Institute of Development Studies

Five Steps Backward: How women become second-rate citizens of globalisation

• Dates: 6 October 2011
• Time: 13.00 to 14.30
• Location: KNOTS Meeting Area

Whether the subject is migration, surrogate motherhood, international matchmaking, tourism and expatriatism or plain old commercial sex, women are consistently assigned the passive role. They cannot make their own decisions, men pursue them relentlessly for evil ends and their sexual bodies are innately vulnerable. A Rescue Industry from the enlightened middle class is required to save women from themselves everywhere. How did we get here after 50 years of women’s liberation, affirmative action programmes and both state and UN policies to instate Gender Equality?

Laura María Agustín is the author of Sex at the Margins: Migration, Labour Markets and the Rescue Industry (Zed Books 2007). A Visiting Professor in Gender and Migration in Switzerland in 2010, she has worked in a wide range of both formal and informal jobs in Europe and the Americas, including NGOs and academic research. A lifelong migrant herself, she has been a consultant and researcher on irregular migration and trafficking since the early 1990s. She has published widely in academic journals, mainstream media and online and blogs regularly at lauraagustin.com as the Naked Anthropologist.