The Politics of Freedom

Abstract

A politics that enunciates the equality and universality of work is both emancipatory and transformative in the situation of trafficking. It is harnessed to the excessive elements of a situation, the illegal migrant sex workers, who are present but represented as not belonging to the situation. By formulating the universal of work from the standpoint of illegal migrant sex workers, a politics of equality addresses everybody in the situation and functions as the self-emancipation of those who did not exist according to the count of the situation. The politics of equality and universality is also transformative, as it challenges the institutional practices and representations of what equality means in the situation of trafficking. The enunciation of equality as an institutionally represented fiction challenges the arbitrary limit that was drawn between categories of EU and non-EU citizens. Through this institutional struggle, the ideal of equality creates the collective subjectification of all those involved in sex work, independent of their citizenship and national belonging. The equality of work does not only challenge the risk management of victims of trafficking, but also the imaginary of security that disposed of the subjects’ freedom and equality, depending on national appurtenance, thus disqualifying forms of life from the universal of equality and rendering them abject.