In addition to examining how states have policed racialized women’s bodies, sexuality, and movement, the roundtable will contend with the methodological challenges of researching migrant proletariat women at global, imperial, and local scales. By tracing both women who sold sex and prostitution policies as they crossed borders, our roundtable centers mobility as a key concept in the study of commercial sex. We are particularly interested in generating a discussion on the challenges and rewards of conducting archival research on people and ideas in motion. Our recent monographs employ expansive source bases drawn from archives across multiple continents to reconstruct the transnational migratory routes–and embodied experiences–of the historical actors involved in the commercial sex industry, including women who sold sex, brothel keepers, pimps, and other third parties. By combining top-down and bottom-up approaches, we show how individuals’ motivations and actions at times upheld or collided with state efforts to control commercial sex and migration for sexual labor.

Chairing the roundtable is Eileen Boris, who advanced the concepts of intimate labor and the racialized gendered state and writes on global labor migration. Commentator Jessica Pliley writes on commercial sex, migration, and state policing in both the US and global context. Bringing together these two scholars who have shaped the historiography of prostitution with the authors of new books in the field, our roundtable highlights the historiographical and methodological contributions of these four new works to the study of commercial sex. At the same time, the roundtable will stimulate a broader discussion about the significance and imbrication of sexuality, race, and gender in studies of militarization, migration, citizenship, governance, and empire.