies in the Master of Public
Diplomacy program at USC, where I focused on cultural diplomacy and US-Thailand
relations. Following this, I conducted a formal study in the doctoral program in summer,
2011, which generated data on the cultural underpinnings and Orientalist tropes used in
Western NGO narratives of human trafficking in Thailand. I then conducted follow-up
studies in December, 2011, and December, 2012, interviewing sex workers, female
migrant laborers and trafficking survivors to assess their experiences with anti-trafficking
policy. The results of this data collection comprise Phase One of my dissertation.
I then spent the 2012 calendar year writing and composing “Land of Smiles,”
which dramatizes the preliminary data collection findings of Phase One. A first draft of
the script and score was completed in September, 2012. Two staged readings were held:
the first at the Edgemar Center for the Arts in Santa Monica in late 2012, and the second
at University of Southern California in early 2013. Observational field notes were taken
during this process. This data will inform the basis for a discussion of the process by
which I turned the preliminary research findings into a dramatic musical.
The final phase of the project involved producing a workshop of the musical in
Chiang Mai, Thailand, in December 2013. The performances were geared toward an
audience of the same participant groups who took part in my preliminary research.
Following the performances, focus groups were conducted with employees from anti-
trafficking NGOs, ethnic minority migrants from Burma, and the artists who participated
in the production. The discourses produced in the focus groups that followed the
performances shed light on the utility of the musical as a communication intervention in
the discourse on trafficking, and a platform for dialogue on issues of human rights
witnessing.
Below, I will discuss each of the three phases of the project in detail and provide a
chapter breakdown.
Phase One:
Preliminary Research on Thailand’s Anti-Trafficking Movement
Over the past two decades a movement to combat the trafficking of women in Thailand
and the greater Mekong Sub-Region has gained momentum. Driven largely by the United
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States, this anti-trafficking movement has engaged the resources of the Thai government
as well as a plethora of non-governmental actors to mobilize around an issue that many
believe is growing exponentially. While a recent ILO report cites the numbers of
trafficking victims in Southeast Asia as upwards of 200,000 (Farr, 2005), the UN Inter-
Agency Project on Human Trafficking (UNIAP) reported that Thai authorities deport
over 23,000 Cambodian trafficking victims per year (US Department of State, Office to
Monitor and Combat Trafficking in Persons, 2011). The policies designed to aid the anti-
trafficking agenda in Thailand have been the subject of important criticism, particularly
in the framework of debates between neo-abolitionist feminists who see prostitution as a
key link to trafficking and therefore seek its abolishment (Barry, 1995; Jeffries, 1997;
MacKinnon, 2007) and pro-rights feminists who argue that trafficking and prostitution
are not conceptually linked and that implementing improved working conditions for sex
workers would alleviate the dangers associated with this work (Bindman & Doezema,
1996; Doezema, 2001; Doezema & Kempadoo, 1998; O’Connell Davidson, 1998). Other
important critiques of the anti-trafficking movement discuss the lack of rights-based
approaches to anti-trafficking policy (Pickering, Milivojevic, & Seagrave, 2009; Global
Alliance Against Trafficking in Women, 2010; 2011); the silencing of women’s voices
within the movement (Pickering, et al., 2009; Skrobanek, 2003); the problems with anti-
prostitution legislation (Chueng, 2006); and the rhetorical construction of victimhood in
human rights discourse (Hesford, 2011; Doezema, 2000; Brennan, 2005; Bosworth,
Dempsey, & Hoyle, 2011; Parreñas 2011).
Phase One of my project examines the role that normative values plays in shaping
the anti-trafficking movement’s narratives about trafficking and corresponding policies to
combat trafficking in Thailand. The overriding question in this section is, “In what ways
and with what consequences are the contradictory approaches taken by anti-trafficking
actors in Thailand influenced by normative values, and how are such values used as a
source of power in the anti-trafficking movement?” A framework of “moral
performance” is used to answer this question, as I examine how culture shapes the
“spectacularized rhetoric” (Hesford, 2011) of the anti-trafficking movement and is
“performed” (i.e., communicated and presented in a way that deliberately sways the
emotions of the viewer and creates a “spectacle”) by its members, often with disastrous
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consequences for the women they are working to serve. Drawing on field research that
includes fifty-four interviews with policy makers, NGO employees, government officials,
activist community-based organizations, immigration officers, members of the Royal
Thai police, and, most critically, female migrant laborers, sex workers, and trafficking
survivors themselves, I explore the cultural values and practices that underpin the
movement and its responses to the constructed idea (i.e., artificially manufactured notion
put in place to deal with a whole complex of other problems) of trafficking. I argue that
the communication of the movement’s agendas, policies and practices is rooted in the
intersecting and often colliding norms of the United States and Thailand, and I suggest
that these normative values are the primary forces that drive the movement.
Following a discussion of my theoretical framework (Chapter 1) and methodology
(Chapter 2), in Chapter 3 I provide background on the movement in Thailand, situating it
in the context of two dominant national identity frames—“Thailand’s National Identity
Project” and the “U.S. Abolitionist Project.” The trafficking of women in Thailand is
enacted through what I call Thailand’s “National Identity Project”—a project that began
in the twentieth century under the auspices of modernization and transformed under the
rise of globalization and influx of neoliberal economic policies. This long trajectory of
nation-building is rooted in culture and incorporates “othering”—practices in which elite
Thais construct an identity of “Thai-ness” that is positioned in contrast to that of ethnic
minorities and a rural populous. With the advent of globalization and the rise of an influx
of migrants from neighboring Burma in the 1990s, Thailand’s National Identity Project
was augmented to incorporate the “othering” of irregular, unskilled laborers, including
sex workers. In tandem, the U.S. was embarking on a cultural project of its own—what I
call the “U.S. Abolitionist Project”—the international exporting of the radical feminist
and right-wing agendas of eradicating prostitution. The collision and intersection of these
two projects, and the cultural tensions occurring therein created a “perfect storm”: while
Thailand’s National Identity Project gave rise to conditions of labor exploitation and
trafficking, the U.S. Abolitionist Project, in the form of the anti-trafficking movement,
sought to eradicate it. This “storm,” however, created political tensions between
Thailand and the U.S., with Thailand refusing to adhere to the anti-trafficking agenda
prescribed by the U.S. Moreover, it served as a mask for U.S. complicity in a neoliberal
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development agenda that would end up harming the very women the anti-trafficking
movement sought to rescue.
Contrary to the assertions of the U.S. State Department Trafficking In Persons
Report (U.S. Department of State, Office to Monitor and Combat Trafficking in Persons,
2011), I do not argue that trafficking in Thailand has gotten worse in this chapter, nor do
I present an argument that dwells on the abuses suffered by women in conditions of
exploitative labor situations. Real as these circumstances may be, many noteworthy and
important studies have already documented these abuses (see Parreñas 2011; Pickering,
Milivojevic, & Seagrave, 2009; Skrobanek, Boonpakdi, & Janthakeero,1997).
Furthermore, as the definition and understanding of what constitutes trafficking is
different in every advocacy case, and is highly politicized, thus leading to a
fragmentation of understanding what trafficking actually is, the debates therein are
important data points in themselves. This makes it virtually impossible to quantify
whether and how trafficking has grown in tandem with globalization.
What I argue, instead, is that the changes brought by globalization and its parallel
process, neoliberalism—changes that have occurred in Thailand and impacted
surrounding countries in the Mekong Sub-Region—have set the stage for a new level of
vulnerability to befall female labor migrants who pour into Thailand from “source
countries” such as Burma. The goal of this chapter, then, is to disentangle the conditions
that underlie the circumstance of migration, and show how these conditions, as “push
factors,” contribute to a scenario in which women are vulnerable to labor exploitation.
In Chapter 4, I turn my focus to the “saviors” in the anti-trafficking drama: the
private and state-funded NGOs that seek to tackle the issue of trafficking in collaboration
with an array of state and civil society actors. Taking as my premise the idea that NGOs
are neoliberal actors operating in a rhetorical purpose of “narrating the problems” of the
developing world to the West, I focus this chapter on the communications strategies used
by NGO employees in Thailand to narrate the problem of trafficking. I draw on
interviews with twenty anti-trafficking NGO employees in Thailand to illustrate the use
of narrative as a tool for communicating cultural norms and values. Evoking the concept
of “moral performance,” I assess the way anti-trafficking NGO employees collectively
construct a dominant narrative, or “story” about trafficking. This narrative relies on
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Western ideas about modernization, Orientalism and “othering,” and engages a moralistic
debate about consensual versus voluntary sex-work in the anti-trafficking movement, for
its maintenance. I argue that the narrative used by the employees is formulated from and
enacted through culture and I conceptualize culture as a “space of safety,” a place to
which employees ritualistically retreat in order to manage their daily activities.
Chapter 5 draws on interviews with female migrant sex workers, community-
based organization activists and anti-trafficking NGO employees to argue for a feminist
re-imagining of Thailand’s “Smart Raid” policy. Enacted as a consequence of abolitionist
legislation under the Bush Administration (and bolstered in response to Thailand’s Tier 2
Watch List downgrade in the State Department’s 2011 Trafficking in Persons Report),
Smart Raids, while designed to help victims of sex trafficking, in fact have a detrimental
affect on the very women they are intended to help. These raids penalize consensual sex
workers while reinforcing a victim-versus-criminal binary and a gendered construction of
citizenship that does real harm to female migrant laborers and sex workers regardless of
whether of not they are victims of human trafficking. Incorporating theories of
transnational feminism, gender and citizenship and important prior critiques of anti-
trafficking policy, I argue for a feminist re-imagining of anti-trafficking policy that puts
the expressed views, concerns and experiences of female migrant laborers and sex
workers at the center of analysis.
In Chapter 6 I conclude the presentation of my preliminary research with an
examination of strategies employed by the anti-trafficking movements’ “outliers”:
community-based organizations (CBOs) in Thailand who provide support to female
migrant laborers through engaging in participatory, rather than top-down approaches to
trafficking. Central to the visions of these self-organizing groups is a resistance to
structures of dominance and impractical solutions employed by the anti-trafficking
movement. Based on fieldwork in 2011 comprising over 30 interviews with migrant
community organizers, sex workers union members and most critically, female migrant
laborers and sex workers themselves, I argue that the communication strategies employed
by “outlier” actors are giving rise to new “cultures of resistance.” Drawing on feminist
research methodologies, liberation psychology and participatory methodology I argue
that migrant-led CBOs use their informal status in Thailand to build solidarity with
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potential trafficking victims in creative ways unavailable within the formal, state-
legitimized structure of the anti-trafficking movement.
Phase Two:
Creating the Musical “Land of Smiles”
In Phase Two, I illustrate the process by which I developed the musical “Land of Smiles”
as a vehicle for communicating my preliminary research findings. Included in this section
(as an appendix) is the script and performance video of the two-act, fifteen-song musical.
“Land of Smiles” dramatizes a story about the trafficking of women in Thailand, as seen
through the eyes of sex workers, grassroots activists, NGO employees, and other
members of the anti-trafficking movement. The musical presents a critical look at how
the story about trafficking is told, and shows that finding a solution to this problem is
even more complicated than it seems.
The story focuses on the aftermath of a brothel raid in Chiang Rai, Northern
Thailand. Lipoh, a young Kachin (ethnic minority) migrant from Burma, seems to be
underage, making her an automatic “trafficking victim” according to anti-trafficking
policy. Emma Gable, an NGO case worker from Cedar Falls, Indiana, is sent to prepare
Lipoh to be a witness in a trial to prosecute her trafficker. Emma must convince Lipoh to
be the person everyone sees: a trafficking victim. But Lipoh is unwilling to cooperate.
She insists that she is eighteen, and was working in the brothel willingly. Not only that—
she wants to go back to that work. What transpires is a journey into Thailand’s anti-
trafficking movement—a world burdened with politics, morality and the rhetoric of
human rights. Through hearing Lipoh’s story, Emma discovers that grave atrocities are
being committed against the Kachin people of Burma. But these atrocities are
overshadowed by a narrative about trafficking that serves the needs of the anti-trafficking
movement rather than the women it is trying to help.
“Land of Smiles” responds to the discourse on human trafficking by
problematizing the subject position of the “victim” through the character Lipoh. The
story explores the way the U.S. and Thai NGOs supporting Lipoh rely on her constructed
victimization in order to secure the prosecution of Lipoh’s supposed “traffickers.” As the
narrative unfolds, however, the audience discovers that Lipoh does not see herself as a
voiceless, agency-less trafficking victim. Rather, she shares emotional, social, financial,
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and political bonds with both her “carrier” – the woman who transported her from Burma
into Thailand—and her “Mama San”—the owner of the brothel where she worked. Far
from experiencing her situation as oppressive, or akin to conditions of slavery, Lipoh
finds strength in her relationships with her supposed “traffickers,” and will do anything to
protect them.
Such a contradictory understanding represents what Joan Scott (1991) described
as “a corrective to oversights resulting from inaccurate or incomplete vision” (p. 24) in
positivist research. As a storyteller, by making Lipoh’s experience visible, I challenge the
normative construction of the trafficking victim. Subjugated kinds of knowledge, that is,
knowledge of the research “subject”—deal with histories that have been obscured,
buried, hidden and considered to be naive and low ranking. By privileging Lipoh’s
perspective over that of the dominant narrative in the discourse on trafficking, I give
primacy to the situated knowledges of the sex workers and female migrant laborers who I
interviewed in Thailand.
The goal of the musical was, therefore, to “write back” at the dominant ideologies
that inform the narrative of the anti-trafficking movement. I situate this goal in the
context of Tuhawai Smith (1999) and Mohanty’s (2003) discussion of “researching
back”; that is, developing research practices and agendas that counter colonial narratives
about indigenous communities and re-orient perspectives formulated within neo-colonial
frameworks. Such a process attempts to counter hegemonic structures that, under the
guise of advancing academic knowledge, reinforce notions of marginalized groups being
“less than,” “other than” or otherwise problematized in relation to their Western
counterparts.
In writing “Land of Smiles” I sought to expose the Orientalist tropes, contested
debates between abolitionist and regulationist views on prostitution, issues of feminized
labor exploitation and statelessness and modernization theories that frame human rights
advocacy work in the developing world. Through writing the musical, I sought to turn
dominant perspectives on their heads by exposing the counter-narratives that are seldom
voiced and rarely incorporated into anti-trafficking policy. Such an activist project was
intended to give voice to pluralistic perspectives and, in so doing, disrupt—or at least
cause questioning among—those who have the power to re-orient anti-trafficking policy
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and adopt a more holistic approach to implementing solutions.
In Chapter 7, I describe my creative process of conceptualizing the musical, and I
further explicate my theory of Dramatization as Research (DAR). I argue that qualitative
social science research and creative dramatization can, in fact, be reflexive processes that
inform the generation of knowledge in new and important ways. I deconstruct this
process by looking at the specific tools used to dramatize the musical, and the subsequent
questions and discoveries this process of dramatization provoked. In so doing, I describe
the minutia of DAR and present a road map for other researcher-artists who seek to
utilize this method.
In Chapter 8, I discuss the process by which I drew on the Phase One interviews to
“find” the dramatic story of the musical, and turn this story into scenes and songs. I
explore the way narrative frameworks and what I call “power moments” lent themselves
to the dramatization process, and illustrate the important interviews that led to the process
of writing key scenes. I discuss the creation of characters, the materiality of the creative
process, the logic of the “natural story” (Braun, 2010).
In Chapter 9, I illustrate the way the first staged readings, or presentations, of the
musical informed further research on the subject matter, and how the theatrical
development process of collaboration between artists, researchers, and audience serves as
a foundation for the practice of DAR. Following the Chapter 8 discussion of the way in
which script development and the research process formed co-constitutive processes, here
I focus on the auditions, rehearsals, and performances as processes of discovery that led
to further questions in the research. Drawing on field notes captured during this process,
I discuss issues of liveness, liminality and embodiment and creative collaboration to
further explicate the reflexive nature of the DAR method.
Phase Three:
Production in Thailand
Phase Three of the project brings together the prior analyses with a discussion of the
production of the musical in Thailand. Through this final study, I analyze discourses
produced in focus groups that followed the performances and identifying the
subjectivities that were recovered through these discourses. Specifically, I show how
tenets of “participatory practice”—a core aspect of liberation psychology—were
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demonstrated within the participant discourses, and I argue that these practices serve as
cornerstones of the DAR method.
Phase Three involved assembling a team of artists and researchers to travel to
Thailand in fall of 2013 to stage a performance of “Land of Smiles” for members of the
anti-trafficking and female migrant laborer communities in Chiang Mai (the primary site
of the preliminary research). The goal of the performance was to foster dialogue between
participants around the discourse on human trafficking by presenting a dramatic
reflection of the lived experiences of women in the region. The analysis of the focus
group narratives centered around whether and how the musical provided an emotional
experience, gave life to the devastating and complicated issues in the anti-trafficking
movement, and primed the participants to creatively investigate this narrative for its
multiple interpretations. The goals of Phase Three were also to learn from these
discussions and enrich the attendees and the researchers’ understanding of the issues and
possible solutions.
The performative nature of human rights discourse suggests the need for an
equally dramatic interventionist approach. While performance theorist Judith Butler
suggested, “The theater is a place where one may (somewhat safely) scrutinize the
abject—a feature that renders it…less powerful (Butler 1990, qtd in Shimikawa 2002 p.
19), Karen Shimikawa contrarily argued that the theater can de-stabilize characteristics of
rigidity: “Although the theatrical occasion may, in one sense, render the presentation of
the abject ‘safe,’ the theatre can also function to destabilize the rigid categories of self/
other, subject/ object/abject—not only on a self-consciously fictive… level but on an
experiential one as well” (2002: 19).
In Phase Three, I show how musical theater, as a live medium, has the ability to
bring participants into the present and challenge normative ideologies. Focusing on the
tropes of victimhood and rescue that emerge so dominantly in the anti-trafficking
discourse, I illuminate the way in which the discourses produced after participants
witnessed the musical deepened in comparison to those generated in the preliminary data
collection phase (Phase One). I then explore emerging themes in the discourses,
discussing how aspects of the participants’ responses were rupturing, proactive,
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consciousness-raising, dialogical and performative—criteria that I suggest form the basis
for a successful DAR intervention.
In line with my conceptualization of DAR as a “participatory practice” in which
all members of a community contribute to the generation of knowledge, in Phase Three, I
analyze not only the discourses produced among members of the anti-trafficking
community, but also those of the artists themselves. This method responds to problems of
the Western scholar’s positional location in international research: Drawing on the
narratives that emerged in the focus groups, I discuss issues of subjectivity, positionality,
agency, and trauma, and argue that musical theater, as a live, embodied medium can be
used as an interventionist strategy in human rights witnessing and human rights research
itself.
Chapters 10, 11, and 12 present the discourses that emerged in the focus groups
that followed these performances. I discuss the themes that emerged from the focus group
data and compare and contrast these themes from the data generated by the original
interviews. I found that overall, NGO employees, female migrants, and artistic staff
became more aware of the roles they play within the anti-trafficking “rescue industry,”
and were able to critically evaluate those roles. Normative conceptions about
victimization and rescue, the role of the West, and agency/ subjectivity among sex
workers were challenged.
In Chapters 13, 14, and 15 I go on to discuss the way “participatory practice” was
enacted on the part of the NGO employees, migrant laborers, and artists in the emerging
discourses. To frame participatory practice, I return to the literature on liberation
psychology, trauma theory, performance studies and feminist theory, and I explore
aspects of the focus group narratives that were proactive, rupturing, dialogical,
consciousness-raising and performative.
Definition of Terms
Much of this research represents an attempt to “get underneath” the rhetorical
frameworks used to describe and discuss trafficking—particularly those used to frame
women in certain subject positions that may or may not represent their actual
experiences. The State Department, relying on research and data almost solely generated
by NGOs with strong framing agendas, utilizes the term “victim” to characterize female
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laborers thought to be caught in trafficking situations. Other NGOs, attempting more
sensitivity and nuance, use the term “survivor.” Here, I problematize both labels, as each
responds rhetorically to a framework constructed by the anti-trafficking movement, rather
than the women themselves. Rather than reinforcing the anti-trafficking movement’s
rhetoric, I sought to find a more neutral way of referring to women to whom the
movement responds: female workers. NGOs working in other sectors sometimes call this
population (or, more accurately, set of overlapping populations) “vocational migrants,” or
“sex workers.” These terms, however, sometimes exclude nuances of exploitation that
are, in fact, vital to our understanding of what the anti-trafficking movement is
attempting to identify. Therefore, I will use the term female migrant laborers to refer to
women who have been, are, or could potentially be perceived and labeled as trafficking
victims/survivors. As I will show, this group represents women from various populations
and sectors with multiple interests, goals, and needs. However, since what is common is
their labor and their gender, I refer to them by what I hope is a more neutral term.
Additionally, “survivors” refers to women who have endured labor exploitation
related to the process of migrating from Burma into Thailand in search of work, or who
have been coerced into prostitution unwillingly. These victims identify with having
experienced exploitation and, in some cases, call this exploitation “trafficking.”
Importantly, this term is employed when the individuals referred to have been assisted by
an organization in some way that is meaningful to them.
“Female Migrants” are women who travel from Burma to Thailand in search of
work. Often these women are tasked with providing for families in home villages and
communities who rely on their labor as a means of survival.
“Potential Trafficking Victims” are women in precarious situations whose
experiences of coercion, exploitation, or abuse within their migratory journeys could be
viewed (but has not necessarily been deemed) as “trafficking” under the definition of the
2000 Palermo Protocol. While acknowledging that they have experienced some form of
exploitation, these individuals did not necessarily regard themselves as victims at the
time the research was conducted.
“Participatory Practice” invokes a body of scholarship known as “Participatory
Action Research.” This methodology seeks to engage communities in the research
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process alongside the “researcher,” with the goal of fostering horizontalism, partnership
and trust in the relationship therein.

!

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Chapter 1
Theorizing Dramatization as Research

The discourse on trafficking exists within a highly contested framework in which
trafficking is narrated through the lens of Western advocates seeking to eradicate it,
rather than from the perspectives of the women—the supposed “victims”—who anti-
trafficking policy affects. Taking this as my premise, my goal was to develop a
communication intervention that would recover the narrative of the “voiceless” female
migrants whom Western advocates have been “speaking for” within anti-trafficking
discourse. Such an endeavor was, at first, simply instinctual—I knew, from having
worked in the arts over many years, that the theatrical medium has the power to sway
audiences, create authentic connections between individuals, and change the way
discourses about contested subjects unfold. Such embodied, “tacit” knowledge (Haraway,
1992) was instrumental in my ability to conceive of a project that addressed both
scholarly and artistic pursuits.
What follows, therefore, is a framework for understanding the role of the arts as
an interventionist tool in the anti-trafficking discourse. I propose a way of understanding
how musical theater can be used to “recover” the trafficking narrative from those in the
anti-trafficking movement who have been steering this narrative to their benefit, and I
suggest that the creative process itself has the potential to foster the generation of new
knowledge about the issue of trafficking. In so doing, I explicate a theory that is also a
method—one I call Dramatization as Research, or DAR.
The goal of the project was to evaluate the impact of the musical on the original
participants in my preliminary data collection phase, according to the framework of
“liberation arts” proposed by Watkins & Shulman, 2008. Belenky, Bond, & Weinstock
(1997) argued that, in order for a tradition to survive, it must be named. In the process of
naming Dramatization as Research, I seek to give it contours so that it may be replicated
by other artist-researchers who seek to combine their work in these seemingly disparate
realms. Part of these contours requires developing criteria for evaluation of the project’s
impact. Therefore, drawing from the tradition of liberation arts, my goals were as
follows:
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1. To assess whether and how NGO employees, migrant laborers, and artistic staff
became more aware of the roles they play within the anti-trafficking “rescue
industry,” and whether and how they critically evaluated those roles.
2. To assess whether and how normative conceptions about victimization and
rescue, as well as the role of the West and agency/ subjectivity were challenged.
3. To assess whether and how “participatory practice” was demonstrated by all
three participant groups according to Watkins and Shulman’s (2008) evaluative
criteria.
I begin this chapter by discussing the necessity for such a method—why the need
exists to respond to the dominant trafficking narrative in a new and innovative way.
Drawing on liberation psychology, trauma studies, performance studies, feminist and
post-colonial theories, I illustrate musical theater’s unique potential to support liberation
among oppressed populations in contexts where their voices are silenced, and suggest
that the arts may play an interventionist role in unearthing collective traumas and
bringing commonalities to the fore. I then conceptualize the idea of “writing back” at the
dominant narrative employed by members of the Western anti-trafficking movement: a
narrative that perpetuates Orientalist constructs, tropes of victimhood, and a rescue
ideology more beneficial to Western advocates than to the female trafficking survivors
they are working to serve. From here, I discuss other methodological approaches to arts-
based interventionist strategies, including Participatory Action Research (PAR) and
Practice-Based Research (PBR), and provide overviews on the strengths and weaknesses
of these frameworks. Finally, I build a new conceptual framework for arts-based
interventions in human rights witnessing.
Social Catastrophe, Collective Trauma and the Arts
Research in the areas of liberation psychology and trauma studies describe “social
catastrophe” as a breakdown of the ability of a community to respond collectively to their
own trauma (Caruth, 1996; Martin-Baro, 1994; Santner, 2001; Watkins and Shulman,
2008). Such breakdowns create a rupture in our sense of self-identity and community and
augment systemic social inequalities. As Watkins and Shulman (2008) explained, rather
than coming together as “witnesses” who collectively identify with the trauma and seek
resolution for their part in it, community members often instead become “bystanders,”
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simply watching the trauma unfold from afar without taking ownership of their role in
having created or perpetuated it. Bystanding, the authors explained, has the effect of
fragmenting communities, and further isolating individuals who are not aware that they
play a role in the community’s collective experience. Additionally, as Hesford (2011)
discussed, the inability of community members to respond to a human rights crisis by
accepting their collective involvement can reinforce neocolonial hegemonic practices,
even among those who seek to advocate for victims of human rights atrocities.
An example of one such human rights crisis is the trafficking of women in
Thailand. As I have already explained, the issue of trafficking is narrated and constructed
as a development “problem” by Western advocates who seek to “solve” it. I argue,
however, that while the Western anti-trafficking movement positions trafficking in
Thailand as the problem of the third world “other,” in fact the West is complicit in the
construction and enactment of this human rights issue, due to neoliberal practices that the
West has introduced to the region that have resulted in the booming industry of sex
tourism. Because of Western complicity, I suggest, trafficking in Thailand is also “our”
problem—meaning that the West is equally caught in the social catastrophe that underlies
this human rights crisis.
Many members of the Western anti-trafficking movement, however, have not
accepted that trafficking, and the issues of inequality that underlie it are collective
processes. In avoiding this acceptance, members of the movement “detach” from the
complicity that they are, in fact, enacting. This results in the West’s continued narration
of the problem of trafficking from the perspective of “bystander” rather than engaged
“witness.”
The tendency for community members to be “bystanders,” rather than “witnesses”
in experiences of collective trauma necessitates the development of an intervention that
would raise the awareness and spark the consciousness of all members of the community.
While many types of interventions may be used to address such crises, I suggest that
musical theater, as an embodied practice can provide a unique opportunity for healing on
personal and community levels and serve as a mechanism for confronting conditions of
bystanding that underlie social catastrophe. Indeed, this art form can also contribute to
the process of conducting human rights research.
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Expanding on this notion of embodied experience, I suggest that musical theater,
as a live medium, has the ability to bring us into present and challenge our normative
ideologies. Theories of feminist performance studies contribute to this discussion. As Jill
Dolan (2005) explained, in the theater, audiences must share their experiences with others
in the room, thereby de-stabilizing their own “fixidity” to the cultural product itself.
There is a politics at play in the live-ness of this medium; indeed, the stakes are higher for
audiences participating in a theatrical performance than other forms of mediated
communication, as live-ness necessitates a willingness to participate and engage with
others, thereby allowing the perspectives of all participants to be “in dialogue”-- even if
only by virtue of being in the room with other human beings. Unlike film, television, and
online communication, which are often witnessed in isolation or passivity, theatre
necessitates the presence of an audience, or “community.” It is the presence of this
community that informs theater’s power to play a constructively de-stabilizing role in any
given discourse.
As a feminist praxis, DAR calls for a more complex and positional form of inquiry on
the part of researcher. In such projects, researcher-artist must bring her own subjectivity,
embodied experience to the work, thereby engaging in a stronger emotional,
psychological, and political investment. The interrogation I am concerned with is not of
the subject as “other;” rather, it is the researcher’s own “I” that I wish to deconstruct via
the process of engaged practice. My vision is of a method that does not position the
researcher-artist as being on one side of this binary, but rather requires the continuous
disappearing-reappearing act of researcher-as-performer in her own drama, her own
process of unearthing knowledge. In both implicating and enacting the discovery process
itself, the researcher-artist engages in a type of witnessing that requires a profound sense
of vulnerability-- a willingness to interrogate her own process of change.
In line with a Foucaultian vision of discourse (1977), in DAR the silent spaces are
interrogated in order to unearth what exists “below the surface level” of the research
agenda. Here, the goals of research are not entirely known until they are discovered
through the creative process of uncovering and communicating the dramatic narrative.
This notion troubles the idea that women’s visibility is, in itself, liberating-- that in order
to be “free,” all a woman must do is be seen. As Phelan explains, however, visibility has
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followed a line of identity politics that has reinscribed the surveillance and objectification
of women. She explained that for women, being seen has taken place within a “an
unequal political, linguistic, and psychic field,” in which the “unmarked” woman is
rendered “Other.” (1993, p. 16). Hegde (2011) echoed this notion in her discussion of
visibility, explaining that in rendering a woman “visible” she is subjected to the very
binary categorizations that essentialize and problematize her, particularly in transnational
contexts (p. 2).
Conversely, the goal of DAR is not to re-articulate the potentially destructive act
of imposing visibility on female research subjects in ways that essentialize their
experience. Rather, the project is to unearth the complexities related to visibility of the
“subject” through making the problems themselves visible, and through interrogating the
theatrical practice of creative representation itself. In other words, the onus in this method
is not on the “subject” to “become” visible, but on the researcher-practitioner to
reflexively represent, through an embodied praxis, the “sub-altern” (Spivak, 1988)
experiences of the subject vis-à-vis the artistic project. Performativity thus becomes
encapsulated in the drama of the research project itself, relieving the “subject” of being
acted upon, inscribed upon, or at the mercy of a dominant Western “gaze.” In this way,
DAR becomes an inherently feminist praxis.
“Spectacularization” and human rights witnessing
Literature on liberation psychology and human rights witnessing provides a further
foundation for the discussion of theatre’s social utility. Wendy S. Hesford (2011)
explained that the communicative practices of human rights discourses often rely on a
power imbalance between the spectator and the “spectacle,” or subject, of the human
rights abuse. Hesford implicated the audience in such abuses, explaining that often
spectators are portrayed as the “holders of rights”—adopting the position, by virtue of
their gazing upon the subjects of the human rights violation, of bestowing rights, justice,
or morality on those subjects. Hesford called this “process of bestowing” a power
imbalance, sometimes laden with a multiplicity of meanings and politicized agendas, and,
at other times, merely an unconscious manifestation of larger structures of social,
cultural, national power inequities playing out within the human rights discourse itself.
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Hesford suggested that spectacularization incorporates a “glossing over” of
Western assumptions, experiences, and prejudices in an attempt to draw conclusions
about problems in the developing world. Performance exists both in art and in life, in the
construction of a story and the swaying of an audience’s emotion about the story’s
content. Spectacularization is, therefore, present both in cultural products (theatre, film,
literature) as well as in the discourses and narratives used to frame human rights atrocities
and traumas.
Spectacularization occurs, I argue, when underlying traumas are not fully voiced
and unearthed but rather, are “spoken for,” manipulated and co-opted by those who have
not experienced the traumatic event. A need exists to disentangle the difference between
the trauma itself and the mechanisms by which advocates represent that trauma;
recognizing the many layers that come into play in the narratives that are constructed
around it. In the anti-trafficking movement, trauma is objectified by advocates in their
discussions and representations of trafficking “victims.” Such rhetorical moves serve to
reinforce values and agendas of the Western advocates while obscuring our
understanding of the range of causes and experiences of trafficking (Bosworth, Dempsey
and Hoyle, 2011).
I argue that the failure to allow for nuance in the discourse on trafficking and the
insistence on the rigid subject position of the “victim” is due to a failure, on the part of
Western advocates, to reconcile the intersecting trauma experiences and collective social
catastrophes that advocates and survivors share. Supporting this idea, literature on trauma
theory and liberation psychologies provides an important inroad into understanding the
nexus at which trauma and advocacy intersect. According to Watkins and Shulman
(2008) “collective trauma,” is a phenomenon in which the “the victim is not a sole
individual but a whole group” (p. 14). Since such forms of cultural trauma are not merely
rooted in individual suffering, but in social processes, they can only be remedied by
“psychological practices that can repair the bonds among people as well as the narrative
threads of an individual life history” (p. 14). This understanding of the social nature of
psychology is echoed by Martin-Baro (1994), who suggested that psychology should
address social processes rather than focusing on the individual (p. 37). Supporting this,
Vera and Speigh emphasized the need for psychologists’ “willingness to address
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oppression beyond the traditional individualistic purview of applied psychology and an
expanded notion of ethical duty that incorporates a responsibility to work for the
liberation of oppressed peoples” (Vera and Speigh , 2004, qtd. in Smith et al. 2009: 14),
and Smith pointed out that accepting the limits of traditional therapy is akin to accepting
the conditions of oppression (p. 23).
As Watkins and Shulman (2008) discussed, theater has the ability to augment the
“liminality” and interstitial realities that characterize the undertones of everyday life.
Theater helps us unearth the true uncertainty of identity that characterizes the human,
lived experience. As a testimonial practice, theater bears witness to the subjective
experiences of characters who sing what can’t be spoken. Liminality is present in the
audience’s unique situatedness in relationship to these characters: we are able to be in the
heads of many people at the same time. In this context, music-theater provides an arena
of empathy—a space to experience the realities of both characters through the visceral
emotive process of their self-expression. Theater “holds” liminal space for the audience,
allowing us to suspend the impulse to draw fixed conclusions that separate us from the
characters onstage.
Watkins and Shulman further explained that counter-narratives serve as
witnessing techniques. They are an essential aspect of combating social catastrophe and
fostering restoration and renewal, not only among oppressed populations, but among
those doing the oppressing. In the case of human trafficking in Thailand, the “witnesses”
to the human rights atrocity of trafficking comprise not only the female trafficking
“victims and survivors” and their corresponding abusers, but also the advocates working
to remedy this situation in the form of rescuing, rehabilitating the “victims,” and
prosecuting trafficking cases through the judicial system. As members of this movement,
their experiences intersect with those of the people who enact trafficking scenarios,
forming what liberation psychology would call a “collective” understanding of the issue.
It is within this collective context that I seek to unpack, disentangle, and understand the
nuances of these relationships and offer strategies for dialogue within them.
“Writing Back” against the dominant trafficking narrative
Feminist post-colonial researchers Linda Tuhiwai Smith (1999) and Chandra Talpade
Mohanty (2003) discussed the concept of “researching back” in international feminist
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work. “Researching back,” according to the authors, involves developing research
practices that counter dominant narratives about indigenous communities and re-orient
perspectives that have been formulated within colonial or neo-colonial frameworks. Such
a process attempts to combat hegemonic structures that, under the guise of advancing
academic knowledge, reinforce notions of indigenous communities being “less than,”
“other than” or in some way problematized in relation to their Western counterparts.
In conceptualizing a framework for an arts-based intervention in the anti-
trafficking discourse, I sought to follow this spirit of “researching back.” As an artist, I
sought to “write back” against the Western act of viewing the trafficking of women in
Thailand by creating a musical that would expose, rather than replicate the normative
tropes of victimhood and rescue that commonly characterize the anti-trafficking industry.
I sought to use music-theater to unpack the speculation-stance, and problematize not
women who are trafficking “victims”—the predominant “subjects” of the well-meaning
West—but rather, the gaze itself: the lens through which Western actors see (and
consume) this human rights abuse.
Feminist Theory as Frame
To explicate my theory of DAR, I draw on feminist notions of positionality, situated
knowledge, postcolonial feminism, the feminist research ethic and critiques of the role of
the state on women’s lives. These frameworks inform the ethical approach that I suggest
artist-researchers take in designing and implementing DAR projects.
Positionality and situated knowledge
Linda Alcoff’s (1988) discussion of cultural feminism versus post structural feminism led
her to define the idea of positionality: a material, politically engaged, dynamic practice in
which “one’s identity is taken (and defined) as a political point of departure, as a
motivation for action, and as a delineation of one’s politics” (376). Alcoff united feminist
positionality with post-colonial theory, saying “When women become feminists, the
crucial thing that has occurred is not that they have learned any new facts about the world
but that they have come to view those facts from a different position, from their own
position as subjects. When colonial subjects begin to be critical of the formerly imitative
attitude they had toward the colonists, what is happening is that they begin to identify
with the colonized rather than the colonizers” (378).
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Alcoff interrogated what she saw as the problems in speaking for others; i.e.,
claiming to give voice to a marginalized person or group of people while simultaneously,
unknowingly or perhaps even deliberately attempting to advance’s one own position of
power, and in so doing committing an act of violence against that person or group of
people. In so doing, she unpacked the problems with not speaking, which she identified
as a trend in recent (feminist) scholarly discourse and which, she suggested, further
reinscribes meaning onto the discourse at hand. Unsurprisingly, to Alcoff, location within
discourse is everything. But it is what is done with this location that renders the what and
how of the speech act meaningful. In line with Foucault, Alcoff suggested that speaking
for others is a discursive practice.
Haraway’s (1988) conceptualization of “situated knowledges” also fits
importantly into this discussion. Haraway offered an epistemological framework
privileging perspectives that are “particular” and idiosyncratic, through which
unrecognized social realities can be brought to the fore (p. 4). She suggested that we re-
imagine positivism and relativism as being reductionist modes of inquiry. For example,
relativism renders all experiences equal, “a way of being nowhere while claiming to be
everywhere equally” (p. 584). Haraway critiqued the lack of politics within relativistic
arguments, suggesting that the symmetry they evoke is an illusion.
DAR, as a feminist practice, incorporates these notions of positionality and
situated knowledge. As a practice dedicated to unearthing perspectives that have been
buried, and interrogating epistemological knowledge claims that stem from positivist—
indeed, masculinist conceptions of reality, DAR projects must start with the location of
the buried subject-position. In a DAR inquiry, it is the marginalized voices that are given
primacy, both in the process of researching a given social and political question, as well
as in the creative intervention that accompanies it. As I will explain further in the sections
that follow, unlike other forms of entertainment interventions, DAR does not seek to
“fix” the problems of the marginalized—who are often coded as problemetized
“others”—through privileging expert perspectives. Rather, the DAR method seeks to
foster the reversal of this privileged perspective.
Postcolonial feminisms
As a practice dedicated to resisting normative Western tropes about the developing
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world, DAR necessarily engages post-colonial feminist perspectives as part of its ethical
foundation. Linda Tuhiwai Smith (1999) and Chandra Talpade Mohanty (2003)
introduced conceptual alternatives to the dominant research methodology that has
characterized Western scholarship in colonial and post-colonial contexts. In their
critiques of Western scholarship, the authors discussed the need for reflexivity in
research, particularly in studies examining indigenous populations and seeking to employ
feminist perspectives. Tuhiwai Smith (1999), a Maori researcher, argued that while
Western academics often view their research as “benefitting mankind” and embodying a
universalist ideal, in reality, these frameworks often problematize the populations they
study, thereby perpetuating colonial attitudes.
Similarly, Mohanty criticized Western feminism for viewing third world women
through the “global hegemony of western scholarship” (1991: 55) and essentializing the
experiences of all women, regardless of their ethnic, national or cultural origins.
Mohanty’s argument points to the methodological trends that are commonly employed by
contemporary Western feminist scholars. She argued that such scholars often mistakenly
use their assumptions about the homogenous oppression of the world’s women to
reinforce images of the “average third world woman” which are stereotypical and
harmful (p. 56), resulting in “flattening” the experience of women in the developing
world (Parreñas, 2011), thus reinforcing the Western feminists’ view that their own
experiences are “normal.” This binary framework employs false universalisms that fail to
give voice to other modes of emancipation and quests for authenticity.
A theory and method dedicated to liberating communities caught in social
catastrophe and collective trauma, DAR relies on post-colonial perspectives as a guide
for its ethical compass. Part of the goals of DAR are to unearth types of knowledge that
have been overlooked and buried. In post-colonial contexts, this approach requires that
the researcher-artist refute the idea of cultural universalisms, and instead, privilege
alternative epistemologies—particularly in regard to issues of culture and development.
Adopting a post-colonial feminist perspective also requires reflexivity between researcher
and “subjects” of their study—the core tenet of participatory action research, and a
foundational principal of DAR.

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The feminist research ethic
Ackerly and True’s (2010) discussion of feminist approaches to international research is
paramount to the conceptualization of the DAR praxis. Ackerly and True explained that
feminists believe research should be useful to the lives of women, in changing the
oppressive conditions they may face. The “feminist research ethic,” involves issues of
process and location, the critical interrogation of power and the researcher’s own self-
conscious location in the research context. It is also circular, requiring constant reflection
and willingness to backtrack and re-approach the research question/ project from a new
position and new discoveries. Because of this, feminist research is particularly dependent
on a kind of mindfulness—a constant analysis of process and willingness to grapple with
whatever new issues, questions, struggles come up as the process shifts. Feminist
research also relies on relationships and the positionality of all who are involved in the
research process. The researcher’s own sociopolitical location, the power of
epistemology, boundaries, marginalization, silences, and intersections, and relationships
and their power differentials serve as benchmarks for this process. Tickner (2001) further
suggested that methodological perspectives guiding feminist research should include
making the research useful to women (particularly in regard to policy) and involve a
“commitment to knowledge as emancipation” (p. 22). This commitment to process and
self-reflection fits well with the principals of DAR.
Feminist critiques of the role of the state
Finally, I draw on feminist critiques of the role of the state to problematize the policy
solutions to combat trafficking that the movement currently offers. In so doing, I further
situate this issue as the subject of my DAR intervention.
Parreñas’ (2011) ethnography exploring the world of Filipina hostess clubs in Tokyo
informs this critique. Parreñas unpacked the nuances of affective and emotional labor that
characterize this type of sex-work, and exposed the problematic policies and moralistic
underpinnings of the U.S.-driven anti-trafficking movement in Japan. Parreñas described
the way Filipina contract workers invent a form of labor known as hostessing. Parreñas
took the experiences of these women, known as “talents,” as her starting point for
research, then widened her lens to examine the State Department-led anti-trafficking
movement and the policies that, while designed to curtail trafficking among this
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community, instead resulted in the restriction of women’s migration and autonomy.
Parreñas explained that because of their presumed status as severely trafficked persons in
the State Department’s Trafficking In Persons (TIP) Report, Filipina hostesses are subject
to paternalistic policies designed to protect them from the horrors of prostitution. But, she
explained, it is these very policies that underlie their exploitation in other arenas—
namely a lack of protection under Japanese law, and the burden of debt owed to
middlemen who exploit the “liminal” legal status of talent hostesses (2011, p. 78).
Parreñas suggested that anti-trafficking policy should instead focus on the
implementation of safe migration practices, as this would enable women to make more
informed, empowering choices and migrate without the dual fears of exploitation and
prosecution.
Other critiques of the U.S.-led anti-trafficking movement support the application of
DAR to the subject of my study. In their discussion of global policy responses to human
trafficking and their effects on women on the ground, Segrave, Pickering, & Milivojevic
(2009) argued that a more robust, critical, feminist approach to trafficking is needed. In
re-formulating its approach and perspective on trafficking, the authors suggested, the
West must also “re-cast… our expectations of global mobility and control” (p. xvii).
Women’s mobility must now be at the center of the conversation, and states must
acknowledge that their current policy approaches prohibit mobility and severely limit the
agency of women—a circumstance that has proved to be debilitating. This study puts the
policy to eradicate sex trafficking at the center of the discussion. As such, and in contrast
to Parreñas’ monograph, it takes a “top down” approach to these issues, examining the
way policy choices impact the lives of female migrants and sex workers (often, but not
always, overlapping categories).
Pickering, et al.’s study informs my investigation of the US-led anti-trafficking
movement, and the application of DAR as an intervention within it. The authors
employed a critical perspective to the research, interviewing women who were being held
in detention centers and shelters, who had been targets of state-sponsored anti-trafficking
“rescue” operations. In addition, the authors interviewed the service providers whose task
it was to help these detained women, showing how their subjective experiences were
informed by policies designed to eradicate trafficking, which they were tasked with
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implementing. The quality of these interviews reflected the authors’ commitment to
positionality and an understanding of the power dynamics that inherently accompany the
experiences of the marginalized. In so doing, the authors employed a feminist research
ethic to the process of conducting the study.
Agustin’s critique of “the rescue industry” (2007) provides another important
framework for examining the implications of anti-trafficking policy and the role of the
state on female laborers. Agustin draws on research on migration, trafficking and sex
work and social work to discuss the relationships between migrant sex workers in Europe
and members of the social sector attempting to help them. Agustín’s argument is that the
social sector, with its roots in colonialism and in tensions around women’s role in the
public sphere, reproduces the conditions it supposedly is working to eradicate and
actually benefits those who are doing the helping over those who they attempt to help.
Agustin’s argument importantly unpacks the often grossly over-simplified (or flat-out
ignored) relationship between migration and sex work, and implicates the lack of
understanding of nuance of the migration experience in the social sector’s failure to
positively impact the women it seeks to serve.
Situating the discourse on trafficking within a larger discourse on migration, Agustin
explained that migrations are generally described in terms of push-pull factors—reasons
people have to leave a country and move to another, reasons usually involving economic,
political, and/or life or death hardship circumstance. This conception “envisions migrants
as acted upon, leaving little room for desire, aspiration, anxiety, or other states of the
soul” (p. 17-18). It is a way of constructing the migrant as object, as someone less than
human, or not as human as “us”—the thickly constituted rich Westerner who has the
ability to have complex emotional and psychological and relational life. “We” are
complicated, Agustin observed, while “they” are basic. Put another way, she suggested,
“we” are conceived of as human, while “they” are not.
Advancing this conversation, Doezema (2010) explained that the concept of
“trafficking in women” is elusive, impossible to pin down because of the discourse that
surrounds it and constructs it. This discourse, explained Doezema, is marked by a
melodramatic narrative that stems from the myth of white slavery in the UK and the
abolitionist agenda of early feminists. It employs a construction of victimhood for the
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“good” women, which is juxtaposed against its equal and opposing image of the “bad”
harlot—the criminal prostitute who, through her consent to dirty and dangerous acts,
negates any possibility of empathy or good will. The narrative comprises what Doezema
called a “myth” – yet not one which indicates a blanket falsehood of the phenomena of
“trafficking in women.” As Doezema explained, to claim that this moral panic is based on
nothing is equally as spurious a claim as to buy into it wholeheartedly. Instead, as
Doezema explained, the “trafficking” myth reinforces ideology, in the Althussairian
sense, serving to uphold institutions and social structures that privilege and “normalize”
the social structures and value systems of the middle class—particularly the role of white,
middle-class British women.
This point connects to Agustin’s rich historical description of prostitution in
Victorian England—the stem of the abolitionist movement that has re-manifested itself in
a contemporary form, much for the same reasons, Doezema and Agustin argue, as the
original phenomenon did. Indeed, the earlier social panic reinforced binaries between
consent and force, suggesting that in consenting to prostitution, a woman would “fall”
from the grace of the middle class. This panic began with white women who traveled,
suggesting that it was not only sex acts but also movement across national borders, that
was to be feared. This analysis underscores my discussion of the U.S. Abolitionist
Movement and the cultural underpinnings of the modern anti-trafficking movement. In so
doing, it forms the foundation for the DAR intervention in this study.
These and other feminist critiques of the role of the state problematize the policy
solutions to combat trafficking and suggest that we approach trafficking research
critically. As such, they form a foundation for my current study of the anti-trafficking
movement and for my conceptualization of DAR as a way of disrupting the discourse that
this movement has produced.
Arts and Social Justice
In conceptualizing a theory and method of DAR, it is paramount to examine prior types
of arts interventions and gauge their successes and failures. While previous attempts to
fuse social science research with the arts have often focused on “top-down” strategies
employing positivist analysis, the DAR method refutes such approaches. Here, I discuss
contrasting styles of arts interventions, and introduce theories of social justice and
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alternative approaches to research that, I suggest, provide more unique and productive
ways of implementing this new method.
Entertainment-Education
Prior research in Entertainment-Education, or E-E, has demonstrated the utility of artistic
performance in community-building and organizational collaboration. Projects such as
MTV Exit’s recent multi-media, multi-platform awareness and prevention campaign
against human trafficking evaluate knowledge, attitude, and behavior measures among
audiences. E-E research has explored the use of TV, film, and theatre to advance social
justice aims in developing contexts. The goal of this work is to produce a targeted
behavioral change on both individual and system or community levels (Singhal, Cody,
Rogers, Sabido, 2004). These interventions are grounded in social learning theory
(Bandura), social judgment theory (Sherif, Sherif and Negarbal), third person effects
(Davison) and two-step flow (Lazarsfeld, Berelson and Gaudet).
An example of E-E’s impact can be seen in an intervention led by David
Poindexter (of Population Media Center and a pioneer of E-E) in the 1970’s, which was
designed to reduce population growth in Mexico via the production and airing of
Acompaname, a family planning serial drama. Research indicated that following a 9-
month run of the show, “sales of over-the-counter contraceptives (e.g., condoms and oral
pills) had increased by 23%, compared to a 7% rise the preceding year” (Poindexter qtd
in Singhal, et all, 2004, p. 28). Poindexter goes on to describe parallel interventions in
India, Brazil, China, the Philippines, and Tanzania, based on the methodology of social
scientist and broadcast professional Miguel Sabido, demonstrating the success in E-E
programming’s population control among individuals in targeted developing nations.
Entertainment-Education projects also focus on audience reception as a mode of
analysis of impact. Unlike many Entertainment Education initiatives, which seek to
change people’s behavior on an individual basis (for example, convincing South Africans
to use condoms by showing them TV shows with storylines tailored to a favorable view
of condom use), my project’s goals are not geared toward individual behavior change.
They are, instead, community-oriented, interrogating the process and utility of
collaboration and collective trauma. In addition, the political goals of the project have
been identified and designed based on the expressed needs and desires of the women who
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participated in my preliminary interviews, rather than on top-down strategies that impose
goals onto marginalized communities.
Additionally, unlike Entertainment-Education projects focusing on vulnerable
populations with an eye toward changing their behavior, my project turns that paradigm
on its head. I did not want to ask how the musical might affect the women and make them
“better,” “more Western,” or “less problematic,” but rather, how the musical might
inform the communication practices that occur between stakeholders in the environment,
as well as participants in the artistic process.
While E-E provides an important conceptual first step toward a theory and
practice of arts intervention, the dominant methodological approach employs many
problematic assumptions. First, the values-based assumptions Poindexter and other
scholars make as to what defines and constitutes socially problematic aspects of the
developing world contain a strong undercurrent of cultural imperialism that may, in fact,
serve to disempower participants and audience members. Additionally, the primacy
placed on the individual as social agent, the dominant focus on targeted behavioral
change, the prescriptive tone of these projects, and the lack of attention toward the more
humanistic aspects of community-building and social change evoke neocolonialist
agendas of managing non-Western populations for the benefit of Western policy goals.
Theatre of the Oppressed
Another form of social justice research that utilizes hands-on artistic practice is Theatre
of the Oppressed (Boal, 1979). Theatre of the Oppressed is a technique that integrates
theatrical exercises and rituals designed to foster agency and consciousness on the part of
audiences, creators, and performers, and engage participants in constructing narratives
about the oppressive conditions that affect their lives. Developed in the 1970’s by
Augusto Boal, it offers an alternative approach to the Aristotelian form of drama, upon
which the foundations of Western theatre have been built. Aristotelian tragedy, Boal
asserted, offer narratives that show society “as it is.” Such narratives, as Larry Gross has
explained (2011), elicit audience reactions of “pity and fear,” often serving as a kind of
“social warning” for audiences to avoid engaging in the behavior that the narrative
illustrates. According to Boal, these warnings pacify rather than empower audiences (p.
45) because audience members are largely unaware that they are experiencing a passive
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political relationship. To counter this, Boal developed participatory theatre techniques
that sought to re-position the political relationship between audience and actors and place
the primary emphasis on the active agency of the audience.
Theatre of the Oppressed techniques serve as a complementary method of
interrogation within this conceptual framework; however, they also come with certain
limitations. First, they depend on a facilitator—usually someone from a Western,
industrialized country—to lead participants in order for them to identify the issues that
affect their lives, rather than simply interviewing participants to hear, in their words,
about what affects them. Second, the inquiry often stops at the conclusion of the
performance. Generally, after the show, no further action is taken to change or resist the
oppressive situation that the participants have identified. It is, instead, up to the
communities to organize around these issues. Finally, these techniques evoke a Marxist
framework that pits “victims” against “oppressors” in ways that are static and
unchanging, and can prevent a nuanced examination of the complex roles that community
members in any human rights crisis play. I therefore concluded that while Theater of the
Oppressed could be used to augment the experiences of participants, it would likely
merely provide a complementary, rather than complete, framework for the project as a
whole.
Responding to the limitations of this prior research in entertainment education and
theater of the oppressed, I concluded that a need exists for a more artist-based, audience-
inclusive, context-specific and culturally respectful way of designing and implementing
arts interventions in the developing world—one that treats “subjects” and researchers
reflexively, and integrates the process of art-making as a form of inquiry in itself. My
project sought to bridge this divide by employing a practice-based, embodied artistic
medium designed to deepen awareness of the discourse on human trafficking, foster
dialogue between stakeholders, engage artists as researchers, and advance
epistemological considerations in communication research. I asked: How can music
theatre as an embodied practice serve as an intervention in the discourse on the
trafficking of women in Thailand? How can a music theater project based on research on
this subject inform not only an audience’s experience of the issues, but the people about
whom the show was written? What role do artists and the dramatization process itself
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play in unearthing new knowledge? And how does the process of creating an artistic
work inform the future research about a given subject matter in the social sciences, and
influence the direction and method whereby that research is conducted? I suggest that
addressing these concerns requires a new form of communication inquiry, one that is
materially based, embodied, reflexive, and feminist.
Building an Arts-Based Communication Intervention
Politically engaged dramatic writers often seek to tell stories based on true events and
people, in order to advance political goals or shed light on important social issues. In so
doing, these artists have sought to find ways to engage the “subjects” of their dramatic
works in the story-telling process itself; be they members of the artists’ own community,
or members of another community about which the dramatist is writing. In so doing,
these artists engage a creative, analytical, and social process that serves both a dramatic
storytelling function, as well as a research function. I call this process “Dramatization as
Research,” or DAR.
There are numerous ways of involving subjects in the telling of their stories: from
field-based interviews that later become fictional dramatic works, to documentary films
in which subjects tell their stories in real time with the help of the dramatist, to theatrical
works that are co-created by participants and dramatists, and finally, to purely fictional
accounts of real events. Each of these types of DAR projects seek to advance social
justice agendas by shedding light on the lived experiences of people in the community.
As such, they may all be considered, in different ways, “participatory.”
Here, I will conceptualize a theoretical framework for Dramatization as Research;
one that incorporates criteria based on the theories and methods of Participatory Action
Research (PAR) and Practice-Based Research (PBR). Situating DAR in a feminist
context, I will suggest that the most successful DAR projects are those that incorporate
aspects of liberation psychology into their conceptual frameworks.
Contributing frameworks: Participatory Action Research (PAR)
In recent years, Participatory Action Research has emerged as a new paradigm in the
academy, largely in response to positivist approaches that fail to acknowledge the
responsibility of academic scholarship to the communities they study. The researchers
behind the push for this approach, hailing from the fields of liberation psychology,
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trauma studies, and communications fields (Dura & Singhal, 2009; Kim & Ball-Rokeach,
2006; Watkins and Shulman, 2008), argue that by becoming actively involved in their
research projects and interventions, research participants – the “subjects” – can be re-
framed as agentive partners in scholarly inquiry (Ledwith and Springett, 2010; Watkins
and Shulman, 2010). In PAR, the re-positioned researcher is able to build ‘tacit
knowledge’ through direct experience rather than distanced abstraction. Similarly, by
being uniquely “situated” (Haraway, 1988) in relation to their subjects, researchers are
able to privilege perspectives that are both “particular” and idiosyncratic, and through
which unrecognized social realities may be brought to the fore (p. 4).
PAR is often situated precariously in the social sciences due to the difficulty in
measuring its validity. As I discussed elsewhere (Kamler, 2013), PAR is in need of
rigorous analysis on the validity of its impact on both researchers and communities, and
in its process of unearthing knowledge. In addition, the relative newness of the approach
means that there has been limited attention to evaluation of efficacy, particularly with
regard to arts-based endeavors. In order to effectively evaluate PAR, therefore, I suggest
that the tenets of liberation psychology be integrated into the framework of PAR studies.
Deriving from the liberation theology movements of the 1960’s, liberation
psychology resists the idea that the goal of psychological health be focused around an
individual’s personal happiness. Instead, the health of the whole community should be
the goal of this work (Erikson, 1995; Martin-Baro, 1994; Prilleltensky, 2003; Shabad,
2000; Watkins and Shulman, 2008). Liberation psychology draws on participatory
approaches to help subjects deal with “collective trauma,” a phenomenon in which the
“the victim is not a sole individual but a whole group” (Watkins and Shulman, 2008,
p.14). Since trauma is understood to be rooted in social processes and not merely
individual suffering, practitioners argue they can only be remedied by “psychological
practices that can repair the bonds among people as well as the narrative threads of an
individual life history” (p. 14). People living in poverty or other marginalized conditions,
note Smith, Chambers, and Bratini (2009), are often labeled as “resistant” or “unsuitable”
for psychotherapy. For these individuals, engagement through participatory approaches
focused on the social processes that define their circumstances and their place within
them provides vital possibilities for collective healing and social change (Smith,
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Chambers, and Bratini, 2009, p. 22; Martin-Baro, 1994, p. 37). Accepting the limits of
traditional psychotherapy, say Smith, Chambers, and Bratini, is akin to accepting the
conditions of oppression (2009, p. 23).
According to Watkins and Shulman, in order for research to have a “liberatory”
effect it must be critical and insight self-reflexivity on the part of the researcher:
This reflexivity involves researchers in a critical stance toward the processes and
uses of research in the history of their discipline(s), and asks them to be willing to
dis-identify with aspects of their training and practice that reinforce the divides a
critical participatory action approach questions and works to heal (2010: 269).
In addition, Watkins and Shulman suggest five criteria for evaluating whether
projects (and here they refer specifically to “arts-oriented” projects) are “participatory.”
In order to be considered participatory, a project must be:
1) Proactive (i.e., engaging ways of building shared understanding of history and
social context in a community environment that will witness past events in order
to prevent future violence and exclusion);
2) Rupturing (i.e., the goal of these projects is to disrupt dominant, hegemonic
narratives);
3) Dialogical (i.e., inspiring communication between individuals or groups);
4) Consciousness-raising (i.e., generating new insights about one’s personal and
social role in society); and
5) Performative (i.e., communicated through a performance medium such as
theater, dance, music, film, etc).
Given the important conceptual links between Participatory Action Research and
liberation psychology, I will argue that PAR should incorporate liberation psychology,
and specifically the criteria offered by Watkins and Shulman above, into its framework. I
will then show how these criteria can be used to evaluate DAR projects.
Contributing frameworks: Practice-Based Research (PBR)
Another method which can be used to advance a conceptual framework of DAR is
Practice-Based Research (PBR). Often discussed in relationship to projects that
incorporate creative arts practice (Barrett & Bolt, 2010; Beck, Belliveau, Graham, &
Wagner, 2011; Piccini, 2002; Rye, 2003), PBR provides a useful way for considering
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how dramatization processes can inform the processes of research. PBR was originally
conceptualized in the UK in the 1990’s (Piccini, 2002). Like PAR, this method relies on
“tacit knowledge” (Barrett & Bolt, 2010); that is, knowledge gained through direct
experience rather than distanced abstraction, and associated with an inability to replicate
results scientifically or predict an outcome (p. 2). PBR also relies on “situated
knowledge” (Haraway, 1988), which privileges perspectives that are “particular” and
idiosyncratic, through which unrecognized social realities can be brought to the fore (p.
4). Barrett explains that tacit knowledge underpins all discoveries, “yet the operation of
this logic is often overlooked because it is subsumed into the rational logic of discursive
accounts of artistic production” (2010, p. 4). PBR privileges the direct experience of tacit
knowledge over theoretical abstraction.
As Bolt (Barret & Bolt, 2010) explained, PBR engages a “double articulation”
between theory and practice, “whereby theory emerges from a reflexive practice at the
same time that practice is informed by theory (p. 29). According to this logic, theater may
be the best vehicle for informing research; for theater, unlike other mediated forms of
creative practice (such as film and TV), relies on live repetition to achieve its
communication ends, rather than relying on representational forms. Actors and musicians
perform live on stage, re-creating communication moment by moment, thereby
privileging the temporary over the fixed (Dolan, 2005). Bolt explained that “good art”
relies on the living process of the artists. The mechanism by which art is produced is as
important as the resulting product (p. 28). In addition, he suggested, the “non-standard
nature of methodology” in creative practice is key to the success of a practice-led
research endeavor (p. 29). Such a methodology arises from disjunctures, idiosyncrasies,
and particularities, rather than generalizations.
Central to the tenets of PBR is a philosophy of embodiment—the idea that the
actual materiality of creative practice can open up “other ways of knowing.” As such,
PBR is often discussed in relation to the live medium of theater, with its proponents
debating the epistemological saliency of mediatized documentation and narrative. Peggy
Phelan (1993) rejected the notion that documenting live performance can adequately
capture its epistemological potential. Auslander (1999) discussed how mediatization and
liveness are merging categorically, while Dolan (2005) argued that we can best trouble
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social norms through practice of visibility vis-à-vis the live, embodied medium of theatre.
Conquergood (1991) further explained how performance can be used as a tool for
engagement:
The performance paradigm privileges particular, participatory, dynamic, intimate,
precarious, embodied experience grounded in historical process, contingency, and
ideology. … Performance centered research takes as both its subject matter and
method the experiencing body situated in time, place, and history (p. 187).
Expanding on this notion, Carter (2010) explained, “To understand the social
value of what we are doing, we need to study the process of creativity, rather than its
outcome” (p. 17). So the “interest” of an invention (i.e., in any creative—artistic—
pursuit) is not in the artistic product itself, but in the process of artistic creation (p. 21).
Carter discussed the importance of materiality in creative practice in what he called
“material thinking”— a response to the intelligence of the materials and processes
themselves, to foster creative research. Key to this creativity, he explained, is the ability
to join “hand, mind and eye” (p. 30) to consider “the relations that take place within the
very process or tissue of making. In this conception, the materials are not just passive
objects to be used instrumentally by the artist, but rather, the materials and processes of
production have their own intelligence that come into play in interaction with the artists’
creative intelligence” (p. 30). In thinking materially, Carter suggested, we must abandon
notions of positivism and empiricism—the quantification of our artistic and research
pursuits. Such a framework, when put in conversation with feminist epistemologies and
theories of research, provides a provocative and important foundation for thinking about
the role of creative practice in research.
Importantly, the literature on PBR also grapples with the politics of how and
where to situate this process-oriented paradigm within the academic tradition of social
science research.
Uniting PAR and PBR
PAR and PBR share philosophical approaches to research. Both refute ideals of
positivism, rely explicitly on “tacit knowledge,” and both are inherently active, situating
themselves in the ongoing process of change. Perhaps most critically, however, both
methods involve the incorporation of collaborations, partnerships, and other “horizontal”
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relationships between researcher and subject. PAR treats the researcher as an active
participant in the research process, which renders them subjects, while PBR takes this
idea even further, regarding the artist as a researcher. As close methodological cousins,
the frameworks of both PAR and PBR lend themselves to dramatic projects that engage
real events, and strive to make meaning out of subjects’ participation in the creation,
production and reception of artist work.
Different types of artistic projects engage these methodologies in different ways.
Ethnotheater is a method of research-based theater in which the playwright creatively
uses verbatim interviews to construct a dramatic narrative about a given character and
subject matter (Barone, 2002; Conquergood 1991; Saldana, 2003). As Saldana (2003) and
Whitton (2009) explained, often the audiences of ethnotheater do not attend for
entertainment purposes, but rather to learn about the subject of the play’s research.
Therefore, aesthetics are often not the center of this practice. As Conquergood (citing
Geertz) explained, ethnography is well-situated for critical theory, as it is an inherently
post-colonial method of research, having emerged in the academy in tandem with the
process of decolonialism (1991). In addition, performance vehicles such as documentary
and narrative film may also engage tenets of liberation psychology and PAR, making
them viable mediums for DAR.
Dramatization as Research (DAR)
In discussing the research methods that live at the intersections between creative practice,
social justice and research, questions emerge as to what role participants—or, the “real”
people on whom a dramatic work is based—play in the research process itself. How do
we understand the relationships between participants and artist-researchers? How do
various performance contexts inform these relationships? And what practices influence
the success of a project as both a dramatic work and a piece of research? I suggest that
one way of understanding DAR projects is to evaluate them according to the liberatory
effects they have on researchers, artists, and subjects within the community.
Whether we are talking about theater, documentary film, or narrative film, it is the
engagement with the subjects of research (and with their positions as subjects, rather than
objects) that informs the potential success of DAR. Drawing on the criteria offered by
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Watkins and Shulman, I suggest that proactive, dialogical, consciousness-raising and
performative aspects best lend themselves to a conceptualization of “liberation.”
Additionally, such projects should unearth silences within a community and help
give voice to pressing social issues. As Carter remarked, “The motivation of the artist is
not to add another object to an already crowded world. It is not a positive will to
reproduce (albeit with new features) what already exists. The impulse to make or invent
something stems, rather, from a growing sensation of silence, of loss, lack, incoherence
or absence” (2010, p. 21). Carter’s suggestion is that the motivation inspiring the
dramatization process exists in the social context itself. Therefore, interest in unearthing
social contextualized silences and losses precedes invention, rather than developing out
of invention.
How might DAR projects draw upon this interest? In so doing, how can DAR
projects achieve a liberatory effect? In order to advance our understanding of these
processes I turn to the work of two important theorists, Paolo Freire and Augusto Boal.
Freire’s “conscientization”
In Pedagogy of the Oppressed Paolo Freire theorized the idea of conscientization: the
process by which the oppressed move from a position of powerlessness toward one of
humanity, and liberation (1993). Through this process, Freire explained, the oppressed
begin to unearth silences, understand their own structural positions within society, and
overcome fear (p. 39). In attempting to understand the components that make a DAR
project “liberatory,” I suggest that we begin with Freire.
Freire’s theory of conscientization rests on the premise that every human being
has the capacity to be critical. Out of a combination of reflection and action comes praxis:
a critical practice that moves beyond the limitations of academic abstraction and is thus
imperative for the humanization of all. A culture of silence enshrouds the oppressed as
they internalize their oppression. Parallel to this, the oppressors themselves engage in the
continuum of oppression, as what Watkins and Shulman would call “bystanders” (2008,
p.61) or, in Freirean terms, defenders of the status quo, having internalized a subject-
object relationship with those they dominate (1993, p.57). Freire asserted that each
person has the right to speak—to “name the world”—and in so doing, strive to realize
humanism. Friere distinguished between humanism and humanitarianism, which he saw
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as being premised on a paternalism that perpetuates the objectification of the oppressed
through rendering them dependent on the (false) good-will of “helpers.” For often, those
wanting to help are merely invested in maintaining dominance, as they fear their own
liberation (as oppressors) on the journey toward manifesting a fuller humanism (p. 58).
This “fear of freedom” is predicated on the false notion that “to be is to have” (p. 58);
that one must exist either as an oppressor or the oppressed. Those who fear their own
freedom see their demise in the liberation of the oppressed, so that one person’s liberation
is a threat to those who are, in turn, forced to lose the privilege that perpetuates
oppression. Freire explained:
Any restriction on this way of life, in the name of the rights of the community,
appears to the former oppressors as a profound violation of their individual
rights—although they had no respect for the millions who suffered and died of
hunger, pain, sorrow, and despair. For the oppressors, “human beings” refers only
to themselves; other people are “things” (1993, p. 57).
Freire further explained that negating freedom can come from both the right and
the left, as “circles of certainty” serve to close off possibilities of collective liberation (p.
39). In contrast, he explained, the “radical” person is open, always listening:
This person is not afraid to meet the people or to enter into dialogue with them.
This person does not consider himself or herself the proprietor of history or of all
people, or the liberator of the oppressed; but he or she does commit himself or
herself, within history, to fight at their side (p. 39).
Scholars of PBR, in particular, have pointed out that one productive way of
approaching arts-based research is to empower the artist as a vehicle for change (Barrett
& Bolt, 2010; Carter, 2010; Conquergood, 1991). As Barrett (2010) discussed in her
essay, Foucault’s ‘What is an author,’ scholarship on the arts has largely been situated in
artistic criticism, or what she calls the “trap of cultural studies” (p. 135). Instead, she
suggested, such scholarship should view the artist as an active subject who has the
potential to foster change in the community through processes that echo the
“conscientizaton” Freire described. According to Barrett, the author/artist/researcher is
not the sole creator of meaning. She is, rather, situated in a discourse. By understanding
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the nuances of this discourse, the artist’s work has the potential to activate consciousness
within the broader community.
Freire’s notion of conscientization adds richness to the liberatory criteria that
Watkins and Shulman suggested should be utilized in arts-oriented research projects.
Conscientization is proactive, as it engages ways of building shared understanding of
history and social context in a community environment that will witness past events in
order to prevent future violence and exclusion; is rupturing, in its disruption of
hegemonic narratives; is dialogical, in that it inspires communication; and is
consciousness-raising, as it generates new insights. Here I turn to another theory,
developed by Augusto Boal, which exemplifies the performative element that Watkins
and Shulman suggested should be included in their liberatory criteria.
Boal’s “Poetics of the Oppressed”
Drawing on the notion that artists have the potential to be active agents of social change,
Augusto Boal (1979) developed a praxis called “Forum Theatre,” which responds to what
he saw as a hegemonic condition of the Western theatrical tradition. Created under the
umbrella of his “Poetics of the Oppressed” (p. 122), Forum Theatre seeks to turn
Aristotelian tragedy on its head by empowering both artists and audiences to engage in
dialogue and consciousness-raising activities through the performance medium.
Boal explained that Aristotelian tragedy rose as the accepted dramatic form at a
political moment when theatre went from being an event of the people to an event
propagating the interests of the state (p. xiv). Aristotle constructed a “poetic-political
system” designed to intimidate the spectator (or audience) and “eliminate” the tendencies
toward politically subversive behavior through the dramatic catharsis (p. xiv). Aristotle
believed that art’s purpose was to imitate men as they “should be,” not as they are. In so
doing, art was meant to support a view of the ideal social and political culture of the time,
re-create the creative principle, and “correct nature where it has failed” (p. 20). “Nature,”
in Aristotle’s view, included social structures, laws, class stratification-- aspects that
Freire might call products of social inequality. According to Boal, Aristotle did not see
these structures as problems; on the contrary, he saw them as ideals.
Tragedy, then, was an imitation of the world “as it is,” with the specific social
goal of “correcting” the bad tendencies of the people, and steering them toward becoming
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socially acceptable, law abiding citizens. Tragedy, Boal explained, was seen by Aristotle
as man’s rational actions (passions) as he searches for happiness. Happiness, in turn, was
seen as equal to virtue; which in turn was defined as a way of fitting into society (1979, p.
20). As Boal explained, “catharsis is correction” (p. 29). Its purpose is to purge the
spectator of her or his impulse toward the bad behavior reflected in the tragic character’s
downfall. This is accomplished through the elicitation of pity and fear: the spectator pities
the tragic character (through empathizing with them, which Boal described as being the
single most dangerous weapon a dramatist has to wield), and in so doing, fears the
implications that the character’s tragic actions could have on their own lives, were they to
go down the path of the bad-behaving protagonist. The tragic character, in other words,
resembles us (p. 29). In empathizing with the tragic character, Boal explained, we the
audience experience a catharsis—a kind of “homeopathic cure” (p. 32) for our own
tendencies toward anti-social behavior.
In response to this oppressive theatrical tradition, Boal developed a political
theater technique that “focuses on the action itself: the spectator delegates no power to
the character (or actor) either to act or to think in his place; on the contrary, he himself
assumes the protagonist role, changes the dramatic action, tries out solutions, discusses
plans for change—in short, trains himself for real action” (p. 122). Rather than instilling
pity and fear, the goals of Boal’s “poetics” are to support a Freierean notion of
conscientization through changing the habits of the human body in the material world, as
the first step toward changing the human in the world (p. 128).
Employing the notion that an idealist theatre arouses feelings, while a Marxist
theater incites action (p. 106), Boal’s “poetics” offers further insight to the liberatory
criteria that Watkins and Shulman suggested be included in arts-oriented, participatory
research project. In addition to encompassing aspects of rupture, consciousness-raising,
dialogue, and pro-action, Boal’s “poetics” also draws on the performative aspect of
liberation described by Watkins and Shulman.
Conclusion
Art has the power to transcend contradictory logics. Information can be communicated in
deeply humanistic ways that override the tools of the scientist, as well as the technique of
the politician. As a higher octave of communication, art can create a universe that allows
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for the seeming disparities in understanding to dissolve and for a new method of
connection to arise. As cultural “soul workers,” (Krywotz 2011), artists need to be more
conscious about the narratives we are constructing, what they reflect, what came before
them, and what social purpose they serve. In this chapter I have attempted to illustrate
music-theater’s unique potential to “write back” against the dominant narrative employed
by members of the Western anti-trafficking movement: a narrative that perpetuates
Orientalist constructs, tropes of victimhood, and a rescue ideology more beneficial to
Western advocates than to the female trafficking survivors they are trying to save. I have
also attempted to explicate a theory and method of dramatization as research, an
inherently feminist praxis that unites aspects of participatory action and practice-based
research, but which goes beyond these methodologies in its incorporation of the
subjectivity of the researcher.
Responding to this theoretical framework and the questions that accompany it, my
next step was to test this theory by creating a musical explicitly designed to recover the
narrative of trafficking for the female ethnic minority migrants whose perspectives and
voices have been silenced in anti-trafficking discourse.

