This essay argues that U.S. judicial decisions in obscenity cases at the beginning of the twentieth century reveal a systematic social process of emotion management that supported, in ways not previously recognized, the emotional culture of the middle class and, through it, middle-class status policy. Using a grounded theory analysis on a sample of 256 U.S. federal judicial opinions between 1873 and 1956, the analysis shows how the evidentiary rules developed by judges in anti-obscenity cases at the turn of the twentieth century were actually “feeling rules” meant to penalize lust, assert social control over women via normative shame, and define normalcy as self-control over inner life.

ABSTRACT Taking Catholic sexual ethics and liberal feminist ethics as points of departure, this essay argues that both frameworks are ill-prepared to deal with the moral problems raised by sex trafficking: while Catholic sexual ethics is grounded in a normative understanding of sexuality, liberal feminist ethics argues for women’s sexual autonomy, resting upon freedom of action and consent. From a perspective that attends both to the phenomenological interpretation of embodied selves and the Kantian normative interpretation of dignity, it becomes possible to critique both the Catholic and the liberal feminist frameworks of ethics. I argue that Catholic sexual ethics requires a reconceptualization as social ethics in order to meet the challenges of our present time, but that the shift is possible without giving up the moral imperatives of both Catholic and feminist ethics to protect human dignity and women’s rights. KEY WORDS: Catholic sexual ethics, feminist ethics, sex trafficking, human dignity, women’s rights, social ethics, justice Citation Information: Feminist Ethics Reconsidered – The Case of Trafficking, Journal of Religious Ethics 43 (2) 2015, 218-243. Available Online: http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/jore.2015.43.issue-2/issuetoc

In late 2016 a feminist movement against problems of commercial sexual exploitation, and especially issues of coerced pornography filming, arose in Japan. This article describes the history of this movement as it mobilized to combat human rights violations perpetrated by the country’s pornographers. The movement’s success came not spontaneously or haphazardly; in fact, it was orchestrated earlier over a full decade-and-a-half by activists who persevered in researching and highlighting pornography’s harms in a civil environment of hostility, isolation and social derision, even among progressive groups and individuals. The Anti-Pornography and Prostitution Research Group (APP) was particularly prominent in this history. Its members were inspired and instructed early on by the work of Catharine MacKinnon and Andrea Dworkin in bringing to public attention victims’ accounts of pornography’s harms in the US from the 1980s, and they attempted to follow this example. The example of feminist anti-pornography activism we described here, therefore, is a case of unlikely political success achieved in an unexpected place (e.g., Japan currently ranks 110th-place in global gender equality league tables), and it is offered in real-world example of MacKinnon’s "butterfly" model of radical social change.

This research sets out to explore how ‘victims of human trafficking’ are constructed in contemporary anti-trafficking discourse. Through a literature review and a critical discourse analysis of three American NGOs, the results show that despite different world views and trends, most anti-trafficking organizations share a discourse that constructs an ‘ideal victim’ of innocence, without recognizing their agency and the possibility of multiple realities. Moreover, human trafficking discourse depoliticizes and oversimplifies an issue that is intertwined with a global system of inequality. In the light of fighting human trafficking to restore dignity and equality, this research advocates for a discourse of truth that acknowledges and utilizes complexity and agency.