Basic HTML Version
Selected Topics
Prof. Richard Vacco,
2 credits day; 2 credits evening.
Topics in Business
Elective Course
Sex Trafficking in Film and Law
Prof. Kate Nace Day, Ms. Alicia Foley Winn,
3 credits day; 3 credits evening.
This course examines sex trafficking as presented in film and law. The story of sex trafficking in
girls and women involves entrenched inequalities, systemic and systematic violence, shocking
profitability and a failure of local, national and international law. While all these may
contextualize the experience, may show them with more texture, it is the victims and survivors of
sex trafficking - their gestures, details and remembered events - who create the path through the
hidden door of this story. As slave narratives from the l800's and the Holocaust testimonies of
the last century, these voices tell stories of rape, torture, disease and death - women and girls,
violated at will, for someone's pleasure and someone's profit. These stories emerge in Hollywood
feature films, investigative news reports, multi-media presentations, short films, video advocacy
projects, and even the hand-held images of rights-claimants themselves; however, the particular
focus of this seminar is documentary films. Through documentaries, we will exmine the
gendered dimensions of national behavior through law, including the distinction of public and
private , naturalizing dominance as difference, obscuring coercion as consent, and hiding sexual
politics behind morality. We will explore how international human rights law might challenge
these dimensions rather than merely reproduce them at a higher level. We will trace the social,
political and legal changes needed to secure the substantive rights of sex trafficking victims, to
move them to the center of the human rights process, to have them become fully human in both
the legal and lived senses. This seminar is a collaboration of human rights activist Alicia Foley
Winn and Kate Nace Day, both of whom are committed to the project of theorizing the reality of
women's lives toward social, political, and legal change. Students will be evaluated on the basis
of presentation of independent projects and class participation. Not offered 2012-2013
Elective Course