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Chapter 2
Methodology
Dramatization as Research (DAR) is an inquiry into a process. This process requires
attention to international research and the creative practice of conceptualizing, writing,
developing and performing a theatrical work. As such, DAR is more than a theory—it is
a method of communication research in itself. The goal of this project, therefore, was to
discover the contours of this method—the ways in which international human rights
research and dramatization interest, overlap and inform each other, both as creative
processes and as methods of discovery.
To attend to this process, I drew on a range of qualitative research methods—
including interviews, ethnographic field note-taking, participatory action research and
focus groups—as guidelines for each phase of the project. As I discussed in Chapter 1,
such methods provide an alternative to positivist research—an alternative that
underscores the theoretical approach to this project. Below, I will describe the
methodology in detail, explaining how the qualitative methods I utilized worked together
to inform my overall approach.

Figure 1. Project Model

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Phase One: Preliminary Data Collection
During the preliminary data collection phase (Phase One) I conducted three
research trips to Thailand—in summer 2011, winter 2011 and winter 2012. I interviewed
employees at NGOs, CBOs, government and UN agencies, female migrant laborers
(including sex workers, factory workers and domestic laborers), members of the Royal
Thai Police, the Cambodian border police, Thailand’s Office of Immigration, as well as
US government and UN officials. Interviews took place in Bangkok and Chiang Mai
among NGO staff on multiple institutional levels. Additional interview data was collected
in Chiang Rai, Poi Pot and Samut Sakhon. One interview was conducted via Skype after
the conclusion of the research trip. I relied on “snowball sampling” among members of
the anti-trafficking movement in Thailand to inform the process by which interview
participants were recruited. An IRB information sheet describing the project was
provided to each respondent, and interview questions were translated into the Thai,
Burmese and Akha languages. In interviews with Thai, Burmese, Akha, and Kachin
participants whose knowledge of English was limited, translators fluent in each language
were employed.
As a guide for Phase One of the research, I drew on principles of grounded
theory, a method in which data is gathered and analyzed as it is presented, allowing the
researcher to shift the direction of inquiry as new data emerges. As Charmaz (2005)
explained, grounded theory “entails developing increasingly abstract ideas about research
participants’ meanings, actions, and worlds and seeking specific data to fill out, refine,
and check the emerging conceptual categories” (p. 508). Using this method allowed me
to re-formulate my questions as the study was progressing and draw on meanings that
emerged from the interviews to inform the further direction of the study.
The feminist research ethic, as discussed by Tickner, Ackerly, and True (2010)
also informed my methodological philosophy for Phase One of the research process. This
theoretical foundation is important to establishing a context in which women’s voices and
narratives can be expressed (and analyzed) in non-linear ways. Putting primacy on the
participant’s narrative agendas—i.e., allowing them to tell the stories they want to tell—
fosters a strong, authentic research process leading to measurable results. As Mohanty
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(1991), Tuhiwai Smith (1999) and Harding (1998) suggested, positivist approaches to
research limit the ability for such rich data collection, as these approaches insist on the
idea of “objective truth” in research. In contrast, feminist and post-colonial perspectives
allow for the notion that data exists within an informant’s subjective understandings of
her or his world.
Research Questions
1. What cultural factors have impacted the trafficking of women in Thailand and the
subsequent rise of the anti-trafficking movement?
2. How do NGOs, as primary actors in this movement, narrate the issue of
trafficking to members of the public, as well as to themselves?
3. What anti-trafficking policies are in place in Thailand, and how do these policies
affect female migrant laborers and potential trafficking victims?
4. What strategies, if any, are being implemented as alternatives to these policies?
Participants
Participants included twenty (20) employees of local and international anti-trafficking
NGOs, six (6) female migrant sex workers, two (2) female migrant factory laborers,
seven (7) female migrant domestic laborers, ten (10) community–based organization
migrant activists, two (2) Thai immigration officers, one (1) Cambodian immigration
officer, three (3) US government employees, and three (3) United Nations employees,
bringing the total number of interviews to fifty-four (54). Interview participants were
solicited via email, with a recruitment script attached. Participants were of American,
Australian, Thai and Burmese nationalities and of Kachin, Karen and Akha ethnicities.
All participants were over the age of eighteen. Participants were informed that for the
purposes of this study, no names of individuals or organizations would be used; rather,
participants would be identified according to gender, ethnicity, and role in the
organization (i.e., Thai Female International NGO Employee, American Male Local
NGO Employee, Burmese Community-Based Activist, etc), or role in the community
(i.e., Female Akha Sex Worker, Female Kachin CBO Activist, etc).
1

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1
See Appendix B for a key of respondent demographics
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Procedures
Each interview lasted between 45 minutes and one hour, and was recorded while I took
notes by hand.
2
Throughout the research process, I used analytic memos to identify
emerging themes and further “steer” the direction of the interviews. The data were stored
on my laptop computer, as well as uploaded into a Dropbox in order to prevent loss.
Some interviews were arranged prior to the research trip via contact with NGO and CBO
staff members, while others were arranged once I was in-country. To the extent possible,
I sought to center the interviews on the experiences of female migrant laborers, as these
actors are the focal point of the anti-trafficking movement’s “victim-centered approach”
(U.S. Department of State, 2011). Much rich data has been collected on stories of
experiences that support such women’s status of victimization—for example, stories of
exploitation in prostitution and other labor situations, often told through the lens of NGO
employees who have worked to assist the women. Critically, I chose not to focus on the
experiences of women who were currently being assisted by NGOs, as I felt the
authenticity of the women’s responses could easily be compromised. Rather, I sought to
engage with female migrant laborers who were in the midst of their labor migration
experiences, as I suspected these responses would be more authentic, if not also more
complexly situated within the trafficking discourse. Most of the female migrant laborers I
interviewed, therefore, were connected with a CBO.
Analysis
Following data collection, I relied on the assistance of a graduate student to transcribe the
interviews and organize a respondent “key” of participant demographics, according to
gender, nationality, ethnicity, and role in organization or community. The interviews
were transcribed by me and by two university research assistants. Once transcribed, the
data were parsed into categories based on the participant populations, for further analysis.
Participants were coded according to ethnicity, gender and role in the community.
Interview excerpts and analytic memos were color coded according to emergent themes. I
revisited my field journal to assess my responses to the themes that emerged, and to
reflect on my own location and potential bias in the research process. I then compared
and contrasted participants’ responses to emerging themes, noting the nature of
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2
See Appendices C and D for Phase One interview questions
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inconsistencies and agreement among participants. Taking these complexities into
account, I then summarized the emergent themes broadly, noting, where possible,
variations among participants.
Limitations
Some NGO and CBO participants worked in positions that required them to have direct
contact with female migrant laborers on a daily basis while others worked in positions
that required them to have little to no contact with the female migrant laborers who their
organizations served. Furthermore, some female migrant laborers were receiving direct
assistance from a CBO, while others received no such support. These discrepancies, as
well as the limited sample size of respondents, prevents the Phase One research from
being generalizable to all NGO and CBO employees working in the anti-trafficking
movement in Thailand. Additionally, the limited sample size does not allow the research
to claim to be representative of all female migrant laborers in Thailand. The qualitative
data gathered here is highly useful, however, in that it allows us to better understand
some common patterns, circumstances, concerns, and experiences among these
populations.
Phase Two: Developing the Musical “Land of Smiles”
During the creative phase (Phase Two), I re-visited the preliminary interview data while
relying on dramaturgical engagement to develop the musical. During the staged readings,
I utilized ethnographic and feminist voice-centered methods to guide the data collection
process. As noted by Conquergood (1991), ethnography is well-situated for critical
theory, as this method derives from post-colonial theory. Discussing Geertz,
Conquergood explained, ethnography as a method emerged in tandem with the process of
decolonization. This moment in history, “altered radically the nature of the social
relationship between those who ask and look and those who are asked and looked at” (as
cited in Conquergood, 1991, p. 179). This turn in research represented a “double fall” in
both scientism and imperialism. Out of this fall came a new mode of inquiry-
ethnography, which brought with it four important themes (Conquergood, 1991, p. 180):
1) The return of the body
2) Boundaries and borderlands
3) The rise of performance
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4) Rhetorical reflexivity
The themes of embodiment, reflexivity, boundaries and performance suggest that
ethnography is well suited to projects that interrogate creative processes and practices.
Thus, I relied on this method to capture the experiences of conceptualizing, writing and
staging the musical—some of which were standard to the production of any theatrical
work, and some of which reflected new discoveries on my part as artist-researcher.
Above all, the ethnographic method allowed for personal reflection and self-discovery—
what I now regard as tenets of the DAR method—to become part of the field data
records.
Feminist voice-centered methods requires becoming attuned to the relationship
between culture and the psyche by “listening” for the internalization of dominant social
discourses (Brown & Gilligan, 1992). In incorporating this method, the researcher must
pay attention to dissociations, absences, and traces of trauma that emerge throughout the
research process, and make note of these moments in the field journal. As Watkins and
Shulman (2008) explained, “Feminist voice-centered methods embody sensitivity to the
multiplicity of imaginal voices of psychic life, to their relations with one another, and to
processes of the marginalizing and retrieving of psychic voices” (p. 289).
This process connects well with the practice of dramatization, in which the artist
must be attuned to her own psyche, as well as to the research that informs the subject of
the dramatic work. As artists, we are required to listen to our “inner voices,” allowing
seemingly disparate ideas, themes and emotional discoveries to emerge. In the DAR
method, this reliance becomes augmented to include not only the psychic, emotional well
of information from which we, as artists, draw our creative material, but also our psychic
attention to the field data of the original research inquiry. A double process must be
employed, in which the researcher-artist analyzes the themes that emerge in the original
interviews, while simultaneously reading “beneath the text” of their own response to this
field data. This process speaks to the conceptualization of DAR as a practice in which the
artist-researcher’s own process becomes part of the study of inquiry. As Gilligan noted,
feminist voice-centered methods require the researcher to listen for the “voice of
relationship” and the struggles that are being acted out therein. As Niobe Way explained,
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such a method allows the researcher—in this case, artist-research, to obtain both theory-
driven and theory-generating results (as cited in Watkins & Shulman, 2010, p. 97).
Drawing on these methods, in Phase Two I conceptualized, wrote and produced
two staged readings of “Land of Smiles.” In so doing, I relied on the dramaturgical
guidance of Ted Braun, professor at USC’s School of Cinematic Arts; Mina Yang,
Professor of ethnomusicology at USC’s Thornton School of Music, and producer Rick
Culbertson to help guide the development of the story narrative, script, and music. During
this process, I also kept a field journal to document issues that emerged. I frequently
returned to my preliminary interview transcriptions as guides for the script and score
development, reflecting on themes and discoveries that emerged, noting these in my field
journal. I used these ethnographic field notes as a guide to explicate the way the creative
process interfaced with the research process. In addition, during the rehearsal process, I
used the interview recordings as tools to help guide the actors in better understanding
their characters’ accents, speech patterns, and the social context of the story. I continued
to capture this process while preparing for the workshop production in Chiang Mai,
Thailand. Finally, during this phase, I conducted interviews with seven (7) members of
the artistic team who would be traveling with the musical to Chiang Mai.
3

Research Questions
1. How could I, as an artist-researcher draw on the preliminary data to inform
characters, narrative arcs, dramatic themes, emotional textures, and, ultimately,
communicate the complexity of my findings through the medium of a musical?
2. How might the dramatization process further inform research questions on the
issue of trafficking in Thailand?
Staged Readings
Part of Phase Two involved producing two staged readings of the musical. During this
process, data were captured about the reflexive nature of the artistic process and the
research process. During this “incubation” period, I kept a detailed field journal of the
experience of working and re-working the piece, based on the preliminary data collection
and my own responses to the data. Integral to this process was also a collaborative aspect,
both with members of my artistic team, including dramaturge and director, Ted Braun,
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3
See Appendix F for Artist interview questions.
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producer Rick Culbertson, the actor-musicians, as well as online communication with my
community partner organization in Chiang Mai, Thailand.
The first reading took place in September, 2012 in a 99-seat theater space in Santa
Monica, California. Six female actors (four Asian-American and two Caucasian) played
the roles of the American, Thai, and Kachin characters. The musical was directed by
writer-director Ted Braun, and produced by Rick Culbertson and Gregory Franklin. I
directed the music and accompanied the performance on the piano. This reading was
attended by approximately 100 audience members, most of whom worked in the
entertainment industry and in higher education. The second reading took place in
February, 2013, at a USC conference, From Prosecution to Empowerment: Fighting
Trafficking and Promoting the Rights of Migrants, sponsored by the USC Center for
Feminist Research, the USC Center for the Study of Immigrant Integration, and USC
Department of Sociology. This reading was attended by 200 members of the USC
community and the general public.
Participants
Members of the creative team including dramaturge/director Ted Braun and producer
Rick Culbertson. I served as producer, musical director and accompanist. The cast was as
follows:
Emma- Lowe Taylor
Lipoh- Jennie Kwan
Achara- Melody Butiu
Lewelyn- Kerri-Anne Lavin
Woman 1 (Soon Nu, Mama X, Mae, Volunteer, Guard, Customs Officer) - Joan
Almadilia
Woman 2 (Mother, Nono, Buya) - Katy Tang
Phase Three: Production in Thailand
Phase Three (the “production” phase) involved facilitating a production of the musical in
Thailand in December, 2013, for an audience comprised of community members whose
demographics were similar to those who participated in my preliminary 2011 interviews.
Five focus groups were held following these performances, in which sixty-four (64)
participants were asked to respond to the musical. They were asked to discuss their
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understandings of it, to share their attitudes toward the subject, and finally, to reflect on
their own experiences. The focus groups included three migrant groups, one Western
NGO group and one artist group. The focus group design and implementation was
constructed in partnership with USC doctoral student Prawit Thainiyom, who served as
Co-PI on the focus group research.
Research Questions
1. After viewing the performance, were NGO employees, female migrants and
artists able to critically evaluate the roles they play within the anti-trafficking
“rescue industry?”
2. After viewing the performance, were normative conceptions about
victimization and rescue, the role of the West, and the agency of sex workers
challenged?
3. After viewing the performance, was “participatory practice” demonstrated by
all three groups according to Watkins and Shulman’s (2008) evaluative criteria?
Participants
Focus Group participants included nine (9) NGO employees, forty (40) migrants, and
fifteen (15) artists. Participants were asked to provide demographic information regarding
gender, age, visa & employment status, and length of residence in Chiang Mai. We
selected these variables in order to capture basic demographic information and variance
of participant experiences in Chiang Mai (i.e., as short-term visitor, long-term resident,
employee, intern, performer, etc)
4
. This allows the results to be transferable (or used with
limitations) to others with similar profiles in Chiang Mai. Groups were divided
according to Western NGO employees, migrants and artists. This ensured the somewhat
homogeneous characteristics of the participants in each group, and contributed to
fostering a welcoming environment in which participants would be encouraged to discuss
relevant topics openly, thereby reaching a certain level of consensus.
Artist Participants included members of the creative team including director Rick
Culbertson, TO facilitator and assistant director/ choreographer Kimiko Broder, State
Manager Eleonor Delmas, Lighting Designer Ben En Vadrouille Berimbau, prop master
Jeff Lynn, music assistant Christy Humphry, production assistant Jessica (Mai) Nkhum
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4
See Appendix J for focus group participant demographics.
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and co-producer Stephan Turner of The Gate Theater Group. I served as producer,
musical director, and accompanist. The cast was as follows:
Emma- Amanda Kruger
Lipoh- Jennie Kwan
Achara- Marisa Mour
Lewelyn- Ann Fink
Woman 1 (Soon Nu, Mama X, Mae, Volunteer, Guard, Customs Officer) - Melody
Butiu
Woman 2 (Mother, Nono, Buya)- Yardpirun Poolun
Moderator Guidelines
The NGO focus group was moderated by Prawit Thainiyom. The migrant focus groups
were moderated by a staff member of a Chiang Mai-based NGO, an artist participant, and
an external field consultant. The artist focus group was moderated by a staff member of a
Chiang Mai-based NGO. Moderator guidelines were used to structure each focus group.
5

The focus groups’ questions were deigned to achieve greater participation among all
those involved in every stage of the project—from the original interview respondents, to
the artists who helped generate and interpret the dramatic material, to the audience
members who engaged in the final performance.
Focus Group Questions
Questions for the anti-trafficking NGO Employees focused on the following themes:
1) Reflections on NGO employee experiences- personal and professional
2) Ethical dilemmas and challenges faced by the employees in the anti-
trafficking sector
3) Use of the musical as an advocacy tool
4) Representation of survivors and victims
5) Tensions between faith-based and secular organizations
Questions for the migrants focused on the following themes:
1) Reflections on personal migrant experiences
2) Discussion on being a survivor of trauma
3) Migrant needs versus society needs
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5
See Appendices G, H and I for moderator guidelines.
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4) Representation of migrant voices in the production
5) Use of the musical as an advocacy tool
6) Opinion about NGOs in the anti-trafficking sector
Questions for the artists focused on the following themes:
1) Experiences participating in the production
2) Changes of knowledge about issues related to human trafficking
3) Challenges of performing in front of the Thailand audience
4) Difficulties and concerns about the production
5) Engagement with the migrant groups
6) Changes in awareness about political landscape in Burma
Compensation
Participants were not compensated monetarily; however, some compensation was given
to the migrant women’s organization in the form of hiring members of the organization to
serve as production assistants during the pre-production phase of the musical. Translators
from this and other Burmese migrant women’s organizations were also employed and
compensated. A light meal was provided for all participants following the production.
Procedures
Focus groups took place in two rooms adjacent to the theater. One focus group took place
in the theater itself following the performance. Data was recorded via hand-held audio
and video devices, to ensure back-up. Data was then stored on the computers of the two
Principal Investigators and transcribed by two graduate assistants in the US. Participants
were then coded according to gender and group (for example, “Female Artist,” “Male
Migrant,” etc).
Evaluation
Data from the focus groups was analyzed by color-coding the emergent themes in the
focus group transcriptions. I then drew on the emerging discursive themes to assess the
impact of the musical on members of the three participant groups, consistent with the
framework of “participatory practice” proposed by Watkins and Shulman. According to
these authors, a successful “participatory” project should be:

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1) Proactive (i.e., engaging ways of building shared understanding of history and
social context in a community environment that will witness past events in order
to prevent future violence and exclusion);
2) Rupturing (i.e., the goal of these projects is to disrupt dominant, hegemonic
narratives);
3) Dialogical (i.e., inspiring communication between individuals or groups);
4) Consciousness-raising (i.e., generating new insights about one’s personal and
social role in society); and
5) Performative (i.e., communicated through a performance medium such as
theater, dance, music, film, etc).
Theatre of the Oppressed Workshop
In addition to the focus groups, part of the Phase Three study involved facilitating a
Theatre of the Oppressed (TO) Workshop, in which artists and migrants from the Kachin
Women’s Association of Thailand took part. In the workshop, the TO facilitator
introduced theater of the oppressed games and exercises, in an effort to get all
participants in the room engaging with each other. Games included opening the voice,
moving the body in new ways and interacting with members of the community as a
whole through the medium of improvisation in ways that surpassed language. Such
techniques were ideal for participants from two or more different cultures, who did not
speak the same language. The theater games allowed participants to overcome the
barriers of spoken language, engaging sounds and motion in ways that freed them from
the need for translation.
From there, the TO facilitator, in collaboration with the participants, identified
aspects of daily life that could be thought of as “traumas.” The Kachin migrants
described scenarios from their home country such as forced portering, forced
displacement, abuse by the military, and sexual violence. Artists from the United States
identified scenarios of their own, including racism, homophobia, and intolerance of
religious differences in the United States. From here, participants worked together to “act
out” scenes exploring these themes. Participants were then led through the process of
reflection about these scenarios. The group offered ideas about strategies that could help
overcome the problems presented in the scenes. Participants were then invited to re-enact
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the scenes they had presented, incorporating the suggested strategies. This workshop was
designed to augment the inquiry into DAR as a process of fostering aspects that were
dialogical, pro-active, rupturing, consciousness-raising and performative.

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Chapter 3
Constructing the Problem:
Thailand’s National Identity Project, the U.S. Abolitionist Project
and the Trafficking of Women in Thailand

What looks from the outside and from a distance as a bounded group appears
much more divided and contested at closer range. Culture is more often not what
people share, but what they choose to fight over.
–G Eley and G Suny (1996, p.9)

Thailand’s National Identity Project
For the better part of the past century, Thailand has been embroiled in a nation-building
project—an attempt, fostered by the Thai government and reinforced throughout the
culture to define itself as a unique, coherent nation-state. This project plays out in
numerous ways, and involves a rigorous self-definition of what constitutes “Thainess,” or
“Kwampben Thai” (Thongchai, 1994). In order for Thai citizens to feel they belong to the
nation-state, they must adhere to certain characteristics and behaviors. These include,
among other things, speaking the central Thai language, paying reverence to the
Monarchy and practicing Theraveda Buddhism. While most people living within
Thailand’s borders are considered Thai citizens, certain ethnic groups, particularly in
Thailand’s northern provinces, are not granted this qualification. The Shan, Kachin, and
Akha are three such groups. Though many members of these ethnic communities have
resided within Thailand’s borders for generations, and while many others have sought
refuge in Thailand from the politically unstable nation of Burma, Thailand nevertheless
does not recognize these ethnic groups as being Thai citizens. Many are rendered
“stateless,” possessing no land rights, no government-sponsored educational
opportunities, no health care or political protections.
I argue that the Thai Government renders these and other ethnic minority groups
“others” as a way of strengthening its national identity. As a result of this “othering”
process, many ethnic minority community members are unable to find regular, well-paid
work in Thailand. Instead, they must turn to informal labor—an unregulated sector in
which exploitation and human trafficking are common occurrences—in order to survive.

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Ethnic minority communities in Thailand
The plight of ethnic minority communities, many of which are comprised of migrants
from Burma, is articulated in research by a number of NGOs and CBOs in Thailand who
address the issue of trafficking from rights and indigenous-based perspectives.
Organizations such as Development Education Programme for Daughters and
Communities, The Kachin Women’s Association of Thailand (KWAT) and Mekong
Minority Foundation (MMF) situate the issue of human trafficking in a citizenship and
indigenous rights-based paradigm, explaining that the Thai state excludes ethnic
minorities and informal migrants (many of whom are refugees fleeing political
persecution and state-sanctioned violence) from participation in Thai society.
6
These
organizations paint a vivid picture of the plight of ethnic minorities who live in Thailand
and participate in Thai society, but do not possess land rights, access to education or
formal employment opportunities. Without access to basic services, poverty and crime
augment the insecurity of ethic minorities in Thailand’s north
7
(DEPDC Staff, personal
communication, 2009). I draw on examples of Shan, Akha, and Kachin ethnic minority
communities who are continually at odds with the Thai government, and suffer from the
“othering” practices described herein. I choose to focus on these communities because
they provide diverse examples of “othering,” and because—particularly in the case of the
Kachin and the Akha—they represented the majority of my research respondents in Phase
I.
The Shan State, as it has been known for over a century, comprises over 64,000
square kilometers of land overlapping portions of eastern Burma, Southern China,
Northern Thailand and Western Laos (Shanwomen.org.). Situated along the border of
northern Thailand, Shan State is home to a multitude of ethnic minority groups, including
the Kachin and the Akha. A people with a rich cultural history, the Shan now exist in a
community that is straddled by the borders of the Burmese, Laotian, Thai, and Chinese
nation-states. Since the Shan state as an identifiable ethnic territory existed long before
the creation of identifiable national territorial borders, many Shan define themselves by
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6
See, for example, www.DEPDC.org, www.kachinwomen.org, www.minorityleadership.org).
7
Thailand’s northern most cities of Chiang Mai and Chiang Rai, and the territories that surround
them are considered part of the ancient Lanna Kingdom, which was established in the thirteenth
century along the borders of Burma and Laos (see Scott, 2009).
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their ethnic identity first, and by the national identity of the country they occupy only
second.!!
Many Shan families have lived within Thailand’s borders for generations, yet
remain un-recognized by the Thai Government as citizens. Historically, the Shan who
resided in Burma faced great difficulty surviving under, first, British rule and then, prior
to the end of colonialism in 1948, the Junta’s military regime. In the face of Burma’s
ongoing civil war, like other ethnic minority groups, thousands have fled across the
border into Thailand seeking political asylum.
Kachin State, Shan State’s neighbor to the north,

represents an equally ancient
civilization rich in culture and history. Having practiced Christianity for over a century
(Leach, 1954), conflict between the Kachin and the central Burmese government has
been ongoing since Burma’s independence from colonialism in 1948 (Sun, 2014). Active
armed conflict, spurred by Kachin grievances over the lack of autonomy from the central
Burmese government and ongoing ethnic discrimination escalated in 1961, and was
fueled by the newly formed Kachin Independence Organization (KIO) and its armed
wing, the Kachin Independence Army (KIA) (Global Witness, 2005). One of a number of
armed ethnic groups in Burma, the Kachin are known for their political organization and
military prowess (Lintner, 1997), having, by the early 1990’s, trained over 6,000 troops,
plus militias (Global Witness, 2005). The conflict continued until 1994, when a ceasefire
agreement was reached between Burma’s then-governing body, the State Peace and
Development Council (SLORC) and the KIO, resulting in seventeen years of relative
peace. According to Woods (2012), the ceasefire served the interests of both political
parties, as it created opportunities for economic expansion in the region (for example, in
the jade and timber trades). However, this, in turn, enhanced the power of Burma’s
central government, authorizing the state to enact land-grabbing in the resource-rich
Kachin region (K. McLeod, personal communication, October 13, 2014). As such
practices continued, the ceasefire was ultimately broken, and armed conflict continues at
the time of this writing. The KIO are now “the country’s second largest remaining armed
ceasefire group” (Woods, 2012, p. 749).
As a result of the conflict, conditions on the ground remain volatile for Kachin
people. As fighting has escalated in and around KIO-controlled areas, internally
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displaced persons (IDPs) face worsening insecurity in and around the camps, and many
have had to flee across the China border to escape the fighting (Quintana, 2014). The
Kachin Women’s Association of Thailand documented that between June, 2011, and
May, 2012, 70,000 civilians fled their homes due to state-sanctioned violence and
growing human rights abuses and now live along the border (Kachin Women’s
Association of Thailand, 2011).
The Akha, another ethnic group, live in the highlands of Burma’s Shan State, and
comprise a population of approximately 100,000 (Smith, 2002). Possessing neither a
delineated territory of their own, nor an organized state or government system, Akha are
considered “stateless” in both Burma and Thailand, and many migrate to Thailand and
work in the informal sex industry. Living in relative isolation from the Western world for
centuries, it has been suggested that, in recent decades, an erosion of traditional village
life and rampant drug addiction have degraded the social conditions of the Akha
(Kammerer, 1992). This, as well as circumstances of economic inequity, has influenced
the trend in Akha migration into Thailand (Akha migrant, personal communication,
2011).
For ethnic minority women from these communities, the journey traveling into
Thailand seeking employment in the hopes of helping to support their families and
communities is not uncommon. Burma, a country known for being “near the bottom” for
its human rights violations (White, 2004) before its supposed transition to democracy in
2010, has served as the instigator of these migratory journeys. According to one Kachin
migrant, women migrate by any means necessary—by oxcart, elephant, flat-bed truck,
and on foot (Kachin migrant, personal communication, December, 2011)—seeking a
better life across the Thai-Burma border. Upon arrival in Thailand, however, ethnic
women often face equally harsh circumstances. Regardless of their plight, the Thai state
does not award them the same rights or privileges accorded to Thai nationals. Displaced
refugees living along the Thai-Burma border areas are perceived entirely in accordance
with their political situation—their identities wholly defined through the political lens of
their asylum (Tangseefa, 2007). Furthermore, the Thai government does not recognize all
ethnic minority populations as refugees, and continuously denies certain groups such
status (Shan Women’s Action Network, 2003):
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The absence of refuge and services particularly impacts on the more vulnerable
Shan asylum seekers such as pregnant women, children, elderly and disabled
persons who are unable to fend for themselves in the jungle or on work sites. The
Shan asylum seekers in Thailand live in precarious situations as they live in
constant fear of being arrested and deported to Burma, where they face ongoing
persecution in the forms of torture, rape and death… This fear has increased after
the implementation of an agreement between Thailand and Burma on the
repatriation of migrant workers since August 2003 (Shan Women’s Action
Network, 2003).
Ethnic minority women from Burma are, therefore, among the most vulnerable
populations in northern Thailand. Due to Thailand’s failure to ratify the 1951 Refugee
Convention (Shan Women’s Action Network, 2003), an agreement that advocates for the
rights and protections of people seeking political asylum, the Thai government is
complicit in maintaining the desperate circumstances faced by refugees from these
communities. Lacking legal status and political recognition, many Shan and Akha
migrants turn to the sex industry, and many Kachin turn to domestic, construction, and
other unregulated labor sectors in order to survive.
“Zomia” and the “Wild People”
The history of the Thai government’s relationship with ethnic minority communities such
as the Kachin, Akha, and Shan has been discussed in literature dealing with the
anthropology and political history of Thailand’s north. Toyota (2007) described the
process by which Thai statehood was bestowed upon ethnic Thais, while subsequently,
how statelessness was imposed upon ethnic minorities who had been historically
dwelling in Thailand, as well as upon those who had more recently migrated from Burma.
In the early part of the 20
th
century, the concept of statelessness did not yet exist, as
notions of nationhood and state sovereignty were not yet being used to define citizenship.
In Siam’s pre-colonial era, Toyota explained, clear political boundaries between
“highland” and “lowland” people were extremely blurred, as “The borders of center-
oriented ‘galactic polities’ of the traditional state were ‘porous and indistinct’” (Tambiah
1977). It is said that peoples of these margins used to be under the “indirect rule” of the
Thai authority” (Toyota, p. 94). However, when such rule became overwhelming, as
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James Scott noted, “subjects moved with alacrity to the periphery or to another state”
(Scott, 2009, p. 7), reinforcing a pattern of fluidity in ancient state formation. “Hybrid
identities” in the hill communities thus continue to characterize many of the ethnic
populations of northern Thailand and Burma. James Scott referred to this territory as
“Zomia” (2009).
It wasn’t until Siam emerged as a “buffer state” in the late nineteenth century
during France and Britain’s colonial conquests of neighboring Southeast Asian countries,
that Western-oriented mapping techniques were adopted by Siam (Toyota, 2007, p. 95),
thereby relegating Zomia’s populations to the framework of the classical state.

Thongchai
(1994) explored this process in his discussion of ancient indigenous border
“cosmography” in what is now considered to be northern Thailand. It was not until the
twentieth century, he explained, that the modern paradigm of nationhood manifested
itself with definitive certainty in what is now known as Thailand’s north. During the
reign of the Lanna kingdom, multiple ethnic groups lived and worked on the land; land
that did not adhere to the boundaries that were later seemingly artificially imposed on
what is now the sovereign Thai state. Tribes, villages, and vast communities of
overlapping languages, cultural practices, and political and spiritual allegiances settled
and migrated across the borders of Thailand, Burma, Yunnan China, and Laos. Their
conception of political boundaries was a “patchy, disconnected network of power units.”
(Thongchai, 1994, p. 79). These communities paid allegiance to local overlords, but had
no concern for concepts of nationhood or state sovereignty; indeed the very idea of
physical borders remained unknown.
The implementation of Western map-making techniques, however, created a new
paradigm for both administrative and military operations in Siam, and influenced
significant changes in the political construction of nationhood (Thongchai, 1994, p. 130).
The new construction of a Siamese nation-state with physical borders and territorial
boundaries, spurred a new need for Siam to define its national identity. Indigenous ethnic
groups who had once lived freely on the natural land suddenly had to pay allegiance to a
nation-state: be it Burma, Thailand, Yunnan, China or Laos (p. 130). The Shan State in
particular, which had previously stretched across pre-national boundaries for generations,
became divided and partitioned across three different countries possessing vastly
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different national identities. This compartmentalization of space, and corresponding need
to adhere to the rules of the “nation-state,” created problems for Kachin, Akha, and other
ethnic communities who were unable to speak the national languages or understand the
newly institutionalized customs and laws. Indeed, the concept of “nationhood” in itself
was a paradigm to which ethnic minorities could not readily adhere. Called “wild people”
by elite Bangkokians, ethnic “hill tribes” were said to have little in common with the
elites in the capital, a discrepancy that delineated the muang (center) from the pa
(highland) (Scott, 1991), and was used as a way a way to identify “Thai-ness,” in contrast
(Toyota, 2007).
Additionally, the U.S. military presence in Thailand in the 1950’s contributed to
this process of nation-building, helping to define the moment when ethnic minorities in
Thailand’s north became a national “problem.” In the advent of the Cold War, the U.S.
occupied northern Thailand, promoting the image of a lawless northern frontier in an
attempt to ward off communist insurgencies in the surrounding countries of China and
Laos. In the face of a perceived communist threat that was sweeping the region, the
United States, hand in hand with the Thai government, established the Border Police and
the U.S. Operation Mission (USOM), an organization involved in developing and
implementing training programs for “highland” people in Thai citizenship (Toyota,
2007):
As part of these programs, photographs of the Thai King were distributed to the
border villages and instructional speeches on Thai nationalism were delivered to
raise patriotic awareness among villagers (Kunstadter 1967)… In 1959, the
official identification “hill tribes” (chao khao in Thai), which includes nine ethnic
highland minorities, was established (Vienne 1989, 36) (p. 98).
By the late 1960’s, in order to establish citizenship in Thailand, members of the
“hill tribe” communities were instructed to prove that their families had been living on
Thai soil for at least three generations. This proof would earn one a “pink card,” and,
theoretically, the ability to claim one’s status as a Thai citizen (Toyota, 2007). This
process, however, turned out to have dire consequences on ethnic minority populations,
many of whom did not share the Thais’ language or transcription system, and therefore
were unable to understand this registration procedure (Akha migrant, personal
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communication, December, 2011). Furthermore, few hill tribe peoples possessed written
identification documentation, which negated the possibility of obtaining citizenship.
Lacking proper documentation would render a person an “illegal migrant,” in effect
turning them overnight into a criminal (Toyota, 2007). Thousands of ethnic people were
arrested, deported, jailed, or fined. Land rights were denied, educational opportunities
revoked, employment options dissolved (p. 98).
Despite the fact that virtually the entire hill tribe population was rendered
“illegal,” “non-citizens,” and “migrants,” however, their presence in Thailand remained
strong throughout the remainder of the century. A 2002 survey estimated that the official
“tribal” population in Thailand was 914,755 people, a figure that amounted to
approximately 1.4 percent of Thailand’s total population (Toyota, 2007, p. 91).
Being stateless, for many in Thailand’s rural north as well as in Burma, is not
merely a passing trend of history, but rather a self-perpetuating condition (Scott, 2009).
Avoiding governance, Scott argued, served as a way for the people of Zomia to maintain
autonomy in the face of oppressive nation states. Nevertheless, when a family goes
unrecognized by the Thai state, the ripple effects are felt for generations: migrants and
stateless ethnic peoples must adhere to strict legal and cultural restrictions that prevent
them from fully participating in Thai society. The condition of statelessness has opened
up a vast, seemingly endless dilemma for ethnic minority individuals seeking to work and
participate in a society that offers them no legal protections or rights.
“Push factors” and the feminization of migration
Conditions of statelessness, migration and discrimination against migrants in the informal
labor sector in Thailand do not occur in a vacuum. Collapsed into this reality are the
factors that drive women to migrate from economically deprived and war-torn villages of
upper Burma. In the literature on trafficking, these conditions are known as “push
factors” (see Sassen, 2000; U.S. Department of State, 2010). I argue that such factors not
only influence conditions of labor exploitation and trafficking—they also play a role in
the construction of Thailand’s National Identity Project.
8

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8
In explicating the connection between Thailand’s National Identity Project and the “push
factors” around women’s migration, I seek to not only illuminate the realties faced by thousands
of women throughout the Southeast Asia, but also to concretize a key aspect of my larger
argument on human trafficking: namely, that the best approach to confronting this issue from a
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One example of a “push factor” is economic disparity. Seen most sharply in
circumstances faced by women, such disparity is a primary cause of women’s migration
through and beyond Southeast Asia for purposes of prostitution (Volunteer Coordinator
at D.E.P.D.C., personal communication, July, 2009) As Sassen noted, informal migration
processes occurring under globalization foster “new forms of cross-border solidarity and
identity formation that represents new subjectivities” (2000:261).
According to the United Nations:
Women represent 70 percent of the world’s poor. They are often paid less than
men for their work, with the average wage gap in 2008 being 17 percent. Women
face persistent discrimination when they apply for credit for business or self-
employment and are often concentrated in insecure, unsafe and low-wage work.
Eight out of ten women workers are considered to be in vulnerable employment in
sub-Saharan Africa and South Asia, with global economic changes taking a huge
toll on their livelihoods (2000: 1).
Acknowledging the reality that women generally face harsher, more dire
economic circumstances than men is a critical, yet often overlooked aspect of the
discourse on trafficking. Additionally, it is essential to acknowledge that working as a
prostitute in a destination city (such as Bangkok) is likely to earn a woman a higher wage
than she would otherwise earn working, for example, in a rural village in Burma. Indeed,
as I will discuss in forthcoming chapters, contrary to many myths that abound about
migration and sex work being uniformly “forced” or “coerced” processes (see
Kempadoo, Sanghera, & Pattanaik, 2005; Parreñas, 2011) many women migrate from
Burma into Thailand voluntarily, as conditions in Burma are so dire that the precarious
labor experiences they face in Thailand are more acceptable. Such disparities point to the
way political economy factors in home countries violate women’s rights to economic and
social security.
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policy perspective is to examine conditions that influence irregular migration, and work to
eradicate women’s insecurity in home countries from which they migrate. As I will show in the
chapters that follow, this approach would prove more valuable and effective than addressing “end
game” aspects of the trafficking cycle. I suggest, in other words, that trafficking can only be
eradicated if it is prevented, and that prevention can only be achieved by addressing the political,
economic and social instability in the countries from which women migrate.
!
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Of central importance to the discussion of women’s migration is the issue of
neoliberal capitalism (often inaccurately referred to as “globalization”). Sassen (2000)
unpacked the relationship between neoliberal capitalism and women’s labor migration,
explaining that neoliberalism, with its emphasis on deregulation, overseas manufacturing
and new forms of profit-making to remedy structural adjustment policy debt in the
developing world, has opened up new labor markets in which women participate. This
influences their decision to migrate and participate in the sex industry. Globalization,
therefore, has created new economies on the backs of poor women (p. 225). Arguing for a
more nuanced, complicated look at globalization—one focusing on its impact on
women—Sassen explained:
Through their work and remittances, women enhance the government revenue of
deeply indebted countries and offer new profit making possibilities to
‘entrepreneurs’ who have seen other opportunities vanish as a consequence of
global firms and markets entering their countries or to long time criminals who
can now operate their illegal trade globally….It is through these supposedly rather
value-less economic actors- low wage and poor women- that key components of
these new economies have been built (p. 255).
Important here is the premise that the world economy, under a neoliberal model,
depends on women’s low wage labor for its maintenance. Such labor helps boost GDP,
economic hegemony and even, I argue, the national image of a country. Additionally, as
Mohanty (2002) noted, neoliberal capitalist practices have “reprivatized” women’s labor,
moving the responsibility for their welfare from state projects to the private, domestic
sphere. Mohanty critiqued such practices, saying, “While globalization has always been a
part of capitalism, and capitalism is not a new phenomena (sic), at this time I believe the
theory, critique, and activism around antiglobalization has to be a key focus for
feminists” (Mohanty, 2002, p. 510). Women, Mohanty explained, bear the brunt of the
social consequences of the privatization of social welfare, as it is their labor that goes
unregulated, unpaid and unacknowledged under conditions of neoliberal capitalism.
Furthermore, in order to successfully construct, uphold and perpetuate a specific
body of nationalistic traits and practices, the Thai state must perpetuate an identity of an
“other,” a group of people who clearly do not belong, who do not participate, and
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therefore do not receive the benevolent treatment that the state offers to those who follow
its every rule. Such workers, as Harvey (2005) noted, are rendered “illegal” enemies of
the state, and subsequently deemed “disposable:”
Captive labour forces abound because immigration is restricted. These barriers
can be evaded only by illegal immigration (which creates an easily exploitable
labour force)… Under neoliberalization, the figure of the ‘disposable worker’
emerges as prototypical upon the world stage. Accounts of appalling conditions of
labour and the despotic conditions under which labourers work in sweatshops of
the world abound (Harvey, 2005, p. 169).
The nature of women’s irregular migration, coupled with the quest for an
established Thai national identity has given rise to an increase in the exploitation of
migrant workers from Burma. This exploitation, I suggest, bolsters the image of the Thai
nation state. As Toyota (2007) explained, the existence of national borders gives rise to
the establishment of state identity, as the ability to define an “other” more readily helps
one define oneself. Thai identity, she suggested, is a politics of exclusion. Creating
definitions of the non-Thai “other” not only contributes to the construction Thailand’s
strengthened self-image, but also to its role as a regional power.
Trafficking, then, is not so much a result of Thailand’s assertion of its national
identity and regional dominance, as it is a means. The exploitation of female ethnic
migrant workers has become a form of currency for the Thai Government—a tool for
constructing identity, and a way to differentiate between populations who belong (and
thus are not exploited) and populations who don’t belong (and thus, must turn to
irregular, exploitable labor as their only means of survival). Viewing these ethnic
migrants as problems due to their participation in the informal labor sector is one
example of how this “othering” process plays out in Thai civil society. Shan, Kachin,
Akha and other minority women are rendered both troublesome burdens, and expolitable
commodities whose personhood is exchanged for their “othered” role. This role, in turn,
helps uphold the legitimacy of the Thai nation-state.

