Contesting Aradau: On the Desecuritising Potential of Sex Work in the Situation of Trafficking in Women

In this paper I engage critically with Claudia Aradau’s unique theoretical and empirical approach to unmaking security, as applied specifically to the securitisation of trafficking in women for sexual exploitation at EU level. Based on an empirical analysis of such securitisation and of the advocacy of sex workers at EU level, I contend, first, that Aradau is wrong in identifying sex work as a universalising and equalising condition in the situation of trafficking in women. Indeed, the concept of work and the liberal notions of freedom and the self that underpin it play a central role in securitising trafficking in women at EU level in the first place. Secondly, I contend that Aradau adheres to a hegemonic ontology of agency that make her disavow the desecuritising potential of the advocacy that sex workers engage in at a distance from the state. Drawing on post-anarchism theories I argue that it is in sex workers’ prefigurative forms of direct action and anarchistic forms of subjective resistance, as enacted in whore-walks in particular, that their true desecuritising potential lies, by suspending the in/security binary in a way that reduces the risk of reappropriation by the security dispositif.