White Slavery Reconfigured: The "Natasha Trade" and Sexualized Nationalism in Canada
Bibliographic record
Abstract
White Slavery Reconfigured: The Natasha Trade and Sexualized Nationalism in Canada examines the role the post-socialist migrant exotic dancer has occupied in debates on human trafficking policies in Canada and seeks to centre race, ethnicity, and nation within discourses on sex trafficking. The international Natasha discourse relays a narrative of impoverished and innocent Central or Eastern European women trafficked into the sex trade by organized criminals. This narrative found expression in policy debates surrounding human trafficking and the temporary work permit for foreign workers during the years 2004 2007. This study finds that the post-socialist female subject appeared as a contemporary reconfiguration of the historical white slave. Fears about victimized white femininity and foreign threats present in government discourse gesture to the importance of white female bodies to the stability of national boundaries. Concern over the violation of white femininity speaks to a desire to protect the whiteness of the nation that is visible in both historical and contemporary discourses. This dissertation engages with two geo-temporal categories, the West and the post-socialist, and illustrates how the post-socialist was invented as a peripheral, tradition-bound geo-temporal space that permitted parliamentarians to position Canada as a progressive leader in the struggle against modern day slavery. Expressions of sexuality and nationalism in government discourse constituted a form of Canadian sexualized nationalism where notions of civilizational superiority became linked to a gender egalitarian enlightened masculinity and where buying sex became coded as un-Canadian in its disregard for women. This project is situated within the transnational feminist paradigm, but intervenes into transnational scholarship by employing Madina Tlostanovas decolonial framework centred on Eurasia as a method to re-consider established frames of thinking within transnational feminist thought. Analyzing how the post-socialist is configured in narratives of human trafficking shows the role the post-socialist continues to play in producing categories of us and them that are entwined with modern, emancipatory rhetoric of victims and saviours. The presence of nationalism and imperialism within discourses on sex trafficking points to linkages between the contemporary anti-trafficking infrastructure and the rise of novel articulations of nationalism and xenophobia in Europe and North America.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.038 | 0.020 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.009 | 0.002 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.005 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.004 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".