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The U.S. Abolitionist Project in Thailand
Thus far, I have described how the cultural de-legitimacy of ethnic minority and migrant
populations in Thailand is part of an underlying National Identity Project on the part of
the Thai government and Thai populous. I will now present an argument around a second
project, the U.S. Abolitionist Project—a global movement focused on the eradication of
prostitution in the form of anti-trafficking policy. I argue that through the use of
narratives conflating trafficking with prostitution, this movement promotes the normative
values of the U.S., while, simultaneously, distracting audiences who consume the
trafficking narrative away from the U.S.’s neoliberal policies in the developing world,
and thus, also from the plight of the female migrant laborers who the movement is
supposedly trying to help.
Having been labeled a “source, transit, and destination country” for trafficking in
the Mekong Sub-Region (U.S. Department of State, Office to Monitor and Combat
Trafficking in Persons, 2011), Thailand has gained a reputation for sex tourism,
prostitution and, more recently, what has come to be thought of as an underground
criminal network of transnational organized crime that fuels human trafficking.
In tandem with this, neoliberal economic policies and a burgeoning tourist
industry have kept Thailand a regional economic hegemon, not coincidentally in tandem
with its reputation as a prostitution hub. As I will illuminate in Chapter 5, responses by
the abolitionist anti-trafficking movement have sought to “clean up” Thailand by
conducting “raid and rescue” efforts in a stated attempt to “catch” the victims of human
trafficking as well as traffickers. I argue, however, that this agenda is masking the U.S.’s
neoliberal incentive to keep conditions of women’s migration and labor unsupported,
unstable and exploitative. It is no coincidence, I suggest, that on the face of things, the
anti-trafficking movement works to save the “victims” of Thailand’s sex trade, while all
the while, the “race to the bottom” (Harvey, 2005) that has been created through
Western-driven capitalist practices in Thailand grows stronger. Employing a rhetorical
frame enacted through the performance of paternalistic moralisms (Cheng 2011;
Doezema, 2001, 2010; Parreñas, 2011) the U.S. Abolitionist Project, which dictates the
policies of the global movement to combat trafficking, has gained political traction by
focusing on “spectacles of suffering” that distract its audiences away from the “everyday”
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rights violations of poverty and other abuses faced by the women who it claims to be
rescuing.
Cultural Roots of the U.S. Abolitionist Project
The U.S. culture wars of the 1980’s produced, among other things, fierce debates about
prostitution and the relationship between women’s sexuality and labor. Radical feminists
argued that prostitution was a manifestation of male sexual violence against women,
while sex radical feminists saw sex work as a terrain of struggle, and potential site for
resistance. More recently, these debates, which rely on moralisms and binary conceptions
of women’s sexuality, have been adopted by the U.S.-based anti-trafficking movement
and “exported” in international foreign policy.
The discourse produced by the feminist politics of the 1980’s represented a shift
in the cultural perception of women’s sexuality and labor. “Sex work” became a term
used by sex radical feminists to suggest that sexual acts can be considered legitimate
forms of labor, and as such, should be fairly compensated. Conversations about sex work
began to incorporate discussions of creativity, difference, self-expression, and women’s
roles in the public sphere (Thomas, 1996). Much like the response to the AIDS epidemic
of the 1980’s, however, the cultural response to this new way of viewing and talking
about women’s sexuality and labor generated backlash, derived from the ongoing panic
around the “polluted body” of the prostitute (Butler, 1991). While sex workers viewed
the claiming of their sexual labor as an act of empowerment, they continued to be seen as
“symbols of suffering and need, of the mythic malevolence of women, of ‘criminals and
deviants’” (Leigh, 1996), and faced ongoing stigmatization, scapegoating and legalized
abuse (Alexander, 1996; Leigh, 1996; Nussbaum, 1998; O’Connell Davidson, 1998;
Rubin, 1993; Thomas, 1996; Vance, 1993). Thus, during this era, the meaning of sex
work became an increasingly contested terrain of struggle.
The heightened debate about whether a woman can truly exercise agency in
selling her sexuality, in tandem with the increasing expression, organization,
empowerment, and radicalization around this issue underscores a larger tension within
the culture over the way women’s sexuality and labor is produced and maintained. This
tension, in turn, echoes broader cultural conflicts about the social roles of women in
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society, and the way these social roles are performed. Gayle Rubin discussed the
symbolic aspect of such debates, explaining:
Contemporary conflicts over sexual values and erotic conduct…acquire immense
symbolic weight. Disputes over sexual behavior often become the vehicles for
displacing social anxieties, and discharging their attendant emotional intensity.
Consequently, sexuality should be treated with special respect in times of great
social stress (Rubin, 1993, p. 267).
More recently, the debates about the relationship between women’s sexuality and
labor have become the subject of the U.S.-based anti-trafficking movement, one
predicated on a discourse that pits “abolitionist” feminists, who see all prostitution as a
violation of women’s human rights and therefore seek its abolishment (Barry, 1995;
MacKinnon, 1989; 2007) against “pro-rights” feminists, who view sex work as a
legitimate form of labor and suggest decriminalization as a response to the industry’s
often oppressive conditions (Bindman & Doezema, 1997; Doezema, 2001; Kempadoo et.
al., 2005; O’Connell Davidson, 1998). Far from being abandoned in the cultural and
political landscape of the United States, this discourse instead, became “exported” in U.S.
foreign policy. The various “camps” of the feminist movement—from pro-positive
feminists such as Gloria Steinem who believe that sexual relations should be based on
love and mutual respect (Chapkis, 1996), to radical feminists like Catherine MacKinnon,
who suggested that all sex acts between men and women are inherently abusive and
violating to women (MacKinnon, 1989)—continue to make their arguments conflating
prostitution with trafficking known. However, it is the abolitionist feminists, such as
Kathleen Barry who argue that there are no differences between sex work, sexual slavery,
incest and rape (Chapkis, 1996, pp. 46-47) who receive the majority of anti-trafficking
funding and thus, the most robust platform on the international stage (Chuang, 2006;
Doezema, 2001; 2010; Doezema & Kempadoo, 1998; Global Alliance Against
Trafficking in Women [GAATW], 2007; Parreñas, 2011; Pickering, Milivojevic &
Seagrave, 2009).
The agenda of this abolitionist project is, therefore, to steer U.S. foreign policy to
support anti-prostitution advocates in environments where they may maintain dominance.
Having lost the “culture wars” at home, abolitionist feminists embarked on a new
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mission: to impose anti-prostitution moralisms and policies on the developing world in
the form of the anti-trafficking movement.
Historical roots of abolitionism
Far from being an invention of the culture wars, the U.S. abolitionist movement, in fact,
began a century before, in response to national panic about women’s sexual promiscuity
and the influence of men of color in the United States. These foundations were
concretized in two important projects: The White Slave Panic of Victorian England, and
the Mann Act and Page Laws of early 20
th
century America. In addition to regulating
sexuality of women and immigrants on America’s shores, the later two laws
foreshadowed the repressive foreign policy legislation of the more recent Bush
Administration. Importantly, these historical roots of abolitionism provide clues as to
why the discourse on trafficking continues to inflame ideological differences between
feminists, and foreshadow the tensions around issues of migration and the sovereign
state.
Jo Doezema (2010) traced the concern over “trafficking in women” back to its
roots in the “White Slave Panic” era of Victorian England. She explained that from its
earliest conception, the term “trafficking” was an elusive concept. It was, and remains,
difficult to pin down, precisely because of the discourse that surrounds and constructs it.
This discourse, explained Doezema, is marked by a melodramatic narrative that stems
from the myth of white slavery in the UK. It draws on an idea of the victimhood of “good
women” (i.e., women who do not want to be prostitutes; who wish to remain pure and
virginal, but are coerced into the trade against their will) and juxtaposes this image
against the equal and opposing image of the “bad harlot” (i.e., the criminal prostitute
who, through her consent to disgraceful and dangerous acts, negates any chance of
receiving empathy or good will from society at large). The narrative comprises what
Doezema called a “myth,” intended to “normalize” the social structures and value
systems of the middle class—in particular, the social roles of white, middle class British
women.
Agustin (2007) added a rich historical account of prostitution in Victorian England to
this critique, suggesting that “rise of the social,” which developed in Europe around the
time of the French and American revolutions as part of the Enlightenment project, was, in
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fact, a women’s project (p. 96). This social project, linked with philanthropy, supported
the construction of the discourse on trafficking through white, middle class women’s
attempts to help sex workers—women who they deemed to be less fortunate then
themselves. But the discourse produced by these seeming attempts at altruism had more
to do with what remained obscured than what became exposed. As Foucault has noted,
“The discourse on sex in the 19
th
century was based on a “stubborn will to non
knowledge…. There can be no misunderstanding that is not based on a fundamental
relation to truth” (Foucault, 1977, p. 55). Agustin echoed this idea, suggesting that the
trafficking discourse was predicated on the construction of that category of the
“bourgeoisie woman” (p. 104) – a category of citizenship that would inspire order and
regulation in the emerging capitalist system (p. 105).
It was this connection between the act of prostitution and “the social,” Agustin
explained, that created a discourse centered around the problem of “the prostitute” as
object/ unit. Consequently, the roles of perpetrator and victim were treated as identities,
rather than temporary conditions:
Victims become passive receptacles and mute sufferers who must be saved, and
helpers become saviours, a colonialist operation warned against in discussions of
western feminism’s treatment of third-world women and now common in discussions
of migrant women who sell sex (p. 39).
These historical conditions formed the root of the U.S. Abolitionist Project. Just as
today’s discourse is predicated on debates about whether women can truly possess the
ability to consent to sex work, the earlier social panic also reinforced binaries between
consent and force, as it was thought that in consenting to prostitution, a woman would
“fall” from the grace of the middle class. This panic was exacerbated when white women
began traveling from Europe to the Americas, suggesting that it was not only the act of
commercial sex itself, but also women’s movement across national borders that provoked
concern.
The White Slave Panic served as a powerful rhetorical device, evoking images of the
transatlantic slave trade of the 16
th
through 19
th
centuries. Today’s “modern slavery”
campaigns designed by NGOs and governments paint an equally powerful rhetorical
picture (see Free the Slaves, 2015; US Department of State, Office to Monitor and
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Combat Trafficking in Persons, 2013). But, as Kempadoo et al. (2005) pointed out,
“trafficking” of the present does not reflect the practices of the transatlantic slave trade,
as today’s forms of labor exploitation—be they debt bondage, indentureship or other
forms of forced labor—are largely “lodged in contractual, wage relations and principles
of free labor power and its market exchange value” (2005, p. xx). While the
circumstances of exploitation may in some ways mirror those of slavery in previous
centuries, the actual conditions producing these circumstances are vastly different. Thus,
it is a misnomer to make such a comparison.
Not long after the advent of the White Slave Panic, the U.S. took a cue from
Victorian England and adopted legislation of its own intended to police women’s sexual
behavior and, simultaneously, curtail immigration on its own shores. Following the 1904
International Agreement for the Suppression of the White Slave Traffic signed by leading
nations of Europe, the U.S. amended its own immigration laws to criminalize the act of
“importing” a woman into the U.S. for prostitution or any other “immoral purpose.” The
Federal Mann Act, also known as the “White Slave Traffic Act,” made it a felony to
knowingly transport “any person in interstate commerce or foreign commerce for
prostitution, or any other immoral purpose” (U.S. Legal 2003) or to coerce an individual
into such acts. The law was enacted in 1910 by President Taft, during a time of “moral
panic” – while ostensibly designed to combat prostitution, it was more often used more as
a tool of “political persecution” and blackmail (Weiner, 2008).
Additionally, not unlike the Palermo Protocol that would follow almost a century
later, the vague wording of the original act allowed the U.S. government to use it as a tool
to regulate sexuality and the societal construct of morality (McCoy, 2010; Weiner, 2008).
McKoy (2010) explained that the act relegated women to the form of property, subject to
regulation by the government and, in essence, unwilling to consent to both their own
physical movement and sexual behavior.
Furthermore, McKoy suggested, the Mann Act served the purpose of regulating
the movement of men of color; in essence, targeting male immigrants whose masculinity
was seen as a threat to the purity and morality of the (white) middle class. The act, which
cemented the construction of women as potential victims and men of color as potential
criminals into the national narrative, was more often used to publicize and criminalize
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extramarital sexual relationships that protect women (McCoy, 2010). Furthermore, before
being amended in 1986 to include more gender-neutral language, the Act was criticized
for stripping women of the right to willingly travel across state lines, under the
assumption that such travel would be conducted for purposes of having an extramarital
affair (McCoy, 2010).
Travel, gender, race and morality were thereby bound together in the national
narrative of the turn-of-the-century U.S. The legislation underpinning these acts
illustrates the extent to which the U.S. abolitionist project, as a national identity project,
was predicated on socially constructed notions of gender and the regulation of women’s
sexuality.
While the Mann Act served as a project for regulating women’s sexuality,
constructing promiscuous women as victims, and stripping women’s right to consent to
making autonomous sexual choices, the Page Law’s focus was on criminalizing
immigrants. As the U.S.’s first restrictive federal immigration statute, the Page Law of
1875 banned the immigration of Chinese prostitutes, and targeted the practice of
polygamy—which was seen to be an entrenched practice in Chinese immigrant culture
(Abrams, 2005). Similar to the language of the Mann Act, the law banned the
immigration of women who entered into contracts for “lewd and immoral purposes,” and
made it a felony to import women into the U.S. for prostitution. It was soon followed by
the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882. The law incorporated an increase in fines and jail
time for those transporting to or from the U.S. anyone from Japan, China, or any
“Oriental” country without their voluntary consent, and explicitly prohibited the
immigration of Chinese prostitutes (Peffer, 1986).
The Page Law has been criticized for allowing the U.S. to gain legislative power over
morality not only of women, but also of immigrants. Ostensibly created out of concern
over preserving American conceptions of marriage and family by preventing Chinese
immigrant women who were prostitutes or in polygamous marriages, the law, in effect,
allowed the U.S. government to regulate female migrants’ sexual and marital behavior as
a way of shaping and controlling racial demographics in the U.S. (Abrams, 2005). Under
this law, prostitution and polygamy were conceptualized as “twin relics of barbarism” (p.
659): Prostitution, when entered into by white women created victims of these women
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and was viewed as the “antithesis of marriage.” So too, was polygamy linked to
victimhood and slavery—with non-monogamous marriage seen as an affront to the
cultural values of the west.
What we may understand from the historical roots of the abolitionist project, then, is
that the growing panic over immigration, as well as over the ramifications (moral,
political and economic) of women’s mobility that are echoed in anti-trafficking policy
today stemmed from a national identity project of the United States that relied on the
construction of gender and regulation of women’s sexual behavior for its maintenance.
Moreover, these foundations suggest that such panic was driven by the notion that
women’s purity is, in fact, linked to their roles as citizens. As I will discuss further below,
the discourse on trafficking is framed in such a way as to separate the “good victim”
(citizen) from the “bad prostitute” (non-citizen). But perhaps most problematic is the fact
that embedded in these discursive roots is an ongoing absence of the voices of the women
who are affected by anti-trafficking policy. The project, in Thailand as well as throughout
the developing world, was framed by policy makers and NGOs, while leaving the women
caught in its crossfires out of the conversation.
The Abolitionist Project and the “Palermo Compromise”
From a policy perspective, the U.S. Abolitionist Project was given prominence by the
2000 United Nations Convention to Prevent, Suppress and Punish Trafficking In Persons,
Especially Women and Children, also known as the “Palermo Protocol.” While the goal
of the actors at Palermo was to find consensus around an appropriate definition and
subsequent policy response to the issue of trafficking, the Convention failed to yield these
results (Chaung, 2006). Instead, the Protocol cemented the ongoing, contested debate
between neo-abolitionist and pro-rights feminists. In so doing, it offered abolitionsts the
opportunity to export their agenda worldwide.
The Convention at Palermo was largely influenced by the Coalition Against
Trafficking in Women, or CAATW, one of the early NGOs that dedicated its efforts to
fighting sex trafficking through the abolishment of prostitution. In so doing, CAATW
introduced policy recommendations to Washington that would steer anti- trafficking
policy for the next generation (Doezema, 2010). Led by Barry, CAATW promoted the
idea that sex work and sex trafficking are synonymous, and that consent in prostitution is
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a misnomer. Following this logic, Barry and her camp believed that the only way to
eradicate forced prostitution, or “trafficking,” is to rid society of prostitution altogether
(Pickering, et al., 2009).
Several pro-rights feminist groups also attended Palermo. Among these were
organizations such as the Global Alliance Against Trafficking in Women (GAATW),
who argue that sex work should not be considered human trafficking as it is not
necessarily a violation of women’s human rights (GAATW, 2007). Putting the rights of
migrant and trafficked women at the center of the conversation, GAATW warned that the
“trafficking” label could be misused to describe relationships that, in various different
cultural circumstances, were considered acceptable, not exploitative. If the definition of
trafficking were too broad and un-nuanced, GAATW argued, female migrants, sex
workers, and those who legitimately sought to help them earn wages and cross borders
could be at risk of being penalized and criminalized by the very laws that were intended
to protect them (GAATW, 2007, p. 10).
Because consensus on these divergent understandings of human trafficking was
difficult to achieve, however, members of the U.N. Convention settled on a compromise
at Palermo: Individual states would be left to decide, for themselves, whether they
viewed prostitution and trafficking as being one and the same (the abolitionist view), or
whether, as GAATW and others urged, they would approach the problem of trafficking
from a human rights perspective (Chaung, 2006, p. 442-443; Segrave et al., 2009). In so
doing, the members of the convention came up with a definition of human trafficking that
was conceptually broad—and, some have argued, deliberately vague—in order to
appease the many different stakeholders in the anti-trafficking movement (Segrave, et al.,
2009). I call this negotiation the “Palermo Compromise.”
The Palermo Compromise resulted in the following definition of trafficking:
The recruitment, transportation, transfer, harbouring or receipt of persons, by
means of the threat or use of force or other forms of coercion, of abduction, of
fraud, of deception, of the abuse of power or of a position of vulnerability or of
the giving or receiving of payments or benefits to achieve the consent of a person
having control over another person, for the purpose of exploitation. Exploitation
shall include, at a minimum, the exploitation of the prostitution of others or other
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forms of sexual exploitation, forced labour or services, slavery or practices similar
to slavery, servitude or the removal of organs (United Nations Office on Drugs
and Crime [UNODC], 2000, p. 2).
Scholars have critiqued the Protocol for its overly broad definition of trafficking
which, they suggest, makes trafficking virtually impossible to adequately identify or
quantify (Doezema, 2010; GAATW, 2007; Agustin, 2007; Parreñas, 2011; Chaung,
2006; Kempadoo, et al. 2005; Segrave, et al. 2009). Additionally, these scholars
suggested, the problem with the definition is that it encompasses many bits and pieces of
other problems. Since “trafficking” cannot be exemplified by only one type of situation,
members of the movement to combat trafficking “cherry pick” from an array of issues,
and focus their efforts on combating whatever sub-issue serves their interests.
Furthermore, as Kempadoo et al. pointed out, the Protocol explicitly links trafficking to
illegal immigration (2005, p. xiii)—a conceptually sharp departure from the human rights
frameworks offered by GAATW and other pro-rights groups at Palermo.
The Palermo Compromise succeeded, therefore, in cementing a problematic
discourse on trafficking—one in which definitions are vague and mean vastly different
things to different actors, and in which terms such as “force,” “coercion,” “rights” and
“exploitation” are often misunderstood, used interchangeably, and based on scant
empirical data (Parreñas, 2011)
9
. It also created vastly chaotic landscape in which an
array of actors adopt an “anything goes” approach to policy, depending on their
organization’s ideology.
Additionally, Palermo paved the way for the U.S. government to construct wholly
new abolitionist avenues in anti-trafficking policy: from the development of the Office to
Monitor and Combat Trafficking (G/TIP), to the creation of the Trafficking In Persons
Report, to funding pools that were benchmarked for the benefit of international NGOs
(personal communication, 2010, 2011, 2012). Chuang (2006) described how the UN
!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
9
For example, Kevin Bales estimated that 27 million people are enslaved worldwide, but
admitted that this figure is merely an approximation. (Bales, 2009: 8). While the International
Labor Organization estimated that there are 12.3 million people in forced labor around the world,
and estimates that 2.4 million are victims of human trafficking (ILO, 2009), the Thai government
managed to prosecute only four (4) trafficking cases in 2011 (Personal Communication with anti-
trafficking NGO employee, 2011). Clearly, the discrepancies between anecdotal ideas about
trafficking and real empirical data on the issue are vast.
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General Assembly’s decision to leave contested issues (i.e., the possibility of—and laws
designed to address the issue of—consensual prostitution) up to individual member
states, resulted in the U.S. government’s creation of the 2000 Trafficking Victims
Protection Act, or TVPA (p. 439). The TVPA subsequently set the precedent for US anti-
trafficking policy abroad:
Specifically, it establishes a sanctions regime authorizing the President to
withdraw U.S. (and certain multilateral) non-trade-related, non-humanitarian
financial assistance from countries deemed not sufficiently compliant with the
U.S. government’s “minimum standards for the elimination of trafficking” (2006,
p. 439)
In enacting this sanctions regime, the U.S. government, now free to decide in its
own terms how it wished to define human trafficking, launched an international
abolitionist campaign to eradicate prostitution around the globe (Segrave, et al., 2009).
Thus, rather than achieving constructive consensus around the ideological
differences between abolitionist and pro-rights feminists, the Palermo Compromise
further divided these opposing camps, and cemented abolitionism as a framework for
U.S. foreign policy.
Neoliberalism and the rescue industry in Thailand
In Thailand, anti-trafficking NGOs function as actors in what Agustin has called “The
Rescue Industry”: a network of practitioners that receives funding from the State
Department, foundations, and individual donors to implement policies focused on
combating trafficking. Neoliberalism has created the conditions for this industry, in
which private-public partnerships thrive, as NGOs and other transnational actors depend
on global capitalist practices for their survival. These actors are part of a complex drama
in which they both uphold the authority of the state (in their compliance with State
Department driven policies around trafficking) and subvert the state (in that they are
doing the work of the state but, as private entities, are retaining profits for themselves).
As neoliberal actors, members of the rescue industry are contributing to the changing
nature of the state and the rise of private industry. As such, they shape the discursive
space in which trafficking is understood while profiting from their role in the discourse.
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Agustin’s (2013) discussion of the “rescue industry” connects the moralistic
motivations of the anti-trafficking movement to its role as a vehicle for promoting a US
neoliberal agenda in Thailand. An example of the way neoliberalism is fostering an
“industry” of rescue can be seen in her discussion of Global Reality Tours– “do-gooder”
voyeuristic excursions in which American tourists go to developing nations to “learn
about” the horrors of sex trafficking through “touring” brothels, bars and slums (Agustin,
2013). Agustin called attention to a recent Thailand Delegation to End Modern Slavery
and Human Trafficking, aimed at “aspiring individuals” – upwardly mobile, white,
privileged elite American liberals who were told by the campaign that going on a “reality
tour” would be akin to taking a class on the horrors of trafficking. As Agustin pointed
out, “To my mind, this is sex tourism” (Agustin, 2013, p. 1).
Agustin (2013) called these types of commercialized interventions forms of
colonialism, noting that they are predicated on the perpetuation of a “clear differentiation
between Subject (tourist) and Object (exotic other)” (p. 1). Pointing out that the “help”
offered to the poor victims with whom the elite tourists come into contact as part of these
tours often comes in the form of “online sales of folkloric and supposedly authentic third-
worldish objects” (p. 1); that is, “buying stuff.” Agustin’s discussion highlights the way
private industry is using the abolitionist agenda to its advantage, profiting from a
discursive space in which “victims” are treated as commodities for the voyeuristic
pleasure of members of the developed world. These and other actors in the rescue
industry represent neoliberalism at its most absurd best.
The U.S. Abolitionist Project masks what David Harvey has called the “race to
the bottom” (2005); a process whereby private Western corporations set up offshore
business and manufacturing mechanisms in the developing world as a way of keeping
their labor costs low. This “race” to pay laborers as little money as possible subsequently
creates the conditions whereby migrant laborers work for impoverishing wages. This, in
turn, enables large corporations to increase profit potential. This “race,” as the direct
product of neoliberal policies that prevent the regulation of labor, creates the conditions
in which actual trafficking and forced labor occur.
An example of this process can be seen in the Transpacific Trade Partnership
(TPP) initiative that, at time of writing, is being championed by the Obama
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administration. The TPP seeks to remove the regulatory trade apparatus between the
United States, a selection of other Western countries and various Southeast Asian
partners with the goal of providing “new and meaningful market access for American
goods and services exports” (Office of the United States Trade Representative, 2015).
While the Administration claims that the initiative will enforce labor standards in
developing countries in which increased investment among Western corporations will be
allowed and encouraged, critics of the TPP have pointed out that language barring
countries engaging in human trafficking and “modern slavery” from being part of the
agreement (such as Malaysia) has been removed—in effect, opening up a more “flexible”
interpretation of what those fundamental labor rights actually mean (see
Huffingtonpost.com, 2015).
Furthermore, as Joseph Stiglitz argued, the U.S.-driven and dominated TPP not
only sits on precarious ground with regard to labor standards in the developing world, but
also goes “well beyond trade, governing investment and intellectual property as well,
imposing fundamental changes to countries’ legal, judicial, and regulatory
frameworks, without input or accountability through democratic institutions” (Stiglitz,
2015). Such projects, while ostensibly designed to “liberate” markets, form the basis of
the neoliberal “race to the bottom” which create the conditions for labor exploitation to
thrive.
Ironically, while this race to the bottom is being played out, the U.S. state project
of combating trafficking continues to gain traction and resources, butting heads against
the corporate practices, which, Harvey explained, have co-opted the authority of the
state’s regulatory apparatus. These contradictory processes represent what Kempadoo et
al. (2005) described as “underground” crime and “legitimate” crime working together
hand in hand. In Kempadoo’s words, “One of the more obdurate characteristics of
transnational organized crime is that established (legalized) and underground
(criminalized) sectors stand in a symbiotic relationship (Beare, 2003)” (2005, p. xviii).
The relationship between “legitimate” corporations who create conditions for
labor exploitation, and the “illegitimate” labor vocations themselves, intersect with the
abolitionist project in a complex but important way. In order to uphold the project
wherein corporations flourish by enslaving workers, the attention of the public must be
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turned away from the practices that underscore labor exploitation, and instead made to
focus on the “victim versus criminal” binary used as a cornerstone in the abolitionist
project.
The U.S. abolitionists’ overwhelming focus on female sex workers and almost
nonexistent focus on factory labor, is managed in such a way as to perpetuate the
conditions of labor exploitation without revealing their source. In other words, sex
workers—many of whom are also migrants with precariously balanced existences—have
become scapegoats in a drama that should, in fact, be focused on American corporate
greed.
Sex tourism in Thailand: A neoliberal problem with an abolitionist solution
In the late 1990’s and 2000’s, Thailand saw its reputation as a destination for sex tourism
increase. Due to the 1997 economic crisis, social and economic factors contributing to
Thailand’s sex industry grew rapidly. Women from the rural northeast and other
economically deprived areas flocked to Bangkok to find work as unskilled laborers, many
turning to prostitution. The trafficking of children for sexual exploitation also increased.
While some studies estimated that 200,000 to 300,000 prostitutes were working in
Thailand in 1997 (International Labour Organizaiton [ILO], 2009), others claimed
statistics as high as 2 million in 2003 (Blackwell, 2003). By this time, Thai officials were
well aware that “policies to encourage the growth of tourism, promote migration for
employment, promote exports of female labour for earning foreign exchange…
contributed indirectly to the growth of prostitution” (ILO, 2009). Illegal services ranged
from prostitution that was freely chosen by women to the commercial exploitation of
children as victims of sex trafficking, and it was widely thought that police corruption
played a large part in the issue. With Western television shows promoting its beaches as
easy places to purchase sex, and bar girls crowding Bangkok’s tourist-district streets,
Thailand’s image as a destination for sex tourism was clearly on the rise.
Thai scholar Siriporn Skrobanek (2003) described how the emergence of the
Western tourism industry in Thailand during the 1980’s sparked what was later dubbed a
human trafficking epidemic. Skrobanek explained that when American troops initially
withdrew from Vietnam, “sex tourism took over the existing sex-related infrastructure.
Bangkok and Pattaya became sex havens for men from all over the world (2003, p. 2).
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Truong (1990) advanced this discussion with her argument connecting tourism (and
leisure, as a broader category) in Southeast Asia to the maintenance of the U.S. military
and a new “international working class and managerial class” comprised of Western men.
(p. 100). This new base, Truong explained, “creates new forms of leisure activities and
absorbs new categories of wage work in the production of highly valued and
exchangeable personal services geared towards the maintenance of the foreign workers’
welfare and quality of life” (p. 100). In such contexts, Truong suggested, tourism became
an “alternative development strategy” for the developing world—a strategy in which
tourism and sexuality became inextricably linked (p. 101).
As a result of being sewn into the fabric of Thailand’s development, prostitution,
which had been criminalized in 1960, began to occupy a different category in Thailand’s
legal system by the mid 1990’s. In 1996, Thailand passed a law on the suppression and
prevention of prostitution, designed to shift the focus to fining consumers and purveyors
of prostitution rather than victims. As Truong explained, such seeming “liberalism”
around attitudes toward prostitution were, rather, the result of a tradition of the
institutionalization of Thereveda Buddhist thought within Thai law.
In traditional Buddhist thought, noted Truong, sexuality “is tied to the natural
world, the world of suffering and ignorance” (p. 134). As such, women, who are seen to
be the source of sexual desire, and the degradation that accompanies it, are feared and
disdained within Buddhist institutions and Buddhist thought (pp. 134-135). Buddhism
further allows for polygamy on the part of males, while placing the idea of sexual
impurity on women—a concept that was institutionalized in Thai law during the reign of
King Rama I (pp. 146-147). As a result, the category of “prostitute”—a “woman
publically shared by all noblemen and their sons”—became a legal category in 1805.
Prostitution, Skrobanek et al. explained, was legal during the reign of King Rama V
(1868-1910). “Brothels were first legally registered in 1908, and most were run by
Chinese men, although their clients were both Thai and Chinese. Apart from Thai women
and girls, there were prostitutes from China, Japan and some Western countries (Metta-
rinanondhu 1983, p. 30)” (29).
The influx of Western commercial ties in the late 19th century, however, forced
Thailand to confront the social systems on which prostitution—and polygamy—were
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rooted. In reforming these social systems, new processes of wage labor were introduced.
However, and crucially, “the ideology of slavery prevailed,” and the buying and selling
of female sexuality continued (Truong, 1990, p. 153).
Drawing on these foundations, Skrobanek, et al. (1997) illuminated the more
recent connection between Thailand’s sex industry and the advent of the U.S. neoliberal
policies in Thailand. Describing the rise in the role of debt bondage in women’s
migration practices, Skrobanek et al. explained that the period from 1967 to 1977, was
marked by the push of poverty in the rural areas, as well as the pull of a new burgeoning
sex industry in Bangkok and Pattaya. This “pull” was spurred primarily by the American
presence during the Vietnam War (p. 30-31). Following this initial influx, however, the
conditions surrounding women’s entry into the sex industry began to change:
Poverty continued to be the main factor impelling young women to migrate for
prostitution, but other factors also appeared at this time. Some parents, seeing the
daughters of other families return with considerable wealth, were induced to ‘sell’
their daughters. This provided them with a cash advance, to be paid off by their
daughter’s labour in the sex trade. Some of these transactions took place without
the involvement of a broker. (Skrobanek et al., 1997, p.31)
Skobanek suggested that the rise of debt bondage in association with migrants’
entry into sex work began at around the moment that Western neoliberal policies were
making their influx into the developing world.
The Thai sex tourist industry perfectly exemplifies the collision of Thailand’s
national identity Project and the U.S. Abolitionist Project. As Harvey (2005) explained,
neoliberalism created a mass co-modification of everything. In no other sector is this
more apparent, he suggests, than in the sex industry. Describing the “illicit” nature of this
industry in the U.S., Harvey pointed out that, “though elsewhere it may be legalized,
decriminalized, and even state-regulated as an industry” (Harvey, 2005, p. 165), in the
U.S., it is problemetized past the point of its utility. In other words, there is a great
emphasis being put on the monetary transaction of sex work and prostitution that is out of
balance with the nature of the act. The agents of the U.S. Abolitionist Project focus their
concern on the co-modification of sex, while simultaneously embracing the very
neoliberal policies that promote such a co-modification.
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Thailand’s Non-Compliance
On the surface, Thailand appears to comply with the agendas of the U.S. Abolitionist
Project. As “partners” in the fight to combat trafficking, Thai NGOs receive copious
amounts of State Department funding, and the movement has fostered collaborative
efforts between American NGOs and the Thai government (Thai NGO, personal
communication, December, 2011). Indeed, on paper, Thailand has taken significant steps
to adopt an official stance against human trafficking. Its numerous initiatives, which
began in the 1990’s, range from the National Policy and Plan of Action for the
Prevention and Eradication of the Commercial Sexual Exploitation of Children (1996) to
the 1997 amendment of the Act on Prevention of Traffic in Women and Children to
include boys (Derks, 2000, p. 33). Since 1992, when it ratified the Convention on the
Rights of the Child (CRC) as well as with its adoption of the Optional Protocol on the
sale of children, child prostitution and child pornography, Thailand has publicly
demonstrated a willingness to implement policies that treat human trafficking as a crime.
Yet Thailand’s actual policy efforts fail to conform to the agendas of the State
Department-driven anti-trafficking policy initiatives. As Duncan McCargo noted in his
discussion of Thailand’s judiciation practices, “In the Thai context, the legal system has
often operated as an instrument of power exercised on behalf of the monarchy and other
traditional institutions, rather than as a source of rights and redress for citizens” (2014:
417). In the case of anti-trafficking, the same pattern holds true for Thailand’s response to
international convention. Thailand has failed to demonstrate compliance with norms of
international law by failing to take action to penalize traffickers and helping victims.
According to ECPAT’s Global Monitoring Report on the Status of Action Against
Commercial Sexual Exploitation of Children: Thailand, the Thai Government has taken
recent initiatives to combat trafficking, such as the passing of a law in 2008 which
emphasizes the protection of victims, as well as the National Plan and Policy on
Prevention and Resolution of Domestic and Cross Border Trafficking in Children and
Women (2002-2007). (ECPAT International [ECPAT], 2006, p. 14). While the Plan is
optimistic in theory, it remains unclear where the 500 million Thai Baht has been going
to combat the promotion of Thailand as a destination for sex tourism. Additionally, in
regard to the Plan’s implementation, the report admits that, thus far, the implementation
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measures have been weak (p. 14). According to the report, “Law enforcement, especially
at the local level, must be monitored to guard against corruption and ensure that proper
punishment is administered (p. 20).
The report outlines the types of monetary fines that may be imposed on “a person
who commits the offence of sexual intercourse or sexual acts in a prostitution
establishment with a child of 15 years old or younger,” (ECPAT, 2006, p. 23) as well as
on “an owner, supervisor or manager of a prostitution business or establishment that
involves children 15 years old or younger” (p. 24). It fails, however, to detail the process
by which prosecution takes place, the police work involved in stopping such offenders,
and equally important, the methodology used to stop individuals who recruit, harbor,
transport or otherwise participate in the mechanism of facilitating human trafficking.
Additionally, while the Convention is designed to protect Thai citizens from abuse
in the form of child trafficking, the Government of the Kingdom of Thailand has
specified two reservations on this initiative: Article 7, on birth registration and Article 22,
on children seeking refugee status in Thailand (ECPAT International, 2006). These
reservations point to key exceptions in Thailand’s anti-trafficking policies, revealing that
while the government has begun to take a stance against the trafficking of Thai citizens, it
does not extend these efforts towards refugees.
Thailand’s unwillingness to comply with the parameters of the protocol has
evoked hostility and threats from the U.S. Department of State, as evidenced in the
downgrading of Thailand from a Tier 2 to a Tier 2 Watch List status country in the 2012
Trafficking In Persons Report.
10
The Thai government’s lax response to the U.S.-
imposed Abolitionist Project points to questions about the utility of these colliding
projects, and the deeper meanings that underscore the worldwide crusade against
trafficking. As I have argued throughout this chapter, the exploitation of cheap labor
serves simultaneous national, cultural and economic purposes in Thailand: such labor
both supports Thailand’s rise as an economic regional hegemon, while upholding its
National Identity Project—a project seeking to reinforce the cultural and political
authority of the Thai citizen in contrast to the illegal, ethnic “other.” Labor exploitation
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10
At the time of my preliminary data collection in 2011-2012, Thailand had been downgraded to
“Tier-2 Watch List.” At time of writing in 2015, Thailand has been demoted to “Tier 3” status.
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and trafficking not only support Thailand’s National Identity project, they constitute it. If
Thailand were to embrace the U.S. Abolitionist Project, then its own development
projects would stall
Furthermore, as unpacked by Truong, bowing to pressure by the West to change
social processes rooted in traditional Buddhist thought and engrained into Thai society
for centuries, has not been on the agenda of the modern Thai nation-state. Thailand’s
non-compliance with the U.S. Abolitionist Project can, in essence, be understood in terms
of prostitution’s roots in the Buddhist framework of social power relations—a framework
that privileges the marketization of women’s sexual labor in order to legitimize the
promiscuous sexual behavior of men.
Colliding Cultural Projects
As I have shown, the anti-trafficking movement in Thailand is driven by multiple actors
and institutions whose agendas are not uniform. U.S. foreign aid, and the debates
surrounding how and where this aid should be distributed; Western NGOs, whose role in
the global public sphere is (as I will discuss in the next chapter) precarious, due to their
simultaneous need to maintain institutional self-interests, while also upholding the value
systems of their home countries,
11
and Thailand’s National Identity Project, which is
predicated on an anti-immigration agenda, each use the issue of trafficking to serve their
specific goals and needs. These disparate agendas inform the chaotic landscape that has
become the anti-trafficking movement in Thailand, as well as the narratives and policies
that the movement generates. Additionally, the presence of two contrasting projects raises
questions as to how any movement can function when the goals of its driving actors are
so disparate? Inevitably, one set of actors and their corresponding goals must be
compromised, or the movement itself risks losing cohesion.
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11
!As agents of the U.S. Abolitionist Project, anti-trafficking NGOs and other members of the
movement who seek to export the value systems of the U.S. have an implicit agenda in keeping
the goals of their own agenda from being met. For the abolitionists to “win,”!anti-trafficking
NGOs would be rendered useless, thereby defeating the very premise of their dominant presence
in the developing world. The need to survive in a neoliberal paradigm of global interaction and
capitalist-based institutional identity sets the stage for NGOs to often be more concerned with
their institutional self-interest, rather than solving the problems that they seek to address. For this
reason, the abolitionist project thrives on the perpetuation of a system of exploitation—a system
upheld, both symbolically and literally, by stateless migrant women from Burma whose labor
provides the foundation for their existence.
!
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Moreover, both the Thai National Identity Project and the U.S. Abolitionist
Project have elevated the trafficking to occupying the status of the sole “problem” they
must combat, rather than seeing this issue as part of a larger problem involving push
factors, migration, and the impact of neoliberal policies in the developing world. Each of
these projects tackles trafficking from the perspective and within the context of its own
agenda, creating a confused landscape in which larger issues impacting female migrant
laborers often go overlooked or unaddressed. The collision and collusion of these two
projects enact a scenario of desperation for the migrant women on whom the U.S. agenda
of ending prostitution, as well as Thailand’s project of bolstering its national identity,
plays out.
Finally, as I will show in Chapters 5 and 6, it is the migrant women who are left to
work in often devastating labor conditions, not only as a result of inadequate migration
policies and institutionalized ethnocentrism in Thailand, but also as a result of the
policies of the State Department. The perpetuation of their exploitation is reinforced by a
movement which problemetizes the very women it seeks to help.
In the chapters that follow, I will disentangle the frameworks that contribute to
narrating the problem of trafficking in Thailand and deconstruct the policies designed to
combat it, while also taking to task the complexity of Thailand’s National Identity
Project. Castells explained that all globalization processes possess a cultural dimension
(personal communication, April 28, 2010). Thailand’s National Identity Project and the
U.S. Abolitionist Project are no exceptions. Caught in the crossfires of these projects is
the issue of trafficking, whose meaning has been co-opted to serve the cultural and
political agendas of two very different nation-states. Far from adopting measures to
actually combat the problem, both nations use it to their advantage, in a process that
serves interests of elites, while leaving the voices of the people behind.
With the advent of these colliding national projects, the influx of “illegal” female
migrant laborers, the burgeoning of the sex tourism industry, and the Thai elite clinging
to an identity they had painstakingly constructed, the stage was set for the anti-trafficking
drama to play out in Thailand. The crisis was identified, quantified, named—and in its
naming, made real. From within the cacophony, a new question emerged: Who would
come to rescue these women?
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Chapter 4
Constructing the Narrative:
NGOs, Moral Performance and the Power of Culture

The Role of NGOs in Thailand
As agents of the U.S. abolitionist project, anti-trafficking NGOs began to emerge in
Thailand in the early 1990’s and remain active to the present day. Often funded by the
US State Department, large international anti-trafficking NGOs sport signage on the
walls of newly remodeled buildings and proudly broadcast their missions, while other
local NGOs maintain lower profiles, communicating little to the outside world in order to
prevent gangs of traffickers and competing NGOs from tracking their operations. The
burgeoning presence of anti-trafficking NGOs in Thailand and, indeed, the Mekong Sub-
Region at large symbolizes the U.S.’s commitment to rescuing victims of sex trafficking
through eradicating prostitution in the developing world.
12

As private agents conducting activities that fall beyond the scope of the
government, the stated intentions of these organizations, as well as the role the
organizations play in creating legibility around humanitarian crises, differ according to
the landscape in which each organization operates. While some NGOs work closely with
governments to achieve social change, others operate outside the purview of the state,
and each organization’s methodology differs according to its cultural framework.
Globalization scholar Jan Aart Scholte (2000) explained that NGOs are
experiencing a rise in prominence that is occurring in tandem with globalization. Hailey’s
(1999) work exploring NGOs in development contexts estimated that “Twenty percent of
official aid is now channeled through them,” (p. 467) and!Kellner (2002) described the
emergence of NGOs during the 1970s as “new forms of struggle and solidarity... that
have been expanding to the present day” (p. 825). According to The Economist, “This
year’s ‘Trust Barometer,’ an annual survey of attitudes in six countries by Edelman, a PR
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12
Importantly, APLO legislation, also known as the “Anti-Prostitution Pledge,” was overturned
domestically by President Barack Obama in summer, 2013, following a Supreme Court ruling
stating that such legislation violated the First Amendment, thereby changing the scope of anti-
trafficking NGOs operating in the United States. At time of writing, however, government-funded
NGOs operating internationally must continue to adhere to the “Pledge.” For further discussion,
see Chapter 5.
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firm, found that non-governmental organizations… were more trusted than governments
or businesses” (Faith, hope and charities: November, 2010). Castells (2008) explained
that the growing inability of states to effectively address global problems has resulted in
NGOs stepping into the international arena to manage and respond to global crises’. The
expanding presence of NGOs in civil society, their increasingly sophisticated
promotional campaigns, and their facility with communications technology suggests that
the status of these actors in the global public sphere is on the rise.
NGOs also play a role in advancing the national interests of developed countries
by providing aid or services to developing nations, thereby advancing ties of goodwill
between countries. As Castells described, “Often they affirm values that are universally
recognized but politically manipulated in their own interest by political agencies,
including governments” (Castells, 2008, p. 84). In short, NGOs perform “good deeds” for
the world, while often simultaneously maintaining the interests of the nation from which
they originate.
Governments seek to form ties with NGOs so that these organizations will
advance state interests. The U.S. Department of State, for example, relies heavily on
reports from American-run NGOs in the developing world to educate the U.S.
government about human rights abuses and policies being conducted in other nations
(U.S. Department of State, 2009). Importantly, NGOs whose origins are in the Western
world but operate in the developing world are often viewed by their native governments
as representing aspects of Western cultural values.
NGOs use rhetorical frames to promote these values. In his discussion of
language and social motivation, Burke (1954) theorized that ideas do not exist beyond
their expression (p. 29). The notion that language creates reality is exemplified by anti-
trafficking NGOs who use the terms “victims” to construct the identities of their
beneficiaries. Indeed, many NGOs refer to Southeast Asian women who enter the sex
trade, regardless of their often ambiguous or ambivalent consent, as “victims.” This
rhetorical frame reinforces power dynamics that render the NGOs’ beneficiaries as being
innocent and immature. Anti-trafficking NGOs often use this term in their promotional
materials and verbal discourse without regard to its pejorative implications. By using the
term “victim,” the NGO situates itself in a position of power in relation to its
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beneficiaries, and sends a clear message to donors, government officials and other NGOs:
a view of reality in which the NGO is a benevolent caretaker of “helpless,” “wounded”
third world women (Doezema, 2001).
The construction of the “victim” identity, perpetuated by anti-trafficking NGOs in
Thailand is used to construe “rescued” young women as martyrs: sitting targets
perpetually grappling with their underdog status. In a Foulcaultian sense, such a
rhetorical construction speaks to a social need to condemn a shadowy “other.” This
“other” takes several forms: the evil dark male “trafficker,” the poor unsuspecting white
slave (as discussed by Agustin, 2007; Bumiller 2008); the harlot/ sexual deviant who
challenges our gender constructions (as unpacked by Chapkis, 1996; Doezema, 2010 and
Doezema and Kempadoo, 1998) and a new category—the female migrant laborer—who
combines these categorizations and fuels Western anxieties about both. Applying the
rhetoric of the victim label creates a static image of such woman as being un-changing
and un-improving. As Klumpp and Hollihan (1989) asserted, the rhetorical critic has an
obligation to provide a “socially and morally involved criticism” (p.84) to the exigence
he or she is analyzing. While NGOs act as critical voices in humanitarian contexts,
advocating for the rights of less powerful members of society, their rhetorical strategies
often create spectacles of the suffering they are supposedly working to eradicate
(Hesford, 2011).
Additionally, anti-trafficking NGOs use rhetoric to construct the “voices” of their
beneficiaries by serving as communicative mediators and translators. Western NGOs
often do this literally, by providing translation services to supposed trafficking “victims,”
in order to educate Western audiences about their experiences. In examining the ways
NGOs “speak” for their beneficiaries, it is also paramount to interrogate the converse
construction of the beneficiaries’ “silence.” Stucky discussed the notion of silence as
“rhetorical negative space” (Stucky 2006, 287-309), observing, “…absence is an overt
lack, a hole of which everyone is aware but which no one dare acknowledge. This silence
works to maintain the relevant status quo by disempowering potential challenges to it, for
one cannot object to that which is never even acknowledged” (2006, p. 302). In
examining the narratives of anti-trafficking NGOs in Thailand, the voices that remain
conspicuously silent are consistently those of the beneficiaries themselves. Seldom are
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the supposed trafficking victims present in interviews with the Western press, meetings
with government officials or in the day-to-day operations of these organizations. When
they are visible, these beneficiaries are often presented to publics in ways that serve the
interests of the NGO.
NGOs often narrate human trafficking in the form of short, sound-bite-length
stories about the kidnapping, luring, or deception of vulnerable young women into the
sex trade.
13
Such narratives paint a picture of an innocent young woman who is
unwittingly “tricked” into forced prostitution. While the details of such transactions are
rarely explained, what is made clear is that an anti-trafficking NGO came to the rescue
and helped the woman “escape” from her captors (Doezema, 2001; Parreñas, 2011;
Segrave et al., 2009). Examples of NGOs’ use of narratives can be seen in the
promotional materials created to maintain a given NGO’s image. Visit the website of any
anti-trafficking NGO and one is likely to be met with an “About Us” page, describing, in
details, the stated mission, history and trajectory by which the NGO came into being.
Often anti-trafficking NGOs display personalized stories told by CEOs, Managers,
Directors or other primary staff members to distill the organization’s mission and
illuminate the core values on which it operates.
Such narrative frames serve two primary functions: First, they provide audiences
with stories that are familiar, making the organization seem legible. Second, these
narrative frames humanize the experience of the NGO staff members and field officers
through imparting the stories about how these individuals arrived at the NGO, and how
they decided to travel to the country in which they work. These narrative constructions
help to humanize the organization by reminding audiences that its staff members share
Western values—the stories, in essence, justify the often religious motivations of the
organization. These stories also provide a vehicle through which audiences who are
motivated by religion can feel that their values, ideologies and political views are being
supported. Such narrative frames are deeply political constructs that serve to empower
NGOs, and reinforce their role as institutions that tell “real” stories about the world.
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13
See, for example, the websites of The Salvation Army,
http://www.salvationarmyusa.org/usn/www_usn_2.nsf/0/8081A4079639D55A802573E00053096
5?openDocument and World Vision, http://www.worldvision.org/content.nsf/learn/globalissues-
stp !
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Furthermore, underlying these communication theories is the assumption that the NGO,
as an actor, is the most credible voice in the anti-trafficking conversation.
As feminist scholars have illustrated, however, these narratives are seldom
congruent with the realities of female migrant laborers (often identified as “trafficking
victims”) on the ground (see Doezema, 2010; Kempadoo, Sanghera, & Pattanaik, 2005;
Parreñas, 2011). By upholding these stereotypes, NGOs are able to present themselves as
benevolent actors, “attracting more funding, performing more effectively, and receiving
greater legitimacy than government-sponsored international efforts (Castells, 2004, p.
330). Publications such as the State Department’s Trafficking In Persons (TIP) Report
implicitly encourage NGOs’ participation in explaining what trafficking is, how it occurs,
and how women are victimized within it (see, for example, US Department of State,
2010). This, in turn, has policy implications, since the State Department relies on the
scant evidence provided by NGOs as source material for the Report (Parreñas, 2011;
Segrave et al., 2009).
Hauser’s (2008) discussion of “moral vernacular” is important to an analysis of
NGO narratives. Hauser differentiated between the notion of “thin” and “thick” “human
rights talk,” explaining that in the “thin” paradigm, “human rights are transformed from a
discreet set of moral principles to a discourse” (p. 442). Within this discourse, he
suggested, human rights are open to interpretation and revision on the part of experts, or
officials. The “thin” paradigm deals with language used in Covenants, Conventions and
other sites of the Official Public Sphere.
In contrast, Hauser (2008) suggested, “thick” human rights talk is “constituted
performatively” and “enacted by those whose rights have been violated,” (p. 442). He
explained that “thick moral vernacular,” therefore, can be thought of as a mode of
resistance and empowerment, as “it overcomes its domination by power through a moral
critique of power” (p. 443). In line with Hesford’s (2011) notion of spectacularization, a
politics of visibility in which in human rights regimes awarded “certain bodies,
populations, and nations as objects of recognition and granted others power and means to
look and to confer recognition” (p. 30), Hauser (2008) suggested that “thin” vernacular is
the language of an elite class of NGOs and state representatives (p. 446): “All nations
profess to honor human rights,” Hauser explained, “but on their own terms” (p. 446).
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NGO communication processes
Scholars studying the role of NGOs in development have been engaged in disentangling
the complexities involved in the communication processes of NGOs. Of particular
relevance is Suzuki’s (1998) study articulating the cultural and structural issues and
conflicts commonly faced by NGO administrative staff and field officers working on the
ground. Eyben and Napier-Moore (2008) explored the way Western NGOs (and
development discourse, in general) adopt a neoliberal framework as development actors
promote “investing in” women, in effect, comodifying the discourse around human
rights. Lindenberg and Bryant (2001) explored the history and role of NGOs in
development, explaining the importance of the efforts of NGOs to create “compelling
new visions to motivate staff and donors” as part of their organizational cultures (p. 22).
Together, these and other studies pointed to the importance of research on how NGO
employees narrate the goals of their work experiences and perceptions about the roles of
NGOs in development.
Few studies, however, have connected these areas of research by examining NGO
employee narratives about human trafficking from the perspective of culture. Interpreting
such narratives through the lens of culture is important, for as James Carey (1992) has
explained, the study of culture offers us a way to “understand the meanings that others
have placed on experience” (p. 61). Thus, the present chapter works to advance the
important claims made by scholars critiquing the anti-trafficking movement, as well as
those engaged in understanding NGOs’ roles in development.
The Dominant Trafficking Narratives
In Thailand, Western anti-trafficking NGOs utilize narratives that promote their “unique”
ability to understand the problem of trafficking. These narratives are enacted by
employees whose jobs rely on their ability to communicate the values (and organizational
culture) of the NGO. As such, these narratives are “constructions” – products of culture
used to reinforce the values of the organization. Through analyzing NGO employees’
thoughts and feelings about trafficking, I began to see five dominant narratives emerge.
As “moral performances,” these narratives told a story about human trafficking and the
role of NGOs in combating the problem. They included:
1) “Thailand is backwards” (Civilizing narrative)
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2) “Thailand is unethical” (Moralizing narrative)
3) “They should be grateful” (Savior narrative)
4) “Thailand is illegible to the West” (Othering narrative)
5) “Sex workers lack agency” (Victim narrative)
Below, I will discuss each emerging narrative in detail, drawing on examples from my
preliminary interviews. I will then discuss the ways in which these narratives helped
NGO employees frame, categorize, and manage the complexity they faced in their daily
work activities.
1. “Thailand is backwards” (Civilizing narrative)
Several Western NGO employees expressed the idea that Thailand exists in an “interim”
stage of development, both economically and socially, and that trafficking was a product
of the country’s low “rung” on the modernization continuum (Inglehart & Welzel, 2005).
As such, some employees described a vision for Thailand’s future, in which economic
prosperity would lead to rights-based value systems and the ethic of labor equality. One
such interviewee was Western Male Employee (WME 1), who worked to unionize
migrant laborers in Thailand. WME 1’s organization received support from the U.S.
Department of State and other official donors promoting democracy to strengthen
international core labor standards, end enforced labor and discrimination in the
workplace, support freedom of association and collective bargaining, and promote labor
unions and democracy there (personal communication, August 5, 2011).
WME 1 expressed frustration regarding his attempts to instill these values into
Thai society. He used the case of a garment factory in central Bangkok to illustrate the
challenge of getting Thai business-owners and government to see slavery as a problem.
“The owners were a Thai couple. It was a clear case of forced labor,” he
explained. “The wife got up in front of the news cameras and said, ‘Well, we had to lock
them in. We pay the agents a lot of money to bring them here. If we didn’t [lock them in],
they’d run away.’”
The employee expressed bewilderment that conditions of slavery among migrant
workers were so openly accepted among members of the Thai business class. Drawing
implicitly on ideas of difference, he claimed that Thais are “not like us” and that it was
“our” job to teach “them” how to be more civilized. Such deficiencies justified the
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employee’s retreat into a static notion of culture: by drawing on essentialized notions of
cultural difference, WME 1 could claim to be an “authority figure” in the TIP space.
When I questioned WME 1 further about whether the “acceptance” of slavery was
based in a value system commonly held in Thai culture, the employee responded by
offering another example:
“If you ride on the highway here, the chances of your getting killed are 10 times
higher than in the U.S.,” he explained. “There’s not an understanding that this should
change. With trafficking, it’s the same attitude: it’s just the way it is. In cases of
trafficked foreign nationals, you have issues of nationalism and immigration. Sixty
percent of Thais think foreigners shouldn’t have rights. The majority of Thais don’t care
about Burmese workers at all.” WME1 went on to say that he believed this attitude would
change slowly over time, and that “this change will relate to the economy as it develops.” !
The employee’s story illustrates the premise of modernization theory: that in
development contexts, a society’s economic progress will automatically beget values of
individual human rights. This view is, in fact, a cultural lens in itself, a retreat into a
familiar understanding about the “other” as being different and “less than” the Western
actor. The employee used this narrative as a way to make sense of a challenging cultural
situation.
Another example of the civilizing narrative can be seen in the responses of the
head of a small, American faith-based NGO. This participant (WFNE1) described life
among the ethnic minority communities from which many of the trafficking “victims” her
organization “rescued” came. When I asked WFE1 to discuss the way in which the
organization responded to girls brought in through brothel raids and other means, she
explained:
“Rehab is the essence of what we do here at [Organization 1], for girls coming out
of emergency circumstances. And we have many, many different activities. The first
activity that we have is education, and that is our primary goal. Education across all
levels for girls. And when I say education, I'm not just talking about academic education.
We view education holistically, including life skills training, reproductive health,
nutrition, maternal health and child care, fire safety, knowledge of human rights.”
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WFNE1 went on to discuss the organization’s “therapeutic activities” including -
music, baking, dancing, art. “We rent an art studio around the corner, we have the girls
do art,” she remarked proudly. “All of the products in this room were made by girls in
our handicraft program.”
WFNE1 suggested that the therapeutic programs offered to the girls served to
accomplish two main goals: “One is developing creative thinking,” she explained, “and
the second piece is developing opportunities for income generation. (Kachin Female
Volunteer 1) actually runs the baking program,” she said, gesturing to another
respondent. “When we do intern evaluations, the girls here often say they find that the
most therapeutic. Baking stuff and eating it and laughing, and having fun.”
I suggest that the “life skills” described by WFNE1 are, in fact, designed to
emulate Christian, Western tropes of femininity. While activities such as handicraft
production, for example, may seem to be an “alternative” to sex work, they are rarely a
viable means of income generation. Rather, I argue, they serve as a rhetorical tool for the
organization—a way of showcase to donors, funders and Western publics how “morally
righteous” labor activities can remedy the “immoral” activity of sex work. As such, these
activities highlight the notion that NGOs are engaged in a civilizing project, providing
former trafficking victims with “clean” means of earning a living (one that, presumably,
these women would otherwise never have considered), while reinforcing the notion that
Thailand, prior to the implementation of such a Western project, existed in a state of
perpetual “backwardness” (for, since the women had never considered engaging in
handicraft production before, it must have been because they were incapable of
conceptualizing such an alternative). These civilizing attitudes and activities also
incorporate a “missionizing” ethic. By promoting morally righteous “women’s work” as a
supposed alternative to sex work, young women living in the NGO are taught that
engaging in commercial sex is not “correct” behavior for a woman. This view reinforces
Western religious notions of female purity that sit squarely in a framework binding
conceptions of modernity, civilization and morality.
2. “Thailand is unethical” (Moralizing narrative)
A second narrative that emerged was the Moralizing narrative. While the Civilizing
narrative focused on economic progress and modernity according to ethnic, gender and
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national identity lines, the Moralizing narrative incorporated judgments around the
perceived differences between “them” (Thailand) and “us” (the West).
WME 2 worked as the head of a program that trained Thai police in anti-
trafficking protocol. Part of this training, he explained, was to instill in the Thai police a
sense of value in pursuing justice. There was more to anti-trafficking work than simply
following rules, he explained. It was up to him and his organization to also teach the
police the social value of adhering to the rule of law.
When asked about the extent to which cultural issues affected police behavior,
WME2 expressed feelings of frustration with Thai police who did not appear to care
about securing justice for trafficking victims, or who did not demonstrate a commitment
to upholding individual human rights:
“Well, [the issue is either] cultural or laziness,” he remarked. “They have too
much to do. It’s a pain-in-the-ass kind of thing to deal with. Culturally, cops are the same
all around the world. They’re not incentivized. Do you get money? Do you get extra
benefits? An award? No. You just get more paperwork. You get nothing. They don’t get
our idea of individual human rights. They don’t get it at all,” he said.
WME2 presented a narrative that situated the U.S.’s rights-based paradigm of law
and order against a Thai context, in which law and order was of no value. Expressing
frustration, he noted that “they” don’t “get” the importance of the rights-based system.
He explained that despite the “universal laziness” of police across all cultures, the
Western value of universal human rights is superior to the values held by police in
Thailand.
WME2’s inability to accept differing cultural perceptions of law served a
pragmatic, as well as idealistic, purpose. Like most NGO employees, the success of
WME2’s work depended on the willingness of the community with whom he was
working to accept the premise of his organization’s activities. WME 2’s work involved
persuading the Thai police to internalize and practice the values that were being
promoted by the NGO. The failure to do so would imply a personal failure on the part of
the employee.
In a broader context, such a practice represents an act of ritualistic hegemony – a
way of reclaiming the dominance to which the West has grown accustomed, first under
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colonialism and, more recently, by promoting policies of neoliberalism. By claiming that
a Western rule of law paradigm represents a morally advanced, Enlightened state of being
(see Keal, 1995), this employee reinforced a familiar neo-colonial trope.
The moralizing narrative was also demonstrated in the responses of the Western
female NGO employee (WFNE1) whose work was faith-based. In her interview, this
employee described what she felt to be inherent differences between the West and the
ethnic minority communities of the girls her organization sought to “rescue.” These
differences, she suggested, were not just behavioral, but deeply embedded in two
contrasting value systems. In her view, a Western, Christian moral system promoted the
values of romantic love (as opposed to sex work), protecting children from exposure to
sexuality before the age of eighteen (as opposed to sexualizing teenagers), and the notion
of obtaining individual betterment through hard work (as opposed to the dependence on
family members—particularly young women—as breadwinners).
I asked WFNE1 whether she believed there were inherent cultural differences
between these ethnic minority communities and the values of the West. The employee
responded by discussing what she believed to be an inherent “death wish” on the part of
some members of ethnic minority communities:
“We actually just had a case of a girl who was a victim of human trafficking - sex
trafficking and forced labor,” she said. Explaining that the victim had lived in the shelter
from age nine to fourteen, WFNE1 described her as being HIV positive, and coming from
a “horrendous case” of sex trafficking, and abuse.
“We cared for her for five years, the employee went on. “We have a one-on-one
counselor who spent literally hours with this child, counseling her and talking to her
about dignity and self-worth.
“And she decided in the end, last summer… we let her go back to her village area,
she has a father who's disabled, and for the first time allowed her to go back for a week
by herself. And she chose to leave us. And she is now living with some Thai guy, and
selling (drugs) on the street.”
The employee then went on to reveal her theory as to why the victim had chosen
to return to her home community, stating:
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“I come from a clinical social work background and I guess in those rare
occasions, what I see and - this is extremely blunt – but…. men and women have this
suicide wish - and part of becoming an adult is dealing with that. Sometimes I wonder in
these rare cases where you have this eighteen-year-old who's HIV positive, who received
so much love here… We tried to love her as best as we could, and give her opportunities
and yet, does she still grapple herself with that essential sense that she is worthless? That
she doesn't have a hope and a future? That what happened to her was so damaging? Is she
still stuck in that space psychologically?”
The employee seemed baffled as to why this young woman would ever make such
a choice, given the fact that the “home environment” to which she returned was
inherently damaging. The employee described this home environment as a place in which
her quality of life was degraded: the victim was “living with some Thai guy,” selling
drugs, and back in contact with a disabled father. Each of these circumstances—the “Thai
guy,” selling drugs and the father’s disability was described in equally devastating terms,
suggesting that having a relationship with an ethnic man and having a disabled father
were just as damaging as drug addiction or being HIV positive.
The racist and culturally insensitive implications of this should not be overlooked:
by equating conditions of poor health and selling drugs with reuniting with men from her
home culture, WFNE1 imposed a moral judgment on the value of life in such ethnic
environments. She suggested that life at the NGO, in which Western social workers and
counselors “invested” their time into trying to reform the young woman’s attitudes about
her home culture, was far superior to life back in the village. She then rationalized that
the young woman’s choice to return to her home village was prompted by a “death wish,”
as if to return to one’s indigenous cultural environment was akin to “regressing” back to a
less developed psychological state.
WFNE1 seemed to suggest that it was not just “culture,” but the actual value of
human life, that was in question among members of the ethnic minority communities
from which trafficking “victims” were being plucked. This implies that the NGO’s rescue
efforts were not merely intended to eradicate circumstances of forced labor, they also
represented an attempt to rescue women from indigenous cultural (and racial/ ethnic)
environments, which the employee viewed as being inherently unethical.
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3. “They should be grateful” (Savior narrative)
A third narrative category that emerged depicted the Western NGO worker as a “savior”
of the helpless Thai “victim.” This narrative was demonstrated by the same faith-based
NGO employee, who went on to describe the NGO’s mission of “giving love to the girls”
(personal communication, August 4, 2011). When I asked this employee how she felt
when a beneficiary returned to the sex industry (as is often the case following anti-
trafficking “raid and rescue” efforts
14
), WFNE1 offered an emotional response:
“If you want to talk about my feelings when that happens, I feel profoundly sad, I
feel regret, I feel so disappointed, and I feel very sorry for her,” she said plainly. “Here at
[Organization 1], we try to love each girl so much. We try to provide the best in the world
for her. And we also try to teach her that she's valuable in the eyes of God. And we try to
introduce these concepts that she has worth, she has dignity, she has value, and that she
can have the knowledge of the love of God for her. And when she - if she goes back into
an old situation… You know, girls leave our program - we're not a jail,” she explained.
“We only hope that she did have a period where she was loved, she was cared for, and
hopefully someday she will draw on that which she received.”
The employee expressed the idea that the “victim” in question had the opportunity
to receive love, something she could never otherwise obtain in her home community. The
employee equated the love given by the organization with the love of God—in essence,
aligning her own efforts with those of God. Continually absent from her narrative,
however, was an acknowledgement about the economic and social conditions that
underscored the sex workers’ entry into the industry. This was apparent in WFNE1’s
description of the home villages of the beneficiaries:
“There’s a village in the Northeast that has a party for a girl when she sells her
virginity to a guy in Bangkok,” she noted. “The girl who receives the highest amount of
money gets rewarded by elders.”
“Isn’t that great!” she went on sarcastically, as if to imitate members of the girl’s
community. “You got 50,000 baht! You got 80,000 baht! Now you can buy your
grandmother a house!” Then, she looked at me with a pointed stare, as if to ask, How can
you change that?
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14
See Chapter 5.
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Of particular significance here was the fact that the employee’s sense of “duty” as
a savior was undermined by an ungrateful beneficiary. In addition, while WFNE1
focused on the village’s pre-occupation with money and material possessions, it was not
poverty itself that seemed to concern her. Rather, it was the imagined value system of the
families in the village that troubled her, values that were not only not aligned with her
own, but that actively undermined her efforts to enact her “savior” role.
The employee did not seem to consider that the Northeast, also known as Issan, is
the most impoverished region in Thailand, with many people living under the official
poverty line, earning no more than 1,242 Thai Baht
15
per capita per month (Coronini-
Cronberg, Laohasiriwong, & Gericke, 2007). In such a circumstance of poverty,
prostitution is perhaps one of the only viable economic options available. By failing to
respectfully recognize the aspirations of the young woman with whom she was working,
and by extension, the woman’s community, WFNE1 retreated into a Western normative
framework that placed dependency at the forefront of advocacy.
Additionally, the employee’s perception that her beneficiary didn’t want to accept
her “love” made her feel extremely sad, as if the beneficiary had personally rejected her.
In equating the value of the love the beneficiary received with her own sense of purpose,
the employee enacted the role of the savior—a benevolent Christian from the West whose
moral compass was evolved beyond that of the ethnic minority “other.”
4. “Thailand is illegible to the West” (Othering narrative)
A fourth narrative that emerged evoked a self-versus-other binary between Thailand and
the West. This narrative also evoked the premise that Thai culture is fundamentally
illegible, or incomprehensible, to the West. Participants who enacted this narrative
included two Thai female NGO employees in their thirties (TFE 1 and TFE 2).
In many trafficking situations in Thailand, the family of the female migrant (i.e.,
“trafficking victim”) is directly involved in the trafficking scenario (Rende Taylor, 2005).
This is because in Thai culture as well as numerous ethnic minority cultures, girls and
women are held responsible for upholding the family’s economic well-being (Skrobanek,
2003; Skrobanek, Boonpakdi, & Janthakeero, 1997). Given conditions of economic
deprivation and job insecurity in home villages, however, resources are scarce and
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15
1,242 Thai Baht is equivalent to roughly US $41.47.
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opportunities for economic success are few and far between, leaving many female young
women to migrate and become sex workers in destination cities (Sassen, 2002;
Skrobanek, Boonpakdi, & Janthakeero, 1997).
In prior research, I observed that Western NGO employees were often critical of
families’ seeming complicity in their daughters’ migration experiences (Kamler, 2010).
When asked about their impressions of survivors’ families, however, TFE1 offered a
different perspective:!
“In Lao, the family is involved,” she explained. “The girl or boy feels responsible
for taking care of the family. Mostly traffickers approach the family. Recruiter gives a
fancy offer. The families don’t know the truth about what will happen to their child.”
Adding her thoughts, TFE 2 stated, “As a mother, I don’t think I would be happy
sending my family into the sex industry.”
When asked for clarification, both women agreed that the families were aware of
what their children would be doing, but not how extreme some of their situations might
be. “They don’t know it will be torture,” TFE2 said of the families. TFE1 explained,
“They have no idea how difficult or how bad.”
TFE2 then went on to explain that, in addition to “not knowing how bad” the
situation might be, Asian cultural norms allow for the families of trafficking survivors to
simply “forget” the bad things that happened to their children:
“In Asian culture, people think, ‘If it was difficult for me, I should just try to
forget it. Karma will take care of the person who did the bad thing to me,’” TFE2
explained.
In addition to their desire to just “forget it,” girls may also be reluctant to speak
about their experiences because, as TFE 2 explained, “Losing face is also an issue. You
lose face by talking about it”.
I commented that it seemed ironic that, on the one hand, the employees were
responding to a cultural practice of “not talking about it” while, on the other hand, the
NGO they worked for required them to talk about trafficking and confront the situation
directly. This interaction illustrates how culture shaped the way these employees
processed their experiences. While familiar with Thai cultural norms relating to karma
and losing face, these employees were nevertheless required to uphold a viewpoint
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underscoring the Western modernization narrative, as they were working on behalf of a
Western NGO. Thai culture was therefore implicated in the NGO’s narrative. While
seeming to try to maintain allegiance to their ethnic and national identities as Thai
citizens, both employees exhibited caution around framing their fellow Thai citizens
judgmentally.
In their discussion of karma and the acceptance of child prostitution in Thailand,
the employees reinforced a self-versus-other binary between the West and the East. This
binary framework evokes Said’s (1979) discussion of the way Western actors construct
the identities and knowledge about the East. As Said explained, “In quite a consistent
way, Orientalism depends for its strategy on this flexible positional superiority, which
puts the Westerner in a whole series of possible relationships with the Orient without ever
losing him the relative upper hand” (Said, 1979, p. 7). In explaining that the acceptance
of child prostitution in Thailand occurs because of essential differences between Thailand
and the West, the employees reinforced a notion of difference.
Another, yet starkly different example of the Othering narrative can be seen in
further discussion with TFE2, whose work in the organization caused her to question her
role as a woman in Thai society: !
TFE2 noted, “I’m the first daughter. My parents have the expectation that I will
take care of them and my siblings. I have to make my life better while earning enough to
support them also,” she said. “But it means they will never grow up. My siblings are in
their 30s and they still want support from me. Working at the NGO helps me be more
strong in my life.”!
Here, the employee contrasted her previous acceptance of her obedient gender
role to her newly transformed view. She attributed this transformation to her experience
working at the Western NGO. In so doing, the employee reinforced a narrative of
difference that equated Thailand with fatalism around gender roles and the West with
notions of gender equality. In narrating the difference between her previous view and her
transformed view, this employee relied on culture as an explanation for her personal
transformation. While championing the values of the Western NGO, the employee
reinforced the idea that both difference and hierarchy exist between Thai and Western
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societies, with Western gender norms representing a more “advanced” form of social
organization.
5.!“Sex workers lack agency” (Victim narrative)
Finally, another prominent narrative involved Western interviewees’ difficulties
reconciling the difference between forced prostitution and consensual sex work. The
2000 UN Palermo protocol (United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime, 2000) sets forth
a description of human trafficking in what the International Labor Organization has
admitted are vague parameters of the term “coercion” (Lisborg & Plambech, 2009). As I
will discuss further in Chapter 5, such parameters often result in the conflation of forced
prostitution and consensual sex work, resulting in international policies that are
detrimental to the women they are supposedly designed to help.
It was in the context of this discourse that I asked Western Male NGO Employee
1 (WME1), the labor union organizer, whether he believed that consensual sex workers in
Thailand were able to benefit from the policies that his NGO was championing on behalf
of other migrants (such as factory workers, farm hands, and domestic laborers):
“You mean like…a sex workers union?” he asked. “No. The U.S. Government
would never condone something like that. We can’t receive U.S. grant money if you
support the premise that sex work is legitimate work,” he said.
The employee then commented that he couldn’t imagine “something like that”
existing in Thailand.
My interview with an employee at a sex workers’ union in Chiang Mai
(AUFCB2), however, revealed that such an organization does exist, and has for thirty
years. Describing the organization as a “Thai sex worker organization working across a
broad range of issues to promote the rights of sex workers, including migrant sex
workers,” this respondent argued that prostitution was a cultural “given” in Thai and
ethnic minority societies. Anti-trafficking NGOs needed to accept this, she felt, because
“When you talk to Shan women in Burma, it’s not a question of if they’ll go to Thailand
[to do sex work], it’s a question of when.”
Rather than narrating prostitution as a social ill, AUFCB2 framed sex work as a
ritualistic part of the Shan (ethnic minority) experience. Moreover, by reinforcing the fact
that her organization was comprised of active sex workers (“Not ‘former,’” she
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reiterated), WFE 4’s narrative framed sex work as an act of empowerment. As numerous
pro-rights feminist scholars have explained, such a narrative evokes a fundamental
rejection of the “trafficking frame” itself (see Brennan, 2005; Doezema 2001; Parreñas
2011; Pollack, 2006; Segrave, et al., 2009).
This respondent used culture and economic incentive as a way to explain the
prevalence of prostitution in Thailand, and argued that these motivations for Shan
women’s participation in sex work should be respected among anti-trafficking advocates.
This example shows how an NGO employee used culture not as a polarizing “problem”
in anti-trafficking work, but as a key to understanding the needs of the NGOs
beneficiaries. In contrast to WME1’s rejection of the possibility of agency in sex work,
AUFCB2 used the space of culture to support a narrative of inclusion (Watkins &
Shulman, 2008).
Culture as a Space of Safety
This preliminary research sought to assess how anti-trafficking NGO employees in
Thailand construct narratives, or “stories,” about human trafficking. A key finding of this
study was that NGO employees rely on culture to help them navigate their daily work
experiences. I will now offer a theory, which I call “culture as a space of safety,” to
explain why the employees I interviewed ritualistically retreat from the overwhelming
circumstances that confront them in their daily work activities. This theory engages the
premise that culture, in itself, is a form of communication.
I take as my premise the “disconnect” which I observed between Western NGO
employees’ intercultural work experiences and their apparent inability to suspend
judgment about members of the culture in which their organization operated. Despite the
fact that Western NGOs have been operating in development contexts since the latter part
of the 20
th
century (Lindenberg & Bryant, 2001), NGO employees have been slow to
adapt their communication and training practices to the realities on the ground (Suzuki,
1998). This is due, I argue, to a need on the part of NGO employees – those “on the
ground” – to take refuge in their own cultural values and practices as a way of coping
with challenging day-to-day experiences. I suggest that the need to retreat from such
challenging experiences is strong enough to sway the employees so that they do not alter
their practices even when it may be in their professional interest to do so. Despite the fact
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that culture is not a static entity but, as Wedeen (2002) suggested, a “social process
through which people reproduce together the conditions of intelligibility that enable them
to make sense of their worlds” (p. 717), the NGO employees I interviewed appeared to
retreat into static notions of culture, narrating their experiences according to fixed ideas
about identity and difference.
James Carey (1992) described communication as a ritualistic act – a way of
reinforcing one’s purpose and identity in a given community (p. 18). Drawing from
Carey’s theory, we may see how, in responding to challenging situations, NGO
employees retreat to the ritual of communicative reinforcement. By reenacting culture as
a space of safety, they recreate a space of comfort in which the values that motivate their
participation in the organization, and the meanings associated with their professional
roles are not threatened. Carey’s theory of ritual communication informs my theory of the
“safety net” of culture. I found that the NGO employees I interviewed, ritualistically
retreated into a known space – a space in which their professional goals, ethical
compasses, and personal values remained static, and therefore safe.
When considering the work of NGO employees in the anti-trafficking movement,
it is not difficult to understand why it might be desirable to retreat into the safe space of
culture. The employees I interviewed confronted sobering, dangerous, and rapidly
changing conditions on a daily basis, often characterized by these employees as
“emergency situations.” Some of the situations described by participants about the
victims of human trafficking with whom they worked included: illegal border crossings,
rape, sexual abuse, memory loss, negotiations with criminal networks, imprisonment,
torture, death threats, corruption within law enforcement, starvation, poverty, and lack of
confidence in the rule of law (personal communication with participants, August 5, 8, 9,
18, 30, 2011). In the face of constantly shifting contexts that place demands on NGO
employees and force them to confront their deeply held values and beliefs, culture
becomes a way of navigating complexity and uncertainty. It provides a space of
psychological safety – the frame through which employees view the world, and the
mechanism they use to mediate their daily work experiences.
Examining the narratives in this theoretical context may inform our understanding
of NGO employees’ need for order within their communication practices. As Carey
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discussed, ritualistic communication practices such as “strings of speech” represent the
human need for symbolic social order (1989, p. 19). The employee interviews highlighted
in this study demonstrated a tendency to “return” to the binary categorizations of “them”
and “us” that often serve as a safety mechanism for survivors of trauma (Martin-Baro,
1994). As such, these narratives provide opportunities for understanding the role that
culture plays in creating “spaces of safety” in their advocacy efforts.
The Influence of Narrative Frameworks
The narrative frameworks of international organizations have the ability to influence an
audience’s understanding of development problems. The dominant narratives about the
trafficking of women in Thailand are deployed by NGO employees, who are tasked with
the role of “speaking for” trafficking victims, sex workers and, indeed, for Thailand’s
anti-trafficking movement more broadly. Employing “thin human rights talk” (Hauser,
2008) that rarely, if ever, incorporates the actual voices of supposed trafficking “victims,”
NGO employees morally perform their cultural values, using the corresponding
narratives to construct an image of their organization and their roles as advocates. Such
images often reinforce self-versus-other binaries that eclipse their understanding of the
women to whom they seek to give voice.
But as postcolonial feminists have warned, “speaking for” others can create a
hierarchical power relationship between Western actors and non-Western actors, thereby
reinforcing essentialized notions of third world women and perpetuating the hegemony of
the privileged West (see Alcoff, 1991-1992; Mohanty, 1991; Tuhiwai Smith, 1999). Such
speech acts also have policy implications. As I will discuss in the following chapter, anti-
prostitution legislation mandated by the Bush Administration in U.S. foreign aid projects
is still evoked in the narratives of U.S.-based NGO employees, despite the fact that this
legislation has been overturned under the Obama Administration.
There is, therefore, an important connection to be made between narrative
frameworks of trafficking in Thailand and the enactment of anti-trafficking policy. The
way research questions relating to trafficking are framed, the way the stories of survivors
are told, and the way organizational narrative frameworks are created all directly affect
the lives of women on the ground. Frameworks that reinforce “information hierarchies”
have the potential of doing real harm to women when their agency is seen as limited and
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their real needs are overlooked. These narratives not only inform cultural and national
attitudes toward trafficking and the “othering” of supposed “victims,” they also set the
stage for the Western-driven anti-trafficking policies in the developing world.

