Daughters of the State: A Social Portrait of the First Reform School for Girls in North America, 1856-1905

Migrant Asian massage workers in North America first experienced the impacts of COVID-19 in the final weeks of January 2020, when business dropped drastically due to widespread xenophobic fears that the virus was concentrated in Chinese diasporic communities. The sustained economic devastation, which began at least 8 weeks prior to the first social distancing and shelter in place orders issued in the U.S. and Canada, has been further complicated by a history of aggressive policing of migrant massage workers in the wake of the war against human trafficking. Migrant Asian massage businesses are increasingly policed as locales of potential illicit sex work and human trafficking, as police and anti-trafficking initiatives target migrant Asian massage workers despite the fact that most do not provide sexual services. The scapegoating of migrant Asian massage workers and criminalization of sex work have led to devastating systemic and interpersonal violence, including numerous deportations, arrests, and deaths, most notably the recent murder of eight people at three Atlanta-based spas. The policing of sex workers has historically been mobilized along fears of sexually transmitted disease and infection, and more recently, within the past two decades, around a moral panic against sex trafficking. New racial anxieties around the coronavirus as an Asian disease have been mobilized by the state to further cement the justification of policing Asian migrant workers along the axes of health, migration, and sexual labor. These justifications also solidify discriminatory social welfare regimes that exclude Asian migrant massage workers from accessing services on the basis of the informality and illegality of their work mixed with their precarious citizenship status. This paper draws from ethnographic participant observation and survey data collected by two sex worker organizations that work primarily with massage workers in Toronto and New York City to examine the double-edged sword of policing during the pandemic in the name of anti-trafficking coupled with exclusionary policies regarding emergency relief and social welfare, and its effects on migrant Asian massage workers in North America. Although not all migrant Asian massage workers, including those surveyed in this paper, provide sexual services, they are conflated, targeted, and treated as such by the state and therefore face similar barriers of criminalization, discrimination, and exclusion. This paper recognizes that most migrant Asian massage workers do not identify as sex workers and does not intend to label them as such or reproduce the scapegoating rhetoric used by law enforcement. Rather, it seeks to analyze how exclusionary attitudes and policies towards sex workers are transferred onto migrant Asian massage workers as well whether or not they provide sexual services.

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Justice without the State within the State

10.5771/9783465142683 ◽

2016 ◽

Keyword(s):

Conflict Resolution ◽

North America ◽

Self Regulation ◽

Social Groups ◽

17Th Century ◽

The State ◽

Global Perspective ◽

State Courts ◽

History Of ◽

Research Questions

History of justice is not only the history of state justice. Rather, we often deal with a coexistence of state, parastatal and non-state courts. Interesting research questions emerge out of this constellation: Where are notions of just conflict resolution most likely to be enforceable? To what extent is non-state jurisdiction a mode of self-regulation of social groups who define themselves by means of ethnic, religious or functional criteria? How do state and non-state ambitions interact? This collective volume contains contributions exploring non-state and parastatal justice between the 17th century and the present in Europe, Asia, North America as well as from a global perspective.

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Where Do New Ideas (About Class) Come From?

International Labor and Working-Class History ◽

10.1017/s0147547900212702 ◽

2000 ◽

Vol 57 ◽

pp. 53-59 ◽

Cited By ~ 1

Author(s):

Barbara Weinstein

Keyword(s):

North America ◽

Latin American ◽

Western Europe ◽

Labor History ◽

Careful Consideration ◽

The State ◽

The Political ◽

Working Class History ◽

New Ideas ◽

American Labor

In my comment I raise two main questions about the Eley/Nield essay. First, I express some doubts about whether the issues discussed in their essay can be unproblematically transposed to historiographical debates in areas beyond Western Europe and North America. Certain themes, such as the need to reemphasize the political, are hardly pressing given the continual emphasis on politics and the state in Latin American labor history. Closely related to this, I question whether the state of gender studies within labor history can be used, in the way these authors seem to be doing, as a barometer of the sophistication and vitality of labor and working-class history. Despite recognizing the tremendous contribution of gendered approaches to labor history, I express doubts about its ability to help us rethink the category of class, and even express some concern that it might occlude careful consideration of class identities. Instead, pointing to two pathbreaking works in Latin American labor history, I argue that the types of questions we ask about class, and primarily about class, can provide the key to innovative scholarship about workers even if questions such as gender or ethnicity go unexamined. Finally, I point out that class will only be a vital category of analysis if it is recognized not simply as “useful,” but as forming a basis for genuinely creative and innovative historical studies.

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