Distant suffering, proper distance: Cosmopolitan ethics in the film portrayal of trafficked women
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This article contributes to a developing body of critical work on the ethical and political issues raised by anti-trafficking films and campaigns through a focus on two films, Lilya 4-ever (Luke Moodysson, Sweden/Denmark 2002) and Sex Traffic (David Yates, UK/Canada 2004), which are about young women trafficked to work in the sex industry in Europe. It evaluates the degree to which these films meet the criteria for ‘proper distance’ that are required for a ‘cosmopolitan’ aesthetics of spectatorship as proposed by Lilie Chouliarki (2006) in which our philanthropic compassion for ‘distant suffering’ is accompanied by a reflexive engagement with political questions about causes and solutions. It also argues for a ‘proper distance’ for film analysis that includes how texts are circulated and interpreted within particular discursive contexts, in this case NGO and government anti-trafficking campaigns in the United Kingdom and Sweden. Finally, a move outside trafficking as a discursive frame draws attention to critical perspectives on the ideological assumptions embedded in these campaigns and to alternative conceptions of our ethical relation to migrant labour that are obscured as a consequence. In line with Rosi Braidotti’s (2006) critique of humanist conceptions of cosmopolitanism, it argues for a ‘nomadic ethics’ that avoids voyeuristic ways of seeing these women as objects of our compassion, and takes into account their point of view, agency and right to mobility rather than imposing our own, more powerful, perspective, however sincerely held.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 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 teacher head, 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".