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Chapter 5
Constructing the Solution:
The (Not So) “Smart Raid” Policy

The year 2012 marked a pivotal moment in Thailand’s anti-trafficking policy efforts.
During that year, Thailand came under criticism for its failure to comply with the
recommendations outlined in the U.S. Department of State’s annual Trafficking in
Persons (TIP) Report. The 2011 TIP Report cited problems with Thailand’s inability to
comply with the minimum standards of anti-trafficking policies that are identified in
section 108 of The Victims of Trafficking and Violence Protection Act of 2000 (TVPA)
(US Department of State, Office to Monitor and Combat Trafficking in Persons [US
Department of State], 2011). Above all, the TIP Report mandated that Thailand increase
its efforts to prosecute cases and penalize traffickers. It concluded by downgrading
Thailand to “Tier 2 Watch List” status—the second-to-lowest “rung” in anti-trafficking
compliance for countries around the world.
One of the key responses to this downgrade was an increase in State Department
funding for “Smart Raids”: collaborations between anti-trafficking NGOs and the Royal
Thai Police to raid brothels, karaoke bars and massage parlors in an attempt to help
women working as prostitutes against their will. During a Smart Raid, women working in
brothels, many who are there voluntarily, are arrested, questioned and detained—
sometimes for several months to even years—in an attempt to facilitate trafficking
prosecutions. The effects of this policy is often devastating as it hinders women’s ability
to provide for families who rely on their incomes to survive. While this policy is intended
to address the needs of trafficking victims, my preliminary research found that these raids
often have detrimental consequences for the women they are intended to help. Smart
Raids penalize consensual sex workers while reinforcing a victim-versus-criminal binary
and a gendered construction of citizenship that does real harm to female migrant laborers
and sex workers, regardless of whether of not they are victims of human trafficking.
In this chapter I draw on interviews with sex workers, other female migrant
laborers and members of the anti-trafficking movement in Thailand to offer a feminist
critique of the Smart Raid policy. I show that while sex workers contend that safe
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migration policies and regulations within the sex industry would be more beneficial than
Smart Raids in suppressing trafficking, their voices remain silent in the discourse. I then
argue for a feminist approach that puts the concerns of female migrant laborers and sex
workers at the center of policy discussion.
Contextualizing the Policy: Smart Raids in Thailand
As noted in Chapter 1, policies designed to combat trafficking in Thailand are recent
inventions. Human trafficking only emerged as a central concern for the U.S. State
Department within the last two decades, and formally crystallized into an official global
problem with the 2000 U.N. Protocol to Prevent, Suppress and Punish Trafficking in
Persons, especially Women and Children, and the UN Protocol against the Smuggling of
Migrants by Land, Sea and Air—the “Palermo Protocol.”
Formal problems demand formal solutions. Smart Raids were designed as a
mechanism for freeing victims of human trafficking while minimizing harm to others
(U.S. Department of State, 2010). Ideally, these raids are “grounded in real evidence,
have a well-defined goal grounded in law, and are planned to ensure the safety of
everyone involved. They should also include arrangements to segregate supervisors,
conduct victim-centered interviews, cross-reference victims’ accounts, and quickly
transition to post-rescue care and shelter for identified victims” (U.S. Department of
State, 2010). The TIP Report distinguishes these interventions from “Blind Sweeps,”
which do not rely on credible surveillance or verification of the evidence of trafficking
victims in the targeted location.
The Smart Raid policy, while intended to “do no harm” nevertheless has
detrimental effects on women who work in the sex industry consensually. In a “Smart
Raid,” women working as prostitutes in a given establishment are taken to one of
Thailand International Detention Center’s (IDC’s) where they are held while social
workers and NGO staff enact a “weeding out” process, working to identify which are
consensual sex workers and which are victims of human trafficking. In so doing, this
policy strips women of agency in either category: women who are victims are treated as
non-human, non-thinking objects, while those who are working consensually are “illicit”
actors, an identity construction that renders them with an equally dehumanizing and
objectifying status.
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As noted earlier, the underlying construct that informs this binary categorization
is the anti-trafficking movement’s abolitionist agenda which conflates sex work and sex
trafficking and suggests that all prostitution is a violation of women’s human rights.
While pro-rights feminists argue this simplistic equation is a fallacy (see, for example,
Bindman & Doezema, 1997; Doezema 2001; Doezema & Kempadoo, 1998; O’Connell
Davidson, 1998; Parreñas, 2011) the Smart Raid policy puts the onus on sex workers to
prove either a “victim” (i.e., forced) or “criminal” (i.e., consensual) status. Because of the
“secondary” effect of penalizing consenting sex workers, the Smart Raid policy, I argue,
is actually little more than a thinly veiled attempt on the part of NGOs and the
government to abolish prostitution. Such a purposeful and strategic goal, enacted with
copious amounts of funding from the U.S. government, represents an anti-feminist
agenda that reinscribes notions of victimhood, criminalization and silence.
Secondly, Smart Raids are problematic because they serve as a way of allowing
the state to penalize illegal migrants. As noted in Chapter 3, in Thailand, female migrant
laborers pour into the country at increasing rates due to the economic and political
climates and dysfunctional development policies in the surrounding countries of Burma,
Cambodia and Laos. Conditions in Burma, a nation “near the bottom with regard to levels
of education, healthcare and protein consumption” (White 2004) and lacking protections
against child labor (US Department of State, 2011) influences many of these migratory
journeys. Women from Burma are caught in a web of economic desperation due to the
practices of military land conscription, forced labor, and other human rights violations
(Kachin Women’s Association Thailand [KWAT], 2011). Thailand’s Office of
Immigration estimates that while Thailand hosts 200,000 documented migrant laborers
from Burma annually, the real estimates exceeds 1 million (personal communication with
Thailand Office of Immigration, 2011).
Parreñas (2011) turned our attention to the problematic processes and constraints
encountered by female migrants in other areas around the globe. She explained, "We
need to dismantle the binary framework that separates these two distinct migratory flows
and construct a middle ground that recognizes the agency of migrants without dismissing
the severe structural constraints that could hamper their freedom and autonomy" (p. 7).
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Such concerns are also reflected in the experiences of migrants facing criminalization
upon entry into Thailand.
As this preliminary research demonstrates, female migrants from Burma are often
unable to secure the proper documentation needed to migrate “formally” into Thailand.
This results in their hiring “carriers” to help manage their migration processes (personal
communication, 2011). These informal migration arrangements often leave women
vulnerable to exploitation. Yet instead of remedying this problem by implementing safe
migration policies, the Thai and U.S. governments use Smart Raids to “weed out” illegal
immigrants and deport them back to their home countries. Female migrants thereby
become doubly vulnerable in their migration processes. As Sassen noted, the new
informal migration process occurring under globalization fosters “new forms of cross-
border solidarity and identity formation that represents new subjectivities, including
feminist subjectivities” (Sassen, 2002, p. 261). Smart Raids work against this process,
privileging state-centric policies intended to halt women’s migration.
The problems of penalizing sex workers and punishing migrants must, I argue, be
analyzed together since both responses serve as components of the state project of
gendering citizenship among female migrants in Thailand. The victim/ criminal binary is
constructed and enacted by the state—women must either demonstrate their loyalty to the
state by identifying as victims and participating in subsequent prosecution trials, or
demonstrate their defiance against the laws and protocols of the state as consenting sex-
workers. Through the Smart Raid policy, women’s relationship to the state is gendered,
while the victim-criminal binary is reinforced and reinscribed.
Furthermore, the gendered nature of citizenship has implications for the extent to
which women are able to control their own bodies. In the absence of a nuanced
understanding of sex work, women’s agency is denied and the state mediates the
relationship women may have with their bodies. Smart Raids enact and legitimize the
state’s regulation and constitution of the female subject/ citizen.
The Anti-Prostitution Pledge and the Origin of Smart Raids
Prior to the concretization of human trafficking as a global concern at Palermo, Western-
based non-governmental organizations had set up shop in Thailand to explicitly combat a
problem that the Thai government was failing to address. Their efforts were largely
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functional before the advent of Palermo, which introduced the participation of the U.S.
government into what is now a full-fledged anti-trafficking movement. The benefit of this
movement is that it has legitimized trafficking as a concern on the world stage and an
international human rights priority of the West. The drawback is that the collaborative
efforts of NGOs and the U.S. Government, though well intended, often backfire and
negatively impact the very women they are designed to help.
One of the problems with the U.S. government’s entry into the anti-trafficking
movement concerns the accompanying legislation that it imposed. In 2003, President
George W. Bush enacted the President’s Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief (PEPFAR).
PEPFAR began as a five-year plan for public health outreach to 15 countries, allotting
$15 billion to address the issues of HIV/AIDS, malaria and tuberculosis. The plan
includes the Anti-Prostitution Loyalty Oath (APLO), or the Anti-Prostitution Pledge,
which denies funding to any organization with activities that “promote or support the
legalization or practice of prostitution,” and requires that any organization that receives
PEPFAR funding must have a policy that explicitly states its opposition to prostitution
and sex trafficking (One Hundred Eighth Congress of the United States of America
[PEPFAR], 2003).
The Anti-Prostitution Pledge is the site of deep divides within the anti-trafficking
movement, particularly in regard to Smart Raid methodology. Prior to the legislation,
coordination among religious INGOs, secular NGOs and even sex workers rights
organizations was achieved through an organized (albeit fragile and personal)
communication network. The Bush Administration’s policies put an end to this cordiality.
As Australian Female Community-Based Organization Employee 1 (AUFCB1),
the director of a community based organization supporting sex workers rights in Thailand
explained, NGO coordination began to break down during the Bush Administration in
what she called “a messy divorce.”
“Back in 1980,” she explained, “three-hundred women were rounded up in a
brothel in Chiang Mai. The new head of police needed to show power, so he did a
crackdown. Organized all the bribes. That’s always been happening. A police-prostitution
connection. CCPCR [an NGO advocating for children’s rights] jumped in as part of it,
and in 2001, International Justice Mission—the ‘cops for Christ’—descended from
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heaven into Chiang Mai and the money from George Bush arrived,” she added with a
note of sarcasm.
“For us, we could say that the motivation was all about border control for
America,” she explained. “Our analysis is that somewhere in their mind, gangs, drugs and
women all follow the same big transnational crime networks. Before the Anti-Prostitution
Pledge, people could sit around the table and talk about the issues freely. But once the
Anti-Prostitution Pledge came, it became a dividing line. We had to talk about it and it
divided us.”
AUFCB1 went on to explain how the coalition attempted to work together to
conduct Smart Raids in the early 2000’s, shortly after Anti-Prostitution Pledge legislation
was implemented. Despite these attempts, however, the imposition of the policy created a
rift in inter-sector collaboration efforts. This rift imposed a moralistic stance against
prostitution that affected the efforts of well-meaning organizations—many of whom felt
no need to integrate this type of dogma into their policies. Once the U.S. government
became a vocal actor in anti-trafficking policy, the relationships between NGOs
worsened. Criminalization efforts deepened, as NGOs began to view their efforts as being
oriented toward “fighting crime” rather than offering services and support to survivors.
The results of this shift in perception and accompanying policy of “Smart Raids”
has had detrimental effects on many female migrant laborers and sex workers. Such
policies enact a “blaming the victim” strategy that involves pulling a sex worker out of
her labor environment, under the auspices of protection. These paternalistic policies also
fail to address the needs of sex workers. In this way, top-down anti-trafficking policies
represent a form of neocolonial dominance by the State Department-driven anti-
trafficking movement.
In their work on liberation psychology, Watkins and Shulman (2008) offered an
analysis of narcissism and the colonial psychic process that bears resonance with the rift,
as well as the accompanying assertion of dominance described here. The authors
explained,
The colonial self, profiting from the oppression of others, creates a view of others
that justifies oppression. The other is inferior, impulsive, undeveloped, unable to
perform abstract thinking, locked in superstitious thought…. Fantasies of colonial
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superiority, intelligence, disciplined work ethic, logical thought, resourcefulness,
and scientific thinking elevate the colonial self and justify control over others’
resources. This colonial self splits off its own inferiorized, underdeveloped, and
vulnerable aspects (Watkins & Shulman, 2008, p. 69).
This process of “splitting off,” the authors suggested, works in tandem with
dominance in that it sees limitations of resources as constituting the notion of “self”; i.e.,
there’s not enough to go around, therefore “for one group to be fully ‘authorized,’ others
have to be subordinate to them” (Watkins & Shulman, 2010, p. 69).
The imposition of the State Department’s agenda in the anti-trafficking
movement, and the accompanying rift in collaborative efforts between NGOs, INGOs
and government actors is the result of a paternalistic approach to policy that negates the
possibility of participation and horizontalism among female migrant laborers and their
advocates. Such top-down approaches leave little space for reflecting on the subjective
experiences of women who are directly affected by the policies intended for their benefit.
Additionally, such approaches employ organizational hierarchies that rely on corporate
and bureaucratic strategies to instill change.
Punishing consensual sex workers
The Smart Raid policy penalizes sex workers by insisting they be held in detention
centers, environments in which they have virtually no freedom of movement, access to
communication technology or interaction with members of the outside world (Pickering
et al., 2009). As such this policy robs female migrant laborers of their freedom, dignity
and violates their human rights. Often, as was revealed to me in several interviews,
women are held without due process, access to mobile communication technology or
appropriate translation services. Those who are deemed “trafficking victims” may be held
for many months to over a year (personal communication, 2011) while they await trial.
While the needs of sex workers are diverse, and cannot be treated uniformly, and
while many women work voluntarily in Thailand’s sex industry, earning a living and
providing for their families, the Smart Raid policy uniformly penalizes and criminalizes
them. In describing the process of conducting a Smart Raid, one Thai female NGO
employee (THFLN1) explained that consensual sex workers are often “caught” in these
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raids. When I asked the respondent to describe the process of raiding a brothel, she
explained,
“We first need the senior police to give us the command. We are the social worker
team. We follow the police. Make sure it’s safe. Make sure they don’t have guns inside
the establishment. Then we follow the police in. Our duty is to take care of the women
inside,” she went on. “We have to inform them who are we. Because in some cases they
start to cry. They are very afraid. We need to protect them from the media. It’s very
messy.
I then asked THFLN1 how her organization went about identifying trafficking
victims in the brothels.
“First we point to our target,” she replied. “But we have to understand that some
people—some women want to work. Some blame us. ‘Why you come here? This is my
job. We don’t want you here.’ But our objective is to protect the victims who need help.
Underage women need help,” she said emphatically.
“What about the other women?” I asked. “What happens to them?”
“We need to take them all out (of the establishment),” THFLN1 explained. “There
is an appropriate way to talk to them—we say, ‘We need your cooperation.’”
I then asked her whether the non-victims cooperate.
“We don’t force them,” THFLN1 went on. “We ask their cooperation. They
usually do. I think the women know that prostitution is against the law.”
THFLN1 explained that the objective of the policy is to protect women under the
age of eighteen, who are considered “automatic” victims of human trafficking in the eyes
of the state. But consensual sex workers inevitably get “caught” in this process. THFLN1
explained that those who are over the age of eighteen and working voluntarily are
subsequently fined 1000 baht (US $30) and can be held in detention for up to one month.
The result is that the livelihoods of consensual sex workers are disrupted and their
movements restricted. Smart Raids therefore have the secondary effect of penalizing
consensual sex workers and violate their human rights.
One of the problems with these “inadvertent” violations is that they reinforce a
view of prostitution that negates the possibility of its legitimacy in the labor market. All
of the sex workers I interviewed explained that they were working in the sex industry
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consensually. All viewed their work as a legitimate form of labor, and expressed feeling
discriminated against under Thailand’s anti-prostitution law (personal communication,
2011). These concerns should be taken seriously, as they point to an important
intersection between anti-prostitution and anti-trafficking policies. Criminalizing
prostitutes increases women’s risk of exploitation within brothels, as their precarious
labor and migration status makes them vulnerable to a host of problematic relationships
with managers, customers and middle-men, and unable to depend on police or authorities
for protection (see Parreñas, 2011).
Criminalizing prostitutes also reinforces moralistic ideas about women’s sexuality
that are outdated and impractical. As Patricia Hill Collins (2000) has pointed out, “It is
important to remember that what appear to be natural and normal ideas and practices
concerning sexuality are in fact carefully manufactured and promoted by schools,
organized religions, the news media, and, most importantly, government policies”
(Collins, 2000, p. 145). The criminalization of consensual sex work exemplifies such a
manufactured idea.
Additionally, as Sanghera (Kempadoo, Sanghera, & Pattanaik, 2005) has
discussed, such policies create a double bind for women who are actual human trafficking
victims, since “in being compelled to lead ‘illegal’ lives, victims of trafficking are
simultaneously converted into criminals” (Kempadoo et al., p. 9). In contrast, a rights-
based approach to combating trafficking suggests that sex workers be treated as
legitimate laborers and offered workplace protections, rather than being criminalized
(Global Alliance Against Trafficking in Women 2011; Jordan 2010). As Nussbaum
(2012) argued, criminalizing prostitutes only creates further obstacles for women who
may have few employment options to begin with: “Keeping prostitution illegal only
increases the threats of violence and sickness and abuse that women face because
illegality prevents adequate supervision, encourages the control of pimps and discourages
health checks. And prostitution's continued illegality hampers any efforts on behalf of the
dignity and self-respect of prostitutes” (Nussbaum, 1998).
Dispelling myths about sex work and sex trafficking
My interviews with sex workers dispelled several myths about the connection between
trafficking and sex work. All expressed that they were not troubled by engaging in the
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commercial sale of their sexuality. Many worked in multiple jobs, revealing that sex
work is but one of many vocations in the informal labor sector that women engage in, and
therefore rarely exemplifies the notion of “slavery” that is associated with human
trafficking. Sex workers also explained that this form of labor pays better than other jobs
in the informal labor sector. Finally, sex workers and their advocates expressed that
implementing regulations such as minimum wage, mandatory condom use, lack of quotas
and caps on percentages given to brothel owners, as well as an acceptance of sex work as
a legitimate form of work would be the best strategies for protecting sex workers from
exploitation.
Understanding the causes of women’s entry into voluntary sex work may help
illuminate the differences between voluntary sex work and sex trafficking. One Akha sex
worker in Chiang Rai (AKFSWDS2) described her incentives for working in a karaoke
bar:
“A lot of people come here with friends. People know this place,” she said. “They
talk and talk, say they get a lot of money so they come with friend. Their parents their
families are very poor so they want to help their parents. Some sex workers, they are
afraid their parents know. So some people go to Bangkok and work. A lot of people in
ethnic groups, they come from the mountains to help their parents. Then their parents
send for money. A lot of sex workers have very poor families,” she reiterated.
AKFSWDS2 explained that women’s incentives for working in brothels are
rooted in economic need and strong ties with family and community. Akha migrants, like
many ethnic minority migrants and Thais, experience a sense of responsibility toward
taking care of their families. This is especially true among oldest daughters, who are
often primary breadwinners. Many of the Akha sex workers I interviewed expressed that
the desire to care for their families living in remote villages in Burma’s Shan and Kachin
states motivated their entry into sex work.
Rather than painting a broad policy brush over all women’s experiences, anti-
trafficking policy should respond to the nuances of women’s varied experiences.
Understanding the nuanced material and local motivations of female migrant sex workers
is a first step toward a feminist re-imagining of anti-trafficking policy in Thailand. As
Mohanty (1986) explained, Western feminist research on women in the third world which
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blurs the distinction between “Woman” and “women” “eventually ends up constructing
monolithic images of ‘Third World Women’ by ignoring the complex and mobile
relationships between their historical materiality on the level of specific oppressions and
political choices on the one hand and their general discursive representations on the
other” (Mohanty, 1986, p. 77).
Reiterating the fact that her labor was voluntary, one female migrant
(AKFSWDS1) explained that sex work is often one in an array of jobs in which women
engage:
“In the day there is acheap—‘another occupation,’” she explained, “like
construction, agriculture. Another labor job. You know? I need to get more money,”
AKFSWDS1 noted. “My income and my spending are not balanced. I need more money
so I work here (in the brothel). I don’t know how much I will make in one month
working in here. Some days we have a lot, some days we don’t have anything. In the day
I make about 150 Thai Baht every day,
16
but in the evening, not sure. It depends on
experience in the job during the night. But I have to pay for light and water,” she
reasoned.
AKFSWDS1’s explanation of her situation suggests that sex work, like any work,
offers women the ability to pay for electricity, water, and other necessities, and does not
necessarily constitute an elusive, abusive or desperate act (Doezema & Kempadoo, 1998)
in which women are enslaved. Among the women I interviewed, sex work was discussed
in practical terms: as a means of generating the income necessary to survive. Such
responses challenge the notion that all women’s experiences are alike, and contradict the
assumption that all sex workers lack agency.
Interviews with migrant sex workers also challenged the beliefs commonly held
among anti-trafficking NGOs that alternative income generation strategies—such as
handicrafts—are viable options for sex workers. As I discussed in the previous chapter,
many Western NGO employees adopting an abolitionist perspective on sex work
suggested that “life skills” are a viable means of replacing the income generated by sex
work—life skills such as sewing, hand-weaving and jewelry-making.
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!150 Thai Baht is equivalent to approximately US $5.!
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But interviews with sex workers themselves revealed that these alternatives rarely
reversed a woman’s decision to continue working in the sex industry.
One Burmese sex worker (BUFSWD) described the problematic earning potential
of handicraft production, explaining, “If I was sewing I would make only make 150-180
baht per day.
17
If I was a Thai person, 200 baht per day. If I am a migrant, only 120 per
day. In Mae Sot [on the Thai-Burma border] only 80 baht per day.”
This respondent explained that in contrast, sex work is a far more lucrative
vocation. The women receiving support from her community-based organization earned
enough money to buy farm equipment and start businesses. “In Mae Sot
18
the women are
migrants. Customers aren’t paying a lot but the women are still making three times the
minimum wage,” she explained.
BUFSWD’s analysis illustrates the reasoning behind many women’s choice to
work in the sex industry. While NGOs attempt to “rescue” women from sex work, “life
skills” training can never compensate for the deeper problem faced by migrants in
Thailand: that professional opportunities are wholly denied to migrant women. My
interviews revealed that women from Burma are prevented from working in Thailand’s
formal labor sector due to their status as non-Thai citizens. The denial of these
opportunities is of great concern to migrant women.
The women who no one trusts
The interviews revealed that many women’s experiences of sex work did not match with
the sensationalized narrative around trafficking articulated by the U.S. government and
many NGOs. As noted by Segrave (2009), female victims of sex trafficking often do not
conform to the “ideal type” of victim promoted in documents such as the TIP Report. In
contrast to the stereotyped portrayal of women locked in rooms and controlled by violent
pimps, many of the women I interviewed had close ties with the individuals who
facilitated their transport and employment (i.e., their “traffickers”). Interviews in Chiang
Rai among the Akha sex worker’s community showed that often, female sex workers
trusted their mama sans, or brothel managers.
“Do you have problems with your boss?” I asked one sex worker, AKFSWDS2.
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17
150-180 Thai Baht is equal to approximately US $7-$9.
18
A city on the Thai-Burma border!
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She responded, “I have no problem with my boss. We are like sisters. When I
have work, I will do my work. If I have free time I go home. If I have a problem then the
boss helps me. (We are) like a family,” she explained.
AKFSWDS2’s depiction of her close relationship with her mama san illustrates
the discrepancy between assumptions made in the “flattened” paradigm of anti-trafficking
policy, and the nuanced subjectivities of women’s reported experiences. While anti-
trafficking policy regards all brothel owners and mama sans as “traffickers” who enslave
and abuse their “victims,” in reality, these individuals often serve as sex workers’ support
systems, forming a web of protection where no other resources exist.
Another Akha sex worker (AKFSWDS3) explained that due to a lack of
citizenship documents and access to formal banking structures, many sex workers rely on
their mama sans to hold their earnings.
“When I finish my work the boss gives me my money,” AKFSWDS3 explained.
“Some people want to save their money with the boss. When they need money, they get it
from the boss. Some people get their money, like 500 baht, but they buy something.
Where does the money go? I don’t know,” she said. “This is the example (of how we
might waste our money). So we give our money to the boss to save. In one month we can
have a lot of money saved. One day we may give the boss 200 or 2000 Baht. Then we
have a lot of money saved.”
Contrary to speculative data in the 2011 TIP Report which suggests that women
are forced to re-pay large debts to their traffickers (US Department of State, 2011), this
interviewee reported that she trusted her mama san and was, in fact, working with her to
save money. This evidence suggests that the idea that trafficking in Thailand has reached
a point of “crisis” that can only be remedied by abolitionist policies is, in fact, a fallacy.
Contrary to this widely held belief, many sex workers do not experience themselves as
trafficking victims embedded in a “crisis” scenario. They work alongside their bosses and
co-workers, developing informal strategies for economic advancement in the face of state
systems that place them at a structural disadvantage.
Yet despite such evidence, the emotional concern about trafficking remains a
powerful force in anti-trafficking rhetoric and policy. Trafficking has been described as
being “on the rise” (Bales, Trodd, & Williamson, 2009; Kara 2010) by scholars who
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often have little empirical evidence to support this claims (Cheng 2011; Ditmore 2009;
Kempadoo et al., 2005; Parreñas 2011). This “crisis” rhetoric insights a kind of emotional
panic that, as Hesford has explained, creates a kind of spectacle in the mind of the
Westerners that subsequently displaces a critique of the self in favor of a critique of the
colonial “other” (Hesford, 2011).
In her discussion of abject economics, Sara Ahmed (2004) called attention to the
location of emotion in constructing crises and creating social fear:
It is the very production of the crisis that is crucial. To declare a crisis is not ‘to
make something out of nothing’: such declarations often work with real events,
facts, or figures (as we can see, for example, in how the rise of divorce rates is
used to announce a crisis in marriage and family). But the declaration of crisis
reads that fact/ figure/ event and transforms it into a fetish object that then
acquires a life of its own, in other words, that can become the grounds for
declarations of war against that which is read as the source of the threat (p. 133).
In the context of sex trafficking in Thailand, it is the brothel owners, recruiters,
and transporters—i.e. “traffickers” who are seen as this threatening source. But there is
another dynamic at play too, and this involves the agency of consenting sex workers. I
argue that they, too, are viewed by the anti-trafficking movement as the source of the
trafficking threat. For their very existence challenges the notion of victimization that is
perceived as a necessary condition of women who are trafficked into the sex industry. It
is therefore not just the “external agents” of the brothel who are held under scrutiny by
the Smart Raid policy model—it is the female sex workers themselves.
It is no wonder then, that the rights of consenting sex workers are considered a
last priority under the Smart Raid policy. Consenting sex workers are asked to
“cooperate” with law enforcement at the expense of their security and detriment of their
livelihoods. Imagine for a moment the idea of a Western man working in a corporate job
being asked to “cooperate” with government investigations that would displace him from
his home, his work environment and force him to give up a significant amount of time
and income, all for the purpose of helping others in need. Indeed, this type of fantasy
seems ludicrous. Yet the Smart Raid policy asks consenting sex workers to do exactly
this. Why are consenting sex workers asked to make these sacrifices? I suggest that it is
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because they pose a threat to the legitimacy and infallibility of anti-trafficking policy.
They are the women who no one trusts.
Smart Raids and migration
Smart Raids pose further problems for the migrant women they are supposedly designed
to help. These raids serve as a convenient mechanism for the state project of “catching”
undocumented migrants, detaining them, and halting migration. Thailand’s policy of
criminalizing undocumented migrants penalizes women who struggle to support families
and villages in home countries, while endangering migrants who may be actual
trafficking victims. As Saskia Sassen has noted, with the advent of globalization, women
over the last decade have begun to participate in cross border “circuits” in order to secure
livelihoods against the unstable backdrop of global capitalism and structural adjustment
policies in home countries (2002, p. 256-7). Sassen explained, “These circuits could be
considered as indicators of the (albeit partial) feminization of survival, because it is
increasingly on the backs of women that these forms of making a living, earning a profit
and securing government revenue are realized” (p. 258). “Feminization of survival”
refers, then, to the notion that entire communities are depending on the labor of female
migrants.
Yet migration—a process that many consider to be a basic human right (Global
Alliance Against Trafficking in Women [GAATW], 2011) is still subject to regulation,
oversight and, if conducted without proper documentation, criminalization. Often, female
migrants are unable to obtain the proper documentation needed to make their
employment status legitimate.
As one grassroots community organizer (KHMLN1) working on the Thai-
Cambodian border explained, “People think it’s all poverty, but no. There’s no
mechanism to support migration. To get a letter or to register you have to go to Phnom
Penh. Nobody up here in the provinces can effectively do that. So they migrate illegally
and then are subject to all kinds of labor exploitation. It’s about survival.”
While migrants seek support for safe migration processes, neither the Thai nor the
U.S. government has responded to these expressed needs. Instead, Smart Raids provide
the government with away of cracking down on “illegal” immigration—all in a stated
attempt to increase prosecutions of trafficking cases. The effects of these practices on
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female migrant laborers are often devastating: rather than responding to migrants’ needs,
the practices of criminalization, detention, and grooming for prosecution prevent
migrants from providing for families who rely on their labor to survive.
Smart Raids and gendered citizenship
Feminist theories of citizenship and the gendered nature of social welfare policies
contribute importantly to the discussion of Smart Raids and their inadvertent effects on
female migrants. Ann Shola Orloff (1993) argued that the key to analyzing states’ effects
on gender is whether and how they guarantee women access to paid labor. She explained,
In some countries, men’s rights to jobs are promoted through full employment
and active labor market policies. Thus, I contend that the extent to which the state
ensures access to paid work for different groups and the mechanisms that
guarantee jobs (e.g., reliance on private employment, creation of tax incentives,
legal regulation of private employment, or public jobs programs) are dimensions
of all policy regimes. The key issues in investigating states’ effects on gender
relations is the extent to which women (or subgroups of women) can claim this
right (p. 318).
The sex workers I interviewed explained that access to paid employment was a
necessary condition of their emancipation, as such access would provide them with
legitimacy. Regulating sex-work, they suggested, would offer practical solutions to the
problem of exploitative conditions in brothels. Having the freedom to set their own
schedules, earn a minimum wage, work with brothel owners to create safe working
conditions (such as safe sex) and eliminate customer “quotas” would allow sex workers
to function professionally, rather than criminally. This, in turn, would reduce the potential
for exploitation (RATS-W Team, Empower Foundation, 2012). Such improvements have
been demonstrated in the Netherlands, where brothel legalization has led to an increase in
law enforcement’s ability to detect cases of sex trafficking (United Nations, 2007).
Anti-trafficking policy does not address these concerns, but instead prioritizes the
concerns of the state. AUFCB1 further explained this discrepancy, stating,
“One woman came to work in a karaoke bar. She thought the debt was too high.
There was no freedom of movement. Thought the owner was taking too high a cut. These
were the criticisms—of the workplace itself, and the fact that there are no regulations
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within them. But with anti-trafficking policy and law, when you think about it, none of
the options under that law would protect her family or her.”
This respondent explained that policies criminalizing sex work, in tandem with
policies designed to combat trafficking, do sex workers a disservice, as neither support
women’s agency or emancipation. Instead, they prioritize state–driven agendas. The
criminalization of sex work, in tandem with the lack of support for the employment of
female migrants, points to the gendered nature of citizenship in the Thai state. As Walby
(1994) noted, full social citizenship depends on one’s ability to be a worker with full
access to rights. Indeed, denying women the legitimacy of employment by criminalizing
sex work, together with denying female migrants legitimate access to employment by
virtue of their migrant status, collapses the circumstances of sex work and migrant labor
to form a gendered identity of the migrant sex worker as an enemy of the Thai state—one
that must be managed, penalized and silenced.
The question as to whether sex-work can and should be considered legitimate
work is central to the construction of female migrant laborers as agents in achieving
personhood under the Thai state. Both trafficking victims and consensual prostitutes are
non-subjects, possessing no rights to the full benefits of citizenship. Both “types” of
women suffer under the Smart Raid policy and are caught in a double bind: “trafficking
victims” are punished for being non-citizens while simultaneously tasked with the burden
of proving their loyalty to the Thai state in the form of witness testimony. Consenting
prostitutes are criminalized for being non-citizens and for being “illicit” sex workers,
while simultaneously blamed for the existence of trafficking (in the eyes of abolitionists).
Citizenship and legitimacy are gendered by virtue of the fact that sex work, as a form of
labor, defines the women’s status in relation to the state.
Furthermore, as Orloff suggested, citizenship is an embodied reality. Citing Jones,
she explained, “Feminist analyses of citizenship highlighted sexuality, reproduction, and
physical bodies: ‘Citizenship is defined as a practice of embodied subjects whose
sex/gendered identity affects fundamentally their membership and participation in public
life’” (as cited in Orloff, 1993, p. 309). As sex work is enacted via the bodies of women,
where and how it is regarded by the state constitutes where and how sex workers are
situated in relation to the state. Orloff further argued that citizenship be viewed through
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the lens of gender, as often studies claiming to offer data on “the average citizen”
construct such a citizen as male, thereby ignoring the structural and social discrepancies
faced by women and men in relation to their status within the state. Smart Raids, as a
state policy that explicitly targets sex work as a gendered form of labor, should therefore
be analyzed through the lens of gender. To this I add the crucial and explicitly political
project of viewing policy through a feminist lens.
Conclusion
The data presented here suggest that the Smart Raid policy has detrimental consequences
for the women the policy is designed to help. Rather than curbing trafficking, the policy
penalizes consensual sex workers and serves as a mechanism for halting migration. These
effects have detrimental consequences on women whose families and communities
depend on their labor for survival. Furthermore, the Raids enact a construction of
“gendered citizenship” in Thailand, in which undocumented female migrants working as
sex workers are explicitly targeted and discriminated against for their “non-citizen”
status. The female bodies of migrant laborers are subjected to a “victim-versus-criminal”
identity binary, in which they are stripped of agency and rendered voiceless in the
construction of policies and practices being designed to help them.
In this chapter I have sought to question where and how feminism, as a rights-
based rather than abolitionist project, might better inform anti-trafficking policy, and
where and how it is currently being left out. While policy makers and practitioners
believe their anti-trafficking work to be of a feminist bent, Smart Raids relegate women
to a victim-versus criminal identity binary that silences them. Such a policy cannot be
considered feminist. This paradox represents an important problem in contemporary
humanitarian work, showing that much of this work is still driven by an underlying
agenda of neocolonial hegemony. Illuminating this reality is an important project, for
until we see the effects of policy for what they are, practitioners and scholars will
continue to falsely believe their work is “doing no harm.” Often, it is the failure to
perceive nuance that does the most harm to disadvantaged women.
Building a feminist theory of anti-trafficking policy begins at the site of
subjectivity. It requires a reflective understanding of the location of Western feminist
discourse; a discourse, as Mohanty explained, that is situated in a “world balance of
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power” (1986, p. 63). It requires localizing our analysis and suspending assumptions
rooted in Western positivist epistemologies and binary frameworks. Above all, it requires
a continued commitment to positionality—a refusal to look away.

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Chapter 6
Cultures of Resistance:
The Role of Community-Based Organizations

Parallel to the controversial policies of the anti-trafficking movement, or perhaps in
response to them, other self-organizing groups have emerged to combat the issue of labor
exploitation in Thailand. CBOs, comprised of women from Burma’s ethnic minority
communities and generally operating “below the radar” of the anti-trafficking movement,
address the issue of human trafficking from a very different angle than large, State-
funded NGOs. Rather than relying on Smart Raids, detaining “victims” in an effort to
bolster prosecutions, or pressuring sex workers to undergo moralistic “rehabilitation”
policies designed to redeem them of their “sins,” these groups instead operate in
solidarity with female migrants. As such, these groups enact what I refer to earlier as the
principle of “horizontalism,” a tenet of participatory action research that allows for
agency and subjectivity on the part of research participants (Kim & Ball-Rokeach, 2006;
Morello-Frosch, Pastor, Sadd, Porras, & Prichard, 2005; Watkins & Shulman, 2010).
In this chapter, I argue that the “underground” or “irregular” status of activist
CBOs in Thailand fosters participatory approaches to trafficking prevention and
rehabilitation. These approaches, in turn, have more positive impact on the lives of
female migrants and sex workers than the approaches adopted by anti-trafficking NGOs.
My research found that local actors are developing creative strategies to support female
migrants and sex workers as they navigate through the difficult and precarious process of
migrating and searching for legitimate work in a system that is decidedly operating
against them. These strategies, which offer opportunities for agency and empowerment,
rather than regurgitating tropes of victimization, could prove to be “best practices” in
trafficking prevention. This section introduces a comparative framework for anti-
trafficking policy, demonstrating that the organizations that most effectively meet the
needs of migrant laborers and sex workers are those operating on grassroots levels to
provide education, skills training and other forms of economic support.
The women who make up the fabric of these organizations come from what
Shulman described as an “atrocity environment” (personal communication, Shulman,
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2011). They have been abused, exploited by a militarized government, silenced and
terrorized both in political and social contexts, isolated and marginalized. As such, these
women are in need of a human space in which community, dialogue, freedom of
expression, strength and healing are encouraged. Therefore, rather than focusing on
advancing trafficking prosecutions at the behest of the Thai government or the funding
benchmarks of the U.S. State Department, these organizations are instead fostering
community involvement, group solidarity and cross-border partnerships. It is these types
of strategies that, I argue, lead to positive change in the lives of female migrants.
I characterize these types of organizations as “outliers,” for they often fall through
the cracks in visibility, remaining virtually unnoticed by policy makers and unrecognized
by governments. Despite—or perhaps because of—their relative invisibility, these
“outlier” organizations maintain identity and autonomy through resisting the narratives of
victimization, contested debates about trafficking, and impractical solutions employed by
members of the formal the anti-trafficking movement. Their communication strategies
and organizational inclusivity allows them the ability to operate in an autonomous
space—one defined by illegitimate citizenship status, mobility and a network of cross-
border communication. Often seen as “enemies” of the state due to questionable
citizenship status and political alignment with the efforts of non-state armed groups in
Burma, these actors are nevertheless reaching trafficking victims and potential victims
more effectively than their NGO counterparts, and successfully forming strategies for
long-term social change.
To explicate the achievements of these groups, I will examine three community-
based organizations whose efforts are making noteworthy contributions to the anti-
trafficking movement: Organization 1 provides support to Kachin ethnic minority
migrants in Chiang Mai; Organization 2 provides support to migrant sex workers
throughout Thailand; and Organization 3 focuses on collective bargaining strategies
among factory workers in Samut Sakhon. These organizations serve as models for others
working to assist potential trafficking victims in Thailand.

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Community Based Organizations:
Alternative Strategies and Emergent Systems
In contrast to Western NGOs that rely on carceral means of combating trafficking,
CBOs—many run by migrant women and former trafficking victims themselves—instead
foster trust and participatory practices between their organizations and the community at
large. Interviews with female migrant laborers from ethnic minority communities in
Burma revealed that women actively sought out such CBOs in Thailand as their primary
means of support, rather than relying on police (who they consider to be their
adversaries) or anti-trafficking NGOS (who often work with police and therefore appear
to also be their adversaries). The process by which these female migrant laborers sought
assistance operates in contrast to the process of the Smart Raid policy, and in direct
contradiction to the policies of faith-based anti-trafficking NGOs who seek to
“rehabilitate” victims by offering them handicraft skills and love. As the following cases
illustrate, it is neither low-level skills training nor moralistic teachings that female
migrant laborers seek as they attempt to escape labor exploitation and better their lives.
Rather, these individuals seek community support, state recognition, economic
advancement and safe working conditions as a means of empowering themselves. It is
these types of goals that, I argue, offer female migrant laborers agency, allowing them to
be subjects in their own lives, rather than “victims” in a movement premised on their
objectification.
Three Case Studies
1. Organization 1
The first case study I will discuss involves a community-based organization stating that
its mission was to meet the needs of the growing Kachin migrant population in Northern
Thailand (personal communication, 2011). The organization’s members came from
Kachin State, an ethnic area in Northern Burma that has long suffered conflict with the
central Burmese government and which, in recent years, has fallen into a state of active
military conflict (Global Witness, 2005). The organization’s members are closely linked
with the women’s arm of the Kachin Independence Army (KIA) (personal
communication, 2011). Responding to the ongoing atrocities in Kachin State (see Chapter
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1) Organization 1 sought to promote women’s equality and gender equality among the
Kachin people through its migrant support programs.
My research took me to the offices of Organization 1, and later to a safe house in
Chiang Mai that had been created as a drop-in center for Kachin women. Supported
under the auspices of the Migrant Program, the drop-in center offered computer skills
training courses, English and Thai language courses and community support for female
migrants who struggle to find and sustain legitimate employment in Thailand. The center,
and indeed the entire organization, was run by migrants themselves—women who had
experienced the difficulty of leaving their families and villages in Burma to seek a better
life in Thailand, only to face obstacles of delegitimized status and discrimination in
Thailand due to their nationality, ethnicity and gender.
As the female migrants I interviewed explained, such discrimination poses an
obstacle for Kachin migrants who seek to achieve legitimacy in the workplace in
Thailand. Thailand’s restrictive migration policies do not afford ethnic minorities or
undocumented migrants opportunities to participate in state-sponsored educational
programs, nor do they allow female migrants to advance in professional vocations. A
combination of policy and discrimination is at play in this context: while many Kachin
women have received an education in Burma, their precarious status as migrants prohibits
them from claiming a fair wage for working in a job that offers safe conditions. Thai
employers, both in public and private sector industries, pay these women lower wages
than those earned by Thai citizens or other foreign nationals. Educational opportunities
are also limited, and undocumented migrants are excluded from attending government
sponsored schools and Universities in Thailand.
Such discriminatory practices lead to extremely precarious life situations. One
Kachin Female CBO Employee 1 (KFCE1), the organization’s program director,
explained that the CBO was unable to register officially with the Thai government.
“This year we’re trying,” she explained, “but it’s a process. If we do register, it’s
difficult. We have to discuss with the owner of the house who is Thai.
I asked KFCE1 how the citizenship status of the migrants working in the NGO
affected this process. I wondered, for example, whether the women had passports.
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“Some have passports,” she replied. “But most do not have travel document. This
is a big challenge for us. Some have passport and some don’t have Thai labor card. We
need to think about many situations,” she explained. “If we were registered we would
have to report to the government.”
Here, KFCE1explained that without the proper documents, members of the
organization are not able to work legitimately in Thailand, and the organization itself is
not able to securely own property or liaison with the Thai government. It could be argued
that these aspects of organizational functionality are cornerstones to achieving a cohesive
organizational identity. Without them, the organization suffers an inability to reap the
benefits of legal protections and funding opportunities—opportunities that are often
afforded to legitimate citizens of a nation State.
Unity of experience
Despite these obstacles, I suggest that the precarious nature of Organization 1’s status is,
in fact, an asset to the organization. The challenges endured by the organization fosters a
community of solidarity, which in turn, I argue, fosters an ethic of participation in the
organization’s daily activities. As members of a marginalized group, the leaders and
managers of this organization are situated in similar structural conditions as the women
their organization serves, creating what I refer to as a “unity of experience.” This unity
allows the organization to see their community members not as “others”—women who
are less fortunate than the organization’s leaders; women who must be “rescued”—but
rather, women who are equal partners in a struggle for the entire community’s
emancipation and empowerment.
Because of this unity of experience, equality, trust and respect play key roles in
the relationships between the organization’s leaders and the women who the organization
serves. An example of this can be seen in the following story of a female migrant laborer
from Burma’s Kachin State who was also a former trafficking survivor (KCFD2):
“I grew up in Tachilek [on the border of Burma and Northern Thailand], KCFD2,
began. “In 1982 my family moved to Mytchina [the capital of Kachin State, Burma]. In
1990 I married. In 1997 my husband passed away and left me with two girls.”
KCFD2 laughed. “I am laughing,” she said, “because we hear this story a lot.”
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“After he passed,” KCFD2 went on, “the children needed to go to school. I
needed to support them myself. I knew that there was money in Tachilek, so I decided to
go there in search of work. I left my daughters with the relative in Rangoon in 1998. I
came to Tachilek and found work as a housekeeper in Chinese house for 4 months. My
salary was 1000 baht per month [$30] in 1999! At that time I was keeping only 200 baht
for myself and sending 800 baht [about $22] to the children.
“My cousin was working in a different house in Mae Sai. She told me there is job
in Chiang Mai doing housekeeping. “We’ll both go and work for 750 baht per person. So
then the boss bring us to Chiang Mai- but on the way, the police stop us. The boss gave
some money to police but I don’t know how much.”
KCFD2 recalled, “In 1999 I work in Chiang Mai for 7 months. I work in Chiang
Mai for 7 months. My salary was increased to 900 baht [about $27]. But the regular
salary was 4000 baht [US$120]. I wanted a regular salary. So I looked for other job.”
KCFD2 recalled contacting members of the Kachin church community in Chiang
Mai in her search for employment. “ I heard that there is a health training in Mae Sot,”
she said. “At that time, it was the start of 2000, [Organization 1] was just formed. They
said, ‘Does anyone want to go to represent [Organization1]?’ [Organization 1] helped me
to get there. There were only a few people working at [Organization 1] at that time, so it
worked out.”
I asked how many women were working in Organization 1 at the time.
“Around ten,” she noted. She then described receiving two years of the medical
training, after which she returned to Burma to work in the KIA controlled areas, serving
as a nurse in a mobile clinic for five years.
“I worked in fourteen villages, she recalled. “I got the health mobile funding
clinic from the Burma Relief Center here (in Chiang Mai). I was the head of the nursing
clinic. We went around to the villages, curing diarrhea and malaria. We gave training to
the villagers about traditional birth, hygiene, education to schools, children and family
planning. There was a doctor too; he and I worked together. But while I was serving
away from the doctor I take care of the injury people. Because that area is jungle so
people cut themselves. I had to sew them up.”
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KCFD2 described villagers whose serious illnesses went beyond her capacity to
treat. “One was a soldier from KIA,” she said. “In the fighting he was unconscious for
three days and then they brought him to me. I was giving the medicine and also installed
the urine pipe. After two days the man was alive,” she recalled.
This respondent’s story of resilience due to the support of Organization 1
demonstrates the unity of experience between an organization’s staff and members.
Because of this unity, participatory practices were enacted on the part of the organization.
Such practices, as I have argued throughout this section, prove to be valuable tools—
indeed, often serving as “best practices”—in human trafficking rehabilitation efforts. By
the standards of the 2000 Palermo Protocol, KCFD2 could likely be considered a
“victim” of human trafficking, having endured gross labor exploitation in the informal
labor sector and coercion to migrate under the promise of better work. Throughout her
interview, KCFD2 expressed that the lack of minimum wage, what she called a “regular
salary” was her primary concern. Once she accessed Organization 1 and was given an
opportunity to study medicine, however, she not only turned her own life around, but the
lives of hundreds of people back in Burma. By trusting in KCFD2’s abilities, the
organization utilized a participatory approach to community building. Rather than
attempting to “manage” KCFD2’s activities in an attempt to “rehabilitate” her after her
difficult experience, the organization engaged her in an educational opportunity that had
the possibility of benefitting not only KCFD2, but the entire Kachin community. By
trusting and respecting KCFD2, organization 1 empowered her while simultaneously
empowering itself.
KCFD2’s fortuitous alliance with organization one also demonstrates the
surprising potential of non state-legitimized education. Carefully assisting KCFD2 to
meet the demands of a rare medical training opportunity, the organization provided an
inroad to a vocation that would have been entirely denied to her—both in Burma and, as
a migrant and unrecognized refugee, also in Thailand. As several migrant women who
were receiving education and skills training at the organization explained, in Thailand,
migrants from Burma aren’t allowed to be professionals. A wage ceiling and
systematized discrimination against the Burmese prevent them from making strides
toward professionalism, and even from earning a fair wage to feed their families. Since,
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by necessity, the organization functioned outside the purview of a state-legitimized
structure, the organization was able to open an alternative door for KCFD
-
2, one that led
to her ability to realize her intellectual potential.
2. Organization 2
The second case focuses on a community-based organization (Organization 2) run
entirely by and for sex workers in Thailand. The organization uses an ethic of
empowerment to assert that sex is a legitimate form of work, involves the use of a
woman’s mind as well as her body, and should be respected and supported by society
rather than stigmatized and criminalized. In addition to providing social support to sex
workers throughout Thailand, this organization offers educational and skills training
courses to migrant workers, and puts social pressure on the State-Department led anti-
trafficking movement, which the organization sees as an impediment to sex workers, due
to policies that violate their human rights. Organization 2 is also currently working with
the International Labor Organization (ILO) in an attempt to legitimize regulatory
practices in sex work in Thailand (personal communication, 2011).
As one of its main foci, Organization 2 serves as a hub for community support for
sex workers. Australian Female CBO Employee 1 (AFCE1), described a typical day at
the organization:
“We open at 10 AM and it takes a half an hour to get over our hangovers. Some
women start to arrive at 11 AM. People chat together, check emails and gossip. Some
women come to study in the education program: language and Thai school qualifications.
People come to get condoms, get counseling on broken hearts, do Facebook, etc,” she
said.
The respondent then went on to explain the importance of having a place to call
“home” as a female migrant, explaining, “Sex workers are always moving. When you
move, you need a place and a space to do your normal community things—
housewarmings, mournings, etc. So they do that here.”
Organization 2 also facilitates an outreach program for sex workers, designed to
raise awareness about the need for regulatory practices in sex work.
“All of our centers are staffed by sex workers. Once a month we have a
workshop. Sometimes it’s on a serious issue like trafficking, sometimes not so serious,
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like nails. There’s a hairdressing area where they get ready to go to work. Then they go to
the bars—Karaoke, massage, freelance—everywhere. Our bar opens at 6:00 PM. Women
can work in the bar if they want. About 30-40 women a day drop in. In the rainy season
sometimes we get more. Women go on outreach once a week, go to meet women in the
workplace,” she explained.
Organization 2 as homeplace
Shulman (personal communication, 2011) described “public homeplaces” as spaces that
allow people from diverse backgrounds to come together for a shared purpose. While the
individuals may share no common language, music, or cultural forms, the homeplace
allows them a site on which to build new community frameworks. When a collective
trauma occurs, Shulman explained, links between people in the self-organized structure
can begin to break down. People begin to lose bonds with others. But self-organization,
as a principle, allows for these links to be re-built, and the possibility for individual and
social re-generation to occur. New communities, languages, and cultural projects can be
built through such organized structures (personal communication, October 11, 2011).
As Shuman explained, homeplaces are most needed and most effective at “the
moment when people are pushed off their land and become dispersed. The only hope of a
human existence… lies in the creation and regeneration of postmodern spaces” (personal
communication, 2011). As a public homeplace, Organization 2 reflected this process of
regeneration. The sex workers who used the drop-in center formed a heterogeneous
group, one that was constantly in flux, as the demands of labor migration dictated these
women’s movement and demanded the need for their flexibility. The organization was
comprised of local actors who came together in order to build their community “from
scratch.” As such, Organization 2 exemplified a working manifestation of a public
homeplace. It offered sex workers a network of support and a space to develop
consciousness about the conditions that had oppressed them, as well as the strategies
needed for achieving better working conditions.
3. Organization 3
Located in Samut Sakhon, a seaside factory town in central Thailand, Organization 3
offered collective bargaining support to migrants from Burma who worked in Thailand’s
fisheries industry. The organization used grassroots methods to address the problem of
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labor exploitation in this industry, which many researchers in the anti-trafficking
movement have acknowledged as a growing problem (U.S. Department of State, 2014).
According to a 2011 report on Thailand’s frozen shrimp industry, shrimp packaging
plants employ tens of thousands of migrant workers and children in conditions akin to
slavery (Solidarity Center, 2011), making this industry a labor trafficking hub. Much like
the response to the supposed problem of sex trafficking, in these contexts Smart Raids are
often enacted by NGOs in collaboration with the Thai government, in an attempt to
prosecute traffickers.
The problem with these measures, however, is akin to the problem of
implementing Smart Raids in brothels, massage parlors, and Karaoke bars: once a factory
is targeted as a potential labor trafficking site, workers there are rounded up, detained and
deported—often back to situations in Burma that are even more precarious than the
conditions they face in Thailand. Rather than attempting to reform labor regulations and
practices within the shrimp factories, Thai authorities and large, State-funded NGOs seek
to curb exploitation by “catching” victims and grooming them to be witnesses in
prosecution cases. While this method of justice seeking is laudable from a U.S.
government perspective, it has not proven to be an effective measure to curb labor
exploitation and trafficking. Furthermore, it overlooks systemic problems within the
shrimp packaging plants themselves: namely, the lack of safe and fair working conditions
for migrants. Additionally, much like the Smart Raid policy in the sex industry, this
carceral response to labor trafficking method does virtually nothing to address the needs
of laborers themselves—namely, the need to earn money to support their families.
Parallel to the concerns of sex workers, factory workers seek to secure fair wages,
appropriate working conditions and collective bargaining strategies within the plants. The
problem, however, is their undocumented status. Without legitimacy, migrant workers are
at risk both within the informal labor sector of the shrimp processing plants, as well as in
the policed immigration system that criminalizes them due to their undocumented status.
To address these problems, Organization 3 worked “below the radar” of the anti-
trafficking movement, helping migrants to conceptualize and implement collective
bargaining strategies in shrimp packaging factories. In so doing, Organization 3 sought to
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empower migrants and prevent labor exploitation by helping them build collective
strategies for resistance.
An interview with an eighteen-year-old female migrant (BUFSLDS) from a small
town near Rangoon, Burma highlights the importance of such strategies. BUFSLDS was
a labor trafficking survivor who had used a Thai carrier to cross the border on the
promise that a job in an orange grove awaited. After crossing, she was forced into
domestic slavery, working for a family that starved and tortured her for several weeks.
Upon running away, she avoided the police for fear of being deported. Finally, she was
assisted by the organization, who helped her negotiate her new job in the shrimp factory.
Like many other women, BUFSLDS
-
’s primary concern was to earn enough money to
send back to her family, and to avoid detention:
“At the factory we get small room for the worker,” BUFSLDS told me. “And the
factory have nearly 400 Burmese workers there. Peeling shrimp.”
I asked whether the factory paid their workers. BUFSLDS affirmed that she was
paid, “sometimes over 100 or 200 baht per day [$3-$10].” She then noted that the job was
preferable to her previous vocation in the beer factory in Burma.
I mentioned that I had heard stories about the shrimp factories not paying their
workers, or beating employees. I asked whether she had seen any such problems.
“No,” she said. “Now I don’t have documents so I can’t go out. Every day is ok at
the factory,” she explained. “I have food and place to sleep. But the problem is I cannot
go out. They let me go out, but they cannot be responsible for my security. I have no
document.”
I asked BUFSLDS what she thought would happen if she were discovered by the
Thai police.
“I don’t know but I scared to find out,” she said. “If police arrest me, I have to
stay 45 days at the jail and then will be sent back to Burma border. Then Burma authority
will detain us and we have to get money to be released.”
I asked the respondent what step she would like to take next.
“Now I’m thinking to collect some money to travel back to Burma,” she said. “I
worry about my family,” she added.
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This respondent’s story demonstrates the importance of support mechanisms in
the lives of female migrant laborers. Rather than trying to “fix” migrants’ situations by
inadvertently problemetizing them (as is exemplified in the policy of Smart Raids),
organization three helps migrants become more mindful of their labor situations by
considering ways to empower themselves while remaining in their labor situations.
Organization 3 attempted to empower migrants by working with them to develop critical
consciousness about their labor situations.
The discrepancy between these policies is crucial. By working to address issues in
the labor environment as they arise, rather than removing migrants from their labor
situations with no effort to change conditions on the ground, organization three works to
find emergent solutions to problems of exploitation within the labor environment. The
strategies employed by the State Department-driven anti-trafficking movement, however,
do not address these problems on the ground. Instead, their use of top-down approach of
taking migrants out of the labor environment and engaging them in attempts to prosecute
factory owners who may have exploited them. By offering “emergent,” rather than “top
down” strategies for change, Organization 3 fostered agency and subjectivity among
migrants who sought to achieve equitable labor conditions.
CBOs, trauma and healing
I suggest that the CBOs described here are healing actors who help migrants confront
their experiences of trauma. As BUFCBD, the head of Organization 3’s Migrant Justice
Program explained, “We try to educate migrant laborers about the organizing issue. We
form the informal group. We use the structure and concept, the same as the Thai trade
union. And we work with the Thai union to learn how they fight for their rights. Because
migrants have no voice in Thai society,” she explained.
This respondent’s articulation of the role of the CBO in empowering migrants
provides a useful window into our conceptualization of CBOs as healing actors.
Trafficking, migration, exploitation and poverty are experiences of “collective trauma”—
a phenomenon which acknowledges that trauma is rooted in community experiences and
contexts (Martin-Baro, 1994; Watkins and Shulman, 2008). By acknowledging this
reality, CBOs such as Organization 3 allowed female migrant laborers to own the
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enormity of the violence that has been perpetuated—not just against them as individuals,
but against an entire society.
Rather than victimizing its beneficiaries or creating spectacles of the human rights
atrocities they have witnessed and endured, these organization’s efforts supported
migrants in unearthing their experiences of trauma. Their non-authoritarian
interventionist strategies enabled female migrant laborer’s experiential abilities, allowing
for the impact of the trauma to resonate in a way that ultimately lead to their
emancipation. Rather than attempting to “fix” migrants through top-down policies that
speak more to the interests of the state than the interests of human beings, these CBOs
used participatory strategies to engage with migrants and foster their critical
consciousness. As Caruth explained in her writing on trauma, “the story of trauma, then,
as the narrative of a belated experience, far from telling of an escape from reality—the
escape from a death, or from its referential force—rather attests to its endless impact on
life. At the core of these stories, I would suggest, is thus a kind of double telling, the
oscillation between a crisis of death and the correlative crisis of life: between the story of
the unbearable nature of an event and the story of the unbearable nature of its survival”
(p. 7). By allowing the space of both trauma and its survival to remain active in the
migrants’ experiences, the CBOs described here helped to empower communities, rather
than fracture them.
Frameworks of Participation
In contrast to the hierarchies enacted by traditional NGO networks, CBOs engage in a
process oriented toward the ethic of participation. By engaging with female migrant
laborers, trafficking survivors and potential trafficking victims through a framework of
participation and fostering a network of strong community support, CBOs such as these
organizations conduct important anti-trafficking efforts that arguably offset the
problematic focus of government-sponsored Smart Raids. While NGOs, following the
mandate of the State Department, are focusing on prosecution strategies that leave out the
social and psychological needs of trafficking survivors, CBOs engage in strategies for
prevention, healing, and empowerment.

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The Freedom of Non-Status
The ambiguous status of being an undocumented female migrant from Burma living in
Thailand gives rise, I argue, for new possibilities of strength, solidarity and resistance not
available within formal, state-legitimized structures and top-down policies. Operating
beyond the purview of the anti-trafficking movement, in an informal space that is not
characterized by competition for funding, state legitimacy or expensive marketing
campaigns frees activist CBOs to focus their efforts on the work of trafficking
prevention-- work that many well-funded “prosecution-focused” NGOs rarely undertake.
In addition, the personal networks that characterize the way CBOs operate serve them
well, as they foster trust among members of the network. Staff turnover rates and project
funding do not burden them as heavily as NGOs.
Activist migrant CBOs survive and thrive in a loose, yet solidly interwoven social
fabric. Imagine a hammock made of loosely woven yarn. Sometimes it feels fragile to
step inside, and one can see through the cracks in the yarn to the ground below. But the
material is pliable, malleable—sturdy when pressed. Now imagine the same hammock
made of thin, but taught fabric. One large jolt and it can rip apart. The trade-offs in these
designs are evident: the yarn, if pressurized without being tied to the rest of the structure,
will unravel immediately, If the holes are too porous one could fall through. But when in
balance, it is sturdy and flexible all at the same time. Whereas the other hammock is an
all or nothing proposition: the feeling of being inside it is rigid, uncertain, and if one
jumps into it, it is sure to break.
To elaborate on this metaphor: Liberation arts scholarship conceptualizes “liminal
space” as an experience of being situated not only in between two identities, but at the
intersection of two disparate paradigmatic ways of thinking and acting in the world
(personal communication, Shulman, 2011). Anzaldua (1987) named this space that of a
Mestiza: a place “where phenomena tend to collide… though it is a source of intense
pain, its energy comes from the continual creative motion that keeps breaking down the
unitary aspect of each new paradigm…. Because the future depends on the breaking
down of paradigms, it depends on the straddling of two or more cultures” (Watkins &
Shulman, 2010, p. 101)
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The modern world has largely lost its ability to “hold” this liminal space due to a
resistance to ambiguity and uncertainty and a loss of participatory public spaces (Watkins
& Shulman (2008). Such a loss leads to rigidity, in which there is an incapacity for
empathy for the self, and therefore, also for others. The denial of connectedness inherent
in this process can be seen in the rigid frameworks imposed on anti-trafficking NGOs by
the State Department. Having to abandon collaborative practices that take into account
the needs, experiences and best interests of the women the NGOs serve, and replace such
practices with state-driven policies that promote a Western moral agenda necessitates a
“splitting off” on the part of these organizations, in turn stifling their ability to respond
creatively and subjectively (through acts of empathy) to the needs of the women they
serve. By contrast, CBOs, acting “below the radar” of official government processes, are
free to imagine their own realities and create their own strategies. By virtue of their lack
of legitimized status, CBOs are situated in perpetual liminality. While seemingly
disadvantageous, I argue that such an ambiguous space holds power: enabling CBOs to
maintain empathy and connectivity to the women they serve, as well as to be more
flexible and creative in their strategies for change.
Such connectivity allows for CBOs to engage in “Narratives of Participation”
(Watkins & Shulman, 2010, p. 147): a healing space in which an individual or group is
able to bear ambiguity. Organizations 1, 2 and 3 were comprised of a closely-knit group
of activists who rely on each other not only in a professional context, but also in a “life-
context;” that is, these members did not separate their professional interests from their
personal experiences and needs. Rather, they treated these need holistically, building
social networks and tightly woven relationships around the daily activities of their
organizations’ members. In so doing, their commitment to the priorities of the
organization—namely, the freedom and health of the female migrant laborers they
served—was strengthened.
CBOs as Cultures of Resistance
This research shows that while top-down approaches to combat trafficking in Thailand
have proven ineffective, alternative strategies are emerging that show real promise. A
“phased process” of implementing practical solutions to trafficking in the form of
prevention, is already taking place and being implemented by many local community
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based organizations. As Watkins & Shulman (2010) explained, “Identity that is de-
centered can work to claim discarded fibers of affect and desire, yielding a hybridized
subjectivity reflective of multiple roots, even if disjunctive, ambivalent, and
contradictory” (p. 165). Participatory processes, particularly those enacted through inter-
cultural work, threaten the very nature of normative identity vis-à-vis “subjects” under
the control of the state. By claiming such processes, the three organizations described
here positioned themselves as revolutionary agents operating in juxtaposition to the
NGOs and government actors who tow the line of the State Department-led anti-
trafficking movement in Thailand.
Participatory practices have the potential to be successful if supported and
implemented by other actors. The three self-organizing groups described here have found
systems oriented toward prevention, community-building and psychic healing that speak
to the needs of female migrants and sex workers in powerful ways. I suggest that rather
than dismissing or, worse yet, criminalizing such “outlier” actors, members of the anti-
trafficking movement should nurture, support and foster dialogue with community-based
organizations. In the sections that follow, I will discuss the ways in which the conclusions
drawn in this preliminary data collection process gave rise to the creation of an artistic
piece whose goal was to do exactly that.

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Chapter 7
Conceptualizing the Musical “Land of Smiles”

Dramatization as Research, as an applied theory and method, requires the embodied,
material and conceptual tools to turn research into dramatic work, while simultaneously
allowing the creative and production elements of the dramatization process to further
inform the research. In short, DAR requires that stories be told through creative “doing.”
In this chapter, I explore the creative and material processes that informed the writing of
the musical “Land of Smiles.” I discuss issues of material thinking, counter-narratives,
character development, and the re-positioned researcher, and I illuminate some of the
conceptual and practical concerns that informed the musical’s early stages of
development.
Upon returning from my three research trips to Thailand, having made important
discoveries and drawn important conclusions from the preliminary research, I now faced
the challenge of explicating my findings through an unconventional communication
medium: that of musical theater. To begin this process of dramatizing the research, I first
returned to the research questions that informed my vision for the project as a whole:
1. (How) can the process of researching, creating and performing a musical affect
the discourse on trafficking among and between members of the production team
(actors, director, producer, etc.) and audience members (migrant women, NGO
and CBO employees and other stakeholders who attend the performances)?
2. (How) can the process of dramatization itself – that is, researching,
writing/composing, rehearsing, re-writing, and producing a musical-- contribute
to the generation of knowledge?
To address these questions, I began to conceptualize a musical that would tell the
story of the trafficking of women in Thailand, as seen through the eyes of sex
workers, grassroots activists, NGO employees and other members of the anti-trafficking
movement. “Land of Smiles” would present a critical look at how the story about
trafficking is told, and show that finding a solution to this problem is even more
complicated than it seems.
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The musical would need to explicate, in detail, the “cycle of migrant women” –
the supposed trafficking “victims” who, as I have explained, become objectified in the
discourse on trafficking (see Figure 2). I wanted to illustrate the way female migrants
become caught in a cycle that begins in their home/ village environments and ends with
repatriation and deportation back to that village after being “rescued” from a brothel—in
essence, rendering the women “victims” not to sex trafficking, but to the very policies
and practices supposedly designed to help them. I would therefore also need to illustrate,
through the dramatic project, the complicity of the U.S. and Thai governments in this
vicious cycle, exposing the funding preferences that are given to faith-based NGOs who
instill cultural and normative values upon the women they “rescue,” (as discussed in
Chapter 4) as well as illuminate the complexities of Thailand’s national identity project,
and the Thais’ disdain for irregular migrants from Burma (as discussed in Chapter 3). I
would need to point out that the criminalization of prostitution from both the U.S. and
Thai governments leads to a lack of support for sex workers (as discussed in Chapter 5),
and show how inter-organizational collaboration efforts fail to include grassroots
community-based organizations who are pushing back against the “cycle” by generating
their own solutions to the problem of trafficking (as discussed in Chapter 6). The goal
therefore, was to explicate the complexities of the trafficking “drama” in Thailand
through an actual dramatic work—one that could be easily understood, digested and
consumed by an audience who might know nothing about these issues when they walked
into the theater.

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Figure 2. “Cycle of Migrant Women”

About the Musical
“Land of Smiles” is a two-act, fifteen-song musical about the trafficking of women in
Thailand, as told from the perspectives of the advocates working in the anti-trafficking
movement, as well female migrants laborers, sex workers and others affected by
trafficking and migration. The story focuses on the aftermath of a brothel raid in Chiang
Rai, Northern Thailand. Lipoh, a young Kachin (ethnic minority) migrant from Burma,
seems to be underage, making her an automatic “trafficking victim” in the eyes of the
law. Emma Gable, an NGO case worker from Cedar Falls, Indiana is sent to prepare
Lipoh to be a witness in a trial to prosecute her trafficker. Emma must convince Lipoh to
be the person everyone sees: a trafficking victim. But Lipoh is unwilling to cooperate.
She insists that she is eighteen, and was working in the brothel willingly. Not only that—
she wants to go back.
What transpires is a journey into Thailand’s anti-trafficking movement—a world
burdened with politics, morality and the rhetoric of human rights. Through hearing
Lipoh’s story, Emma discovers that grave atrocities are being committed against the
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Kachin people of Burma. But these atrocities are overshadowed by a narrative about
trafficking that serves the needs of the anti-trafficking movement, rather than the women
it is trying to help.
The musical is designed to serve as a platform for dialogue and awareness about
human trafficking, a subject that has recently exploded onto the international stage as one
of the most disturbing, complex and, many claim, pervasive issues of our time. Often
dubbed “modern day slavery,” the focus of the movement that has sprung up to stop
trafficking has been to “rescue” girls from situations of labor exploitation—specifically
having to do with sex work. The problem with these tactics, and indeed, the entire
movement to end human trafficking, is that often the most well intended of advocates do
little to empower the women they are trying to “save.”
The Creative Process
Incorporating material thinking
Early on in the process of creating the musical, I realized that I would have to take into
consideration various practical elements—forcing me, as the artist, to simultaneously
consider both material and abstract creative issues. Musicals, by their nature, are
comprised of physical beings performing live on stage. The nature of theater is its
liveness: actors, sets, costumes, lights, musical instruments, musicians and their
instruments, time and space are needed in order to achieve the desired result. Material
thinking, therefore, was essential to the process of creating the musical, both in its earliest
stages, and all throughout the production that followed. This type of thinking, I suggest,
is a cornerstone of DAR.
Bolt (Barrett & Bolt, 2010) discussed the notion of “material thinking” in creative
practice-based research, suggesting that it is not just in “talking about things,” but the
response to the intelligence of the materials and processes themselves, that fosters our
creative research (p. 29). According to Bolt, material thinking “offers us a way of
considering the relations that take place within the very process or tissue of making. In
this conception, the materials are not just passive objects to be used instrumentally by the
artist, but rather, the materials and processes of production have their own intelligence
that come into play in interaction with the artists’ creative intelligence” (Barret & Bolt,
2010, p. 30). As Carter explained, material isn’t “brute matter” – it is what exists between
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ourselves. “The distinct focus of creative research, is located neither after nor before the
process of making but in the performance itself. This can be the case because the making
process always issues from, and folds back into a social relation. It is this back-and-forth
or discourse, that provides the testing-ground of new ideas, and which establishes their
interest” (p. 19).
Carter (2010) took this notion a step further, teasing out the politics of abstraction
and materiality, suggesting that it is the reversal of the trend in academia that must be
undertaken in order to ascertain new knowledge forms. Practice is material, not abstract,
and these are the processes that must be studied, and done so from within, in order to
understand the new knowledge that they generate.
Material thinking provided me with an important foundation as I began to
conceptualize “Land of Smiles” (which, in its earliest stages, I referred to under the
working title “Survive”). My background working as a playwright in Michigan, New
York and Los Angeles informed my ability to engage in this thought process, as I was
able to draw on over twenty years of experience making creative and practical choices
about the structure of musicals, sometimes forcing me to learn the hard way about which
types of choices worked better than others. I knew, for example, that it would be wise to
keep the cast small, as productions with over five or six actors become prohibitively
expensive to develop.
I therefore chose to limit the cast to six women. I identified four characters who
would remain “static” throughout the show: Emma, a young American human rights
attorney who comes to Thailand wanting to “save the girls” from being trafficked;
Lewelyn, an American woman in her late 40’s who runs the faith-based anti-trafficking
NGO where Emma is employed, Lipoh, a young female migrant from Kachin State,
Burma on whom the story centers, and Achara, a Thai NGO employee in her 50’s, and
Lewelyn’s partner at the NGO.
The remaining two actors, both Southeast Asian women, would change characters
throughout the piece: Woman One would need to be a strong actress in her 40’s who
could play the demanding roles of Soon Nu, the Kachin freedom fighter and Lipoh’s
supposed “trafficker”; Mae, the head of the Women Power bar-turned-sex workers’
union; and Mama X, the mama san in the Kachin brothel where Lipoh works. Woman
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One would also play various smaller roles in the larger group scenes, such as the
Volunteer (during the opening number in which the brothel is raided), the Immigration
Officer at passport control (as Emma enters Thailand). Woman Two, in contrast, would
need to be in her twenties, and play the multiple roles of Lipoh’s mother (in flashback
scenes); Nono, a Kachin prostitute and Lipoh’s best friend; and Buya, a sex worker of the
Women Power bar. As such, I already knew that Woman one and Woman Two would be
extremely demanding roles, requiring an enormous amount of flexibility and character
work on the part of the actors. In addition, knowing that two women could be “used”
when needed to fill in additional characters allowed me a certain amount of freedom in
the story-telling process: I could safely imagine how the story might travel back and forth
in time, for example, showing flashback scenes from Lipoh’s village in Burma. I could
also allow for the musical to incorporate a variety of settings in the present, such as the
NGO office, the Women Power bar, a brothel and the streets of Chiang Mai.
Additionally, I decided early on that the piece would be full length, comprising
about 15 songs, and would likely run between 1.45 minutes to 2 hours with
intermission—a typical running time for a full-length musical. These practical choices,
once made, would create a structure from which I could begin the creative work of telling
the story.
Identifying the narrative structure
The primary narrative explored in “Land of Smiles” is what I call the “dominant
narrative” about trafficking in Thailand; that is, the narrative constructed and enacted
from the perspective of Western-based anti-trafficking NGOs and adhering to values
systems, policies and procedures put forth by the U.S. Department of State. In their work
on liberation psychology, Watkins and Shulman (2008) present a conceptual theory of
narrative and culture, explaining: “A narrative frame is a cultural nexus with its own
particular set of imaginings about the world…. When we become aware of the narrative
frameworks we are embedded in, when dialogue with others causes us to question the
logic of our narrative frameworks, we open up possibilities for evolution and
transformation” (p. 141). The authors explain that while some narrative frames open
individuals up to broader possibilities, other frames “create information hierarchies where
interaction is highly limited and compartmentalized” (p. 142).
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Such hierarchies are demonstrated by the narratives that Western-based
institutions and actors operating in anti-trafficking advocacy initiatives in Thailand
construct and communicate in their efforts to combat trafficking. As discussed in the
preliminary data collection phase (Phase I), through ritual descriptions of their
organizational activities, promotional literature and campaigns, and through cultural
enactments of the values held by their organizations, the members of the anti-trafficking
movement “perform” parts of this narrative and in so doing, re-constitute this their own
dominance. Such performances re-center the West and strengthen the imagined reality of
trafficking while simultaneously silencing alternate perspectives, voices and experiences.
In her discussion of identity as a social construction in the context of race in
performance, Dorinne Kondo, explained how identities are “performed,” a process
whereby enacting one’s identity in effect constitutes that identity. Citing Judith Butler’s
theory of “subject formation” (1990), J.L. Austen’s work on “performativity” (1975) and
Derrida’s (1988) notion that identities are “cited… as repetitions of normative injunctions
without which identities would be unthinkable”, Kondo (1997) explained that without the
performance, there is, in fact, no identity (p. 7). This idea relates to the way the dominant
trafficking narrative is reinforced within the movement. The trafficking narrative is, in
essence, an invented one—built around and in the context of other scenarios of
development, human rights discourse, the emergence of NGOs as neoliberal actors, and
Thailand’s National Identity Project. Through ritual descriptions of their organizational
activities, promotional literature and campaigns, and through cultural enactments of the
values held by their organizations, the members of the anti-trafficking movement
“perform” parts of the dominant trafficking narrative and in so doing, re-constitute this
narrative’s dominance.
Counter-narrative as policy critique
In exposing these complexities, my intention was that “Land of Smiles” serve as a
creative vehicle for political communication in global politics. In line with the theory of
constructivism in International Relations, which suggests that relationships between
nations, cultures and international institutions interact with each other in a dynamic,
process-oriented way, influencing one another through increasingly varied modes of
communication technologies that serve to socially “construct” the world of global politics
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(see Buzan & Little 2000; Lechner & Boli 2005; Wendt 1999), such performances
cement the identities of NGOs and others working in the TIP space, bringing them into
being by virtue of the narrative re-enactment. In this way, the dominant narrative Land of
Smiles. In its performance, the imagined reality of trafficking is re-constituted and
strengthened while alternative perspectives, voices and experiences are silenced.
Additionally, extending Butler’s notion that “gender, sex, and sexuality (are)
performatives that are constitutive—not merely attributes – of identity,” (Kondo, 1997, p.
7) we may begin to understand the dominant trafficking narrative as an identity in itself:
one that seeks power, gathers political support and retains an illusion of stasis as it is
performed by constituents in the anti-trafficking movement.
In order to problematize the dominant trafficking narrative, counter-narratives
would also need to be interwoven throughout the piece, based on perspectives of “outlier”
actors: individuals and groups who did not participate in the anti-trafficking movement,
but who interface with the issue of trafficking in such a way that their perspectives are
legitimate. These counter-narratives would be voiced by ethnic minority migrants and sex
workers, survivors of trafficking, and community-based organizations working outside
the purview of the anti-trafficking movement in Thailand.
Embodying the contradictory narrative: “Emma” as anti-hero
Early on in the development of the piece, I realized that one way of expressing a counter-
perspective to the dominant Western narrative about trafficking would be to problematize
not trafficking “victims,” but anti-trafficking advocates themselves. I therefore
conceptualized the character of “Emma,” a “would be” savior of trafficking victims who,
through the course of the musical, discovers that her attempts at advocacy are actually
doing more harm than good.
As a character, Emma represents that perspective of many American and Western
human rights advocates: born and raised in a middle-class, Mid Western, largely
Protestant environment, she has never ventured far beyond her cultural container to gain a
first-hand understanding of the developing world. When she learns the smallest glint of
information about human trafficking, it is through the rhetorical frame of a Western NGO
taking part in “rescue” operations in Thailand. Emotionally stirred to act, Emma gets on
the next plane with dreams of saving the world and rescuing the “poor victims” from
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their evil oppressors. When she arrives in Thailand, however, the facade of her American
“do-gooder” is quickly dashed, and a more complex reality sets in.
19

The song “Emma” represents the breaking down of static otherness, the liminality
that comes with questioning one’s certainty, and the important journey from certainty to
questioning that, in the best of circumstances, accompanies human rights advocacy work.
In addition, the song is intended to open the space for a counter-narrative to emerge—one
that demands self-awareness on the part of the advocate. Unable to maintain a hold on the
moralistic ideas that compelled her to take a job working at an NGO in Thailand, Emma
must face the reality that her actions, however well-meaning, carry a weight of culture: a
weight that has real consequences on the lives of the women she is seeking to help.
Emma must face her own narrative—her pre-conceived notions of what it means to
rescue someone whose life she barely understands.
In their work on liberation psychology, Watkins and Shulman (2008) presented a
conceptual theory of narrative and culture, explaining: “A narrative frame is a cultural
nexus with its own particular set of imaginings about the world…. When we become
aware of the narrative frameworks we are embedded in, when dialogue with others causes
us to question the logic of our narrative frameworks, we open up possibilities for
evolution and transformation” (p. 141). The authors explained that while some narrative
frames open individuals up to broader possibilities, other frames “create information
hierarchies where interaction is highly limited and compartmentalized” (p. 142). By
implicating the Western NGO worker(s), rather than problematizing the trafficking
“victims” in Thailand, I sought to intervene in the dominant narrative, and show how this
narrative is, in essence, an invented one—built around the agendas and values of NGOS
and other Western actors.
“Emma” and the re-positioned researcher
The theory of DAR necessitates troubling the location of the researcher as being
distanced, in opposition to the “real” subjects of research—in this case, the “trafficking
victim,” or “third-world other” (Mohanty, 2003). In a DAR model, knowledge comes not
from the “confession” of the sub-altern “subject” but from the researcher-artist herself.
According to Spivak (1988) it is not possible for the “sub-altern subject” to speak
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!See Appendix E for lyrics of the song, “Emma.”!
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because of the force of mediation, the erasure of a positionality that can maintain its own
coherence, free of translation into the language of The Research. But the researcher-artist
can speak, using a language of music and dramatization to mediate between the legible
and the untranslatable.
I recognized, early on, that “Land of Smiles” would be informed by my own
subjectivity, my own experience as a Western female researcher in Thailand. This
experience is encapsulated by Emma, who comes to Thailand wanting to “do something”
about the problem of human trafficking. During the course of the play, the Western
audience is meant to identify with Emma, “waking up” to their own misunderstandings of
the reality of human trafficking in the developing world—in essence, going along with
Emma on her emotional journey.
Act Two of the musical focuses on the discoveries Emma makes during
Christmas, when Lipoh, the Kachin sex worker who she is tasked with grooming to be a
witness, reveals the truth about the atrocities taking place in her village in Burma. Not
knowing how to comprehend this new truth, Emma spirals into uncertainty about her role
at the NGO and her purpose as a Westerner in Thailand trying to “do good.”
Emma not only represents the role of the Westerner in the discourse on
trafficking, she also represents the experience of the artist-researcher. Indeed, in
embarking on the creative process of writing “Land of Smiles,” I quickly came to the
realization that my own experience in Chiang Mai in December, 2011, while celebrating
Christmas with female migrants from the Kachin Women’s Association of Thailand, was
informing the discovery of the character and the journey she would take throughout the
story. The following passage illustrates the emotional complexity of my own research
process in Thailand, and sets the foundation for this connection:
I had a really super hard day. I was invited to church with some women from the
Kachin tribe- an unrecognized/ illegal migrant/ stateless group here in Thailand. It
was really sweet and lovely of them-- but also incredibly sad... the whole
missionary/ entire populations converting to Christianity by threat of death thing
just gets to me. It's hard to see all these Kachin children acting out a nativity scene
that has absolutely nothing to do with their culture, and then everybody wishing
each other merry Christmas, all while having to be stealthy getting to and from
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the church for fear of being arrested by the Thai police just for existing. Hard to
stomach.
Then I did a four-hour interview with [Female Migrant 1], this sharp,
amazing spitfire of a girl who is managing a safe house for female migrants here
in Chiang Mai. She told me her life story and everything was going fine until she
started telling me about her neighbor getting beaten to death with a brick by the
Burmese military. I think that was when I started to hit the emotional wall.
I decided not to go out with [friends who work at a local NGO] last night
for Christmas, immediately after getting home from a ten-hour day with the
Kachin, because I just wasn't ready to leave the place of emotional pain. As hard
as it is to sit inside it, I believe that it's necessary to go through it. You do feel so
utterly helpless. And in this case I feel helpless not only against the enormity of
the cultural and political realities so many women are facing but also, and now in
a much more finely-tuned way, up against policy and the backwardness of those
who set it. (Kamler field notes, December 25, 2011)
This passage illuminates the connection between my personal experience as artist-
researcher, and the journey of Emma. In discovering the reality of Lipoh’s life in Burma
and in Thailand, Emma endures what Watkins and Shulman (2008) describe as a
“rupture:” a trauma undergone with a shift in consciousness, a “feeling of isolation when
you’ve undergone a change while the world around you stays the same.” As Emma
experiences this rupture, so too is the audience brought into that ruptured space,
challenging any safety in the distance from the performance. In this process,
simultaneous visibilities are at play: the “subjugated knowledges” (Haraway, 1988) of the
third world “subjects,” the actual discourse on trafficking and the production of that
discourse, the rupture of the Western protagonist (representing a death of the notion of
the enlightened, Western individual) and—importantly—the production process itself.
That is, the researcher-artists’ own process of discovery is traced throughout the musical,
inviting the audience to experience her discovery in real-time.
This goal marks an important shift in the location of the research subject. Ideally,
a DAR project will unearth complexities related to visibility of the “subject” – not by
reinscribing them through an inquiry that reinforces binaries, but through interrogating
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the process of creative representation in the theater project itself. The researcher,
therefore, becomes the subject of inquiry, equal to or more central than the “subjects” of
the piece—in this case, women in the developing world whose circumstances have thrust
them into a Western discourse on trafficking.
This process also implicates the audience as active agents in research, as they too
would likely undergo a “rupture” of consciousness, both in their experience of the story
(by identifying with Emma, for example), as well as through their participation in the
theatrical event as representation of the real. Because my research would be an ongoing
project, and not something merely situated in the past, it was likely that the audience
would not be able to sit comfortably apart from the musical, at a distance, as might be the
expectation in a traditional cultural studies context. Rather, the audience might also
experience the continued rupture endured by the researcher-artist. The performance,
therefore, would serve as one step along the way in a larger process in which the
audience would become involved. In conceptualizing “Land of Smiles,” it was my
intention that all those who participated—subjects, researcher-artist, actors, and audience
members—would be invited to undergo a change.
Resisting the victim narrative: “Lipoh” and situated knowledge
In her discussion of situated knowledge, Haraway (1988) called for a “feminist
empiricism,” a way of accounting for subjectivity of experience while simultaneously
trying to unearth the “real.” The way forward, she explained, is to “learn in our bodies,
endowed with primate color and stereoscopic vision, how to attach the objective to our
theoretical and political scanner, in order to name where we are and are not, in
dimensions of mental and physical space we hardly know how to name” (p. 394). In other
words, situated knowledge is a positional perspective, a particular way of seeing the
world.
In “Land of Smiles,” the character Lipoh represents an attempt to “unearth” such
situated knowledge—to correct, as Scott (1991) explained, the “oversight” of migrant
women’s experiences. By privileging Lipoh’s perspective, I positioned the standpoints of
female migrant laborers front and center in the musical, asking the artists as well as the
audience to suspend previously held beliefs about this population and, through following
Lipoh’s story, listen to their voices in a new way.
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But there is another level to Scott’s discussion of experience, one that intersects
with Haraway’s project that I sought to engage. Scott argued that it is not enough to
simply make visible the experience of the “subject,” even when that experience
challenges normative notions of identity. Rather, the goal should involve “trying to
understand the operations of the complex and changing discursive processes by which
identities are ascribed, resisted, or embraced because they aren’t noticed. To do this a
change of object seems to be required” (p. 33). In the context of dramatization, I suggest
that the unearthing of situated knowledge, and consequent re-positioning of the
traditional “subject” of research, is a collective process that requires embodied
participation, thereby destabilizing the discursive production of identities by exposing the
context in which such identities have come to be constructed. In other words, I suggest
that the theatrical medium invites all involved—writers, performers and audiences—to
situate themselves in a given discourse and temporarily “suspend” their identities vis-à-
vis their participation in the live event.
In identifying with Lipoh’s character, the audience, researcher, artists and
performers all participate in a collective process of unearthing knowledge that has
previously been dismissed. This is done through all members’ active participation in the
ritual of theater and music, a space in which a community of people come together and
have shared experience. It is the shared process of discovery that allows for a more
complete “knowing” of experience, since this process necessitates a suspension of the
appropriated system of binary thinking (i.e., self v. other) that marks the discourse on
trafficking.
The live medium of theater invites this shared discovery to take place. For it is not
a mediated (i.e., hyper-manipulated) representation of a “real” person (the “real Lipoh”)
that is being scrutinized, nor is it the “real person” herself. Rather, Lipoh is a composite
of “subjects,” a fictionalized character who articulates the partial experiences of many
women. In creating this character—her voice, her language, her music—I as author
embodied her, as did the actress, Jennie Kwan, who played her part in the performances.
It is, therefore, not an actual subject who is discovered through the theatrical medium, but
rather, the merging of researcher, artist(s), subjects and audience that together create or
“unearth” the character of Lipoh. This discovery is part of the ritual of theatre. We all
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know we are not seeing something “real,” or even, as in film, something that “pretends”
to be real. There are no illusions that the woman playing Lipoh is the “real” Lipoh.
Instead, we collectively enact the coming into consciousness of the character, while
remaining aware that we are seeing and participating in a performance—something
meant not to be real, but symbolic. In this same way, the research process itself is
performed.
Feminist scholar Shimikawa (2002) argued that the theater can de-stabilize the
rigid conceptualizations of the subject-object binary. Following this line of thinking, I
suggest that music-theater demands high stakes among participants—both artists and
audiences—as all must share their process of discovery with others in the room, thereby
de-stabilizing their own “fixidity” to the cultural product itself. There is a politics at play
in the live-ness of this medium; indeed, the stakes are higher for audiences participating
in a theatrical performance than other forms of mediated communication, as ‘live-ness’
necessitates the willingness on the part of audiences to participate.
The collective “discovery” of situated knowledge of the “subject” (in this case,
the “trafficking victim”), as well as the collective awareness of that subject’s
performative construction, contribute to a theoretical foundation of DAR. This method
relies on the eradication of self versus other binaries, and the shared discoveries of
researcher, artist, audience and subject. By all being in the room together and consciously
participating in the performance and discovery of the character’s experience, we
formulate hypothesis about the experience of the “real” subjects of research, as well as
the research process itself.
Conclusion
In this chapter, I have discussed both the conceptual/ theoretical and practical elements
that informed the creation of the musical “Land of Smiles.” I sought to show how the
considerations of material thinking, counter-narratives, character development and the re-
positioning of the research-as-subject contributes to the formulation of DAR as both a
theory and a method. I relied on both conceptual and practical considerations to inform
the musical’s structure, identifying characters who would best represent the perspectives
of those involved in Thailand’s anti-trafficking movement, as well as the female migrants
from Burma whose standpoints provided a new lens for understanding the dominant
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trafficking narrative. I drew on what I call the “cycle of migrant women” to help guide
this creative development process, and paid particular attention to the intersection
between my personal research experience and the character of Emma. In the chapters that
follow, I will further explicate how the processes described herein served as a foundation
for the script development and initial stages of the production process.

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Chapter 8
Developing the Script
Following the process of conceptualizing “Land of Smiles,” I was tasked with turning my
research findings into a script and score. In this chapter, I will illustrate the process by
which I drew on the Phase One interviews to “find” the dramatic story of the musical,
and turn this story into scenes and songs. Essential to this process, I discovered, was an
allowance for the interviews to “speak” for themselves, leading me to identify key
aspects of the story that would need to be teased out in the dramatic narrative.
As Watkins and Shulman explained, cultural production makes memories
“visible” (2008). Cultural work that draws on the “real,” or “non-fictional,” has the
potential to create a counter-history that disturbs hierarchies of power, making it a
potentially potent political tool. Thus, in this chapter I will describe what I call “power
moments”: notable incidents, occurrences or themes in the preliminary interviews that
steered the musical’s dramatic narrative in pivotal directions. For example, I will discuss
how researching the process by which brothel raids are conducted led me to the
subsequent realization that these raids often have an ill effect on women who claim to be
working in the sex industry by consent. I realized that “the raid” would be an essential
moment to dramatize in the story of “Land of Smiles,” as a foundation for explicating
Lipoh’s character arc. In the context of both the research process and the dramatic story,
this “discovery” could be considered a crucial indicator of a power dynamic at play
within in the anti-trafficking movement (i.e., in this example, the power rendered by the
Thai police over migrant sex workers).
Such dynamics between actors in “real life” have relevance—indeed, a kind of
potency—in the dramatic context. In line with Foucault’s (1977) notion of discourse,
which suggests that discursive fields are as dependent on silences as they are on what is
spoken, I sought to interrogate the subtextual meanings and relationships that emerged in
the preliminary interviews, and dwell in those processes of power to inform the musical’s
text. Doing so required me to embark on a process of listening for the “power moments”
in the dominant anti-trafficking story. These moments led to key scenes that formed the
structure of the dramatic story.
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Below, I focus on five examples of power moments—aspects of the interview
data that often re-occurred, or re-surfaced in interviews, or were repeated thematically
across the research spectrum. While the “power moments” that emerged from the
interviews and made their way into the dramatic narrative are too numerous to explicate
in their entirety, here I focus here on the themes of the brothel raid, sex worker agency,
constructing the IDC, Thailand’s weak rule of law and tensions between U.S. and Thai
views of human rights. I conclude with a discussion of what Ted Braun has termed, “the
natural story;” that is, the events that seem to emerge more or less organically in dramatic
writing (Braun, 2010). This process, I suggest, is parallel to the process of excavating
data in a qualitative research project. It’s implications mean that DAR, as a method, is a
two-way process in which research and dramatic writing continually inform one another,
making it a unique and ongoing way of unearthing truth.
Dramatizing the brothel raid
In an interview with a Thai anti-trafficking NGO receiving State Department funding, I
asked the head of the organization (THFLN2) to describe the process of conducting a
brothel raid. I was specifically interested in understanding how the women working in the
brothel reacted to being sent to the Immigration Detention Center (IDC).
The Employee responded, “At first the women think we are coming after them
because they are working against the law, because they are illegal and prostitute. We
explain that there are some people here against the law, like the controller (brothel
owner).
“So you have to get an understanding of everyone’s situation?” I clarified.
“We had a case in Mae Sot many years ago,” THFLN2 went on, “Karen people—
they couldn’t speak Thai. Sometimes it’s difficult to find an interpreter. One woman
said, ‘I’m willing to die, but I don’t want to go’ (to the IDC).”
I was struck by this employee’s recollection of the statement made by the Karen
(ethnic minority) sex worker. Being “willing to die” seemed a powerful, indeed,
harrowing reaction to being caught in a raid and sent to Thailand’s Immigration
Detention Center. The dramatic potential of this emotional reaction to being “rescued”
and detained stayed with me as I began to develop the script for “Land of Smiles.” I
decided that the opening number, “Women of the World” would need to incorporate an
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actual brothel raid, in which we meet the character Lipoh and see her being arrested by
Lighthouse (the NGO) and the Thai police. Like all well-written musical openings,
“Women of the World” would need to show a complex series of events unfolding, in
order to orient the audience to the primary characters and situate them in the action of the
musical. I would need to establish Lipoh’s life in the brothel, introduce Nono as a
supporting character, and show the process by which the raid occurs. Drawing on my
interview with THFLN2, I dramatized the following:

NONO
REMEMBER WHAT OUR MAMA SAID
STAY QUIET OR YOU’RE BETTER OFF DEAD
STAY QUIET, LIPOH
YOUR SISTER NONO
WILL BE WAITING ON THE OTHER SIDE
NOW GO-- RUN AND HIDE!

(NONO and LIPOH dash away. As LIPOH reaches the door,
LIGHTHOUSE VOLUNTEER [WOMAN 1] catches her. Holds
her down)

VOLUNTEER
KHUN JEP MAI KA? ARE YOU HURT?

(LIPOH shakes her head no)

VOLUNTEER (CONT’D)
WHAT’S YOUR NAME? WON’T YOU TELL ME?
PLEASE TRUST ME
EVERYONE HAS A STORY
WHY NOT YOU?
Khun put pasa Thai dai mai kha?
Do you speak Thai?
I’M SURE YOU DO
COME WITH ME

(LIGHTHOUSE VOLUNTEER touches LIPOH’s shoulder.
LIPOH resists violently)

I said come with me!

(VOLUNTEER grabs LIPOH, locks her in cuffs. OTHER
WOMEN are locked up one by one. We hear the clang of bars)
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In this moment in the scene, the Lighthouse Volunteer (played by Woman One)
wrestles a struggling Lipoh to the ground. She asks Lipoh questions about herself, as
would a real volunteer conducting a raid—and which, in this case also served the
dramatic device of providing exposition to the audience about Lipoh’s character. We also
meet Nono, Lipoh’s best friend and fellow Kachin sex worker, who instructs Lipoh to
“stay quiet or you’re better off dead.” This line and the sentiment attached to it were
derived from the “power moment” revealed in the interview with THFLN2. The notion
that a sex worker would rather die than be taken to the IDC allowed me to think both
creatively and materially—Despite my never having witnessed a raid first-hand, I began
to imagine the fear and desperation of the women who endure them. This dramatic
context provided a foundation for both the tone and the story of “Land of Smiles.”
Dramatizing sex worker agency
As discussed in Chapter 5, the sex workers I interviewed spoke of their “choice” to work
in the sex industry, and explained that their reasons for choosing this vocation have to do
with earning money to support their families. Inherent in these conversations was a clear
assessment, on the part of the sex workers, as to the power of their own agency. None of
the sex workers I interviewed identified as being “victims” of human trafficking.
The sex workers’ unwavering claim of their own agency struck me as being a
sharp “power moment” in the research process. The sex workers who I interviewed, most
of whom did not speak English, vehemently insisted that they had come to the brothel of
their own free will. It was as if they were speaking directly to the volumes of abolitionist
literature, cultivated by Western feminists over a century from the era of the White Slave
Panic, as well as to the advocates of the Bush administration’s anti-prostitution
legislation—voices that speak loudly in today’s anti-trafficking discourse. By contrast,
the voices of these women are never heard. The dramatic aspect to their insistence upon
their agency, their absolute determination to have me, the Western researcher, understand
that their work was their choice, virtually leapt out of the research, presenting itself in no
uncertain terms as a crucial “power moment” in the anti-trafficking drama.
I relied on the natural build of the relationship between Emma and Lipoh to
dramatize this expression of sex worker agency. In Act I, Scene 11, Emma has already
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tried to persuade Lipoh to testify against the owner of the brothel, to no avail. Suspecting
that Lipoh is sixteen—which would make her an underage “trafficking victim” in the
eyes of the law—Emma insists that she acquiesce. But her attempts to control Lipoh are
in vain:

EMMA: Why won’t you let me help you?

LIPOH: I need money.

EMMA: I did some research. The Thai government will give you a hundred and
twenty dollars for testifying. That’s four thousand baht. A good amount. And I
also found out our organization, Lighthouse, offers life skills classes. You can
make beautiful pencil cases and quilts and then sell them...

LIPOH: I am not doing those silly things. I need to work!

EMMA: You mean, work in a brothel?

LIPOH: Karaoke bar. I need to sing.

EMMA: You’re not going back there. Ever. I don’t care what that trafficker told
you to say, or how she thinks she can brainwash her victims. You will testify.

LIPOH: No. I will not.

EMMA: Why not?

LIPOH: Because I am not a victim!

In this scene, Emma grows increasingly frustrated by Lipoh’s resistance to self-
identifying as a trafficking victim. Stating, in exasperation, that she is simply trying to
“help,” Emma tries to rationalize with Lipoh, telling her the NGO will help her learn
“life skills” as an alternative to sex work. But Lipoh refuses to capitulate to Emma’s
condescending suggestions. She insists upon returning to the bar where she worked, and
she insists that she is not the victim Emma sees. This scene, and in particular the
vehemence and clarity with which Lipoh expressed her needs, were derived from my
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interviews with the migrant women in the brothels of Chiang Rai. Such voices are seldom
ever in anti-trafficking discourse. In “Land of Smiles” I sought to correct that absence.
Dramatizing Thailand’s Immigration Detention Center (IDC)
During the process of collecting preliminary data, multiple interview sources revealed the
existence of Thailand’s ominous Immigration Detention Center, or IDC, where
trafficking victims were held as they awaited trial or deportation. The largest of these
centers is known as Ban Gretegarn, or “Gretegarn House,” and is located in Phetchaburi,
Central Thailand. It is a place where many migrants from Burma are sent to await their
trafficking trials.
I had heard about Baan Gretregarn from other sources as well. An interview in
2011 with a Thai female employee at a large, international anti-trafficking NGO
(THFIN2) revealed that detention centers in Thailand were notorious for detaining
migrants from Burma—both trafficking victims and non-victims deemed “illegal”—for
up to months, sometimes even years. These migrants, the NGO employees revealed, were
often held without proper legal representation, adequate social support, or even
telecommunication access (personal communication, 2011, 2012). The employee also
discussed her frustration with the bureaucracy of processing cases in the IDC, and the
effects that this bureaucracy has on the women who end up there:
There are too many layers of communication,” THFIN2 began. “So some
information will be dropped or bent a little bit, or changed. For example, the case of (one)
victim: Normally we will contact the social worker - the Bureau of Anti-trafficking in
Women and Children, and then they will contact their respective office in each province
to follow-up with the case. And after that, they are supposed to come back with the
reintegration plan,” she said. “But in the sense of this victim, she has already told the
social worker what she needed. But the social worker needed to get back to her also, to
say, 'Okay this is what you need, this is the plan that you should go through - do you
agree with that? Let's build a plan together.'”
THFIN2 explained, however, that this process rarely happens. “The victim
expects that assistance should go to her quickly. But at the same time, we are also waiting
– [Our Organization] is waiting for the reintegration plan from the Bureau. We try to
follow up with them, but the information we receive… keeps changing. So okay, it is
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now about 6 months or 7 months already. So I say, ‘Okay may I talk to (the victim)
directly?’ I contact her directly, and then she says, 'Hey, I have been waiting for nearly 6
months. Nothing is happening to me. Are you offering to really help me?’”
Here, the NGO employee revealed her own frustration with the stalled
communication process that occurs in the IDC. “Victims” are subjected to long waits and
“slippery” communication mishaps, in which information often gets lost or blatantly
skewed. Months may go by, she revealed, before cases are processed. This reality struck
me as a horrifying “power moment.” THFIN2’s response illuminated that while anti-
trafficking policy makers continue to fund brothel raids, virtually no support is given to
the supposed “victims” of trafficking once they are “freed.”
Another interview with an American Male International NGO Employee
(AMIN1) reinforced this grim reality. Recalling a court case involving the fate of
Burmese trafficking victims who had been working in a shrimp factory, this participant
described the deplorable conditions faced by migrants in Thailand’s IDC:
“Some (of these) victims were clearly humiliated,” he recalled. “There were
twenty sitting in Baan Gretegran shelters for weeks and months. The prosecutor didn’t
trust the police investigator, so I recommended they do a deposition—a pre-trial hearing
in front of a judge. Meanwhile, the victims are held prisoner at the shelter.”
AMIN1 explained with certainty that “victims” of human trafficking are treated as
no more than “prisoners” in the shelters of Thailand’s IDC. He described the humiliation
they endure, and the lengthy pre-trial process that keeps them locked up for months at a
time. This reality, often overlooked by anti-trafficking policy makers who focus on
carceral means of dealing with the problem, nevertheless demands our attention. This
respondent clearly saw that the rights of migrants held in detention were being violated in
the name of combating trafficking.
These examples of resistance to detention were enough to spark my creative
process of dramatizing the IDC. But it was my interview with the community-based sex
worker’s rights organization employee (AUFCB1) that most clearly articulated the fate of
migrant sex workers in such shelters, and ultimately cemented my vision for the
Immigration Detention Center, in which much of the musical’s story would take place.
This respondent described the case of a woman who was being held in one of Thailand’s
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detention centers for eighteen months. The government had tried to determine her age by
using what the employee referred to as the “teeth and bone” method: a process in which
the gums are scraped to try to verify a trafficking victim’s age. The respondent explained
that a ruling by the European Commission had negated the validity of this method. “Even
U.S. immigration doesn’t use it,” she commented (personal communication, 2012).
Nevertheless, she added, in Thailand the method still stands. The respondent then
described her organization’s suggestion about a preferred method for determining a
woman’s age:
“Bring someone in from the same ethnic group. Let them spend a week talking to
the woman,” AUFCB1 asserted. “They can tell her age. But these women are still locked
up—they caught a guy who they think is the trafficker. They won’t release them. One
woman was pregnant and gave birth in detention,” she added.
Having now heard from multiple sources about the fate of migrant women in
Thailand’s IDC, I sought to visit Baan Gretregarn myself. I received a referral to a social
worker at the Department of Social Development and Welfare (DSDW), Thailand’s
government-run social services sector. After contact via telephone, I was instructed by
the social worker to send my request via email and fax. After doing so, I waited for a
response—but none came. In attempting to follow up the conversation with a phone call,
I was left on hold for a lengthy period of time before being told that my contact was no
longer available.
I continued to probe the question of what conditions were like in the shelter. In
late 2011, I attended an anti-trafficking NGO training in Bangkok in which the group was
invited to hear a lecture given by immigration police. The lecture depicted (to my
personal horror) photos from a detention center in Bangkok in which proud male
immigration officers lauded over groveling Burmese migrants. The photos depicted
migrants sitting and lying on cell floors, dressed in longyis,
20
crowded together. Many of
the men were shirtless and many of the women held babies in their arms. During the
Powerpoint presentation that accompanied the talk, the immigration officers explained
that Thailand’s anti-trafficking policy was premised on the need to rid Thailand of illegal
migrants, essentially “clean up” the country. No apologies were made for this policy,
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A type of wrap-around skirt commonly worn by women and men in Burma.
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which was blatantly touted as a strategy to build Thailand’s prominence and regional
strength.
Frustrated about my lack of access to the IDC, I later asked a Thai NGO
employee at a different organization (THFLN3) her thoughts about why getting in was
such a challenge:
“You are farang. A foreigner,” she said flatly. “You will never be allowed into
Baan Gretregarn. It is forbidden.”
This explanation by THFLN3 as to my problematic status as a foreigner further
cemented the dramatic potential of the IDC. Following these interviews, I knew I would
need to dramatize this secret location, which was being maintained as a symbol of
Thailand’s national pride, while paradoxically kept hidden from the eyes of “outsiders.”
Given the limitation of my inability to access the IDC, I realized that I would have to use
my imagination to dramatize this setting. Given the dramatic and harrowing interview
responses, I decided that the IDC was where the action between Lipoh and Emma—the
primary relationship explored in the musical—would take place.
Dramatizing Thailand’s weak anti-trafficking policies
Another theme that emerged strongly in the original interviews was the complexity of
Thailand’s anti-trafficking policy, and the way in which government, police and NGOs
collaborate—or fail to collaborate—around anti-trafficking efforts. One interview with an
American male employee (AMIN1) who had been hired to train Thai police in anti-
trafficking protocols brought this point to the fore.
“In Thailand,” AMIN1 explained, “there’s a lack of rigorous application of facts
to elements. Prosecutors claim they’re too busy to focus on trafficking cases. They don't
see it as their role to maintain contact with victims, (get their) needs taken care of,
prepare them to testify. And the reason they don't do it is because they don't see it as their
responsibility to do it. They say they’re ‘overburdened.’ There’s a disconnect between
police and prosecutors—they don’t cooperate, talk to each other.”
I asked AMIN1 to elaborate. “The police don’t do things in a timely way,” he
said. “They’re ‘overworked,’” he said, gesturing with air quotes. “There’s a hasty
decision, no discussion about how to deal with the victim. There’s none of that. It’s
disconnected work.”
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“What about convictions?” I asked.
“Thailand is the key country” in Southeast Asia’s anti-trafficking movement, he
explained. “This is where the crimes occur, where the big operations are taking place.
You’d expect them to be a leader, but they’re not. They’re not at all. They haven’t
developed special prosecutors units- though they say they’re receptive to it at a high
level.”
I then asked AMIN1 why he thought there was so much resistance to change in
Thailand.
“Turf,” he said plainly. “People have jobs and systems in place- who’s gonna have
power if there’s a change? There’s also institutional friction between prosecutors and
judges,” he went on. “Distrust between prosecutors and police. Resource issues. Genuine
concerns about putting money into trafficking, when there are so many other pressing
issues to be dealt with. I keep saying this to my Organization: ‘Trafficking is not the only
crime in the world. Get real.’ The Thai government’s resources are very short.”
In my analytic memos that accompanied this interview, I observed that this
respondent seemed to be saying that the Thai government feels as if its being compelled
by the West to adhere to and implement new anti-trafficking policies—but that Thai
officials themselves were not convinced these measures warranted attention and
implementation.
As I discussed in Chapter 3, anti-trafficking has been met with resistance from
Thai officials (as well as the Thai public), due to what I conceptualize to be a nation-
building project that relies on neoliberal economic structures in which labor exploitation
is necessary for its maintenance. Human rights paradigms, as Western constructions are
not embraced by the Thai government in ways congruent to their conceptualization in the
United States. The common sense, practical analysis offered by AMIN1, as to the
discrepancies between Western organization’s expectations around anti-trafficking and
the Thai government’s slow responses, illuminated the inherent fallacy in making
assumptions about the primacy of universal human rights. AMIN1 suggested that it was
personal gain, not ideology that underscored the functioning of Thailand’s legal system.
Any Western organization or government who failed to see this, he seemed to say, would
be wasting their efforts.
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I drew on this conversation about the complexity of the relationship between
Thailand and the U.S. around anti-trafficking policy, and the resistance of Thai law
enforcement to tackling the problem, to dramatize conversations Emma and Lewelyn
have regarding Thailand’s status in the TIP Report and the pressure the country was
facing from the West to adhere to anti-trafficking policy. I also realized that in order to
present a fuller picture of the complex anti-trafficking landscape in Thailand, I would
need to illustrate the cultural underpinnings of the disparity between Western policy
mandates and Thailand’s lackadaisical response. Doing so would require showing that
Thailand, in essence, resists much of the human rights rhetoric used to support anti-
trafficking efforts.
I considered several ways of dramatizing this complicated relationship between
Thailand and the U.S., but ultimately decided to explicate it through the lens, and the
critical stance of the Thai NGO worker character, Achara. In a scene late in the play, one
that takes place in the office of Lighthouse, Emma challenges Achara, suggesting (for the
first time) that the NGOs anti-trafficking efforts are misguided. Emma, having just come
from the Women Power bar, has just learned that while sex trafficking is “real,” much of
the horrors of the trade (in children) take place down in Bangkok’s “Pot Pong” road—a
place according to members of the bar, that is “…run by powerful Thai family. No one
can raid bar Karaoke down there.” Mae, the bartender goes on to explain, “No matter
how many bars you raid, or how many people you lock up, you will never save the ones
who are truly suffering” (Act Two, Scene Five).
Having realized that corruption complicated Thailand’s anti-trafficking landscape,
Emma challenges Achara’s belief that the NGO is, in fact, able to tackle the root of the
problem:

EMMA: Have you heard of a place in Bangkok called Pot Pong?

ACHARA: Many tourists go there.

EMMA: Do you ever raid the bars there? I heard it’s really bad for trafficking.
Little girls.

ACHARA: Some groups have tried, but it is difficult. The police are corrupt.
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EMMA: In America that kind of thing would be all over the front pages.

ACHARA: We are solving the problem one victim at a time.

EMMA: By arresting Lipoh?

ACHARA: By finding the criminals responsible.

Emma continues to pressure Achara, provoking her into a conversation about the
misguided attempts of the NGO, until Achara snaps back:

ACHARA: This job is not easy. We have seen many caseworkers come and go.

EMMA: I didn’t expect it to be easy. I’m ok with not easy. I just can’t make sense
of anything here!

ACHARA: You Americans. You think everything is black or white, good, bad,
moral, immoral. You come here to Thailand and you think that if you help us
build roads, and businesses and policies, we will suddenly become just like you.
You do not think we see how hopeful it makes you? Believing that each of us has
a little American hidden inside them, just waiting to pop out? But as hard as you
try, you can never find that little American. And it makes you crazy. Don’t try to
understand us. Just help us follow the law.

Emma begins this scene thinking she holds the power in the conversation. She
clearly feels that her rationale for pressing Achara on the policies adopted by the NGO is
sound. When Emma probes too far, however, Achara retaliates, delivering a monologue
about the discrepancies between U.S. and Thai visions of human rights. In this
monologue, she articulates, in no uncertain terms, that the differences between Thai and
U.S. conceptions of human rights are rooted in culture. Emma realizes that her own
ideology—her assumptions about the universal value of human rights—is not necessarily
being shared by other anti-trafficking advocates. As in many other scenes throughout the
musical, here Emma undergoes a “rupture”—a change in consciousness that forces her to
let go of old ideas, and embrace the liminal space of the unknown. Drawing on my
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interview data, I attempted to dramatize the complex relationship between Thailand and
the U.S., showing how the ideological assumptions of Western human rights advocates
are not always necessarily shared by their Thai counterparts.
Finding “The Natural Story” in Research and in Art
Where do the boundaries between theater and research lie? Where is the discerning line
between the fictitious and the real? And is it theater’s job to expose this line, or to blur it?
Numerous scholars on research-based theater have contributed their thoughts to
this conversation. Beck et al (2011) discuss the “spectrum” of research-based theater,
explaining that the purpose of all theater is to “reflect our lives back to us in order that we
may see ourselves more clearly” (p. 688). Pollack (2006) takes this notion further by
delineating two goals of the research-based playwright: 1) to render ‘objective’
presentations of research, and 2) to only include what will make the piece aesthetically
viable. As such, the author explained, “theatre created to disseminate findings may seek
to be more objective than compelling, while theatre created for the general public may
seek to be more compelling than objective” (p. 688). Saldana (2003) suggested that all
playwrights face the challenge of making research palpable and therefore should work in
tandem with scholarly researchers. However, Beck asserted that academic researchers
have more “binding” obligations to the data.
I disagree with these rigid notions of the researcher-artist binary. Instead, I
suggest that theater may contain the findings of research and still be as dramatically
compelling as theater whose purpose is not necessarily to communicate such findings.
The issue at hand is more dependent on the frame we put around such a research process.
How do we view research and data? The process of dramatizing “power moments”
reveals that research, much like dramatic writing, contains a “natural story” (personal
communication, T. Braun, 2010). It is the task of the artist to find this story within data,
to sift through the information that is most meaningful, relevant, dramatically ripe. It’s
not that these two worlds are opposed in some binary—on the contrary, they are
intimately fused. The task of dramatic writers/ artists who are also researchers is to learn
how to go deeply into real data—and to be patient enough to do this in a rigorous way—
and discern the most fascinating and authentic results, which they then transform into
creative work. Artists and researchers do not, therefore, have to be different people
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inhabiting different bodies. In fact, they can be one and the same, performing the task of
unearthing the “real” and transforming it into the “imaginary,” from which they then, in
turn, unearth more “real” discoveries. Again, the method involves re-framing the goals
and very philosophical tenets of “research,” and eliminating the positivist frame that has
been used to characterize it throughout the history of the social sciences and arts.
Another question that lingers in the conversation about the transformation of the
“real” into the “imaginary” and then back again, revolves around dramatic license. An
excerpt from my field notes taken after completing the fourth draft of the musical reveals
my own process of grappling with this issue:
What I have found is that new information was gleaned through my dramatic
process. In other words, I took creative license and “made stuff up,” and in doing
so, unearthed new findings. This is the most compelling space, the place worth
interrogating. Not so much the question of “how true do we have to be to our
data,” as Beck et. al are asking—though of course this is an important question in
the beginning of the dramatic process-- but rather, how, when a writer finds what
Braun calls “the natural story,” the questions become much more murky, and the
limits of the traditional research process start to reveal themselves.
I draw on two examples:
1) First, the issue that there really are Kachin sex workers. What it took to
unearth this “finding” was immense, because of the fact that the Kachin women
(who are my community partners) don’t want to admit that any of them are sex
workers. And yet here I went and created a show about a Kachin sex worker,
mostly in order to serve the convenience of the dramatic narrative. But what
happened was very unexpected…. [Migrant 1] and I had all this discussion, all
this back and forth; they read the script, and finally, we had the conversation that
I’d/they’d been skirting around, and when the rubber really hit the road she
admitted that yes, this story line is completely plausible because there are Kachin
women working as prostitutes in Thailand.
2) In tandem with this conversation, a new article came out in the
Bangkok Post just a few months ago that documented abuses taking place at IDC
and the attempts made by two underage girls, called “trafficking victims,” to
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escape. The article described, in eerie detail, the death of these two teenage girls
from Burma who had escaped from IDC and tried to cross the river. Now the river
meant death, silence, the oppression of the nation—the polarity of what it stood
for in my show, and, in this very tragically real story, provided an “answer” to the
question posed at the very end of my fictional story—“What will happen to Lipoh
when she tries to cross the river?”
And there it was, already in the narrative of the show. Front and center—
as if it had been “waiting” to come to light. This example demonstrates that there
is something in the unconsciously produced dramatic narrative worth
investigating. Perhaps the “natural story” of the dramatic narrative can actually
guide our questions, help us trace our interrogations, provide a compass for us, as
grounded theory researchers, to follow. These stories have their own logic. It is a
logic worth listening to as we seek to make new discoveries about the world.
(Kamler field notes, May, 2013).
As my field notes reflect, in developing the script for “Land of Smiles,” life and
art merged in a deeply close way in the interplay between the dramatic, “natural” story
and real events that unfolded after the dramatic story was created. Identifying “power
moments,” that is, palpably important, meaningful tensions that emerged from the
research findings to aid the dramatic content became a key part of this script development
process. Subsequently, the “natural stories” that unfolded in the dramatic writing process
itself led, quite amazingly at times, to further revelations about the subject of the
research. This reflexive process is what characterizes, at its core, DAR as a new method
of academic and artistic inquiry.
In a discussion of kinesthetic imagination, Roach (1996) suggested that artistic
processes, reliant upon imagination and dreams, can have material effects:
The kinesthetic imagination… inhabits the realm of the virtual. Its truth is the
truth of simulation, of fantasy or of daydreams, but its effect on human action
may have material consequences of the most tangible sort and the widest scope.
This faculty which flourishes in the mental space where imagination and memory
converge, is a way of thinking through movements—at once remembered and
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reinvented—the otherwise unthinkable, just as dance is often said to be a way of
expressing the unspeakable (Roach, 1996, p. 27).
Dreams and imagination, Roach explained, inform real events. In turn, real events
inform the fictitious, the imaginary. I therefore argue that DAR is, in fact, a 2-way
process in which discoveries about the non-fictional world fuse with the dramatic world,
continually informing the other as both the real and imaginary dramas unfold.
Stories have lives. As Carter (2010) noted, creative work does not exist in order to
project meaning onto the world. Rather, it is “unearthed,” emerging out of a need for the
unspoken to reveal itself. Just as research data “exists,” and is waiting to be “discovered,”
the dramatic story is already there, waiting to be told.

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Chapter 9
Getting It on its Feet
!
In this chapter, I discuss the way the first staged readings, or presentations of the musical
informed further research on the subject matter, and how the theatrical development
process of collaboration between artists, researchers, and audience serves as a foundation
for the practice of DAR. Following chapter eight’s discussion of the way in which script
development and the research process formed co-constitutive processes, here I will
discuss the way the embodied nature of the staged readings led to new discoveries about
the research subject, further explicating the reflexive nature of the DAR method.
About the Staged Readings
As noted earlier, the first reading took place in September, 2012 in a 99-seat theater space
in Santa Monica, California. Six female actors (four Asian-American and two Caucasian)
played the roles of the American, Thai and Kachin characters. The musical was directed
by writer-director Ted Braun, and produced by Rick Culbertson and Gregory Franklin. I
directed the music and accompanied the performance on the piano. The first reading was
attended by approximately 100 audience members, most of whom worked in the
entertainment industry and in higher education. The second reading took place in
February, 2013 at a USC conference, From Prosecution to Empowerment: Fighting
Trafficking and Promoting the Rights of Migrants, sponsored by the USC Center for
Feminist Research, the USC Center for the Study of Immigrant Integration, and USC
Department of Sociology. This reading was attended by 200 members of the USC
community and the general public.
The Audition Process
The auditions for the first reading of the musical marked an important “launching point”
for the project. As with any new theatrical work, it is often at this stage that some of the
material is performed for the first time. In the auditions for “Land of Smiles,” actors were
asked to come prepared to sing a song and read from one or two scenes from the musical.
As the author, I would hear my words and melodies performed for the first time.

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Liveness and creative practice
In his discussion of practice-based research Barrett (Barrett & Bolt, 2010) explained,
“materials, methods and theoretical ideas and paradigms may be viewed as the
apparatuses, or procedures of production from which the research design emerges” (p.
138). It is not just the random act of a sole individual artist, but the combination of these
processes that contribute to the creation of the work, and the discoveries made therein.
Dialogue and music, as live artistic mediums, come to life when they are performed.
Unlike reading a script on a page or listening to a recording, in live performance the full
thrust of a character—who she is, what she wants—comes springing into being. Lyrics
that may have taken on one meaning while on the page are suddenly colored by new
layers of meaning when expressed by artists, who bring their own embodied experiences,
emotions, and expressions to the process. As Conquergood (1991) noted:
The performance paradigm privileges particular, participatory, dynamic, intimate,
precarious, embodied experience grounded in historical process, contingency, and
ideology. … Performance centered research takes as both its subject matter and
method the experiencing body situated in time, place, and history (p. 187).
This process of embodiment could be seen in the audition process for the first
reading. During her audition, actor Melody Butiu sang Kachin Women Are Proud and
Strong while I accompanied her on the piano. This song is sung by the character Soon
Nu, Lipoh’s “auntie” who helps her cross the river into Thailand, finds her a job as a
domestic worker and ultimately helps her secure a job in the brothel in order to send
money home to her family and the KIA. As the back-story is revealed, the audience
learns that Soon Nu is also a freedom fighter, running money and arms across the
border—money earned by the Kachin sex workers and sent back to fund the Kachin
Defense Forces in their war with the Burmese military. Kachin Women Are Proud and
Strong depicts the life of Soon Nu before she became a freedom fighter. Once a happy
teenager growing up in the remote hills of Kachin State, the Burma army invaded her
village on the day she turned sixteen. The song depicts the army slaughtering her family,
destroying houses and burning the village to the ground. Soon Nu fled to the jungle and
ultimately made her way to a refugee camp along the Thai border. There, she learned that
she was no longer a citizen, a person with rights and a name. Instead, she was treated like
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a “ghost.”
Responding to this devastation, Soon Nu met other women in the refugee camp—
freedom fighters who were secretly planning to go back into Burma and fight the junta on
their own. Soon Nu decided to go with them—a choice that changed her life, and her
identity, forever.
I had written Kachin Women as a “journey” song, intending that the audience
experience Soon Nu’s transformation from innocent girl to freedom fighter—a “woman
with no name.” I had not, however, heard the song performed until Melody Butiu’s
audition. In the room, Butiu quite literally “captured” the song, embodying every aspect
of Soon Nu’s character as she lived through these transformative events. While sitting at
the piano accompanying her, I was moved to tears. The feeling I had was a mixture of
catharsis and relief—as if I had transferred the enormity of the emotional content of my
interviews onto the “shoulders” of someone else. As Krywotz explained (2011), the
actor’s job is to “hold” such emotional content, embodying the writer’s message and in so
doing, transforming it fundamentally from an ethereal nature into a physical
manifestation.
Carter (2010) explained that artists “share a common belief in the epistemological
value of invention.” We don't just deconstruct—rather, we put reality back together and
in so doing, transform our world (p. 16). Butiu’s audition, and the rehearsals that
followed, sparked a process of “putting the world back together,” allowing something
new to form. Indeed, each manifestation of a performed work is, in essence, a new life.
As Carter explained, “To understand the social value of what we are doing, we need to
study the process of creativity, rather than its outcome” (Carter, 2010, p. 17) In line with
this idea, I suggest that in the DAR paradigm we interrogate not only the necessary
physical manifestations of invention, but also the ethereal, cognitive and energetic
elements that contribute to the creative process itself.
The Rehearsal Process
Rehearsals for “Land of Smiles” took place at producer Rick Culbertson and my loft
space in downtown Los Angeles. As our production team followed the Actor’s Equity
union performance guidelines, the rehearsal process was limited to twenty-five hours in
total. Music rehearsals and acting rehearsals were scheduled according to actor
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availability, with each song being given approximately an hour of rehearsal time while
longer amounts of time were given to scenes. While I led the music rehearsals, Braun was
in charge of directing the actors in their scenes. This process was extremely valuable for
me as a dramatist, as it allowed me to observe, from a distance, the way in which the
actors related to their characters and the intentions of the scenes. When a line seemed out
of place, or needed clarification, Braun and I would pause the rehearsal process and
discuss the “beat,” or moment, in the scene. This allowed me to make dramaturgical fixes
and clarifications on the spot. At times, the music, too, needed modification, in order to
evoke a more appropriate dramatic tone or feeling.
Liminality and embodiment
The rehearsal process incorporated aspects of liminality and embodiment, and brought to
the fore their importance in the DAR method. DAR, as I have explained, relies on
liminality as a framework for gaining insight into new knowledge. The “in between” state
in which research and dramatization inform each other provides a potent space for
reflexivity. Unlike other forms of inquiry, in this method “uncertainty” is key.
DAR, like any theatrical endeavor, also relies on the “embodied experiences” of
actors, singers and musicians as vehicles for inquiry. During the rehearsal process, it was
the six actors who claimed this embodiment, making discoveries about their characters
that, in turn, informed the direction of the dramatic narrative. As I reflected:
There was a moment when Ted was working acting beats in the songs when he
explicitly told the actors to "go against the pull of the music," dramatically. As in,
don't play into the raw emotion of the music. At first that raised a red flag for me,
because I wasn't sure what he was doing. Why go against the music? But then I
realized that when I sing the demos, I do just that. I try to hold the strength of the
character in the face of the music-- as if the music is the bed, but the character is still
laying in that bed, a different entity, responsible for her own journey. There's
something in there—about the journeys of the characters having a layer of depth that
is not just in the text of the words or in the "text" of the music. Like those are the
languages the characters speak, but there's more going on underneath the medium of
the language (Kamler field notes, September 16, 2012).
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Here, I described an experience in which Braun instructed the actors to move between
various levels of character embodiment. While the actors were initially tasked with
communicating the “text” of the music and lyrics, Ted asked them to go beyond this layer
of meaning and discover the subtext, or other emotional spaces within the characters.
This process reflects Anzaldua’s conception of “Mestiza” (1987). Anzaldua suggested
that there is knowledge to be gained from the embodiment of liminal spaces, as these
intersections help us push back against inscriptions of power. Such push-backs, she
suggested, come from a sense of the body, rather than the abstracted mind.
Watkins and Shulman (2008) discussed the importance of liminality in the
creation of “narratives of participation,” that is, spaces in which ambiguity is tolerated
and embraced, rather than silenced in favor of fixed categorizations. As Watkins and
Shulman explained, “In narratives of participation, one is no longer completely congruent
with fixed identifications… This rift in reality is also the space where one enters into
relationship with others formerly excluded from one’s habitual circles, and where one
begins to listen for the creative formation of new sentiments” (2008, p. 148). Such
liminality provides an inroad to research, in that it allows for knowledge to be unearthed
through the actors’ relationship to subtext, rather than text. Liminality also responds to
the problematic epistemological positivist research tradition. As Shulman explained, this
space is characterized by “surprising insights that erupt spontaneously.” By inhabiting
multiple worlds simultaneously and allowing knowledge of these worlds to erupt freely,
the actors engaged in deeper ways of knowing their characters-as-subjects.
The Performance Process
During the performances, the actors stood at music stands and followed their scripts and
scores throughout the piece. They wore all black, with Woman One and Woman Two
incorporating minimal costume pieces (such as a scarf for Mama X and a hat for the IDC
Guard) to suggest their particular character changes. This was done so that the audience,
who did not have the benefit of being able to follow visual cues such as lighting and set
design, would stay oriented to the action of the story. To further assist this process, a
“reader” sat to the side of the actors. Her job was to read the stage directions that
described the action of the piece.
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Staged readings are messy, fragile aspects of the theatrical development process.
They represent the first major step in the concretization—or “materialization”—process.
What was before only an abstraction—words and songs written on paper, sometimes only
performed in the mind of the composer, now becomes “real.” This occurs through the
engagement of the actor—the live, human, radiant body (Krywotz, 2011) breathing life
into these words and songs. Without this human conduit, musicals are not alive. We may
even say that they are less alive than other art forms such as the novel, the poem, the
recorded song, simply because they cannot exist until they are performed.
Yet staged readings are not the same as fully realized productions. They are
designed to evoke future possibilities without relying on a complete manifestation of
production elements. The purpose herein is to keep an audience, to the greatest extent
possible, focused on the script itself. Staged readings, then, are deliberately “liminal”
modalities of communicating an artistic work.
Collaboration and discovery
Staged readings also rely on the participation of the temporally bound artists on stage as
well as the audience members who witness the performance. As Larry Gross (2011)
explained, an assumption exists in the contemporary West that artistic work is rooted in
the achievements of “individual genius.” But this romantic image of the artist as a lone
outsider, an individual constantly innovating, Gross says, is flawed. Rather, collective
experience is what constitutes the making of art, both in the process of its creation and its
reception. Music-theater is not individually constructed but comes into being through
collaboration. The consciousness of the actor-musicians, awareness of the playwright in
response to the actors’ discoveries and the audiences’ reactions to the material all
constitute the collaborative nature of this practice. A dynamic process of shifting
consciousness is at play within the creative process. Harnessing this process is a practice,
because it requires participants to let go and embrace the collaborative efforts of the
group, rather than the isolated efforts of an individual. My field notes following the first
performance demonstrate this process of “letting go”:
I feel like we're in a new moment now, after the piece was first read… It's the
creative moment that's shifted. There's something interesting about this interplay
between the creative path and the unearthing of material, and how the
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consciousness of the artist/ researcher intersects (or is ahead of?) the audience,
and how the audience in some ways is a step ahead of the artist/ researcher,
because they do work too. They piece things together in ways that are palatable.
They want more humor (in the future revision of the work), for instance. Well,
that entails getting a lot darker with the material, less earnest. That means going
further into the cynicism about the world [of the anti-trafficking movement],
which in turn means presenting the discovery of the cynicism in a more
immediate and more complex way, making that discovery smarter. And that was a
demand from the audience. So you really have to think about the interplay
between everyone in this work. The moment shifts, the consciousness of the artist
shifts, the audiences' consciousness shifts, and together these inform the new
draft. No one is alone. There are no creative islands in this practice (Kamler field
notes, November 6, 2012).
Here, I explore how the collaborative production process mirrors and reveals the
production of the researcher-as-subject. Through not only writing and rehearsing the
musical, but also rehearsing with actor-singers and experiencing the performance in the
room with the audience, I became aware that all of the actors are participants in the
research process. Our collective experience of the artistic work informs new knowledge.
It is not merely the performers’ emotional experiences, nor those of the audience that
inform knowledge about the research; rather, knowledge is unearthed in the shared
process of the performance.

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Image 1. The Cast of “Land of Smiles” (formerly, “Survive”). Santa Monica,
September, 2012

Dramatic Storytelling and the “Logic of Knowing”

From a production standpoint, how does the process of creating a musical inform
research questions and methods that, in turn, inform knowledge about the subject matter?
Unlike other research methodologies, a DAR approach as applied to the creation of a
theatre project allows for unpredictability of outcomes, and locates questions of
“knowing” in the dramatic narrative itself.
As Carter (2010) explained, in Practice-Based Research, the “aleatory,
constitutionally open, anything-goes character, which is said to weaken its claim to rigor,
is, in reality, a sign of its sophistication” (p. 16). Theater and performance serve as tools
to “open up” true events, experiences and processes (i.e., research subjects) to a particular
kind of scrutiny by placing such events in the “flexible time” of the liminal performance
space (Turner, 1974). This space, Jill Dolan has suggested, is “utopian” for it allows us to
“experiment with the possibilities of the future in ways that shine back usefully on a
present that’s always, itself, in process” (p. 13). To this, I add, theater has the potential to
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help us re-visit research questions, allowing the logic of dramatic narrative to inform
“streams of thought” that influence further research questions and projects
21
. This process
relies on the ability of dramatization to transform “fixed” concepts into multiplicities of
meaning. Through participating in the storytelling process we may begin to view
meanings from multiple sides and through multiple lenses, re-frame our perspective on
issues, and discover new insights where none had existed before. This is because stories
have their own logic. We are “programmed” to find meaning within them. As Joseph
Campbell (1949) reminded us, stories evoke, in a visceral rather than analytical way, the
unconscious coming to light, as the “hero” searches for renewal (p. 11). In dramatizing
research, events, ideas and “data points” that may otherwise seem arbitrary or ambiguous
suddenly begin to take on cohesion, and a logic emerges where none previously existed.
The readings of “Land of Smiles” activated this process in numerous ways. One
example can be seen in the way the dramatic logic of the story informed new questions
about the role of Kachin sex workers in the KIA resistance. The story explores the
connection between Kachin migrants from Burma who use their precarious labor
situations in Thailand as a means of funding the Kachin Independence Army. As I
discovered through the course of my research, the KIA has been resisting oppression by
the Burmese military junta for several decades (personal communication, 2011).
Prolonged fighting between these factions has recently resulted in renewed atrocities
against the Kachin people in Burma (Kachin Women’s Association Thailand, 2011). In
the dramatic narrative of “Land of Smiles” I chose to collapse the stories of several
Kachin migrant laborers who were not working in the sex industry, with the experiences
of Akha sex workers, another ethnic minority group from Burma, who were working in
the sex industry. While one group was funding an army, the other was simply sending
remittances home to their families. For the purposes of the dramatic narrative, I chose to
create characters who were Kachin sex workers using their employment in the sex
industry to fund the KIA resistance. This dramatic choice allowed me to tell a more
complex story dealing with the structural conditions that underlie multiple circumstances
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This process is akin to what psychoanalysis refers to as “free association,” and draws on a
similar unique informative logic.
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of migration from Burma into Thailand. Following the first staged reading of the piece,
the narrative choice yielded surprising discoveries:
Yesterday, Ted and I were talking about bringing the show to Thailand and
performing it for the people whom it's about: The real Lewelyn, Achara, and the
Kachin women. And, Ted added, the Akha sex workers who I had interviewed. In
mentioning the Akha, Ted reminded me that I had made a dramatic connection
between the Akha sex workers and the Kachin rebels—in essence, fusing their
experiences to serve and simplify the story narrative. I commented that yes, that
connection was part of my dramatic license. But then, I thought, what an
interesting thing to look at when I go back to Thailand in December. Maybe there
are Kachin prostitutes fueling the KIA? Are there? If so, where are they? How do
they function? This might be the subject of another research project. (Kamler field
notes, September 29, 2012)
Here we see how the production process led to further research questions about
women’s roles in the Kachin Independence Army. While such questions were not
originally conceived as being part of my study, the narrative logic of the dramatic piece
shed light on new possible directions of inquiry. There was suddenly a potentially new
project at hand, one that could influence a scholarly understanding of the Kachin
community in Thailand and could inform the Kachin women’s understanding of their
participation in the KIA military efforts. This information could be useful in enabling
Kachin migrants to mobilize around their rights as migrants, and demand safer labor
practices not only in contexts of domestic work, but in sex work as well.

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Chapter 10
Findings:
NGO Narratives

“I think this is something that is really complicated, and we’re never going to
solve it, but it’s great that we can have a discussion about it. I think… what we
see in the media like Law and Order: SVU, or whatever, the way they show how
victims of trafficking are treated in the US compared to what actually happens on
the ground… the way it is portrayed in most Hollywood Angelina Jolie movies,
it’s completely ridiculous. So I think it is great to have stories that are a more
accurate portrayal of what’s really happening. It’s something I came away with
today, that I was really pleased to see.”

- Male NGO Employee, Chiang Mai, Thailand, December, 2013

In this chapter I present the narratives of the NGO employees that emerged in the focus
group discussions that followed the performance. I will compare and contrast these
narratives with the themes of the narratives that emerged during my original interviews in
2011. I will also draw on characters and excerpts from the play (particularly the NGO
characters) to illustrate the ways in which the play both challenged, and authorized these
emerging narratives.
Following the performance, four dominant themes that were discussed earlier
emerged in the focus group narratives of the NGO employees. These included:
1. “Sex workers lack agency” (Victim narrative)
2. “Thailand is unethical” (Moralizing narrative)
3. “They should be grateful” (Savior narrative)
4. “Thailand is Illegible to the West” (Othering narrative)
1. Troubling the “victim” narrative (“sex workers lack agency”)
In the narratives that emerged in the preliminary interviews, both Western and Thai NGO
employee participants demonstrated difficulty reconciling the difference between forced
prostitution and consensual sex work. While some NGO workers acknowledged the
abolitionist versus pro-rights approaches to prostitution, and by extension, trafficking,
overwhelmingly the Western anti-trafficking NGO employees adhered to the premise of
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abolition—that is, the idea that all sex work is a violation of human rights and is
demeaning to women.
The character Lipoh
As previously discussed, in writing Land of Smiles, my intention was to trouble the
victim narrative via the character Lipoh, and dismantle the objectifying trope of the
“voiceless third world victim” that has been discussed by Doezema (2001, 2010),
Kempadoo et al. (2005), Segrave et al. (2009), and others. In the original (2011)
interviews with NGO employees, the perceived victimization of sex workers was a
common trope.
The focus group data that emerged among the Western NGO employees,
presented a very different picture of the victim narrative. This NGO focus group included
participants from organizations adhering to State Department policies promoting
abolition as well as organizations working in support of sex workers’ rights. In the
discussion, several participants acknowledged the problematic use of the “victim” label.
One male NGO employee 1 (MNE1), for example, expressed the need for a more
nuanced look at the categories of victim and agent:
“The voice of the main character, the Kachin woman, was very well drawn and
you saw the degree to which, well sure, she was making a choice that she probably
wouldn’t have made in other circumstances—there were lots of difficult things that she
had to do, lot’s of people who were kind of pushing her to do things for them rather than
for herself—but you saw all that, and I think that was very true to life,” he commented.
“A lot of times people… it’s difficult to use the word ‘victim’ with them but it’s
also difficult to use the word “autonomous” and “empowered” or any other things either.
They are somewhere in between,” he said.
This participant acknowledged the problematic trope of victimhood that typically
characterizes anti-trafficking discourse. In so doing, he questioned the use of this trope,
and the objectification of female migrant sex workers as agent-less “victims.”
Other employees also avoided such oversimplification. One employee responded
by recognizing the structural processes that fueled Lipoh’s migration into Thailand—
processes that expose labor exploitation as being situated in the context of migration, not
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victimhood. In the discussion, one female NGO employee 1 (FNE1), discussed the “pull
factors” that influence such migration:
“I think a lot of people who don’t working in trafficking, or myself before I read
anything abut trafficking, just… you always have this idea like (its) this poor victim
who’s been kidnapped and ends up in this ring,” she explained. “But quite often, I mean,
people can sometimes get into something by choice. And they stay in that system because
of the choice they made. And I think that the play tries to bring on the pull factors that are
involved in the situation.”
Similar to MNE1, this participant expressed sympathy for Lipoh’s situation in
way that refuted, rather than reinforced, the normative trope of victimization that
typically characterizes anti-trafficking discourse. This employee identified with Lipoh as
a subjective agent, rather than a passive object. She engaged self-reflectively with the
dramatic material, realizing that the portrayals of sex workers victimhood typically
espoused by her industry are often more damaging than productive.
In this way, dramatization served to expose the problem of “flattened” portrayals
of real women that often accompany anti-trafficking advocacy work. By stepping away
from the “static” social world and temporarily visiting the “liminal” space of the
theatrical world, these employees could disengage from the typical narratives often
adopted by others in their roles. The post-performance discussion allowed them to openly
express thoughts that might, in another professional context, be overlooked or dismissed
due to the organization’s need to uphold the values of benevolence and rescue. Here, the
employees were freed from the burdens of upholding such normative tropes. The
theatrical event created an opportunity for them to explore these issues more deeply.
Sex workers’ union non-participation
One participant population that was notably absent from the focus group discussions was
sex workers’ union NGO employees. Like the other participant groups, I had extended an
invitation to these employees, who had participated in my initial interviews, to attend the
performance. However, field notes from April, 2013 documenting my correspondence
with the head of the organization revealed that some members expressed concern that
their perspectives might not be adequately represented in the play. Thus, they declined to
attend the performance or participate in Phase III of the research.
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Interestingly, while this group declined to participate, other members of the NGO
focus group noted that the views of the sex workers union were strongly advocated for
through the production.
In discussing the issue of inter-organizational collaboration, one female NGO
employee (FNE2) explicitly called attention to the strengths of the sex workers’ union,
and how those strengths were reflected in the play:
“That kind of reminds me about in the play, the scene they have in the bar that
was modeled on the [the sex worker’s union]-- they have one here in Chiang Mai. I think
one of the great things about [the sex worker’s union] is working with the women there
and helping them increase their capacity but not saying, ‘You have to leave,’ but (instead)
working with them, and accepting what they’re doing, and helping them stay safe, and
helping them increase their capacity.”
The respondent then suggested that she thought it would be beneficial if more
organizations would work with female migrant laborers “to increase their own capacity,
so when you have victims, or—what is the definition of victim? But people who have
been in these (situations), I think that’s something the play really exposed. People can’t
just wave a magic wand and fix everything really easily with a lot of money and experts,”
she concluded.
FNE2 reflected on the scene in the musical set in the “Women Power bar,” a sex
workers’ union working to empower Thai and migrant sex workers through regulation,
while fighting for decriminalization of prostitution. Inspired by a real organization in
Chiang Mai, the Women Power bar scene offered audiences a look into the perspective of
the sex workers’ rights movement. This movement, as I discussed in Chapter 6,
acknowledges that sex trafficking is real, but challenges the abolitionist narrative that all
sex work is conflated with sex trafficking. As such, it presents an alternative
understanding of the sex-worker, rendering her a subject, rather than a victim.
Recognizing both the mission of the Women Power bar, as well as the real
establishment that inspired the dramatic scene, this NGO employee acknowledged the
utility of complicating the sex worker-as-victim narrative. She recognized the importance
of partnering with migrant women, rather than rendering them objects of rescue and
rehabilitation, and she explicitly questioned the victim label that is so frequently used to
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depict sex workers in Thailand. Such a response represents a “push back” against the
dominant narrative about trafficking that is touted by the US government and abolitionist
anti-trafficking organizations. While the sex workers union did not participate in Phase
III of the study, their perspective was, nevertheless, acknowledged and accepted among
members of the anti-trafficking NGO population, This stands in sharp contrast to the
original 2011 interviews, in which anti-trafficking NGO employees failed to reconcile the
very existence of such an organization, let alone the value of its mission.

Image 2. “Women Power Bar.” Chiang Mai Production, December, 2013.

2. Troubling the moralizing narrative (“Thailand is unethical”)

Another narrative that emerged in the preliminary interviews was the moralizing
narrative. This narrative enacted judgments about the idea that “they” (Thailand) do not
uphold the same value systems and moral codes as “we” do (the West). Let us recall that
in the interview data presented in Chapter 4, this narrative was demonstrated by the faith-
based Christian NGO employee, who described what she felt to be inherent differences
between the West and the ethnic minority communities of the girls her organization
sought to “rescue.” These differences, she suggested, were not simply behavioral, but
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deeply embedded in two contrasting value systems. In her view, a Western, Christian
moral system promoted the values of romantic love (as opposed to sex work), protecting
children from exposure to sexuality before the age of eighteen (as opposed to sexualizing
teenagers), and an idea of individual betterment and progress through hard work (rather
than dependence on family members—particularly young women-- for support). As I
pointed out earlier (Chapter 4), when I asked if she believed there were inherent cultural
differences between these ethnic minority communities and the values of the West, she
responded by discussing what she believed to be an inherent “death wish” on the part of
some in the ethnic communities. This suggests that, in her eyes, it was not just “culture,”
but the actual value of human life, that was in question among members of these
communities.
The character Lewelyn
As the CEO of Lighthouse, Lewelyn represents the morality of the Christian West. A
devout missionary, Lewelyn’s NGO also operates a shelter for the “rescued” underage
women from ethnic minority communities in Burma. Lewelyn is strong in her dedication
to the cause of “raid and rescue,” and holds staunchly to her beliefs that reforming the
girls through Christian teachings will steer them away from sex work and onto a “moral”
path.
Lewelyn represents the morality narrative expressed by several respondents
during the preliminary interviews. Her determination to change both the behavior and the
value system of Lipoh represents what I gleaned to be a kind of “moral panic” on the part
of many faith-based anti-trafficking NGOs. Lewelyn also represents a clear antagonist for
Lipoh, as she stands in the way of Lipoh’s ability to meet her goal of escaping from the
IDC and returning to work in the brothel.

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Image 3. “No Woman Fights to be a Prostitute.” Chiang Mai Production, December
2013.

The moralizing narrative, and the tone of “moral panic” that often accompanies it, was
articulated by a male NGO employee (MNE2), and then immediately challenged by two
female NGO employees:
“It’s about the demand,” asserted MNE2. “You’ve got to tell Thai people that it’s
not right. I mean it’s not right to go out there. I mean if there was no demand we
wouldn’t need sex workers!” He said, emphatically.
FNE1, a female employee, countered this line of thought, remarking, “But when
in history has it ever been like that? I mean, prostitution is the oldest form of like… in
the entire world. It’s not like a Thai issue. It’s a worldwide issue. But you saying this is
wrong is, again, taking away empowerment of people who may choose to be in that
profession. Like, it’s still looking at it from a one-sided black or white, right or wrong.”
Another female employee, FNE2 then asserted, “This is the endless debate really
because, you know, there is a feminist viewpoint on this, and then there’s multiple
feminist viewpoints on this.”
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MNE2 then reiterated his thoughts about demand, noting, “The demand, from
what I can gather, is more like the foreign demand for sex is about 20% of the actual sort
of usage of sex workers, and then 80% is Thai people.”
At this point in the discussion, FNE1 questioned MNE1’s use of the statistics to
inform his argument.
MNE2 replied, “Well this is just my statistic and my looking at it.
Another male respondent (MNE1) then countered MNE2’s argument, noting, “I
mean, I don’t know how we can have percentages about anything. I mean, we don’t even
know the population of Chiang Mai.”
In this heated exchange, MNE2 reiterated a common abolitionist trope: if
“demand” were reduced, he reasoned, prostitution could be eradicated. Embedded in his
statement was a moral critique of Thailand and the Thai people; and the need to teach
them that buying sex is wrong. As discussed in Chapter 4, this trope cements Orientalist
ideas about inherent differences between West and East, rendering the east as “childlike,”
and needing education and reform (see Said, 1979).
What was interesting about this exchange, however, was the degree to which
MNE1’s narrative was instantly challenged by not just one, but three other members of
the group. I suggest that if they had been interviewed one-on-one, each of these
participants, as employees working for anti-trafficking organizations, could easily have
reiterated the simplified Orientalist narrative expressed by MNE2; however, in the
context of the post-performance focus group, they instantly challenged him. I suggest that
the group cohesion, in the aftermath of a theatrical presentation that challenged this
abolitionist narrative, allowed this challenge to take place. Rather than simply reiterating
a known trope, three members of the focus group went farther in their thinking, and
ventured to express an opinion that, as revealed in the preliminary data collection
process, is seldom expressed among members of this population.
Missionaries’ non-participation
One population that was notably absent from the NGO focus group was faith-based anti-
trafficking NGO employees (or, “missionaries”). Prior to the performances, three
missionary women from two different faith-based anti-trafficking organizations were
invited to attend the performance and take part in the focus group discussion. These
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women attended the production, after which I was able to speak with each of them briefly
and again invited them to participate in the focus groups.
In talking with these women, I noted a feeling of discomfort and, perhaps, veiled
confrontation occurring in our conversation. As I later reflected in my field notes, it felt
as if the missionaries were made uncomfortable by the production. While none expressed
this explicitly, I noticed each reacting with frozen smiles, whispering and other body
language that indicated feelings of discomfort. My hope was that the missionaries would
choose to participate in the focus groups in order to have a platform to express these
views and feelings. However, each politely declined.
Interestingly, while the moralizing narrative was, for the most part, absent from
the NGO focus groups dialogue, further research revealed that this narrative continued to
circulate among the missionaries who attended the performance, well after the production
was finished. It was later revealed to me by another project participant—Female
American Actress 1, who played the role of Lewelyn-- that one of the missionaries
sought this actress out and expressed concern about her portrayal of the missionary
character in the play.
A follow-up interview with American Female Artist 1 (AFA1) (conducted on
October 20, 2014) revealed more information about this interaction. I asked AFA1 about
her experience being part of the tightly knit social community in Chiang Mai, which
included several missionaries. Some of these missionaries came to the production, AFA1
noted, but did not choose to participate in the focus groups:
“Following one of the shows, an older woman in her late 70’s—her husband is
head of a church here and has done mission work for many years and they raised their
children in Chiang Mai—she came up to me. She’s always been very complimentary
about my musical talents and was excited that she’d been able to hear me sing,” AFA1
explained.
“That said, she told me that she totally disagreed with the subject matter. And that
the work she and her husband do may have been misunderstood. And in the realm of
what they do, she felt that the show was incorrect. The way the head of the Christian
NGO was portrayed. And she said she understood that I had to follow the script, but that
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she did not agree with it at all. And then I had a conversation with her daughter later, who
said the same things. And I said it was based on research, but you know…”
AFA1 then noted that the missionary did not tell her why she declined to
participate in the post-production focus group.
This respondent suggested that the three missionaries who attended the performance
likely felt resistance to taking part in the focus group. Their non-participation is a notable
data point in itself: while the focus groups were presented as an opportunity to express
feelings, concerns and engage in open dialogue about the themes that emerged in the
play, these missionaries may have felt that their perspectives—or, indeed, their
organizations’ ethics—had been challenged too directly for them to effectively engage in
constructive dialogue. Their decision to not participate illustrates the limitations of the
theatrical medium, or, potentially, of focus groups as a comprehensive method of data
collection. It was not possible to glean evidence as to whether attending the performance
had a “liberatory” effect on these audience members, or, in contrast, whether it simply
cemented their views. Like the absence of the sex workers’ union organization
employees, the dialogue that emerged in the focus group was characterized by notable
“silences.” Interestingly, these silences came from the standpoints of those who were
typically the most vocal—and, indeed, polarized—about their views on the subjects
explored in the musical.
3. Troubling the Savior narrative (“They should be grateful”)
A fourth prominent narrative that emerged depicted the Western NGO worker as “savior”
of ethnic minority “victims.” This narrative was demonstrated primarily by, WFE1, the
Christian employee. As discussed in Chapter 4, the employee’s sense of “duty” was
undermined by her ungrateful beneficiary. In addition, while WFE1 was concerned with
the village’s pre-occupation with money and material possessions, it was not poverty that
seemed to concern her. Rather, it was the value system she imagined the families in the
village to be upholding, values not aligned with her own.
The character Emma
In creating the character Emma, I sought to unearth this savior perspective, and challenge
it, through the voice of an anti-hero with whom we—the Western audience—strongly
identify. Much like the inclination of Westerners who seek to witness human rights
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atrocities and provide a corrective, in the opening song of the show, Emma sings about
her desire to rescue “The Women of the World:”

EMMA
LEGAL BRIEFS IN HAND
AND I UNDERSTAND
I LONG TO BE
WORKING IN THE FIELD
SLAVERY IS REAL
THIS PLACE NEEDS ME

I’VE BEEN WAITING FOR THE CHANCE
FOR THIS MOMENT
AND NOW I’LL SHOW THEM
RESCUING THESE GIRLS
I’LL BE THERE
FOR THE WOMEN OF THE WORLD

As the story deepens, however, Emma slowly discovers the reality of Lipoh’s life back in
Burma, and comes to appreciate the circumstances that fueled her migration and decision
to work in the sex industry. She then begins to question her own role as a Western NGO
worker and, in so doing, undergoes a gradual transformation from unconscious “savior”
to ruptured “participant” (Watkins and Shulman, 2008). Emma’s journey into
consciousness represents the breaking down of static otherness, the liminality that comes
with questioning one’s certainty.

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Image 4. “Emma.” Chiang Mai Production, December 2013.

In the NGO focus group discussion, employees expressed contrasting responses to the
savior narrative. One male employee (MNE3) took issue with what he felt was an “over-
simplistic” portrayal of the NGO workers:
“The range of perspectives (examined in the show) was really great, and it did
raise a lot of tough questions I think people who work in this industry sort of need to
confront. So I thought that part was very well done and it was obviously very well
researched and very well thought out in terms of the ideas that it conveyed. But,” he said,
“I felt like it almost felt—sort of the way NGOs deal with the issue was quite simplistic.
In a way just sort of black or white. I feel that most of the NGOs that work in the area,
with maybe a few isolated exceptions, are aware of these subtle grey areas (and) are
constantly confronting them on an everyday basis—where to draw the line, how to deal
with these borderline cases, and so the degree to which these people were just so turned
off and making no effort whatsoever to consider the complexities other than the new
fresh faced lawyer, I felt like there could have been more layers to those characters. They
could have been more complexly drawn than they were,” he added.
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This employee articulated that he felt the NGO employees were portrayed as being
“turned off,” seeing the problems too simplistically. In his criticism, however, he makes a
nod to the face that Emma, who began her journey as a young “fresh faced” lawyer,
becomes more nuanced and aware of the complexities of Lipoh’s situation as the play
goes on. The employee’s reaction could be seen as a defense against what he felt was a
criticism of the savior narrative, through the characters Lewelyn, Achara and Emma.
In contrast, another male employee (MNE1) expressed appreciation for the way the
“savior narrative” was articulated in the play:
“I volunteered at NGOs on the border and I wasn’t directly involved with trafficking,
but I did meet victims of trafficking and also big NGO people and that kind of thing,”
MNE1 began. “And I would say I think that this play took a good shine of light onto the
motivations of these NGOs. And I think that is something that is rarely talked about when
you see how these kinds of things are represented in the media and in film. It’s usually
the victims beings saved-- the “white savior” complex—that sort of thing… The play
raised a lot of questions. I think the viewers walk away really being, I think, informed.
For example, I bumped into the widow of the founder of the KIO. She saw the play and
she told me she cried as she was leaving today.”
MNE1 indicated that he recognized the savior narrative that the play, and particularly
the character Emma, seeks to expose. In addition, he indicated having observed the
response of a migrant woman, the “widow of the founder of the KIO,” who also attended
the performance. In mentioning that she cried as she was leaving the performance, he
suggested that she, too, felt that the play accurately represented the voices of migrants,
rather than rendering them as flattened “victims.” The savior narrative was troubled not
only in this respondent’s own recognition, but in his observation of the recognition of a
migrant woman, herself.
In addition, two female NGO employees (FNE3 and FNE4) expressed resonating
with the way the play problemetized the savior narrative:
“I think it’s an important reminder for Americans or foreigners from other
countries who are coming to Thailand to realize that they are guests in this country,”
noted FNE3. “They are not people that should just come in like, “this is our way of doing
things and we’re going to try and change you and make sure you’re on the right track,”
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and stuff. We have to come and learn from their culture and learn what their needs
are…and maybe even have our minds changed.”
FNE4 then added, “When I attempt to speak with young lawyers coming in to
start doing this kind of work… the message is always “do no harm,” but NGOs by their
very nature are set up in a way that they inevitably do harm. The NGO has a mission,
they have to sell the mission to the funder, (but) in order to do that they often end up
hurting people-- not intentionally, but because they make mistakes. And in certain
contexts people’s lives can be put at risk by those mistakes.”
These employees drew from their experiences as foreigners in Thailand, and
observing the structures that underlie NGO activities, to reiterate the danger of the savior
narrative. Though it was not made explicit, interestingly, both of these participants
connected to Emma as a character. One expressed recollection of coming to Thailand and
realizing that she must accept the humility of being a guest in the country, rather than an
“expert” telling people how to behave. This observation falls in direct parallel to the
dramatic change that Emma goes through during the course of the play. Where at first she
arrives in Thailand thinking she can “save the world,” by the end of the play she leaves
Thailand humbled, realizing that the only way to save even one girl is to listen to that
girls’ needs, rather than impose her own values and solutions upon her.
The second participant similarly identified with Emma’s dramatic arc. She
recalled speaking with “young lawyers” (presumably like Emma), explaining that she
instructs them to “do no harm.”
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However, she explains, NGOs are often structured in
such a way that their work is inherently harmful to the populations they intend to serve.
This admission is both bold and insightful, and related directly to the character arc of
Emma. As I will discuss in the chapters that follow, it can be argued that the theatrical
medium allowed this participant to recognize her own transformation in witnessing
Emma’s journey from wide-eyed “savior” to ruptured “participant.”

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“Do no harm” was a common phrase I heard among the Community-based organization
population of migrant women who participated in the study. This phrase was often geared toward
larger, international NGOs or government bodies who, in the process of providing aid to
marginalized populations, end up causing damage to the very communities they are ostensibly
seeking to help. Interestingly, during the preliminary data collection process, I never heard this
phrase uttered by NGO employees themselves.
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4. Troubling the Othering Narrative (“Thailand is Illegible to the West””)
Another narrative that emerged in the original interviews with NGO employees evoked a
“self-versus-other” binary between Southeast Asia and the West. As previously
discussed, this narrative was reinforced in the original interviews by Western NGO
employees as well as Thai NGO employees, who each spoke in polarizing terms about
the value systems of “West” versus “East.” Several Thai NGO workers discussed the
cultural underpinnings of women’s migration, explaining how the social expectation need
of caring for families and communities often fuels the choice to enter the sex industry.
These NGO workers also suggested an allegiance to “Karma” on the part of Thai women
who enter the trade, explaining that the care for families is considered to be a positive
way of accruing Karmic in the Buddhist faith. Similarly, several faith-based NGO
employees and secular, Western government-supported NGO employees spoke of
inherent “differences” between the Thai and Western value systems and ways of life. As I
suggested in Chapter 4, the responses revealed that employees often have difficulty
navigating what they perceive to be deeply engrained cultural issues that they face in
their daily work activities.
The othering narrative was demonstrated in several ways in the NGO focus group.
Uses of the othering narrative included: othering as a way of abdicating responsibility for
policy change, as a tool for strengthening organizations, as a vehicle for resistance, and as
a way of negotiating dual roles and identities within the organization.
Othering as a way of abdicating responsibility
One male NGO employee (MNE4), engaged with the othering narrative in response to a
question about whether the show raised possibilities for policy change, as well as
conflicts and ethical dilemmas among NGOs:
“A lot of people, they could have the words, ‘This is Thailand,’” began MNE4.
“Now, Thailand is a place that is completely different from Western thinking. Now, to
come in here with Western thinking, without learning as much about Thais and Thai
people—Thai people, they have ways that are just completely different from us. They
just want to please and do whatever they can to serve the ‘white saviors’ as you said
before. And that sometimes gets in the way of actually being able to effectively work
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together… People just don’t get it. They have to… close their Western thinking because
everything is just so different,” he asserted.
Here, the group was asked a pointed question about their approach to anti-
trafficking policy in the context of a discussion about ethical dilemmas and conflicts of
interest that many employees face. In response, this employee used the othering narrative
to avoid the question. The respondent explained that since Thais and Westerners are so
incompatibly and essentially different, achieving a transparent and productive working
relationship is virtually impossible. The essentialized view expressed by this NGO
employee served as a way not only of maintaining the othering narrative, but also of
relinquishing his own commitment to policy change. It was as if the employee was
saying, “Since Thailand is illegible to the West, anti-trafficking policy will always be
unproductive, and there is nothing that I, as a Westerner, can do to change that.”
Othering as a tool for strengthening organizations
In stark contrast to this use of the othering narrative, one female NGO employee (FNE5)
responded to the same question by using the concept of othering as a call to strengthen
organizations:
“In China, the organization that I worked for was a very big organization that was
all around the world,” she said. “And it’s premised on this issue about criminal defense…
In Beijing there was a serious issue about who should be running the office, and whether
or not the NGO staff—the Western staff—really needed to get out of there and turn the
running of the offices and the programs over to the Chinese, Chinese nationals who were
better equipped to understand the subtleties of building relationships, the requirements of
those relationships, the whole what Westerners always perceive as “the Asian issues”
about saving face, and therefore appearing compliant and whatever stereotypes we bring
to the table. But an actual solution is to empower the people, and make them in charge.
That was the only way that the program could continue working,” she explained.
Here, we see how FNE5 drew on the othering narrative as a site of possibility for
policy change, rather than abdication. This use of the narrative was not present in the
preliminary interviews. As such, it represents a new level of complexity in the dialogue
around the experiences of anti-trafficking NGO employees.

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Othering as a vehicle for resistance
Perhaps most interestingly, the othering narrative was maintained, yet simultaneously
troubled by the response of one female NGO employee (FNE6). When the group was
asked about their experiences working for an ex-pat run organization, FNE6 expressed
difficulty maneuvering the cultural differences she perceived:
“Sometimes, I don’t know how to say, they are like different expert,” FNE6
explained. “Like sometimes I feel that like some expats, they don’t really know about the
country and maybe they might have an understanding about that, but they are like…
complex. Like the show. They are like, some so bad they cannot see.”
This participant drew on the othering narrative as a way of supporting what she
felt to be an accurate portrayal of the problematic—indeed, what she seemed to think
were often misguided—attempts on the part of Western NGO employees to assert their
expertise. Here, the employee used the othering narrative, in a sense, against itself—she
drew on the notion of cultural difference as a way to resist the Orientalist tropes
commonly imposed on her by the Western NGO staff. This use of the othering narrative
as a vehicle for resistance, as opposed to its use as a vehicle for abdicating efforts to
effect policy change, has important implications on the play’s success as a participatory
communication intervention.
Othering as a way of negotiating dual roles and identities
Finally, the othering narrative was used as a way of discussing the difficulty NGO
employees working in anti-trafficking have navigating the multiple roles they are
required to play within the organization. As discussed in earlier chapters, NGO
employees working in anti-trafficking are often required to manage multiple roles in their
everyday work activities (Suzuki, 1998). Through ritual descriptions of their
organization’s activities, promotional literature and campaigns describing their
organization’s missions, members of the anti-trafficking movement must demonstrate the
values of their organizations, and “perform” for donors, publics and other constituents
whom their organizations seek to impress. As such, they also serve as “information
brokers” for well-meaning Western audiences (Sulaiman, 2009). Such NGO
performances privilege Western cultural norms and, in so doing, re-center the role of
West in the international arena. They also strengthen imagined ideas about human
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trafficking that are not always congruent with the actual experiences of female migrant
sex workers.
The Lewelyn-Achara relationship
In “Land of Smiles,” I sought to trouble the dual identities and “performances” enacted
by NGO employees, through the complex interplay between Lewelyn and Achara, her
colleague, a Thai NGO worker. Throughout the play we learn that Achara, who has been
trained as a lawyer and is from a well-to-do family in Bangkok, is dedicated to upholding
international law above all else—including the rights of migrants. Together, these
characters embody the conflicts of duality that are commonly faced by NGO employees.
Both must adhere to the mission of the organization while, simultaneously, navigating
their own cultural compass—that is, the value systems that have been imposed up onto
them through culture, and which they struggle to uphold, even in the face of challenges
that surround their daily work in the organization. Lewelyn and Achara embody the
concept of “dual identities,” navigating multiple cultural landscapes simultaneously.
In the focus groups, the othering narrative was troubled through NGO employees’
reflections on their own roles in the organization, and the challenges of managing their
dual identities within these roles. Like Lewelyn and Achara, these employees—who
came from both Western and Thai backgrounds—had to manage their own values while
struggling to make sense of what they perceived to be very differing values of the
“other.”
The focus group responses revealed that dual identities and inner conflicts, much like
those explored in the relationship between Lewelyn and Achara, were echoed by Western
NGO employees. When asked whether they identified with the characters Lewelyn and
Achara, one respondent, a female employee (FNE7) remarked,
“It was almost like a cautionary tale. I felt like (these are) the worst kind of NGO
workers… especially Achara and Lewelyn… I didn’t feel like I identified with either of
them. I mean I do identify with the struggle, with the need to report to donors and that
certainly is true. I mean I think that everyone has been in the situation with the pressure
to report impact within a certain amount of time, in order to have funding renewed, in
order to achieve your targets or whatever… It requires you to go for low hanging fruit, to
tackle easy things rather than doing the things that are maybe more important, because
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they are more difficult to measure. …That part certainly is a real challenge of NGO
work,” she admitted.
Other employees expressed tensions around the cultural “performances” they enact in
“real” life. They explained that sometimes, these cultural performances become difficult
to maintain. FNE7, for instance, began by stating that she did not recognize herself in the
NGO employee characters portrayed in the musical. As she went on, however, it became
clear that she did, in fact, identify with their struggles. Her response illustrates a gradual
breaking down of defensiveness about her role as an NGO employee, caught in the
pressure of having to tackle “easy” issues rather than “important” ones. She revealed
anxiety about her own “dual role” as an employee who must perform for the benefit of
her organization, while simultaneously recognizing that such performances are not
engaging what she deems to be the most important aspect of her work in the organization.
The theatrical event allowed this employee to communicate authentically about her
dual roles in the NGO. Allowing herself to inhabit the liminal space of the performance
context helped this employee entertain possibilities for her own experience that, prior to
seeing the performance, she may have been reluctant to accept.
Similarly, female NGO employee 8 (FNE8), expressed dissatisfaction with having
to please donors in the ongoing search for institutional funding:
“But we’re also talking about grants and funding and most of them are coming
from major donors whether it’s in the West or here. This is one of the major flaws and
problems in the NGO sphere,” she explained. “Everything we do depends on pleasing
someone else to get money from them. So we’re restricted just as much as everyone else
is. It’s one of the major flaws within the NGO world.”
In expressing the “need to please” that accompanies her work, FNE8 revealed
anxieties about the pressures of self-presentation required of NGO employees. Again, we
see how the theatrical medium created a space for dialogue about complicated issues—
issues that often go unexpressed or unexplored in the context of NGO employees’ daily
activities.
The focus group discussions challenged the othering narrative, in that participants
began to recognize that they, too, had struggles. They began to question their own daily
activities, their need to perform and uphold a certain value system within the
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organization. This turn to self-reflection, I suggest, inherently erodes the othering
narrative, in that the focus turns to the identity struggle of the NGO worker, rather than
that of the trafficking “victim.” Instead of seeing their own values as “the norm,” these
Western employees were able to momentarily question the values they had been working
to uphold, and begin to differentiate between their value systems, and those of the
organization in which they worked.
In addition, one female NGO employee, FNE9, grappled with her role in the
organization, as well as with issues of her own cultural and national identity. Dual
identity, and the difficulty of upholding it, was expressed in FNE6’s discussion about
agentive sex work and Thailand’s reputation as a hub for prostitution:
“I think it is a good way that [the sex worker’s union] exists, to teach the sex
worker to protect themselves when the customer or foreigner or whoever got them, and
you know, force them to provide the sex service,” she commented. “But for me… a lot
of foreigner come to Thailand because we have high demand. And we ever to supply, like
you know Burmese, we allow to… and everybody supply. And the topic today is called
the “Land of Smiles” and a lot of foreigners believe that Thailand is the land of sex….
legal luckily or illegal luckily is something I’m still questioning.”
Here, the participant made reference to the sex workers’ union, reflected in the
play’s Women Power bar scene. FNE9 struggled with the question of whether agentive
sex work actually exists in Thailand, given its reputation as a prostitution hub. This
employee gave voice to a broader conversation about national and cultural identity. She
expressed anxieties about her dual role as an NGO employee seeking to “help” sex
trafficking victims, and her role as a Thai citizen concerned about her nation’s reputation.
Her response reiterates the complexity of NGO employees who must “perform” the
values of their organization, while simultaneously managing their own personal—and in
this case, national and cultural—identities.
Conclusion
In this chapter, I have discussed the narratives of the NGO employees that emerged in the
post-performance focus groups discussions, and contrasted them with the themes of the
narratives of my original interviews. Four dominant themes emerged, including “Sex
workers lack agency” (Victim narrative); “Thailand is unethical” (Moralizing narrative);
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“They should be grateful” (Savior narrative) and “Thailand is Illegible to the West”
(Othering narrative). Notably absent from the NGO focus groups were employees from
the both sex workers’ union and anti-trafficking missionaries—interestingly, populations
that are often two of the most polarizing voices in the anti-trafficking discourse. Their
absences reveal information about silences in the discourse that followed the
performance, and have important implications on the outcome of the performance as a
“liberatory” communication intervention.

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Chapter 11
Findings:
Migrant Narratives

“You show about what we cannot show. We work hard, we work so much. Thank you for
showing everybody. When we go back into our home, we will share, saying,
‘Oh our foreigners! They are working for Kachin people! We love that they care.’
We will tell our people about you.”

- Female Migrant Laborer, Chiang Mai, Thailand, December, 2013

Cathy Caruth (1996) described trauma not as an event that is tangibly memorable, easily
accessible, and readily available to the human psyche, but rather, the opposite—
something, opaque, buried, unclear, “something experienced too soon to be known” (p.
4). The “unknowing” nature of trauma, she explained, “is what comes back to haunt the
survivor.” Caruth connected the unknowing, buried nature of our traumas to the concept
of story, suggesting that the wound of each trauma event has a story attached to it, and
that this story longs to be told in order that the wound can finally be expressed.
In the focus groups that followed the performances of “Land of Smiles,” migrant
women and men from Burma’s ethnic minority communities discussed the themes of the
play, and the way those themes related to their own experiences. Part of what emerged in
these discussions relates to Caruth’s notion of story—that is, the trauma of not only an
individual, but of an entire community, being voiced.
In this chapter, I suggest that not only was the reflection of migrant experiences
unearthed in the focus group conversations—that is, the witnessing of stories they had
told to me, that I then processed, transformed and told back to them—but in addition, a
new narrative emerged. I suggest that it was the unknown wounds, or what we might
think of as other “layers” of wounds, which ultimately emerged through the focus group
discussions. Through their emergence, the “voices” of these wounds enabled the migrants
to become more aware of the trauma underlying their experiences.
To explicate this, I draw on five key themes that emerged in the migrant focus
groups:
1) Complicating the victim narrative
2) The role of NGOs
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3) Advocacy to the public and to ourselves
4) Authenticity and representation
5) The power of liveness
I draw on the focus group discussions to show how these themes emerged and
were expressed, connecting the emerging themes to the idea that one cannot fully
experience or recall their trauma until it is voiced. I argue that this process of voicing was
enabled by the performance of “Land of Smiles.”
1. Complicating the “victim” narrative
Migrants participants were quick to respond to the trope of victimhood that the musical
sought to trouble. Interestingly, however, their responses to the “victim” label did not
focus on the binary categorizations of agency and oppression that are commonly
associated with the sex work debate.
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When asked about whether they felt victimhood
was an important topic of exploration, rather than grapple with binary categories, the
migrants instead drew from their personal experiences of what it means to be a victim or
an agent:
“It is very good,” remarked one female migrant (FM1), “because in the show, we
are not a victim.”
“I really like Lipoh’s decision,” added FM2. “Emma and Achara, they said to
Lipoh, ‘You’re fine here, even though back in your home is the war, the situation is that
you’re fine. You can be happy here.’ And Lipoh said, ‘No, I need to go back, I need to
work.’ At the end Lipoh is released, and she can go back.”
FM1 and FM2 identified with Lipoh’s refusal to perform victimhood when asked
to do so by the NGO. They appreciated that Lipoh did not accept the NGO’s label, and
identified directly with Lipoh’s experience. Such a perspective on victimhood challenges
the normative discourse of rescue, which paints sex workers as “wounded” or, if
consenting to prostitution, as “criminal” (Doezema, 2001; 2010). The migrants accepted
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It is important to note that none of the migrants who attended the performance reported having
personally worked in the sex industry. It could, however, be hypothesized that some of the
migrant population who attended the performance may have worked as sex workers, either
currently or in the past, but were not willing to admit to this, as sex work in many ethnic minority
populations is stigmatized.
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neither of these tropes. Instead, they appreciated that Lipoh refused to accept the
definition put on her by the NGO, an outsider.
Another male migrant (MM1) discussed the way his impressions of sex workers
and their victimization had changed through watching the musical:
“I began to understand the feelings of women from seeing this musical,” he said.
“In the past I used to treat others, like sex workers, as like – I didn’t want to talk with
them because other people will view me as, you know, as something. But from seeing
this musical, I’m aware that we need to educate each other. I understand the situation of
this woman, from seeing this musical. Because the family situation is difficult. We need a
lot of money, we need a lot of money and the family also needs money – and that’s why
women are pushed to this kind of sex work. So I came to understand the situation.”
Another female migrant (FM3) described the way the musical reflected the
experience of a sex worker she knew, and described the feelings empathy it generated:
“It really raises a lot of awareness about what's happening in the migrant
community. I have a friend whose story is similar to this show. This girl from northern
Shan state was trafficked by her family, and had to work, and was sold to the brothel
house in Bangkok. Later she wanted to go back to her home but she couldn't find an
opportunity to leave the brothel. But her family member was looking for her because they
were going to move to another place as a whole family. After 5 years, one of the men
visited the brothel and found her, and because he feel pity on her and he take care of her -
he take her to her family. But she got HIV/AIDS,” she recalled.
Other migrants responded to the issue of victimization quite differently. Two
migrants, in particular, revealed the importance of revealing the reality of victimhood, by
showcasing the vulnerability of a teenage girl in a precarious migration circumstance:
“In (my) village—(my) village is also the border area with China (and) Kachin
State—there are no teenage girls,” explained FME4. “It is hard to find teenage girls
because as soon as they become teenagers, they drop out of school… They go to China
for work and what they do, we don’t know.”
The moderator then said, “So you’ve all agreed (victimhood is) an important
issue. Why do you think it is an important issue? How important is it, is it right up there
at the top?”
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“The victimhood is very important to spotlight,” noted another migrant, FM5,
“because for example in this show, we talk about the underage of prostitution,” . So there
will be many people underage but maybe they don’t (recognize that about) themselves…
Back in our village…13 or 14-year-old girls, they think they are big girls and that they
can do whatever they want. But by showing this, they will understand…”
Here, FM4 identified with the theme of migration and the dangers that can be
associated with it. She described the dangers of living on the Burma-China border, and
cautions about young women who turn to prostitution to help their families survive. FM5
appreciated the show’s exploration of the dangers of underage sex work, in what she saw
as a message that might help caution young women who have “too much” agency at a
young age, and thus, are vulnerable to exploitation. Both migrants identified with Lipoh’s
precarious status as a migrant in Thailand, recognizing that her vulnerability has
subjected her to having to make difficult choices in the context of her migration.
While it could be argued that these perspectives reinforce normative tropes of
underage sex workers as victims, I suggest that these perspectives, in fact, refute such
tropes precisely because they are being expressed by migrants, rather than Western
advocates. Having attended the performance alongside their NGO employee counterparts,
these migrants were able to engage in a dialogue and offer ideas emerging from their own
experiences. The musical and post-show discussions allowed the migrants to express
what was important to them. In so doing, it served as an intervention, disrupting silences
and interrogating the rhetorical construction of the trafficking “victim” typically
reinforced by Western NGOs.

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Image 5. “Auntie Soon.” Chang Mai Production, December, 2013.

Victimization through a wider lens
In their discussion of victimization, the migrants acknowledged the complexities of the
victim versus agent dilemma explored in the play. However, their discussion also went
beyond this conversation, casting a wider lens on the concept of victimization. When
asked about the issues of victimization that the play brought up, many migrants took the
opportunity to discuss victimization more broadly, citing examples of their own feelings
of being victims as migrants in Thailand, for example, or under the oppressive regime of
the Burmese army.
It is this wider lens, I argue, that exposes the “unrealized trauma” inherent in the
migrants’ experiences. Through linking in to one narrative frame, the migrants began to
explore a host of other narrative frames dealing with similar questions about
victimization and migrant identity. In so doing, they engaged with an even more complex
terrain than the play explicitly presented.
2. The Role of NGOs
A second theme that emerged in the migrant focus group discussions was the role of
NGOs working to curb trafficking and provide assistance to ethnic minority populations
in Burma. As the migrant population who participated in the focus groups was primarily
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Kachin, the question of whether NGOs were doing “enough” to provide aid in ethnic
areas was a front-and-center focus. Indeed, one of the points raised in the musical was
that anti-trafficking NGOs obfuscate the war in Kachin State (as well as other “push
factors” that influence women to migrate from Burma into Thailand) while privileging a
narrative of rescue. When asked whether they thought that NGOs and CBOs focus
enough on the conflict in Burma (as opposed to other issues), one migrant, FM6,
responded:
“Because of the conflicts, more NGO and CBO are focusing more on peace rather
than the trafficking and other issues – women issues. The funders and donors focus more
on the political issues now inside Myanmar. They focus less on the border, and the NGOs
in Burma are not working well, and there is no transparency. But donor wants to provide
only funding through the government. This kind of situation makes it difficult for the
organization working in Chiang Mai. Aung San Suu Kyi, she doesn’t speak much on the
gender issue she more focuses on politics.”
The moderator then asked whether the group felt there is an adequate international
response amongst NGOs and governments to the conflicts going on (in Kachin State).
“Back home, I work with IDPs,” remarked one respondent, MM2. “In my view,”
he said, “we receive 40% of our needed support from the international community, but
60% of our needed support is lacking still. The humanitarian support is not enough.”
Another respondent, MM3, then added his perspective on the issue, explaining, “I
come from the conflict area. People are in difficulty, and the only international support
comes through our government. And there is corruption in the government.”
Here, FM6 explained that in Burma, many NGOs have turned their focus away
from issues of migration in favor of “internal” political issues, such as the ongoing peace
process between ethnic armed groups and the central Burmese government. “Women’s
issues” such as trafficking, she explained, now go under-funded. This change in funding
likely began shortly following Burma’s so-called “reform” process in 2011, in which the
military dictatorship decided to take on a quasi-democratic role. Critics of this process
suggest that while reform has been touted as an ongoing goal by the Burma’s new
government, many problems have, in fact, become exacerbated under these conditions—
not the least of which being the ethnic armed conflict between the Kachin Independence
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Organization and the Burmese military at the government’s behest (see, for example,
Human Rights Watch, 2014; Global Witness 2005; Woods, 2012). FM5 connected the
problems associated with the reform process with the role of NGOs in Burma, suggesting
that NGOs seek to work through the government, which is corrupt, rather than in ways
that directly meet the needs of people on the ground. MM2 added anecdotal evidence
from his own experience, suggesting that NGO—or what he characterized as
“international,” “humanitarian” support—remained well below the level of meeting the
Kachin people’s needs. MM3 explained that he came from the “conflict area” of Kachin
State, in which there are many IDPs struggling to survive. Concurring with FM5’s
assessment, this respondent concluded that government corruption inhibits NGOs from
responding to the needs of the people in appropriate ways.
Such issues were addressed in “Land of Smiles,” through the play’s critique of
anti-trafficking NGOs’ reluctance to focus on “push factors,” such as the war in Kachin
State, in favor of a focus on “raid and rescue” of sex workers in Thailand. In the focus
groups, the migrants seemed not only to concur with this critique, but also to take it a step
further by explaining the dearth of international support for ethnic minorities in Burma.
In essence, they made the connection to their own lives and experiences, and took the
narrative of the musical a step further, explaining that the result of such obfuscation by
anti-trafficking NGOs is an overwhelming lack of NGO presence in their home regions.
3. “Land of Smiles” as an Advocacy Tool
The idea of whether and how the musical might serve as an advocacy tool generated an
enormous amount of discussion in the migrant focus groups. In analyzing these
discussions, three sub-themes emerged. First, migrants overwhelmingly expressed that
the musical could—and should—be used as an advocacy tool to communicate the
realities of the political situation in Burma, as well as the realities of the anti-trafficking
movement, to the global community. Interestingly, the concept of the musical as
advocacy tool did not stop there. The second emerging sub-theme involved migrants’
view of the musical as a potential advocacy tool among migrant communities themselves,
both in and outside of Burma. They discussed the way the musical can help them clarify,
for themselves, the issues that are important to them. In so doing, a fascinating third sub-
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theme emerged: that of the migrants’ awareness of their own traumas, and the musical’s
ability to help them recover these traumas through narrative.
Advocacy to the public
When asked, “What was this musical about?” migrants overwhelmingly pointed to the
conflicts faced by the Kachin in Burma. In this way, the migrants seemed to see the
musical as an advocacy tool for the Kachin people, in that the show communicated the
conflict in a way that resonated with their experience:
“Our people, Kachin people, we have hardship inside Burma and our life is very
hard, difficult, so that is the theme,” said MM4.
MM5 added, “The situation, the political situation in Burma—like Burmese
government and Kachin people, and also like Burmanization and like the hardship inside
Kachin state, and of course especially about Kachin women.”
MM6 then noted, “For me, it looks like a documentary film consisting of three
main things: anti-trafficking, the real political situation inside Burma, and the difficulties
of Kachin women in Burma and in Thailand. There are no men, so it is women
empowering.”
While MM6 identified anti-trafficking as a main theme of the musical, most of the
migrants’ responses reflected that of MM4 and MM5, focusing on the political situation
in Burma and its effect on Kachin people, especially women. This identification set the
tone of the discussion that followed, as to whether and how the musical could serve as an
advocacy tool to raise awareness about the issues raised in the show. Interestingly,
Thailand’s anti-trafficking policy was never identified as a main theme, and advocacy for
sex workers was not discussed. Instead, as discussed below, the migrants primarily
focused on the musical’s potential to raise awareness in migrant communities,
particularly in Burma, and to unearth truths within the migrants’ own personal
experiences.
Advocacy within migrant communities
Several migrants felt that the musical reflected important truths that the broader migrant
community would benefit from engaging with.
When asked who they felt the musical should be performed for, MM7 responded,
“It should be performed for the domestic housewives or domestic house workers.”
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“And also the men,” added another, MM8. “For the men is the carpenter.”
Here, MM7 and MM8 suggested that the musical be performed for members of
ethnic minority migrant communities other than sex workers. These respondents
identified “domestic housewives/ house workers” and “men/ carpenter” as potential
audiences for whom the play could prove beneficial. As many anti-trafficking NGOs and
CBOs have documented, these populations in Thailand are at high risk of labor
exploitation (see Global Alliance Against Trafficking in Women [GAATW], 2010; US
Department of State, 2010). Interestingly, the migrants did not identify sex workers as
another suitable migrant population for whom the musical could be beneficial. It is
unclear as to why this sub-group was not identified: perhaps stigma associated with sex
work prevented the migrants from openly suggesting that this population watch the show.
However, what is interesting is that in their identification of domestic laborers and
construction workers, the migrants (perhaps unknowingly) seemed to concur with
critiques of the anti-trafficking movement’s overwhelming focus on sex trafficking over
that of labor trafficking. As pro-rights groups have explained, labor trafficking in
Thailand is a much larger problem than sex trafficking, particularly in the domestic labor
and construction work sectors (GAATW, 2010). Likely not attuned to the policy and
academic debate, the migrants nevertheless pointed to these very sectors as being ideal
audience members for the musical.
I suggest that this response illustrates that the migrants saw a commonality
between the experience of Lipoh, a sex worker, and other types of precarious labor
experiences. In this way, the migrants did not seem to be stigmatizing sex work but, on
the contrary, pointing to commonalities that many migrants—including sex workers—
share. The suggestion of showing the musical to these populations suggests that the show
had a unifying effect on the migrants who attended the performance—whether or not they
were responding to stigmatization of sex work by not suggesting it be shown to sex
workers, the fact that they felt it could be used as a way to empower those in other
precarious labor situations illustrates the way the performance served an empowering and
community-building function.
In addition, many migrants suggested that the musical be staged in Burma, both
for members of the Kachin community and others:
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“I think it would be very good if we show it in Burma,” said MM9.
When asked what they thought the reaction in Burma would be, FM7 commented,
“In Rangoon there are a lot of Kachin people so in the Kachin community it would be
good but because there are a lot of Burmese people, and the Burma Army, it would be a
little uncomfortable.”
MM10 then elaborated, saying, “This show reflects for me that we all must
realize—especially Kachin people—we all must realize ourselves about our situation, our
real situation, and how our women are facing this trafficking and working situation in
other countries. So we need to try harder.”
These respondents suggested that the musical could serve as an advocacy tool
within Burma, particularly among Kachin and non-Kachin populations in Rangoon. Such
a response highlights the migrants’ awareness of the discrepancies in awareness between
citizens in Rangoon—the nation’s capital, and those living in the ethnic armed areas,
such as Kachin State. Interestingly, however, as MM10 reflected, the musical’s potential
as an advocacy tool not only relates to outreach within migrant and Burma-centered
communities, but also to Kachin people themselves. MM10 suggested that above all, the
musical could serve as a kind of reminder to the Kachin people about the realities they
face, and a way to open eyes about the dangers Kachin migrants face in Thailand and
elsewhere. Such awareness, MM10 seemed to suggest, is paramount to the social health
of the Kachin people.
Self-advocacy: Expressing unconscious trauma narratives
In discussing the ways that the musical could be used to communicate Burma’s political
situation to the outside world and generate awareness within migrant communities, a
fascinating additional theme emerged: the need, on the part of the migrants, to embrace
and communicate trauma to the self. As Caruth (1996) articulated, the “voice”—that is,
the witnessing mechanism of truth—should be thought of as something other than the
human subject, or the self. Traumatic experience is “not only…the enigma of a human
agent’s repeated and unknowing acts but also as the enigma of the otherness of a human
voice that cries out from the wound” (p. 3). This voice itself, she suggested,
communicates a truth that the human cannot fully know.
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In reflecting on the musical, several migrants engaged not only with the
“conscious” trauma narratives explored in the musical—that is, the stories of Lipoh, Soon
Nu, Lipoh’s mother, Nono and the other migrants’ depicted in the musical—but also with
what I will call “unconscious trauma narratives”—that is, narratives of traumatic
experience that were not explicitly given voice through the musical, but which, I suggest,
the act of witnessing the musical allowed to come to the fore.
Examples of these unconscious trauma narratives can be seen in participants who
reflected on their emotional responses to the show, as well as the personal experiences
that the show propelled them to remember:
“I felt like crying when I saw the show and then I wished I could,” noted MM11. “I hope
this musical can be shown to other groups in the future.”
“What made you feel like crying?” The moderator asked.
“I felt that it reflects the reality, the real situation that we have,” elaborated
MM11. “That’s why I felt like crying. And the actors are also very good,” he added.
FM12 then reflected on her emotional response to the performance, saying, “At
first I didn’t understand that well, in the beginning, I didn’t know what was going on. But
in the middle I began to understand and I felt like crying – because it reflects our
situation and the political background which affect the lives of women. Also staying
inside Burma, or whether you come to take a job in Chiang Mai, but we cannot stay
without being fined, and we still have hard life in Chiang Mai. This makes me cry,” she
said.
Here, KMM11 discussed its explicit representation of actual events in Burma,
while KFM12 discussed her own traumatic experience being a migrant in Chiang Mai.
FM12 explained that many migrants living in Chiang Mai are fined, and live a hard life
day to day. While the musical did not explicitly dramatize such experiences, this migrant
was able to relate her own experience to the questions and issues raised in the show. I
suggest that in this way, the migrants were able to give voice to an unconscious trauma
event. While watching the show, KFM8 began to recognize her own experiences, and
“felt like crying,” for she had been given a narrative “starting point” on which she could
allow her own narrative to emerge.
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Another example of the emergence of unconscious trauma narratives can be seen
in the narrative of FM13:
“When I was younger,” she began, “the Burma military – when they were at the
church, they collect the young people to be recruited as porters, and then some were
taken by the military leaders as – you know, they wanted post-wife. You know, so this
kind of situation I experienced when I was young. And we also have to become the
porters, and we were recruited as porters and those who are very heavy we have to carry
for them. And they make us run. They put the piece, very heavy, over our heads. If there
is any prospect of losing work, they will kill the porters. We also have to carry things –
the ration and food for ourselves and we also have to carry like weapons and other things
for the soldiers,” she recalled.
“Is this the Burmese army?” Clarified the moderator.
“Yes, the Burmese army,” replied FM13. “They also hit us if we cannot work
well, or work slowly.”
FRM13’s recollection illustrates that while many migrants responded to the
explicit themes addressed in the musical, and suggested that it be used to foster advocacy
and dialogue within the migrant community, other migrants responded to the musical by
engaging with seemingly unrelated traumatic events, memories and experiences. FM13,
unprompted, began to narrate her experience with portering—a circumstance of brutal
forced labor at the hands of the Burma army. While the musical did not explicitly discuss
portering in detail,
24
this migrant was moved to share her own experience with being
forced to porter. In so doing, she was able to give voice to a traumatic event that required
the process of witnessing discussed by Watkins and Shuman, in order that it could be
processed, and understood. As I will discuss in greater length in Chapter 14, , these and
other seemingly “unrelated” narrative ties point to the musical’s utility as a platform for
dialogue, and a technique for fostering recollection, mourning, and the transformation
from bystander to witness.
Other participants recalled similar related trauma events. Here, we see how some
were moved to discuss the reality of life as a migrant in Chiang Mai, and the daily
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In one scene in the musical, Lipoh tells Emma that her uncle was “made to be a porter, carrying
100 pounds on his back.”
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struggles associated with different types of work—domestic labor, construction work,
and other vocations:
“Police, when they check our ID cards, they always take more money from the
Burmese workers,” FM12 said. “They separate the many groups, and if you are Burman,
then you get this certain kind of identity card. You are already discriminated against.”
FM13 added, “At first they will make the ID cards for you, but if we cannot work
well, or if we are sick, they won’t give back the ID cards. This makes it very difficult to
work.”
Here, FM12 ad FM13 discuss the difficulty of life as a migrant in Chiang Mai.
They explain that migrants must possess ID cards that are checked by Thai authorities
while on the job. If their work is for any reason deemed inadequate, these participants
explained, the authorities will arbitrarily confiscate their ID cards, in effect rendering
them powerless and without rights in the face of the Thai State. Again, we see how the
musical served as a vehicle for fostering dialogue about trauma events that, while
seemingly tangential to the story of the show, are nevertheless important sites of conflict
and trauma in the lives of many migrants.
I am not suggesting that these memories, or narratives, were unknown or went
unspoken before the migrants watched the musical. That information goes beyond the
scope of this study. What I am suggesting, however, is that witnessing the narrative
explored in the musical—the story of migrant women’s traumatic experiences in Burma
and in Thailand-- allowed the migrants to then explore other trauma events that were
important and meaningful to them in the context of the focus groups. The act of
witnessing and participating in the theatrical event created inroads—new pathways for
dialogue about the broader subject of trauma. In so doing, these events were “given
voice” in a new way, one which linked them to the reality of trauma. As Caruth (1996)
explained, a person who suffers trauma and the actual trauma, or wound, are not the
same. Often the person is unable to experience the wound until it is voiced. I am
suggesting, then, that it was not that these memories of experiences were repressed or
buried, but that they were not “voiced” in the context of the recognition that they were
wounds. As Caruth explained, it is not until the traumatic event, or wound, is given voice
that it can be seen for what it really is.
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Image 6. “Nono and Lipoh in the Brothel.” Chiang Mai Production, December,
2013.

4. Representation and Authenticity
Many of the respondents expressed surprise and happiness at the fact that aspects of
Kachin culture were being portrayed onstage. Though seemingly simple, this aspect of
the production nevertheless generated a great deal of positive emotional response among
the participants.
When asked to describe their “first impressions” of the musical, FM14 replied, “I
am very impressed about all the Kachin traditional clothing and materials are used, and
also with the real information from inside Burma, our current situation.”
FM15 added, “When they sing the Kachin hymn, Christmas hymn, they sing it in
Kachin and the language is very clear and understandable.”
FM16 then remarked, “I thank a lot to the show, because it is advocating to the
other communities because Kachin…. actually Kachin is a very small tribe that we
couldn’t… even though we wanted to tell about our situation to others we couldn’t’… we
don’t know how to do. It is very difficult for us. But it is very impressive,” he said.
I suggest that in the DAR model, it is not by realizing a great truth and then
expressing it dramatically that change occurs; rather, it is through dramatic expression
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that realization, and in turn, transformation, occurs. In these excerpts, respondents
realized that their worlds were being represented. Through this act of representation, they
were, in essence, being supported by a community of artists—people from the other side
of the world who they had never met. The act of being sympathetically “known” by the
world of the “other” allowed them to be freed from an assumed isolation—and realize
that support was available to them in ways they might have never imagined possible.
5. The power of Liveness
The final main theme that emerged in the migrant focus group discussions involved the
idea of the power of live theater as a vehicle for communicating truth. Many of the
migrants expressed that speaking and singing real truths made them feel stronger and
literally more alive. This has profound implications in the face of actual danger—threat—
to one’s existence.
“The actors seemed to feel the story and they also acted really well and this is
very good for public awareness,” suggested MM12. “I also felt that I need to make
awareness to other people,” he added.
MM13 remarked, “All the actresses, they sing very good. I really like the voices.
The good voices make the show more alive. I like that.”
Finally, KFM17 added, “What I like is that Emma finally released Lipoh, and
finally increased her position by singing what her feelings are. That really impressed
me,” she said.
Conclusion
As Watkins and Shulman (2008) explained, the arts provide space for witnessing, and
making sense of, our realities. It is through this process of witnessing that the “voices” of
our wounds can be expressed, and through this expression, realized. The responses of the
migrants who attended the performance reflect this process of public expression. Their
discussions, both of the musical’s explicit content as well as the unconscious trauma
events that came to the fore reflect the power of narratives in the healing process. As I
will discuss in the chapters that follow, by allowing the voice to cry out through the
wound, to use Caruth’s (1996) imagery, the migrants began to break free from the
anasemic effects of the unknown parts of the psyche that dwell in trauma. The narrative
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of the musical served as a kind of anchor—a symbolic starting point for the voices of
other wounds to be expressed, witnessed, and healed.

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Chapter 12
Findings:
Artist Narratives

“We’re going home on Monday and I’m having these feelings of… I don’t know
who I am once I go back. Because I knew this was going to happen. If I really
allow myself to take it in. I ran into Erin this morning and I was like, ‘You already
know this but you’ve opened up this world that I could have just never dreamed
possible.’ That means something. That’s not just some superficial… You know, if I
never do a job again, maybe I will become a humanitarian. I don’t know. I just
don’t know, but I’ve been changed.”!
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- Female Artist, Chiang Mai, Thailand, December 2013

In her discussion of liminality, Shulman described this “in between” psychological state
as a “dangerous passage,” infused with “symbolic loss” (class lecture, 2011). In a liminal
psychological space, we know what our old ideals are, but because of the “rupture” that’s
taken place in our consciousness, we are no longer able to believe those ideals. This type
of loss, she explained, is often very painful. The certainty—what Jill Dolan (2005) would
refer to as “fixidity” with which we have been approaching our lives—is now gone.
Liminal space, therefore, is a precarious space, but one with the potential to ignite great
healing.
Liminality arises in the DAR method, as real and dramatic events and material
collide. As a testimonial practice, theater bears witness to the subjective experiences of
characters who sing what can’t be spoken (Watkins and Shulman, 2008). It asks that
actors step outside the certainty of their identities and inhabit the needs, desires, fears and
losses of the characters they portray. As an aspect of DAR, the theatrical process
necessitates that actors embrace liminality as they engage with the communities on which
the dramatic material is centered.
According to Shulman, liminality and its counterpoint state, rupture, go hand in
hand. “Rupture” refers to a state in which old patterns, worldviews and views of the self
no longer hold true (personal communication, Shulman, 2011). When we encounter a
rupture in our lives, we are jolted into awareness, suddenly seeing our old beliefs and
thought patterns as a mirage of consciousness. This state goes hand in hand with Friere’s
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(1993) “conscientization”—the attainment of awareness of the political and social
structures that are playing out not only in our lives, but in our very thoughts.
In the artist focus group that followed the performances, the actors, stage crew
and designers discussed their experiences working on “Land of Smiles” in the context of
their interactions with participating migrants from Burma. Within this discussion, six
main narrative themes emerged:
1. “I now see Thailand/ trafficking/ sex work through a new lens” (Discovery
narrative)
2. “I no longer know where performance ends and life begins” (Liminality
narrative)
3. “I want my work as an artist to serve a higher purpose” (Service Narrative)
4. “I can’t go back to who I was before” (Rupturing Narrative)
5. “I want to become more aware of the political situation in Burma” (Political
Consciousness Narrative)
6. “Theatre has the power to heal” (Healing Narrative)
1. “I now see Thailand/ trafficking, sex work through a new lens” (Discovery
Narrative)
The responses of the artists revealed a discovery narrative; that is, a change in perception
of the issues presented in the show. Interestingly, as the responses below reveal, the Los
Angeles-based artists approached this change in perception as occurring through their
relationship to the characters they portrayed, whereas the Chiang Mai-based artists
described experiencing a change in relation to real people in their communities.
“Once you actually began working on the show,” asked the moderator, “did your
impressions of the subject matter, did they change?”
“Well yeah, replied Female LA-based Artist 1 (LA1). “ I first read the script at
jury duty and when I read it the first time when I got to the end I was like “wait she lets
her go?” I was really confused and conflicted and like, that’s weird. I don’t know if I
identified if there was a bad guy or a good guy, just that that’s odd that (Emma’s) not
trying to get this little girl out of the life she’s in, she’s just letting her go.”
Here, FLA1 explained that in first reading the script while in Los Angeles, she
was confused by the plot twist at the end of the story, in which Emma frees Lipoh from
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the Immigration Detention Center (IDC) in which she has been held throughout the play.
FLA1 explained that in reading the script, she did not understand why Emma made this
choice, as her own views about trafficking and underage sex work were still dictating her
view of the story. As this actor expressed later in the focus group, it was not until she
began digging into the rehearsal process in Thailand and engaging with the migrant
women from Burma, that she truly understood Emma’s reason behind setting Lipoh free.
This actor’s response reveals the power of participation in the DAR process: by
inhabiting the “world” of the play, she was able to go beyond simply playing a role, and
more authentically understand the choices of the character she portrayed.
Similarly, Female Los Angeles-based Artist 2 (FLA2) described a process of
discovering the play’s “world” through the characters she portrayed:
“I like the themes of the play being grey and life is not black and white,” she
remarked. “I mean you can see the different perspectives of Achara’s character wanting
to stop people one at a time (from migrating) and follow the rule of law and having some
sort of guideline in order to achieve the goal of ending trafficking. And then, you know,
the missionaries perspective as well. It’s not just simple bad guy and good guy. And then
certainly the complexities of Lipoh’s choices and what they have to do to fight for their
people and for their survival.”
“Did you know about that before you came into the play?” The moderator asked.
“I mean, I knew about it from doing the show (in Los Angeles),” FLA2 went on,
“but it didn’t’ really hit me as much until I started approaching this character (of Soon
Nu). I didn’t play Soon Nu before, so even just working the Kachin Women are Proud
and Strong number, just going through beat by beat, it’s such an epic song of the life that
they had before, and what their life is like now in war-torn Burma, and the choices they
have to make and the sacrifices they have to make. Even though I kind of knew it
intellectually, it didn’t hit me emotionally until working on it this time around.”
Here, the participant described the process of discovering Thailand’s anti-
trafficking landscape, as well as the realities faced by migrants from war-torn Burma,
through her work with the two characters in the play who represent these themes. FLA2
explained that while she intellectually understood the hardships such migrants faced
while playing the role of Achara in Los Angeles, it wasn’t until she came to Thailand and
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worked on the Soon Nu character that the play’s themes really hit home. Both actors
approached their discoveries through the lens of character—by understanding the
difficulties their characters faced, their views of the “world” of the play—issues related to
Thailand, Burma, sex work and migration—were transformed.
Interestingly, the Chiang Mai based artists’ responses revealed a more complex
relationship to character and discovery of the world of the play. While they, too,
discussed the way the play had changed their views of Thailand, sex work and
trafficking, this process also involved navigating pre-existing relationships with members
of the community who were either similar, or different, from the characters in the play.
As one Female Chiang Mai-based Artist (FCA1) explained,
“I have Christian Missionary friends and so I sort of knew their complexities and
conflicting values (going into the play) and basically they want to do good. And so I can
kind of deal with all the tensions that they are carrying within them. But I also know
people who are Thai feminist NGO workers and they have the values that Achara does.
And so while I was trying to embody this role and was working with both Erin and Rick
and they were trying to have me fill out the role of Achara, it actually made me more
compassionate for what people who are Thai feminist NGO workers might be doing, and
their single mindedness about, you know, the law is paramount. So yeah, I didn’t
understand that side, the missionary side. Now I can understand that more,” she
concluded.
Additionally, another Female Chiang Mai-based Artist (FCA2) elaborated on a
similar process of discovery through her participation in the play coupled with her
reflection on members of her community in Thailand:
“I have to admit before I moved to Thailand the whole trafficking thing, I mean I
knew nothing about sex workers before I came here. And trafficking I only knew from
movies. So I mean, I was pretty naïve in a lot of ways. And even after I moved here I
kind of got to know a little bit. I have a friend who used to work for Empower and she
took me to one of the bars and introduced me to the ladies there, and I think that was the
first time I had ever realized there was a difference. And I mean, just seeing this play and
being a part of this I think… Every time I listen to the words I’m like, ‘Oh, I’m getting it,
I’m getting it.’ I mean, I’m a Christian, but I’m not a missionary. But I have a lot of
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friends who are, and I kind of understand why they are out to save souls. But I look at it
differently, especially after seeing this play. I realize that it’s not necessarily something
we need to be doing,” FCA2 said.
Finally, a third Female Chiang Mai-based Artist (FCA3) expressed a similar
narrative of discovery:
“Living here in Chiang Mai is a unique experience,” she explained. “Because I
know NGO workers, I know missionaries, I’ve been an NGO worker, I know that people
in the audience. They have lived a lot of what they are seeing. And they know the
situation, some know it’s there and choose not to find out about it. So I think it is very
unique to have this here for folks that are in the audience.”
This respondent expressed a narrative of discovery not for herself, but for
members of an audience that, she perceived, already knew about these issues but may
have been able, through watching the play, to see them in a new way. Evoking the
Western characters of missionary and NGO worker, this participant expressed the value
in reflecting the characters back to an audience that embodies these roles every day. Her
response reflected her belief that the audience, too, may be able to make discoveries
about the themes of the play, and see their “world” in a new way.
Image 7. “Kachin Women are Proud and Strong.” Chiang Mai Production,
December, 2013.

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2. “I no longer know where performance ends and life begins” (Liminality
Narrative)
The state of liminality, that “in between” space in which the primary aspects of the DAR
method—art and life—intersect, was expressed by many respondents in response to the
question, “What was your impression of the migrant women?” In the focus group
discussion, the artists were asked to reflect on their experiences interacting with the
migrant women. Their responses underscore a tension, as they navigated the space of
liminality—that “in between” space in which art and life—the primary aspects of the
DAR method—intersect.
“I was just humbled to be there,” reflected one Female LA-based Artist (FLA3).
“The thing is, I think theater is really powerful and has it’s purpose, but I’m in awe of the
work that they’re doing and their background and the courage that they have to fight for
their rights and for their voice,” she said. “My sister does a lot of social justice work and
she’s volunteering in the Philippines right now and whenever I hear what she does it’s
always very humbling. She’s like, you know, ‘We hiked six hours up to this village in the
Philippines so we could bring them food,’ and I’m like, ‘Oh, I’m trying to get off book
for this show.’ I mean it is so humbling. And not to diminish the work that we do as
artists, and the fact that we get to tell this story and start a dialogue and try to you know,
encourage awareness, but it is… it’s very humbling just to even spend the day with them.
And the fact that a bunch of them are going to be here tomorrow is freaking me out.”
In his discussion of Marxist theater, Boal (1979) explained that Brecht sought to
expose the social, economic and political forces that underscore what he saw as character
“objects.” In order to discover the truth about such characters, he suggested, artists must
enter the “real world” rather than relegate themselves to the world of the stage.
According to Boal, “Brecht contends that the popular artist must abandon the downtown
stages and go to the neighborhoods, because only there will he find people who are truly
interested in changing society,” (p. 105).
Participatory practice, according to the tenets conceptualized by Watkins and
Shulman (2008), also asks that artists abandon the idea that they exist purely to perform
an interpretive, or aesthetic function. As this actor expressed, she felt that she had moved
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beyond just “doing a show.” In performing the musical in Thailand and interacting with
the migrant women from Burma, life and art had begun to merge in new ways.
Such a complete entry into liminality is, as Shulman noted, often troubling, as it
evokes an uncertainty as to the boundaries of one’s identity (personal communication,
2011). Old views of the self are exposed as no longer relevant, and the subject is forced
to confront the unknown spaces of possible self. For an actor who has been accustomed
to just “doing a show,” such entry into liminality can have profoundly rupturing effects.
Indeed, when asked to compare their experiences of performing the musical in Los
Angeles and Chiang Mai, several artists expressed undergoing such a rupture:
“For me,” noted FLA4, “yeah, it is completely different. I want to tell the story as
authentically as I can. I know it is still a musical, I know it is still a story. I just want to
do the story justice, I want to tell it honestly. And the reason it is different is because we
are so close to it here. We have seen their faces and have been touched by the situation
here and it’s close, you know, we are right here.”
FLA5 added, “When we did the workshop (in Los Angeles), even though we
knew that it was a true story or inspired by real people, there was still a distance. It was
still like, ‘This is a play. I’m telling a story,’ you know, the safety that [FLA2] talks
about. It was still an emotional piece in the U.S. but to come here and to meet the
people… It’s more real than anything that I could have imagined.”
The impact of the relationship between art and life was felt full-force by these
actors, who expressed being profoundly moved by the “realness” of the play in Thailand.
These artists, who had performed the play in a reading series in Los Angeles, seemed to
feel a kind of “awakening” in bringing the show to the communities on which the story
was based. This process of performing the artistic work before bringing the work into the
community and subsequently making discoveries about the community upon which it is
based, reflects the inherently liminal and reflexive nature of the DAR method. My
conception is not simply of a linear method in which a researcher-artist makes a
discovery about the world, then transforms that discovery into an art. Rather, as we noted
earlier, in DAR it is the artistic process itself that fuels further discovery. As these artists
expressed, it was the process of performing the play in Los Angeles and then Thailand
that led them to making their own discoveries about the real world. The DAR process,
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then, does not stop with the artistic product; rather, art becomes another step—a
vehicle—for communicating new discoveries about the outer world, as well as the self.
Along these lines, several actors expressed similar feelings of liminality when
asked to reflect on the aspects of the production that were most challenging.
FLA6 remarked, “I think there were a couple difficulties: the feeling of not
wanting to let down the people whose story we are telling, wanting to serve the piece and
do justice, and then on a personal level there is overcoming all the things you thought
were true, overcoming your own insecurities, like battling your own demons while you’re
looking in the face at everybody else’s.”
“You know,” added FLA7, “the day before we opened I went up on a line, and I
was like, ‘What am I doing?’ And just—‘Here we go, I hope it works!’ And that it all
came together, the tech, and everything, it came out beautifully, it’s simple and lovely
and tells the story, and the audience gets it. And the Powerpoint happened, and I mean
they were up ‘til three o’clock in the morning most nights putting that together and
formatting it, and just everything that needed to be done just seemed so daunting. And the
fact that it came together is so satisfying. Like, we did it, you know? And sometimes I
think about the people that we’re singing about and talking about, they ran through the
jungles for their lives. (So) we can get off book. We can put this together,” she said.
Here, FLA6 and FLA7 expressed their desire to “do justice” to the piece for the
people in the audience whose lives the piece reflected. FLA6 expressed the personal
challenges of overcoming “insecurities” and “demons,” while FLA7 discussed her
uncertainty as to whether the company could pull together a simple, lovely performance
that would express the story to the audience. The satisfaction of working through these
demons, insecurities and uncertainties, in the context of the “real” world in which the
musical lives, was extremely gratifying to both artists. FLA7 expressed that if the women
in the audience could “run through the jungles for their lives” she could certainly take on
the challenges related to performing a play. Here, again, liminality was expressed as
artists comprehended the merging of art and life—the production process, itself, became
a touchstone, a focal point for overcoming challenges that were not separate from those
of the migrant women for whom the play was performed. Rather, the artists embraced
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these challenges as aspects of reality: the production process became a mirror for coping
with the ruptures of discovery these artists were experiencing.
As Jill Dolan explained, myths too, evoke this state of liminality. It is useful for
an audience to inhabit the potent space between the real and the fictitious, as occupying
this space allows us to synthesize events internally, respond differently to the narratives
we have been given, and feel things we otherwise wouldn’t (Dolan, 2005, p. 139). In
embracing the concept of liminality, “Land of Smiles” offered the artists a “clearing,” a
way of holding their own feelings of ambiguity, uncertainty, and the new questions about
their roles and identities that the production process instilled.
3. “I want my work as an artist to serve a higher purpose” (Service Narrative)
The third narrative theme emerging from the artist focus groups was the service narrative.
In this narrative, artists expressed a desire that their work serve a greater purpose. This
narrative evoked similar emotional content as the liminality narrative; however, present
here was not so much the tension between art and life, but rather, an active desire to fuse
these two spheres. In this way, the service narrative encapsulates a main tenet of DAR
method: the awareness that one’s work as an artist can serve a political, social and even
spiritual role.
When asked to reflect on their experiences in the production, Female LA-based
artist (FLA8) and Female LA-based Artists 9 and 10 (FLA9 and FLA10) expressed their
desire to be of service:
“Well, I guess it has just been a great honor,” started FLA8. “I was really excited
when Erin said, ‘come along’ and I thought ‘ok, what am I gonna do?’ And it started out
as one thing and it got to be huge, my participation, and I just feel, it’s amazing to be
showing the show to people who are the marginalized, in Thailand, and also people to
have awareness about theses issues. I feel there is an awakening going on with this show.
It is astounding. You were all so open throughout everything, to everything to everybody
and every curve and every wave. That is a gift, to bring together people from so many
countries in one show.”
FLA9 added, “I feel like I am in service to something way bigger than myself. It
sounds so melodramatic but whenever I would think about it, like it was getting closer it
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was getting closer, it was almost like I couldn’t think about it because I knew when I
came here it was going to change my life.”
“Did you have any apprehension or misgivings about doing the show in
Thailand?” The moderator asked.
FLA10 remarked, “When we did the Theater of the Oppressed workshop with the
Kachin interns I was just like, ‘I hope I have something to offer, I hope I have something
to say.’ That was my apprehension, knowing that they had been through so much and I’m
coming, you know, coming from LA... The humility involved and wanting to be open to
learning and to hearing their stories.”

Image 8. “Land of Smiles Artists and Kachin Interns” Chiang Mai, December, 2013.

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4. “I can’t go back to who I was before” (Rupturing Narrative)
When asked to describe their feelings about the production, several artists expressed
experiencing a sense of rupture:
“It’s been this emotional ‘ugh,’ explained, FLA11, “like everything has just
flooded out. And it’s like, I feel tired and disoriented, and I feel like I don’t know who
I’m going to be when I get home.”
“We all are emotionally drained at the end of these shows,” added FLA12. “I
mean, most of us are crying, most of us are just overwhelmed by the message at the very
end. It’s unbelievable.”
Additionally, artists expressed a sense of rupture in response to their participation
in the Theatre of the Oppressed workshop with the migrant women from KWAT.
FLA13 noted, “For me I think the most surprising thing was the unifying aspect,
the fact that as we’re playing these games and we can’t communicate directly with one
another we still felt just like people. And that’s when, for me, something clicked. And I
called my mom and I called my boyfriend and I was like, ‘I just don’t think I’ll be the
same,’ because all of a sudden that distance and that safety that I felt before… suddenly
I’m like, ‘you’re just like me!’”
“Right,” agreed FLA14, “they’re still being bombed.”
“And they’re still being… one girl was like, ‘my village isn’t there anymore,’
added FLA15. “And we’re just like, ‘What?’ I’m just in awe. It’s amazing how quickly
your heart just goes, ‘I treasure you for what you’re doing here.’ And now I’ll just be
praying always for the Kachin boy whose hand I’m holding, like, ‘I hope that you’ll be
ok.’ And before it was safe because I didn’t know what he looked like.”
Here, FLA13 expressed a profound sense of personal change in relationship to her
interactions with the migrants from KWAT. Similar in some ways to the liminality
narrative, she expressed apprehension about not knowing who she would be when she
returned home. Here we see how a state of liminality, of inhabiting the realities of both
art and life at the same time, gives way to a sense of breaking from past notions of
identity, from old scripts used to cement a certain illusion of security about the world. In
realizing that “the Kachin boy whose hand I’m holding” was not just a statistic or an
abstraction, but a real person “just like me,” AFLA13 was confronted with a kind of
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breakthrough about the state of the world, and her place within it. She no longer saw
herself as the same person she was before she began her work on the project. Rather, she
began to see her “previous” self as illusory.
Such a disjointed sense of identity, what Shulman referred to as the “profound
loss” of a ruptured state (personal communication, Shulman, October, 2011), is an
inherent part of the DAR method. The merging of life and art enforces a change to take
place within the artist-researcher, thereby reinforcing the participatory nature of the
research endeavor, as well as the concept of artist-as-subject. I note that the state of
rupture inherent to the DAR method also stands in sharp contrast to positivist research
endeavors, in which researcher (and in the case of Entertainment-Education, artists who
are not thought of a researchers) is thought to remain static, detached, in essence “above”
his or her subjects of study. In DAR, by contrast, it is the researchers themselves—in this
case the artist-researchers—who must undergo a transformation in order for the project to
be a success.

Image 9. “Theatre of the Oppressed Workshop.” Chiang Mai, December, 2013.

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5. “I want to be more aware of the political situation in Burma” (Political
Consciousness Narrative)
Several artists agreed that the musical can and should be used as a tool for political
advocacy. When asked to clarify what they believed the show was advocating, however,
debate rippled through the group.
“Yeah, but what are we advocating here?” Asked one Male Artist (MCA1).
“What we need to advocate is how do we support these people so that their young women
don’t have to be prostitutes to defend their villages.”
“You mean going back to the root causes?” Clarified the moderator.
FLA16 suggested, “I think what this play advocates is to not to believe one story
you’ve been given, and to maybe, you know, shake people up about what they think is
the story.”
FCA4 then responded, “I think the issues are so universal. It’s not just about
Thailand and Burma, it’s about the United States, it’s about Europe, it’s about the issues,
about thinking no matter who you are that you know best. And you think you’re being
sensitive when you really haven’t done the research.”
At this point, FLA17 noted that she had initially been troubled by the ending of
the musical “…because the Kachin army is being supported literally on the backs of their
young women, and there’s no other source of income. And so that leads me to wonder
what the geopolitical scheme of things is? If the reason they are being driven off their
land by the junta up until now, or even now, is because they are sitting on resources
minerals, timber, coal…”
“Yeah, and they don’t have access to the resources because they are not Burmese,
they are not Thai, they are hill tribe and they are marginalized,” added FLA18. “They are
people without a country. So they don’t have any resources. Like when Soon Nu sings,
‘I’m not Burman, I’m not Thai, I’m nameless, I’m a ghost.’”
FCA5 then added, “You don’t hear about this in the States. You don’t hear about
what’s going on in Burma. Most people don’t even know who Aung San Suu Kyi is. I
would say that 99% don’t know who she is.”
In his “poetics,” Boal (1979) theorized that while an idealist theatre arouses
feelings, a Marxist theater incites action (p. 106). As the focus group responses indicate,
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many artists felt passionate about the utility of the production as a tool for political
advocacy. Many were also left wanting to better understand the root causes, or “push
factors” which underscore the process by which women from Burma migrate and are
trafficked into Thailand. Agreeing that the musical could be used as an advocacy tool to
raise awareness about these processes, one artist then raised the important question
“What are we advocating for?” The artists then began debating their views on the subject
matter of the play as well as its controversial ending, in which Lipoh crosses the river
holding a gun above her head, presumably preparing to return to Kachin State as a rebel
fighter. Artists expressed conflict over this ending, and were quick to suggest that the
play should not be used as an advocacy tool to promote fighting or sex work, but rather,
eradication of root causes of the conflict in Kachin State. Unlike the policies of the anti-
trafficking NGOs that attempt to curb trafficking through smart raids, the artists
understood the play’s message of needing to more deeply analyze the factors that lead to
trafficking and irregular migration, and address the issue according to the logic of those
root causes, rather than their “end” results.
The artists also pointed to statelessness and land resource management as root
causes for the conflict in Kachin State. One artist expressed frustration that people in the
United States know very little, if anything, about Burma. Drawing on the issues raised in
the production as well as on their own discoveries about Burma’s political situation, the
artists expressed a desire to take action around these issues, as well as learn more.
6. “Theatre has the power to heal” (Healing Narrative)
The final narrative that emerged in the artist focus group was that of the healing narrative.
In this narrative, artists described the power of theater and music to evoke an emotional
response in audiences as well as in themselves. When asked what sort of challenges they
had to overcome as artists, respondent described the emotional nature of their connection
with the audiences, as well as with the roles they played, and described the challenge of
being emotionally invested in the dramatic and musical material of the piece:
“I mean just emotionally Soon Nu is a powerhouse of a role,” said FLA17. “Her
solo is like a five-act play in one song. So that is just emotionally challenging and
emotionally draining.”
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“For me, I felt the first night just like, super relieved when people started
clapping,” noted FLA18. “Not that I thought the production was bad, but the subject
matter is clearly volatile. And you’re just like, are they gonna hate us are they gonna like
us? Are they gonna swallow it or are they gonna spit it back out? And to see them stand,
it was overcoming. I thought I was going to cry right there before bowing. I was like,
‘Keep it together, cry after.’”
FLA19 added, “When I thought of coming to Thailand, I wouldn’t listen to the
music on purpose. Because if I listen to it and I’m open to it, then it just affects me really
deeply. So for me it’s a challenge doing the show because I have to tell the story and I
have to get through it. But it just hits you right at your heart at your core.”
FCA7 then remarked, “All the melodies and all the notes are so emotional, that I
can cry easily on the show stage.”
The artists expressed that the production evoked deep emotions. These emotional
responses, as one artist explained, ultimately led to a sense of communion between artists
and audiences, evoking a state of healing among them all. I suggest that we conceptualize
the healing nature of DAR projects in a different sense than that according to Aristotelian
logic. As Boal asserted, empathy, as an Aristotelian tool, is a “dangerous weapon” in the
arsenal of a dramatist (1979). Empathy, he explained, juxtaposes the universes of the real
and the fictional. This juxtaposition has the effect of encouraging spectators to
incorporate the reality of the fiction portrayed in the dramatic narrative. When a spectator
empathizes with a tragic figure, they will internalize the message of the tragedy—in
essence, heeding the “warning” of the tragic figure and avoiding taking political, critical
action and its devastating social consequences. Clearly, this is not the same logic of
empathy as it plays out in the very political context of DAR.
Furthermore, in contrast to the logic of Aristotelian drama, Boal saw that the
poetics of the oppressed (and, I would add, of DAR), “focuses on the action itself: the
spectator delegates no power to the character (or actor) either to act or to think in his
place; on the contrary, he himself assumes the protagonist role, changes the dramatic
action, tries out solutions, discusses plans for change—in short, trains himself for real
action” (Boal, 1979, p. 122).
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Consistent with this idea, we note how the artists in “Land of Smiles” were so
profoundly struck by the healing and action-oriented nature of participation—rather than
remaining detached spectators, they instead “embodied” the experiences and relationships
evoked in the play. In so doing, the themes of the musical became real to them. They
were no longer “split off” bystanders, disassociated from the events of the dramatic
narrative. As participating subjects, the artists became actively implicated and
empowered.

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Chapter 13
Restorative Justice and Reconciliation:
NGO Subjectivities

“If you come only to help me, you can go back home. But if you consider my struggle as
part of your struggle for survival, then maybe we can work together.”
- Aboriginal woman,
from the People’s Global Action Manifesto (Solnit, 2008, p. 447)

In this chapter I discuss the ways in which the NGO employee participants became more
conscious of their roles in the anti-trafficking “drama,” and in so doing, began to engage
in the process of participation. In contrast to the original interviews, the narratives that
emerged among the NGO employee focus group participants incorporated an acceptance
and engagement with the migrant women not as victims, but as subjects. Normative
conceptions about “otherness” were challenged, rather than reinforced. In so doing, the
subjectivities of the NGO employees were unearthed. The employees critically evaluated
their roles in the industry, and were more willing to openly discuss the challenges they
faced on both personal and professional levels. I also discuss the ways in which
“participatory practice” was achieved through these NGO subjectivities. As a framework,
I focus on two key concepts: restorative justice and reconciliation, which, according to
Watkins and Shulman (2008), represent core tenets of liberation arts.
NGO Employees and Restorative Justice
In the original interviews, NGO employees presented a “rigid” picture of their work,
often creating a binary conceptualization between themselves and the women who their
organizations sought to help. In so doing, they rendered the women passive victims,
while positioning themselves as experts. After viewing the performance, however, the
employees were able to more fluidly discuss the migrant women’s experiences, as well as
their own experiences. They began to view the women as agents in their own life stories,
rather than as objects in need of rescue. In the discussions following the performance,
normative conceptions about “otherness” were challenged, rather than reinforced. In
addition, the employees critically evaluated their roles in the anti-trafficking industry, and
were more wiling to openly discuss the challenges they faced on both personal and
professional levels. The subjects of this discussion, as well as the ways in which issues
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were discussed, reflected a significant contrast to what emerged in the Phase 1
interviews.
The dialogue that took place among the NGO employees evokes the concept of
restorative justice. Restorative justice, according to the tenets of liberation psychology, is
a way of enabling community members who have committed atrocities or otherwise
enabled trauma to occur within the community to acknowledge their own participation in
the injustices that have taken place. As such, this concept fits into Watkins and
Shulman’s liberatory criteria of rupture (2008), which I suggest is also a tenet for
participatory practice. In order for restorative justice to take place, these community
members must go through a process of self-reflection and recognition of the effects their
actions have had. This process is often a painful.
Restorative justice, somewhat in contrast with Frierean notion of
“conscientiziation” (1993) and Boal’s “poetics” (1979), does not situate an antagonist
squarely against a protagonist in the analysis of a trauma event. Rather, it implicates all
members of a community in the trauma event, suggesting that everyone has had a role to
play in enabling, causing, reinforcing or even simply witnessing the trauma event as it
occurred. This notion suggests that despite the common tendency to hold a view of
themselves as agents of “rescue,” NGO employees are, themselves, capable of
reinforcing or perpetuating trauma. In the case of the anti-trafficking movement, the
musical depicted an example of such reinforcement. It was the characters of the NGO
employees who, despite having the best of intentions, kept Lipoh in the IDC against her
will, thereby perpetuating a traumatic situation. Despite seeing themselves as agents of
rescue, the employees in the musical were bystanders, overlooking the needs of the
protagonist while simultaneously imposing a victim identity upon her. The narrative
exposes that even “saviors” can be implicated in the process of a trauma event unfolding.
Looking at a given social context through the lens of restorative justice exposes
the roles we all play, and offers a framework for making amends to those who have been
harmed, as well as to ourselves. In describing the way trauma is unearthed and
communicated in those who have committed atrocities or enabled trauma, Caruth (1996)
explained, “the voice is released through the wound” (p. 3). It is precisely the buried,
unformed aspects of one’s truth that make one experience it as trauma. The lens of
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restorative justice, as a way of “giving voice” to one’s own complicity, “stresses the
importance of critically understanding the local history shared by all members of the
conflict” (Watkins & Shulman, 2008, p. 317). In this way, restorative justice serves as a
profound tool for social unification. It radically suggests that all members of a given
community share experience, that no one is immune to the legacies of trauma, and that
everyone has a role to play in “restoring” the health of the community as a whole.
As Caruth (1996) suggested, “It is always the story of a wound that cries out, that
addresses us in the attempt to tell us of a reality or truth that is not otherwise available”
(p. 4). Restorative justice asks that “oppressors,” too, take part in the process of
witnessing past trauma events in order for healing to take place within a community. As
perpetrators, she explains, they too have experienced rupture, isolation, depression,
remain frozen in social catastrophe, impaired, and unable to claim the voice of truth as
their own. Restorative justice is a way of enabling community members to acknowledge,
feel and experience a rupture around their participation in the abuses that have taken
place in their community. It “stresses the importance of critically understanding the local
history shared by all members of the conflict” (p. 317). Restorative justice serves as a
tool for unification of the most profound type, suggesting that all members of a given
community share the experience, and that all should and can participate in the experience
of collective healing. In this way, the process of restorative justice is inherently
dialogical, another criterion of participatory practice.
In contrast to the narratives that emerged in my preliminary interviews, the NGO
employees who participated in the focus groups began to develop an awareness of shared
responsibility. In the discussion following the performance, employees began to claim, or
“own” their roles in the traumatic experiences that often take place in rescuing supposed
“victims” of trafficking. Several of the narrative tropes that emerged in the preliminary
research phase were challenged—or broken. Additionally, the employees own anxieties,
losses, concerns, regrets and uncertainties began to come to the fore. This process is
paramount to the concept of restorative justice. By opening up and sharing their own
life’s challenges, the employees began to move from a place of “bystanders,” located on
the periphery of the events, to “witnesses” engaged in their own stories. Consequently,
their own subjective participation in the overall anti-trafficking “drama” was reinforced.
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To elaborate on this last point: Restorative justice is not predicated on the putative
notion of condemning perpetrators or bystanders. Rather, by asking that all members of a
community accept their roles in a given trauma event, it allows them the space for self-
reflection and healing. I suggest that through the DAR approach it is the NGO
employees’ own grappling with trauma events—that is, the traumas they witness,
consume, digest and otherwise come into contact with vis-à-vis migrant women’s and
experiences—that “steers” their ability to perceive migrant women as subjects rather than
objects. This is in contrast to how NGO employees objectify migrant women who their
organizations serve, due to their own struggles with the traumas that their work with the
women provoke. When the employees’ trauma experiences are not fully integrated or
given “voice,” they manage it in the only way they know how—through the
objectification of the migrant women—the supposed “beneficiaries” with whom they are
tasked in “liberating” from conditions of oppression. I suggest that it is the NGO
employee’s “buried crypts” (Watkins & Shulman, 2008) of trauma—their own
difficulties processing the experiences that their daily work activities demands they
confront and endure—that drives such objectification. After viewing the musical and
taking the opportunity to talk through these issues, however, the NGO employees began
to view the migrant women as subjects. Through this process, the employees’ own
subjectivity began to emerge.
Restorative justice is a radical strategy for change that challenges the Western
normative conception of justice. As scholars of liberation psychology have explained, the
American view of justice is “retributive,” based on a system that values the “upstanding
citizen”—traditionally, a privileged white male—while de-valuing and subsequently
criminalizing the colonized, enslaved, female, immigrant, homeless “other”—in short,
those who do not uphold the white male standard of privilege (Watkins & Shulman,
2008, p. 321). A retributive justice model seeks to punish these individuals for not
conforming to the values upheld by the privileged class. As Lanek explained,
Retributive justice seeks to establish guilt and exact punishment, and to separate
the guilty from the innocent. There is no attempt to knit the victims’ and
perpetrators’ families and communities into the process. The Western legal
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approach is adversarial, and discourages the accepting of responsibility for one’s
wrongdoings (Lanek, 1999, as cited in Watkins & Shulman, p. 321).
Retributive justice is, therefore, predicated on a falsehood—a denial of the
unification of experience between community members. This divide, in turn, negates the
subjectivities of those involved in a trauma event—it objectifies the act of perpetuating
the victim’s trauma while also denying agency to her.
Dramatization and Restorative Justice
The paradigm of restorative justice insists on the participation of those who previously
may not have been able to recognize or acknowledge their complicity in a social
catastrophe, or in the social structures that perpetuate social fragmentation and
devastation. It suggests that perpetrators of abuse also experience rupture, isolation, and
depression. Bystanders, as I have discussed, remain “frozen” in the social catastrophe,
impaired, unable to claim the voices of “others” in a community as also being their own.
The challenge of restorative justice is to meet bystanding individuals to meet on a human
level, in order to forge a space of reconciliation—to in a sense, “hold” a space of trust so
that these individuals can feel empathy, not only for others, but also for themselves. As
Friere noted, “Critical and liberating dialogue, which presupposes action, must be carried
on with the oppressed at whatever the stage of their struggle for liberation” (1993, p. 65).
“Land of Smiles,” as a performative event, sought to foster this dialogical space.
By pausing to reflect on their own challenges, the NGO employees began to enact
principles of restorative justice. Through witnessing the relationship between Emma and
Lipoh, and Emma’s subsequent rupture as she discovered the truth about Lipoh’s story,
the employees in the audience began to see themselves as part of a community affected
by trauma, rather than outsiders looking in. In so doing, they developed conscientization
about their roles in the anti-trafficking movement. This, in turn, enabled them to embrace
the trauma experiences of both NGO employees and migrant women more holistically,
while paradoxically remaining “detached” from these experiences vis-à-vis their roles as
audience members. The dual nature of the performance medium, as an intimate space that
invites the participation of the audience while simultaneously allowing them to “see the
way they see” (Dolan, 2005), fostered a space of conscientization as the employees
moved from being bystanders to witnesses. This process illustrates the consciousness-
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raising effect that the production had on members of the NGO community. As such, it
encompasses another criterion of participatory practice.
This process also illuminates how the performative nature of theater can foster
restoration. As Watkins and Shulman explained, “If traumatic experience, as Freud
indicates suggestively, is an experience that is not fully assimilated as it occurs, then
these texts, each in its turn, ask what it means to transmit and to theorize around a crisis
that is marked, both by a simple knowledge, but by the ways it simultaneously defied and
demands our witness” (2008, p. 5). Such questions, I suggest, have greater potency when
asked through the language of theater—a language that is literary, and that defies, even as
it claims, our understanding.
Reconciliation and Trauma
A second aspect of liberation psychology that was evoked through the performance and
NGO focus groups was reconciliation. Reconciliation calls for an examination of a given
social catastrophe on every level—not only from an abstract, policy-oriented level, but
also on the level of the participation of those who are creating policies, and those who
implement them. Where do NGO employees stand in relation to the conditions that
underlie the abusive scenarios they are trying to correct? Liberation psychology forces us
to confront our own complicity and participation in these processes. As Watkins and
Shulman (2008) noted, “The moral challenge of confronting whether or not one’s own
social location contributed to the suffering and violence will need to be embraced,
requiring fantasies of one’s own neutrality to be surrendered” (p. 316).
The authors cited cases of indigenous projects geared toward reconciliation in
which communities worked to open a space in which the “wrongdoer can be re-knit into
the community” (Watkins & Shulman, 2008, p. 322). This necessitates seeing conflict
within a larger social context, rather than pointing blame on an isolated individual,
incident or act. Such an approach, the authors explained, necessitates adopting a view of
a cohesive whole made up of inter-related parts and experiences.
Reconciliation also necessitates coming to terms with, or “owning” the memory
of traumatic events or processes. In her discussion of trauma, Hoffman (2000) explained,
Disavowal is the strategy whereby we deny, or sometimes literally do not see,
something that may be right in front of us, but that is too disturbing to
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acknowledge. In our strategy of avowal, we declare that we remember, identify
with, defend, something extremely disturbing that we have not experienced—and
that we simultaneously declare to be unimaginable. We avow, or vow ourselves,
to be faithful to a past that, in a way, we refuse to know (p. 8).
Such a denial speaks, quite acutely, to what I have suggested often occurs in anti-
trafficking advocacy work. NGO employees often uphold a narrative of authority – a
claim to “knowledge” about migrant women’s experiences, regardless of how removed
they may actually be from the women themselves. This apparent “knowledge” justifies
their expertise and roles in the organizations. Yet, as evidenced by the responses that
emerged in the focus groups, employees cannot possess such knowledge “firsthand.”
They know “histories,” not “memories” of the women’s trauma.
Reconciliation and the safety of culture
My preliminary interviews demonstrated how anti-trafficking NGO employees in
Thailand construct narratives, or “stories,” about human trafficking. A key finding of this
study was that NGO employees rely on culture to help them navigate their daily work
experiences. In presenting this data, I offered a theory which I called “culture as a space
of safety” to explain why the employees I interviewed ritualistically retreated from the
overwhelming circumstances that confronted them in their daily work activities. I took as
my premise the “disconnect” which I observed between Western NGO employees’
intercultural work experiences and their apparent inability to suspend judgment about
members of the culture in which their organization operated. I suggested that the need to
retreat from such challenging experiences is strong enough to sway the employees so that
they do not alter their practices even when it may be in their professional interest to do
so. Indeed, the NGO employees I interviewed in 2011 “retreated” into static notions of
culture, narrating their experiences according to fixed ideas about identity and difference.
Expanding on this theory to include a discussion of reconciliation, I suggest that it
was the NGO employees’ fear of their own complicity in the objectification, exploitation,
and social catastrophe that caused them to dismiss, neglect and deny the agency of the
migrant women—the very women whose needs they intended to serve. Again, and
despite its Marxist overtones, Friere’s conscientization (1993) comes into play here:
Oppressors, Friere explained, even on the left, talk about the needs of the people but often
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do not trust the people themselves. “Almost never do they realize that they, too, ‘know
things’ they have learned in their relations with the world and with other women and
men” (Friere, 1993, p. 63). Being in the position of wanting to help the “oppressed,”
therefore, requires a stance of constant self-interrogation and re-examination of one’s
own motivations and actions. By witnessing, through theater, an illustration of their own
experiences and challenges, the employees were more readily willing to accept their own
complicity in the anti-trafficking “drama,” and the implications of their own
organizational practices. As such, their perception of themselves was able to shift.
Watkins and Shulman described this shift in perception as a “loosening in
entanglements” (2008, p. 323), a healing of the “othering” that, as I have suggested often
defines NGO employees’ “space of safety.” Reconciliation, then, asks that we all
reconcile feelings of helplessness, fear and complicity in the social catastrophes in which
we find ourselves participating. As a tool for reconciliation, “Land of Smiles” opened up
a space for the employees to be “re-knit into the community” (p. 322).
Reconciliation and mimetic distance
The dialogue that emerged in the NGO focus groups also exemplified the way “mimetic
distance” can be used to foster conscientization. This speaks to the proactive aspect of the
piece—another criterion I suggest should encompass participatory DAR projects.
Rossiter and Goddaris (2011) discussed theater’s potential to communicate cultural
practices through embodied experience, thereby making research accessible to audiences
who might otherwise never have engaged in critical thought about the particular subject
matter at hand (p. 653). Research-based theater, they explained, has the potential to
“surface key cultural/ ethical debates… and provide a space for audience members to
reflect and grapple with these complicated and often conflicting issues” (p. 654). This, in
turn, allows audiences to step outside their cultural embeddedness, ask questions and
engage in dialogue about the issues raised in the performance piece. As a result,
audiences experience “mimetic distance;” or, “space” between themselves and the
research findings. This then allows them to reflect on these findings in a new way.
Rossiter and Goddaris (2011) suggested, “the type of engagement fostered through
mimetic distance is very different from ethnographic projects that use performative or
theatrical practices simply to instruct audience members or to transfer new knowledge
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from its original site of development to a wider audience” (p. 654). Performance, they
explained, is not just about relaying issues in a classically “pedagogical” way. Rather,
performance disrupts hegemonic discourses that often get reinforced in the “monolithic,
disembodied texts” of traditional scholarship (p. 656), unsettles the audience and
provides distance—a type of relief—that allows audiences to see the material in a new
way.
“Land of Smiles” engaged this process of mimetic distance in a way that fostered
its utility as a tool for reconciliation. Audiences were able to grapple with cultural and
ethical tensions that may have been less apparent to them prior to the performance, due to
their embeddedness in the cultural context explored by the musical. Stepping out of this
cultural space, the NGO employees were invited to inhabit a liminal space, in which they
could suspend—if only for moments at a time—attachment to their cultural roles. With
mimetic distance, therefore, comes relief-- and that opportunity to critically reflect and
process information in a new way. By witnessing a story that was not their own, but
simultaneously very much their own, and subsequently taking part in a dialogical process
which also required liveness for its maintenance, the employees own subjective, lived
experience was reinforced.
Conclusion
The path to the liberation of the subject, Friere noted, is a radical one, and radicalism is
inherently always creative (1993, p. 37). The dialogue that emerged in the NGO
employee focus groups illustrates that that participatory practice, according to the
“liberatory” criteria outlined by Watkins and Shulman, was achieved. The performance
effected participants in ways that were proactive, rupturing, dialogical, consciousness-
raising and performative. Moreover, NGO Employees engages with the concepts of
restorative justice and reconciliation as they moved from objectified bystander status to
subjective witness.
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Chapter 14
Recollection, Mourning and Witness:
Migrant Subjectivities

“I want the world to recognize with me, the open door of every consciousness.”
– Franz Fanon (1967, p. 123)

In this chapter I will discuss the way the migrant participants restored their own
narratives, re-claimed their voices and experiences of trauma. I show how the processes
of creating unrelated narrative ties fostered aspects of recollection, mourning and witness
among the migrant participants, and discuss the process by which new pathways for their
visibility and subjectivity were achieved. I will also discuss the ways in which
“participatory practice” was achieved through these migrant subjectivities.

Trauma, Recollection and the Voice
As Caruth (1996) explained, survivors of collective trauma do not fully realize they have
undergone trauma at all. In contrast to the accepted psychoanalytic framework of Post
Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD), which suggests that survivors are plagued by
repetitively reliving their traumas in a ways both horrific and unavoidable, Caruth called
trauma a “missed experience” (p. 60), more dream-like than conscious, the response to
the shock of a threat to one’s survival which creates a “break in the mind’s experience of
time” (p. 61). Citing Freud, Caruth explained that traumatic events are, in fact, not
“repressed” in order to counter the ego ideal, as is commonly understood according to a
psychoanalytic model. Rather, such traumas are “actually never experienced at all”
(Watkins & Shulman 2008, p. 121).
I return here to Hoffman’s (2000) idea of “disavowal,” the “strategy whereby we
deny, or sometimes literally do not see, something that may be right in front of us, but
that is too disturbing to acknowledge (p. 8). Due to the buried nature of trauma, and the
strategy of disavowal that often accompanies it, the “voice” becomes an essential agent in
the process whereby trauma survivors recall their experiences, as the voice, according to
Caruth, is the agent for making trauma known. Part of the practice of DAR involves
creating ways for the voice to express what a subject does not yet consciously know. As
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Watkins and Shulman explained, “If a society is to work against the dynamics that
generate atrocities, it must provide educational pathways to support children and adults in
becoming aware of the collective norms they have identified with. (Watkins & Shulman
2008, p. 99). DAR seeks to help participants recover their own trauma voices and enable
them to recall, mourn and witness their experiences. The medium of theater provides a
vehicle for this process—a space in which trauma can finally be known, and a future
beyond the trauma can be made possible.
“Land of Smiles” as Space for Recollection
In a country such as Burma, in which citizens have been oppressed by a ruthless military
regime for the better part of the past 60 years, virtually no public expression of resistance
has been possible. Such expressions, when they surfaced, were repeatedly punished by
imprisonment, torture, or disappearance (Fink, 2009; Skidmore 2004; White, 2004). Prior
to the country’s “opening” in 2010, citizens under Burma’s military regime had not had
the opportunity to express—or even fully experience—the traumas they endured. They
had no way of hearing the “trauma voice,” or re-constructing their experiences through a
“symbolic and imaginative process” (Watkins & Shulman 2008, p. 121). Migrants from
Burma experienced a disconnection between the self and the community, which in turn
fostered a sense of hopelessness and caused a retreat into isolation (personal
communication, Kachin migrants, 2011). Fragmentation of experience, and the inability
to communicate that experience, often marks the migrant survivor from Burma
(Skidmore, 2004).
In such circumstances, a space of recollection is needed to “unfreeze” the wounds
of migrant participants, allowing these wounds to speak. Linking the buried trauma
events to a narrative that fosters communication among and between those who have
experienced trauma, is one of the goals of DAR. Spaces of recollection provide a public
platform for symbolic expression—a way of voicing experiences that have not yet been
acknowledged at either the psychic or the social levels:

In spaces of recollection, we can publically begin to speak or to express through
the arts what has not yet been acknowledged. We take an active role in trying to
make sense of our history and context. When such potential spaces are lacking
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because no one is prepared to witness what has occurred, isolated and
unprocessed islands of unbearable image and symptom go on living in what
Abraham and Torok called ‘anasemic’ effects, parts of the psyche that are
unknown because they are not linked with narratives and symbols of self-identity.
These crypts form a living kernel surrounded by a symbolic shell made up of our
remembered and symbolized personality. We are then haunted by enigmatic
symptoms, images, and feelings emanating from the phantom kernel (Watkins &
Shulman, 2008, p. 108).
Responding to the need to overcome, or heal these “anasemic” effects, is the
project of DAR. Musical theater, as an embodied story-telling medium, is not merely a
way to communicate experiences of trauma. In the DAR model, it can also be used to
help survivors heal and overcome this trauma.
Fostering unrelated narrative ties
As researchers and dramatic artists, how do we encourage knowledge of trauma to come
to the fore, when the conscious awareness of such trauma has not yet been unearthed?
Fostering the process of recollection is predicated on the creation of a new kind of
space—one in which new narrative connections are encouraged and facilitated.
Throughout the migrant focus groups, participants made connections between the show’s
narrative and other events that had occurred in their lived experiences. These memories,
or experiential stories, were seemingly unrelated to the narrative of the musical, yet they
evoked a strong emotional “pull” within the migrant participants. These seemingly
unrelated narratives point to the musical’s utility as a technique for fostering recollection.
Participants spoke about their traumatic experiences working in Chiang Mai as domestic
laborers, construction workers, and other precarious labor situations. While the narrative
of the musical did not specifically illuminate the conditions of these jobs, the participants
imaginatively “tied” Lipoh’s experiences together with their own, linking her experience
in the brothel and being locked in the IDC with their own experiences of being exploited,
living in fear, running from police, and having their voices dismissed by those in power.
The migrant participants also recalled traumatic experiences of being beaten and forced
into labor at the hands of Burma’s military junta. Again we see how the musical, which
alluded to such atrocities but did not explicitly dramatize them, evoked memories of
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related experiences among the migrant participants. As such, several aspects of
“participatory practice” were demonstrated in the migrant focus groups. The discussions
had both dialogical and consciousness-raising effects, as migrant participants began to
give voice to their own trauma narratives.
“Land of Smiles” as Space for Mourning and Witness
Such narrative ties provide a foundation for recalling the “unearthed” trauma discussed
by Caruth (1996). In addition, they provide a vehicle for “mourning and witness”— a
process by which survivors of collective trauma re-claim and identify “with aspects of a
culture that has been besieged and weakened” (Watkins & Shulman 2008, p. 115).
Mourning and witness occur in processes in which groups of people speak out in
“startling ways” against the oppression they have endured (p. 116). Songs, poetry, and
other cultural expressions often form the foundation for these processes of collective
resistance. Again, however, in scenarios in which such expressions are rendered
impossible, the ability to mourn and witness is kept at bay. The act of recollection that the
musical fostered created an opportunity for the migrant participants to witness and mourn
the buried trauma experiences of their past.
A distinction must be made here between the process of recalling and the process
by which a subject understands and frames his or her own experiences as being one of
trauma. I am not suggesting that the migrant participants did not remember their personal
experiences prior to witnessing the performance. Rather, in recalling these experiences
and linking them to the dramatic narrative of the musical, the migrants were able to
situate these experiences in the framework of trauma. The musical thus became a vehicle
for the “voice” described by Caruth (1996) to express itself—a mechanism the migrants’
wounds to “cry out.”
Interestingly, this process of utilizing unrelated narrative ties to frame and express
the reality of trauma, was also demonstrated in the story of the musical itself. In several
scenes in “Land of Smiles,” Emma attempts to pressure Lipoh into testifying as a witness
against her “traffickers.” Resisting this pressure, Lipoh retreats to the floor of her IDC
cell and begins to pray. She closes her eyes, holds her hands together and chants in
Kachin. In one such scene in Act 1, Scene 7, Emma asks her what she is saying. Lipoh
turns to Emma:
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LIPOH: I am reciting the names of my female ancestors.

EMMA: Your ancestors?

LIPOH: Kachin people can say the name of every ancestor dating back two
thousand years.

EMMA: No way.

LIPOH: Yes way.

EMMA: How is that possible?

LIPOH: Saying the name of the ancestors keeps us alive. It is how the Kachin
people survive.

Lipoh’s explanation that repeating the names of her female ancestors is a means
of the community’s survival underscores the importance of the “voice” in the witness of a
community’s trauma. By speaking these names, Lipoh is symbolically keeping her
history alive and her persona identity in tact. Such an expression also illustrates the way
unrelated narrative ties provide a mechanism for the trauma voice to come to the fore. In
my preliminary research on Akha and Kachin cultural customs, I discovered that these
communities evoked the names of ancestors as a way of maintaining the cultures’
survival. Indeed, repeating these names was used as a way of preserving identity in the
face of destruction by the Burmese military (personal communication, Akha migrant,
2011). In the musical, Lipoh’s decision to evoke her ancestral names occurs in the face of
a seemingly unrelated event—that of her incarceration. In a scene late in the play, when
Lipoh returns to chanting, Emma remarks, “Lipoh, we don’t have time for this… We’ve
got to figure out a way to…”
But Emma does not have a better solution as to how to help Lipoh preserve her
identity and find strength. Emma stops speaking, realizing that Lipoh’s mechanism for
summoning strength in the face of adversity—her solution to the events that confront
her—is to recite the names of her ancestors. This ritual, Emma realizes, is one of
defiance.
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The act of reciting ancestral names to counter difficulty in a seemingly unrelated
context is akin to the migrants’ use of unrelated narrative ties to recall their experiences
of trauma. The expression of their experiences fostered a process of reclaiming, naming,
and giving importance to the trauma they had endured. Through this process, the
migrants were able to witness and mourn their own histories.
Creating Space Through DAR
As a communication intervention, DAR relies on the open field of creativity and dialogue
to foster recollection, mourning and witness. As such, DAR interventions must also foster
spaces of liminality and uncertainty—key criterion for bridging narrative ties and
bringing expressions of trauma to the fore. Indeed, remembrances and expressions are
contextually bound. Because of this, the DAR researcher-artist cannot expect that her
interventions may be reproduced in other contexts with the achievement of the same
results. Just as no two theatrical productions can ever occur in the same way due to the
medium’s dependence on temporality and embodiment—of “liveness”—so too must we
abandon the notion that a DAR research project can be identically reproduced by another
scholar at another time and place.
Instead, DAR is predicated on the idea of creating “space” for unknown,
previously unvoiced experiences and expressions to emerge. As such, this method
refutes positivism’s central notion of de-contextualized objectivity and instead embraces
the concept of contextualized, situated knowledge, or a “feminist objectivity” (Haraway,
1988). As Sandra Harding explained, “postcolonialism and feminism can usefully be
thought of as thinking spaces that have been opened up by changes in “’discourses’”
(1998, p. 17). DAR evokes its own “thinking space.” It is the creative process itself that
informs and allows new contextual discoveries to be made.
“Land of Smiles” and iconic memory
In discussing the construction of spaces of recollection, Watkins and Shulman
differentiated between iconic memory versus narrative memory, explaining: “cognitive
psychology has identified a form of iconic memory that precedes narrative memory in
childhood development. Narrative memory always has a plot line: this happened first and
then that happened. In iconic memory, an object, a smell, a sound, or an image may
trigger a set of associations for which no narrative structure yet exists. So the sound of
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the opening of the refrigerator door or the smell of food cooking may bring a rush of
interest and energy to a small child who still has no idea how these events are organized.
Poetry and fiction often make use of this form of memory when they use the literary
device of metonymy in their work” (Watkins & Shulman 2008, p. 126).
This important discussion of narratives in art relates to the contextually bound
nature of how experience is communicated. Artists must be cautious not to impose
linearity and rationally-bound narratives on experiences that would be better expressed in
non-linear, symbolic forms. Similarly, in the DAR method, researchers must also resist
imposing such linearity onto their subjects and research processes. The recognition of the
utility of iconic memory supports the argument that artists, not scientists or policy
makers, should be doing the work of “arts interventions.”
Participation, rather than positivism, is the essence of the DAR framework. In
contrast to Entertainment Education initiatives, which seek to apply scientific
standardized and decidedly Western interpretive solutions to contextually bound
problems, DAR is predicated on the idea that all members of the society who experienced
the collective trauma can and should participate in the creative process of self-discovery.
As such, this process fostered a proactive ethic among the migrant participants. DAR also
seeks to utilize cultural expressions that have a meaning within the society and have
social meaning in their enactment. Theater, a cultural expression, fosters communication
and empathy in a wholly different way than other forms of mass media. The goal here is
not to create art for the sake of consumption, but rather, art that engages with social
processes such as recollection, mourning and witness.
Pathways of Visibility
In her writing on feminism and performance, Phelan (1993) explained that there is a
tension at play around the issue of visibility. We long for a witness to our experience, our
being. We think, therefore, that the visibility of our experience gives it value—“proof,” in
a sense, of what we have endured. But, Phelan asked, what about the immaterial
constructs of identity? What about the experiences and aspects of ourselves that can
never be seen?
Phelan sought to locate subjects who cannot be seen. She troubled the idea of
visibility, suggesting that for women, visibility is often a trap in which fetishization,
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surveillance and objectification are reinstated in place of the subjectivity that is assumed
to accompany the “seen.” She drew on Butler’s notion of performativity, in which “the
real is positioned both before and after its representation” (Butler 1990, p. 2).
Representation, Butler explained, frames the real, while rendering illusive the subjectivity
of those who are being represented.
DAR can provide an alternative to the trappings of visibility and the limitations of
representation that often accompany both performance and research. As a live medium,
theater requires the participation of the audience—a group of people who, in witnessing a
performance, also inevitably witness each other’s presence in the room. As such, the
collective processes by which the audience grapples with the artistic material is, in a
sense, exposed. The liveness of the medium—the fact that “we’re all in this together”
means that we are implicated in each other’s processes of recollection, mourning and
witness.
This has particular salience for the migrant participants, whose political and social
history of marginalization has eclipsed their ability to be recognized by the outside world.
Having gone “unrecognized” by the Burmese government, the Thai government, the
West and, in Caruth’s conception, even unrecognized by themselves, the ethnic minority
migrants who attended the performance of “Land of Smiles” were invited to inhabit a
space of participation. In experiencing the performance and participating in the focus
groups, the migrants not only engaged in uncovering their own “trauma voices,” but were
also rendered “visible” to the artists, NGO employees and other audience members in the
room. A double layer of restoration occurred in this process—through engaging with the
narrative of the musical, the migrant participants began to restore aspects of their own
personal and collective narratives. Simultaneously, their subjectivity was restored,
through the very act of their participation, and through other audience members’
recognition of their participation. Several of the migrant participants expressed feeling a
sense of triumph, for example, that “other people” or “foreigners” were watching the
play—groups other than themselves. I suggest that this sense of triumph also
encapsulated the fact that these “other people” were watching them watch the play—in
essence, bearing witness to the migrants’ processes of recollection, mourning and
witness.
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Grappling with the conflict between the representation and the real, Phelan
pointed out, “A believable image is the product of a negotiation with an unverifiable real”
(1993, p. 1) She asked, if “seeing” is not all we believe it to be, how then do we locate
subjects who cannot be seen? In response to this question, I suggest that it is the process
of witnessing the act of seeing that fosters the location of the subject, and, in the case of
the migrant participants, the transformation of those subjects from passive “victims” to
active agents re-claiming their experiences and speaking their truths.
Haraway (1988) also sought to re-claim the vision that Phelan found so illusive.
She wrote, “I want a feminist writing of the body that metaphorically emphasizes vision
again, because we need to reclaim that sense to find our way through all the visualizing
tricks and powers of modern sciences and technologies that have transformed the
objectivity debates. We need to learn in our bodies, endowed with primate color and
stereoscopic vision. How to attach the objective to our theoretical and political scanners
in order to name where we are and are not” (p. 582).
I argue that the DAR process enables an alternative way to visualize experience.
Following the performance of “Land of Smiles,” the migrant participants began to see
themselves through a new lens. In this way, they also experienced aspects of rupture. It
bears repeating here that I am not suggesting that the migrants did not remember their
traumas or had not previously thought about their own experiences. Rather, through
witnessing the production and taking part in the focus groups, they began to see these
experiences through the double lens of both the performance narrative and the audience’s
recognition. They began to see the way they are seen. This, in turn, created a new
possibility for visibility— one that, I argue, does not fall into the trap of essentialism
described by Phelan, nor linger in the myth of objectivism problemetized by Haraway
(1988). “Land of Smiles,” as a DAR process, fostered a new pathway of visibility—a
way for the migrants to consider, name, and thus direct the visualization of themselves. In
so doing, their subjectivity was restored.
Communities of Resistance
Communities of resistance demonstrate to us that “life is possible, that a future is
possible.” (Watkins and Shulman, 2008, p. 209) They are places “where people return to
themselves more easily, where the conditions are such that they can heal themselves and
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recover their wholeness” (Nhat Hahn, 1975). Re-claiming the collective, the spaces of
both trauma and triumph that communities share, is paramount to this process. As
Conquergood noted, the “person” is not an autonomous space. He/she is a site of
identities and voices. (1991, p. 185) Recovering the collective is, therefore, part of the
process of recovering the self.
The engaged, embodied, live, collaborative and participatory process of musical
theater fosters such recoveries. Through making music, telling stories through words and
the body, and working collaboratively with fellow artists and audiences, DAR
practitioners create a “clearing,” a way of coming back to the self on the part of all
involved. Following the performance of “Land of Smiles,” the migrant participants
engaged with processes of recollection, mourning and witness. They utilized unrelated
narrative ties to make sense of their traumatic past experiences, and they re-claimed
visibility through the very act of their participation.
In discussing the construction of community, Oliver (2002) spoke of the
“colonization of psychic space that results from a lack of support.” For psychic
decolonization to occur, she suggested, the restoration of communities, through their
resistance to colonization of the psyche, must occur. Re-imagining histories, through
creative means is the project of DAR. Through this process, not only did the migrant
participants restore a sense of their own community, they also fostered a broader
enactment of community restoration—that is, in the community that formed around the
musical as a whole. By bearing witness to each other’s processes, audience member and
artists alike came together. In so doing, they restored the subjectivities of all members of
the group and fostered a site of resistance to the normative tropes of victim and savior
that mark the trafficking discourse.

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Chapter 15

Rupture and Hospitality:

Artist Subjectivities

“Love is an ethics of otherness”
- Kelly Oliver (2002)

In their discussion of rupture, Watkins and Shulman (2008) presented a theory of an
“ethics of hospitality.” Hospitality, they explained, involves a revaluation of what
individuals and communities “owe” one another. The authors explained that ethical
contracts are often formed around a commitment to “sameness;” that is, a respect for an
“other” who has taken on similar characteristics to the self. In an ethics of hospitality, the
emphasis is not on contracts of “sameness,” but rather, “encounters with the unknown”
(p. 151). In these alternative contracts, they explained, “we discover a sort of liminality in
the heart of our experience of ourselves, and in the core of the Other that ruptures our
expectations. We confront each other across a space of symbolic possibility that has not
yet been filled up with conventional language, where a mysteriousness connectedness can
be felt” (p. 151).
Through participating in the DAR project, the artists began to engage in processes
of rupture and hospitality. They moved from a space in which artist and migrant, self and
other were fixed categories, into a space of unknown connection—a liminal zone in
which barriers between self and other were no longer firm. This space, in turn, incited a
sense of implication and action in the artists—what we might, in essence, call
participation. Moving beyond a view of themselves as actors “just doing a show,” the
artists became invested in the migrants’ processes of liberation. In communicating the
story of the musical, the artists sought to actively create a site of resistance against the
structures of oppression that were holding the migrants back. Through this service, and
the political consciousness it generated, the artists became empowered and transformed.
Additionally, and critically, through their participation in the DAR project the
artists began to interrogate their own experiences of bystanding. They located aspects of
their lives in which they felt held back or disengaged—unable to draw on their own
agency to incite change. This willingness to interrogate their roles as bystanders fostered
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profound experiences of rupture and hospitality—liberatory processes which are key
tenets of the DAR method.
Theatre as discourse
In his “poetics,” Boal (1979) suggested that expression occurs not only through words,
but also through the body. In this way, the body’s experience becomes a tool for
dialogue. Thus, in Boal’s imagining, theater is a form of discourse in itself.
Artists, as somatic vehicles for communication, naturally exemplify this notion of
theater as discourse. The artists participating in “Land of Smiles,” however, experienced
this process of communicating through the body in new ways. In contrast to their work in
other theatrical contexts, they did not perceive their roles as being confined to
memorizing lines, conveying emotion and aesthetic—i.e., doing a “job.” Nor did they
perceive themselves to be the agents of an Aristotelian tragedy designed to inspire “pity
and fear” among a passive audience. Rather, the artists involved in the Chiang Mai
production became active agents of change. While craft and aesthetics formed the basis
of their participation, the heart of their roles incorporated something much more
profound—a willingness to surrender to the liminal space in which life and art merge,
and embrace the unknown, not only onstage, but also within themselves. In this way,
participatory practice, according to the criteria discussed by Watkins and Shulman, was
achieved. The artist narratives revealed aspects of the project that were: proactive,
rupturing, dialogical, consciousness-raising and performative.
In the focus groups, artists expressed feeling changes occur on a somatic and
emotional level, both in their experiences onstage as well as in the world. FLA17’s
discussion of the enormous emotional toll she felt in performing “Kachin Women Are
Proud and Strong” for the Chiang Mai audiences illustrates the power of the body as a
tool for discourse and a site for transformation. Through embodying the character Soon
Nu, FLA17 facilitated dialogue around the experience of Kachin freedom fighters to take
place. Her body became the site for this dialogue, her voice the vehicle for
communicating a complex narrative about the character’s life-world. By “embodying”
Soon Nu in the performance, FLA17 generated a dialogue between the character, the
audience, and herself.
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Similarly, FLA18’s description of relief when the audience stood at the end of the
performance speaks to the notion of theatre as discourse. This artist was initially
apprehensive about the way the musical would be received by the Chiang Mai audience.
When the audience rose, demonstrating acceptance and enjoyment of the complex
message the musical sought to communicate, this artist expressed a feeling that her own
personal commitment to social justice had been heard. Beyond merely playing a role, the
artist “took on” the message of the musical, both physically through the use of her body
and voice as a vehicle for her performance, and psychically, through her newfound
commitment to the emancipation of the migrants who attended the performance. In this
way, FLA18 “stepped into” the dialogue that she was facilitating.
The artists’ embodied sense of implication in the dramatic narratives they were
communicating, reflects Freire’s idea of conscientization. According to Freire (1993),
conscientization is the process by which the oppressed move from a position of
powerlessness toward one of humanity, and liberation. Through this process, the
oppressed begin to unearth silences, understand their own structural positions within
society, and overcome fear (p. 39).
Freire’s theory (1993) is premised on the idea that every human being has the
capacity to be critical. Out of a combination of reflection and action comes praxis: a
critical practice that moves beyond the limitations of academic abstraction and is thus
imperative for the humanization of all. As Freire explained, a culture of silence enshrouds
the oppressed as they internalize their oppression. Parallel to this, oppressors themselves
engage in the continuum of oppression, or “bystanding” (Watkins & Shulman, 2008: 61).
In Freirean terms, bystanders are defenders of the status quo, having internalized a
subject-object relationship with those they dominate (Freire, 1993, p. 57).
As bystanders engaged in a struggle toward liberation—a struggle that, as
liberation psychology has explained, takes place in members at every level of society—
the artists underwent a process of conscientization. This process was fueled by their
embodied participation in communicating a narrative in which they felt both implicated
and invested.
Throughout the production process, the artists engaged in the process of listening,
not only to the migrants but also to their own inner voices. By being willing to undertake
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this journey into the self they grappled with overcoming habitual thinking (Watkins &
Shulman, 2008, p. 133). This underscores the dynamic process of rupture, in which old
modalities of thought and behavior are suddenly and irrevocably troubled. Rupture was
demonstrated by artists who spoke of no longer being able to see the world the way they
saw it before. Artists expressed apprehension about traveling back to the United States, a
place that, psychically, had become a site for bystanding and disassociation. In returning
to this site, the artists explained, they would be forced to confront the conditions of
oppression that fueled their feelings of powerlessness. Although on the surface, returning
to the United States was seemingly disconnected from the act of giving voice to migrant
experiences, this return symbolized an even more personal journey—that of the artists’
return to themselves.
By clearly identifying their newfound political voices, the artists brought
themselves into their roles, a process Boal described as changing from passive beings,
what he termed “spectators,” into “spect-actors”—subjects who transform the dramatic
action. As Boal’s explained, “The liberated spectator, as a whole person, launches into
action, No matter that the action is fictional; what matters is that it is action!” (1979, p.
122). The artists became present with their characters, in essence, speaking to the
audience through these characters, rather than being mere vessels through which the
characters spoke. This difference, I suggest, is crucial to the integration of Boal’s poetics
in the DAR method.
In the performances of “Land of Smiles,” a reflexive process took place between
artist and character. Crucially, this process was made visible to the audience, who
witnessed the artists’ dynamic, ruptured state. An example of this visibility of rupture
occurred in the final scene of the musical, in the moments after Emma has let Lipoh free
from the IDC: As the company sings the finale, “Home To You” Lipoh appears at the
edge of the river, preparing to cross back into Burma. We, the audience, see Lipoh’s
mother lit in a separate part of the stage, waiting for her daughter to come home. Lipoh
turns to her mother and sings:

LIPOH
I KNOW YOU’RE WAITING
I KNOW YOU’RE PRAYING
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HOME IS THE LOVE YOU GAVE ME

AND ONE THING’S TRUE
I’LL COME BACK HOME TO YOU

HOME TO YOU
HOME TO YOU
HOME TO YOU
HOME TO YOU

As the scene goes on, Soon Nu appears at the river and hands Lipoh a gun. As Lipoh
takes the gun she looks at Soon Nu, as if to ask if it is all right to cross. Soon Nu nods,
giving Lipoh both the permission and the courage to cross back into Kachin State and
join the revolution. In doing so, Lipoh will help her people survive:

SOON NU
MA RE DE WA
MA RE DE WA NA
(GO BACK TO THE VILLAGE)

JI WOI NIA LAM
H’TAH H’AKA NAH
(WALK THE ANCESTOR’S PATH)

On the other side of the stage, we see Emma, about to board a plane for the United States.
We know she is returning home to a troubled life; a life marked by her parents’ silence as
they bury their trauma about the loss of their son, Emma’s brother. Having experienced
the rupture that her relationship with Lipoh propelled, Emma is now prepared to return to
the US and face this trauma head-on:

EMMA
MOM AND DAD
JUST WANTED YOU TO KNOW
I’M COMING HOME…
HOME IS A FAMILY HOLDING ON

Finally, in a pool of light across the stage, Lewelyn and Achara appear. They are still in
their office at the NGO, remaining steadfastly committed to rescuing trafficking victims.
Unlike Emma, they have not experienced rupture, or undergone change.

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LEWELYN
THERE WILL ALWAYS BE
ANOTHER GIRL TO RESCUE

ACHARA
THERE WILL ALWAYS BE
ANOTHER GIRL TO SAVE

LEWELYN AND ACHARA
WE CARRY ON

EMMA
BUT I HAVE CHANGED

As the song goes on, all the women turn toward the audience and sing Lipoh’s anthem,
“Home to you.” In the final tableau, Lipoh holds the gun over her head and steps into the
river. We hear the sound of water rushing as the lights fade to black.
As the actors performed this final song, they were overcome with emotion, and
expressed this emotion through tears. I too, was often overcome with deep emotion while
accompanying them on the piano. Other members of the artistic crew noted that the
audience, too, would often cry during this final song. All were responding to an
identification with Lipoh and Emma, the musical’s dual protagonists, who underwent
profound shifts in their perception of the world, and of themselves.
I suggest, however, that the artists were also responding to another layer of
experience—their own newfound consciousness and transformation from bystander to
witness.
In the professional theater, it is normally considered problematic for an actor to
convey an emotion that goes beyond or outside the confines of the character. This
process, known as “breaking character” is considered unprofessional and discouraged. In
the context of “Land of Smiles,” however, an entirely different process occurred. During
the musical’s emotional climax, the wall between actor, character and audience became
porous. In essence, the barriers between these worlds became removed. The audience was
able to witness the actors’ embodiment of a newfound consciousness. Their experiences
of rupture, hospitality, and conscientization were laid bare for all to see, and share. In this
way, the artists’ physical responses exemplified Boal’s notion of theatre as discourse—
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their bodies took over, communicating a commitment to liberation that went beyond
words.
Disorientation and confrontation
In the focus group discussion, the artists frequently expressed feelings of disorientation,
the notion that things were not the way they were before. This was evident in the artists’
liminality narratives. Many artists expressed a desire to “figure out” what to do with their
feelings of uncertainty, as exemplified by the actor who stated, emphatically, “I don’t
know. I just don’t know, but I’ve been changed.”
Such feelings of disorientation are a natural, and important part of the DAR
method. These feelings, I suggest, carry within them a liberatory potential. As Boal
(1979) discussed, the conditions for fostering liberation and oppression through theatrical
engagement are quite distinct. In Aristotelian drama, he explained, when man fails to
achieve his objectives, “the art of tragedy intervenes” (p. 27). Here, Boal was referring to
the goal of dramatic catharsis, explaining, “catharsis is correction.” Its purpose is to purge
the spectator of their own impulses toward the “bad behavior” reflected in the tragic
character’s downfall. In empathizing with the tragic character, and thereby experiencing a
catharsis, we—the audience—undergo a kind of “homeopathic cure” for our own
tendencies toward anti-social behavior. By getting a “dose” of this bad behavior, we, in
turn, cure our own tendencies toward its replication.
The goal of tragedy, according to Boal, is to prescribe this emotional experience,
which is also a political experience in that it is designed to prompt us—the spectators—to
uphold the interests of law and order and the social world as it is, rather than how we
might want it to be. The tragic flaw is, therefore, a flaw of non-conformity. By bringing
the audience’s attention to this flaw, tragedy becomes a “coercive system:”
The tragic hero appears when the State begins to utilize the theater for the
political purpose of coercion of the people. It should not be forgotten that the
State, directly or through certain wealthy patrons, paid for the theatrical
productions (Boal, 1979, p. 33).
Boal presented an alternative vision of theater, one meant not to reinforce
coercive social behavior but rather, to incite transformation in both the artist and the
audience. Boal’s poetics “focuses on the action itself: the spectator delegates no power to
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the character (or actor) either to act or to think in his place; on the contrary, he himself
assumes the protagonist role, changes the dramatic action, tries out solutions, discusses
plans for change—in short, trains himself for real action” (p. 122). Arguing that the site
of theater is the human body, in Boal’s vision we must first focus on changing the habits
of the human body in space and in the material world. In his way, he suggested, theater
becomes a site for dialogue.
Disorientation—the inhabiting of liminal space—is a first step toward changing
the human in the world. If we disrupt our bodies’ patterning, in essence “act” ourselves
into other social realities, we can begin to change the world around us. The feelings of
disorientation that the artists experienced during the production of “Land of Smiles” were
tied to the liberatory nature of the story narrative. Had it been written according to
Aristotelian logic, “Land of Smiles” would have presented Emma as a flawed, tragic
character: Unable to conform to the standards that her job in the NGO demands, she is
instead steered down the tragic path of empathizing with Lipoh—a path that, in turn,
leads to her losing her job. Emma’s “tragic flaw” would have been the actual process of
conscientization that leads her, in the end, to release Lipoh from the IDC. In an
Aristotelian re-telling of the story, we, the audience, would be “taught” to avoid such
consciousness and corresponding behavior, pitying Emma as we witness her demise.
Fortunately, Emma is not a tragic hero in “Land of Smiles” but rather, a
celebration of the processes of rupture and concientization meant to evoke empowerment
on the part of all participants. As Watkins and Shulman explained, such processes are
unexpected, beginning with a “shocking break in routine” (2008, p. 134). As such,
ruptures are more than just day-to-day occurrences. Rather, they challenge “all of one’s
capacity to make sense of life” (p. 134). In a positive sense, the world becomes
unfamiliar—the old scripts of bystanding and disassociation are suddenly rendered
obsolete, as a new feeling of awareness takes over. Emma’s journey in the musical
exemplifies this liberatory process.
I suggest that it is precisely this inversion, this refusal to portray Emma’s
conscientization as a tragic experience, that evoked a sense of disorientation on the part
of the artists. Far from recreating the conditions of conformity that Aristotelian tragedy
reinforces, “Land of Smiles” pushed back against this trope of pity and fear. Responding
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to the musical, artists, too, “broke” their patterns of habitual thinking, embracing the
liminal space and allowing themselves to dwell in the “lost” structures that previously
characterized their sense of reality.
Watkins and Shulman (2008) explained that embracing this liminal space often
gives rise to feelings of confusion and anomie—a sense of meaninglessness as the
ruptured participant searches for clarification of his or her old viewpoint, in what Jung
described as “regressive restoration of the persona” (p. 138). In the DAR project,
participants were initially able to avoid such regression, as the focus groups and social
support provided them with a “container,” a way of embracing their own processes of
rupture and the disorientation that accompanied it.
25

Beyond Bystanding: The Theater of Oppressed Workshop
One of the richest points of reflection that emerged in the focus group discussion
involved the artists’ participation in the day-long Theatre of the Oppressed (TO)
workshop, which was conducted in partnership with migrant interns from the Kachin
Women’s Association of Thailand (KWAT). In the workshop, the TO facilitator, in
collaboration with the participants, identified aspects of daily life that could be thought of
as “traumas.” The Kachin migrants described scenarios from their home country such as
forced portering, forced displacement, abuse by the military and sexual violence. Artists
from the United States identified scenarios of their own, including racism, homophobia,
and intolerance of religious differences. From here, participants worked together to “act
out” scenes exploring these themes. Participants were then led through the process of
reflection about these scenarios. The group offered ideas as to strategies that could help
overcome the problems presented in the scenes. Participants were then invited to re-enact
the scenes they had presented, incorporating strategies that the group had identified for
overcoming the problems. The workshop was designed to augment the inquiry into DAR
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It remains an important question as to whether the American artists lingered in this ruptured
state following their participation in the project, and to what extent regressive tendencies emerged
upon their return to the United States. As FLA11 expressed, “I feel tired and disoriented, and I
feel like I don’t know who I’m going to be when I get home.” This artist may have been voicing a
premonition of having difficulty processing the rupture she endured during the production in
Thailand. While such an inquiry goes beyond the scope of this study, it is, nevertheless, an
important consideration for further research.
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as a process of fostering aspects that were dialogical, pro-active, rupturing,
consciousness-raising and performative.
In the focus group discussion, many of the artists expressed feeling a sense of
profound rupture and conscientization following their participation in the TO workshop.
This occurred, I suggest, because it was not simply the traumas of the Kachin interns that
were being explored and confronted. Rather, the artist participants were asked to reflect
on their own traumas. Through this process, the artists’ began to move from bystanding
to witness, thereby restoring their subjectivity and agency in their own life-dramas.
! Shulman described this process as one in which participants move “from
dissociation to participation.” (personal communication, Shulman, October, 2011). In
identifying themselves as human beings first, and theater professionals dedicated to
communicating aesthetic and craft second, the artists made discoveries about the nature
of their own agency. They realized that they, like the migrants, were affected by the
problematic social processes that constricted and deterred them. Bystanding and
powerlessness were explored in American contexts as well as Kachin contexts, allowing
the artists to voice their frustrations about participating in a society undergoing collective
trauma of its own. Subsequently, they discovered that they too could become empowered
to change the circumstances that constrained them. In the focus group discussion, several
expressed feelings of no longer knowing who they were, or not being able to “go back to
the way they were before.”
The artists’ realizations demonstrate the consciousness-raising and dialogical
aspects of “Land of Smiles” as a DAR project. They also recall Watkins and Shulman’s
discussion of hospitality (2008): by awakening to their own traumas alongside the
migrants, the artists began to break down their previously held imaginings of “self” and
“other,” stepping out of the habit of objectification – i.e. perceiving a community as
being different than ourselves and operating according to a separate set of standards,
behaviors and values (Kaufman, 2003, p. 252)—and instead, enacting an ethic of
hospitality.
Ritual and trauma
The ritualistic nature of theater and performance informed this process of discovery.
Shulman explained that trauma situations often result in “somatization” – a process by
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which people break down physically. In Jungian psychology, the response to this trauma
can be highly symbolic (personal communication, Shulman, October, 2011).
Alternatively, if the trauma sufferer does not stop, rest and reflect on what’s occurred, a
type of manic defense can take over, obfuscating the central issue.
As a remedy for this suffering, she suggested, ritual has the effects of boosting the
immune system, helping trauma survivors incorporate and integrate their experiences.
Music, dancing and other art forms are key examples of these types of healing rituals.
Such forms of artistic expression require participation and commitment, letting go of
cynicism, even just being with other people rather than being confined in isolation
(Kaufman, 2003, p. 252). As such, rituals help us absorb and diffuse experiences of
trauma.
Artist participants described the healing effects of the TO workshop, suggesting
that it was through the ritual of theater games that identification—what we may think of
as hospitality—with the migrants took place. As FLA13 remarked, what stood out about
this process was “the unifying aspect, the fact that as we’re playing these games and we
can’t communicate directly with one another we still felt just like people.”
Carey (1992) connected the idea of ritual to the process of communication.
Distinguishing from a transmission view of communication, in which ideas are merely
imparted through time, Carey explained that ritual communication is “linked to terms
such as ‘sharing,’ ‘participation,’ ‘association,’ ‘fellowship,’ and ‘the possession of a
common faith…. A ritual view of communication is directed not toward the extension of
messages in space but toward the maintenance of society in time; not the act of imparting
information but the representation of shared beliefs” (p. 18). The practice of art, Carey
suggested, represents a deep communal order, one that moves beyond boundaries of
culture, “self” and “other.”
The TO workshop fostered a “hunger” for shared experience among the artists
and migrants to occur. Participants expressed a longing to produce and re-produce the
world through art, as a way of making sense of that which they could not rationally
understand. Through the TO ritual, these experiences were made bearable. Such
recoveries of the self are what make DAR a powerful tool for psychic healing.

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Positionality and the Artist-Researcher
Ackerly and True (2010) explained that in adopting a feminist research ethic, researchers
must be attuned to positionality—the attention to process and location of subject-
participants, the critical interrogation of power and the researcher’s own self-conscious
location in the research context. Feminist research, they explained, requires a circular
methodological approach, in which the researcher engages in constant reflection and
willingness to backtrack and re-approach the research project from a new position.
Because of this, feminist research is particularly dependent on a kind of mindfulness—a
constant analysis of process and willingness to grapple with whatever new issues,
questions, and struggles come up as the process shifts. Feminist research also relies on
subjective relationships between participants in the research process, making it highly
collaborative and complimentary to the arts.
Issues of social location and shifting notions of social identity came to the fore in
the artist discourses. Several of the artists, particularly those who had lived and worked in
Chiang Mai prior to their participation in the production, expressed newfound awareness
about their social roles, and the performances of these roles in their everyday lives. In
discussing the themes raised in the musical, they began to re-frame and re-evaluate the
social locations of people who reflected characters in the musical.
An example can be seen in the artists’ changed perceptions of the role of
missionaries. FCA1 and FCA2 each discussed their friendships with missionaries in
Thailand. Both artists talked about how they began to see their missionary friends
differently, as a result of participating in the musical. FCA1 developed more empathy for
her friends who, she said, were trying to “do good,” while FCA2 began to see the
inherent problems with missionaries who were out to “save souls.” The musical helped
her better understand the perspective of sex workers’ rights movement, and transformed
her view of the missionaries’ who try to civilize them. She began to see the inherent
power differences that come into play in relationships between Western missionaries and
migrant women who inhabit unequal structural locations. In so doing, she began to
interrogate her own role as a Christian ex-pat in Thailand.
Similarly, FCA3 shared that many of her friends in Chiang Mai were NGO
workers and missionaries, and that she, herself, had once worked in an NGO. During the
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performance, she was confronted with the knowledge that many people in the audience
were “living” what they were seeing onstage. She expressed sensitivity to the power of
their social roles, and her role as an actor in reflecting these roles back to them.
Like the artists from Los Angeles, the Chiang Mai-based artists enacted a process
of speaking “through” their characters in order to construct a discursive space between
actor, character and audience. Interestingly, however, this discourse involved inciting
criticism, rather than unity, around the perspectives their characters held. Again, what is
critical here is the visibility of process: the Chiang Mai-based artists inhabited the same
social worlds as audience members who were “living the lives” of the characters they
played, and were aware that their performance was being witnessed by these audience
members. Subsequently, their process of “holding” a critical lens up to the social roles of
NGO workers and missionaries was made visible to the audience. The NGO employees
and missionaries in the audience were implicated in this process, as the criticism of them
came not from an actor “just playing a role,” but from a “spect-actor”—a dynamic agent
of change whose consciousness was attuned and alive.
Boal explained that Marx saw theater as the most powerful of all art forms, due to
“its immediate contact with the public, and its greater power to convince” (1979, p. 53).
In Marx’s view, all artists are situated in a political structure whose interests lie in self-
perpetuation of power. Drawing on this framework, Brecht conceived of characters not as
subjects, but as objects of social and economic forces. For Brecht, the true subjects were
the social and economic forces at play, while characters were merely objects in the larger
social drama. Boal described Brecht’s characters as being “object-subjects” (p. 92).
The process of confronting the audience that the Chiang Mai-based artists enacted
draws on these Brechtian (i.e., Marxist) view of character-as-object. The actors
themselves did not personally share the perspectives of the NGO worker and missionary
characters they portrayed. Thus, they objectified these characters by presenting them in a
critical light. Instead, the actors, as spect-actors, became subjects, negotiating this critical
lens in a dynamic dialogue that took place with an audience comprised of actual
individuals who they were criticizing. This process of engagement demanded an
enormous personal investment on the part of the Chiang Mai-based artists, as they used
their performance to critique their social and personal worlds. Drawing on Boal’s
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“poetics,” this process illustrates how the DAR method can serve as a site of dialogue
around contested social issues and create new discursive spaces for those issues to be
addressed.
While the Chiang Mai-based artists made new discoveries about their positional
location in a social community, all artists expressed newfound awareness about Burma’s
political situation and as a desire to understand this situation more deeply. In her
discussion of transnational feminism, Mohanty (2003) suggested, “cross cultural feminist
work must be attentive to the micro-politics of context, subjectivity, and struggle, as well
as to the macro-politics of global economic and political systems and processes.” (p.
501). In recognizing the struggles of the migrant women as reflections of larger political
and economic processes in Burma and by locating, organically, a desire to further
understand the implications of these processes, the artists enacted a narrative of
participation that speaks to Mohanty’s discussion. Engaging in a cross-cultural feminist
praxis, the artists began to take on the identity of the “humanist, revolutionary educator”
(Friere, 1985, p. 75), or what I call “artist-researchers.”
Harding’s (1998) discussion of standpoint feminist methodology and alternative
knowledge systems speaks to the issue of research as it plays out between Western artist-
researcher and non-Western participants. Harding problemetized the idea of a neutral
observer—the idea that researchers stand “outside” of the world, making generalizations
in order to “capture” that world—framing it intellectually without being implicated as
participants within it. By contrast, she explained, western researchers who begin to think
from the lives of people who are marginalized will acquire broader understanding of the
world. As the framework of participatory action research has shown, such methods often
achieve more socially beneficial results.
The artist-researchers enacted frameworks of participation congruent with the
tenets of the feminist research ethic and with the theory and practice of standpoint
feminism. Harding (1998) explained that in the positivist tradition, the voices of the
people go largely unheard: “The majority of peoples who bear the consequences of the
science and technology decisions made through such processes do not have a
proportionate share in making them” (p. 58). The processes of conscientization and
rupture experienced by the artists challenge claims to the superiority of the positivist
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approach. These processes also demonstrate that the “splitting” of self versus other, as
described by Haraway (1988) can be overcome.
“Performing Back”
Through their participation in the DAR project, the “Land of Smiles” artists changed their
location from passive performers to active artist-researchers, and to participatory agents
of change. They merged consciousness with craft, interrogating their experiences in a
new way, and openly engaged in processes of rupture and hospitality. In line with
Tuhiwai Smith’s (1999) concept of “researching back” and my explication of “writing
back,” the artists enacted a process of “performing back” against the dominant narratives,
tropes of victimhood, and their own passivity in a culture (and a cultural industry)
marked by trauma and an unaccustomed-to idea of participatory practice. In so doing,
they spoke with newfound voices.
In her discussion of speech acts, Alcoff (1991-92) interrogated what she saw as
the problems in speaking for others; i.e., claiming to give voice to a marginalized person
or group of people while simultaneously, unknowingly or perhaps even deliberately
attempting to advance’s one own position of power, and in so doing committing an act of
violence against that person or group of people. Alcoff acknowledged, however, the
epistemological difficulties of assuming that all speech acts for the self are inherently
more authentic than speech acts made in service to the other. Since all representations of
self are mediated, she explained, the speech act of self-representation can be just as
problematic as the attempt to represent others.
Despite this, to “just be quiet,” in Alcoff’s eyes, is a grave error in political
discourse. This is because silence carries a politics and an action in itself. We do damage
by remaining silent, she explained. Since we cannot divorce ourselves from the reality
that we exist within a “web” of discursive acts, and that what we do and say affects
others, we must resist the narcissistic tendency to try to make no mistakes in our speech
acts, for this simply replicates the attempt to maintain or gain positions of power. To
Alcoff, dialogue is the most merit-worthy act a feminist can pursue.
In the “Land of Smiles” DAR project, the artists used the tools of theatre and
performance as sites of resistance. By engaging in processes of critical, horizontal modes
of inquiry, in which their own self-reflections were interrogated alongside those of the
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migrant participants, the artists resisted the problematic and simplistic practice of
speaking for others that Alcoff described. By consciously working against this practice,
the artists engaged in a dialogical process of performing back, using their craft as well as
their subjectivity to bear witness to the struggles that the musical brought to the fore.

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Conclusion
Dramatization as Research:
A Communication Intervention

“Moving from silence into speech is for the oppressed, the colonized, the
exploited, and those who stand and struggle side by side a gesture of defiance that
heals, that makes new life and new growth possible. It is that act of speech, of
‘talking back,’ that is no mere gesture of empty words, that is the expression of
moving from object to subject—the liberated voice” – bell hooks (1990: 9)

While socially-conscious art—that is, art intended to communicate a social message or
purpose, as well as art whose creation is inspired by social processes—is not a new
phenomenon, the merging of art and the social sciences—particularly international
research and, as an additional specification, feminist international research, is only just
beginning to be recognized and understood within the field of communication.
Furthermore, while top-down approaches to behavior change, exemplified by
entertainment education initiatives have dominated the thinking in research dealing with
international communication, the intersection between the processes of making art, and
the process of uncovering meaning in the social world has not yet been interrogated.
This project responds to these nascent, seemingly disparate interdisciplinary ties.
In this dissertation, I sought to bring together the seemingly un-related domains of
dramatization and social science, through an analysis of the processes by which feminist
international research and art-making are conducted, and show how these processes not
only serve mutual interests for the artists and researchers, but are also co-constitutive.
That is, I showed how the process of uncovering meaning in the social world and the
process of making art work together, answer one another’s questions, and serve
complimentary purposes. As such, “Land of Smiles,” the vehicle for this interrogation, is
unlike other communication interventions that unite the arts and the social sciences. This
interrogation is not meant as a prescriptive tool for behavioral change, nor does it simply
involve opening a window into the world of the “other.” Rather, “Land of Smiles” and
the method of Dramatization as Research (DAR) that I have explicated here, is intended
to be a roadmap for discovery and change.
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In Phase One of the project, I examined the role that culture and national identity
play in shaping the anti-trafficking movement’s narratives about trafficking and
subsequent policies to combat trafficking in Thailand. I asked, “In what ways and with
what consequences are the contradictory approaches taken by anti-trafficking actors in
Thailand influenced by the project of nationalism, and how is nationalism used as a
source of power in the anti-trafficking movement?” I drew on a framework of “moral
performance” to answer this question, and examined the way the national identity
projects of both Thailand and the United States shape the “spectacularized rhetoric”
(Hesford, 2011) of the anti-trafficking movement and are “performed” (i.e.,
communicated and presented in a way that deliberately sways the emotions of the viewer
and creates a “spectacle”) by its members. I drew on field research including fifty-four
interviews with policy makers, NGO employees, government officials, activist
community-based organizations, immigration officers, members of the Royal Thai police
and, most importantly, female migrant laborers themselves to understand the normative
values and practices that underpin the movement. I interrogated the responses of NGO
employees whose jobs involved framing the issue of trafficking, and examined “Smart
Raids”—the policy in which State Department-funded NGOs, in collaboration with the
Royal Thai police raid brothels, karaoke bars and massage parlors in an attempt to
“catch” victims of human trafficking, secure prosecutions, and bolster Thailand’s ranking
in the TIP Report. I interrogated this practice from the perspective of the sex workers and
other female migrant laborers who these raids are intended (but usually fail) to support.
I then turned to the problem of rifts in inter-organizational collaboration between
these government-supported NGOs operating within the framework of the anti-trafficking
movement, and community-based organizations (CBOs) whose methods to combat
trafficking often generate more positive results for women on the ground. Above all, in
this section I showed how the policies of the anti-trafficking movement in Thailand often
have disastrous consequences for the very women they are supposedly working to serve. I
then suggested that the movement would benefit from a communication intervention
designed to create inroads into the discourse on trafficking.
In Phase Two, I gave voice to my findings through the conceptualization and
creation of an artistic project designed to intervene in the trafficking discourse. The
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second section of the dissertation explicates the process by which I developed the musical
“Land of Smiles” as a vehicle for communicating my preliminary research findings.
Included in this section (as an Appendix) is the script and performance video of the two-
act, fifteen-song musical. “Land of Smiles” dramatizes a story about the trafficking of
women in Thailand and presents a critical look at how the story about trafficking is told.
By turning the dominant trafficking narrative “on its head,” the musical shows that
finding a solution to this problem is even more complicated than it seems.
Additionally, in this phase I further explicated my theory of Dramatization as
Research (DAR), suggesting that qualitative social science research and creative
dramatization can, in fact, be reflexive processes that inform the generation of knowledge
in new and useful ways. I presented this argument through a deconstruction of the
process by which I researched and created the musical, examining the storytelling tools
used by all dramatists and showing how the narrative frameworks of important original
interviews informed my own process of writing key scenes and songs. I then focused on
the auditions, rehearsals and first staged readings of the musical as processes of discovery
that led to further questions in the research. In so doing, I illustrated the minutia of the
DAR method.
Finally, in Phase Three of the project, I brought together these analyses with a
final study focused on the production of the musical in Chiang Mai, Thailand. This phase
involved assembling a team of artists and researchers from Thailand and the United
States to stage a performance of “Land of Smiles” in fall 2013 for anti-trafficking Ngo
employees and migrant laborer communities whose demographics matched that of the
participants in my original field research. The goal of the performance and focus groups
was to foster dialogue between participants around the discourse on human trafficking by
presenting a dramatic reflection of the lived experiences of actors from these
communities. I analyzed discourses produced in four focus groups that followed the
performances and identified the subjectivities that were “recovered” by NGO employees,
migrant laborers and artists. I also showed how tenets of “participatory practice”—a core
aspect of liberation psychology—were achieved through the focus group discussions, and
I explicated the way in which these practices serve as cornerstones of the DAR method.
Through conceptualizing, writing and performing the musical, and incorporating
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the involvement of those whose stories were reflected within its narrative, I sought to
challenge the dominant perspectives often held about trafficking and expose the counter-
narratives that are seldom voiced and rarely incorporated into policy. In doing so, this
project created a space for pluralistic perspectives to come to the fore, and for the
dominant normative frameworks that inform the development and implementation of
anti-trafficking policy in Thailand to be disrupted.
As this project demonstrates, Dramatization as Research, or DAR, has
implications on the way in which international development advocacy work is conducted.
Indeed, as a method whose primary purpose is to “disrupt,” normative paradigms, DAR
seeks to critically interrogate human rights witnessing, and the processes that inform it,
and provide a vehicle for the emergence of more holistic approaches. As the preliminary
interviews, musical development process, and subsequent focus group study
demonstrated, NGO employees benefit from having a space in which to pause and reflect
on their own work activities, and question—if only for a few hours—the assumptions and
values bring into their work. Spaces of reflection are essential for the health of not only
the individual NGO employee, but the entire community of advocates who steer the
direction of anti-trafficking policy.
Simultaneously, DAR provides the opportunity for community participants—in
this case, migrant laborers who self-identified as survivors of trauma—to critically reflect
on their own experiences. As I have shown, there is value in inhabiting and sharing these
spaces of reflection. As Watkins and Shulman, explained, seeing one’s narrative as being
separate from oneself – and naming it—allows us to embrace our narratives from entirely
new vantage points, and understand the role we play within them. In the case of the
migrant laborers who participated in the focus groups, many of whom had been victims
of community violence, the dialogical space of the DAR project generated mew pathways
to expression and visibility. As other scholars have noted, migrants from Burma are often
marked by an inability to name their traumatic experiences (Skidmore, 2004; White,
2004). As demonstrated in this project, DAR provides these actors with new tools,
perspectives and strategies for engaging with contextually-bund life experiences.
Moreover, DAR, as a theoretical and methodological approach to research,
creates a space in which such reflections may take place simultaneously for multiple
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stakeholders in a given community. Through this process, actors who are accustomed to
operating within closed realms and contexts can, at least momentarily, see each other in
new light. This type of reflection and insight into the world of the “other” is typically not
incorporated into advocacy situations, as NGO employees and female migrant laborers
often operate in isolation without the benefit of inter-organizational collaboration (see
Chapter 6). Furthermore, funding streams provided by large donors such as the U.S. State
Department often reinforce this type of isolation by failing to reward collaborative efforts
between different types of organizations. DAR provides a solution to the problem of this
isolation. As a non-confrontational, dialogical intervention into seemingly intractable
spaces, DAR makes the contours of these spaces more porous; in effect, bridging
communication gaps between and among otherwise isolated actors. Because of this, DAR
could be an invaluable tool to incorporate within any issue-driven policy space,
supporting stakeholders in coming together to reflect, collaborate, and achieve
meaningful and measurable collective social change.
Finally, this project demonstrates DAR’s potential as a method for engaging those
outside the purview of a given social movement, but for whom the movement’s visibility
nevertheless has important consequences. Here, I am referring to the artists themselves,
who brought the words, music and experiences of the characters in “Land of Smiles” to
life. In line with Friere’s conscientization and Boal’s “poetics,” in this project the artists
were asked to step out of their normative frameworks and undergo processes of rupture
and change. In the context of the anti-trafficking movement and the seemingly
intractable, politicized discourse that accompanies it, the artists were asked to engage
with anti-trafficking narratives in ways that publics—those not directly impacted by
trafficking and migration processes and those not directly involved with implementing
policy—more typically engage. In both the creation and first readings of the project, as
well as the Thailand production and the focus groups that followed, the artists engaged
deeply with these issues, seeing them in a new way. In so doing, they began to question
the underlying assumptions often made by audiences who consume the messages of the
abolitionist anti-trafficking narrative, and the normative framework that this project
sought to challenge. The artists’ experiences thereby highlight the potential of live theater
to cause a rupture in consciousness, and disrupt the taken-for-granted thinking that often
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occurs around social issues that have, as I have shown, been heavily influenced by the
national and political agendas of states, and the normative frameworks of actors working
and living within them. It is, therefore, not only policy makers whose conceptions of the
world and their agency within it can be changed by this work—it is also the ideas and
values adopted by the public.
DAR’s limitations
Despite its success as a communication intervention, the limitations of this project cannot
go un-addressed. The missionaries and sex workers union members who declined to
attend the performance and/or participate in the focus groups created a dearth of
information as to how and whether the project might have had a liberating effect on these
actors. Additionally, the lack of integration of these actors’ perspectives could be viewed
as a limitation to the ability of those who did participate to realize the full dialogical
potential of their participation. However, the non-participation of the missionaries and
sex worker’s union members is an important data point in itself. Their absence from the
focus groups suggests that live theater is a powerful space that not only allows, but in
fact, provokes such discourse to take place. The non-participation of these actors raises
questions as to whether fear was incited by the project—fear of engaging in dialogical
and rupturing processes in which people’s ideas can be changed. The potential of live
theater as a rupturing tool, and the resistance that was met by the most typically polarized
voices in the trafficking discourse, should not be overlooked.
The lack of participation among these groups also reveals the extent to which
actors in the anti-trafficking movement often retreat to their known normative
frameworks for affirmation and validation. This idea was discussed in-depth in Chapter 4,
in which I interrogated NGO employees’ narratives about trafficking and discussed the
tendency for these employees to “retreat” into their normative frameworks and ideas
about the world, as a way of coping with uncertainty and anxiety related to their daily
work activities. DAR offers a way of stepping out of those frameworks. Such an
opportunity can be met with fear, as well as curiosity. Future studies should, therefore,
seek to examine what measures can be taken to more inclusively incorporate the
participation of actors who tens to stay on the “outer edges” of a seemingly rigid
discourse—in effect, keeping those edges from being made porous.
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Future directions
As scholars of performance studies have explained, dramatization provides a space for
community, and connection. A space for witness, rupture, and renewal. These elements
represent the “utopian” potential of the theater as a live, embodied practice that allows
audiences to “feel themselves as citizens of a no-place that’s a better place” (Dolan, 2005,
p. 15). As Castells wrote, “Art has always been a bridge between diverse and
contradictory expressions of human condition… In a global, interdependent world, there
are fewer shared languages that restitute the unity of human experience” (Castells, 2012,
p. 5).
Given theater’s power as a site of social and political intervention, as a tool for
both communicating political message and unearthing new research inquiries, and—as
was demonstrated by the very aspects of the project that seemed to limit its outcome—as
a vehicle for disrupting a dominant discourse and inviting change to occur within that
discourse, we are tasked with the question of where to take these interventions next. What
direction should artists, researchers, and the rare combination of the two vocations take
our projects and inquiries, and how can these projects be maximized to achieve change,
not only at the level of social discourse, but also at the level of international development
policy?
I suggest that while a direct line from DAR project to policy change may not
necessarily be the best goal of this work, the process of how policy change comes about
can and should include DAR as a component. Strategic Communication and Good
Governance, as communication strategies being used by many actors in today’s
international development world (see Riley, et al., 2014) could, for example, incorporate
DAR within their frameworks. Engaging those working at an institutional level, and
helping them examine the issues that underlie their efforts, could and should be a goal of
this work.
Further research might interrogate the potential for DAR to be incorporated into
training for those who seek to do international work in a new way, and strive for more
integrated, holistic results. Government actors, NGO employees, civil society
organizations and other institutionally-bound actors whose communication and research
pursuits are often rule-driven and bureaucratic, could benefit from these tools, which seek
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to unearth processes of discovery, self-reflection and change. Incorporating the DAR
method may help these actors interrogate not only what policies will be most beneficial to
the world and its citizens, but also, better understand and unpack the processes by which
their own experiences and values inform the creation of such policies. The issues of self-
reflection and process are, as I have shown, cornerstones of this work. Just as aspects of
restorative justice have been integrated into international development initiatives and
educational settings (see, for example, McLaughlin, 2003; Zernova, 2007), so too might
Dramatization as Research be woven into the fabric of institutional culture as a site of
exploration and innovation. Doing so could help improve flexibility in spaces that, too
often, suffer from slow movement and narrow ways of engaging with the world.
Finally, it is imperative to note that the DAR method can be replicated. As a tool
for questioning narratives that often go un-examined, DAR can provide a roadmap for
integrating critical thinking and creativity into existing structures of power. The tools
offered here have the potential to empower not only communities on the ground who bear
the fruit (or, in many cases, the brunt) of international development policies—they also
have the potential to empower policy makers themselves.
DAR as feminist praxis
Additionally, introducing these techniques into international development processes—at
both the policy-making level as well as in the implementation activities of development
work—has implications on the way these processes respond to women. As I have argued
throughout this dissertation, crafting better policy that addresses the needs of women and
communities requires attention to the “feminist research ethic,” and integrating narratives
of positionality, experience, embodiment. These aspects of feminist research allow for the
voices of women to emerge and be heard in crucial ways. They are, therefore, paramount
to the success of international development projects whose stated goals involve the
empowerment of women. Conversely, development projects that do not integrate feminist
methods suffer from a dearth of these voices and their expressions, and reinforce the
silence of women at all levels of the development arena.
As noted by Ackerly, True and Tickner (2010), the feminist research ethic
incorporates issues of process and location, the critical interrogation of power and the
researcher’s own self-conscious location in the research context. It is also circular,
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requiring the researcher’s constant reflection and willingness to backtrack and re-
approach the research question/ project from a new position and new discoveries.
Because of this, feminist research is particularly dependent on mindful analysis of
process, and the willingness of the researcher to grapple with whatever new issues,
questions, struggles come up as that process shifts. In line with Haraway’s conception of
an epistemological framework that privileges perspectives that are “particular” and
idiosyncratic, and through which unrecognized social realities can be brought to the fore
(p. 4), feminist research also relies on the interrogation of relationships of power within
the process of research itself, and attention to the positionality of all involved. DAR
makes these feminist theoretical concepts concrete, by involving the participation of
multiple subjects, and inviting contradictory and “situated” perspectives to come to the
fore throughout the research process. As a feminist praxis, DAR’s potential is far-
reaching.
DAR as liberatory practice
Watkins and Shulman (2008) predicated their discussion of “liberation arts” on the
potentiality of transformation that takes place, through art, within the psyche and the
community. Such a transformation represents a series of turns: the turn from bystander to
witness, the turn from dissociation to participation, and the turn from object—or in this
case, “victim”—to subject. The process of these transformations, they explained, requires
participation—the shared commitment to inciting change. In this model, the artist-
researcher becomes an “invited guest” working along side members of a marginalized
community. This process “destabilizes notions of expertise such that the role of
researcher transforms into that of a co-researcher and collaborator” (Watkins & Shulman
2008, p. 269). DAR fosters such collaborations at every level of the research and artistic
process.
In addition, Friere asked that we reflect on whether, as researchers, our research
mirrors our dream for a community, or a community’s dream for itself (as cited in
Watkins and Shulman, 2008, p. 30). DAR fosters this reflection, through a process
whereby the dream of research is fused with the imagination of the artist.
As such, DAR represents a cultural intervention—what Rossiter and Godaris
(2011) noted as being part of a recent turn in the performing arts. Located in a “radical,
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emancipatory and critical methodological paradigm,” theater and performance, they
suggested, become possible solutions to the “crisis of representation” identified in
classical ethnography, disrupting hegemonic discourses that often get reinforced in the
“monolithic, disembodied texts” of traditional scholarship (p. 656).
As a communication intervention, DAR sparks the exploration of cultural values
among participants in both the artistic and research processes. Through researching,
writing and performing “Land of Smiles,” and through the subsequent discourses that
emerged following the performances in Thailand, the binary categorizations that had been
cemented into the discourse on trafficking were interrupted, and the epistemological
claims that informed that discourse were troubled. NGO employees, migrants and artists
demonstrated an ability to critically evaluate the roles they play within the anti-trafficking
“rescue industry.” Normative conceptions about victimization and rescue, the role of the
West and agency among sex workers were challenged, and “participatory practice” was
demonstrated by all three groups according to Watkins and Shulman’s evaluative criteria.
The project facilitated processes that were: proactive, rupturing, dialogical,
consciousness-raising and performative.
This study illuminates the way in which dramatization and research are reflexive,
co-constitutive processes. Additionally, it illuminates the inevitable interconnection
between performance and politics. Indeed, integrating narratives that allow for a plethora
of women’s voices to be heard, absorbed and understood begets the promise of a new
approach to advocacy: an approach in which theater helps us engage with real world
problems not as spectators, but as, to use Boal’s term, “spect-actors:” empowered agents
of political change. DAR can help us build bridges between communities that operate
seemingly within the same space—but in reality, seldom communicate in real and
effective ways.
Conclusion
In this dissertation I have illuminated, however preliminarily, a window into a process. In
so doing, I have unearthed as many questions as I have answers. The definitive role of the
researcher-artist, of community members, and of the contours of their participation in the
DAR method remains in need of refinement. Questions arise as to whether teams of
researcher-artists can more easily embark on such projects, so as to alleviate the need for
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one person to assume both roles. The issue of form is also an open question—do
musicals, inherently, produce more liberatory effects than straight plays? Can film or
other mediatized artistic modes achieve similar results, or is liveness essential to the
process of DAR? These questions require further interrogation.
I have, however, argued that musical theater, by its very nature, is a liberatory
practice. As an embodied, live medium, musical theater requires participation—the act of
people coming together in a room and witnessing, in a somatic way, the emotional,
aesthetic, inherently political journey of characters—characters who sing what cannot be
spoken, who express their truths through poetry and song. As participant-witnesses to the
dramatic story we co-exist in liminal space and time, or “non-time,” with these characters
and with each other. We “see the way we see,” embarking on journeys that reflect our
own experiences, and mirror that which we have not yet been able to express. In so
doing, the mind, body and spirit re-create and recover our understandings of the world.
We restore our subjectivity, and in so doing, witness the restoration of the subjectivity of
others.
The vision of Dramatization as Research, then, is a vision of liberation. We live in
a society polarized by discursive divisions; a society in which communication is stunted
by false conceptions of “self” versus “other;” and in which collective trauma goes
unacknowledged. All members of such a society are in equal need of liberatory practices.
Dramatization as Research provides a way for us to orient ourselves toward the idea of
liberation. This vision stands in contrast to the expert-lay person model, in which the
process of “othering” replicates practices of dominance and repeats the cycle of collective
trauma. In such a model, we believe that the psychologist, the teacher, the scholar, and
the human rights witness are not broken. But in trying to “fix” the suffering of others, our
visions turn to spectacularizations and our understandings of ourselves are impeded. We
become bystanders in our own dramas, blind to the reality of our suffering and paralyzed
in the face of the suffering of others.
The artist knows better. The artist knows that gestures toward beauty, defiance
and truth are a way of claiming what we all know but cannot bear to express: that we are
all broken and searching for a way to be whole.

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APPENDIX A

Figures, Tables and Illustrations

Figure 1. Project Model

“Land of Smiles” Project Phases (2011-2013)

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Table 1.

Thailand Needs Democracy: July 2011. (n.d.). Thailand Needs Democracy. Retrieved January 24, 2012,
from http://agentofthefree.blogspot.com/2011_07_01_archive.html

Thailand’s Human Trafficking Record, 2001-2011

!
Table 2.
!
!

The US Seafood Market and Southeast Asia | ASEAN Matters for America. (n.d.).

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328

Illustration 1.

“Cycle of Migrant Women”

Phase One Research Findings

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APPENDIX B
Interviewee Identification Chart
(Phase One)

KEY:
TH Thai
KH Khmer
KC Kachin
KA Karen
AM American
AU Australian
SA South African
AK Akha
BU Burman
SH Shan
F Female
M Male
CB Community Based Organization Employee
LN Local NGO Employee
IN International NGO Employee
TG Thai Government worker
CG Cambodian Government worker
SW Sex worker
SL Seafood laborer
D
-
Undocumented
S
-
Stateless

Respondent Country of
Origin
Gender Ethnicity Age Undoc Stat
e-
less
Occupation Location

1 Thailand F Thai 40s

Head, Local NGO

THFLN1
2 Thailand M Thai 60s

Commander, Royal
Thai Police Anti-
Trafficking Division

THMTG1
3 Thailand F Thai 30s

IDC Immigration
Officer

THFTG
4 Thailand M Thai 40s

Anti-Traff Officer,
Local NGO

THMLN
5 Thailand F Thai
(Issan)
32 Sex Worker Bangkok THFSW
6 Cambodia M Khmer 50s INGO employee

KHMLN1
7 Cambodia F Khmer 40s Head, INGO

KHFLN1
8 Cambodia M Khmer 28 NGO employee Poi Pot KHMLN2
9 Cambodia M Khmer 50s

Cambodian Border
Police
Border KHMCG1
10 Thailand M Thai 50s Thai Border Police

THMTG2
11 Cambodia F Khmer 20s INGO worker

KHFIN2
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12 S. Africa F S. African 50s Faith-Based NGO
Employee

SAFIN
13 Burma F Kachin 30 Migrant

KCFIN1
14 Burma M Akha 21 yes yes Domestic Laborer

AKMIND
-
S
-

15 Burma F Akha 19 yes yes Domestic Laborer

AKFIND
-
S
-

16 Burma F Shan 20s Yes Yes CBO activist

SHFCBD
-
S
-
1
17 Burma F Karen 60s Yes Yes CBO activist

KAFCBD
-
S
-
1
18 Burma F Akha 30s Yes Yes Sex worker

AKFSWD
-
S
-
1
19 Burma F Akha 30s Yes Yes Sex worker

AKFSWD
-
S
-
2
20 Burma F Akha 30s Yes Yes Sex worker Chiang
Rai
AKFSWD